Microsoft's Latest “Scroogled” Ads Attack Sharing Of Information That Google Developers Need To Process Transactions

Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play.

Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy.

In the two videos below, Microsoft uses animations and words to walk you through “what might happen” if your data were to end up in the wrong people’s hands. It’s a fear campaign, and it really doesn’t have any basis whatsoever.

Take a look at the videos and we’ll get into what actually happens when you buy an app from Google Play.

In the second video, a “real life” situation is played out on the front steps of an apartment building:

A Google spokesperson provided us with the following statement:

Google Wallet shares the information needed to process transactions and maintain accounts, and this is clearly stated in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice.

Why the mention of Google Wallet?

The main difference between Google Play and the Apple App Store is that Google uses its “Wallet” service to process transactions. While it’s not a third-party service in the sense that it’s a different company, it is a function of the process that is not embedded into the Google Play experience. It’s something that users are made aware of in the terms of service and privacy policies when they sign up.

More importantly, when merchants and developers sign up to sell things in Google Play, they must buy into not sharing any of the information that they get, which is name, email address and general location — the things that all companies selling things online need in order to process your transaction and provide support. Better start your attack against Amazon, Etsy and everyone else on the Internet, Microsoft.

The timing is interesting on this, because this is the way that Google Play has always worked. Its privacy policies haven’t changed since last July, in fact.

At the end of the video, if you got that far, you’ll notice that Microsoft ends things with a big “Windows Phone doesn’t do it this way.” Instead of doing an advertisement on how great Windows phones and apps are, Microsoft has decided to go after how “horrible” Google is. The “Scroogled” site even has a big old link to explore Windows Phones. Isn’t that convenient?

If Microsoft was purely trying to protect consumers from having their data “stolen” by nefarious app developers, don’t you think that it would focus on that, rather than trying to drum up business for itself?

You can’t put something on the Internet if it isn’t true, right? Wrong.

Wait, wasn’t that bearded “french” guy the same one that shows up at the end of the second Scroogled video? At least we know who is doing Microsoft’s ads now.

Put those marketing dollars into making great products that people love, Microsoft.

Google Play keeps all of your favorite music, movies, books, TV shows, magazines, and apps all in one place. Google Play allows the user to sample any content before they purchase. Google Play also makes recommendations to its users of music that they may enjoy in relation to what they’ve purchased already.

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Just Six Months After Being Acquired, Twitter's Vine Hits #1 Free Spot On Apple's App Store

Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app Vine last October before it ever launched, sending everyone into a frenzy about the company getting into the video space.

In late January, Twitter finally launched the app to much applause. Since then, it’s gone from being temporarily removed from the featured section due to an issue over adult content to being used in interesting ways by brands and celebrities.

Today, it all paid off, as it hit the top of the charts for free apps in the U.S., according to co-founder and Creative Director Rus Yusupov:

https://twitter.com/rus/status/321406005076451328

https://twitter.com/bobby/status/321406757983358977

It’s a pretty impressive feat for any app that’s not a game to hit this spot, and it’s also impressive for Twitter to have another presence on the list, in addition to their own core app. Clearly the push from Twitter helped the cause. The top app on the free store gets quite a bit of downloads after it hits the spot, eventually coming back down to earth after a quick explosion.

The charts are based on new downloads and the trajectory of its current download popularity. Therefore Twitter’s own app sits at No. 35, which just means that a lot of people have already downloaded it. When an app is at the top of the charts for a long time, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of new users being onboarded daily.

Vine’s closest competition in the social sphere? Snapchat. And even then, a few games stand between the two. The good news for Vine and Twitter is that the service is iOS-only at the moment, which means there is quite a bit more growth for the app to experience, much like Instagram did when it went over to the Android platform. Nearly half of all Instagram users are Android users.

The multi-app approach is working for social companies, as all you have to do is look at Facebook’s success with Messenger, Instagram and the quick-hit Poke to get the idea. Once a big platform starts splintering off smaller experiences with focus like video, or, say, eventually music, its main audience will of course at least give them a try.

Cheers to the Vine team.

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.

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Yandex, Russia's ‘Homegrown Google', Looks At Gesture-Based Interfaces To Power Apps

Russian search giant Yandex has collaborated on developing an experimental gesture-based interface to explore how similar technology could be incorporated into future social apps and mobile products. The company offers digital services beyond search already, launching and expanding mapping services and translation apps, for instance, in a bid to drive growth as its domestic search share (60.5% as of Q4 2012) has not grown significantly in recent quarters. Future business growth for Yandex looks likely to depend on its ability to produce a pipeline of innovative products and services — hence its dabbling with gestures.

Yandex Labs, the division that came up with its voice-powered social search app Wonder (an app that was quickly blocked by Facebook), has been working with Carnegie Mellon University on a research project to create a gesture-based social interface designed for an Internet-connected TV. The interface, demoed in the above video, pulls in data from Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare to display personalised content that is navigated by the TV viewer from the comfort of their armchair using a range of hand gestures.

Here’s how Yandex describes the app on its blog:

The application features videos, music, photos and news shared by the user’s friends on social networks in a silent ‘screen saver’ mode. As soon as the user notices something interesting on the TV screen, they can easily play, open or interact with the current media object using hand gestures. For example, they can swipe their hand horizontally to flip through featured content, push a “magnetic button” to play music or video, move hands apart to open a news story for reading and then swipe vertically to scroll through it.

The app, which was built on a Mac OS X platform using Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral for gesture recognition, remains a prototype/research project, with no plans to make it into a commercial product. But Yandex is clearly probing the potential of gestures to power future apps.

Asked what sort of applications it believes could be suitable for the tech, Grigory Bakunov, Director of Technologies at Yandex, said mobile apps are a key focus. “Almost any [Yandex services] that are available on mobiles now: search (to interact with search results, to switch between different search verticals, like search in pictures/video/music), probably maps apps and so forth [could incorporate a gesture-based interface],” he told TechCrunch when asked which of its applications might benefit from the research.

Bakunov stressed these suggestions are not concrete plans as yet — just “possible” developments as it figures out how gesture interfaces can be incorporated into its suite of services in future. ”We chose social newsfeeds to test the system [demoed in the video] as it can bring different types of content on TV screen like music listened by friends, photo they shared or just status updates. Good way to check all types in one app,” he added.

As well as researching the potential use-cases for gesture interfaces, Yandex also wanted to investigate alternatives to using Microsoft’s proprietary Kinect technology.

“Microsoft Kinect has its own gesture system and machine learning behind it. But the problem is that if you want to use it for other, non-Microsoft products you should license it (and it costs quite a lot), plus it has been controlling by Microsoft fully. So, one of the target was to find out more opened alternative with accessible APIs, better features and more cost-effective,” said Bakunov.

Yandex worked with Carnegie Mellon students and Professor Ian Lane to train gesture recognition and evaluate several machine learning techniques, including Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Models and Support Vector Machines — with the latter technique showing accuracy improvements of a fifth vs the other evaluated systems, according to Yandex.

The blog adds:

They [students] put a lot of effort in building a real training set – they collected 1,500 gesture recordings, each gesture sequenced into 90 frames, and manually labeled from 4,500 to 5,600 examples of each gesture. By limiting the number of gestures to be recognized at any given moment and taking into account the current type of content, the students were able to significantly improve the gesture recognition rate.

Launch Date: September 23, 1997

Yandex is an internet technologies company that operates in Russia, CIS and Turkey. It is the largest Russian and fourth-largest world internet search engine. Yandex is an acronym for the phrase Yet Another Indexer. As of March 2013, Yandex had about 61% of the Russian search market (source: LiveInternet.ru). Yandex’s mission is to give the answer to the user anytime and anywhere. Company provides its services for desktop and mobile users and develops embedded solutions as well. The company specializes on highly-targeted...

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AT&T And Boingo Team Up To Offer 1GB Of Monthly Wi-Fi Free At Hotspots In Reciprocal Deal

Boingo has just announced via a press release that through a partnership with AT&T, it will now offers AT&T subscribers access to its hotspots at international airports beginning today, with service expansion planned throughout the rest of the year. As part of the same deal, Boingo subscribers will be able to access AT&T hotspots across the U.S. free of charge.

In the agreement, which applies to AT&T customers who subscribe to either the 300MB or 800MB international roaming data add-on packs, and any Boingo subscribers, the clear winners are the consumers. The expansion means that AT&T users traveling abroad will have a much wider footprint of Wi-Fi access, which should in turn ease their need to use add-on roaming packs and incur data overage charges.

The bigger winners might be Boingo subscribers, however, who now have access to a lot more Wi-Fi hotspots in the U.S. AT&T offers a fairly dense concentration of Wi-Fi hotspots through the U.S., with around 30,000 locations across the country. The arrangement shores up holes in either partner’s network, while providing better access for customers of both.

Offloading network traffic to Wi-Fi hotspots is a key element of carrier efforts to reduce network congestion, increase service quality and decrease infrastructure costs, so for AT&T this is about both adding options for customers and also helping to diminish its own costs around providing international roaming services. It also addresses a major user sore spot, since there are few things more frustrating than finding out you’ve exceeded your international bandwidth caps and ventured into overage territory. That said, these don’t come cheap: as mentioned, only customers with the $60/300MB and $120/800MB monthly add-on pack will be able to participate.

Carriers still need to figure out a way to make using smartphone internationally somewhat affordable, and offering access to free Wi-Fi hotspots is one way to do that. But relegating it to customers who are already paying a tremendous amount for data roaming to begin with seems like an insufficient move. Still, maybe this foretells a much broader (and more useful) partnership to come.

AT&T Inc. (AT&T) is a holding company. AT&T is a provider of telecommunications services in the United States and worldwide. Services offered include wireless communications, local exchange services and long-distance services. AT&T operates in four segments: Wireless, Wireline, Advertising Solutions and Other. Its Wireless subsidiaries provide both wireless voice and data communications services across the United States, and through roaming agreements, in a substantial number of foreign countries. Wireline subsidiaries provide primarily landline voice and data communication services, AT&T...

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Boingo Wireless, Inc. (NASDAQ: WIFI), the world’s leading Wi-Fi software and services provider, makes it easy, convenient and cost-effective for people to enjoy Wi-Fi access on their laptop or mobile device at more than 325,000 hotspots worldwide. With a single account, Boingo users can access the mobile Internet via Boingo Network locations that include the top airports around the world, major hotel chains, cafés and coffee shops, restaurants, convention centers and metropolitan hot zones. Boingo and its Concourse Communications...

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After Rebooting, Lulu Sees Its Database Of Guys App Hit 200K Users In 8 Weeks Across U.S. Campuses

Lulu (formerly Luluvise), the controversial mobile app that lets girls anonymously review and recommend guys, is seeing some pretty decent traction since it rebooted in February to focus on launching across U.S. college campuses, early Facebook-style. The London/U.S. company, backed by Passion Capital, PROfounders and a host of prominent angels including Yuri Milner and Dave Morin, has garnered 200,000 users in 8 weeks across the five U.S. universities where it’s actively been marketed.

That’s out of a possible market of 6 million female U.S. undergraduates, while at the current trajectory Lulu reckons it could be on track to reach 1 in 4 female undergraduates in the U.S. by the end of the year, something which it then plans to use as a springboard to target the U.S. female market as a whole.

Pitched as a “girls-only app for dating intelligence” or an anonymous database of guys, created by girls — men are strictly prohibited from joining via Facebook login and other checks — Lulu has, perhaps understandably, received its fair amount of criticism, even though it initially stalled before take off. The main charge being that the same concept if applied to guys rating girls would be frowned upon, not least by investors, though in actual fact there are a number of similar startups targeting males.

The other, more legitimate, charge levied at Lulu is that the men reviewed have little right to reply due to being locked out of the app, even if there is a limited accompanying app that lets them edit their basic profile. A lawsuit waiting to happen, maybe, though the app’s ToS clearly puts the onus on the women asked to upload reviews, suggesting slightly disingenuously that they must seek the permission of the guy they are reviewing first if they choose to post information about them that may contravene any data-protection laws.

All of which hasn’t put off the startup’s backers. In February, Lulu announced it had added another $2.5 million to its coffers, bringing the total raised to $3.5m.

Of course, controversy has also undoubtedly brought lots of PR, including a fair amount of mainstream media coverage in the UK and U.S., such as on Ryan Seacrest’s Virgin Radio show, so it’s not so surprising to see some traction happening stateside.

Interestingly, I’m told that overall Lulu’s U.S. college campus traction is coming at an acquisition cost of $0.07 per user, while in the first 5 universities where the app launched, it achieved 35-40% penetration within 2-3 weeks. It’s now scaling this approach nationwide.

Other interesting stats that have been shared with TechCrunch: 50% of new users come back weekly, visiting 8 times per week on average, spending 45 mins in the app per week. In addition, 52% of users create content. Overall, Lulu has seen 57 million profile views, 4 million user sessions, 5.2 million reviews read, and 10 million searches.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for every three women that join, one guy tries to — unsuccessfully — sign up.

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

Lulu is the smart girl’s app for private reviews and recommendations of guys.

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Enthuse.me Is An Online Profile Creator To Help You Pimp Your Personal Brand

It’s probably hard to get people enthusiastic about another service that lets you build a professional profile online. But that isn’t stopping Enthuse.me from giving it a go. The startup, based in London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, recently launched a public Beta of its one-page profile creator that targets the self-employed, small business owners, and other kinds of individuals who want to build and promote their personal brand online.

At first glance, competitors would appear to be services like About.me or Flavors.me, which, like Enthuse.me, also consolidate a user’s various web presences and online identities into a single, well-designed page, although a more direct competitor is probably something like Zerply.

To begin creating your own Enthuse.me page, you first pick a username, which also forms the basis for your Enthuse.me web address (e.g. enthuse.me/sohear), and sign up manually or via LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook login. Next you upload an avatar and fill out a short bio defining your expertise, which acts as your personal pitch and appears at the very top of your profile page.

You then populate the rest of your Enthuse.me page with links to and content from your various online presences, such as your career history pulled in from LinkedIn, your follower stats from Twitter, or your Klout score from Klout.

Then comes the more creative part. Using Enthuse.me’s various modules, you add and showcase more content from the web or created and uploaded specifically for your Enthuse.me profile, demonstrating what you are good at and any past projects or achievements. This might be media coverage, blog posts you’ve written, YouTube videos, photos or other visual media.

Finally, you can link to and recommend up to 5 other Enthuse.me profiles to check out — your “A-list” experts — which acts as a form of association and a way to encourage you to invite others to join the service. Overall, the resulting page, though nicely designed, is fairly minimalistic and lacks the customizability looks-wise of other online profile creators, which could be both a good and bad thing depending on your own taste for these things.

Longer-term, the company plans to add social networking features, potentially encroaching a little more on professional networks such as LinkedIn. This might also form the basis for a “knowledge marketplace” that lets users, whose bread and butter is selling services under their own personal brand, to use the site to sell their time or other wares, with Enthuse.me taking a small cut of any transaction.

Of course, that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves and is a far cry from what exists today, both in terms of functionality and the needed network effects. Scale, and a ton of it, will probably be required first. And in an already crowded space, that will undoubtedly be Enthuse.me’s biggest challenge, no matter how enthusiastically the startup or its backers — the company has raised around £1 million in funding from MLC50 — tries to meet it.

Showcase your expertise Create an elegant, one-page profile to show off your work, knowledge or passion. Hand-pick the best examples of what you do to cut through the noise of multiple social networks, blogs and portfolio websites, and focus on only the things that really prove you know your stuff.

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Local Business Marketing Startup Circl Ties Facebook To Foot Traffic, Courtesy Of Mobile Measurement Tools

Circl a new startup helping businesses run online promotions using social media and email marketing, is launching today with already over 1,000 customers who have signed up for the platform, over 100 of which who have since gone live. Although there are plenty of competitors in this general space, what makes Circl interesting is the way it ties into mobile in order to track the success of various promotional campaigns.

Founded by Soso Sazesh and Neej Gore, who bring their own experience with both search engine marketing (SEM) and performance marketing to the new company, the two were inspired to create Circl to address a need in the local space.

“The way you do online marketing, it’s very metrics focused. It’s focused on ROI,” explains Sazesh. “And when you look at what’s available for local businesses, it’s very expensive – you have to give away 75 percent of what you’re selling with certain companies – or you run promotions on Facebook and Twitter, or on your email marketing lists, and you don’t know what’s actually driving people in,” he says.

Circl wants to close that gap by actually tracking the conversions from social media and email to real-world foot traffic, letting business owners know which promotions really worked. To do so, the platform allows the business to set up a promotion using Circl’s centralized dashboard, which they can then share out to Facebook, Twitter, email or elsewhere. When the customer clicks the link, they’re prompted to enter their phone number which sends the offer or deal via text to their phone.

Once in store, the customer clicks the link in the text at point-of-sale, which verifies that they’re actually there using the phone’s geo-location capabilities. But it also identifies the source of the promotion, allowing the business owner to better understand things like which channels work better than other, which promotions send more customers, how many people came in for a particular deal, and more.

By gathering this data, businesses can then improve the way they advertise, and increase conversions. However, Circl will take things a step further, too, by also making suggestions and offering optimizations out of the box.

The system uses machine learning, Sazesh tells us. It first aggregates data across its own customer base, so it understands how businesses in a particular region perform, or how businesses in that same category perform (e.g. how other local pizza places perform). Of course, for these recommendations to be powerful, Circl needs to gain significant traction. If it can achieve that, a future step may allow businesses to not only get recommendations as to how to proceed, but may also be able to compare themselves to others in their same space.

But for now, the company is focused simply on onboarding new businesses, taking advantage of the founders’ SEM experience in user acquisition efforts. The immediate priority is figuring out which channels should come next (Foursquare and Yelp are on the roadmap, Sazesh notes). The long-term goal is to be channel agnostic, and to help customers not only launch and track promotions, but also increase their presence on social media in order to better support those goals.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for up to three locations, and enterprise pricing is also available. AngelPad-backed Circl is currently raising seed funding.

Circl allows local businesses to create and distribute promotions across email, twitter, and facebook - all from one place. Circl uses location technology to track customer visits attributed to a given promotion. This allows Circl to provide deep insights and recommendations into what type of promotions perform best, on which channels, and when.

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