TechCrunch
Why Did Apple Buy Cue? Because Google Now Eats Siri's Lunch
Apple has acquired the ‘smart assistant’ company Cue, for over $40M. Why? Because Google is absolutely murdering Apple when it comes to the utility of Google Now.
Apple is likely to use the acquisition, or its talent, to bolster the offerings of its Today section with additional signals curated from email, social networks and more. This would improve the utility of the section, which is fairly sparse right now, and enable Apple to more vigorously compete with Google Now. Google’s service already collates data from all of its services and networks, offering proactive information and assistance to users on Android (and in the iOS Search app).
Siri and iOS 7′s new Today section of the Notification Center simply don’t compare to Google Now in-depth, usability or overall power. The ability of Google to tap into the deep array of contextual data that people have living in their Gmail inboxes and other Google products is being leveraged wonderfully by the Google Now team. I’ve said before that Google Now can be considered reason enough to buy an Android phone, and I don’t think Apple is blind to how good it is.
With iOS 7, Apple introduced Today as a way to show you upcoming appointments, weather and basic directions to home or to work. This is sort of skimming the top of what is possible with the host of sensors your smartphone has available to it and the troves of data that you store in your inbox and other services. It doesn’t dip into your Mail.app data, or provide information based on your location besides simple ‘get there’ directions.
Google Now does all of that and a lot more, providing transit instructions and recommendations on timing if you’re traveling. The card-based interface of Google Now offers a really compelling experience that only Google is churning through enough data to replicate. Apple ostensibly has similar data available to it, especially for heavy iCloud users, but it doesn’t leverage it. There’s just nothing on iOS that compares to the power of Google Now, including Siri and the Today feature.
Much of that lies in Google Now’s predictive nature. It doesn’t just tell you what’s going on now, it anticipates the information you might need and delivers it to you before you need it.
This is where things get interesting, as the Cue acquisition could be used to make Siri more powerful and aware, notifying you either via push notification or voice of things you may not even know you needed. The early arrival of a flight or train, congestion along your favorite route to work, and more. Push notifications are the future of how we communicate with our smart devices, whether they’re pocketable or wearable. Making sure that any that Siri or Today might send are content rich and relevant is an important problem.
The close integration of Siri as a responsive system and ‘Today’ as a proactive system could be greatly aided by the contextual information that was the core of Cue’s feature set. Cue originally leveraged social accounts to provide an accurate picture of what things you had coming up and what you’re going to do. Later in life it turned its attention primarily to email. The experience of the app itself was never ‘amazing’, per se, but they definitely their claws deep into email parsing and signaling.
And that expertise could help beyond just Siri and Today as well, it could also give other apps like Calendar a contextual steroid shot. Rather than getting context-free dates and names there is potential here for Apple to offer a Calendar app that actually helps you get things done, rather than just remind you when things are due. Apps like Sunrise calendar and Donna are displaying what can be done with smartphone sensors and volunteered user data. That’s just the beginning of what’s possible if you own the bones of the OS.
These kinds of acquisitions are exactly the kind that Apple likes to make. Small, talented teams that offer it the ability to either implement a new feature or augment an existing one. The proactive use of data in service of the user will be the defining feature of the next generation of smartphones. It will be interesting to see what the Cue team manages to get done.
Adobe Gets Hacked, Product Source Code And Data For 2.9M Customers Likely Accessed
Uh oh — Adobe has just disclosed that one of their servers has been hacked.
While their investigations are still ongoing, Adobe has shared a few details on what they believe could have been accessed and obtained in the hack — and it’s a big one.
From what Adobe has shared so far, it sounds like the hackers had access to encrypted data for as many as 2.9 million customers. While Adobe stresses that the data is encrypted and that they “do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers”, that data — encrypted or not — is definitely not something they want out in the wild. Adobe has yet to disclose how that data was encrypted, so it’s currently unclear just how secure it is.
Meanwhile, it also appears that the hackers may have been able to access the source code for at least three of Adobe’s products: Acrobat, ColdFusion, and ColdFusion Builder. This goes hand in hand with a report from Brian Krebs this morning, who noted that he and a fellow researcher had discovered at least 40GB of Adobe source code available on a hacking group’s private server.
Story developing..
Shumway, Mozilla's HTML5-Based Flash Player Replacement, Lands In Firefox Nightly
Shumway, Mozilla’s technology experiment to build an efficient, web-native renderer for Flash files, has now landed in the latest Firefox Nightly builds. The idea behind this project – which is still far from being production-ready – is to fully replace the Flash Player to display SWF files by using HTML5 and JavaScript.
Back in the late 90s, Macromedia’s Flash Player helped bring sound, video and animations to the mainstream web, but today, Flash is probably one of the most hated browser plug-ins. It’s still heavily used, however, and while most mobile browsers don’t support it anymore, it remains a staple on the desktop.
Mozilla started working on this project in early 2012 and, as it noted when it last talked about this project in detail in November 2012, the main goals for Shumway are to “offer a run-time processor for SWF and other rich-media formats on platforms for which runtime implementations are not available.” It also wants to push the open web forward by improving ways to display rich media format in the browser without the need for proprietary solutions.
Until now, Shumway was only available as a browser extension. It’s still not activated by default in the latest Firefox Nightly builds (version 27), but you can go to about:config and activate it (you still need to have the Flash Player installed, though).
Even without installing the latest Firefox Nightly, you can take a look at its capabilities thanks to Mozilla’s online Shumway Inspector. While Shumway won’t run all that many commercially available Flash applications yet, demos like this racing game or this basic 2D physics engine demo show the technology’s potential. Whether it will be able to fully replicate all of Flash’s capabilities remains to be seen, however.
For Mozilla, this is the second major project that replaces an Adobe technology. With PDF.js, the organization already replaced Adobe Reader as the default technology for rendering PDF files in the browser.
It’s also worth noting that other projects have tried similar approaches in the past. Google’s Swiffy, for example, launched as an SWF to HTML5 converter in 2011, and while we haven’t heard all that much about it since, it looks like that project is still going strong.
Adobe itself has also been stepping away from Flash, too, and virtually all of its recent projects for web developers have been about supporting web standards and creating HTML5-based sites.
Instagram To Start Showing In-Feed Video And Image Ads To US Users
Well here it is, Instagram is getting ads and it’s starting with users in the US. In a blog post today, Instagram says that users in the country are going to start seeing video and image ads.
Instagram says that the ads will start appearing over the next couple of months and will come from brands that you don’t follow. They say that this will ‘start slow’. “We’ll focus on delivering a small number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community. “
The advertisements, says Instagram, will be made to feel ‘as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos many of you already enjoy’. There will be some ad controls for users as well, you’ll be able to hide ads you don’t like and give feedback about why you did that. This feedback will then be used to tweak your ads.
In what is likely a nod to the confusion stemming from its policy changes a few months ago, Instagram notes that photo and video ownership remains with the user.
The introduction of advertising to Instagram was anything if not inevitable, considering that its parent company Facebook is one of the biggest modern ad-driven companies. But given the nature of the Instagram product — a focused feed of single-serving images — advertising will be far more disruptive on here than it will on Facebook, which is already comprised of a variety of post types, sizes and formats.
The rollout of the ads will likely be handled with kid gloves, investing in a series of ad partners that can produce high-quality ad ‘content’ that won’t clutter the feed with terrible concepts or execution right off the bat.
If you’re interested in what in-stream advertising might look like, the recent partnership between Apple and Burberry to show off images and video of a fashion show shot on the iPhone 5S is one place to look. The videos are shot well, they’re attractive and they’re interesting. But you also had to follow the brand or see it via a link in order to have seen any of them. Having them shoved into your feed is another matter.
Ads are everywhere, and ad-supported products are quickly becoming the norm, rather than the exception. The path to a sustainable product for Instagram has led down the path of ads for a very long time. Now, how it executes will be the thing.
Also, good job on dropping this news just before the rumored Twitter IPO filing Facebook, well done.
Apple Buys Cue For Over $40M To Compete With Google Now
Personal assistant app Cue has been acquired, we’ve confirmed with a person who should know. The app has sold for between $40 million to $60 million, we’re hearing from two sources, including TechCrunch tips, who posit that Apple has picked up the company for over a $35 million price tag.
While we’re hearing that the price range was more like $50 million to $60 million, Apple Insider earlier published an anonymous tip that Apple picked up the company for at least $35 million. According to our sources, Dropbox had at some point been in the acquisition queue for Cue.
Backed by SV Angel, Sequoia Capital, Lerer Ventures and Index Ventures in addition to some notable angels, Cue was born as Greplin, a social search startup. The company will not be shut down post-acquisition, though it did recently shut down its app.
Greplin turned into Cue last year and relied heavily on user e-mails to create a personal agenda. Cue had previously raised a $10 million round in November of 2012 from Index Ventures, which the startup chose not to announce.
Personal assistants are all the rage, with everything from Apple’s Siri to Google’s Google Now hogging headlines. There is also another tier of independent companies showing similar intent with products like Nuance’s Project Wintermute, Incredible Labs’ Donna and the Sunrise calendar. Apple will probably debut the product in iOS 7, with Cue’s email and social network magic used to more accurately represent what you’ve got going on and coming up in the “Today” section of the Notification Center.
Other recent Apple acquisitions include Swedish mobile data startup AlgoTrim, Matcha.tv and Embark.
Apple has gotten back to our own Ingrid Lunden with a statement, which is apparently “as close to an Apple confirmation as you’re going to get” from the established company:
Hi Ingrid, thank you for your interest in Apple. Here is our statement on this: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
Additional reporting by Ingrid Lunden and Matthew Panzarino.
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