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Merkel Tours Berlin Start-Ups: ‘People Pay Money for That?’

03/08/2013 01:43 PM

Merkel Tours Berlin Start-Ups

‘People Pay Money for That?’

By Annett Meiritz

In a show of support for Berlin’s burgeoning Internet start-up scene, German Chancellor Angela Merkel ventured into a strange new world of employee-friendly tech offices on Thursday. Though she showed a lot of interest, Berlin still has a long way to go in supporting the city’s growth as a tech hub.

Two hours into her tour of Berlin’s digital wonderland, a place where business is booming and “feel-good managers” tend to the well-being of their employees, Angela Merkel was finally confronted with a bit of cautious criticism. Sitting across from the German chancellor, California native Holly mentioned that there are “barriers” for young Internet companies like Wooga, the social gaming developer where she works.

Merkel interrupted, asking: “What kind of barriers do you mean?”

Holly told the story of how she is actually a musician who initially came to Berlin on vacation, but stayed because she found the city so appealing. Then she found a job at Wooga, and the bureaucracy horror began. At municipal offices where residents are expected to register, one is “lucky if someone speaks English,” she said, adding that the authorities don’t even provide forms in the global language.

“We don’t want money from you, but we want a more welcoming atmosphere,” said Jens Begemann, one of Wooga’s founders.

The chancellor thought for a moment, then asked: “Have you spoken with the mayor about this?”

Yes, said Begemann. “But everything that you do to help Germany develop a more welcoming culture really helps the industry,” he said. Merkel nodded. Read more of this post

Korea’s Kakao Talk is paying an unexpected price for becoming the nation’s most popular mobile messenger. To the dismay of Kakao, the company that manages the service, its messages are being used as police evidence

2013-03-08

Kakao Talk pays price of popularity

Chat king suffers increased workload

By Cho Mu-hyun

Kakao Talk is paying an unexpected price for becoming the nation’s most popular mobile messenger. To the dismay of Kakao, the company that manages the service, its messages are being used as police evidence.

As mobile Internet services are increasingly being used for social communication, authorities are starting to look into servers for evidence in cases, rather than calling for witnesses, investigating hearsay or examining hard copies of documents. Read more of this post

Meet Memoto, the Lifelogging Camera; Memoto snaps photos automatically at thirty-second intervals

MARCH 8, 2013, 2:47 PM

Meet Memoto, the Lifelogging Camera

By JENNA WORTHAM

AUSTIN, TEX., — Facebook and Instagram have conditioned people into sharing photos of their most memorable moments — vacations, parties, weddings, meals and outings with friends.

But what about everything else that happens in between?

That’s the content that Memoto, a Swedish start-up, wants to capture with a small, wearable camera that automatically takes photos of the wearer’s surroundings.

The square-shaped device can be clipped onto a collar, a jacket or worn around the neck on a string. It snaps photos at 30-second intervals, and switches off only when it is dark, face-down or placed into a pocket.

“It’s not only the stuff you thought you would want to remember,” like beautiful sunsets, elaborate dinners and rambunctious nights out with friends, said Martin Kallstrom, one of the founders of the company. “Ordinary moments can turn out to be special. But the only way to see that is to capture everything.” Read more of this post

Finnish upstart rival Supercell knocks Angry Birds off its perch

Last updated: March 8, 2013 5:31 pm

Upstart knocks Angry Birds off its perch

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco and Robert Cookson in London

Angry Birds has become a familiar sight at the top of Apple’s app-store leaderboard. Rovio’s blockbuster mobile game and its many spin-offs first topped the iPhone’s charts in early 2010 and is now back at number 1 in the US and other countries after a week-long promotional giveaway.

But the apps market has changed radically in the three years since Angry Birds first burst on to the iPhone. While Angry Birds and its 99 cent spin-offs, Bad Piggies andAngry Birds: Star Wars are still getting plenty of downloads, they no longer lead the app pack in generating revenues, ranking towards the bottom of the 100 “top grossing” apps of Apple’s store.

That’s not bad in a marketplace of more than 800,000 apps. But where Angry Birds once was atop the revenue charts now sits Clash of Clans, a free title from Rovio’s Finnish neighbour Supercell.

Over the past year, the “freemium” model has come to dominate mobile games. Players of Clash of Clans can purchase extra “gems” for $5 to $100 at a time, which are exchanged in the game for cannons and towers to defend from plundering barbarians and attack invading goblins. Read more of this post

Will the Austin startup ecosystem ever live up to its promise?

Will the Austin startup ecosystem ever live up to its promise?

BY HAMISH MCKENZIE 

ON MARCH 8, 2013

On paper, it seems obvious that Austin should be included in the “best startup cities in America” list. For starters, the city hogs the tech industry’s attention for a week every year during South By Southwest, now hyped and mocked in equal measure. Then there are the heavy-hitter tech residents. Some of the biggest and most important tech companies have a presence here: Google, Apple, Facebook, Evernote, Cisco, IBM, Dell, AMD, National Instruments, and Texas Instruments, just to name a few. The local economy is booming, the state is business-friendly, and the cost of living is relatively low, compared to the coasts.

But the key words in the graph above are “on paper,” “for a week” and “a presence.” The reality is despite the best intentions and endless buzz, Austin has never lived up to its much talked about potential as a startup hub. Read more of this post

Why Sogou’s Input Method Search Could Change the Chinese Internet (and More)

Why Sogou’s Input Method Search Could Change the Chinese Internet (and More)

Mar 8, 2013 at 14:00 PM by C. Custer, in Opinion

Earlier this week, I wrote about Sogou’s new method of integrating search results into its Chinese-language input method. I also gave the system a test run on my own computer, and came away pretty impressed. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think this move has the potential to change the way Chinese users search, and maybe even the way they interact with their computers on a more fundamental level. Read more of this post

How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’

How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’

By Devin Leonard on March 07, 2013

One weekend last October, Robert Iger, chief executive officer of Walt Disney (DIS), sat through all six Star Wars films. He’d seen them before, of course. This time, he took notes. Disney was in secret negotiations to acquire Lucasfilm, the company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, and Iger needed to do some due diligence.

The movies reacquainted Iger with Luke Skywalker, the questing Jedi Knight, and his nemesis Darth Vader, the Sith Lord who turns out to be (three-decade-old spoiler alert) his father. Beyond the movies, Iger needed to know Lucasfilm had a stockpile of similarly rich material—aka intellectual property—for more Star Wars installments. As any serious aficionado knows, there were always supposed to be nine. But how would Disney assess the value of an imaginary galaxy? What, for example, was its population? Read more of this post

Everyone wants to talk about the start-up boom in Berlin. But for every success, there are numerous failures, including the award-winning Aka-Aki

03/07/2013 06:03 PM

Aka-Aki

Left Behind by the Berlin Start-Up Boom

By Max Biederbeck

Everyone wants to talk about the start-up boom in Berlin, particularly with Chancellor Angela Merkel visiting promising new firms on Thursday. But for every success, there are numerous failures, including the award-winning Aka-Aki.

Gabriel Yoran had a brilliant idea, but failed nonetheless. Because the entrepreneur wanted to make money, his product could not survive on the market. Today, he is certain of one thing: “Only one in 10 business ideas makes it. Three plod along. The rest immediately disappear forever.”

For a long time it looked like his tech start-up, Aka-Aki, was going to be one of those to make it. It was based on a great idea, was lauded by the media, received the Lead and Webby awards, and was loved by 700,000 users.

“But you can’t trust the hype,” Yoran says today. Everyone wants to talk about projects they find exciting, he says, but that doesn’t mean the business model will bear fruit. That proved to be the bitter truth for Aka-Aki; it no longer has any users at all. In 2012, Yoran and his co-founders dissolved the business.

Young creative minds market their ideas, invent new Apps, or develop the online market in a new way. It is a process that can be fascinating to watch, and it can also be worth a mint to investors. Private equity and venture capital firms are eager to find those projects with promise, and are buying in at earlier stages than ever before. For the start-ups themselves, the cash infusions that result are vital to having a chance at success. Read more of this post

Ansys Aids Innovation With Its Simulation Software; The company that dominates simulation software expects to earn $900 million this year

Ansys Aids Innovation With Its Simulation Software

By Ashlee Vance on March 07, 2013

Jim Shaikh’s first son, Danial, arrived six weeks early, weighing all of 3 pounds and in need of milk every two hours. In the middle of the night, Shaikh would wake up, retrieve breast milk from the fridge, and begin warming the bottle in a pan of hot water on the stove. “Sometimes I would fall back asleep, and everyone upstairs would be screaming at me,” Shaikh says. “Other times I would overheat the milk. I just wasn’t very good at it.”

Shaikh, an engineer who previously helped design cars for BMW (BMW), decided to invent his way out of any paternal inadequacies. He conceived of a bottle to heat milk instantly to a specified temperature and was able to test it without building prototype after prototype. Instead, Shaikh largely brought his product to life digitally, using software from Ansys (ANSS), a Canonsburg (Pa.)-based company that has quietly cornered the market on manufacturing simulation. Ansys’s models showed Shaikh how different plastics would behave when heated up and how varying nipple designs would affect milk flow. “Everything is simulated these days,” says Shaikh.

Since its founding more than 40 years ago, Ansys has become the largest producer of simulation software, which costs thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the simulation. The company’s staff of more than 2,400, including 600 Ph.D.s, has created algorithms that mirror the laws of physics, allowing Ansys programs to model virtually anything. Ninety-six of the 100 biggest industrial companies, and 40,000 customers in all, use Ansys technology to evaluate product mater-ials and durability. Experienced engineers who once had to produce dozens of mock-ups to arrive at a final product now need a handful at most, saving time and money. Work from computer-aided design (CAD) applications can be fed into the simulation software. Read more of this post

Why Redfin, Zillow, and Trulia Haven’t Killed Off Real Estate Brokers

Why Redfin, Zillow, and Trulia Haven’t Killed Off Real Estate Brokers

By Brad Stone on March 07, 2013

Over the last decade, the Internet has seeped into that bedrock of the U.S. economy: the housing market. A group of growing and mostly profitable websites have sprung up to help guide consumers through what in many cases will be the largest and most nerve-wracking transaction of their lives. Four sites—Redfin and Zillow (Z), based in Seattle, and Trulia (TRLA) and Realtor.com, based in the San Francisco Bay Area—attract 61 million of the 67 million visitors to real estate websites each month in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). They also generate hundreds of millions in revenue and have helped turn buying a house into entertainment—a spectator sport that can be enjoyed without darting surreptitiously into random open houses. Ninety percent of consumers now start their real estate journeys on the Web, according to the National Association of Realtors.

It all looks at first glance like the same kind of electronic marketplace that has eliminated travel agents, decimated classified ads, depressed stock brokers, and taken the swagger out of car dealers, but it hasn’t dented the fortunes of real estate brokers. A majority of buyers and sellers still wind up working with traditional brokers, one on each side of the deal.

Not only have brokers resisted the attack by the Internet’s real estate sites but their fees remain stable. Real Trends, a research firm, reports the average commission paid to the buying and selling brokers was 5.4 percent of the price of a home in 2011, up from 5 percent in 2008. (The seller’s agent collects the commission from the seller and then splits it evenly with the buyer’s agent.) That’s considerably higher than the median rate in markets abroad, where there may only be one agent involved in the transaction, such as the U.K. (a 1 percent to 2 percent fee), Germany (3 percent to 6 percent), Israel (4 percent), and the Netherlands (1.5 percent to 2 percent), according to a 2007 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. “Ten years ago almost no one started their home search online. And yet none of that value has come back to the consumer,” says Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s chief executive officer. Read more of this post

The Japanese art of monetization; An aging games studio called Gungho, which had a hit with Puzzles and Dragons for iOS and Android, and is creeping up on GREE in terms of revenue and market cap, and is actually above Zynga, at $2.3 billion based on only 8 million monthly active users. Gungho did not use social for distribution, the game succeeded just the on power of the app stores and TV ads.

The Japanese art of monetization

BY TOM LIMONGELLO 

ON MARCH 7, 2013

You can learn a lot about your company from usage behavior in Japan. Just like the Japanese language has a system for incorporating foreign words, when Japan latches onto particular Internet services like it did with Yahoo and Twitter, they become so important and widspread that they take on a trajectory all of their own.

In the case of Twitter, for instance, Japan found mass adoption faster than the US did. In fact, it still holds the highest Tweets per second record for New Year’s day. Within a short time of setting up shop at Joi Ito’s Digital Garage, Twitter made Japan its testing ground for new features and monetization strategies.

Japan is not nearly the largest market in Asia, but with 128 million people, 40 million of which live in Tokyo’s metro area, where strong 3G & LTE networks, tons of carrier WiFi & WiMax access and high incomes are pervasive, you can’t find a better place to test the logic of an internet business. Japan, unlike China, does not block the most successful companies from abroad. Rather, Japan’s internet border is porous. As long as the service’s simplicity prevails over the language barrier, usually the best service wins. Read more of this post