When Apple Unveiled the iPhone, Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android

When Apple released its iPhone in January 2007, it changed smartphones forever. Competitors who were able to adapt to the new normal, like Samsung, have thrived, while others who moved too slow, like BlackBerry and Nokia, have had a tougher time.

Google, owner and operator of the Android platform, was one of the first to recognize just how important the iPhone was, a new book reveals. Google engineer Chris DeSalvo says as soon as Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone to the world, he knew the Android team would need to "start over," according to Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein, which was excerpted in The Atlantic.

SEE ALSO: 25 Best Free Android Apps

“What we had suddenly looked just so... '90s,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

For the six months before the iPhone unveiling, DeSalvo, Android chief Andy Rubin and the rest of the Android team had been working on the platforms prototype phone. A launch was planned for the end of 2007. All of those plans were scrapped in the wake of the iPhone. All of those plans were scrapped in the wake of the iPhone.

While the software for the prototype had many of the hallmarks of what we now know as Android — mainly cloud connectivity and multitasking — the phone itself was "ugly," the book says. It looked more like a BlackBerry than the sleek piece of metal and glass that Steve Jobs had just unveiled.

The Android team quickly switched gears to focus on a phone with a touchscreen, which would eventually become the HTC Dream (aka T-Mobile G1 in the U.S.A.). The launch was pushed back to fall 2008, months after the second-generation iPhone would go on sale, the iPhone 3G.

7 Tips for Improving Your Ecommerce Strategy

As customers increasingly turn to the Internet and smartphones for purchasing decisions, economies are seeing brick and mortar evolve into "click and order," and ecommerce become intertwined with m-commerce.

More and more businesses are expanding online — from grocery stores to "beer grams," almost any product or service is available via the click of a button or the swipe of a finger. What's more, studies show [PDF] online customers are exceedingly loyal — perhaps even more so than customers who shop in-store.

SEE ALSO: 10 Predictions About the Future of Ecommerce

For businesses breaking into the ecommerce space, the process can be a bit of a whirlwind. Ecommerce presents countless opportunities for retailers and brands, so businesses seeking to take advantage of the benefits must also address some tough decisions — site design, mobile and social media strategies, customer service and product pricing, to name a few.

We've talked to entrepreneurs and marketers about some of the keys to driving ecommerce. Here are seven best practices for your ecommerce strategy.

1. Create a User-Oriented Experience

When your customers can't physically see and touch the products you're offering online, convincing them to break out their credit cards can be a harder sell. Pricing products appropriately and delivering a user-friendly, all-around personalized experience is one way to encourage customers to fill their digital shopping carts.

Luvocracy is an online platform dedicated to helping shoppers find products they'll love via recommendations from "trusted tastemakers." CEO Nathan Stoll says that one of the reasons the platform is successful is because of the feel-good experience of providing quality recommendations to likeminded users. "People want to feel good about the decisions they make, and feel like they matter through the help they provide to others. "People want to feel good about the decisions they make, and feel like they matter through the help they provide to others. Creating a place where those helpful moments are captured, shared, celebrated and easily allowed to cross from the digital to our physical lives is incredibly rewarding," says Stoll.

SEE ALSO: How ModCloth Went From a College Dorm to $100 Million a Year

"Design-with-a-purpose" site Zady places emphasis on aesthetics and UI to provide customers with the best possible online shopping experience. “Just as it is important to greet our customers with a firm handshake when we meet them in-person, on Zady.com, the same ethos of the 'handshake' applies. We work to make the design beautiful, easy to use, and entertainingly educational, illustrating through iconography and beautiful graphics that Zady is a purpose-driven company," says co-founder Maxine Bédat.

A user-oriented approach to ecommerce helps drive brand loyalty, which is crucial to the bottom line — almost no online retailers [PDF] can break even by relying on one-time shoppers. Personalizing users' experiences also helps businesses segment their audience, which can translate into more effective marketing via targeted advertising campaigns.

"To really engage with customers, you have to appeal to the emotional side of your users," says Andres Teran, co-founder of Toplist, a social shopping recommendation platform. "More than the age or the city you want to target, it’s important to look for people who share feelings and behaviors towards something. Once you know this, it’s easier to find what your target customer likes, uses, does and where to engage with him/her."

2. Design a Service You'd Want To Use Yourself

The best test subjects for an online business, app or ecommerce site are often friends, family and fellow team members. "Make your team test the service like your ideal consumer: If you can't use it pleasantly for an hour straight, it's not good enough. If your 99th percentile server performance isn't good enough, you will notice," says Luvocracy's Stoll.

Chieh Huang, CEO of warehouse-club shopping app Boxed, encourages his team to put themselves in customers' shoes. "We built Boxed because it’s a service our entire company wanted to use ourselves," says Huang. "When the entire team is thinking like a customer, it shows in the final product." "When the entire team is thinking like a customer, it shows in the final product."

Alex Gonzalez, CEO and co-founder of Chatalog, a collaborative online shopping platform, knows about testing a business model close to home: "It was easy for us to identify our users and their pain points and then build a product to solve them because the original user was my wife and co-founder, Natalie. Our end customer is the shopper and, ultimately for me, the litmus test continues to be whether I catch Natalie using Chatalog every night with her friends and family when we supposedly have stopped working for the day."

3. Customer Feedback Is Crucial

Any business knows that customer service is part of the foundation for success, but small and medium businesses in particular rely on their customers for word-of-mouth promotion and brand loyalty.

Teran credits customer feedback for crucial decisions in the development of Toplist, and stresses the importance of listening to customer opinions and making adjustments accordingly. "Sometimes, we as entrepreneurs believe that the ideas we have and the products we build will be attractive for everyone — but it turns out you have to go out to the market, ask and try. You have to listen to your customers; what you're building is for them, so they will have a pretty good idea of what they need. At first, our product had too many features and functionalities that we thought were really cool — our users did not think the same. We noticed they wanted a simple product that would satisfy their needs fast and easy, so we set out to do that," says Teran.

Soraya Darabi, co-founder of Zady, agrees that listening to feedback on multiple channels is hugely important when making adjustments or introducing new products: “The community we are forming means everything to us. Customers' feedback, whether it comes in the form of a supportive email or a note on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, is read and shared widely across our team. We listen to the feedback and react swiftly and accordingly."

Not only does customer feedback help businesses evolve and perfect their product or platform, Stoll says that listening to customers can also have a "juggernaut" effect when it comes to building a business. "Leverage the authentic voice of the customer. Your customers are dying to help you and be made to feel like they matter. They are the reason you succeed," says Stoll. "Rather than feeling like you're constantly trying to shock them into participating, make them feel good about what they do and the fact that they've decided to buy into your brand and product."

4. Utilize Social Media — But Don't Rely on it Exclusively

A social media strategy — particularly paid advertising and an engaging content strategy — can be an effective way to target audiences and drive traffic to your site. Sites and networks such as Pinterest, Etsy, eBay and Instagram are often hugely useful for ecommerce businesses of any size. Social is also a great way to get word-of-mouth momentum started, which is perhaps the most important method of launching a new site or platform to success.

“Modern brands must embrace two-way communication online, there's just no question," says Darabi. "It's about remaining nimble to consistently learn from our customers, and to benefit from their sincere interest in helping us grow." Darabi tells Mashable that after granting a customer's request (via Instagram) that Zady begin selling dog gear, the items started flying off shelves. "We can't emphasize enough how listening well and using the appropriate channels to do so can help your business expand.” "We can't emphasize enough how listening well and using the appropriate channels to do so can help your business expand.”

Nathan Stoll shares another example of how social media word-of-mouth can have a "snowball" effect: "We discovered a conversation on Twitter where a Luv member asked her most-trusted beauty blogger to join Luvocracy. She wanted to start shopping all of the great recommendations her favorite blogger was making everyday. [The user] successfully got [the blogger] to join, and she quickly became 'addicted' to the experience. It's exactly how we want members to come into our community."

Jewelry brand Dannijo leverages social media in a unique way with a "Gram Hits" section on the website — it's essentially a shoppable Instagram gallery, comprised of Instagrams taken by Dannijo and their customers. Seeing a product in this environment — where the jewelry is styled and path to purchase is simple, makes a customer 3x as likely to convert, according to Dannijo's analytics.

While you want to excel on social media, it's important to note that focusing on social alone isn't enough. Many factors go into ecommerce success — and putting all your eggs in the social media basket is more than likely misguided. Social should be more than an afterthought — but it shouldn't constitute an entire business plan. "Consumer expectations are higher than ever; being present in all of the channels customers expect is now table stakes, but overall performance of the technology is equally important across all of them," says Stoll.

5. Invest In Mobile

It's becoming increasingly clear that ecommerce companies simply cannot afford to disregard mobile users. In fact, four out of five smartphone owners use their devices to shop.

"One thing is certain, go mobile or die trying," "One thing is certain, go mobile or die trying," says Toplist's Teran. "Mobile goes with you. Users can be engaged into making a purchase via a smartphone or tablet anytime and anywhere, so it’s crucial in the growth of ecommerce."

Teran suggests businesses take advantage of the entertainment or "me-time" value of smartphone culture, and points out that, as a more affordable and portable method of accessing a site than via laptop, mobile presents an opportunity to appeal to a larger market, especially in emerging markets. Additionally, a more interactive interface leaves room for creative methods of customer engagement. "We do not see mobile commerce as the future — we see it as part of the 'new normal,'" Teran says.

6. Incentivize Customers

Anyone with an Amazon Prime account will testify that incentivizing customers works. Whether the offer is a promotion, discount, or loyalty program for VIP customers, providing little extras for your customers can increase word-of-mouth promotion and build positive brand affinity.

Everlane is an online retailer that stresses transparency. Founder Michael Preysman says that the company got the ball rolling by rewarding its first customers. "We emailed our friends and family and said, 'Hey, Everlane is launching in five days — here's what we are. Invite 50 friends and you get free shipping for life.' And we had 600 people invite 50 friends. In total, we had 60,000 sign up in five days," says Preysman.

Chatalog's Gonzalez makes a point of rewarding customers for providing feedback, too: "We are maniacal about talking to as many of our users as possible. [My wife] Natalie literally offers each of our thousands of users a Starbucks gift card in return for talking to us."

7. Be Ever-Evolving

As the online marketplace evolves, so must businesses that want to stay a step ahead of the competition. Continuously listening to customers, keeping up with the latest trends, analyzing metrics and conducting vigilant research help companies stay up-to-date with emerging technologies and effective strategy. Experiment with new tools and make tweaks in real time to improve the experience for your users and the bottom line for yourself.

"There is no ecommerce, there's only commerce," says Stoll. "Instead of using a megaphone, use an inside voice and talk to the customers who already love you and tell them why you love them. Or change your product so they do."

Last year, Facebook gave users their own personal Year in Review. This year, the social network is turning the spotlight on users' friends.

Facebook added a separate Year in Review feature that highlights the top 30 moments and life events from users' Facebook friends.

SEE ALSO: 20 Things Your Most Annoying Friends Do on Facebook

Users can check out their own Year in Review by clicking on a "See Your 2013 Year in Review" button located below their profile picture. Once a user is at their own Year in Review page, they can click on a button labeled "Your Friends in 2013" to see the top moments from their Facebook friends.

Facebook uses a different algorithm than the one that surfaces News Feed content. The Year in Review is made up exclusively of "life events and popular posts," according to a spokesperson. The "popular posts" are determined based on engagement like comments and Likes.

Users can also click on images of their friends featured at the top of the page in order to see that friend's personal collection of moments and posts. If a friend visits your Year in Review page, they will only be able to see the moments and posts that were shared with them throughout the year.

Windows Phone’s 2013: A Year In Perspective

Windows Phone, Microsoft’s smartphone platform has ground out its place at the mobile table employing a combination of tenacity, marketing dollars, improving firmware, and, at last, a world-class device lineup.

It has not been an easy road for Microsoft, who launched Windows Phone 7 Series straight from the ashes of Kin, a time in which your uncle had more credibility in the mobile market. It came to the public nearly 2 years before Windows 8 did the same, for perspective.

And yet, following the release of Windows Phone 8 at the end of last year, along with new hardware from Nokia that could match, at last, rival devices, Windows Phone has outlasted BlackBerry, made market share progress, bolstered its app store depth, and has more or less become the accepted third place mobile platform.

Or, as Paul Thurrott wrote recently, “We’re number three. And no, that doesn’t suck.” But is that right?

The Struggle

It is something like vindication to see Windows Phone walk on its own two feet. If you were around when user interface experiments landed on Zune helped set the groundwork for much of Windows Phone’s GUI, there is a historical element at play in this narrative.

And, personally, I loved the idea behind Windows Phone the first time we got a taste, eventually calling for Microsoft to release a Windows Phone tablet in the pre-Windows 8 days. They did, but they called it Surface.

Still, we need to be careful. That Microsoft has answered the  ”can we beat BlackBerry and become an accepted mobile player” question aside, most of its work still remains ahead of the company.

As Thurrott notes, Windows Phone ended 2012 with 2.8% global market share. It is concluding 2013 with 3.6%, a mere 28.57% increase in a year that we in the media are generally heralding as pivotal in the best possible sense for the company.

So, what gives? The mobile market is growing, and while Windows Phone is growing more quickly — hence its market share improvements — it is hardly tearing up the charts, and Android is increasingly taking on the mantle of smartphone hegemon.

Android

Thurrott details the precise issue that I think could constrain Windows Phone’s forward momentum, perhaps lowering a ceiling onto to how far it can grow in 2014 and beyond:

2013 was, alas, the year that Android became the Windows of the mobile world. Android surpassed 80 percent market share in Q3, which was a big story.

I completely agree with the above.

Here’s a question that you should have an answer to: If Android can show up late to Apple’s game, and utterly crush its market share around the world, what chance does the scrappy, and far smaller Windows Phone have?

It depends on what we decide to call success. Surely 5% market share is not success for Microsoft. 10% could be, but Apple won’t cede that space, and still builds the best smartphone hardware, while Android has been all but unstoppable in recent years. I again agree with Thurrott here, who says “Windows Phone needs double digit market share globally before we can truly declare success.”

So, where to next is my question for Windows Phone. If it manages another year of 28% market share growth, it will end 2014 with around 4.6% share of the global smartphone market. That’s soft, and won’t provide enough increased unit volume to really get developers excited.

So, Microsoft needs to greatly accelerate its unit volume to at once lower the gap between it and Apple — this would greatly drive developer interest, I think — and manage to slow Android before it becomes not just the de facto mobile smartphone platform, but merely that in fact.

So while we have seen a great year for Windows Phone, its new targets will be harder to mark than BlackBerry. In fact, you could very easily make the argument that Windows Phone’s ascent is almost the result of BlackBerry’s implosion, lessening its implicit internal momentum.

It is without a doubt that this moment is the healthiest we have ever seen Windows Phone. But as we shift the perspective from which we view it from the bottom up to the top down, scale changes, and we must now treat the platform as the want-to-be big player that it now is.

Air-Powered Lego Car Is Ultimate Nerd Invention

If a life-sized Lego car that actually drives and is powered by nothing but air doesn't sound cool enough, consider this: The project was funded in part through a single tweet.

The car runs on compressed air, is made up of more than 500,000 Legos and can cruise along at some 15 mph. It's the brainchild of Raul Oaida, a 20-year-old Romanian who previously launched a Lego shuttle into space.

SEE ALSO: Lego Rivendell Is 'LOTR' Fantasy Land Made From 200K Bricks

When Steve Sammartino, an entrepreneur based in Melbourne, saw that project, he reached out to Oaida to partner on something bigger. They had seen Lego engines before, but they wanted to take their project, as Sammartino told Mashable in an email, to "the booya level."

They dubbed their undertaking the #SuperAwesomeMicroProject, and Sammartino started raising money with this tweet in February of 2012:

For potential investors who wanted more info, Sammartino kept his pitch cryptic but couched in fairly epic language. He gave Mashable a demo of his spiel:

In 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis the 3 CEOs of the Detroit car companies hoped on private jets to fly to Washington and beg Congress for money. They did this because they didn't understand what the future looks like. Come with me and build a full-size car that runs on air, from toy pieces, with strangers on the Internet - and you'll be part of the future.

Within a couple of weeks, his network of tech inventors and entrepreneurs donated $20,000 to the cause, then Sammartino pitched in to see the project through. He says the entire thing cost "well over $60,000, but I'm too scared to add it up; I wont sleep tonight if I do."

The final result, however, was worth every penny.

The car runs on compressed air that's stored in two small tanks. That air is then released into a pneumatic engine made of Legos, which then turns the car's drive shaft. The entire project took 18 months, with 12 of those concentrated on building the car.

Oaida and Sammartino's project has gotten plenty of attention since its unveiling this week. A YouTube video (embedded below) of their work has been viewed more than 700,000 times. While Sammartino isn't sure what's next for the car — perhaps an auction or public display — he does have some goals for the project's longterm effects.

"The main thing for the future is the tech community stand up and take notice of Raul Oaida," Sammartino tells Mashable. "He is the guy who made the tech happen. As we move into the hardware era of the digital revolution, I just hope I've helped him get a Lego up. Find funding for his big ideas and seeded him to the world. He wants to explore space and he has the capacity to do anything."

LED Mood-Sweater Shows People How You Really Feel

As the wearable tech market grows, creatives are introducing more high-fashion and interactive designs.

The GER Mood Sweater reads human emotions by reflecting specific LED light colors onto the white fabric of a sweater, which looks like a glowing futuristic loose fit turtleneck. Developed by San Francisco-based design firm Sensoree, the mood sweater contains a type of sensor known as the Galvanic Extimacy Responder. You wear the sensors on your hands, similar to lie detector test technology.

SEE ALSO: This Dress Turns Clear When You're Turned On

The emotions corresponding to the five light colors are tranquil or zen teal, calm or relaxed blue, ruffled or excited magenta, nervous or in love red, and ecstatic or blissful light yellow.

Kristin Neidlinger, Sensoree's founder and lead designer, describes externalized intimacy, or "extimacy," which aims to outwardly reveal sensory awareness to both yourself and others.

"Instead of intelligent technology, we create 'sensitive' or Sensoree technology that is intuitive, responsive and illuminates the senses," she told Mashable. "I believe technology can make us more aware. With responsive clothing, you can animate your body and heighten communication with yourself."

Currently, a limited edition of 100 mood sweaters are available for preorder on Sensoree's website. Its final retail price is still undecided.

This isn't the first example of high-tech fashions. An "intimacy" dress made from opaque smart e-foils turns transparent when the heart races, and the robotic spider dress has jerking and twitching limbs that move to protect those who get too close.

Facebook Tries Salvaging Home With Redesign That Makes Its Lockscreen More Familiar

Facebook’s Home has been a bit of a flop, with few users willing to so drastically change the face of their phone. Today Facebook launched a redesign that makes Home more familiar to a traditional lockscreen by overlaying phone and Facebook notifications, a clock, and weather info on top of Cover Feed and giving users more customization options. The hope is by making Home seem like less of a shock, more users will adopt it.

The new version of Home went into testing with Facebook’s beta community in November but will become available to everyone in the Google Play store over the next hour or so.

It shows time, weather, and notifications overlaid on your lockscreen for instant viewing. You can swipe left to view the Cover Feed of full-screen photos and posts. A shortcut to bring up Cover Feed has been added to the Home launcher, and you can choose a wallpaper as well. The update falls short of letting you add fully customizable widgets to your lockscreen like you can with other Android versions and downloadable lockscreens. Still, it makes Home less foreign, which is a step in the right direction if it wants more usage.

Here you can watch Facebook’s one minute demo of the new Home features.

When Home launched in April, it basically steamrolled over your existing Android phone’s customization. There were no folders, no widgets, no dock of favorite apps. This made people feel like they had to sacrifice the phone experience they’d grown accustomed to live with Home, and many felt it wasn’t worth it. Traction was weak, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted he wasn’t full satisfied with how Home has progressed. As of now, it still only has between one million and five million downloads, while Facebook’s main Android app has well over 200 million active users.

I wrote in May how Facebook needed to make Home more of a social layer on top of your existing Android set-up rather than a replacement. By July Facebook had begun shifting in this direction by allowing you to customize a favorite apps dock, create folders, and crucially, import your existing folders.

Today’s redesign could be seen as an extension of this push to make Home more of a complement than a replacement for how you interact with your phone.

Since launching, Facebook has seen several new competitors enter the lockscreen and launcher market. Rather than a more one-dimensional experience around Facebook or another app, Cover and Aviate are contextual interfaces that try to show you the right apps at the right time, like your work apps while you’re at the office and your personal apps at…home. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook acquire a startup in this space to bolster its lockscreen and launcher efforts.

Home promised an interface that put friends ahead of apps. But in reality, we use our phone for so many things beyond social networking that burying apps and widgets made Faceboo Home for of a roadblock. To make Home succeed, Facebook may need to retreat from its initial strategy, and find a compromise where friends and apps are loved equally, rather than making us play favorites.

Screenshots of the new version of Home rolling out on Android today are below.

Apple Adds FaceTime Audio To OS X 10.9.2 Beta, Bringing Native Mac-To-iOS Voice Calls Closer

Apple has issued a new developer preview of OS X version 10.9.2, and it introduces some interesting new features according to 9to5Mac. The most interesting is probably FaceTime Audio, however. Apple introduced VoIP calling (no video required) to FaceTime in iOS 7 on mobile devices, but this marks its first appearance on the desktop.

9to5Mac reports that the new audio calling feature is “integrated deeply” into both the Messages and the FaceTime OS X apps, which presumably means that you can initiate and possibly receive voice calls from each. This is a major development because it essentially completes the picture on Apple providing a full set of over-the-top text, voice and video communication tools across both its computing platforms, bypassing typical network and even device type limitations entirely.

Already since upgrading to iOS 7, and having most of my friends and family do the same, I’ve noticed a lot of inbound calls coming through via FaceTime Audio, and my outbound ones have mostly been the same. Having the option to use it on the Mac means I’ll now be able to field those calls at the desk, seamlessly, if I happen to be there, instead of having to fumble for the phone.

I’d call this a considerable threat to Skype, if Skype didn’t already work on an even greater range of devices. And the crowd that uses Skype isn’t necessarily the same group that would be using FaceTime Audio – ordinary users who’ve never set up a Skype account could easily call friends using FaceTime instead of their carrier’s voice service, given how deeply embedded it is into iOS in general. In that sense, FaceTime Audio could cut off some of Skype’s growth potential, as iOS and Mac users at least who live mostly within the ecosystem won’t be bothered to look around for alternatives.

As with any beta release, 10.9.2 is subject to change before its eventual launch, so don’t count on this absolutely, 100 percent definitely coming through in the final release. Still, it’s a logical move, and one that I’m personally hoping makes the cut.

AOL Finalizing Talks To Sell Winamp And Shoutcast, No Shutdown Expected On Dec. 20

AOL is finalizing negotiations to sell off Winamp and Shoutcast in a deal that would allow both products to live on, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.

The company (which owns TechCrunch) announced last month that as of December 20, Winamp web services would shut down and that the desktop version of the video and music player would no longer be available for download.

Shortly afterward, TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden reported that Microsoft was in talks to buy both Winamp and Shoutcast, another media streaming service that AOL owns through its acquisition of Nullsoft way back in 1999.

My source did not identify the potential buyer, but they said the deal was close enough that they’re “confident” that an agreement will be reached. Also, they said they don’t believe the previously announced shutdown would happen on Dec. 20 — while these negotiations are progressing, I’m guessing it’s in the interest of both parties to keep the services up and running.

An AOL spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

As we noted in our previous coverage, the products haven’t entirely languished under AOL — for example, Winamp Sync for Mac launched two years ago — but it hasn’t exactly seemed like a big priority. Nonetheless, Winamp in particular has a certain nostalgic appeal for people of the right age (i.e., me) and someone (Microsoft?) thinks there’s still some value here.

Twitter Adds In-App Notifications For Emergency Alerts System As Brazil And Australia Begin Supporting It

Twitter has just announced a couple of small but useful updates to its Twitter Alerts system, which allows participating organizations to send out notices to subscribing users about emergencies or disaster areas.

The alerts system gains the ability to pop up an in-app notification inside of Twitter’s apps today, utilizing the same pop-up ‘toast’ notifications that its new apps use for mentions and retweets. The notifications are red instead of blue and will only display if you’ve subscribed to an organization’s alert system.

Twitter says that you can now also subscribe to Alerts as notifications inside its iOS and Android apps by visiting an organization’s profile and tapping the bell icon.

It also announced that organizations in Australia and Brazil have joined the program. An announcement post from earlier this week noted that various police, city and regional organizations had joined in offering the alerts in Australia. Twitter notes that even if you don’t live in one of the participating countries, you may still find some alerts of use. Currently organizations in the U.S., Japan, South Korea, UK, Ireland, Australia and Brazil are officially participating.

As we mentioned with the program launched, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has already recommended networks like Twitter and Facebook over other forms of communication during emergencies. And it fits in with the narrative of Twitter as a communication channel rather than a ‘social network’.

Varun Agarwal: From failing in engineering to co-founding a million-dollar company

The Art of Listening

One of the first crucial lessons I learned when I first went into business at the ripe old age of sixteen was how to listen. This was due to the fact that all of my business dealings happened on the phone since my ‘office’ was in fact my bedroom in my parents’ house. I was extremely careful about not sounding young and inexperienced, so to compensate for that, I was diligent about hanging on every word that was spoken to me. Through that, I learned the importance of attentively listening.

As a result, I received many accolades as people felt like I truly heard them through our business exchanges. This led me to another critical lesson about the art of business – when you boil everything down, it’s all about relationships. And relationships cannot grow and prosper if you are unable to properly listen and deliver.

I’m definitely fortunate to have had such a unique experience being brought up in the business world at such a young age. I didn’t realize this then but basically if I wanted to succeed, I had to develop impeccable listening skills or else I would have never been able to build the type of trust with others that I have over the years.

I’ve always tried to create a working environment where people feel heard, and the only way to do that is to make sure they are heard. And this doesn’t just apply to business. I think that in life, in general, we could all use a little reminder from time-to-time on the importance of attentively listening to one another.

Engage

First impressions are crucial in relationship building. The first thing I do when I’m introduced to someone new is to make eye contact. Sure, sounds pretty simple, but you’d be amazed at how many people fail to do this simple thing upon first meeting. You want the person sitting across from you not to feel like they’re staring into some abyss – but that you’re totally present in the conversation.

Body language is another obvious piece. If you’re fidgeting, glancing at your computer, or checking your phone –you’re clearly not listening. If you’re not engaging, what’s the point?

Listen Actively

We don’t like to admit this but most of the time, when someone is talking, we tend to begin formulating our responses before they’re finished. If you’re constantly thinking about your response before the person speaking to you isn’t even done with their thought, you’re not engaged – and you’re not listening.

Sometimes it’s nice to be the person who doesn’t dominate the conversation.

Another piece to be mindful of is interrupting people. Sure, we all do it from time to time, and while it’s usually not meant to be disrespectful by any means – it can be viewed as rude and counter-productive in an exchange. When you interrupt, or when you plunge in too quickly to make yourself heard, you are behaving impatiently. And if you’re impatient with the wrong person, the right idea might slip through your fingers.

Listen Reflectively

After you’ve heard someone out, it’s always a good idea to briefly review the main points to make sure you understood everything correctly. This was something I was lucky enough to learn as a teenager, and it continues to serve me well to this day.

Some simple phrases might help in this regard. “What I hear you saying is…” Or, “Let me make sure I got this right…” You are validating and restating the message by paraphrasing what you’ve heard, and in so doing you’ve clarified the message for both the speaker and yourself. By reflecting back what you’ve heard, you are able to demonstrate that you really have been engaged. In addition – and this is a big plus – you have eliminated the possibility of misunderstandings.

If you learn how to listen reflectively, people are more likely to come to you with their ideas.

Don't Judge

After you’ve heard someone out, make sure you respond in a non-judgmental way. If you have questions, and clearly you will, don’t put the person on the spot. Being kind and receptive is empowering for the person you’re engaging with – always try to lean on this mindset. To criticize a bad idea is counter-productive. Even if you don’t respond to an idea, show respect by valuing that person’s opinion.

Judgmental thinking is entrenched thinking. Instead of judging them, judge yourself: An idea might not strike you immediately, but if you give it time, and a little thought, it could surprise you. Sometimes the ideas you dismiss out of hand are the ones that end up being real life-changers. A week later you suddenly understand what the person meant, and suddenly you see the idea in a whole new light. As Steve Jobs pointed out in his book, some of the greatest innovation Apple created came from his reflection that changed multiple industries forever.

Create the Right Work Environment

Every time I start a new business, I do my best to create an environment where all the employees feel heard, and the only way to do that – as I said earlier – is to make sure they are heard. That’s why my door is always open to everyone in the company. I run the place, and the final decisions rest with me, and perhaps at times I’m a bit of a dictator – but I’d like to think I’m a benevolent dictator. If people are afraid of the boss, the boss is doing something wrong. His employees are his best asset, and he is squandering them.

At the end of the day, listening really is an art form. It validates your employees. It makes them feel good about working in an environment where their voices are heard. And it fuels creativity. The job of a CEO is to listen, evaluate, and act on good ideas. And he can only do that by letting everyone know that he or she is open to their ideas. After all, good ideas is what it’s all about. If you’re not listening for them, someone else is.

There’s an old saying: Lead by listening. I believe that with all my heart. If I had to sum it up in a phrase, it would be a simple one: Leaders aren't born, they are created – when they understand art and listen for it in every form.

Top Five Predictions for 2014 in Advertising

In 2014, we'll see brands and agencies harness digital advertising in a way that integrates seamlessly with people's busy lives, whether through location retargeting on their mobile devices, predictive analytics or the intelligent automation of the ad buying process. Consumers send buying signals every day to advertisers and the brands that figure out how to use technology to listen more closely and send their messages in an organic and authentic way will succeed.

At RadiumOne we predict the following industry shifts:

1. Programmatic will Get Smarter -- skyrocketing to 60% of all digital ad spend.

We predict that by the end of 2014, almost two-thirds of the digital advertising market will be automated but the key to growth will hinge on the model's ability to rely less on third-party data and more on first-party data insights. Ad tech companies must take a page from the Facebook and Twitter playbook to incorporate some form of proprietary data into their technology. This coming year will focus on the refinement of advertising automation as technologies that rely solely on third-party data will become table stakes, fueled by the industry need to innovate cookie-less forms of targeting. This added layer of ad intelligence will give brands a leg up on the competition.

2. Platforms Thrive. Networks Die.

As marketers expand their digital footprint this year they will seek more cost-effective media buying solutions that offer them the transparency, control, performance and insights they truly need and generic ad networks will become a thing of the past. Advertising platforms will rise to the forefront as a crucial solution removing the complexity of media buying. Unlike networks, platforms are designed to put the power back in the hands of brands and eliminate arbitrage and heavy fee loads associated with the agency model.

3. Artificial Intelligence is a black box. Automated Intelligence will live on.

Many vendors currently fail to demonstrate how their artificial intelligence based on common third-party data brings any value to marketers. In 2014, marketers will seek those vendors using intelligent software that automates media to produce new insights that no one else has gleaned by combining their brands first party customer data and linking it with location-based and proprietary data. Brands will crack the code of big data by using these findings to drive data-informed decisions on the right course of action to take, at the right time with the right message over the right channel.

4. Mobile will exceed analyst estimates to represent 30% of all digital spend.

Spending an average of two hours and 21 minutes a day on their devices, consumers are replacing computers and TVs with smartphones and tablets to surf the Web and watch videos. The rise of new anonymous cookie-less methods of capturing user insights on mobile will help advertisers overcome one of the biggest obstacles for marketers -- mapping user behavior between mobile and desktop. Although current analyst estimates expects mobile ad spend to increase by 19%, we predict mobile will emerge to account for 30% of all digital spend in 2014.

5. Location becomes the new retargeting signal for mobile.

Elaborating on the personalization theme, next year brands will begin utilizing location-based data to more effectively reach consumers and successfully convert customers across the web and mobile. Mobile ad campaigns will start to leverage comprehensive analytics to hyper-target existing customers in real-time and identify avenues to connect them with their next customers on their most trusted device. Wearables and other innovative technologies analyzing consumers' movements are a sign of what's to come.

Apple's new Mac Pro now on sale, will ship by December 30th

After months of waiting, Apple's new Mac Pro is now available to order through its online store. Coming just a day after the company announced the availability of the trashcan-shaped desktop, the quad-core and six-core models start at $3,000 and $4,000 respectively. Should you order today, Apple says it'll ship your new Mac Pro by December 30th. That base model will get you a 3.7GHz quad-core Xeon CPU, 12GB DRAM, two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs, and a 256GB SSD. However, if you max out every setting, you're looking at around $10,000 -- and that's without a mouse or a keyboard.

Get all Specs details

Floridian Filmmaker Luke Aker, a.k.a. Ikonik Productions, may have found the best way ever to sell a used car.

Aker made a witty parody of the standard car commercial to accompany a Craigslist ad for his old, battered 1996 Nissan Maxima. In the tongue-in-cheek listing, he talks up the car, writing, "It not only brings more admiring stares than any other car I have driven it also has seat belts! Amazing!" The commercial drives home the joke with a dramatic announcer touting the aging Maxima's enviable qualities, such as "wheels" and "tires," over beautiful footage of the car's torn seats and weathered paint job.

SEE ALSO: Seinfeld's Retro Acura Ads Are Intentionally Bad — and Hilarious

The commercial itself is amusing, but what's amazing is that Nissan saw it, liked it and decided to take him up on his offer.

He responded within minutes, and by the next day they had a deal for the car, plus a bonus donation to the Wounded Warrior Project. Aker also threw in another car ad parody, this time taking on magazines.

Smartphone App Uses Selfies to Check Your Cholesterol Level

A team of engineers has designed a smartphone accessory and app that allows users to monitor their own blood cholesterol levels. Think of it as a sort of cholesterol selfie — or maybe a healthie?

As researchers from Cornell University explain in a paper in the journal Lab on a Chip, all you need — aside from their attachment and a smartphone — is a reagent test strip and a willingness to draw your own blood. Cholesterol tests tend to rely on reagent strips that turn different colors, depending on the cholesterol levels of the blood placed on them. The researchers’ achievement was to design an attachment to be placed over the smartphone flash and camera that can illuminate and capture the color of the strip, rendering unnecessary specialized equipment or an in-person health professional. The lab is working on a smartphone app that can determine vitamin D levels, too.

The technology is relatively straightforward, and the research group is one of many developing smartphone tools such as these. Already, apps can turn smartphones into heart-rate monitors, sleep monitors or ultrasound machines, to name just a few. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, half of the more than 3.4 billion smartphone and tablet users worldwide will have downloaded mobile health applications by 2018.


SEE ALSO: Selfies Aren't the Problem - Mark Zuckerberg Is

Whether they use them regularly is another question. Still, the continuing spread of smartphones globally and the determination of health policymakers to drive down costs make such cheap, idiot-proof (at least, idiot-resistant) technologies all-but inevitable.


SEE ALSO: Selfie Society: Fewer Memories of a Documented Life

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Image: Cornell University

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This article originally published at Businessweek here

Can the Internet Help a Blind Man Keep the Dog That Saved His Life?

A new online crowdfunding campaign is seeking $50,000 to prevent a bittersweet ending to a miraculous story involving a blind man and a seeing eye dog.

A seeing eye dog jumped onto subway tracks in attempt to rescue his blind master from an oncoming train on Tuesday. Both dog and master miraculously survived the incident with minor injuries, but due to an impending situation with the man's insurance, he may soon be forced to put up the dog for adoption.

SEE ALSO: 'Humans of New York' Helps Raise $80K for Orphan's Adoption

"The dog saved my life," Cecil Williams, a 61-year-old resident of New York City, told the Associated Press from his hospital bed.

Williams began to faint while standing on the subway platform on Tuesday morning, at which point his dog, Orlando, reportedly made an effort to hold him up and stop him from tumbling onto the tracks. When Williams did fall on the tracks, Orlando leapt down and tried to make Williams move.

Witnesses said Orlando would not leave Williams' side, even with a train quickly approaching. Witnesses said Orlando would not leave Williams' side, even with a train quickly approaching. When the train arrived, Williams and Orlando managed to lay beneath it, avoiding death.

“One more second, he would have been dead,” transit flagman Larmont Smith told the Daily News. Smith, a 15-year veteran of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, said he was screaming at Williams to duck his head.


At nearly 11 years old, Orlando is approaching the retirement age for seeing eye dogs, and Williams said he will have to put the dog up for adoption since his health insurance will no longer cover the cost. Williams said he would "definitely keep" Orlando if he had the money.

Indiegogo user Grant Kirsh, who lists himself as a "good Samaritan," launched a campaign on Wednesday to "help Cecil keep his best friend, who also saved his life." The campaign aims to raise $50,000 in the next two weeks. It has already collected more than $21,000, jumping $6,000 in the time it took to write this story.

Peteducation.com estimates the cost of raising a dog at around $800 per year. At the rate donations are pouring in, it appears Williams will soon have the funds to spoil his heroic pooch, courtesy of the Internet.

UPDATE: 2:40 p.m. ET

Williams answered reporters' questions at a press conference from the hospital Wednesday afternoon, saying he would be able to keep his "best buddy" Orlando.

"All the people that contributed or donated, I think we should take our hat off to them," Williams said. "There are still good people in this world."

Design App Creates Beautiful Photo Collages on Your Phone

Photoshopping yourself into Justin Bieber's arms just got easier to do from your phone.

Tel Aviv-based Bazaart, previously a Pinterest app for creating fashion spreads, relaunched on iOS Wednesday as a social design app. The app lets you layer photos to make collages as well as cut the background out of photos, either manually or with the app's automatic tool, which is based on complex algorithms and works surprisingly well.

SEE ALSO: 10 Better Alternatives to Your iPhone's Native Apps

"People have too many photos," founder Gili Golander says. "[Bazaart offers] the ability to join them together and create something that is more than the sum of the photos in it."

The pivot came because of how the Bazaart team saw people using the previous app not just for fashion, but also to create home design spreads, greetings for family members and art. The app now allows users to add multiple photos, text overlays, backgrounds including gradients, textures and patterns as well as photos provided by the app or via web search inside the app.

Along with cutting out objects in images, the app allows you to change opacity and order of the layers.

The result is everything from high quality artwork to, of course, cutout head shots placed on an image of Justin Bieber (space is another popular background). A quick perusal of the app reveals the many languages represented; Golander says the United States, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and France are the countries with the most users, in that order.

The creations made in Bazaart are shared to Pinterest more than any other social channel, followed by Instagram and Facebook. The portrait layout works well for Pinterest, Golander says, but they are planning on adding options for landscape and square in the future.

65% of World's Top Brands Are Active on Instagram

Almost two-thirds (65%) of the world's most valuable brands now have an active Instagram account, and nearly all active brands post at least one photo per week.

Statista created the chart, below, which breaks down the Instagram presence of the world's top 100 brands, according to brand-consultancy firm Interbrand. It looks at frequency of posts and follower counts.

SEE ALSO: The 10 Most-Followed Brands on Instagram

Between Q3 2012 and Q3 2013, the Instagram presence of the top 100 brands grew considerably; in other words, brands are posting more often, and gaining more followers.

Check out the full results, below.

Google’s Location History Browser Is A Minute-By-Minute Map Of Your Life

Quick! Where were you last Tuesday at 6:35 PM?

If you’re anything like me, your answer is probably along the lines of “I… have absolutely no idea.” Most people’s brains just don’t work that way.

But odds are, Google knows. They probably know where you’ve been most other days, too. And they’ll happily show you, letting you relive your life one step at a time.

If you carry any Google-filled gear (like, say, an Android phone or tablet), there was a prompt during the initial setup that asked if Google could transmit your location data back to the mothership. This is that data. You know how Google Now can auto-magically figure out where you work and warn you about traffic? This is the data that makes that possible (or at least a good chunk of it.)

Now, something to note: if you’ve been paying close attention, you might have seen this before. It’s not new. In fact, it’s been around for years. And yet, I had a helluva time finding many people who knew about it, even when I asked amongst my geekier circles. So consider this a public service announcement of awesomeness. A PSAoA, if you will.

I use “awesome”, here, instead of “terrifying and creepy”, because this is all opt-in. It’s a bit spooky in its scale, of course; it’s mindblowing to think about just how much data they’re gathering. But any data that’s there is there because you gave them the thumbs up at some point, even if it was while mindlessly clicking through the setup of a new device. If you’re suddenly realizing that there’s a location or two that you’d rather weren’t sitting in your history (hey, I’m not judging), you can wipe it on a day-by-day basis or clean your entire location slate in one fell swoop.

Google launched the first version of this tool around the same time that they launched Latitude. After they killed Latitude off, they kept their location browser around, polishing it up and adding new little tricks as time went on.

One particularly cool bit: scrub your mouse cursor over the graph at the bottom. The map above will play back your day, movement-by-movement. I spent well over an hour yesterday reliving the last month of my life, trying to remember what each stop was for.

Oh, and that graph? It’s charting your distance over time relative to where you began your day (so, in most cases, your home), along with a readout of your furthest distance traveled for each day. Fun(/kind of depressing) fact: for 3 days after Grand Theft Auto IV came out, the furthest distance I went was the Jack In The Box across the street.

If you missed the link above, here’s the link to the location history browser.

Yahoo/Siri App Is Actually A Real Prototype Built By Robin Labs But Not Commissioned By Yahoo

A little earlier we ran a story about a video that showed what appeared to be a Yahoo Siri competitor. “Sources familiar with Yahoo’s internal projects tell us that the video is fake,” we wrote. Well, it turns out that this isn’t the whole story. It’s true that Yahoo didn’t make the video itself, and it didn’t make the app, but that doesn’t mean Yahoo isn’t involved. The app was made by a natural language/speech recognition/navigation startup Robin Labs, in discussion with Yahoo.

Here’s the backstory as told to me by Ilya Eckstein, the co-founder and CEO of Robin Labs:

Robin Labs has been building a white-label platform for custom voice assistants. It’s the second stage of the startup’s development, the first of which was to develop its own eponymous personal assistant and navigation app. (That app launched last year.) As for stage two, think of it as Siri for everyone and everything, not just Apple. “The idea is that brands could offer their content to their audiences, wrapped in voice-interactive UI,” Eckstein says.

It turns out that Yahoo is one such brand, and appears to have been behind the development of the white-label platform in the first place. “We’ve been in conversations with them,” he says. “But our white-label platform was not commissioned by Yahoo.”

The Yahoo-branded prototype in the video, powered by the Robin platform, was created as part of those discussions. “Somehow, the video has leaked out after we’d sent it to Yahoo,” he says.

In fact, although Android Police published a link to the video on Dailymotion today, it’s been on at least one other video network since December 4, if you knew where to look. We had already seen it and were trying to get to the bottom of the story before Android Police published its post today.

To be honest, I had thought originally that Yahoo might be trying to buy Robin Labs. Eckstein would not comment on that. ”We are having an ongoing conversation with Yahoo,” he told me, and he says that has been with senior people both in engineering and corporate. “That’s as much as I can say about it.”

It’s not too left-field to wonder if Robin Labs could be another acquisition target for CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo: Yahoo’s been on a long-term buying spree of startups to pick up technology, talent (and sometimes users). Robin Labs fits thematically with other acquisitions Yahoo has made in natural language processing (SkyPhrase) and mobile assistant apps (a href=”http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/yahoo-acquires-to-do-app-astrid/”>Astrid). Robin the app today has seen some 1 million downloads. Today that service focuses on navigation and a few other services but has ambitions to extend out to other areas as a platform for personal assistants across different verticals such as “a news concierge, a communication / scheduling assistant, and assistant in the kitchen,” according to Eckstein.

Asked if Robin Labs had approached Yahoo for this prototype, or if it was the other way around, Eckstein responded with a saying: “Great minds think alike.”

He’s not very happy about how the videos leaked out in the first place, it seems, but is now just trying to accept it as a bit of “unexpected market research.” If you look at some of the readers’ comments, the idea does strike a chord with people, and we are pleased to see that. That actually may be one good thing to come out of that debacle.”

We’ve reached out to Yahoo and will update this post as we learn more…

PayPal Is Buying StackMob For Christmas

Mobile backend service provider StackMob is being acquired in a deal expected to be announced soon, according to multiple TechCrunch sources. We’ve heard from a few people the acquiring company is “down south,” meaning Silicon Valley or the South Bay. Some names that have been tossed around include Oracle and EMC, but we’ve yet to confirm. StackMob, a competitor to now Facebook-owned Parse, had raised $7.5 million in Series A funding in 2011, but was struggling to raise a B round, leading to the acquisition discussions.

Many have been hearing similar rumors of a StackMob acquisition in recent days, but we’ve confirmed with several sources that the deal has, in fact, closed. [Update: Following this article's publication, PayPal confirmed that it is the acquirer, saying in a subsequent statement this afternoon that StackMob's team will put their skills and expertise toward enhancing PayPal’s technology stack.]

“We believe that with the addition of the talented team from StackMob, we’ll move even faster in creating, testing and deploying products that aim to transform payments for customers around the world,” wrote PayPal CTO James Barrese on the company’s blog.

“By joining PayPal, the StackMob team will maintain its focus on developers and extending innovative mobile technologies that aim to allow consumers to access the rich capabilities of the PayPal global network,” StackMob CEO Ty Amell added in a statement. “We believe that our work at PayPal will make it easier for developers to create seamless payment solutions that span online, mobile, and in-store experiences.”

The company, for background, had offered freemium tools that made it possible for developers to more easily build scalable mobile applications, with support for things like custom code, HTML5 hosting, push notifications, location-based services, social authentication, a datastore for apps, API metrics. StackMob’s suite also includes a Marketplace, which allows developers to quickly add modules to integrate additional features from other third-party services into their applications. (StackMob, in turn, would earn a 20 to 30 perfect referral fee on these).

This year, StackMob also begin to court enterprise developers by touting its integrations with other software and platforms-as-a-service companies, API infrastructure providers, and others, initially including services from AT&T, Alfresco, Box, Braintree, GoodData, Mashery, Mulesoft, New Relic and Rackspace. We hear that effort had little traction, however.

At the time, CEO Ty Amell said the company was generating revenue, but would still need another round to grow the sales team and expand faster. “The dirty secret with backends-as-a-service is that it takes a lot of time and money, especially when you’re talking about enterprise. It takes a lot of time to become profitable,” he said in February, adding that the company was not yet “revenue-positive.”

StackMob also tried to capitalize on competitor Parse’s acquisition by Facebook, hoping to woo disgruntled developers to its platform via a Parse migration tool. That acquisition may have validated the overall space, but it seems that only a vocal minority were griping about the change, or frustrated enough to actually leave. In the months since, Parse grew from 60,000 apps at the time of the acquisition to 100,000 apps by this June, and has continued to roll out features.

Furthermore, since publication we’ve learned that StackMob reportedly hired a banker this summer in an effort to help it find an acquirer. We’ve also learned from sources that Yahoo was one of the companies to kick StackMob’s tires, however, in spite of the added incentive of a reportedly low asking price, Yahoo opted not to make a deal.

So, while PayPal and StackMob declined to share details on the acquisition price, it doesn’t sound like this was a blockbuster deal. Furthermore, while StackMob had a good run, it doesn’t come as a complete surprise that StackMob struggled in its efforts to reach profitability and scale to the degree it had initially hoped.

Ultimately, it seems as if StackMob’s early hype ended up working against it, as the initial buzz was followed by lack of momentum — a trend that also seems increasingly endemic to the mBaaS (mobile backend-as-a-service) space as a whole these days. Companies have had issues monetizing — even Parse, which sold to Facebook for a reported $85 million, at times loses money on higher volume applications, we’ve heard. And on the enterprise side, there are security concerns around exposing corporate data to the various mBaaS platforms.

In the end, it seems the time has come for some consolidation among mBaaS players, and StackMob is the latest to pull the rip cord. Let’s see who’s next.

Facebook Acquires SportStream To Increase Sports Chatter By Providing News Outlets With Cleaner Data

Facebook wants more users talking about sports on it instead of Twitter, so today it announced the acquisition of SportStream, a startup that analyzes social media mentions of sports and provides clean data access to news outlets and teams. The idea is by getting more Facebook sports chatter data on TV and digital news, more people will choose it as their athletics watercooler.

Last month I detailed how Facebook had chosen SportStream as an API partner with deep access to its data. As I explained, when people post about sports “The problem is jumbled data. When you write “RG3 touchdown” you mean Robert Griffin the third scored a touchdown for the Washington Redskins NFL football team. Facebook can’t parse that, but SportStream can. By making its sports data easier to understand, Facebook might get more outlets and teams to use it. Facebook hopes the perception that it’s a home for real-time event chatter will trickle down to users.”

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but it sounds like SportStream will continue its work with the fifty plus teams and news outlets it already provides data to.

Apple Will Require App Submissions to Be Optimized for iOS 7 by Feb. 1

Apple has sent out an email to iOS developers, announcing it will require all iOS app submissions to be optimized for iOS 7 by Feb. 1.

The company also announced the news on its Developer portal.

SEE ALSO: Homeless 'Journeyman Hacker' Launches Eco-Friendly Mobile App

"Starting February 1, new apps and app updates submitted to the App Store must be built with the latest version of Xcode 5 and must be optimized for iOS 7," says the message on the site, pointing developers to its iOS Human Interface Guidelines for more info.

It's no wonder Apple is in a hurry to point developers to optimize their apps for iOS 7, as it's vastly different from previous versions of the company's mobile OS. Apple claims iOS 7 embodies deference (meaning the UI helps users understand the content, but doesn't compete with it), clarity and depth, with legible text at every size, precise icons as well as visual layers and transparencies.

Google Glass Gets ‘Wink To Shoot Picture’ Mode, Lock Screen, YouTube Uploading And Hangouts Chat

Google has just announced a massive update to Google Glass which adds a lock screen, Hangouts chat, direct YouTube uploading via a Glass app and a ‘wink to shoot a picture’ mode. The wink photo mode is obviously interesting as developers had dug up references to it in the Glass firmware a while ago and it’s just making an appearance now.

You can shoot images by simply turning the mode on and winking your eye to snap photos. This eliminates the need to snap an image using the photo button or a voice command. There are some immediate privacy issues which rear their heads here of course — winking is a lot less obtrusive than a hand to the face or saying it out loud.

“Glass is about helping you look up and experience the world around you without getting bogged down by technology,” reads the posting. “Based on this philosophy, we’ve got a new setting that lets you quickly and easily capture the moments you care about with a simple wink of the eye. Whether it’s capturing an amazing sunset on an evening walk, or photographing your receipt for the lunch you’ll need to expense, you can now stay in the moment and wink to take a picture instantly.”

The post says that photos are ‘just the beginning’. It asks you to imagine situations like ‘winking at a cab’s meter’ to pay for a ride, or winking at a pair of shoes in a shop window to purchase a pair in your size and have them shipped to you.

“You wink at a cookbook recipe and the instructions appear right in front of you – hands-free, no mess, no fuss. Pretty cool, right?”

Sure, maybe. For now, though, it will be a lot easier for people to take pictures with Glass without their subject’s knowledge. It seems likely that this will cause more friction with those who take exception to Google’s head mounted computer. Some restaurants have already banned the devices in the interest of customer privacy.

A new lock screen mode will now clamp your headset down until you unlock it via taps and swipes in a pattern you set. You can now also upload to YouTube directly from the Glassware app on your device, an experience that was previously enabled by developers hacking the platform. Google Music All Access subscribers now also have access to their music and playlists with this update.

Google also notes that it dropped the iOS version of MyGlass on the App Store too soon, but says that it will be up again later this week. The app showed up momentarily on the store before disappearing earlier today.

Amazon Raises Its Game Against Alibaba, Will Expand AWS Cloud Services To China In 2014

Another step ahead for Amazon in its bid to become the world’s biggest cloud computing platform for businesses, and to specifically take aim at a big regional competitor in Asia, Alibaba: today it announced that it would extend its Amazon Web Services suite of products to China beginning with a limited preview in early 2014. You can apply for early access on the AWS China homepage here. It is teaming up with local players to provide infrastructure to underpin AWS, and is also starting an incubator to develop more localized services to run in the AWS cloud.

AWS China will sit alongside Amazon’s existing China portal (which has seen some success, particularly around the newly-available Kindle); and it will include all of the different services that Amazon has developed for other AWS regions: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Management Console, and AWS Premium Support.

“Current and prospective AWS customers have asked us to build a local AWS Region in China,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “China represents an important long-term market segment for AWS. We are looking forward to working with Chinese customers, partners, and government institutions to help small and large organizations use cloud computing to innovate and deploy faster, save money, expand their geographic reach, and do so without sacrificing security, availability, data durability, and reliability.”

Amazon says that its AWS effort, at least in these early stages, will be rolled out in partnership with local players — they include ChinaNetCenter and SINNET, which will be providing data centers; and ISP services such as infrastructure, bandwidth, and network capabilities. There are also consultants and other partners, including Cloudgo, Bamboo Cloud, Bamboo Technologies, ChinaNetCloud, and Hitachi Consulting China (full list here).

Amazon has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Beijing and Ningxia governments to develop cloud computing services, “to help foster development of a robust IT sector in Western China, empowered through cloud computing, that enables more Chinese customers to innovate and grow existing and new businesses.” As part of that, AWS China will develop an incubator in partnership with the Shanghai Jiading Industrial Zone. It will offer “a combination of resources from AWS China along with a variety of incentives from Shanghai Jiading Industrial Zone.” (If you are familiar with Microsoft’s Bizspark program, that’s what this sounds like.) Amazon says it will roll out more of these in other regions going forward.

This is not Amazon’s first move into cloud computing services in China. It says it already counts “thousands” of companies like Xiaomi, Qihoo 360, TCL, Tiens, NQ Mobile, FunPlus, Kingsoft, Mobotap, and Papaya Mobile as customers. And it was partly their instistence that led Amazon to move into China, the company says.

“Current and prospective AWS customers have asked us to build a local AWS Region in China,” Andy Jassy, SVP, AWS. said today in a statement (the company had a ceremony in Beijing today to mark the new service and sign the agreements). “China represents an important long-term market segment for AWS. We are looking forward to working with Chinese customers, partners, and government institutions to help small and large organizations use cloud computing to innovate and deploy faster, save money, expand their geographic reach, and do so without sacrificing security, availability, data durability, and reliability.”

This is also a more concerted effort by Amazon to pitch for more big business and to tap into the very large and still-growing community of smaller and medium-sized businesses in the country.

In the latter sense, offering cloud computing services to that segment puts Amazon into closer competition with Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant that has also been making more moves to become a one-stop shop for doing business online. Alibaba has arguably been called the Amazon of China, but in fact, Amazon wants to be the Amazon of China.

Amazon claims it is filling a hole in the market as these businesses become more connected.

“Prior to AWS, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of building their own IT infrastructure or contracting with a vendor for datacenter capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that their forecasted capacity was insufficient to keep pace with their growth,” AWS writes in a statement. That will include AWS’s well-known, super-aggressive pricing, which tends to undercut many other cloud-based offerings in other regions, and is built on a pay-as-you-use model with options for no upfront payments — an attractive option for smaller businesses that may not have much working capital.