TechCrunch
Blackberry Posts User Guides for iOS & Android Versions Of BBM Ahead Of Launch
The launch of BBM for iOS and Android appears to be imminent, as BlackBerry has accidentally published user guides for its forthcoming mobile messaging apps to its own website: here (iOS) and here (Android). The guides explain in detail how the apps function, how to get started, and their various feature sets.
For previous BBM users from BlackBerry, most of these details are familiar. The apps are designed to allow for real-time communication between contacts and groups, the guides explain, letting users share pictures and messages, including broadcast messages, multi-person chats, and group chats. Users will also be able to create BBM Groups, where they can plan events, track to-do’s, share photos, and chat with up to 30 people at a time, without the need to add everyone as BBM contacts.
BBM will work over both cellular and Wi-Fi, the latter option which is meant to help avoid data charges when traveling.
Each user can establish their own BBM profile, where they can choose a display picture, name, and status that their contacts will see, and they’ll also have a unique BBM PIN which they can access by tapping “Show Barcode.”
The apps will also include support for various emoticons and emoji, but because the guides don’t include screenshots, we’re not able to see a preview of what these or any of the features look like in more detail.
We already knew BBM was to arrive on iOS or Android globally this summer, as CEO Thorsten Heins announced the news at the BlackBerry Live conference in May. The company also began sending out beta invites earlier this month.
This is a major move for the struggling company, as BBM has for a long time been one of Blackberry, and the BB10′s, strongest features. At launch, Heins had said that only messaging and group features will be available, but promised that the rest of BBM will eventually make its way to the Android and iOS versions including screen sharing, BBM voice, and the newer BBM channels.
The question now for the company is whether it’s too little, too late. Today’s app stores have become saturated with a plethora of mobile messaging apps for users to choose from, including Skype, Whatsapp, KakaoTalk, Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE, Facebook Messenger, Tango, Snapchat, MessageMe, Path, Voxer, Google Hangouts, and many others. Blackberry is banking on its brand recognition and history in the messaging space, but the large majority of its users have since moved on new smartphones and therefore, new mobile applications. Still, BBM may still hold a soft spot in some of these folks’ hearts, and at least some may be willing to give the apps another shot.
Alt links, in case Blackberry takes the guides down, are below. Although that’s probably not the case, as this “leak” could very well be a beg for publicity ahead of the apps’ official debut. (And it worked, sigh). Besides, who needs a manual for mobile messagers, anyway?
BBM_for_iOS-1.0_User_Guide-Beta
BBM_for_Android-1.0_User_Guide-Beta
(h/t: n4bb.com)
The Pavlov Poke Shocks You When You Use Facebook Too Much
Do you spend too much time on Facebook? Why not administer non-lethal shocks to your body when you click over to your News Feed! Two Ph.D. candidates at MIT, Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff, did just that when they realized that they were spending over 50 hours on the service per week combined, and the results – and questions their project raises – are quite interesting.
“The shock’s unpleasant but it’s not dangerous,” said co-creator McDuff. However, they do hurt. The system watches your actions and sends a signal to an Arduino board that, in turn, administers the shock. Over time the user will tend to avoid Facebook and/or rock silently in the corner, quietly weeping. The system uses a specially wired keyboard rest to send the pain.
Did it work?
“We’re not sure,” said Morris. “To be truly effective, many shock exposures are probably needed. Proper conditioning procedures should be followed. Sadly, we found the shocks so aversive, we removed the device pretty quickly after installing it. Anecdotally, however, I did notice a significant, though temporary, reduction in my Facebook usage.”
The pair also created a less invasive version of the system by using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to ask strangers to call the Facebook user’s phone and tell them to get off Facebook. The results, at once frightening and hilarious, are far less painful than the shock treatment. Callers would read off prepared scripts that berated the Facebook user for using Facebook.
You can look at the entire project here and even download the plans and scripts. Morris said that Facebook is as bad as cigarettes (to a degree.) He writes:
Facebook is junk Internet – it’s not good for us, it’s pleasant but vaguely dissatisfying, and it makes us feel good for a short while and then bad for the rest of the day. This project, as tongue-in-cheek as it is, addresses some important issues that all of use face in our online behavior and, more important, makes us reconsider just why we’re visiting Zuckerberg’s Timesink every few hours in the first place.
“While this whole project is intended to be somewhat of a joke, we believe a serious discussion is needed about how communication technologies are designed,” said Morris.
Closing Time, The Comprehensive To-Do List For Home Buyers, Launches Nationwide
Anyone who’s ever gone through the ordeal of buying a house knows that it’s an extremely complicated process. But now there’s a tool, called Closing Time, designed to simplify all the work that needs to be done. And now the product, which creates a comprehensive to-do list for home buyers, is available for users all over the U.S.
Closing Time is the first product to come out of Amitree, a startup founded by Jonathan Aizen and Paul Knegten, the guys behind display-ad company Dapper. After that company had been acquired by Yahoo in 2010, the two wanted to do something a little different. And real estate seemed like the perfect place to start. That’s because they’ve run into their own pain points when trying to buy and close on a house.
To solve that problem, the two built an abstract rule engine designed to take into account all the different things a home buyer has to do between the time when he or she is in contract all the way to picking up the keys. It works by asking the user a series of questions at the start to see where they are in the process of closing, and to determine which things need to be done and in what order.
Closing Time then creates a to-do list, which users can peruse on the web and check off as they complete tasks. It also emails them daily with tasks that need to be done each day, and again once on the weekend to provide a preview of what’s coming up later in the week. The tool can also be used for buyers to connect with their agents and to nudge them when the agent needs to complete a task.
Keeping you in touch with your agent and mortgage lender isn’t just a feature of the app — it’s also the way that Closing Time will be making money. If you don’t have an agent, Closing Time will help you find one. Same goes for a mortgage lender. And since those are highly qualified leads, they’re also highly valuable. The app is also relying on agents to get users signed up in order to broaden the tool’s use.
After a test run in the San Francisco Bay Area, following local rules and regulations, the web app is now ready for use throughout the U.S. Since rules and regulations vary state-to-state and even city-to-city, making Closing Time available to the entire country was no small feat.
The good news is that the rule engine was built to be malleable based on what steps are needed to be completed, and those steps can be changed based on a user’s location or location of the home he or she is buying. The bad news is that it took some time to get all of the local regulations from various places around the country and to create rules in the app around them.
But now rejoice! That work is done.
Crowdtilt Launches Crowdhoster To Let Anyone Create And Customize Their Own Campaigns
Thanks to the JOBS Act and the rise of Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the parade of startups that have emerged in their wake, crowdfunding has gone mainstream. However, according to the minds behind Crowdtilt — the Y Combinator-incubated platform that caters to the many types of “group fundraising” that fall outside the purview of Kickstarter — this is just Phase One. The Crowdfunding Era is just beginning.
While the Kickstarters and Indiegogos continue to dominate headlines in the crowdfunding space, a growing set of niche platforms have emerged to handle the spillover from projects that don’t fit under the traditional umbrella. And some are bypassing platforms altogether: Star Citizen, a space-age video game, recently became the most successful crowdfunding campaign yet, raising a whopping $15 million — on its own site.
With projects like Lockitron, Basis and Myo also joining the list of projects that have raised big bucks without the help of traditional platforms, Crowdtilt founder and CEO James Beshara believes this is a strong indication of where crowdfunding is headed. The writing is on the wall.
That’s why Crowdtilt is today launching the first public version of Crowdhoster — its full-featured, open-source, customizable crowdfunding tool that will allow anyone to launch their own campaign without having to touch a line of code. Built using Crowdtilt’s API, Crowdhoster gives both individuals or businesses the ability to set up and own their own crowdfunding page.
Unlike Kickstarter and Indiegogo, this means that your startup can now launch its very own campaign to fund the development of its Uber for cats app without having to cede control of branding, hosting and the ability to customize with all their favorite cat cartoons to someone else. At launch, Crowdhoster will enable individuals and businesses to not only launch and customize their own campaign, but also tap into a handful of themes that the site will offer to bypass the tinkering and get you up and running posthaste.
Or, for those who are in the tinkering business, because Crowdhoster is completely open source (the code will be available on GitHub in the next few weeks), developers can improve, modify and customize the platform until the cows come home. And for those not flying the old red, white and blue will be pleased to hear that Crowdhoster supports international crowdfunding at launch as well, Beshara tells us. Together, these features are indicative of the type of support and direction Crowdtilt wants to take its new platform.
Beshara tells us that Crowdtilt wants to build (the first) open consumer brand within the crowdfunding space, build on top of a platform with a built-in developer ecosystem. The Crowdtilt co-founder believes that payments are eventually going to become another form of communication and that crowdfunding has the chance to help make that a reality. But, to do so, crowdfunding has to become open and accessible — for any topic, for anyone to use — whether it’s a political fundraiser or a hardware development project.
The other key is that Crowdhoster campaigns come with all the moving parts one would find on traditional campaign pages out of the box, like the ability to include a description, video and reward tiers, for example. But the owners don’t have to share any revenue or branding with a third-party platform. This could have big implications for the types of businesses or use cases which might shy away from crowdfunding campaigns for these reasons, like for a senator who wants to raise money for her re-election campaign, or for multinational brands like Nike or Coca Cola, which likely aren’t too keen to share branding with Kickstarter, for example.
At launch, the free-to-use platform will enable users to run multiple, ongoing campaigns, customize the duration of their campaign, set reward levels and will offer project administration, checkout support and some basic, embedded CRM functionality to help manage communication with backers. Crowdtilt has a wait-list of 2,300 campaigns and, to get things started, the startup will be assisting people with setup and hosting it for them as well in an attempt to avoid down-time.
However, over the next few weeks, Beshara says, Crowdtilt will begin to automate the process, so that users will can point their domain to Crowdhoster and launch their campaign automatically, at which point users will be required to host the campaign themselves.
Although Crowdhoster has been in private development the last few months, Crowdtilt has been working with a handful of startups to test the new platform and has already had a few successes, including its first campaign, the much-buzzed-about nutritional drink, Soylent, which raised over $1 million through the platform.
While he’s more than a little biased, Beshara believes that there’s a huge amount of untapped potential in the wild and whacky world of crowdfunding, which has remained somewhat restricted by the predominance of vertical platforms. By bringing the same tools offered on the biggest crowdfunding platforms to the masses and by keeping it free, customizable and not requiring any technical knowledge to get a campaign up and running, Crowdtilt is essentially looking to do for crowdfunding what WordPress did for blogging and content creators.
Sounding like some kind of crazed crowdfunding zombie founder, Beshara says that his goal is to “infect the entire Web with crowdfunding” — presumably in the way that Facebook Connect infected the Web with your social graph — not in the way malware may be infecting your inbox or zombies want to eat your brains.
It’s too early to make any snap judgements, but it’s probably safe to say that these kind of open and accessible tools have been sorely missing in the Crowdfunding World. Crowdtilt is hoping that by getting this out the door now, it will give them a head start — because it’s only a matter of time before the crowd arrives and before the Joomlas, Drupals and Tumblrs of crowdfunding hit the streets.
Find Crowdhoster here.
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