Hardware is so hot right now. So hot, in fact, that another European hardware startup is formulating an attack on the smartphone hardware space — joining the likes of Finland’s Jolla and Spain’s Geeksphone to have a go at handset making. The newest comer stepping in with a plan to shake up the “status quo” is called Kazam: a startup co-founded by a pair of former U.K. HTC execs, Michael Coombes and James Atkins.

Coombes, who spent just over a year and a half as a U.K. head of sales for HTC, according to his LinkedIn, is Kazam’s CEO. Prior to HTC he apparently worked for mobile and telecoms companies including Nokia and Vodafone. While Atkins, Kazam’s CMO, spent just over a year as HTC’s head of marketing for U.K./Ireland, and has previously worked in U.K. marketing roles for freesat, LG and Panasonic. The pair’s professional network is clearly tied tightly to the local market, hence, presumably, Kazam’s focus on Europe first.

“Kazam will focus on Europe at the outset,” Atkins tells TechCrunch via email, adding with some typical marketingspeak embellishment: “We are currently establishing a network of regional sales and marketing offices to ensure we deliver outstanding products and customer service.” The startup has a U.K. base in Mayfair, London.

Details of how exactly Kazam plans to assault the Samsung and Apple smartphone duopoly were not forthcoming when I asked. Atkins declined to answer the bulk of my questions — including such specifics as whether Kazam’s planned smartphones will run Android and be skinned with a  custom UI or keep the experience familiarly stock. Instead, he trotted out a repeated PR mantra: “Today we are just announcing that the Kazam brand is here, for the rest you will have to wait and see.”

It’s notable that this startup has already engaged a PR company (Noire) — and talks about creating a mobile brand — even before having a great deal to talk about. Which does serve to underline how smartphones have become a game of who can shout the loudest. A game of brash tones (as I have previously described it).

What did Atkins say? Not a whole lot. He declined to reveal how much funding Kazam is backed by at this point, or whether it is currently looking to raise a round. He did at least confirm it has backers, and that those backers have links into Asian mobile manufacturing companies — which suggests it’s following Jolla’s manufacturing playbook.

“Kazam Mobile has been set up by a group of private equity investors, who have previously launched and operated successful mobile telecommunications companies and technology businesses. Some of their current investments include NF Technology Limited, an R&D company specialising in developing and customising mobile phone devices and tablets and Nichefinder (S’pore) PTE Limited, a proven technology procurement and supply company,” he told TechCrunch.

He also confirmed Kazam’s plan is to launch “a range of smartphones at different prices point/specs” later this year. Asked whether it will look at other types of mobile devices, such as tablets, he said only that its initial focus is on smartphones. He added that he and Coombes left their roles at HTC earlier this year “with the desire to build a new brand that really stands out in the mobile space”.

He also declined to be drawn on the differentiation question but in Kazam’s inaugural press release today Coombes said: “We believe your smartphone is a digital reflection of who you are, and since we are all different, it’s important that we don’t adopt a one size fits all approach. Kazam’s dynamic structure and focus on local markets means we can react quickly to the ever evolving and diverging needs of today’s consumer. We aim to provide quality smartphones that are accessible to everyone.”

The release also includes a statement from Atkins hinting that aftersales service might be how Kazam attempts to stand out in a crowded market: “There is a real opportunity for a new mobile brand to disrupt the status quo. We are passionate about delivering a truly positive mobile experience that doesn’t just stop once you’ve bought the phone. Kazam is about stunning design, robust hardware and intuitive technology, underpinned by outstanding customer service.”

Further details about exactly what kind of customer service opportunity Kazam reckons it has identified were not forthcoming.

So there are huge question marks over any startup entering such a fiercely competitive space, especially with so many better resourced former mobile giants continuing to struggle. Disruption often starts small but in a market so beholden to carriers, where the bulk of phones sales occur, it’s especially hard for an upstart to get traction. Carriers tend to be risk averse and have established distribution partnerships and (incentivised) relationships with the smartphone giants so have  disincentives to push anything too new. Going it alone with online retail distribution is the alternative, but that route requires a sizeable marketing budget to even get noticed.

Creating handsets for an underserved niche may be one way to carve out a business, as Geeksphone has been. Securing carrier distribution agreements to carry your hardware is another strategy, as Jolla has with Finland’s DNA. For now, it’s unclear whether Kazam has any similar moves up its sleeve, but it will certainly be hoping it has enough local telco connections — and financial backing — to give it a regional chance of inching in. To say it has its work cut out to make any kind of impact is an understatement.

Here’s a neat greentech idea currently seeking crowdfunding on Kickstarter. SunnyBot is a microcomputer-powered robot that continually tracks the position of the sun, angling its on-board mirror so that it keeps reflecting the sun’s rays onto a fixed point of your choice. The basic idea being to harness solar energy for use as an indoor light-source when rooms might otherwise be in shade, or to target the sun’s heat where it’s needed — for warming a room or heating a swimming pool or nurturing indoor plants, and so on.

SunnyBot’s creators — an Italian startup called Solenica — say the bot can also be used to improve solar charging performance by concentrating the sun’s energy. A single SunnyBot redirects 7,000 lumens to the location of your choice (equivalent to a single 500W halogen lamp). The reflective range of the device is up to 200 metres away, with an accuracy error margin of as little as 0.1 meter over 30 meters.

Obviously, the SunnyBot needs to be able to see sun in the sky to work — so residents of Iceland in December are going to find it brings them very little light relief. But amplifying the effects of sunlight in countries when sunshine is not so plentiful is one application its creators envisage for the device. In countries where sunshine is plentiful, the bot’s use-case is better targeting of the sun’s natural energy to improve the human environment.

Inside the sun-tracking mirror-wielding bot, itself powered by a row of solar cells, is a dual-axis, integrated microcomputer with an optical feedback system. The current SunnyBot design is a prototype, so its technical specifications will be tweaked as the startup moves to industrial production, with additional elements intended to be added to the design to improve durability, such as a custom enclosure for the mirror to support and contain it, and also the use of injection moulding for high quality body and mechanical parts.

Solenica is also planning to offer an open source version of the SunnyBot — called SunnyDuino – that, for a small price premium, will come with an additional Arduino-compatible controller and SDK so bot owners can hack in to the device to develop their own functionalities for its targeted beam of light and heat.

Solenica is aiming to raise £200,000 ($312,000) via Kickstarter to step up to industrial manufacturing so it can bring the device market. It also plans to spend some of the money on marketing SunnyBot, as it ramps up to license it to global manufacturers. It says it believes it can ship the first production run of the bot in time for the 2013 holiday season.

SunnyBot will be assembled in Italy, with macro components produced in different locations, including the electronic boards in Cambridge, U.K.; microcontrollers in Arizona, U.S.; and mechanical parts in Modena, Italy. The consumer cost per bot looks likely to be several hundred pounds. There are a limited number of Kickstarter pledges costing £199 ($310) which include one device. Solenica’s Diva Tommei adds: “We are hoping, after the project is over, to decrease costs of production and therefore the price of the robot. We want SunnyBot to be a household object that anyone can afford.”

Adafruit Industries has put together a weekend project for people worried the NSA is monitoring how many reruns of Seinfeld they watch on their tablet. The Onion Pi Tor Proxy is a weekend project that uses the Raspberry Pi microcomputer, along with a USB WiFi adapter and Ethernet cable to create “a small, low-power and portable privacy Pi” for using with portable or other computing devices (e.g. your work laptop) that can’t otherwise run the anonymising Tor network.

In the Onion Pi configuration, the Pi creates a secure access point which automatically routes any web browsing through Tor’s distributed network of relays. The Tor network is designed to disrupt web surveillance by preventing web snoopers from learning which sites you visit, and also the sites you visit from learning your physical location. It does this by ensuring every Internet packet goes through three layers of relays before going on to its intended destination. Hence Tor’s many layered onion motif.

Adafruit says the Onion Pi is good for those who…

…want to browse anonymously on a netbook, tablet, phone, or other mobile or console device that cannot run Tor and does not have an Ethernet connection. If you do not want to or cannot install Tor on your work laptop or loan computer. If you have a guest or friend who wants to use Tor but doesn’t have the ability or time to run Tor on their computer, this gift will make the first step much easier.

Getting the Onion Pi access point up and running means plugging the Ethernet cable into any Internet access point and powering up the Pi via its micro USB cable plugged into your laptop/the wall adapter. The Pi will then create the Onion Pi access point. Connect to that for a less NSA-friendly browsing session.

That said, Adafruit’s Onion Pi page does contain caveats regarding exactly how anonymous this set-up is — noting: “We can’t guarantee that it is 100% anonymous and secure! Be smart & paranoid about your TOR usage.”

Other Adafruit tips for keeping your web browsing on the down-low include:

• deleting and blocking your browser cache, history & cookies — and/or using a browser that offers anonymous sessions
• avoiding logging into existing accounts with personally identifying information
• using SSL to end-to-end encrypt communications —  NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has also said encryption works

What better way for an anti-social app to get noticed than by insulting its target audience? London-based app design studio ustwo has just put up a pair of billboards in the hipster heartland of Shoreditch, East London, a stone’s throw from where its own studio is based, which brazenly proclaim: You have no friends and No one likes you.

The billboards, which will be teasing Shoreditch’s hipsters for two weeks, are an experimental ad campaign for one of ustwo’s recent apps: random photo-sharing app Rando, which launched back in March on iOS. Rando has now also been rolled out on to Android and Windows Phone. Last month ustwo said the app had racked up a full five million of its entirely social-less random photo shares after around two months in the wild.

So what’s with the anti-social insults? Rando’s schtick is that it eschews all the usual social paraphernalia developers typically embed in their apps. There’s no Facebook sign-in, zero social sharing options at all, no comments, no likes, no favourites, no followers/followees. There’s also no way to tell who gets the photos you share/receive, beyond a general location. It’s deliberately — liberatingly — stripped of context.

Turning to a fixed-location, paper-based advertising medium may seem pretty old school but Silicon Valley has long had a bit of a thing with billboards. ustwo’s Matt Miller tells TechCrunch that’s certainly one reason he was keen to experiment with papering giant fliers atop one of Shoreditch’s busier junctions. “I’ve always been interested in billboards since flying out to San Fran in 2012. I remember during a taxi journey over there, being really impressed with the billboards and thinking to myself how I’d love to see our work pushed that way back home,” he says.

The cost of the Rando billboard campaign is “around the same amount it would cost us to develop a small app”, according to Mills. But it’s the only paid marketing ustwo intends to do for Rando — relying instead on “the virality of the concept” to keep it travelling, which, ironically enough, has led to plenty of organic chatter on social sites like Twitter and Instagram.

Last we saw Lumu Labs it was in Hardware Alley at Disrupt New York where the Slovenian startup was showing off a prototype of its digital light meter plus iPhone app — aiming to convince photographers to replace “bulky” traditional light meters with a pocketable gizmo that plugs into their iPhones. Now, the startup has just kicked off a Kickstarter campaign, aiming to raise $20,000 over the next 25 days to get its light meter into the wild.

Lumu’s hope is to replace the standalone light meters that pro photographers carry around with them by harnessing the iPhone’s processing power and battery, and coupling that with its own digital light sensor. The sensor plugs straight into the iPhone’s headphone jack. Lumu says its hardware is more sensitive than the on-board iPhone light sensor, hence it’s able to provide photographer-friendly luminance measurements.

The basic idea is for a photographer to grab a light reading using Lumu on their iPhone, then input the suggested settings into their camera. Settings are displayed in Lumu’s app, which also allows the user to save data to the cloud so they can retain light-setting and location info, plus add voice records, notes, pictures, photo parameters, and more.

Returning to Kickstarter, Lumu said campaign funds will be used to help with the manufacturing costs of the device, and to recruit more coders so it can further extend the features of the app. The startup’s main software guy, Benjamin Polovičm, told TechCrunch: “We want to take advantage of the smartphone’s processing power and different sensors. The plan is to make different smartphone apps with custom functionalities for all sorts of professionals (photographers, videomakers…).

“We also believe that other developers are more creative than us and hope that they make their own software with new ideas and features, or inspire us. Further, we have to make Lumu work on (almost) all Android devices. But we don’t want to be too specific about our future ideas, because we don’t want to limit our supporters’ creativity.”

Irish startup Galvanic has just launched a Kickstarter to crowdsource funding a wireless stress biosensor it’s calling PIP. PIP — which stands for ‘personal input pod’ — is a Bluetooth biosensor that monitors its user’s stress levels by measuring their galvanic skin response (GSR) as they hold the PIP pinched between thumb and forefinger. GSR means skin conductance — so basically how sweaty you’re getting and therefore how nervous you’re feeling.

PIP isn’t just a quantifiable self-tapping biosensor; it’s been designed to work in conjunction with iOS and Android phone and tablet apps to provide a gamification element. The company has created three games designed to be played using the PIP, which utilises Bluetooth as its data transport tech. The user’s stress level is then incorporated into each game as the core gameplay mechanic — with the ultimate aim being to help the player learn what they need to do to relax.

It sounds a bit counterintuitive, since competitive gaming can be synonymous with sweaty palms, which is presumably why Galvanic’s project extends to designing stress-busting games. It’s created three games to be used in conjunction with the PIP — a relaxing racing game, a seasonal mood game where  players meditate on a wintery scene to turn it into spring, and a more playful lie-detector multi-player game — but it does also plan to launch an SDK in future to get third party developers expanding the PIP’s gaming ecosystem.

With this initial handful of in-house games the PIP can only be so interesting, but if Galvanic can convince enough people to buy in to the gadget and thus lure enough outside developers to join in, there’s plenty of potential for other cool biosensing software ideas. The price per PIP is $79 for a limited number of early bird Kickstarter backers, or $99 thereafter. Presumably each new PIP-compatible game may also carry a consumer price-tag.

Galvanic is gunning for $100,000 in Kickstarter funding, with the money to be used for finalising manufacturing and readying its own apps. Assuming it hits this rather ambitious funding goal, the company reckons it can gear up for mass production by the end of 2013, and expects to be shipping in Q1 2014. In future it said it plans to expand platform support beyond Android and iOS, to add Windows Phone, Blackberry, Windows, MacOS and also game Consoles and set-top boxes.

Netflix has been using original programming to power its Internet-TV business, luring viewers to flagship programming such as the Kevin Spacey-vehicle House of Cards. Today another development showing no let up in its strategy to use exclusive content created to air on its platform to put clear blue water between its streaming service and rivals’: it has inked its largest original content deal yet, with DreamWorks Animation.

Netflix’s other stated goal — as Ted Sarandos, chief content officer, expressed it to GQ earlier this year — is ”to become HBO faster than HBO can become us”. So it’s not just native online streaming rivals like Amazon Instant Video it’s pushing to elbow past here.

There are no figures on the multi-year deal with DreamWorks — not unusual, since Netflix has never confirmed how much it spent on House of Cards. But the streaming service said the agreement is “the largest deal for original first-run content in Netflix history”. What exactly is Netflix buying? First dibs on some DreamWorks Animation’s characters moving into TV, in a branded collection of shows that will comprise more than 300 hours of new programming.

There’s no word yet on exactly which of DreamWorks’ characters will be translated from silver screen to adventures destined for the living room but the studio owns the IP to the characters like Shrek and Kung Fu Panda, to name two. The first TV series from the original programming collaboration is expected to begin airing on Netflix next year, and will be shown in all the territories in which it operates (currently some 40 countries).

The deal between Netflix and DreamWorks builds on an earlier agreement between the pair, announced back in February, for a Netflix Original Series for kids based on DreamWorks’ film Turbo — due to premier next month. That agreement will bring an episodic animated series, called Turbo F.A.S.T, to Netflix in December, picking up the character from where the feature film sets it down.

Also today Netflix said viewers in the U.S. and Latin America will get exclusive access to DreamWorks Animation feature films next year, including The Croods, Turbo and Mr Peabody and Sherman.

Kids’ content is of a course a big pull for the parents who pay the streaming TV bills — and as AllThingsD‘s Peter Kafka points out, Netflix’s deal with Viacom’s Nickelodeon expired last month, leaving a colourful cartoon-shaped hole in its portfolio. Amazon then stepped in and bagged Viacom’s portfolio.

Why are so many app icons blue? The obvious answer is that so many tech brands contain blue in their logo or elsewhere in their tradedress. But why? What’s with the love of the blue tones people? I ask because the number of blue icons on my phone has reached a kind of tipping point where I’m often firing up the wrong app because I reach for the (wrong) blue one. And then I’m heading to Glide rather than Rdio, or the App Store not Dropbox, or Skype not Shazam.

I don’t normally arrange this blue collection on a single page but curious about how much of the stuff is hanging around on my homescreen I created a colour-co-ordinated arrangement (left) which serves to emphasise that it’s both big name apps, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and newer-comers like Glide and Rdio going for blue. Many of Apple’s native apps (in iOS 6) also rock similar blues, be it Safari, the weather app, stocks, the mail app and so on.

Initially this ‘blue period’ homescreen made finding apps even more confusing but I found that amalgamating all the blue tones actually tends to normalise them, making it easier for their distinct symbols and signs to stand out. So I’m tempted to stick with it. In the mean time, I’m still intrigued as to why tech companies are so hot on blue?

It’s possible there’s some deliberate mimicry going on, on the part of some startups. In seeking to establish their services, they want the user to think about other established tech services they know and love so they feel more confident about using a (similarly blue-coloured) alternative. Thinking of the likes of Skype for messaging and Facebook for social, say. In other words startups are hoping a resonating shade of blue will help them build a strong brand too.

Or they might be hoping to accidentally pass their app off as another the user is used to using; a sort of social engineering of where the user sticks their fingertip to steal taps meant for other apps. That’s risky, since the user didn’t meant to click on your app so may just get annoyed and delete it. Still, a swathe of startups clearly think it can’t harm if they project a similar visual aura to other established apps and services. It’s like the old adage ‘no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft’. Apparently no app icons ever offended by being painted blue.

There are other colour factors to consider too. Various colour preference surveys put blue on top, as the most popular shade for men and women globally. It’s certainly not a Marmite shade that polarises opinion — with so many natural instances of blue (sky, sea, flora) keeping things tranquil. Blue also apparently travels well, being more culturally neutral than certain other colours. Or so the theory goes. Colour theory also says that dark blue shades generate a feeling of reliability and stability (Facebook does have trust issues, after all), while lighter blues are apparently relaxing and calming (Apple’s native iOS 6 apps seem to fall into this category), or uplifting and energising depending on how bright the shade is (the bright blues of Skype and Shazam, say, or Twitter’s bird logo).

It’s notable that even when some tech brands’ logos don’t actually have that much blue in them, their app icon can often make blue tones far more prominent (like Glide’s icon for instance, right). Meanwhile Twitter, which has its trademark bright blue bird online, switches to a white bird silhouette on a more muted and steady looking blue background for its current iOS app icon. Perhaps the relationship between a mobile device and its user necessitates an extra injection of trust, being as these gadgets are so personal. Therefore developers reach for more muted blue tones when designing their app’s phone icon.

iOS 7′s coat of many colours

Apple’s iOS 7 redesign ushers in a new, more neon-colour palette which deliberately ramps up the energy level of the native apps’ colour tones. (You could say they’ve been turned up to Ive.) Apps that were a relatively relaxing shade of blue before now positively pop out — with undertones of teal green/turquoise creeping in. The result is definitely uplifting in the sense that the apps appear to float against the background (a parallax effect Apple is encouraging via other features in its redesign, such as translucent layers and subtle shading effects as you move the phone).

The new look iOS also replaces the blue undercoat on toggle switches with green, and paints some native apps a new shade (like the stocks app now a fittingly bleak shade of black rather than a calming mid-blue), to further highlight how Apple is creeping away from its old mid-blue comfort zone. At a glance, there’s definitely a greater colour range to how Apple is painting the iOS 7 icons, and a lot less blue jackets than there are in iOS 6.

Cupertino has been under pressure to refresh the iOS interface, thanks in part to the accelerated speed with which Google has been driving Android’s look and feel forward. iOS is also now a six-year+ old OS, with more new-look competition crowding in than ever before, whether it’s Windows Phone or BlackBerry 10. One way for Apple to create an impression of change — without having to do radical restructuring which might upset its existing user-base  – is a new lick of paint. The iOS 7 palette, including its blues, is certainly far more energetic than the old one — and that’s likely aimed at generating a feeling of renewal, without having to shift too much core furniture and functionality.

The other issue is that perhaps Apple has realised its old favourite blues are becoming a bit stale/invisible because they’ve been so widely adopted. The new iOS 7 palette repaints the goal-posts in more rainbow tones in the short term but, ultimately, app makers will likely fall in step by tweaking their own app shades to harmonise with Apple’s neon brights. So their mid-blues will probably also get dialled up and/or tinged turquoise and green. And before you know it the colour spectrum of apps on the  homescreen could be falling in step again.

Whether Apple stepping away from blue will help other developers to kick the coat off their own apps remains to be seen. Apple’s influence will count for something but there’s no reason to think the human eye’s long-term love affair with blue tones is about to be overthrown, no matter how idealistically psychedelic Jony Ive’s redesign.

Is there aught the Raspberry Pi can’t do? Here’s another interesting implementation of the $35 microcromputer — or rather a stack of 56 Pis, linked together to form what its creators have called PiCloud, using LEGO bricks as bespoke racks for the Pi stacks. (Not the first time we’ve seen Pi paired with LEGO either.)

The project comes out of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, and is intended as a teaching aid so students can hack around with a model cloud platform and play with techs like virtualisation to learn about the infrastructure underpinning services like Amazon’s AWS.

The 56 Raspberry Pis in PiCloud are stacked in four mini Lego racks, each topped off with a top-of-rack-switch which has 16 Ethernet connections: 14 used to network the Pis and the other two for connecting the switches. At the software stack layer of PiCloud, each Pi board is running Raspbian Linux, with three LXC containers per Pi each running a Linux instance.

Hosted software on PiCloud includes running “simple workloads” within each container (such as lighttpd) and “artificial workloads” (like lookbusy) for experiments. Other experimental hacking on PiCloud has featured libvirt and docker. Hadoop is also part of the mix, although this is only currently working on the native Linux instance, rather than an LXC instance.

One of the computing schools’s students has also built an AWS-like web console interface for PiCloud (see screengrab below).

PiCloud’s creators describe it as a “never-ending work-in-progress”. Aka a teaching aid. Their future plans for the platform include using standard tools such as ovirt, “if/when we get libvirt working” — but they’re also asking for suggestions for research directions and collaborations. For more on PiCloud, check out the project homepage.

PiCloud is a great example of how the Pi is fulfilling the mission of its creators, as well as proving popular with the maker community. The Raspberry Pi Foundation originally set out to build a low-cost microcromputer to get more U.K. kids learning to code. PiCloud is certainly helping with that.

Not content with following Nokia’s past playbook, by saturating the mobile market with countless iterations of its smartphone hardware, pushing a whole Galaxy of gizmos at every price point and form-factor fancy you can think of, Samsung has gone one further. It’s opened an R&D centre in Espoo, Finland, right on Nokia’s doorstep. Literally on Nokia’s doorstep. If you were in any doubt that Samsung is the new Nokia, this really has to be the final call.

Samsung said the R&D facility, its first in Northern Europe, is being located in Finland because of “the excellent technology development eco-system in Finland”. Which is basically another way of saying ‘thanks to Nokia, and the tech skills of the local people who likely acquired them working at or with Nokia at some point over the past several decades’. Nokia’s presence in Finland has helped build a thriving startup culture, thanks to the pool of local tech skills and experience but also as Nokia has had to reduce its own headcount it has actively encouraged entrepreneurship through its Bridge Programme by supporting former employees leaving to found their own startups. The irony now is that Samsung is looking to tap into an ecosystem Nokia has been helping to build up.

The R&D center — which is part of Samsung’s strategy of ramping up spending in this area this year, up from the circa $10 billion it spent on R&D activities last year — will focus specifically on development of open source software and “advanced technologies in the domains of graphics, web & security for digital devices such as smartphones, tablets, Digital TV and PCs”.

Another irony here is that as Samsung has gobbled up the marketshare Nokia used to own, the Finnish former phone giant has been forced to pull in its horns – to operate with far fewer resources than it had during its mobile heyday (when it too could produce a phone for every price-point and pocket) — thereby limiting the types of devices it can push into. Which in turn leaves room for a company like Samsung to target more development cash at other device type categories, like tablets, a category where Nokia used to play. In a sense, Samsung is just expanding into the footprints of Nokia’s past success.

Samsung said it plans to recruit at least 50 experts in the various technical domains that the R&D center will focus on in the coming years. It also plans to “steadily grow” the facility, pushing research into whatever tech areas it decides it needs to down the line.

As well as thumbing its nose at Nokia by tapping into local Finnish talent, siting an R&D Center in Northern Europe will give Korea-based Samsung a base to plug into a regional network of research and academic organisations, as well as getting close to European startups and businesses.

Europe has been a stronghold for Samsung smartphone hardware, so building closer ties to the region makes sense to futureproof its lead here. A lead Nokia has been trying to dent with its Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones. Evidence of a slight uplift in sales for Windows Phone in markets such as the U.K. may be another factor pushing Samsung to drive deeper into Nokia’s territory — hence its stated intention now, with the Espoo Centre, to “actively build relationships and co-develop cutting edge technologies with our Finnish partners”.

Doing a startup in Europe is challenging for all sorts of reasons. But one key issue is cultural — even if the gritty realism of European entrepreneurs is ultimately tied to the relative difficulties of raising larger investment rounds in the region. The can-do attitude of Silicon Valley is undoubtedly fuelled in part by the amount of investor money flying around. But that’s not the only reason. Failing in the Valley isn’t seen as an end point in the way it can be in Europe.

Being exposed to a little of that ‘fail and move on’ and ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude is a key part of the rational behind a new internship programme for U.K. computer science graduates that’s placing them with Silicon Valley startups for a year, starting in August. The Silicon Valley Internship Programme (SVIP) is aiming to get some of this Valley chops to rub off on 15 students from nine U.K. universities by giving them real-world startup experience in the place that knows how to do it best.

Programme founder, Michael Hughes, explains the idea for SVIP sprung from a conversation he was having at a meeting in San Francisco involving British entrepreneurs, UKTI reps, the British Ambassador and British Consul General, talking about — inevitably — why Silicon Valley has such a successful startup culture, and how the U.K. can emulate the Valley vibe.

“The meeting was to discuss why Silicon Valley was so successful and what could be done in the UK to try to stimulate similar levels of entrepreneurship,” he tells TechCrunch. ”A big theme coming from the entrepreneurs was that the prevailing ‘feeling of the possible’ in the Bay Area meant that you really felt like you could give things a go in this environment and hence, a lot more people take the leap to start a business knowing that even if they fail, they can have another lash.

“In Britain however (generalizing terribly), there is more of a tendency towards critique of ideas and it is harder to have your career recover from a failed venture.  So if your view is that entrepreneurial success comes with a big dollop of luck, the more people having a go the better.”

What better way to instill a sense of the possible in young coders than by exposing them to startup life for a year. After the year is up, SVIP grads return to the U.K. with a year’s worth of experiences under their belt and — hopefully — bring back a little bit of the West Coast positivity to contribute to the local startup scene.

“Ultimately the goal of the programme is to have a cadre of top engineers who combine the technical expertise with the experience and attitude to start companies once they return to the U.K. after the programme.  My dream is that a few of the guys on the programme get together and start something in the U.K. when they go back, supported and advised by the network they will have developed in the Bay Area,” says Hughes, himself a startup co-founder.

His startup, LoopUp, is one of the nine that will be accepting the 15 paid student placements in the first year’s intake. The other startups are EdgeSpring, Nimble Storage, EAT Club, PostRocket, Caring.com, viagogo, GuideSpark and Coffee Meets Bagel. Hughes says he got the others involved by reaching out to friends in the Stanford community and also hiring a Programme Manager to do more outreach.

“All the guys are coming out on a one year visa which requires them to return to the U.K. after.  Realistically, we all know that some of them will find a way to stay in the U.S., but even if they do, I don’t see this as a disaster for the U.K. After all I am a Brit, living in the U.S. for 17 years, yet with our start-up we employ 40 people in London and have fostered strong technology interchange between the companies,” he adds.

One of the students who will be flying out to California in August is Paul Wozniak, who is graduating with a Computer Science degree from the University of Kent. Wozniak applied for the SVIP in January, and had four interviews with two startups before securing his placement at LoopUp.

“My goals for the year are very much aligned with the goals of the programme: to learn the entrepreneurial skills in the trenches of Silicon Valley. I hope that by the end of the year I will pitch a company idea to an investor. One such idea is based on my final year project and is about making medication a worry free experience for everyone using technology,” he says.

Asked whether he intends to return to the U.K. after a year on the West Coast, he says he does ultimately want to contribute to the U.K. scene. ”I feel so much gratitude towards all the people and the community around these places [where I went to school] and I want to give back also. So when I return at the end of the year, if starting my own company is the best way to do that, then that is exactly what I will do.”

Of course a handful of grads aren’t going to change ingrained, prevailing British attitudes to failure on their own. But as Hughes’ example underlines, the network of people they will plug into will reach much further. So although the SVIP is a small initiative, its heart is definitely in the right place. And its impact might hopefully end up being greater than the sum of its inaugural parts.

This summer the veteran Symbian platform, which started life back when handhelds weren’t phones but PDAs, will quietly pass into development history. Or at least its primary supporter over the years — Nokia – will cease producing any new handsets running the OS (or so says the FT). Unsurprisingly Nokia is keeping officially schtum this time around. Presumably it’s learnt its lesson after the original burning platform memo, in which it publicly declared its intention to jump ship from Symbian to Windows Phone, ended up burning a huge hole in its coffers as people stopped buying phones running a zombie OS.

It’s technically possible smaller entities might look to keep the Symbian flame alive, as the former Nokians, Jolla, are attempting to do with MeeGo. Symbian does still power a fair amount of phones in China, for instance. But Symbian’s assets have been passed over to Accenture to maintain, and it’s no longer open source, so its days as an active development platform are likely numbered. Regardless, it’s certainly true that Symbian is the platform of a bygone 2G era, when phones were phones first and foremost, not today’s data-gobbling pocket computers.

All of which means that even if Symbian lingers a little longer — Nokia is apparently intending to sell off existing Symbian phone stock, so that may well take some time judging by how sales have dropped drastically (it now sells more Windows Phones than Symbian devices) — its end times are approaching. So what better point to take a look back at the platform that powered so many devices and dominated the mobile landscape for so long.

From PDA Roots To Candybar Phones

Symbian’s origins are firmly routed in the PDA world. It sprang from an OS developed by Psion for its handheld organisers — pictured below is a precursor OS to the one that evolved into Symbian.

In mid 1998 Psion Software became Symbian Ltd — a joint venture between Psion and phone makers Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia — and EPOC was renamed the Symbian OS. As befits a joint venture, the OS was splintered into distinct platforms/UIs as each of the various mobile makers put it to work with their own devices.

These included Nokia’s PDA-style Series 80 platform — shown below running on the Nokia 9300 — and the icon-based Series 60 UI platform shown running on the candybar slider Nokia 7650, bottom left, and the N80, bottom right.

Caught Out By Capacitive Touch

Symbian’s clear run extended right through to the mid noughties, as Nokia pumped out a steady stream of candybars, flips phones and other weird/wonderful form-factors from cylinders to spherical squares, all powered by its various flavours of the OS. This was Symbian cooking on gas.

The crunch time for the OS came when Apple’s iPhone arrived in 2007 to usher in the capacitive touchscreen era, putting a new more fluid touch-centric user experience at the fore and elbowing out keypads, Qwertys and fiddly menu systems that relied on wielding a stylus to navigate. The iPhone’s arrival was of course compounded by Android’s debut in 2008. Soon a whole army of touchscreen iPhones and iClones were crowding into a mobile playground that had formerly been Nokia’s and Symbian’s to rule. 

Unlike Symbian, these incoming platforms were starting fresh — designed for the Internet era, not the quaint pocket PDA. They didn’t carry legacy baggage. Their only heritage was connected computing. They were built with the touchscreen at their centre, and they offered a perfect platform for delivering apps. Of course Symbian could run apps too, but all the various flavours of the OS meant its app ecosystem was far more fragmented than its rivals. And although Symbian’s PDA roots incorporated touchscreen tech this older generation of resistive screen tech — which went hand in glove with fiddly drop-down menus designed to be pecked at with a stylus — bore no relation to modern touchscreens that focused on fingers and true touch computing.

All these factors gave Android and iOS a huge advantage over the decade-old Symbian platform. Symbian was stuck in its own folder-strewn rut, desperately needing to evolve to compete in the slick new mobile world order. Add to that, Android was free for mobile makers to use vs Symbian’s licensing fee model. Symbian was being outgunned and outpriced. A crushing combination for any long-in-the-tooth technology.

Last ditch efforts to spur Symbian on

Nokia, the main Symbian user ergo the company with the most to lose as the OS fell behind, made the decision to open source Symbian in 2008 to try to accelerate its evolution to compete with its younger and more agile rivals. A rebooted version of Symbian designed for a touchscreen era was to be created by merging various platform strands — including S60 and technology from UIQ and MOAP(S) — to be pooled into a new unified touch-focused platform.

The first touch-enabled release of the new OS, Symbian^1 (or Symbian S60 v5) — is shown below running on the first device to carry it, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, released at the end of 2008.

But the usability gap between Symbian^1 and its upstart rivals remained a gulf. It wasn’t until Symbian^3 (demoed below in a Nokia promo video) that a more fully-featured touch-centric experience started to emerge. Although, at this point, development work was already pushing into 2010 meaning Symbian continued falling further behind.

Symbian^3 added multiple homescreens with support for widgets, faster graphics and scrolling, pinch to zoom, visual multitasking with app previews and switching, among other new features. But this was still playing catch up with Android and iOS. Too little, too late remained Symbian’s problem, as its two rivals streaked ahead with their own platform evolutions and went on to sew up the smartphone market between them.

In a last ditch attempt to fix Symbian fast, Nokia took development back in house. Two more versions of the OS followed, Symbian Anna, which brought browser speed and text input improvements and ushered in a new rounded icon-based UI. Followed by a final update: Symbian Belle.

Belle added additional modernising touches such as more customisable widgets, extra homescreens, a pull down status screen for accessing settings and viewing missed missives, notifications on the lockscreen, and support for NFC. The problem was Android already had all those things.

The old folder based menu hierarchy that Symbian had carried with it from its PDA days had finally been entirely flattened. But it had taken far too long to level the playing field. Symbian’s work was almost done.

At the start of this year Nokia confirmed that the Symbian-based 808 PureView – announced in 2012 with much fanfare thanks to its 41MP camera sensor — would be the last device it makes on the Symbian platform. This summer it’s also going to stop producing even the remaining few Symbian devices in its portfolio.

After some 15 years, many of them as the leader of its field, it’s the end of the line for this venerable technology stack.

Symbian’s development challenges

Lee Williams, formerly the executive director of the Symbian Foundation — the entity created to oversee the open sourced Symbian in 2008 — takes the view that while the PDA heritage of Symbian was initially off-putting, the platform’s robust underlying architecture and flexibility gave it the ability to power through its legacy past. After all, they were the key strengths that had allowed it to travel so far and find its way on to so many devices for so many years in the first place.

“I remember Symbian as that upstart competitor in the GEOS/BeOS/Palm days. I was at Be at the time, and we discounted the system due to it’s role as Psion software with a stodgy approach to usability and programmability.  By the time I got to Palm, and we were wrestling with how best to provide a multicore platform for smartphones, we started to realise that Symbian had some real potential. Namely, the right architecture for a broad range of devices and a robust programming model for applications,” he tells TechCrunch.

Williams’ take on Symbian’s demise is therefore not that the technology itself was the problem, but rather that Symbian spread itself too thin: it was beholden to too many other partners who all wanted a piece of the pie and that meant fragmentation, development retardation and a fatal inability to innovate quickly enough when others were flying forward.

“When I landed on the board at Symbian U.K. Limited, and then took the reigns as the head of the Foundation, the platform appeared to be the preeminent system for the mobile age. What was ironic, was that its strengths ended up being the soul of its demise. The broad level of Operator/OEM support and the extensive range of technology and device types couldn’t help but make the platform difficult to market and ultimately difficult for others to accept as a good solution for the marketplace,” he says. “Ultimately, politics and perception killed what is arguably still the world’s best operating system for our era of seamlessly connected and extensible products.”

That’s the view from the top. But what about the view from the development trenches? Roopesh Chander, a Qt developer who dabbled with writing Symbian apps after Nokia added support for the cross-platform development framework to Symbian in 2011 — having found Symbian C++ “too arbitrary” and “complex”  – argues that in the post-iPhone years, Symbian struggled simply because it remained dated vs the competition.

Even though Nokia improved the development environment for Symbian by adding support for Qt — meaning developers no longer needed to struggle with Symbian C++’s random API call names and requirements for even simple things to have low level setting up of memory and stacks – the platform itself continued to show its age. And that ultimately dragged down the more modern-looking apps now being developed for it. In short, Symbian Belle was great but years too late.

“Though the apps started looking nice and modern [after Nokia added Qt support], the OS itself (Symbian^3 and Symbian Anna) was still looking dated,” says Chander. “For example, though running on a touchscreen, they had two text buttons in the bottom taskbar, a legacy from the buttoned phones. When the phone orientation changed, weird things happened on the screen before the screen settled in the new orientation. If you wanted to type in portrait mode, you had to make do with a telephone keypad (that has 2 and ABC on the same button). Stuff like these made it quite bad at a time when iPhone and Android were shipping much much better touch-centric user interfaces on their phones.

“Nokia fixed most of those problems with Symbian Belle, but it was too late (and Belle merely brought it to the level of the competition, didn’t elevate it to a higher level),” he adds. ”The pinnacle of Symbian was obviously the Nokia 808 PureView, and I think even that can just about compete with the UX in iPhone/Android (not considering the number of apps and the ecosystem). So, I think Symbian didn’t make it because it couldn’t adapt to the touch-centric UX quick enough. If it had shipped Belle two years earlier, it could have garnered the app ecosystem that Android now enjoys.”

And with an insider’s view, Martin Jakl, a former employee of Symbian Ltd and also subsequently Nokia briefly when the latter took over the running of the OS, believes it was public perception that killed Symbian — the perception that the OS was bad because of an outdated UI sitting on top, holding it back. “At the OS layer Symbian was (and most likely still is) the best mobile OS. But of course what users see is the UI and if UI sucks, general public will not like the OS. And to my mind that’s exactly what happened,” he tells TechCrunch. “Splitting the OS and UI was perhaps the greatest managerial mistakes Symbian did (but not the only one, mismanagement was in general the biggest problem of Symbian).”

“The entire S60 UI – in my mind this was the single biggest problem with Symbian — the UI was getting dated and Nokia’s was too risk aware to change it. When they decided to update UI in S^3, they took a couple of wrong design decisions (work on future S^4 which was scrapped) but finally arriving with the right approach to new UI. That’s today’s Belle UI based around Qt abd QML. But by then it was late,” he adds.

Jakl says Symbian’s great strengths as an OS were its kernel, which supported highly complex real-time system apps, and networking stack, which unlike the competition was written for mobile so was built for switching between radio technologies. Symbian also had platform security implemented in the kernel, making it robust in a way he argues Android is not. “It was virtually impossible to hack the system. Look at Android even today, it struggles with a load of malware, etc. This would not have happened to Symbian,” he says. But despite these native strength at the OS level, failure to unify and evolve the UI fast enough killed Symbian — by pushing mobile users into the arms of rivals who focused on usability first.

As is often the case with dominant technologies, not changing fast enough got the better of Symbian. Whether the platform proving itself a laggard was down to complacency and leadership mis-management, the complexities of its legacy baggage including an outdated UI, industry politics or a combination of all those things is hard to say. Regardless of the specific combination of reasons, the cautionary outcome remains the same: innovate or die.

Along with Skype, WhatsApp is the granddaddy of the mobile messaging app space. But despite its relative great age (~47 months), certainly compared to the myriad messaging newcomers, it appears to be continuing to build usage momentum. Earlier today WhatsApp announced a new daily messaging metric record, following on from its recent “bigger than Twitter” boast. Its new daily high is 10 billion+ inbound (sent) messages and 17 billion+ outbound (received) messages — making for a total of 27 billion+ processed missives in 24 hours.

The reason for the inbound/outbound discrepancy is down to WhatsApp’s group chat feature which means one sent message can be seen by multiple participants. Group chat in WhatsApp still refers to message-based comms since it doesn’t support VoIP calls (although it does offer the ability to send audio notes — so keeping true to its messaging ethos).

Back in April WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum told the AllThingsD Dive Into Mobile conference that the messaging app was seeing an average of 8 billion inbound, and 12 million outbound messages per day, so its new daily record is still within touching distance of those averages. Still, it does indicate WhatsApp is continuing to build momentum, despite all the additional (free) competition in the messaging app space. Most recently Facebook has stepped up its efforts, with the launch of its Home launcher for Android that adds a messaging layer called Chat Heads atop smartphone content in a bid to keep users chatting within Facebook, rather than using rivals’ messaging software. (Albeit, Home hasn’t got off to a great start.)

Other newer mobile messaging players, such as Line and WeChat, have focused on offering multimedia messaging options, with support for emoji/stickers and video, and in Line’s case additional games and apps featuring its kawaii characters. Line has also been building out its global presence, having pushed beyond its home market of Japan, and the Asian region in general, to target Europe via Spain and also the U.S. and Latin America.

The latest version of Line’s iOS app adds support for additional European languages (h/t to TNW for spotting): namely German, Italian and Portuguese, showing that it’s keeping up the pressure on WhatsApp in a region that’s traditionally been one of its strongholds. Back in March Line also added French and Brazilian Portuguese to support its push into Latin America. As well as going aggressively after a global user-base, Line continues to bolster its in-app functions. v3.7.0 of its iOS app adds an in-app browser, for instance, plus themes featuring its sticker characters; alerts for chats that failed to send; and a photos button in the chat room menu to view all sent/received shots from that chat.

WhatsApp has taken a different route to most of its messaging rivals by charging users for continued use of its service, with a $0.99 per year fee on most mobile platforms. Whereas Line, for instance, is monetising its service via in-app add-on content — such as paid stickers and gaming related downloads. In its Q1 earnings earlier this year, Line reported revenue of $58.9 million with game in-app purchases accounting for around half and paid stickers for around a third of that figure.

The freemium approach appears to be working well for Line, from a revenue generating point of view – WhatsApp’s revenues have been rumoured to be $100 million annually — but so far at least WhatsApp appears to be weathering the challenge posed by free-at-the-point-of-use competitors with no apparent signs of messaging momentum dropping off.

Most mobile messaging apps carry a natural lock-in since users typically require their friends to be using the same service in order to chat to them (Yuilop is an exception) so unless your friends decide en masse to move to a new service, you’re probably going to stick with what you’ve got. It remains to be seen whether WhatsApp rivals’ feature-focused innovations — pushing the envelope on multimedia comms and expanding entertainment-focused content — can start to lure significant numbers of its long-time users away.

Obviously MySpace has very few friends left to alienate – Tom has long since moved on – but that hasn’t stopped it annoying the hell out of its few remaining fans by forcing through an update to its shiny new music discovery platform that’s swallowed their old blog content, with no guarantee it’s ever going to be retrievable. Oh but users are being told to vote on the idea of getting their deleted stuff back. I mean WTF?

We’ve asked MySpace exactly WTF is going on and will update this post when/if they reply.

The Justin Timberlake-backed former Prom Queen of social has been dangling the ‘new MySpace‘ since last September, opening it up as a beta in January but offering a parallel sign-in option where users could still click through to ‘classic MySpace’ if they preferred. And let’s face it most of MySpace’s few remaining hangers on were very likely to have preferred the old world order, since that’s where they could peruse the personal content they had posted on the site.

Well MySpace has now shut the door on the past and accelerated ahead into its shiny — or rather space-y — social music discovery future. But in its rush to fulfil JT’s vision of tech brand rebirth it’s managed to miss the fact that all the old clutter lying around the place was the only thing giving it any character. You know, those blog entries that angsty teens wrote back in anger in 2005. Where are they now? Gone is where. Vanished. Disappeared*. Replaced by Pinterest-esque notice board spaces urging users to DISCOVER MORE and CONNECT TO MORE… (Subtext: Srsly, won’t SOMEONE please just start CLICKING. Someone? Anyone?)

In case you’re wondering whether anyone cares that MySpace ‘classic’ has been erased from existence. Or rather whether MySpace still has any users left to notice/care about this departure, well yes actually. More because people care about their own pasts, than about a past-it social network of course. But regardless of the reason, MySpace has committed the cardinal sin of burning the folk who cared the most. Not classy, not clever. And entirely avoidable: just warn existing users about what you plan to demolish in advance, and give them the time and tools to transfer their stuff. It’s not exactly tough to get right, yet MySpace has got it wrong wrong wrong.

Instead of warning the users now crying a river over their lost blog entries of its frankly dastardly plan to despatch blogs to the social scrap heap, MySpace appears to have assumed no one would care and just steamed ahead and flicked the switch. Assuming no one gives a damn about your old services doesn’t augur well for the future of your new services. What goes around… comes around, JT.

Not giving old users a grace period to retrieve their data before it was replaced with empty spaces containing Pinterest-esque urgings to start building multimedia collections is the sort of crime I can last recall Microsoft committing way back in 2007. When it took over Hotmail and decided to delete a decade’s worth of my emails just because I hadn’t logged into the account for a few months. Not cool doesn’t even begin to describe it. As with the MySpace classic blog holocaust these type of situations are entirely avoidable. And should be avoided — if you ever want users to trust you again.

At least in MySpace’s case it sounds as if they might not have actually deleted any blog data yet but rather just cut off access to it — perhaps so they can gauge how much people care and therefore whether it’s worth their while helping them migrate their stuff. Well, JT, on PR grounds alone, it’s worth it. And if you want any new MySpace users to consider trusting any stuff to your servers in future, it’s also worth it. Assuming you think new MySpace has a future. Rather than being, y’know, dead and gone.

MySpace’s explainer about its new world order notes that old MySpace friends (now rebranded as anodyne ‘Connections’ to fit with its new sanitised style) have been transferred over to new MySpace. Users can also transfer their photos and playlists manually using an import tool. (Shucks, you’re really spoiling them there!) But the list of what’s not been transferred is far longer — and includes the most sentimental stuff. The stuff clearly jangling up JT’s vibe…

What will not be available from my old profile?

We’re focused on building the best Myspace possible. And to us, that means helping you discover connect and share with others using the best tools available. Going forward we’re concentrating on building and maintaining the features that make those experience better. That means you won’t see a few products on the new site…

• Blogs
• Private Messages
• Videos
• Comments or Posts
• Custom background design
• Games

It’s a sign of the social times that text-based blogs, messages, posts and comments are being carted out and dumped on the scrap heap. If it’s not shiny, visual and multimedia it’s worthless, is what new MySpace says. Thing is, that characterful textual clutter it’s so keen to paper over may be the last remaining thing of value in the place.

Add to that, this is not the only time new MySpace has been trigger happy with the delete key. Its new groove was so keen to erase the past it also erased bands’ fan bases too. So really this is a reboot of a reboot of a reboot. So, yeah. Good luck with that.

*NB: MySpace users who had a public profile may be able to recover some data from the old site via Google’s cache — searching using: site:http://www.myspace.com/username/blog 

If you think QR codes are a bad joke then consider NFC. Near Field Communications’ evangelists have been trying to get smartphone owners to share stuff by bumping and grinding their phones for years. And progress has been painful, to put it mildly. The reality is NFC is an ugly wasteland of non-use. Ever seen anyone IRL tapping their phones together? Or tapping on an NFC tag or reader? It’s about as rare as hen’s teeth.

Granted NFC is used in some countries as a payment solution but as a general, catch-all system for close data transfer, it’s a dud. The latest setback for the NFC-pushers’ cause comes courtesy of Apple. During Monday’s WWDC keynote, Tim Cook & Co. were cracking jokes at the tech’s expense as they previewed a feature coming in iOS 7 that does the job of NFC without any of the awkwardness of NFC. It’s a classic Apple move to eschew complexity and avoid technology-based redundancy (see also: wireless charging).

It also suggests Apple is in zero hurry to add NFC to its devices. So no NFC in the iPhone 5S then. Instead, it’s adding AirDrop to iOS 7, which uses peer-to-peer Wi-Fi to allow content to be shared to nearby iOS 7 devices without having to physically tap anything together. Or, as Apple’s SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi, put it — whilst miming said NFC-induced social awkwardness — “No need to wander around the room bumping your phone.”

Of course there is a snag: Apple’s AirDrop is limited to sharing between iOS 7 devices, so it’s not an open pipeline. Still, neither is NFC — since sharing using that transfer tech means both people have to have NFC-enabled devices. It’s also worth flagging that Apple’s support for a standard can be the tipping point for the industry to coalesce around a particular technology (e.g. USB, or helping to kick Flash in favour of HTML5). Add to that there are other Wi-Fi sharing apps for iOS that work across Apple and Windows (e.g. Filedrop) and use a Wi-Fi pipe for the transfer. No NFC required.

Apple often talks about how the things it chooses not to do are as defining as the things it does. Well Apple doesn’t do NFC. And that speaks volumes. Don’t forget, NFC is not new. It’s been kicking around in phones since forever. And Apple still reckons it sucks. AirDrop isn’t the only example of Cupertino deliberately eschewing NFC, either: The Passbook ticketing and loyalty card hub introduced in iOS 6 uses visual barcode scanning to deliver its discounts. The phone owner calls up the barcode on their device and the retailer scans it with a barcode reader. NFC? Not a bit of it.

Another of NFC’s myriad problems — i.e. in addition to actually needing its users to act out the physical transfer themselves – is there’s no emollient term to oil the wheels of its use, especially in the commerce space. Want to use NFC on your phone to pay for something? Asking the cashier ‘can I tap that?’ just sounds euphemistic. Falling back on miming the action is the most elegant of the various inelegant options here. It’s another instance of the social awkwardness of NFC.

Just going ahead and trying to tap phone to reader won’t necessarily work either since some NFC POS terminals need to be switched on specifically to conduct the contactless transaction. Before even getting to that point, of course, the phone owner also has to have figured out they are looking at an NFC-enabled terminal. Some resemble standard POS terminals so wanting to pay by NFC means hunting for a ‘pay by contactless’ sign, or asking if NFC can be used at that outlet.

All these barriers to contactless entry fatally erode its convenience… at least for now. Sure it might one day provide a slick way for phones to be used to pay for stuff — but that requires NFC readers to be everywhere. Which they certainly aren’t yet, despite all the hype and cash poured into the space over the past five+ years. And sure, NFC technology can work well in more simple use-cases. London’s Oyster travelcard ticketing system uses NFC to replace paper tickets, for instance. But really, if the best you can say of NFC is that it’s a bit more convenient than paper, that’s not saying an awful lot.

Shortcutting settings or grabbing content was another use-case envisaged by the NFC pushers. Phone owners would be tapping their devices to NFC tags stuck on movie posters to get content downloaded to their handsets, or be sent to a URL to watch a film trailer (an idea which has been kicking around since the turn of the century, I might add). This sounds like exactly the sort of not-IRL scenario that gets dreamt up in marketing departments. If that’s the best you’ve got NFC, you need to try a lot harder. And an NFC tag for pre-setting an in-car phone profile? Oh pleeease.

It’s fittingly ironic that NFC is termed a ‘contactless’ technology when its proximity requirements necessitate physical contact — or at least getting so close it’s academic. ‘NFC: irritatingly invading your personal space’ doesn’t sound quite so handy does it?

Poor Nokia. Samsung doesn’t stop. It’s just announced a new iteration of its flagship Galaxy S4 handset which has a digital camera embedded in its rump. The Galaxy S4 Zoom has a 10X optical zoom lens on the back, giving it two clear aspects: from the front it looks exactly like Samsung’s flagship S4 smartphone. But from the back it looks like a point and shoot digital camera.

The result is a hybrid handset that squeezes the ability of Nokia’s carefully crafted PureView cameraphone brand to stand out. Sure, Nokia’s high end phone lenses might still have better — or at least decent — low light performance, but to the untrained consumer eye which device is going to look more capable in the camera department?

This one:

Or this one?

And that’s before Nokia has even got around to launching the long rumoured ‘true PureView’ Lumia. Which will possibly look a little like the original (Symbian-based) 808 PureView — so something along the lines of this:

If you’re going to ask consumers to lug around a bulky, heavy phone, might as well make it look as much like the camera they used to own as possible. Familiarity will aid the trade off, helping them justify carrying a much larger device because it clearly melds two functions. Meanwhile Nokia’s PureView brand has to shout even louder to get noticed. And no matter how great their camera algorithms are, a lens that relies on digital zoom alone simply doesn’t look as capable as an optical zoom lens.

As well as a 10X optical zoom, the Galaxy S4 Zoom has a 16 Mega Pixel CMOS Sensor, Optical Image Stabiliser (so it’s raining on the Lumia 920′s parade too) and Xenon Flash. So basically Samsung is pushing into all the areas where Nokia is trying its utmost to differentiate its flagship Lumias vs the Android-powered competition (i.e. low light photography and extra steady video). Nokia could still push the boat out on megapixel count — if it launches a 41MP Lumia — but that’s a nerdy specs game to play that’s unlikely to have an impact on the mainstream consumer.

Beyond looks and specs, Samsung has also embedded new camera functions into the S4 Zoom designed to tie hardware and software together. For example, a feature called Zoom Ring allows the user to activate an in-call photo sharing feature by twisting the zoom ring on the device and then capturing and sending an image to the caller via MMS — all without having to suspend the call. The Zoom Ring can also be used to activate the Quick Launch and Shortcut features to navigate to the camera and through its modes quickly, again by twisting the ring.

Of course, the S4 Zoom will stand and fall on camera performance — so there’s a lot riding on the quality of the optics and the smoothness of its functions. But from the outside, at least, Samsung has created a device that bellows a heck of a lot louder than Nokia’s Lumias do, for all the marketing cash Nokia has poured into PureView. Even if Nokia can produce some camera comparisons that rank its kit over Samsung’s, being technically better isn’t always enough in the fiercely competitive smartphone space. Having the marketing brashness and brass neck (and massive budget) to get noticed is what counts.

Samsung has not released full details of all the markets where it intends to sell the S4 Zoom but has confirmed the handset will be coming to the U.K. this summer, and the U.S. and other parts of Europe from Q4. Like Nokia with the original 808 Pureview, Samsung dabbled in this area before with last year’s Galaxy Camera but that device was a Wi-Fi/3G/4G connected camera only, so did not include a phone dialler function. The Galaxy S4 Zoom is a full hybrid of phone plus camera, and yet another iteration of a flagship brand. This is Samsung continuing its strategy of iterating its portfolio to saturate the market by pushing its hardware into all the niches, large and small.

Nokia, meanwhile — which used to follow a similar strategy to Samsung, i.e. by producing a vast portfolio of devices across multiple price-points and form factors — now has a larger mountain to climb to get its camera-focused flagship phones noticed by the general consumer. Since switching to the Windows Phone platform, Nokia has had to rein in its portfolio to fit the shrinking size of its business, no longer having the resources to spread its hardware so far. But even while it’s focusing its remaining energy on specific niches, like high end cameraphones, Samsung is harrying those efforts by pushing its fingers in all the smartphone pies.

Mindy Candy, the U.K. company behind the hugely successful Moshi Monsters adoptable pet monsters kids game, is branching out into animation. Today it’s announced plans to make a series of 52×11 minute episodes based on the most popular characters from its Moshi world platform which is aimed at boys and girls aged 6-12.

The cartoons will be distributed on both linear and digital platforms, with no word yet where exactly they’ll be available for viewing. The company notes that its chief business development officer will be kicking off distribution discussions with “leading global broadcast networks” at Licensing Expo in Vegas next week.

Mind Candy said its executive creative producer, film & TV projects, Jocelyn Stevenson, will lead the production of the cartoons. Michael Acton Smith, founder and creator of Moshi Monsters, commented in a statement: “We’re looking forward to telling a wide range of new stories with these cartoons and taking the Moshi Monsters characters to new fans all around the world.

Speaking to TechCrunch last month, the company also cited plans for a full-length movie featuring its characters but there are no more details on those plans as yet. Mindy Candy has already milked its five-year+ franchise, which has some 80 million registered users in 150 territories worldwide, with spin-off merchandising — including toys, books, trading cards, a magazine and a music album plus music videos.

Making a cartoon is a next obvious step for a kids-focused digital brand. Indeed, it’s rather surprising it’s taken Mind Candy so long. There have been similar moves recently from Angry Birds-maker Rovio, which launched Angry Birds Toons back in March, and youth-focused mobile messaging app Line which created the spin-off Line Town animated TV series for its home Japanese market. Line Town features the main characters from its messaging stickers, underlining how the lines between messaging, gaming and entertainment continue to blur.

DIY micro-robotics is having a moment. The latest project to take the crowdfunding route — via Kickstarter — to build out a platform for playing around with robotics is called BrickPi. As its name suggests, BrickPi is a mash-up of the Raspberry Pi microcomputer, co-opted to act as the brains of the robot, plus LEGO Mindstorms sensors, bricks and motors for crafting its working parts. Firmware is written in Arduino, making it open and hackable. Indeed, the BrickPi makers have put their hardware designs and software source code online for download on Github.

The BrickPi extends the Raspberry Pi with a board that snaps in place over the Pi to connect it to the various LEGO sensors (such as touch sensors, colour sensors and gyroscope). This is then contained within a plastic case that is compatible with LEGO bricks so it can act as the base for building out the robot. An on board battery connector allows the robot to be untethered from a power socket so it can go roving.

The BrickPi is the brainchild of educational robotics company  Dexter Industries which also sells sensors for LEGO Mindstorms. The Kickstarter campaign has five days left to run and is approaching $90,000 in pledged backing from more than 1,270 backers — hugely above the original (modest) goal of $1,889.

Going the crowdfunding route sounds like it was primarily about building a community and getting the word out for Brick Pi’s makers but they have added a series of stretch funding goals to explain what they plan to do with the extra money raised. These include adding more sensors and ports to the device and creating additional libraries (in C/C++, as well as the original Python libraries) to expand programming options.

“We have a lot of plans for the extra funds raised and they all include improving the user experience and opening up the BrickPi to a wider audience,” says Dexter Industries’ John Cole. ” That mostly means putting together some sharp tutorials, and putting together more examples.  In my humble experience, where a lot of technical projects like this go wrong is when they have only 2 or 3 example projects.  Adults can think of a lot of projects and interesting ways to use the product, but kids have trouble with it, get bored, and move on.”

The original goal of the funding campaign was to bring the cost of the BrickPi down to $35 — making it the same price as the Raspberry Pi. BrickPi also pledged to write a library for the Scratch programming language, itself developed for helping kids to learn how to code. With projects like this, and mOwayduino — another robotics platform in the making due to go the crowdfunding route shortly — hardware hacking for creatively minded kids has never looked so easy.

Paris-based Internet of Things startup Netatmo, which makes personal weather station and air quality sensor devices (as seen in the video above) for use with Android and iOS apps, has just closed a €4.5 million ($5.8 million) funding round. It plans to use the funding to launch new connected devices in the second half of this year, including additional indoor air modules (to be announced this month), and also rain and wind meters.

Investors in the round — Netatmo’s first external funding — include Iris Capital, FSN PME, which is the French National Fund for Digital Society, along with Pascal Cagni, Non Executive Director of Vivendi SA and Kingfisher PLC and former Vice-President & General Manager of Apple Europe, Middle East, India and Africa.

Netatmo launched its consumer focused weather station monitoring device last fall. The device allows users to track outdoor weather conditions and environmental conditions indoors — such as air quality and CO2 level — and monitor and chart that data via the corresponding apps.

Although Netatmo is not breaking out device sales data yet, it says its weather stations are currently monitoring the environment in more than 105 countries. ”After a few months on the market, demand continues to grow, and we are experiencing significant increases in sales,” Netatmo CEO Fred Potter noted in a statement. ”Our new financial partners will allow us to pursue further innovations, develop new devices and expand our distribution channels and territories,”

Netatmo said it plans to focus on development and operations throughout Europe, Asia and the U.S., with the goal to expand its headcount as it ramps up the business this year.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Pascal Cagni added: ”The Internet of Things is the next step in the rise of an even more connected digital world… Thanks to Netatmo’s talented teams and ability to integrate advanced software with state-of-the-art hardware, this company is built to play a leading role in that revolution.”

Lango, the U.S. mobile picture-messaging app formerly known as Zlango and backed by Benchmark and DAG ventures to the tune of $20 million in total (raising $6m in its most recent round), is sharpening its focus on its target U.S. market by launching topical pop culture emoji and weekly packs of retro icons. Eight to 10 new textable emoji/icons will be released each week, plus retro icons on Thursdays, for users to download. The new emoji will be based on “current conversation” and gossipy trends.

Whether you want to call them topical emoji, icons or stickers — the latter being the term used by app rivals such as Viber and Line for their own visual messaging content — they are basically all the same thing, albeit Lango’s emoji are being designed specifically to tap into North American pop/gossip cultural. A move it’s clearly hoping will give it a lift vs its global competitors. However Lango is not alone in this thinking here. While Japan’s Line messaging app is most famous for its kawaii characters — e.g. Moon, Brown and Cony — it employees localisation teams to produce culturally specific stickers for each market. Thereby shrinking the ability for local messaging apps to stand out.

Still, you can argue that a few U.S.-flavoured stickers in a huge catalogue mostly composed of sometimes-lost-in-translation kawaii is not the same as purely U.S.-centric emoji, released to coincide with and exploit the latest TV gossip sensations. Or that’s what Lango will be hoping anyway. Slated for upcoming release are a Game of Thrones icon on Friday — “just in time for the finale” — a Father’s Day pack next week, plus a new Duck Dynasty pack. On the retro front, icons based on classic cars and characters from throwback sitcoms like Friends are planned. This summer also expect it to release emoji based on celebrities’ babies, and a Tribute to America pack for the July 4 holiday.

Here is a handful of the sort of topical emoji Lango will be offering, including characters from TV show The Voice:

Tapping topical trends is an obvious way to piggyback on the cultural zeitgeist but Lango’s retro sticker packs are also part of its user acquisition strategy, since it plans to target these at existing enthusiast communities. “We are identifying the ‘queen bees’ or populators of specific interest communities and exposing them to our content,” the company tells TechCrunch. “People who love to follow retro cars online (there are thousands of fan groups dedicated to retro cars), love the idea of creating and sending messages with Lango images.”

Lango relaunched its app this March — pivoting from its prior global focus to specifically target the U.S. and also to pursue this “meme-like social sharing” instead of its past modus operandi of auto adding emoji for every word typed in a text, which sounds, well, pretty annoying. “The idea now is have each text centered upon a more descriptive emoji,” it explains.

It isn’t currently breaking out user numbers for the new Lango but says some of its previous users have transferred over (it hit a million users four months after launching its original app, back in 2012). It also says more than half (60%) of its user base have come from friends inviting friends, and the vast majority (85%) of all messages sent within its platform are using its icons.

As with lots of mobile messaging apps, Lango is tapping into the boom in social photo-sharing that has, in recent year, inflated Instagram and continues to produce new types of pictorial/visual messaging mediums, like SnapChat and Urturn.

Lango rowing back from the global mobile messaging space is likely a measure of how competitive it has become, with tech giants including Facebook (with Messenger) and most recently Google (with Hangouts) jumping in, joining long-standing established players such as WhatsApp and fast growing newer entrants coming out of Asian including Line and WeChat. Regrouping by dialling back and focusing on one market to build a local base seems to make sense with so many giants going global.