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Salesforce Acquires Social And Mobile Cloud Computing Consultancy Model Metrics

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:46:33 +0000

Salesforce.com has announced the acquisition of cloud computing services startup Model Metrics. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2011, have not been disclosed. Model Metrics consulting firm that helps enterprise organizations accelerate the adoption of cloud computing. Specifically, Model Metrics focuses on helping companies adopt mobile and call center technologies, social enterprise solutions, business processes and more. In fact, Model Metrics has completed 1,000+ Salesforce deployments for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. The company also helps businesses create custom mobile solutions for iPad and Android. Founded in 2003 and based in Chicago, Model Metrics, which has raised $6.5 million in funding, has partnered with Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, Apple, and Google. Clients include Abbott, Boeing, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, L’Oreal, Morgan Stanley, and NBC Universal. Salesforce says that the addition of Model Metrics will “empower partners to develop their social enterprise practice.” The CRM giant’s strategic services team will have more mobile and social capabilities with Model Metrics. Recent Salesforce acquisitions include Assistly , and Radian6.

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Salesforce Acquires Social And Mobile Cloud Computing Consultancy Model Metrics

The Death Of The Spec

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:14:37 +0000

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead. There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet . Consumer Reports looked at the iPhone 4S . And the first reviews came in about the Kindle Fire. On paper, the Nook Tablet is the Android-based reading tablet to buy. It has twice the RAM of the Kindle Fire, twice the built-in storage space, a better battery, and it’s lighter to boot. Yes, it’s $50 more expensive, but come on, the RAM difference alone is worth well more than that. Clearly, this is the better value for your money. And yet, the Nook Tablet will not outsell the Kindle Fire. That’s the thing: “on paper” doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that the Kindle Fire comes with Amazon’s content ecosystem attached to it. Perhaps more importantly, it will be peddled like no other on the all-important Amazon.com homepage. The specs are secondary in this race at best. The reality is that they will be an afterthought. Or again, the Nook would win. Next up, Consumer Reports’ take on the iPhone 4S. Hey, this time, they actually like it! And thank god , because as everyone saw the last time around, their damning report really hurt iPhone 4 sales — to the tune of all-time record sales of the device, leading Apple to their most profitable year ever. More on that in a second. First, it’s important to note that while Consumer Reports liked the device, they didn’t like it as much as a few other Android devices. Why? Specs. Marco Arment ripped this apart last week already, but the thing reads like a bad joke. For example, they love the LG Thrill’s ability to capture stills and videos in 3D. This is one step short of knocking the iPhone 4S because it doesn’t have frickin’ laser beams mounted on the top of the device. And such comparisons show just how clueless Consumer Reports has become. Last year, they milked “Antennagate” for the pageviews, not realizing that it could actually undermine their own credibility if the device still sold well. “Sold well” ended up being a major understatement. So in effect, they themselves highlighted that no one cares about Consumer Reports anymore. And why not? Because they Consumer Reports largely cares about specs. And consumers do not anymore. The NPD Group just released their latest numbers . The number one selling smartphone last quarter was the iPhone 4. The over-a-year-old phone which Consumer Reports refused to endorse over a year ago, remember. Meanwhile, the number two phone for the quarter? The two-year-old iPhone 3GS. Does anyone really think that the LG Thrill is going to outsell the iPhone 4S this quarter? What about the Motorola Droid Bionic? Maybe the Samsung Galaxy S II? Consumer Reports now matters just as much as specs do. Which is to say, not at all. Finally, we have the Kindle Fire. This is likely to be the final nail in the coffin for the spec. By pretty much all accounts, this is a cheaply-built device. Spec-wise, it’s pretty ho-hum. But it’s a cheaply-built device that comes at a cheap price. That matters more — especially when paired with Amazon.com, as I previously mentioned. The Kindle Fire outselling the Nook Tablet, even though the latter wins the spec argument, will be one thing. But if sales compete with the gold standard of tablets, the iPad, that will really be something. So far, no other tablet device has come close to remotely competing with the iPad. The Kindle Fire should. They’re clearly different devices — the iPad is a much larger form factor and a price that is more than double the Kindle Fire — but I have no doubt that for many people, the Kindle Fire will be a good enough tablet that they’ll at least wait on an iPad 3 (or iPad 2 HD, or whatever it will be called). That’s a key thought: “good enough”. None of the initial reviews say that the Kindle Fire is better than the iPad — because it isn’t. It can’t match Apple’s product in either specs or polish. But it is $199 versus $499. That matters far more than any spec. You’re paying for something that’s perhaps half as good as the iPad, but it’s less than half of the cost. There’s at least perceived value there. And “good enough” also speaks to where we’re at in the broader computing world. I used to get excited for Sunday inserts in the local paper so I could see what new machines were available at Best Buy, Circuit City, or CompUSA. The only thing I cared about were the specs. Which Intel chip did it have? What was the clock speed? How much RAM? How big was the hard drive? How fast was the CD burner? How much cache? Those things mattered. Then three things happened. First, computers kept going more mainstream — the above listed specs look like gibberish to most people. Second, the web took over and most computers quickly became more than fast enough for the majority of users. Specs became a thing that PC gamers cared about. This contributed to the rebirth of the Mac, because it was never much of a gaming machine throughout the years — especially in the PowerPC years when it was getting smoked by Intel chips (which Apple, of course, eventually adopted). And third, buoyed by the first two things, new platforms arose. During the PC years, specs also mattered because there was one common dominant force in computing: Microsoft. Because Windows was everywhere, you could fairly reliably gauge the performance of one machine against another. But with the rise of the Mac and more importantly, smartphones and tablets, you can’t as easily stack machines up against one another performance-wise. My MacBook Air doesn’t have the specs of a brand new HP PC laptop — but it still feels faster. Maybe it’s OS X, or maybe it’s the solid state drive. Point is, consumers don’t and shouldn’t care. They care about which machine will boot faster and which will be easier to navigate. Time to web matters. And now connected ecosystems matter more than specs. This again helps Apple and Amazon. Does the machine seamlessly integrate with the iTunes ecosystem? Does it have access to the App Store? Can it access the Kindle Bookstore or Amazon’s streaming video service? We’re starting to see backlash against reviews of products that just do spec-by-spec rundown. Because really, who cares how the device sounds on paper? It’s how it feels that matters. Is the Kindle Fire smooth? Is the Nook Tablet fast? Is the iPad a joy to use? Drew Breunig spoke to these things last week in a post entitled “ Device Specs have Become Meaningless “. Dustin Curtis put this more succinctly in two tweets last night: Follow @dcurtis @dcurtis dustin curtis The section headings for a Kindle Fire review should not be "battery, internals, screen;" they should be "reading, surfing the web," etc. about 14 hours ago via Twitter for Mac Reply Retweet Favorite I agree. Why base reviews around specs when specs don’t matter? You could certainly argue that Apple is the company which has ushered in this post-spec era. They’ve flourished in recent years despite (and maybe because of) being cagey with most spec information on their newer devices. Does the iPhone 4S have 512 MB or RAM or 1 GB? Apple refuses to say. But who cares? It’s the fastest iPhone yet. (It’s 512 MB, for the record.) Apple is more traditional with the Mac when it comes to specs (undoubtedly due to legacy), but they still mostly bury that information. Whereas PC sites often trumpet the processor and other specs on the main landing page for their products ( HP laptops, for example ), Apple instead focuses on natural language descriptions: “The new, faster Macbook Air”. But the post-spec era works both ways. If the iPad specs don’t matter when going up against the Motorola Xoom, they also don’t matter when going up against the Kindle Fire. What matters is how the device performs, the ecosystem, and the price. In other words, the way you compete in computing now is to do so by focusing on things that human beings understand. On things that matter.

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The Death Of The Spec

Music Lovers’ Social Network Flowd Gets All New Mobile Apps

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:53:58 +0000

The music lover’s social network Flowd , which recently arrived stateside after its European debut, just updated its mobile applications with a boatload of new features that make them worth a look. Up until now, Flowd was only mildly interesting, as it was primarily touting its 600 or so artists and DJs who had signed up for the network – a number which, in the grand scheme things, is merely a drop in the bucket of all things music. But with the new mobile apps, Flowd is now aggregating artists’ activity from other social networks, including Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud and Last.fm, allowing users to access artist updates, bios and gig calendars, even if the artist is not on Flowd. Although in testing, this added import/aggregation functionality didn’t mean that every artist profile page was now filled with data (it was still sort of hit-or-miss), there’s certainly more information than before. Plus, it should be noted that the problem with filing out profiles through automated means could be affected by the simple fact that some artists don’t have gig info online right now. In other words, nothing to pull in. In the updated Flowd mobile apps, there are nifty Twitter-esque “follow” buttons which let you quickly build a stream of updates from your favorite bands in order to get details on new concerts and other news. In a way, the Flowd apps can serve as a Twitter client for those interested in music, without you having to…you know…actually use Twitter. Also new in today’s app updates (iOS and Android) is a feature that lets Flowd scan your device to see what music is currently being played or the last track played. It can then post that info back to Flowd and optionally cross-post it to Facebook or Twitter. It’s not as elegant as the Spotify + Facebook integration (or MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, etc. + Facebook), but it can serve as a path for social music sharing for those old-school people who still like to purchase MP3′s from services like Amazon or iTunes instead of paying for a music subscription. (And yes, there’s a lot of those people left yet). The Flowd mobile apps are available for free on iTunes , Android and Ovi (Nokia), but the app updates are on iOS and Android only. Flowd is a portfolio company of Digia Ventures, the venture division of leading Finnish technology services firm Digia, Plc with offices in Helsinki, Finland and Santa Clara, CA.

Prototype Blade Laptops Stolen From Razer Offices

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:36:33 +0000

We’ve been eagerly awaiting more news of Razer’s Blade , a 17-inch beast that they claim is “the world’s first true gaming laptop.” Alas, we didn’t think the news would be of the troubling variety: Razer says that two of their prototypes were stolen from their Bay Area R&D lab. Razer is working closely with the authorities, as you do when something this valuable is stolen, and they urge their fans not to buy any suspiciously Blade-like laptops in back alleys or out of the backs of pickups. The state of the prototypes isn’t mentioned, but I have to guess that they’ve probably been working on nailing down driver support and custom software for the customizable keys and touchscreen. And without proper support from developers (like, say, the ability to show your ammo count, lives left, that sort of thing), the Blade is really just an ordinary expensive laptop. Sure, they can sell them for a substantial bit of cash, but there are easier ways to steal laptops. Maybe the thieves are just big Razer fans. At any rate, if you have any clues or see one of the laptops on the market, contact cult@razerzone.com.

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Prototype Blade Laptops Stolen From Razer Offices

Amazon Kindle Fire tablet ships out today

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:40:43 +0000

Great news for those of you looking forward to getting your hands on Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet – Amazon has announced that it will be shipping the tablet today, one day ahead of schedule (it was supposed to ship out on November 15th). The Kindle Fire is the ultimate device for accessing Amazon content, featuring an Amazon-modified version of Android, access to Amazon services (nothing Google on this tablet) and apps, and a super low price tag of $199 (no contracts involved here). The Amazon Kindle Fire is available for ordering now and will set you back $199. If anybody receives their Kindle Fire in the mail today, let us know what you think about it so far. Check out our first impressions of the tablet, and stay tuned for our review in the future. [ Press Release ] Amazon Kindle Fire tablet ships out today , By Ubergizmo . Top Stories : Galaxy S2 Review ,

t’Light S iPhone dock doubles up as a table lamp

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:40:36 +0000

We’ve come across many iPhone docks in the past, and safe to say the good majority of them have been speaker docks, so you can imagine our delight when we came across an iPhone dock that doubled up as a table lamp as opposed to your run of the mill speaker dock, although to be fair the t’Light S by M&C Lighting does have a couple of speakers built into it, but you would never guess based on the design alone. (more…) t’Light S iPhone dock doubles up as a table lamp , By Ubergizmo . Top Stories : iPhone 4S Review ,

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t’Light S iPhone dock doubles up as a table lamp

Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G ready to ship tomorrow

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:25:29 +0000

Mark tomorrow on your calendars if you are up for some Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G love – as Amazon prepares to ship them six days earlier than originally expected. Both the $99 Kindle Touch and $149 Kindle Touch 3G will be part of Amazon’s all-new full-featured e-readers, where the latter will be the new king of the hill from the vendor, sporting a rather similar design and features that can be found on the Kindle Touch – although you now have the added capabilities of 3G connectivity for easy access to the Amazon store to purchase content there. (more…) Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G ready to ship tomorrow , By Ubergizmo . Top Stories : iPhone 4S Review ,

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Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G ready to ship tomorrow

Want The Chance To Work At Instagram? Solve This Photo Shredder Puzzle

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:49:05 +0000

Coding puzzles have been part of the Silicon Valley hiring process and lore since the days when Fizzbuzz was just a gleam in some HR recruiter’s eye. Blue chip companies like Microsoft , Google and Amazon all use questions like, “Write a function that takes a string consisting of numeral characters and returns all possible alpha character strings of same length as input that correspond to the keypad of a typical telephone,” in order to separate the skilled coders from the chaff. Come to think of it, that function would really come in handy if you want to create customized phone numbers like 247-PIZZA really quickly (but I digress …). Photo-sharing startup Instagram isn’t yet raising new funding , but it is adding to its staff of six, setting up this “shredded” photo puzzle as an engineering challenge. The objective? Write an algorithm that would “un-shred” the photo — i.e. producing a whole image when given the sliced image as input. “If you think about it, there’s a pretty simple approach that would allow you to find matches in a different domain,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom writes in a blog post announcing the challenge, “That is, imagine you’re sitting there trying to find a match between two pieces. What are you looking for to decide whether they’re a fit or not?” Ooh! Ooh! I know. While the idea of an image-based puzzle is novel, some of the folks at HackerNews were concerned that this particular puzzle was too easy (of course they were), to which the solution of course is “make it harder.” Systrom has provided a couple of ways to do this on the blog, and I feel like someone whose coding skills were better than mine could really get creative with this. Apparently at some startups it’s not even that important if the candidate correctly solves the puzzle, just that they were the type of person who would attempt it. At those startups I’d be a shoo-in! When asked why he followed in the footsteps of Facebook and his former employer Google in using a puzzle as part of company’s hiring process,” Systrom explained, “It’s less of a hiring process and more of a marketing tool. I think it starts a discussion that may lead somewhere – but not necessarily with hiring. We just like meeting really smart folks — [and] want to attract people who have the same intellectual curiosity as the rest of our team. We love the challenges we face every day with imaging and building scalable technology, and this challenge is simply a way for us to speak to the people who feel the same way.” Anyone who completes the challenge correctly will get an Instagram T-shirt and everyone who tries will get a response from the team. When asked how many people they were planning on hiring, Systrom told me, “Anyone that’s great we’ll take,” saying that he had no specific numbers in mind.

Hands On: Motorola Droid Razr Is Super-Thin, But Not Quite Super [PICS]

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:15:09 +0000

The Motorola Droid Razr rolls out to the United States on Friday, bringing an unusually thin smartphone into the hands of Android aficionados. Let’s put it to the test. Its claim to fame is its industrial design — the ultra-thin Motorola Droid Razr (Verizon, $299.99 with 2-year contract, $111.11 if you order it from Amazon on 11/11/11) is a mere quarter-inch thick. That’s the big story here. For those of the metric persuasion, that means it’s sporting a thickness of 7.1mm, quite an achievement considering the amount of tech goodness crammed into such a tiny package. Everyone who saw it was impressed by its slim form factor and smart good looks. If you’re sold on Verizon and Google ‘s Android smartphone operating system, that might be enough to get you to plunk down your three bills. Upon closer examination, it feels unusually light. It has a Gorilla Glass screen, but its plastic sides feel cheap. I like its handsome woven Kevlar back, the same material of which football helmets are made. To the untrained eye, it might be mistaken for more-expensive carbon fiber . But I like Kevlar as a material used on the back of a phone. It’s tough. It’s not the pleasantly grippy material I liked so much on the Motorola Atrix 2 , but it’s still excellent. While many users will complain about the lack of a removable battery, as far as the Razr’s design goes, that’s a plus. The back is uninterrupted by doors and latches, giving it a much cleaner look. However, I’ve never been fond of the big “chin” at the top of the back of many Android smartphones (see our gallery below for pics of this compared with an iPhone 4S ), and this super-thin model’s design is marred by that raised ledge that contains the 8-megapixel camera/lens, its flash and a speaker. That “chin” is at least double the width of the rest of this otherwise-thin phone. On the side is a plastic door for the SIM and microSD cards, and it feels so flimsy that I wouldn’t be surprised if it broke off after a few months of hard use. That, along with the plastic volume controls on the other side, imparts that overall feeling of lightweight cheapness to this otherwise beautifully designed handset. Here’s a complaint I haven’t often seen: Why does no smartphone maker (except Apple) object to cellular providers placing a company logo front and center — and on the back, too? This might be seem like nitpicking, but I really don’t want to be reminded of Verizon every time I look at the screen of my smartphone, and that’s what I’ll have to do with the Droid Razr with its Verizon logo glaring at me from the bottom of the screen. Speaking of the screen, I’ve seen better. Completely spoiled by Apple’s “retina” display, for close-up viewing angles, no matter how many superlative-sounding names you attached to this (albeit generously sized) 4.3-inch “ Super AMOLED Advanced qHD ” screen, I could still see distracting and visible pixels. Not good. I’d give it a C+. A plus for spec hounds ( see detailed specifications here ) is its dual-core 1.2GHz processor, making everything happen in a snap. It’s satisfyingly fast. Along with its 4G LTE connectivity, this phone is a speed merchant. SEE ALSO: Motorola Droid Razr Specs Compared to iPhone 4S, Galaxy S II, Droid Bionic, More However, even with all this processor power and graphics goodness, for some reason the Droid Razr can’t scroll smoothly enough for my taste. No matter what app I’m using or what I’m doing with the phone, if I’m scrolling from one screen to the next or from top to bottom of a long Twitter list, it’s just not the kind of buttery-smooth movement I’d like to see on a phone with this kind of power and technology. This is an example of a product with superior specs but inferior usability. The 8-megapixel camera does an admirable job of shooting both stills and 1080p video, with vibrant color and sharpness in both. Its focus and exposure snaps into place a little slower than I’d like, and its motion stabilization when shooting video doesn’t help much, but its level of quality is still slightly higher than most Android smartphone cameras I’ve used. See the gallery for a couple of unretouched examples of its photos, demonstrating the vibrant color and sharpness that’s possible in good lighting conditions. Android users can find better screens on which to view their beloved operating system, but they won’t find a thinner 4G LTE smartphone than the Motorola Droid Razr. There’s improvement on the horizon as well — Motorola promises the new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system will be available for this Droid Razr in early 2012. That’ll be a plus, adding better usability and an enhanced feature set to Android, which still feels to me like a work in progress. SEE ALSO: Android Ice Cream Sandwich Coming to Droid Razr in 2012 Overall, even though it has more shortcomings than I’d like, I think the Motorola Droid Razr is a notable technological achievement. It offers a large screen that looks acceptable until you get too close, along with the satisfying speed of its dual-core processors, graphics and connectivity. Although it doesn’t have the smooth usability of other smartphones, its pleasant good looks and ultimate pocketability make it a strong contender for your Android dollar. Thin, Light, Big Screen It feels good in the hand. Click here to view this gallery. More About: android , Motorola Droid RAZR , review

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Hands On: Motorola Droid Razr Is Super-Thin, But Not Quite Super [PICS]

New Yorker, Wired and More Coming Free to Kindle Fire for 3 Months

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:48:55 +0000

It’s not just apps making their way to the Kindle Fire — some 400 magazines and newspapers will also be made available when the device goes on sale Tuesday, some through extensive free trials, Amazon announced on Friday. Magazine publishers appear to be particularly bullish about the content consumption device, which they hope will bolster middling digital sales on the iPad and Nook Color. The Kindle Fire’s $199 pricetag will help many publishers get the digital editions of their magazines into the hands of their core readers. “The challenge is that we have a big segment of the mass market in middle America, who are not early adopters and are price sensitive,” Liz Schimel, chief digital officer at Meredith noted in an earlier interview with The Wall Street Journal . “This device breaks that barrier.” Conde Nast appears to be particularly confident about the platform. The publisher announced that 17 of its magazines, including Glamour , GQ , The New Yorker , Vanity Fair and Wired , would be available for free on the device for the first three months. Many titles from Hearst, Time Inc. and Meredith will be available on the Kindle Fire Newsstand from day one as well. It’s unlikely, however, that all of these editions will already be optimized for the Kindle Fire in the same way that, say, Esquire is optimized for the iPad . Newspapers will be better off, because they pull from a feed, but magazines will likely take longer to fully adapt to the 7-inch format and Android operating system on a weekly or monthly basis. More About: amazon , conde nast , kindle fire , trending For more Business coverage: Follow Mashable Business on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Business channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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New Yorker, Wired and More Coming Free to Kindle Fire for 3 Months