TechCrunch
Samsung Announces A Galaxy Tab Just For Kids
Samsung today confirmed its plans to launch a version of its Galaxy Tab designed for kids with the announcement of the Galaxy Tab 3 Kids tablet. The tablet will come pre-loaded with kid-friendly apps and games, a Kid’s Store, and parental control features that include whitelisting capabilities, time management features, password protected access, and more. Samsung will also offer an easy-to-grip Kids Case and, for drawing, a C Pen, which ships with the case.
The company says the tablet will first arrive in Korea next month, before rolling out to China, Europe, U.S., Africa, South America and South East Asia. The tablet itself includes a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a seven-inch 1024 x 600 display, both front and rear-facing cameras, and 8GB of internal storage, which expandable via a microSD slot up to 32 GB. The tablet runs the Jelly Bean (4.1) version of Android.
The market for kid-specific tablets is still relatively niche. Some companies, like Leapfrog, make tablets which are more like electronic, educational toys than they are mom or dad’s iPad. They run apps and games, but they’re not about being able to browse the ever-expanding mobile app store for the latest and greatest from the child’s favorite characters and big-name kids’ brands. You get a curated selection of apps, but not some of the better learning apps designed specifically for Apple’s iPad.
The same holds true for Android. Across the Android platform, there are plenty of others hoping to compete in the kid tablet space, like Nabi or Toys R Us’ own Tabeo tablet, as well as a slew of low-end Android tablet offerings. Amazon’s own Kindle Fire makes for a decent “kid” tablet as well, without the limitation of being only a kid’s toy. Instead, it ships with software that lets parents put the tablet into a kid mode, which includes parental controls and time-limiting features as well as pre-approved apps. When the kids finish playing, parents can then use the tablet for themselves, making it more of a family computer.
With kids-only tablets, price point is key. Tablets need to stay under $200, generally speaking. For something mom and dad can’t share, and kids will soon overgrow, $150ish is even more palatable for what feels more like a stocking stuffer purchase than a real technology investment. Anything too expensive leads parents to consider paying just a few dollars more for a low-end iPad Mini ($329).
Samsung, however, has not yet announced pricing, so it’s hard to evaluate where this new tablet will fit in.
More details are on Samsung’s site here.
Mobile Web Add-On Brow.si Raises $1M, Partners With PrestaShop To Help M-Commerce Stick
MySiteApp, the Israeli startup behind mobile web site add-on Brow.si, has raised a further $1 million from existing investors thetime and a number of U.S./Israel-based angels, bring to the total backing for the company to $3.2 million. The additional funding will be used to help the company double-down on further integrations with third-party CMS and e-commerce platforms.
To that end, Brow.si is also announcing a decent partner win today through a tie-up with open source e-commerce platform, PrestaShop. It follows existing integrations with a range of CMS software, including Drupal, Joomla and Blogger, as well as being a WordPress VIP feature partner.
Specifically, the partnership with PrestaShop promises to be a boon for m-commerce, with support for Brow.si making it easy to bring a range of engagement features to e-commerce on mobile — the whole premise of Brow.si is that mobile sites that install the add-on are able to offer functionality that rivals ‘native’ apps, such social sharing, a read it later button, subscriptions, and push notifications in the form of a bridge between mobile sites utilising the add-on and the Brow.si Reader iOS app.
PrestaShop powered stores that use the Brow.si add-on get a floating menu that provides users access to the Brow.si functionality in a consistent way across all pages of the merchant’s store. This includes site-wide search, a social sharing button to enable shoppers to share product pages and other store content across multiple social networks, “save for later” options (Pocket, Readability, and Brow.si’s own Reader), “push notifications”, and an app-like mobile shopping cart.
In the near future Brow.si says it will roll-out additional features, such as targeted coupons, “hot deals”, and product recommendations.
“All these features are available from anywhere on the store when it is accessed from a mobile device, and represent new capabilities/ways for merchants to bring focus back to key assets in their stores and make it easier for mobile shoppers to engage with their products/brand, navigate through the store and make a purchase,” explains the company.
Or to put is more simply, this about combatting shopping cart abandonment, not least because of a shoddy mobile experience, as well as drumming up more business by lowering the barriers to sharing product pages.
To help support this, PrestaShop merchants get access to analytics that include engagement metrics to give them insights about their mobile customers and the performance of the store.
BitTorrent's File Synchronizing Service Sync Launches As An iOS App
BitTorrent, which years ago first made its name as an efficient distribution network for music and video (sometimes not in the most legit of ways), has been of late positioning itself as a distribution service for everything, and today it’s adding two more strings to that bow: it’s launching Sync, its file synchronizing service, as an iOS app, and it is adding support for 10 languages beyond English.
Since launching Sync in beta and as an Android app just over a month ago), BitTorrent tells me that the service has seen some strong take-up. “We are closing in on 14 petabytes synced since the open alpha in April,” a spokesperson tells me. “We were at 8 petabytes in July when we moved into beta.”
The iOS app will let users move big files between devices, not unlike what you do with Dropbox, Bitcasa and other cloud-based storage systems — except that BitTorrent’s P2P distribution architecture means that nothing is “stored” in any cloud that can be accessed.
You can use it to back up photos from your iPhone to your laptop, or use it to send files from you iPad to your home computer. As with the desktop and Android versions, there is no file size limit. In a sense, adding the iOS support is a natural extension of the original premise of Sync: being able to access your data regardless of device or location.
In terms of new language support, the 10 getting added today are German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal). Adding them in early-doors, while the product is still in beta, underscores the fact that BitTorrent as a brand has long had a loyal group of users worldwide.
But while the company plans to monetize the service longer term, it’s still holding back on that for now. “The basic features of BitTorrent Sync will always be free of charge,” the spokesperson says. “[But] we are exploring potential business models which may include premium features to address certain applications. For example, enterprise, where we have the potential to offer significant cost savings and added security and speed benefits.”
There is no timing yet for premium features, he says, but notes that the company is in “closed discussions” with a few potential companies that might either help BitTorrent sell or build them out. “It’s too early to say what direction these will take. We are interested in hearing from people about how what premium features they would like to see and how BitTorrent Sync would be helpful to them in say the enterprise setting,” he says. Until BitTorrent formally announces anything, it looks like the best channel for feedback about this idea is through its Sync forums.
Apple TV Gets Vevo Music Videos, Disney And Disney XD, The Weather Channel And Smithsonian Content
Apple continues its selective content partner rollout today with an update to Apple TV software that adds Vevo, as previously rumored, as well as Disney Channel, Disney XD, The Weather Channel and Smithsonian via new dedicated apps, as 9to5Mac reports. All those content providers are live in the U.S., but U.K. users and other regions will see only select channels via update.
The Apple TV update actually marks the first time that Apple has provided weather information on the Apple TV, something which now seems like a long overdue addition to the platform. With that addition, the Apple TV starts to take on more of a general services dashboard tone, in addition to its video and entertainment content sources.
Vevo was rumored to have been preparing a dedicated Apple TV application last week, the Wall Street Journal reported, which is part of its efforts to distribute content from its network more widely outside of YouTube, which currently powers a huge share of its views through a licensing agreement between the music industry joint venture and Google.
Disney content appearing on Apple TV via dedicated channels is also something that isn’t all that surprising, considering the cosy relationship that exists between Disney and the Mac maker. Disney CEO Bob Iger sits on Apple’s board, and Steve Jobs famously sold computer animation studio Pixar to Disney. Disney has been a strong, longtime partner for the iTunes media store, as well.
Apple building out content relationships for Apple TV seems to be the way the company prefers to welcome third-party material to the platform, rather than via opening up an API and providing an application store as it has done on iOS. The new partnerships today could help boost the device’s appeal among the teen set, as well as with younger kids thanks to Disney and Disney XD, and overall more content sources = a wider potential audience, but Apple clearly wants to make sure that new content sources also fit with its overall vision for a home media streaming device.
Rumors of a dedicated Apple television, or of a new next-gen media streamer launching later this year continue to swirl, so a staged content buildup could have something to do with those plans, too.
As Badgeville Hones In On Gamification For Large Enterprises, It Launches A New Behavior Lab
Gamification — the idea of adding gameplay elements into services to get people to interact more with them — has been one of the more buzzy features in the last few years of social media services, but it’s also been one of the more problematic. Last year, Gartner estimated that some 80% of apps with gamification incorporated into them are liable to fail in their purpose. And if you look at companies like Gowalla and Foursquare, you can see that consumer apps that incorporate these have had mixed success.
In that context, today, Badgeville, a $40-million backed startup that has developed a platform for third parties to incorporate gamification elements, is getting much more serious about how it positions its product, and who might be the most receptive audience for it. Today the company is launching a “Behaviour Lab” aimed at enterprises and their systems integrators to help test out gamification systems and put more research and development into how to improve them more in the future.
The new lab getting launched today is a mark of how Badgeville has been sharpening its focus under Comee, who joined the company four months ago with a specific intent to grow the company’s large enterprise business.
“We are going hard after the enterprise,” he told TechCrunch. In Badgeville’s defense, Comee notes that the company does “significantly better” than Gartner’s 80% failure estimation, ”but this is still a nascent space, so part of that involves educating our customers, helping them figure out the best behavior for engagement.” He says that Badgeville has already seen some strong success in working with large enteprises directly and also via systems integrators Cap Gemini, PwC and Accenture. Current customers include American Express, Oracle and Universal Music.
That shift to enterprise customers has also meant a rebalancing of another kind at the company. We had heard, now confirmed, that Badgeville has laid off employees, 13 to be exact. “Yes, I took 13 people out of the business,” CEO Ken Comee told TechCrunch, “but we’ve also hired over 20 in replacement.” He says the company was “overstaffed” with sales people who weren’t performing, “and I’ve put those resources back into development, and services and support, as well as a different breed of salesperson who is very comfortable selling into large enterprises.”
It’s a widening of the funnel for Badgeville, which first debuted at TC Disupt in 2010 (and then won the audience choice award) with a plan to become the gamification layer for the web — giving consumer sites the ability to add incentives like badges to get people to engage more.
By expanding its business to serve not just consumer sites but also enterprises, Badgeville is positioning itself further as a platform for gamification services. This also raises the question of what may be next for the company. Comee notes that Badgeville has several patent applications in progress and refers to Salesforce when he talks about how a cloud-based company based around a single focus can evolve by working with third parties to court business users.
For now, he says the company is not planning to acquire or otherwise move into offering actual applications incorporating gamification: for example, for now, AmEx’s travel expense applications that use Badgeville’s technology will not compete against anything from Badgeville itself.
Rather, Comee believes there is still a lot of business to be gained in what Badgeville is pursuing today. We’re faced, he says, with an older workforce who’s retiring, and the a new workforce weaned on the internet replacing them. The big question, he says, is “how do you get them more engaged? By 2020, 70% of the workforce will be Gen X’ers who are gamers by nature, who care about their online reputations, and who like to collaborate. Organizations will have to address all of that to keep their employees motivated.”
Last Chance To Register For Disrupt SF Startup Alley
This is it. You have until the end of Wednesday night to register for a spot in Disrupt SF Startup Alley. And this is an opportunity that you should not pass up.
Startup Alley is one of the best parts of Disrupt. It’s a boisterous marketplace of startups, vying for attention from the best of Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists, other founders and countless potential users and developers roam the large Concourse at San Francisco Design Center.
As in years past startups covering nearly every category are exhibiting, including separate pavilions with startups from Brazil by initial.vc, China by TechNode, India by YourStory.in, Ireland by IDA and Enterprise Ireland, Israel by initial.vc, and Korea by KOCCA. Needless to say, Disrupt SF is truly an international event.
The first two days of Disrupt will feature web startups covering media, mobile, lifestyle, enterprise, and many more. Then, on Wednesday September 11th, hardware companies will take over the Concourse exhibit hall for Hardware Alley, our semi-annual celebration of gizmos and gadgets.
The full list of Startup Alley and Hardware Alley companies is here.
These companies are also fighting to demo in front of Disrupt judges on Monday and Tuesday. If selected as the Audience Choice, they’re fast tracked to the Startup Battlefield where they compete for the Disrupt Cup and $50,000 grand prize.
You can find out more at the Disrupt event page but the gist is this: The event runs from September 9 – 11. We’re running a pre-event 24-hour hackathon for folks who want to get one free ticket but, as it stands, you still have the opportunity to pick up a ticket to the show. Or better yet, get a Startup Alley and Hardware Alley package and show off your startup. Packages are available here until Wednesday night.
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