TechCrunch
Facebook Adds Content From Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr And Instagram On The Home Lock Screen, Beta Users First
In September, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the progress of Facebook’s Home Android launcher at TC Disrupt, he mentioned that users would soon start to see content from Instagram and other third-party apps on the lock screen, in addition to Facebook posts. Today, it’s beginning to roll that out, first to Android beta testers, and starting with photos and posts from Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr and its own photo network, Instagram. Facebook is not disclosing how many beta users there are who will be getting this, but a spokesperson adds that “We hope to bring this to everyone soon.”
The idea here is that by making Home more useful, it will attract more users. So far the app has had between 1 million and 5 million installs according to the app’s page on the Google Play store, and last month Zuckerberg admitted that Home was “rolling out slower” than Facebook had hoped.
For context, Home reached about 1 million downloads one month after it launched in April, amid waning interest from carriers like AT&T who had signed up early to sell HTC handsets with Home preloaded on them.
Zuckerberg and Facebook are remaining bullish on Home turning a corner, and adding in services like these from beyond Facebook’s own walled garden could be one way to achieve that. “I fully believe that [Facebook Home] is something that people will want over time,” Zuckerberg said last month.
Here’s how it works: you need to select the app you would like to add from the Home settings menu and log in with your credentials. From there you can effectively use the apps as if they were within Facebook itself — meaning you can like and view posts, and click on a “view on” link to go directly to the site.
Zim Is A 3D Printer For The ‘No Muss, No Fuss' Mainstream
The 3D printer market looks set to swell in size over the coming years, as the appeal of 3D printing builds — shifting from being the preserve of makers and hobbyists (and TC’s own John Biggs), to something that more mainstream consumers and business users feel comfortable dabbling with. But in order to get there 3D printers need to get easier to use. They need to feel more approachable to Average Joe.
One example of the consumer-focused makeovers going on in this space is the touchscreen-packing Zeus all-in-one copy machine, currently calling for funds on Kickstarter. And here’s another, in its words, “consumer-oriented” 3D printer, also seeking crowdbacking to ship a printer that doesn’t look like it wants to extrude plastic all over your settee. Zim is not as elaborate as Zeus; it’s merely a 3D printer, not a scanner and copy shop all-in-one. But less may well be more when it comes to convincing a mainstream user to try a newfangled technology.
“The use and maintenance of many 3D personal printers available on the market today requires extensive technical knowledge, as well as hours of assembly, before you can start to print your first 3D object,” argue Zim’s Stamford-based makers, Zeepro, on their Kickstarter page. “We wanted to create a 3D personal printer which was ready to use, straight out of the box.”
Zim’s consumer concessions include what its makers describes as “fully plug & play” operation (with the printing process being condensed to: connect the printer to the Internet, download a model, open the Zim app, print); a sleek-looking aluminium frame; the ability to control and view progress on the current print via a smartphone app thanks to the printer’s onboard camera (so rather than having to stand by the printer waiting to see if it’s finished making your replica plastic sphinx yet, you can check in on how it’s looking via an app); a cartridge system for easily loading different filament colours into the printer (and also refillable cartridges if you want to add your own filament).
The printer packs Ethernet and Wi-Fi — allowing it to also be remotely controlled from a computer web browser, as well as via the Zim app. Other neat tricks up Zim’s sleeve are dual extruders in its print head so multiple colours can be printed at once. Or you can use one extruder to print a water-soluble PVA plastic support material to simplify the process of printing more complex objects, as demonstrated in the video below.
Zim can print up to 50 microns per layer. The print volume area is 205 cubic inches (5.9”x5.9”x5.9”). And at its fastest, it can print 3D objects at 110 mm/s.
What about price? The high price-tag of many 3D printers remains a huge barrier to mainstream adoption — albeit, analyst Gartner expects prices to be squeezed over the next few years as more large multinational retailers start stocking devices, helping to drive demand and trim price-tags.
Zim is being offered to early Kickstarter backers for a ‘special price’ of $599, and a ship date of March 2014. Expect the retail price to be higher — likely around the $899 mark. Zeepro’s Kickstarter campaign has raised around two-thirds of the $300,000 target so far, with 20 days left to run.
CDN Provider EdgeCast Gets Into The DNS Market With Launch Of EdgeCast Route
CDN provider EdgeCast Networks wants to get into the global DNS market, and is doing so with the launch of a product called EdgeCast Route. The new DNS offering will rely on the company’s global IP infrastructure and will be priced at a fraction of what customers expect from existing enterprise DNS services, it believes.
Since 2006, EdgeCast has been building up its reputation in the content delivery business, taking on incumbents like Akamai. Along the way, it’s been gradually adding adjacent technologies as a way to provide a more competitive product portfolio and *ahem* upsell its existing customers.
That includes stuff like whole-site acceleration and dynamic site acceleration — and, most recently, the launch of a dedicated CDN just for e-commerce companies.
The launch of an enterprise DNS service follows along that trend — and, more importantly, it leverages technology that the company had built out for its CDN business. The new service is based DNS technology EdgeCast has been using internally to direct traffic for tens of thousands of EdgeCast servers around the world.
Big web properties rely on DNS providers to ensure that their online presence is available to end users, while providing protection against DDOS and other attacks. EdgeCast believes that it can provide all that and more, thanks to the infrastructure that it has built out.
EdgeCast Route relies on the company’s massive IP network, which has points of presence all over the world. In testing through its own and third-party performance tests, the company believes that its product outperforms many of the major existing DNS providers by a factor of 15 percent to 300 percent, depending on the competitor and region. In fact, according to president James Segil, EdgeCast found that many of its customers were relying on the CDN to compensate for “a less-than-stellar DNS host.”
As a result, the company figured it was time to make the DNS service available to customers, and to do so with a pricing scheme that would be disruptive to the industry. Pricing will be based on the number of zones, queries, and number of DNS healthchecks that the service receives per month. It will also depend on what level of routing customers need — i.e. whether they’re looking for just standard DNS routing, or if they want load balancing and failover, or even more advanced policy routing capabilities like geo-blocking.
Regardless of the setup, EdgeCast believes that it can save customers significant amounts of money over existing enterprise DNS customers. That means spending hundreds of dollars a month on DNS services as opposed to thousands or even tens of thousands, according to EdgeCast VP of product management Ted Middleton.
EdgeCast has raised $74 million in funding since being founded in 2006, including a big, $54 million round it announced in July. Investors include Performance Equity Management, Menlo Ventures, and Steamboat Ventures.
A Chinese Mobile Startup With Global Reach: Android-Based Go Launcher Touches 80M Monthly Actives
As I’ve written about before, while the Chinese startup scene is sometimes criticized for producing copycats of Western businesses, there are emerging entrepreneurs building software products with global appeal.
One of the startups with the largest reach is Go Launcher, a Beijing-based company making an Android homescreen that boasts 80 million monthly actives and three Android products with more than 50 million installs each.
The company has taken three rounds of funding in the “tens of millions” from investors like IDG and WI Harper, although the company declined to specify how much it’s taken.
Xiangdong Zhang, one of the co-founders, help set up the company about a decade ago when it was a portal for the mobile web — a super basic WAP portal.
“It was like Yahoo for the mobile Internet,” explains Shenxin Xu, a spokesperson for the company. He said that back in the mid-2000s, Go Launcher’s 3G portal product used to consume as much as one-third of the bandwidth for mobile Internet usage in China.
But they later switched to an Android-centric strategy about three years ago, just as the platform was poised to take off in mainland China. It was obvious that a WAP strategy wasn’t going to be successful in the long run.
So they launched a series of products including Go Launcher Ex, which lets customize their home screen with more than 10,000 themes and Go Locker, which lets Android users open apps directly from the lock screen or add more security protection with extra pins, patterns and gestures.
Now Go Launcher’s biggest audiences, in fact, aren’t in the mainland. They’re in the U.S. followed by South Korea, another major Android market thanks to Samsung’s dominance there.
“It was a global product from the beginning and then it moved back into to China,” Zhang said. Over the last two years, Android has far surpassed iOS as the dominant smartphone platform in mainland China, thanks to a wave of low-end handsets.
Go Launcher, which now has about 800 employees, earns revenue mainly through advertising, a premium paid version of the product and providing distribution for third-party apps.
Half of the revenue comes through the largest couple of Go Launcher apps. They sell themes for Go Launcher at $2 each, then a premium version of the app for $16.
They also earn revenue for distributing third-party apps through a small app store widget in the launcher, plus an exchange with Getjar, the Accel-backed independent app store. There are also ads directly in the product from Google’s mobile advertising network.
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