For the past couple of years now, when talking about the Apple TV product, Apple likes to throw out the word “hobby.” It’s as if they’re ashamed of the device. And considering sales are anemic next to Macs, iPods, and iPhones, it’s no big surprise that they talk this way. But there’s actually nothing to be ashamed of. The Apple TV is a good product. Apple just needs to put some proper time and energy into it, to expand it to its full potential. And news today about the so-called “Google TV” should do just the trick. Apple and Google are on the verge of war. The formerly close allies are increasingly competing in key spaces for both, and the living room is likely to be a new battleground because it’s still very much up in air. As the New York Times reported yesterday, Google is working with partners including Intel, Sony, and Logitech to bring a Google TV experience into the living room. This is, of course, where the Apple TV resides. And Apple would be foolish to simply cede any ground it does have to its new favorite rival just because it’s focused on other things (*cough* iPad *cough*). That’s a Microsoft move. As Nick Bilton points out, this Google TV would be based around the Android platform. This means that the key idea is likely to have third-party developers work on it to make applications built for a television set. That’s easier said than done, but Android’s open nature should yield some interesting results rather quickly. Apple, meanwhile, is of course anything but open with regard to their devices. In fact, the Apple TV is entirely closed right now, as only Apple is able to modify its software (without hacking it, of course). I suspect that will change, following this revelation. The idea of running iPhone-style applications on the Apple TV has long been a sexy one . Hell, people have even ported apps over to a TV screen to show how well it could work. The main problem with developing iPhone apps for the Apple TV seems to be resolution. With the iPhone (and iPod touch), Apple offers only one screen size/resolution, ensuring developers have an easy time making great-looking apps while at the same time, making sure end users have a great experience. But the iPad has already changed everything. With their new device, Apple has kept things as simple as possible by making iPhone apps scale up two times to work on the bigger display, but it’s still shows a willingness to move beyond the one screen size. Unfortunately, with the Apple TV, it can be attached to a screen that could be a huge variety of sizes, so it would be hard to control that. Google doesn’t care about that because Android already runs on dozens of phones with different screen sizes. But Apple clearly cares about how apps look on its devices (so much so that the iPad itself was likely designed at a strange ratio simply to make scaling apps look as good as possible). So does that mean they start offering an actual Apple TV (as in a screen)? Rumors of that have been around for a long time. Or maybe they black-box apps to a certain resolution similar to what they’re doing on the iPad when an app isn’t scaled up? Who knows. But what I do know is that upon hearing this Google TV news, the Apple TV became a little less of a “hobby” yesterday. Aside from calling it a hobby, Steve Jobs has referred to the Apple TV as being a potential “fourth leg” of a chair Apple is building. Leg one is the Mac, leg two is the iPod, leg three is the iPhone, and Jobs had hoped the Apple TV would complete the chair one day. But it seems clear now that he thinks the iPad could be the fourth leg instead. Screw that. I think it’s time for Apple to build a whole dining room set of furniture. We, as consumers, need a living room arms race between Apple and Google (and Microsoft, TiVo, Roku, Boxee, and the rest) to kick the cable companies’ shitty television user experience to the curb. CrunchBase Information Apple TV Google Apple Information provided by CrunchBase

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Google TV Should Finally Push Apple TV Beyond A Hobby

70% of users on the web do not speak English. Considering how many web sites and services are done entirely in English, obviously, this is a problem. Smartling thinks it has the solution. And now they have $4 million in funding to prove it. The realtime website translation tool has raised the Series A round led by Venrock . Also participating are U.S. Venture Partners , First Round Capital , and several angels, we’re told. There are professional translators out there that will convert your site into a different language, but they’re usually expensive, and it can take a while. Meanwhile, services like Google Translate are pretty much instantaneous and free, but accuracy is an issue. Smartling attempts to find the middle ground. They offer fast, accurate translations at a low cost. How? They use a hybrid model which essentially allows you to pick between professional translators, machine translations, and crowdsourced translations. The key is managing it all, which can be done with Smartling’s software. With it, you can pick and choose which part of your site to translate which way. As the web continues to grow quickly in places such as China, translation is going to be a very important aspect of an increasing number of sites and services. Smartling, which only started itself last year, seems to be in a good position to expand its operations now with the new money. CrunchBase Information Smartling Information provided by CrunchBase

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Traduccin Necesita? Smartling Raises $4 Million To Do It For You.

Brazil is sort of a strange country to throw into the emerging market category. Its not a particularly young country like India or Israel, nor is it a country like China or Russia that embraced capitalism fairly recently. Brazil is as old as the US and has had a decently built out infrastructure of things like roads and phone lines for some time. Yes, its a growing country with a young and stabilizing democracy that has a long way to go in terms of technology, modernization and bridging a quality of life between very wealthy and very poor. In that sense, it shares enough in common with emerging markets that Wall Street, at least, tosses it in the BRIC bucket. Indeed, Wall Street has had a way bigger crush on Brazil to date than Silicon Valley. That seems to have had two effects on the startup scene in Sao Paulo. The first is that theres a good deal of innovation in the finance space. Banks in Brazil had to become advanced, many people told me, because of the runaway inflation that plagued the country for so many years. As opposed to other huge markets like Mexico, China or India that lagged in the adoption of checking accounts and other basic services, in Brazil you had to have your money in the bank, because the value of cash changed so rapidly. So its no surprise more of those theres-a-better-way spin-offs have come in finance than, say, Web 2.0 or mobile. (Theres a ton in agriculture and other sectors outside the cities too, but more on that in a future post.) My favorite finance company that I met during my February trip to Brazil is called Crivo , and it left me wondering if that great wave of finance innovation might come from our Southern neighbors, not us. Crivo has developed a way to do lightning-fast, three-second credit checks. Its servers pull information from a variety of sources, including all the places you’d expect but but also sources like utility records to verify an applicant’s address or ensuring that their phone number doesn’t just go to a payphone. Even a single piece of information can be useful in detecting fraud, says Daniel Turnini, one of Crivos founders. (Pictured above, on the right, with his co-founders.) Theres nothing like a FICO score in Brazil so, in the past, credit decisions were made based on negative data and positive data. In other words you are good or bad in the banks eyes. Theres little record for positive data in Brazil, because the wealthiest people dont want how much they paid for a house or a car in public records. Its a security issue, Turnini says. That only leaves negative data. So if theres no information about you, its assumed youre a good credit risk. But miss one payment and you have a dirty name, Turini says. Its a flawed system. Many good credit risks (indeed Id bet most people) have missed a payment before, and its a huge assumption to make that someone with no credit history would be a good borrower. In recent years there have been banks, insurance companies, and similar institutions vying to cash in on Brazils emerging middle class and increasingly wealthy upper classes, but had no real way of knowing how to extend credit. Sound like great timing? It would have been if Crivo wasnt started in 1998. Back then, few banks in the US would have been early adopters of something like this, let alone banks in Brazil. (Ok, most banks in the US still wouldnt be.) Nailing that first customer was near impossible. The founders kept thinking they were on the right track because potential customers would freak out when they saw how quickly the software worked, but they’d never quite pull the trigger on a purchase. Always hoping things would finally click the next year, the founders kept bootstrapping the company. Finally, it did. Toyotas Brazilian financial arm bought their software and used it to rapidly approve people for loans, beating other car makers who were flooding into the growing market. The company has been on a sharp growth rate for five years now. They did roughly $12 million in revenues last year, and expect that to double in 2010, Turini says. Crivo says it has more than 80 employees and 100 customers today. There are clear ripple effects if Crivo does well. More people getting credit cards helps grow spending and ecommerce, more small businesses can get loans, and more people who cant afford to pay in cash can buy houses – to name just a few advantages. Weve seen the benefits of greenfield markets when it comes to innovation in telecom and even physical infrastructure, like roads and trains. Might Brazil be able to come up with some greenfield solutions for finance? Its easy to see how a FICO score could be improved on and, ahem, really easy to make the argument that way too much credit has been extended in the US in the last ten years. But while we have a system in place, who is going to upend the apple cart and force widespread-adoption of a newer, smarter system? Its South Korea and telecom all over again. And theres another benefit to an emerging market that plays host to lots of finance and consulting multinationals. While countries like Israel and India have gotten a raft of talented coders thanks to US outsourcing, their own startups struggle when it comes to finding locals with sales and management expertise. Those jobs are usually kept in the US or done by transplanted Americans. And just as Intel, Cisco, Oracle and Google have trained thousands of engineers in emerging markets, so the big consulting, finance and CPG companies are training hundreds of potential managers in Brazil. Yes, I realize that to many tech entrepreneurs, the idea of a country amassing an army of middle managers sounds about as appealing as a resurrection ship of Cylons. But a lot of the most talented local entrepreneurs, managers and even investors I met in Brazil had spun out of a year or two in consulting and finance. An example was Diego Simon of VivaReal (pictured right, working in his tiny home office), a broad Latin American real estate portal that has increasingly been focusing on Brazil. Neither of the founders are Brazilian – or even live in Brazil – so finding someone like Simon was essential. Entrepreneurs from other South American countries say selling to Brazil as an outsider is harder for them than selling to China. That makes Simon exactly the Droid any company like VivaReal is looking for: He had experience running his familys business, worked a stint for a multinational but left because he wanted to do something vaguely entrepreneurial – although he didnt know exactly what. Ive never been particularly bullish on real estate portals, but if VivaReal does well, it will be in no small part due to Simon criss-crossing Sao Paulo in his Fiat extolling the virtues of online listings under the auspices of a common culture and language. The problem islike in China and Indiathe allure of the multi-national paycheck and prestige is strong in Brazil. The management expertise may be there in greater numbers, but convincing someone to take a gamble on an unproven startup for stock is as hard as it is anywhere in the emerging world.

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Brazil: The New Home of Financial Innovation?

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time , but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore . Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users). That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge ), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down. It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it ). But since the acquisition by Facebook , it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither , but that seems to be exactly what is happening. If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too. Update : FriendFeed is still down over an hour later. Their official Twitter account blames a “major power outage.” CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Information provided by CrunchBase

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FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed.

As you might have heard earlier today, Google made another acquisition the email search startup reMail . While its topical description may make it seem like an obvious buy, there’s another layer that makes this really interesting. reMail isn’t just any email search startup, it’s a startup working to perfect email search on the iPhone. Or rather, it was. Here’s the key part of reMail founder Gabor Cselle’s post about the acquisition today: “ Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. ” Yep, it looks like this may be another battle in the Apple-Google mobile war. While you might assume this was a pure talent acquisition, there’s something odd: Cselle has already worked for Google in the past. On Gmail. While I’m sure Google is happy to have him back, I’m betting they’re just as happy to kill off what is hands down one of the best email applications on the iPhone much better than the iPhone’s native email app. As an advisor for this year’s Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator startup competition at SXSW this year, I had a chance to take a good look at reMail recently. Not surprisingly, it was chosen as one of the finalists (though I’m sure that will change now). It’s sad that other iPhone users won’t get a chance to check out this app now that Google is killing it. But all’s fair in love and war, I suppose. And make no mistake , this is war. [image: Dreamsworks] CrunchBase Information Google reMail Apple iPhone Gmail Information provided by CrunchBase

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Pollice Verso: Google Buys Awesome iPhone Email App; Kills It

Unlike most other smartphone platforms, Windows Mobile doesn’t come with a mapping application pre-installed by default. While this may very well change with the soon-to-be-announced Windows Mobile 7 , it has thus far been up to the handset manufacturer to throw in a map app if they so choose. Later this week, messaging/location technology providers TCS will announce that Sony Ericsson has chosen their turn-by-turn application, Gokivo, to be pre-loaded onto future Sony Ericsson-made Windows Mobile handsets. The first Sony Ericsson handset to come with Gokivo out of the box will be the Aspen , which was just announced last week. This is pretty big news for TCS; they just acquired the company behind Gokivo, Networks In Motion, back in December, and this is the first time any manufacturer has chosen to pre-install the app at the factory. The flagship features, according to TCS: Local Search Traffic and Weather Location Sharing While it’s great news for TCS, I have to wonder: with Nokia and Google’s recent moves toward making turn-by-turn navigation a standard feature on S60 and Android, how much longer will smartphone consumers be willing to cough up a subscription fee? CrunchBase Information TeleCommunication Systems Networks in Motion Information provided by CrunchBase

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Sony Ericsson To Pre-Load Gokivo Navigator Onto New Windows Mobile Handsets

As is to be expected of any device that the masses get excited about prior to it actually existing, the iPad has torn the Internet in two. Some love it, seeing it as the first iteration of an eventually world-changing device; others just don’t see a point. “It’s just a big iPhone,” they say, “and I already have an iPhone!” These iPhone owners are exactly who should be the most excited about the iPad – even if they don’t plan on buying one. Even before its release, the iPad has heralded a number of changes on the way for iPhone OS – and presumably, the iPhone itself. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch > >

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5 Things The iPhone Could Learn From The iPad

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks there is a social paradox in the location space . A new service, Rally , believes the power of location lies in less rather than more. That is to say, fewer social connections rather than more of them. It’s an idea that you don’t hear a lot of social networks talking about these days as each tries to build a social graph that’s as sprawling as possible. But the team behind Rally is taking this different approach largely due to their past experience. Much of the team is the same one that built 12seconds , one of the video platforms that rose as Twitter began to become popular. And eventually, 12seconds started relying heavily on Twitter’s large social graph for its own service. But co-founder Sol Lipman isn’t convinced that’s the right way for services going forward. So he pulled together a team with the idea of building a dead-simple location service from scratch. There is no option to pull in your friends from Twitter. No option to pull in your friends from Facebook. That’s ballsy, and risky, but it could pay off in the form of a location service that people use just with their actual friends. To put it another way, “ friending becomes a virus that ruins your application ,” Lipman says. If you’ve used a location service such as Foursquare or Gowalla , Rally will feel familiar to you. Like those services, the core concept is to “check-in” at various venues around a city. But Rally does things a little differently. One thing is that they place an emphasis on tagging a check-in with a picture. You don’t have to do this, but Rally has a very nice stream UI that will highlight check-ins with pictures from those people you follow. Another unique concept is the idea of checking in at “Home.” While plenty of users create venues on Foursquare and Gowalla for their homes, Lipman realizes that many people aren’t comfortable putting their addresses on these services. So the “home” location in Rally is a non-geotagged place that still allows you to check-in so that your real friends know that you are home. And since they are your actual friends, they will likely already know what that location is. Rally also has a feature that allows you to make temporary locations. This is the perfect solution for creating a spot that is only going to last for a set amount of time, such as a conference or a party. These temporary spots automatically expire 12 hours after the last person checks-in there. Leaving behind comments at venues, and the aforementioned picture functionality also gives the app an almost Yelp-like quality. As with Foursquare, badges are also an important part of Rally. However, whereas Foursquare’s collection is pretty limited, Rally plans to gives users a ton of them for various activities (including a number of potentially racy ones). Like Gowalla, much of the location data in Rally (such as venue names) will be crowd-sourced. They’re also working on some deals to get some pre-populated location information around the world. Until they do that, they are restricting the service to the Santa Cruz, CA area, where Lipman and his team mainly reside. Once they’re ready, likely in a few weeks, they plan to open it up to everyone. So how does Rally make money? “ With location-based services, you don’t have to rely on anyone else to make your money. Location is the Holy Grail of advertising, ” Lipman notes. And he plans to use what they’ve learned from partnering with brands on 12seconds to inject a model into Rally. An early build of Rally is actually available in the App Store right now as a free download. Eventually, the plan is to make a web version, and extend it to other mobile platforms. But for now the focus remains the iPhone, Lipman says. A final differentiating factor to note between Rally and the other location services is that they’re decidedly not focusing on gaming elements. Lipman says they’ve talked to various groups of people who feel that these types of gaming elements are simply a gimmick. “ Games have winners and loser, we just want to build a very clean service ,” Lipman notes. While Rally may not rely on Facebook or Twitter for its social graph, Lipman says that they may use Facebook Connect to help spread its data to your real friends on that network. He does notforeseethem using Twitter, at all.In terms of how else they’ll spread the word about the service, Lipman says that have some other interesting ideas in the works, but declined to say what. The key will remain making sure that these are people you actually know and want to share your location information with, he says. with location based services you don’t have to worry on anyone else to make your money location is the holy grail of advertising. leveraging experience as to what big brands are looking for. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Rally Wants To Bring Location Back To Its Core, With Only Your Real Friends.

With the launch of iTunes 9, Apple revamped many of the areas of the iTunes online store so that they were rendered with WebKit , the open source web layout engine (which browsers like Safari and Chrome also use). Alongside this, the whole store was redesigned. But one area that remained untouched were the pages for individual apps in the App Store. Today, those are finally starting to be revamped as well. While the new layout isn’t live for all apps yet, it is for plenty of them. As you can see below, the new pages look much nicer. Instead of being text-heavy by default, the new pages have much of the text area collapsed, and the emphasis is clearly on the images. Instead of just one app screenshot being shown, there are now 3. It’s just much, much nicer. It will be interesting to see how this change affects the way app developers do their descriptions. Now that the emphasis is clearly on the first few sentences of the description, developers should be more concise in describing their apps, since that’s all that shown by default. If you click the “…More” link, the area will expand to show all the text, but again, that’s not the default look anymore. [thanks Paolo] Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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App Store Apps Finally Gets Prettier Pages

The overflowing inbox. It’s a problem many a journalist or blogger has had to deal with, but it’s often a necessary evil. After all, we’re all on the hunt for the next big story, cool gadget, or interesting startup, and Email has long been the standard for receiving pitches. Unfortunately, Email is really bad at filtering through the noise, so it’s easy for good stories to fall through the cracks. That’s where eGether comes in. The new site is looking to offer an alternative to the pitch-by-Email method. It’s essentially a social network for people who are pitching, and people who are looking to be pitched. eGether was founded by Vincent Nguyen and Ewdison Then of SlashGear , a rapidly growing gadget site, so they know a thing or two about some of the problems with the standard Email pitch. Nguyen says that the site combines elements of many social sites, like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to create a social network that’s optimized for efficiently submitting or reading pitches, as well as for learning about the people behind them. Like Facebook and Twitter, the site lets you update your status, which you can use to share articles you’ve found interesting or converse with other members using an @reply system. These updates have a 144 character limit, and are shown in a Twitter-like stream. There’s also a second class of update: The Pitch. These are longer updates that allow members to upload text, documents, images, entire media kits, and more. In effect, they’re much like the Email pitches many PR people send out every day. But they’re limited to a maximum of 999 characters. That’s not much the previous two paragraphs come out to just over 900 characters. But that’s exactly why eGether is imposing the limitation. Anyone who has read many press pitches knows that they can become overly verbose, filled with unneeded backstory, explanations, and quotes. It can be struggle to tell what exactly a company does when that information is buried in a full page of text. And that problem is only magnified when there are dozens of other pitches coming in every day. eGether forces users to condense their pitches to the most important material. You can see a sample pitch in the shot below. Of course, tech press aren’t the only people who want to get pitched. When you register on eGether, the site asks you what type of user you are: PR, Author, Consumer, Analyst, or Press. It can use this to break out users out into their own networks based on their field. That means an author could write a pitch for their book that would only be read by a literary agent or publisher rather than the entire site. eGether has some solid ideas, but it’s going to face the classic chicken and the egg problem: it needs to get press, agents and other people looking for pitches onto the platform. Otherwise, it won’t be very appealing for PR people and authors to submit their pitches in the first place. That said, I don’t know many press who aren’t willing to try out an alternative to their mountains of Email, so eGether may not have such a tough time generating interest, after all. Disclosure: CrunchGear editor John Biggs assisted Nguyen with some of the site’s functionality. CrunchBase Information R3 Media Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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eGether: A Social Network For Pitching And Getting Pitched, Without The Email Overload