Fresh Stats On Social Networks Pinterest Catches Up With Twitter, Digital Divide Shrinks

I find statistics absolutely delicious. Pew research released fresh stats on what slice of Americans are addicted to all of the various social networks as of December 2012. There are a few big business and cultural implications.

Pinterest has practically caught up with Twitter, with 15 percent and 16 percent of adult U.S. Internet users on each network, respectively. Pinterest, which launched in 2009, has experienced explosive growth, especially with a white, female and affluent user base. Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest (5 percent vs. 25 percent) and almost twice as likely to be white and college-educated. It’s become a magnet for hip urbanites searching for the hottest wedding gowns and apartment decor. Twitter, however, gets a lot more attention, since neither presidential campaigns nor Middle Eastern activists are leveraging style catalogs to rearrange their countries’ political leadership.

There is no longer a minority gap in social media use. The surveyed groups (whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans) hover around 68 percent of total adults. Almost twice as many African-Americans (26 percent) use Twitter as whites (14 percent). The disproportionate African-American use of Twitter has fascinated culture commentators and scholars. One study found that African-Americans in celebrity news strongly predicted their Twitter use. Former web editor of the The Onion, Baratunde Thurston, hypothesized that “there’s a long oral dissing tradition in black communities,” explaining, “Twitter works very naturally with that call-and-response tradition — it’s so short, so economical, and you get an instant signal validating the quality of your contribution.”

Ironically, not using social media may be an elite thing. Those with a college degree are slightly less likely than those with some college to use social networks (69 percent vs. 65 percent). While the difference isn’t statistically significant, at least one study verified the trend among educated users to ditch Facebook for moral, political or cultural reasons. “Many Facebook refusers actually revel in their difference from the mainstream, seeing it as a mark of distinction, superior taste, and identification with an elite social stratum,” said New York University Professor Laura Portwood-Stacer.

Hipsters find it too mainstream and others find their privacy policies troublesome. In other words, not using social media is likely a product of more education, not a lack of access.

The full totals for each social network. Sixty-seven percent of online adults say they use Facebook, 15 percent of online adults say they use Pinterest, 13 percent of online adults say they use Instagram, 6 percent of online adults say they use Tumblr, 16 percent of online adults say they use Twitter (and 20 percent of online adults say they use LinkedIn as of August 2012). Below is a full table summarizing the results of the survey:

Sunrise Brilliantly Redefines Calendar Apps On iOS

Meet Sunrise, the calendar app that will replace every calendar app that you’ve tried so far. It’s the best calendar you’ll ever use. Behind its apparent simplicity, there’s a server component (like Mailbox), making it significantly smarter with data from Google Calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. The app was made by ex-Foursquare designers who believe they may have finally figured out how to make the calendar a powerful tool.

Sunrise first launched as an email newsletter that delivers your calendar information in your inbox everyday. At the time, UX designer and developer Pierre Valade said in an interview that “calendar apps today are mostly broken as they don’t show you useful information, even though you spend a lot of time adding items every day.”

With a brand new iOS application, this statement sounds even more true today. I’ve been using Sunrise for a couple of months and saw it grow into the best calendar implementation on a phone.

“We looked at this underestimated issue because nobody wanted to redefine the underlying principles of existing calendar apps,” Valade said. “And we think we built a very futuristic app, giving you all the information that you need in a beautiful user interface,” he continued.

When you launch the app, you get an infinite feed with your Google Calendar and Facebook events, birthdays and weather for the day. For every event, the app will provide information about the person you are meeting, such as a Facebook profile pic or a LinkedIn profile. You can RSVP to an event without ever leaving the app.

Sunrise is clean yet easy to understand, efficient yet full of “ah-ha” moments.

Overall, it is one of the best user interfaces I’ve ever seen in a mobile app. Sunrise is clean yet easy to understand, efficient yet full of “ah-ha” moments.

For example, when you first swipe your finger across the month grid, you’ll be amazed to see the two-week area expand to show you the entire month. You can then scroll easily to three or four months from now. This is the kind of effortless and clever UX trick that you won’t see in another calendar app.

As calendar users tend to be nitpicky about feature sets, Sunrise is packed with essential features. For example, you can quickly add an event by typing “Lunch with Matt tomorrow at 1pm.” Recurring events, reminders and all-day events are all there.

When it comes to competition, other developers have had the same feeling that you need to make your calendar smarter. Cue is one of those apps, but Sunrise’s implementation takes it one step further and is not cumbersome to use. Google Now could be considered another competitor, but Google is reinventing another service with Google Now, instead of improving its already solid Google Calendar.

In the App Store, you can find many calendar apps. Yet, many of them are just a UI layer around the core calendar APIs of iOS (Fantastical, Calvetica, etc.). Those apps are limited by what the default calendar app can do for the basic calendar features. They can add Facebook profile pics, but can’t manage Facebook event invitations or deliver push notifications for example.

That’s why they have appealed to a small percentage of users. Just like Mailbox, Sunrise needs a server component to make sense. In addition to providing more features, the app solves a lot of synchronization and conflict issues because Sunrise uses push synchronization everywhere.

Made in New York by Pierre Valade, Jeremy Le Van and Joey Dong, Sunrise is only available on iOS for now — and it’s free. It hasn’t received any funding yet. After Mailbox replaced your email client with its cloud-powered features, Sunrise will be the perfect app to replace your default calendar app. The two app icons make a perfect productivity duo on your iPhone.

Crunchbase

SUNRISE Company:SunriseWebsite:sunrise.amLaunch Date:2012

Sunrise is a free calendar app made for Google Calendar users. Designed with love, Sunrise is a new experience that will make your life easier.

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Shapes Of Things

To absolutely no surprise, the people I know are enamored of Google Glass. The world of sensor-driven big data is sure to come, just as apps have supplanted sites as the metaphor with which we frame our lives. As one who replaced music with computers, I am eager for the next phase.

But while Glass forges ahead in mind share, my thoughts slide to the elegant footnote that is increasingly absorbing my interest. The iPad mini, a device I only bought because I couldn’t quite rule out something lurking there, so subtle that I can really only see it in the absence of something. As I’ve lived with this strange step-child, that something is taking shape, becoming visible and tangible.

Just as Glass captures our imagination, the mini absorbs our reality. Always present, just big enough to transfer much of the iPhone’s work load, barely big enough to suck the Retina iPad dry, and just waiting to use AirPlay to push toward the big screen for media. Waiting not for the tech but the politics of the death of the broadcast windowing business and the rise of streaming to sort itself out.

With so many cycles opting for the mini, our behavior is shifting. This is bigger than big data, because the compressed signal of behavior moves ahead of the raw data in identifying the underlying sentiment. It’s not analysis, it’s the feel in musical terms. It’s that rush we felt the first time, and every time, we heard the Stones’ Last Time. It’s not the riff, although that was plenty for starters. It wasn’t the lyric either. It wasn’t any of the parts but for sure it just felt good.

There’s some of that in the Glass video, too – the moments where you can extrapolate what will happen when we can dive into an event and feel it because so many people are running it that we can cut to just the right person at just the right angle both in image and sound. Groups will form like the Beatles in Hamburg where the band got so tight they just simply started making music greater than the sum of its parts.

When people start finding the value, the joy, in working together, now that is something big. Right now, we can’t quite see it, but these new tools are like the electric guitar, the Arriflex in movies, Netflix in the changing of the guard. Each of them produced a state of being where magic could happen. Only now, years later, can I hear what the British musicians heard when they heard the blues masters. It was there all the time, I just didn’t listen. Lightweight cameras birthed the French New Wave, freeing Truffaut and Godard to deconstruct the studio system into its essential elements of story and naturalism.

We don’t yet see Netflix for what it is, intuiting that ethereal something but getting lost in irrelevant cord cutting and cartel stonewalling. But here it is: Just like the Beatles and their compatriots dismantled the existing music business and took over both the means of production and then distribution, so too will the next wave take over this live-streaming cloud-based network and produce live push notification-driven events owned and created by the artists themselves.

You can begin to feel the power of this moment with the mini. It’s small enough to always be there, big enough to get work and research done, Bluetooth-enabled to add a keyboard as I’m doing right now to write this, enough battery to manage notifications, news, Spotify, Chatter, AirPlay, everything. It’s the hub, and Glass will work with it because it needs to. When Jobs said he’d cracked the code, I believed it. It wasn’t bravado; he just ran out of time. And when I finally settled into the mini, I began to see how.

The mini is hard to write to. It may be because I’m sick of the tricks, or the usual kerfuffles, or whatever. But the mini reeks of just enough, no fluff. What is annoying and dumbed down on the Retina, like Pages, is plenty good enough with the keyboard. I don’t know what will happen with the Logitech mini keyboard, if MG is to be believed that it may be too small. But if I can make it work, it will be the first non-Apple Smart Cover I’ve bought. Already I can see the Bluetooth rules engine choosing keyboards based on location, priority, and all those intangibles that govern the studio recording process. How far behind is the atomization of the MacBook Air via the Bluetooth console?

The mini turns my iPhone into the Pebble, at least until or unless Apple jumps in. With notifications turned on, Twitter and increasingly Facebook are draining the battery and pushing me even more toward the mini. And it’s made FaceTime an increasingly valuable choice where the Retina is too big and way too heavy. Glass may move in here as well as a Bluetooth mini accessory. They’ll need to spend significant search bucks to subsidize Glass or risk being beaten by Apple on price.

Meanwhile event television is testing the streaming waters as the Mini melds controller, point of sale terminal, and notification multiplexing. Broadcast and cable politics mandate blocking of Netflix over AirPlay for the moment, but when I can’t watch Episode 4 and whatever of House of Cards through Apple TV, I opt for the mini and out of Showtime or NBC. The one thing I have a finite amount of is viewing time, and the more Netflix wins in that arena, the more pressure is on the hotel to participate via AirPlay and get a cut. Watch for the weaker news channels like MSNBC cracking the code first.

I spent the weekend in a hotel in New York hacking into HDMI2 with the mini and a new Apple TV. The more I butted up against the roadblocks, the more I realized how Apple is partnering with companies like Netflix and Spotify rather than fighting. Being on HDMI2 made it difficult to watch shows on the hotel broadcast channels, but I could Slingbox in to California and watch on three hours later or Comcast on demand or buy on iTunes the next day. I could listen to three tracks off Boz Scaggs’ new record on Spotify and then buy it on iTunes for the full album.

The network fare suffers greatly when matched against House of Cards or the relentless advance of time-shifting. I’ve stopped recording Glee because I know it will be on Netflix when the season’s over, and besides how can it compete against a steady stream of 13 week-seasons from the streamers. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Downton Abbey, House of Cards II, these things are stacked up over Gotham in relentless fashion. Just as the Beatles moved the record business from singles to albums and went to yearly production and release patterns, these binge-streaming series are wiping out the weakened networks. Unless they buy in like AT&T did with the iPhone.

Sure, there’s a second screen these days. But it’s not the one you might think. The second screen is the TV, where the decaying rules remain in force as network comedies atrophy and the fall season is rife with cancellation. The first screen is the mini, managing the push notification appointment calendar and relationships of the binge viewers as they kibitz, joke, and narrate the stream economy.

MTV Twitter #8220;Hack #8221; Prank Was A Risky Ploy For Attention

MTV has officially acknowledged that early reports of their hacked Twitter account was, in fact, a prank. An hour ago, MTV’s twitter account began tweeting naughty comments about musicians (screen shots below) and fooled a few media outlets into reporting the prank. A spokesman for MTV tells TechCrunch in an email “the hack was pre-planned in the spirit of corporate camaraderie with our sister network, BET [Black Entertainment Television]“.

The hack seemed real, given the raunchy tweets coming from the account, ”Wowz. @SelenaGomez, @AshBenzo + @VanessaHudgens showed major skin n’ sideboob at the #SpringBreakers premiere,” tweeted MTV’s official account”

MTV’s marketing director had alluded to the stunt shortly before it went live. After realizing it was a hoax, users began heckling MTV for what appears to be a widely criticized stunt. Denny’s Diner swooped in to make fun of MTV, with a clever tweet that instantly went viral. Perhaps, this stunt, which ended up making Denny’s look cooler than MTV shows that all this hacking news has saturated, to the point of parody.

The hoax was apparently a coordinated effort to promote the BET Experience, a live music event in Los Angeles. There is some reason to believe such a stunt could end up successful. After Burger King’s actual hack earlier this week, their account grew by thousands of users. For better or worse, MTV and BET are getting a lot of (free) coverage. If you subscribe to the notion that “all news is good news,” then the strategy was a marketing success. But, if the on-going torrent of negative tweets keep rolling in, this may have been a very high profile mistake.

Your Galaxy S IV Will Probably Be Plastic, And That #8217;s For The Best, Says Samsung VP

We’re just over a week away from the Galaxy S IV’s official unveiling in New York City, and the pieces are starting to fall into place. Sure, we still don’t know what the thing is going to look like, but persistent rumors have pegged the device as sporting the same sort of plastic body that Samsung has been (in?)famous for.

While she wouldn’t weigh in on the Galaxy S IV specifically, Y.H. Lee, executive VP of Samsung’s mobile unit, told CNET’s Roger Cheng that the love-it-or-hate-it plastic chassis endemic to the company’s gadgets aren’t going anywhere just yet.

According to Lee, it’s just as much about practicality as it is about style: In order to churn out (and sell) as many devices as Samsung does, the company has to pay plenty of attention to how efficiently they can be made. Naturally, Samsung can’t just pump out loads of shoddy devices and call it a day, so durability weighs heavily on the company’s mind when it comes time to picking out materials for a final design.

Meanwhile, would-be rivals like HTC have embraced metal with open arms in its latest flagship device designs. The benefits are as plentiful as they are subjective — the adjective that seems to be bandied about most often is “premium,” since these metal-clad devices tend to feel more weighty and substantial when compared to the sorts of flimsy plastic bodies that many Android-friendly OEMs still cling to. I’ll be the first to admit that I prefer handsets that feel like they could withstand some abuse, though in fairness I’ve found that devices like the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II can handle their fair share of turmoil despite having light, plastic bodies.

Granted, I can see how the choice of materials could prove to be occasionally problematic for the companies involved here. Crafting a device like the HTC One or an iPhone 5 out of aluminum can be more exacting (and therefore more time-consuming), not to mention more expensive than sticking with a less ornate body.

But here’s the thing — Samsung doesn’t need to play by those same rules. It’s an undeniable juggernaut in the smartphone space, and has proven ably over the past months and years that yes, people will often buy their smartphones even when faced with alternatives that arguably feel more premium. That’s not to say that Samsung will never rethink its position on the materials it uses. Lee concedes that the company “listen[s] to the market” and tries to accommodate it, so that sentiment could soon change if the masses demand it.

Crunchbase

SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS Company:Samsung ElectronicsWebsite:samsung.comLaunch Date:1969

Samsung is one of the largest super-multinational companies in the world. It’s possibly best known for it’s subsidiary, Samsung Electronics, the largest electronics company in the world.

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Halfway Through Its 100 Day Voyage, Checking In With The #8216;Unreasonable At Sea #8217; Startup S

When we first heard about Daniel Epstein‘s plan to bring his Unreasonable Institute startup accelerator to the high seas with a 100 day, around-the-world sailing expedition called ‘Unreasonable At Sea,’ it frankly seemed like a pretty crazy idea. Let alone the risk of pirates (the real kind, not the entrepreneurial kind), there are so many possible things that could go wrong for the 11 startups aboard the ship — bad Internet connections, seasickness, homesickness, and the like.

Unreasonable At Sea’s around the world voyage

So now that Unreasonable At Sea is more than halfway through its voyage (it started January 9th in San Diego and ends April 25th in Barcelona) we decided to check back in with Epstein for a TechCrunch TV talk yesterday morning to see how everything is coming along. For starters, the Internet connection is actually pretty solid, as we were able to see in the quality of our Skype chat as he was aboard the Unreasonable At Sea ship in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Mauritius. He told us that everything else is going just as swimmingly (sorry, I can never resist making some kind of water pun when writing about this endeavor.)

Watch the video embedded above to hear Epstein talk about the perks of the journey so far, how the startup folks are mingling with the Semester At Sea students aboard the ship (and getting some work out of them too), what the biggest lessons and surprises have been so far, and what’s in store for the rest of the journey ahead.

Crunchbase

UNREASONABLE INSTITUTE UNREASONABLEATSEA Company:Unreasonable InstituteWebsite:unreasonableinstitute.org

We accelerate Unreasonable entrepreneurs and their ventures. We are solving the world’s biggest problems by arming the entrepreneurs who can take them on with the mentorship, capital, and network to make it happen.Each year, we unite 25 entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe to live under the same roof for six weeks in Boulder, Colorado. These entrepreneurs receive training and build long-term relationships with 50 world-class mentors, ranging from the former Managing Director of Investments at Google.org,...

→ Learn more Company:unreasonableatseaWebsite:unreasonableatsea.com

unreasonableatsea is a mentor intensive and mentor driven program. Throughout the course of the voyage, you will sail, live, learn from, and be mentored by 20 of the world’s most prominent innovators and entrepreneurs.

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YouTube Announces That It Has Hit One Billion Monthly Users, Which Is Roughly Ten Super Bowl Audienc

Today, YouTube announced that it has hit a billion monthly users, which is an extremely insane metric. We know that YouTube is the go-to place for silly, interesting and important videos, but these numbers are something that even TV networks dream of.

The great part for YouTube is that this means that online video ad spend will go up since the eyeballs appear to be ready, willing and able. It’s not only advertisers that are rushing YouTube, budding music artists are heading there too, and making a career from the attention that they get.

Fueling this insane growth is the availability of YouTube on all devices, plus a growing interest from “Generation C,” which happens to love to curate. That content curation means that people are sitting in front of their device and watching video after video with genres that range from politics to cartoons.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about the milestone:

In the last eight years you’ve come to YouTube to watch, share and fall in love with videos from all over the world. Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences. Advertisers have taken notice: all of the Ad Age Top 100 brands are now running campaigns on YouTube. And today, we’re announcing a new milestone: YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month.

Content creation is getting easier now, with every mobile device able to upload videos in minutes. Even YouTube caught on to this and launched a stripped-down version of its app called Capture, which lets anyone grab video and upload it with two taps.

To give the news some more color, YouTube broke the numbers down a bit:

What does a billion people tuning into YouTube look like?
- Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
- Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly ten Super Bowl audiences.
- If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India.
- PSY and Madonna would have to repeat their Madison Square Garden performance in front of a packed house 200,000 more times. That’s a lot of Gangnam Style!

These numbers, along with the adoption of YouTube by seemingly every generation, means that Google’s gut feeling on acquiring them was right.

$1.65 billion certainly feels like a steal now. That’s a little more than what? A dollar for each monthly user*?

*Not actual math.

[Photo via iJustine]

Crunchbase

YOUTUBE GOOGLE Company:YouTubeWebsite:youtube.comLaunch Date:February 2005Funding:$11.5M

YouTube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos. The company recently redesigned the site around its hundreds of millions of channels. Partners from major movie studios, record labels, web original creators, viral stars, and millions more all have channels on YouTube. YouTube is predominantly an ad-supported platform, but also offers rental options for a growing number of movie titles.YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who...

→ Learn more Company:GoogleWebsite:google.comLaunch Date:September 7, 1998IPO:NASDAQ:GOOG

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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GAME sells Steam vouchers in its UK stores, sees no dramatic tension in that whatsoever

GAME is certainly up for trying new things after getting a second chance at life, and today it becomes the first store in the UK to offer Steam Wallet Codes for purchase. You can buy £5, £10, £20 or £50's worth, and until December 7th, you can get a 33 percent bump in trade-in value, should you put the credit towards codes. Customers can also browse the entire Steam catalog on tablets dotted around the shop floor. While the vouchers will obviously make good gifts this holiday, and also appeal to those who don't want Steam knowing their card details, we're not sure how smart a move this is. We imagine there are still a few keyboard-and-mouse gamers out there who don't use Steam, but once GAME shows them the light, will they ever set foot in a physical game store again?

Hands-on with Divekick's minimalist two-button controller (video)Hands-on

Just a couple days after we got our hands on Tenya Wanya Teen's crazy 16-button arcade stick, we were treated to its polar opposite; Divekick's two-button controller. Created by Iron Galaxy Studios just to show off the game at PAX East, the controller consists of two buttons slightly larger than the palms of our hands; the yellow one denotes a jump or dive, while the blue corresponds to a kick. As a parody of the fighting genre, Divekick's gameplay avoids complicated combo moves, is incredibly simple and immensely enjoyable, if we do say so ourselves. Unlike traditional fighting games, the health bars are essentially meaningless, as a single power hit can take down your rival. Therefore you're focused on just the most basic movements -- a common one involves jumping in the air, tapping the other button for the downward kick, and then tapping it again to fly backwards. As for moving your character about, a jump and kick combo will get you charging towards your foe. Some characters let you fly when jumping, while others reward pressing buttons simultaneously. From our few minutes mashing the controller, it seems that timing and position are more important than ever with such fundamental mechanics, and ones that we picked up pretty quickly. We especially enjoyed kicking our adversary in the head to make them dazed and vulnerable in the early seconds of the next round. Divekick's two-button controllerSee all photos

ThinkGeek offers $500 HAL 9000 replica, makes you answer to 'Dave'

It was a little over a year ago that ThinkGeek gave folks a chance to add a bit of 2001 to their home with the IRIS 9000 iPhone dock, but it's really gone the extra mile this year. The retailer has today announced its new HAL 9000 Life-Size Replica, a $500 device that's said to be built using the original 1967 blueprints and image files. What's more, while it isn't exactly "fully functional," it is able to respond to voice commands and most IR remotes with a variety of suitably unsettling phrases (yes, including a rendition of "Daisy Bell"). The downside is that it will set you back considerably more than the $60 of its smaller counterpart -- ThinkGeek is asking a full $500 for this conversation starter, each of which is "hand-assembled to make sure they are perfect." Would-be purchasers can get a taste of what's in store in the video after the break.

2013 Original and Exclusive Series Preview laquo; Hulu Blog

CaptainDash Reckons It Has A New Take On Big Data Dashboard Apps

Tableau Software in Seattle recently released a new data visualisation platform with new APIs. But it wasn’t in the cloud and we were, er, unimpressed. Meanwhile, Ducksboard in Spain is trying to disrupt the space with its own real-time dashboard for tracking internal metrics and web services. But now there’s a new kid on the block which might just overtake both of these players as is aiming specifically at the marketing community. Captain Dash has come out with an iOS app to compliment its existing Windows 8 application. So it seems to be coming from the right angle, given its apps and cloud focus.

Leveraging Hadoop and cloud architecture, the platform connects to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Analytics, and Atlas. The user can then track KPIs and metrics and track social, web traffic, sales, marketing spending etc. They then create multiple dashboards with multiple sets and fill them with the metrics that are important to the business.

The app is “freemium”, therefore free to connect up to 20 data sources. Any user can have a comprehensive view of their social activity on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other networks. Once 20 sources are reached, an upgrade is needed to continue exploring.

Along with all the usual customization things you’d expect Gilles Babinet, chairman and co-founder, says the new apps are based on the idea that “an easy user experience and the notion of synchronization are revolutionizing the multi-channel approach”.

The company was founded in 2010 by Babinet and Bruno Walther and boasts approximately 30 employees split between Paris and Tunis, in Tunisia. Babinet has led multiple startups with exits such as Musiwave, while also heading the Digital Agenda in the European Commission. Cofounder Walther was previously the President and CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide.

The startup has raised €1.4M from both iSource Ventures and personal founder capital.

Crunchbase

CAPTAIN DASH Company:Captain DashWebsite:captaindash.comLaunch Date:December 2010

Get your superpowers! Marketers, profit from smart, real-time data, beautiful visualizations, and a cool interface. Aggregate data from Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, Foursquare, and Microsoft Atlas to a single screen. Create interactive, customized dashboards displaying all your widgets to optimize decision-making. Connect the data that matters to you. All your data is in one place, automatically updated and accessible in real-time.Track data relevant to your universe as widgets, and structure your dashboards to fit your business.Smart interactions and datavisualization...

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Facebook Mobile User Counts Revealed 192M Android, 147M iPhone, 48M iPad, 56M Messenger

Facebook keeps user counts for its mobile apps hidden, but analyst Benedict Evans found a way to uncover them and they provide critical insight into the direction and performance of Facebook’s mobile efforts. Most interestingly, Facebook’s Android user count is growing much faster than its iPhone user base, but is found on a lower percentage of Android devices. Let’s take a closer look at the data.

A year ago, Facebook stopped reporting user counts for its own mobile apps via the Graph API. But if you searched for one that none of your friends used and hovered over the search result, you could see its monthly active user count (MAU). Evans of Enders Analysis meticulously recorded until “some time in November [2012], those disappeared and were replaced” with hover cards lacking the usage data, he tells me. He incorrectly calculated Facebook’s mobile web site stats due to overlap between native app and HTML5 site users. Facebook declined to comment but solid analytics sources and old official numbers say the rest of his stats are accurate.

Evans gave me the raw data dump from his research, which is more current than his blog post, and here’s what it shows.

iOS vs. Android

As of September 2011, Facebook for Android has 66 million MAU and Facebook for iPhone had 91 million MAU. In December 2011, right before Facebook stopped openly publishing stats, Android surpassed the iOS app. By just 11 months later in November 2012, Android had grown to 192.8 million MAU while iPhone only had 147.2 million MAU.

This shows Android is a core source of growth that helped Facebook reach 604 million mobile users by the end of Q3 2012. This underscores the need for Facebook to speed up Android development. Many new features and sometimes entirely new apps like Pages Manager launch first on iPhone. This could be because Facebook defaulted to giving employees iPhones for a long time, and still more team members carry them than Androids.

While Facebook for Android may have more absolute users than its iPhone counterpart, the iPhone has a much better penetration rate. Facebook’s native app is actively used by 73.6 percent of the estimated 200 million iPhone install base. Only 35 percent of the estimated 550 million Android install base see monthly usage of Facebook’s native app. This may be in part due to the popularity of Android in China where Facebook is blocked. However, it may also show Facebook’s lagging penetration in emerging markets like India where Androids are common.

This all leaves out the iPad, though. Facebook for iPad rapidly grew from just a few million users in September 2011 to 48 million MAU in September 2012. If you estimate iPad’s install base at 100 million, 48 percent use the Facebook app monthly. That’s a lower penetration than on iPhone but worthy of regular updates.

Meanwhile, out of the 195.2 million iOS devices regularly accessing Facebook’s native apps, only 53.8 million or 27.5 percent of devices have turned on Facebook’s iOS 6 integration. That means there’s lot of people who aren’t using contact sync, easy sharing, and single sign-on for third-party apps. Facebook may need to come up with a way to convince more users to turn on the integration, both for its own benefit, and to convince Apple that Facebook is a powerful partner.

The big takeaway from the iOS / Android platform battle is that Facebook needs to focus more on Android. If Facebook’s iOS and Android apps have continued on the same growth trajectories, by now Android likely has more MAU than the iPhone and iPad apps combined. Even if Android is not the preferred mobile OS of employees, building for it is critical to keeping its overall mobile usage growing.

Feature Phones Are Big. RIM, Nokia, Windows Not So Much

From September 2011 to November 2012, the Facebook’s feature phone app called Facebook For Every Phone that’s built on the Java Platform, Micro Edition, more than doubled in MAU to 82 million. The feature phone app’s growth shows emerging markets around the world are getting on mobile, and a decent number are using Facebook.

We don’t hear much about this app from Facebook. That might be because most of its employees carry smartphones, and so it may be harder to see how important it is, brainstorm improvements, and test updates. But until low-cost smartphones start displacing feature phones in the developing world, Facebook needs to innovate here.

What it doesn’t need to worry as much about are the second-tier smartphone platforms. RIM’s BlackBerry still has a somewhat significant Facebook user base of 60.2 million as of December 2012. Unfortunately that was only up from 48.9 million in November 2011, and its failed PlayBook tablet’s Facebook app had just 690,000 MAU by December 2012. Meanwhile Nokia had 15.7 million MAU by November 2012, and Windows Phone had only a couple million Facebook users. Fracturing engineering resources across these platforms is likely inefficient for Facebook.

Messenger Grows Quickly, But Is Still Far Behind

Facebook does a lot. Having a ton of features on the web makes sense, but cramming them all in a single mobile app can make it feel bloated. That’s why Facebook began releasing standalone apps in August 2011. They give users quick access and a dedicated interface to a popular feature, and helps Facebook experiment with new capabilities it might add to its primary smartphone apps.

After buying the group messaging and SMS-replacement app Beluga in March 2011, Facebook re-skinned it, and hooked it into its unified web/mobile messaging system. The result was Facebook Messenger which launched for iOS and Android in August 2011.

A month later it had almost 3 million MAU. Growth picked up in the fall and it had 10 million users on each platform by November. It continued steadily gaining users, and Android pulled in front of iOS in Fall 2012. By late November 2012, Messenger had 22.8 million iOS MAU, 32.3 million Android MAU, and 1.6 million BlackBerry MAU for a combined 56.7 million MAU.

That sounds impressive but Messenger still lags far behind several international messaging apps. WhatsApp is believed to have several hundred million users and China’s TenCent says its WeChat app had 200 million users as of September 2012. That’s why we’ve heard Facebook has made inquiries about acquiring WhatsApp as well as Snapchat, which it instead ended up cloning as Poke. Owning the platform you private message on is critical to Facebook because knowing who you message with helps it refine its content-sorting relevancy algorithms. There’s also potential monetization options within messaging.

Facebook Camera Can’t Compete With Instagram

Facebook knew it had do something unique with photos on mobile. So, long before it began negotiations to buy Instagram, it started building Facebook Camera. The Instagram deal was signed quickly, and Camera was almost done so it launched the standalone app a month later in May 2012.

Though Camera offered its own filters, a powerful bulk upload option, and more cropping flexibility, Instagram had too much momentum and a loyal user base. Instagram passed 100 million users in September 2012.

Thanks to Evans, we’re now getting our first look at Camera’s progress, and its lackluster performance. A month after its launch it hit 1.4 million users, dipped for a while, and now six months later it only has 1.5 million MAU. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to Facebook. It showed a slick photo selection flow, filters, and bulk uploads were popular, so Facebook added them to its primary apps. But in the end, Facebook may be better off dedicating development resources to Instagram.

What’s Next For Facebook Mobile?

To put it simply — going hard at Android, making its feature phone app more viral, and figuring out whether to concentrate on one omni-app or several standalone apps. Obviously there’s monetization, but that’s for another article.

Android’s growth momentum means Facebook for Android needs to become its premier app. Facebook’s competition with Google might make that painful, but it needs to stick to its social layer strategy. It should view building an incredible Android app as a way to take advantage of Google’s mobile install base, not the other way around.

There’s a ton of of feature phone users, and not enough are on Facebook. The social network should look to how it can convince its feature phone users to get their friends on-board too. That might mean some kind of incentive program for feature phone recruiters or recruits, such as mobile data discounts.

Finally, with Messenger, Camera, Poke, and Pages Manager, its standalone app portfolio is starting to bulge. Users might not want a home screen full of Facebook, and that might lead them to bury the apps in a folder. Then again, Google has done well with a suite of standalone mobile apps. Either way, 2012 was about Facebook getting serious about mobile in general. 2013 will be about trading the shotgun for the scalpel.

[Image Credit: Kelsey Dake / The Daily Beast]

Crunchbase

FACEBOOK Company:FacebookWebsite:facebook.comLaunch Date:February 1, 2004IPO:NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users.Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Playdek Closes $3.8M Series A To Build A Digital Community Where Tabletop Gamers Can Feel At Home

Fresh from putting smiles on the faces of tabletop gaming geeks everywhere, with yesterday’s news that it would be helping to bring Dungeons & Dragons to iOS devices later this year, mobile game publisher Playdek has closed a $3.8 million Series A funding round.

The round was led by Qualcomm Incorporated, via its venture investment arm, Qualcomm Ventures, with IDG Ventures and ff Venture Capital also participating. Existing investors Deep Fork Capital, Greycroft Partners, Jarl Mohn and unnamed angel investors also joined in. The company had previously raised $1.56 million in funding from its seed and Angel rounds — taking its total funding post-Series A to $5.36 million.

Playdek said the new funding will allow it to expand its digital hobby games portfolio with new launches, including its forthcoming app, Agricola, based on the strategy board game of the same name. Flagship existing titles from Playdek include its Ascension series.

The company’s other big plan for the funding is to build a hobby gamer community and online platform for players to meet and hang out, due to launch later this year. It said this platform will “provide the services that hobby gamers value” — so presumably stuff like leaderboards ranking players by score and forums to discuss the merits of different gaming strategies. In a press statement, Joel Goodman, CEO, said it would be about “giving gamers that ‘around the table’ feeling in the digital realm”. The platform will also offer events and tournaments.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Phil Sanderson, Managing Director, IDG Ventures said: “The market category is poised for growth, and Playdek has proven that it is the expert when it comes to bringing this dedicated audience what they want in mobile gameplay.”

“Playdek gives gamers what they want — compelling online games based on the franchises they know and love.  Playdek allows people to explore these worlds and stories in a compelling new way,” added John Frankel, ff Venture Capital, also in a statement. “We love the team, the strategy, and what they have done to date; we expect great things from them in the future.”

Crunchbase

PLAYDEK Company:PlaydekWebsite:playdekgames.comLaunch Date:June 2011Funding:$5.36M

Playdek is a mobile portal, developer and platform for tabletop gaming (board games, collectible card games and miniatures games).Playdek is powered by the Mber network, which is the foundation of the central portal, and provides the support for a broader online gaming community. Mber integrates into each game, and allows for players to join online games, play games asynchronously (play by mail), match and share data with their friends, and join online tournaments.

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Firefox 18 launched with Retina support, Android browser also updatedMobile

We took a look at Mozilla's mobile OS at the final pre-proper CES event yesterday, and little did we know the official release of its Firefox 18 browser was dropping today. The update adds the new Javascript compiler IonMonkey, which is said to make wep apps "perform up to 25 percent faster." Mac users who will settle for nothing less than high-res browsing will be happy to know Retina display support has been implemented, as long as you're on OS X 10.7 or above. Preliminary support for WebRTC has also been added. The upgrade is available now, but if you're reading this on FF, you've probably got it already. The Android version of the Firefox browser has received a little TLC alongside its computer-based counterpart. The IonMonkey compiler is also new to this version, the Google Now search widget has been integrated, and Mozilla suggests mobile browsing has never been safer. Head to the source link for the release notes for both versions.

Microsoft posts job listing for Cloud TV engineers, promises 'ambitious new project'

Companies might want to keep covert projects top-secret, but the more mundane aspects of business life often seem to get in the way. Take this Microsoft job listing, for example, which reveals that the company is recruiting engineers to work on a new Cloud TV platform. The Mountain View-based team will work under Redmond's Mediaroom business, which already powers IPTV services like AT&T's U-Verse. Personally, we're hoping it's the genesis of a Steve Ballmer-fronted reality show.