Meet Slade Villena.

In February, the ex-Zynga engineer publicly slammed the door in the San Francisco online social gaming company’s face in this discussion thread on Reddit, although he kept his real identity a secret at first.

With a new seven-person team and a successfully-funded Kickstarter game under his belt, Villena’s a prime example of the sort of independent game developer I wrote about last week. He’s passionate, ambitious, and full of big ideas.

But even though he’s adamant about focusing now on a small niche, audience, he’s also made a name for himself online directly bashing his old employer.

Welcome to the dark side — or, at least, the gray area– of indie dev culture.

Villena’s Reddit thread three months ago got hundreds of questions and thousands of upvotes, and made Zynga look pretty bad.

But today, Zynga — which declined to comment for this article — gets a chance to strike back. In the same section on Reddit, known as IAmA, two Zynga engineers, Seth Allison and Andrew Pellerano, are scheduled to open a Q&A thread at 1 PM PST.

So, who do you trust?

When he waxes philosophical about the video game industry, Villena makes some good points. Most interestingly, that competition may be a myth in the indie space, since developers don’t necessarily have to go after a mass audience of, for example, war game-loving teenage boys. But I was surprised by how just how much he was willing to put Zynga down, especially since he worked there for only eight months and quit almost a year ago.

And while some of Villena’s points are valid or plausible, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said others are “borderline psychotic.”

On the one hand are arguments you’ve probably heard before: That in the pursuit of bigger and bigger audiences, Zynga grinds its employees too hard and pushes them too far.

“I was averaging 70 hours a week because I had to,” Villena said. “They were demanding large spikes and large revenue gains in a very short amount of time.”

He said the heavy workload leads to lots of bugs, and that bugs drive away players. Pachter readily acknowledged that yes, that could happen, but questioned whether Villena was a fair judge.

“He’s probably not spending as much time playing everybody else’s games like I am,” said Pachter. “So, I can tell you that their games are less buggy than most.”

On top of that, Villena alleged a culture of unprofessionalism at Zynga, where long hours were rewarded with trips to Las Vegas and free alcohol for engineers while they worked.

Pachter said he had never observed anything of the sort any of the times he’s visited Zynga, nor had he heard anything about this supposed drinking culture from the 50-odd people he knows who work there.

Putting aside any culture clash on the social front, Villena also alleged that Zynga invades players’ privacy in the Reddit thread. I asked him to elaborate in our interview, and he compared the games’ use of player data to military-intelligence profiles he observed while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.

When he was a member of the FrontierVille team, he said, the company posted the pictures, real names, ages, habits and Facebook posts of some of the game’s biggest spenders on the wall.

Creepy? Maybe, if true. But the devil’s advocate argument, of course, is that many social gamers technically agree to give over some or all of that data to game developers in order to use their apps in the first place.

“I was told, ‘We’re getting to know our players,’ but why are you posting their names?” Villena countered. “Why not just post their game’s avatar without having to deal with their photo or their name or anything like that?”

Fair enough. But it’s really when the discussion gets into Zynga’s finances that he starts to sound, to steal Pachter’s words, “a bit unhinged.”

As we were wrapping up our interview, Villena volunteered: “I don’t expect Zynga to survive the summer at the rate that they’re going. Look at their stock, dude. They’re scraping at $7. The way I’m looking at it, by the end of the summer, they’re going to be de-listed from NASDAQ.”

Pachter’s reaction over the phone was, “HA! Ha ha ha! No.“

He later apologized for laughing, while simultaneously calling the idea of Zynga going under this year “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Even though Zynga’s stock is at record low levels, under $7 per share, it would need to trade at under $1 per share for 90 days to get de-listed. As for going bankrupt, Zynga is profitable, and doesn’t have any debt.

“And by the way, why the hell does he care?” Pachter asked. “This guy sounds pretty bitter.”

But back to things that matter: Like I said in my last article, gamers don’t have to choose between the games that come out of big companies like Zynga and indie shops like Villena’s Mercenary Game Studios.

Keep an eye on the Zynga engineers’ Reddit thread today. In theory, Redditors are supposed to be able to ask them anything, so we’ll see if and how they respond to Villena’s claims.

That said, one thing has clearly shifted. Microsoft is now taking on Google directly, given that the Motorola deal closed on Tuesday. So a German court decision Thursday that certain Motorola Android products infringe on Microsoft patents can officially be chalked up as Microsoft’s first direct hit to Google.

The ruling was actually a split one, as the court ruled that Motorola does infringe on a patent related to text messaging but does not infringe on another patent related to localization.

“We’re pleased the court agreed today that Motorola has infringed Microsoft’s intellectual property, and we hope Motorola will be willing to join other Android device makers by taking a license to our patents,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a statement.

Motorola, meanwhile, was pleased that the court ruled in its favor on the other patent. As for the one it was found to infringe on, Motorola told AllThingsD that it “will explore all options including appeal.”

“This is one element of a global dispute initiated by Microsoft,” Motorola said.

So far, it has deployed at 2,000 Home Depots and has plans to be at 20 major retailers by the end of the year.

Stay tuned as we cover the announcements live.

10:10 am: “Midmarket businesses represent a third of the U.S. economy, and we looked at our capability and decided to partner rather than build,” explains PayPal president David Marcus.

So rather than ripping out their existing systems, the new stuff integrates with existing point-of-sale systems.

The POS software partners are: Vend, Erply, shopKeepPOS and Leapset.

That plugs PayPal into 50,000 merchants across the country, Marcus said. And that’s added to VeriFone and Equinox POS terminal manufacturers, announced this morning, in addition to an existing relationship with Ingenico.

Cue video of the owner of a PayPal-enabled shop full of cute dresses, who says she likes seeing her customers’ faces on the register, emailing them receipts and knowing their purchase history.

Next topic: large retailers. Don Kingsborough, VP of retail and prepaid, takes the stage.

Physical retail and offline retail is no longer about “location, location, location,” but instead about access to customers, Kingsborough posits.

Kingsborough pokes fun at Google’s mobile wallet pronouncement last year in New York (not by name, but it’s obvious), and other competitors’ tests, saying PayPal is much closer to ubiquity.

PayPal’s big partner so far has been Home Depot, so it trots out the company’s Dwaine Kimmet, treasurer and VP of financial services.

10:28 am: Kimmet says PayPal has been a good partner for 1) improving and speeding up checkout 2) combating bank card acceptance costs and 3) providing value to everyone.

That last one sounds really vague, but he’s elaborating. Kimmet gives the example of how text messaging around transactions gives both added security as well as convenience for customers.

Kingsborough is back to give a list of the first 15 retailers, and says some of them will be launching in the next few weeks. This is the meat of the announcement we were expecting. Office Depot, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Jamba Juice, Foot Locker, J.C. Penney, Guitar Center, Jos. A. Bank, Aeropostale, Nine West, Advance Auto Parts and TigerDirect are the ones I could get before the slide changed.

Now for a string of video testimonials from people like J.C. Penney CTO Kristen Blum. But CEO of Jamba Juice James White is here in person.

White talks about the convergence of online and offline, customer satisfaction, incremental traffic and brand strengthening, while my mind wanders to flavors of smoothies.

Marcus is back to recap. His big theme is scale, and he says that word a bunch of times to describe PayPal’s different categories: online, mobile, different sizes of businesses.

The offline launch will enable PayPal to tap into a market that’s 17 times as large as what it has today, Marcus says.

That was short and sweet. PayPal had given a target of 20 major retailers by year’s end, so announcing 15 in May in addition to Home Depot is pretty far along.

10:55 am: Okay, got the full list of retailers. Here they are: Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, Jamba Juice, J.C. Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us.

That list includes some overlap with Google Wallet, including American Eagle Outfitters, Foot Locker and Jamba Juice. It seems clear that retailers are willing to try multiple strategies to see what works best.

Google said on Thursday it is adding support for in-app subscriptions, allowing apps or services within apps that are paid for on a monthly or annual basis. The subscriptions will be auto-renewing unless a customer chooses to stop them.

“Developers just set the price and billing interval and Google Play manages the purchase transactions for them, just as it does for other in-app products and app purchases,” Google Play product manager Ibrahim Elbouchikhi said in a blog post.

The move comes roughly a year after Google added in-app payments. Google says that 23 of the top 24 grossing Android apps use in-app payments and that revenue from in-app payments exceeds that generated from paid downloads. Google has also added support for carrier billing in a number of markets.

Game makers have been among the most agressive adopters of in-app payments and are expected to be among those that gravitate to subscriptions as well, though the option will be for any Android app.

One of the first companies to adopt the new subscriptions will be Glu Mobile, which plans to offer a virtual currency that can be used across a number of its games, including Frontline Commando.

Glu senior VP Adam Flanders said subscriptions, which it already offers via Amazon, boost the value and experience for customers, while also boosting retention of those customers.

Also planning to use the new feature is music site Qello, which well start offering an “all-access pass” to its library of concerts and documentaries to its Android app. The company already offers that option on iOS and the Web.

Google said that, for developers already using in app payments, the move to add subscriptions will involve adding just a few lines of code.

What we didn’t know, however, is that Facebook was essentially building its own version of a standalone mobile photo-sharing application, ostensibly to compete with Instagram before it took over the mobile photo-sharing world completely.

How do I know that? Because Facebook will launch the product this afternoon in Apple’s App Store.

It’s called Facebook Camera, and it’s essentially Instagram redux. One, it’s a standalone Facebook application, separate from the Facebook app proper, much like the company’s Facebook Messages app. Facebook Photos product manager Dirk Stoop told me in an interview this morning that it’s an instant portal to one of Facebook’s largest use cases: Photo sharing.

Secondly — and I cannot stress this point enough — Facebook seems to have learned a heck of a lot from Instagram. Photos in Facebook Camera are full-bleed, spanning the entire width of the iPhone’s screen (which was probably tested when Facebook tweaked the photo experience for mobile last week). You’re able to comment and “Like” photos directly from the stream. And, of course, there are filters (albeit ones with names nowhere near as fun as Toaster or Valencia).

More than this, it’s very lightweight. The app moves much faster than browsing photos within Facebook’s proper app. And by introducing a separate camera app, it’s another way of bypassing the cumbersome, clicky process of adding pictures via the main Facebook app.

It would be nice if the main Facebook app could just work this well, but Stoop said that this app was the brainchild of the dedicated Photos team he spearheads. That means moving faster, and breaking — then repairing — things quicker.

“Having separate teams focus on their area of expertise allows us to innovate faster,” Stoop told me. “Which, eventually, helps to integrate features into the main line product.” There’s hope, then, that Facebook’s main app will actually get better.

There is, of course, a way around all of this photo-sharing friction: If Facebook were to integrate with iOS just as Twitter has, iPhone users could instantly upload photos to Facebook, straight from the iOS camera app. Stoop didn’t comment when I mentioned as much in our conversation.

So yes, the app is slick. And yes, it’s a fast portal into mobile photo-sharing, the likes of which Facebook needs. But it’s skirting the billion-dollar elephant in the room: Why build another camera app when you just dropped a ton of cash on one last month?

Two things: One, the Instagram deal hasn’t actually closed yet. It’s still purportedly being probed by the FTC, and that could take time to finish. And two, Stoop’s team was most likely working on this product long before buying Instagram was ever a real possibility. Stoop confirmed to me that Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and his team had nothing to do with building Facebook Camera.

But now that Facebook Camera is finally coming to the App Store a month after the Instagram purchase, the whole deal is starting to make a lot more sense. With Instagram’s rapid rise to prominence in quickly garnering a strong user base, Facebook had to have seen the writing on the wall. Tens of millions of users signed up in the span of two years. And the app surpassed 50 million downloads after finally being released on Android earlier this year.

In essence, Instagram was taking over mobile photos, and Facebook couldn’t wait around and watch the company snap up every user while still working on perfecting the Facebook Camera app.

It’ll be interesting to see just how Facebook integrates Instagram’s user base into Facebook over time. It’s odd, too, that Facebook would launch a standalone Camera app, especially when it’s likely that the acquisition will go through. Still, perhaps a mashup of the two apps is on the road map eventually, despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s protestations that Instagram will maintain its autonomy.

Or perhaps Facebook itself doesn’t even know quite yet.

That’s the day Microsoft will learn whether anything has come of its challenge to the $1.14 billion penalty the European Union slapped it with eight years ago for failing to comply with its antitrust decision.

In just over a month’s time, the EU’s General Court will rule on Microsoft’s appeal of the fine, the culmination of a long, contentious legal battle over interoperability. Issued after it was determined that Microsoft had failed to comply with a 2004 antitrust judgment that required the company to charge fair and reasonable rates for its interoperability protocols, the $1.14 billion fine was the largest ever imposed by the EU against a single company, and the very first to be meted out for noncompliance with an EU court order.

It was also, in Microsoft’s opinion, “unnecessary, unlawful and totally disproportionate.”

“This case would not have arisen if the commission had been as explicit with respect to rates which it wanted Microsoft to charge as it had been with all other terms of licensing proposed by Microsoft,” Microsoft’s attorney Jean-François Bellis told the EU General Court at the time the company filed its appeal. “How can the Commission fine Microsoft for failing to apply reasonable rates from June 2006 to October 2007 when the final parameters were only determined on October 22, 2007?”

In short, Microsoft says it failed to comply with the order because EU regulators didn’t give it the guidance it needed to do so. Interesting argument, but will it carry any weight with the EU General Court?

HP shares rose nearly 5 percent to $22.10, up $1.02 as of 11:15 am ET. Investors appear to be showing new confidence in HP and how CEO Meg Whitman is running the show. All the announcements that HP made yesterday bear repeating, because it was a busy afternoon:

Analysts had a mixed view. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities has been one of the more skeptical voices on HP’s turnaround prospects. “New sheriff, old game plan,” was the headline on his note to clients today. “We remain cautious on HP’s weak fundamentals, challenging macro conditions and deteriorating cash flow,” he wrote. Despite the beat on earnings, free cash flow — at $1.4 billion in the quarter — declined by half, pointing to what Whitmore calls “very poor earnings quality.” He rates HP as a “sell,” with a $20 price target.

Brent Bracelin of Pacific Crest Securities wrote that he remains unconvinced that an unexpected strength in HP’s PC unit is sustainable. “Apple and Samsung now account for 39 percent of market share across PCs, tablets and smartphones, and have a volume advantage relative to HP’s 6 percent share,” he wrote in a note to clients this morning. He rates the shares “market perform,” or neutral, and worries that HP’s biggest problem is that about half its sales are still tied to PCs and printers.

Whitman took to CNBC this morning to talk about HP’s situation. She portrayed the turnaround under way as about “10 to 15 percent” complete. That means there’s still a lot of work to do ahead. “We’ve laid a lot of pipe and done a lot of groundwork,” Whitman told the network’s anchors in a 13-minute appearance. I’ve embedded it below:

Lift co-founder Tony Stubblebine

Word of the company first came out last August, but since then the idea has changed quite a bit, co-founder Tony Stubblebine told me this week. The problem with earlier versions was a misguided foray into gamification, he said.

Lift’s purpose is still the same: It’s a mobile app to motivate people to reach their goals. And it’s still not out yet, so take all these early learnings with a grain of salt.

Where earlier versions had points, badges and levels, the prelaunch Lift has stripped all that away. Now it will be one part social — Lift community members make each other accountable and give each other positive reinforcement — and one part quantified self — users can see charts and graphs of their personal progress around health, education, happiness and productivity goals.

Everything in Lift is public to the community, so the goals tend not to be terribly personal — some popular ones are “eat breakfast,” “talk to a stranger,” “exercise,” “drink more water,” “do pushups” and “read.”

In recent testing, dropping gamification increased retention to 50 percent from 5 percent, Stubblebine said.

That’s only among a small elite group of early users, but it’s enough of a positive signal that Lift should be ready to launch in August, he said.

Originally, San Francisco-based Lift naturally gravitated toward gamification in the hopes that it could create a sort of “Zynga for good,” according to Stubblebine. But designing around gamification presented a few problems: It tempted complication in the product design, and it set up a rigid structure for people to succeed on preset terms, rather than allowing them to find their own motivation.

“If you build a game, you’re providing a fantasy,” Stubblebine said. “We basically replaced a fantasy with reality.”

The new Lift is an iPhone app that allows users to name their goals and join ones other people have started. Each time users meet a goal, they “check in” to it. Then, other people can give them “props.”

At least anecdotally, giving people information seems to be a far bigger driver of changed behavior than giving them points and badges.

Check out the above chart of Evan Williams’ quest on Lift to trim his incoming emails down to “inbox zero.” Seeing a chart of his inbox zero days starting the week of April 8 quickly motivated him to get to that point on a daily basis.

So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

Keep in touch via Facebook, this is critical to your future success. And we’re public now, so can you click on an ad or two when you’re there?

– Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at Harvard Business School’s “Class Day” event Wednesday

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III will come with its own Siri-like feature called S Voice, but for other Android phone owners, there are a number of virtual assistant apps available from the Google Play Store. I spent this past week testing two of them, Vlingo and Speaktoit Assistant, on the HTC One X from AT&T. The apps aren’t exclusive to Android. Vlingo first launched on BlackBerry in 2008, and also works with Symbian and Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Meanwhile, Speaktoit began on Android in 2011, and now supports iOS, with a Windows Phone app arriving in June.

Both of the Android apps are free and let you perform multiple tasks using voice commands. Speaktoit is more conversational, capable of using context to answer questions like Siri does, but it needs a bit of training to work with casual phrases, which Siri does without training. Vlingo, on the other hand, performs better, but lacks the ability to create calendar appointments, which is an important feature for a virtual assistant, thus tipping the scale in Speaktoit’s favor.

Of the two, Vlingo is definitely more of your no-nonsense personal assistant. It doesn’t offer any friendly banter; in fact, unless you press the Read button or turn on the SafeReader function to read incoming messages, it doesn’t talk back to you at all.

Vlingo’s list of abilities includes basic tasks, like dialing contacts, as well as more specialized requests, such as buying movie tickets. However, it seems to me that the app’s inability to create new appointments should be a key feature of a virtual assistant app.

This became especially clear over the past week as I was planning a surprise birthday party. In all the chaos, it would have been nice to create appointments with Vlingo. As it was, Vlingo didn’t understand the command “Create new appointment,” and searched the Web instead.

Vlingo says that while the ability to create appointments and alarms is a frequently requested feature, it does not have details about when this function might roll out.

This is an unfortunate drawback of an otherwise solid app, as Vlingo’s voice-recognition software was accurate from the start. When dictating messages, I appreciated that the app capitalized letters at the beginning of a sentence, inserted apostrophes where appropriate, and understood commands for adding text to the subject line. Speaktoit does not do any of this.

You can use Vlingo to update your Facebook status, send tweets, and check into Foursquare, as well. I sent a tweet using Vlingo, and I liked that it brought up a separate window, so I could attach a photo, whereas Speaktoit only gives you the option to send.

Be aware that you will have to log into your social networks and email accounts on both apps, so they can perform such functions as accessing your address book for voice dialing. Both companies say they do not collect any personal data without a user’s permission or disclosure, but earlier this year, Vlingo was hit with several software bugs that resulted in the app gathering more data than intended. The company has since tightened its security protocols to fix the issue.

One other unique feature about Vlingo is its InCar mode. Though still in its beta, or testing, stage, you can use this mode to call, compose and send text messages or navigate to a place, all by voice. As long as you have the app open, you can say, “Hey Vlingo” to launch the voice-recognition system.

Speaktoit Assistant is an app that’s more like Siri in that it offers more personality when answering questions; it even adds a human touch with a customizable avatar. You can choose between a male or female assistant, and change its hair, voice and more. There’s also a simple microphone if you find the avatars to be cheesy.

Right from the beginning, Speaktoit looks to get more personal by asking for your name. Unfortunately, my assistant Sam and I didn’t get off to a good start, after she interpreted “body” for “Bonnie.” After four tries, I finally gave up and typed in my name. (We made up after I asked Sam to be my best friend, and she said, “I thought we already were.”)

Speaktoit uses Google’s voice-recognition system (Vlingo uses its own, but you can switch to Google), and the first few rounds can be rough. However, the system learns your voice as you continue to use it, so accuracy should improve over time. I found this to be the case in my testing.

Even so, there’s a bit of a learning curve with using Speaktoit. While the app says you can ask questions as you normally would in real life, I found that’s not necessarily true. For example, I asked, “How deep is the Pacific Ocean?” and Sam said, “I’m still learning about that myself, Bonnie. As soon as I know, you’ll know.” But if I asked, “Find depth of Pacific Ocean,” Speaktoit brought up Google search results.

Once you learn these tricks, Speaktoit serves as a good virtual assistant. It has several advantages over Vlingo, including the fact that it reads back answers out loud. The app also does a better job with location-based requests. With Speaktoit, you can ask, “What is today’s weather?” and get the forecast for your current location, but with Vlingo, you have to include the city in your question.

To be sure, neither Vlingo nor Speaktoit Assistant is perfect. Thankfully, they’re free, so you can try both. But with a bit of time and training, Speaktoit is a more capable virtual assistant, with its talk-back abilities, full calendar management, and better location-based results.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/for-hire-good-virtual-assistant-for-android/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/mobile-app-bump-can-now-push-photos-to-your-desktop/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/mobile-app-bump-can-now-push-photos-to-your-desktop/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 13:00:01 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=211834 Bump Technologies launched a new Web site feature on Thursday morning, allowing Bump’s mobile app users the ability to share smartphone photos to their computers by physically bumping the phone against the PC keyboard. The photos are hosted online, and users can choose to download the images to their hard drive or share them using a short URL. Previously, Bump’s mobile app allowed for sharing photos and contact information between mobile phones, but not directly to a computer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/mobile-app-bump-can-now-push-photos-to-your-desktop/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/scoutmob-attracts-investors-and-partners-by-saying-its-not-a-daily-deals-company/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/scoutmob-attracts-investors-and-partners-by-saying-its-not-a-daily-deals-company/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 12:30:23 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=211750 Scoutmob was able to attract $3.25 million in new funding and a major new payments partner by pitching itself as a mobile company and not as a fledgling competitor in the daily deals space.

The Atlanta-based company’s mobile app tries to be a resource to consumers who are looking for local merchants and events, sort of like the Web’s original CitySearch service from years ago — except that it’s on mobile. The app also distributes coupons to restaurants, but instead of charging consumers for the deals, like Groupon does, they are free, and merchants pay a flat rate to Scoutmob each time one is redeemed.

Investors in the company’s second round include AOL Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, Capital Broadcasting, Cox Enterprises and Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. To date, Scoutmob has raised $5 million, which means that even if it wanted to, it doesn’t have the resources to go up against Groupon and LivingSocial.

In an interview, Scoutmob co-founder Michael Tavani said the company gets lumped into the daily deals category, but said that from day one, “we tried to differentiate ourselves and to be more of a mobile company.”

So far, the strategy has worked.

The app, which is available free on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, has 1.2 million users who have redeemed one million offers. To date, the company has launched in 10 cities, with varying success rates. Some markets, like Seattle, don’t have many deals yet, while other cities, like Atlanta or Washington, D.C., are used more.

Because of its emphasis on mobile, the company was also able to to score a partnership with payment processing company First Data Corporation.

“It’s crazy, we are a two-and-a-half year-old company, and every week we have the largest payment companies in the world contacting us,” Tavani said. ”They are worried that if they don’t have mobile engagement, then what do they have?”

First Data processes about 55 percent of all transactions in the U.S., and will help Scoutmob close the loop of offering a discount, making a purchase and earning loyalty points.

The new funding will be used to support the company’s next wave of product development, which will include building out a mobile rewards program with the help of First Data and other payment companies it signs up.

Tavani said it will work like this: When users make a purchase at a Scoutmob location using a credit card, they’ll accrue points automatically. Once enough points have been accumulated, they can be redeemed at any Scoutmob retail location.

Unlike traditional loyalty programs, which require consumers to go to the same coffee shop 10 times in order to earn a free coffee, Scoutmob will let consumers earn and redeem points by visiting any merchant in its network. It’s similar to frequent flyer programs, where miles can be earned at a variety of merchants and then redeemed at a handful of airlines.

“We want to be the equivalent of an airline reward program, but for local,” Tavani said. “That’s exactly what we want to be.”

Scoutmob has landed in a sector spanning local businesses and mobile payments, which is ripe from innovation and extremely crowded by well-funded start-ups and massively large incumbents. But Tavani argues that it’s a level playing field.

“There’s going to be multiple players and lots of winners,” he said. “Groupon and LivingSocial are two with a gigantic lead. But we can go out and visit merchants today — there’s no one preventing us from having those conversations.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/scoutmob-attracts-investors-and-partners-by-saying-its-not-a-daily-deals-company/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/some-big-firms-got-facebook-warning/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/some-big-firms-got-facebook-warning/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 12:15:47 +0000 Gina Chon, Jenny Strasburg and Anupreeta Das http://allthingsd.com/?p=211926 Capital Research & Management wanted to buy into the Facebook Inc. initial public offering. But days before the IPO, an underwriting bank on the deal warned the big investment firm about Facebook’s dimming revenue prospects.

The Los Angeles firm, armed with information from a May 11 “roadshow” meeting with underwriters and Facebook, along with similar estimates of its own, slashed the number of shares it intended to buy. The night before trading began, a Capital Research manager told a banker at Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter, that the deal’s pricing was “ridiculous,” according to a person familiar with the situation. Some Capital Research fund managers didn’t buy into the IPO at all, say people familiar with the matter.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/some-big-firms-got-facebook-warning/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/ahead-of-big-retail-push-paypal-inks-deals-with-top-hardware-vendors/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/ahead-of-big-retail-push-paypal-inks-deals-with-top-hardware-vendors/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 12:00:19 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=211833 In advance of the company’s press conference today, Paypal is announcing that it has secured partnerships with three of the top point-of-sales providers, giving it access to nearly 40 million terminals worldwide.

The partnerships are important because it makes rolling out PayPal’s in-store payments technology to retailers much easier.

PayPal is hosting an event at its San Jose headquarters later this morning to announce the next batch of retailers that are adopting the company’s in-store payments solution. AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes will be there to cover the announcements live, starting at 10 am PT.

To date, PayPal has deployed its service to all 2,000 Home Depots, but it has a long way to go in meeting its goal of having 20 major retailers by the end of the year.

One reason why PayPal is able to deploy its services to retailers so quickly is because it only requires sending out a software update to the retailers’ terminals — in other words, retailers won’t have to purchase all new hardware. This morning, PayPal confirmed it has signed up VeriFone and Equinox Payments, the largest and third-largest providers, respectively, which will handle those software updates. PayPal already had a relationship with Ingenico, the second-largest provider.

The relationships inked today are focused on solving back-end integration problems for merchants. But the front-end experience is all about the consumer.

At participating stores, consumers will be able to pay with PayPal by either using a PayPal-issued credit card or by entering a mobile phone number and PIN code into the terminal. Down the road, PayPal could also support near field communication technology.

All told, the three terminal providers manage about roughly 40 million terminals worldwide, representing a large majority of the terminals in existence.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/ahead-of-big-retail-push-paypal-inks-deals-with-top-hardware-vendors/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/mohr-davidow-leads-25-million-investment-in-zebits-consumer-credit-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/mohr-davidow-leads-25-million-investment-in-zebits-consumer-credit-platform/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 11:30:52 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=211592 San Diego-based Zebit has raised $25 million in a fourth round of funding to grow its platform, which enables retailers to assess the risk of selling items to an individual consumer on credit. Mohr Davidow Ventures led the round, with Crosslink Capital, Leapfrog Ventures and QED Investors also participating. To date, Zebit says it has completed more than a million transactions.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/mohr-davidow-leads-25-million-investment-in-zebits-consumer-credit-platform/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/french-data-regulators-to-google-how-about-making-your-answers-to-our-questions-universally-accessible-and-useful/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/french-data-regulators-to-google-how-about-making-your-answers-to-our-questions-universally-accessible-and-useful/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 11:02:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=211870 The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), the French data-protection authority investigating Google’s new privacy policy on behalf of the European Union’s 27 member states, isn’t getting the kind of cooperation it would like from the search sovereign. And its patience with the company is wearing thin. So much so that it has publicly upbraided Google for its lack of forthrightness in responding to the agency’s questionnaires about the new policy.

In a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, CNIL head Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin said she’s reviewed Google’s response to its questions and found them to be sorely lacking — in clarity and specifics.

Answers, too.

“For a large number of questions, the elements provided do not give a precise, clear and comprehensive response to our questions,” Falque-Pierrotin wrote. “While in some cases the questions themselves may have been misunderstood or not clearly expressed, many answers merely provide illustrative examples without describing the exact [processes], procedures or systems Google actually operates.”

In other words, Google’s answers to CNIL’s questions were often incomplete or approximate. And while Falque-Pierrotin generously offers that this might be the result of poor communication, it’s hard to accept that as a legitimate explanation. At this point, the CNIL has clarified its questions to Google twice — once in writing, and a second time during the in-person meeting with Google executives that evidently preceded her letter. During that same meeting, Google was given a third version of the questionnaire, and a June 8 deadline to answer it.

Are we really to believe that Google — a company that prides itself on hiring PhDs, that once sought out cream-of-the-crop engineers with a “mind-bending” Google Labs Aptitude Test, whose mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — can’t properly answer a few questions about its privacy practices and handling of consumer data?

Because that’s about as likely as Larry Page faking his Master’s degree in computer science.

A more reasonable explanation: Google not only doesn’t want to answer these questions, it doesn’t even believe it is obligated to do so. Indeed, it essentially said as much back in April, when it specifically questioned the authority of the CNIL and the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party to even investigate it. From Google’s April 5, 2012, response to the CNIL:

1) What is the legal basis for the Working Party to act as a regulatory body, or to mandate the CNIL to conduct a regulatory review on behalf of 26 other independent DPAs?
2) What law is being applied to this review?
3) Could the Working Party explain the process being followed and the ultimate aim of the review?

Questions respectfully asked, certainly. But they clearly reflect an uncooperativeness and, more to the point, an overweening arrogance that’s so prevalent these days that it might as well be one of Google’s hallowed “10 Things We Know To Be True.” As Christian Sandvig, a researcher in communications technology and public policy at the University of Illinois, recently told the New York Times in an article on that very subject, “Google doesn’t seem to think it ever will be held accountable. And to date it hasn’t been.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/french-data-regulators-to-google-how-about-making-your-answers-to-our-questions-universally-accessible-and-useful/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/mer-i-tok-ruh-see-an-elite-group-of-people-whose-progress-is-based-on-ability-and-talent-rather-than-on-class-privilege-or-wealth/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/mer-i-tok-ruh-see-an-elite-group-of-people-whose-progress-is-based-on-ability-and-talent-rather-than-on-class-privilege-or-wealth/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 06:59:50 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=211890

It’s a meritocracy. I have no doubt that there are pockets of issues. I can only speak about Sequoia, we have quite a few women partners.

– Sequoia Capital partner Greg McAdoo, answering a panel questions at TechCrunch Disrupt about whether there’s sexism in the venture capital industry

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120523/mer-i-tok-ruh-see-an-elite-group-of-people-whose-progress-is-based-on-ability-and-talent-rather-than-on-class-privilege-or-wealth/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/good-lord-i-might-now-want-to-use-yahoo-search-again-product-dudes-talk-about-new-axis-browser-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/good-lord-i-might-now-want-to-use-yahoo-search-again-product-dudes-talk-about-new-axis-browser-video/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 03:14:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=211847

Yahoo introduced its new Axis browser tonight, with versions for the Apple iPad and iPhone, as well as plugins for the top desktop browsers.

The company briefed a media army on the product and the consensus is that it’s very good. My favorite headline from Gizmodo: “Yahoo Came Out With Its Own Web Browser and It Actually Doesn’t Suck.”

No, it’s even — dare I say it — innovative!

That it was done while Yahoo has been in such crisis is a minor miracle, I would add.

It’s a slick offering, which essentially eliminates the texty link-filled search page for one of pretty visual tiles and pull-downs and more. Think Pinterest of search and you have the general idea.

But let’s hear from the dudes who pulled it off (though please allow me to customize or hide the giant klutzy search bar at the bottom).

Here’s an interview I did with Ethan Batraski, who runs product for Yahoo’s Search Innovation Group, as well as Shashi Seth, who heads its Connections unit, about Axis (which I might note was the name of the group that lost World War II).

But better luck at winning the browser war here, since — in this case, at least — Yahoo deserves it.

And here’s the Yahoo press release on Axis:

Navigating a New Course In Search — Introducing Yahoo! Axis

Seamless Across Multiple Devices, Axis Re-defines Searching and Browsing

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 23, 2012 – Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), the premier digital media company, today announced the availability of Yahoo! Axis, a new experience that re-imagines how people search and browse on the web. Axis offers the only search experience that allows you to enter your search, see and interact with visual results, all without ever leaving the page you are on. Axis seamlessly integrates with your favorite desktop browser and automatically connects your online experiences across multiple devices. Axis is available today for download across iOS devices and as a desktop plug-in for HTML5-enabled browsers.

“Our search strategy is predicated on two core belief — one, that people want answers, not links and two, that consumer-facing search is ripe for innovative disruption,” said Shashi Seth, senior vice president, Connections, Yahoo! Inc. “With Axis, we have re-defined and re-architected the search and browse experience from the ground up.”

Visually rich, Axis provides an easy and efficient cross-device experience that today’s connected consumers want:

· Smarter, Faster Search with Rich Design: Axis gives people instant answers and visual previews so they can continuously discover and explore content without interruption. Encased in a sleek design, Axis keeps people moving forward rather than constantly returning to a page of endless blue links. Once on a search results site, Axis also lets people simply swipe or click to the next result.

· Connected Experience: Axis allows people to move seamlessly across devices. Upon downloading Axis, people can start a search on their computer, flip through the results while out on their iPhone, and finish the search at home on their iPad. Content can be easily shared by email, Pinterest and Twitter.

· Personalized Home Page: After signing in with Yahoo!, Google or Facebook credentials, Axis centralizes online lives with a customizable Home Page that provides direct access to their favorite sites, saved articles and bookmarks across all devices where Axis has been downloaded.

· Standalone Mobile Browser, DesktopPlug-In: On iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Axis serves as a standalone mobile browser app. On the desktop,Axis is a browser plug-in that works with Firefox 7+, Safari v5+, Internet Explorer 9 and all versions of Chrome.

· Innovative Technology Backbone: Axis is built upon the Yahoo! Cocktails mobile development platform, which is designed for creating deeply personalized products that are built for connected devices first. Comprised of Mojito, an open source JavaScript MVC framework and Manhattan, a cloud-based hosted environment, Cocktails is a blend of open, standard web technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Node.JS.

To learn more about Yahoo! Axis and download the desktop plug-in, visit the Axis microsite and our company blog, Yodel Anecdotal. The new Yahoo! Axis App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch or at www.iTunes.com/appstore/.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120523/good-lord-i-might-now-want-to-use-yahoo-search-again-product-dudes-talk-about-new-axis-browser-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/being-john-malkovich-means-youre-bored-and-youre-monkeying-around-with-an-iphone/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/being-john-malkovich-means-youre-bored-and-youre-monkeying-around-with-an-iphone/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 03:11:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=211862 The good news: Apple’s newest Siri ads feature John Malkovich, who’s pretty cool.

The bad news, if you’re an Apple fan: Just like Apple’s other recent Siri ads, these don’t make Siri seem very cool.

In the first one, there’s at least the suggestion that Siri will help Malkovich find a restaurant where he can get some sausage. So that’s something, at least.

But the second one, where Malkovich is sitting around by himself, just killing time with his iPhone, without any discernible purpose?

That’s pretty realistic, actually. But it’s not fun to watch:

But, like I said, Malkovich really is cool. There are a gazillion furniture-chewing scenes I could pick to illustrate this, but for some reason I’ve always been partial to his preposterous Russian poker heavy, from “Rounders”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120523/being-john-malkovich-means-youre-bored-and-youre-monkeying-around-with-an-iphone/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/can-congress-resist-a-juicy-facebook-ipo-hearing-of-course-not-its-an-election-year-people/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/can-congress-resist-a-juicy-facebook-ipo-hearing-of-course-not-its-an-election-year-people/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 00:55:24 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=211762

It was a bad time for Facebook’s IPO to go south.

Retail investors are not happy. Class-action lawsuits have been filed against Nasdaq, Facebook and the three Wall Street investment banks that took it public. The Securities and Exchange Commission, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Massachusetts Secretary of State are all “looking into” just exactly how the deal went down.

So, will that be enough to sate a scorned investment public at large, especially amid a current political climate of public skepticism — if not outright contempt — for Wall Street as a whole?

Not at all, especially because it is an election year.

Therefore, cue the tsk-tsking politicians lining up Wall Street’s powerbrokers, as well as a Facebook exec, for a session of pompous I-told-you-sos.

It’s clear the big guns on Capitol Hill are gearing up to intervene. The Senate Banking Committee is in the process of meeting with Facebook, regulators and other stakeholders in the IPO, according to a statement issued by its chairman, Sen. Tim Johnson, on Wednesday.

“Once these briefings have concluded and the staff reports back to me,” Johnson said, “I will determine if a Senate Banking committee hearing is necessary.”

Maybe not necessary, but those hearings do seem inevitably inevitable.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking subcommittee, chimed in as well. “There’s a lot that we don’t know about this IPO, but a lot that we do,” Brown said in a statement released on Wednesday. “Effective capital markets require transparency and accountability, not one set of rules for insiders and another for the rest of us.”

And while the House Financial Services committee didn’t as yet return my Wednesday afternoon calls, HFS spokeswoman Marisol Garibay told Reuters that it is also being briefed on the issues, and is in the midst of “gathering information and facts.”

After the most hotly anticipated IPO of the year was mired by technological and potential ethical issues, leaving thousands of retail investors holding the proverbial bag, it’s natural that Congress would consider intervening. Allegations against Facebook and its underwriters surfaced earlier this week, claiming a Facebook executive explicitly told at least one member of its syndicate that the firms should lower their financial forecasts for Facebook at the eleventh hour, mere days before the highly anticipated IPO.

This apparently resulted in institutional investors dialing back the price at which these firms would buy Facebook stock, and that could have dampened demand for shares on the first day of trading, affecting retail investors’ chances at any potential first day gains.

Some have taken steps to ease the investor backlash. Morgan Stanley may adjust prices of orders made by its retail investor clients, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Nasdaq, too, may earmark around $13 million in order to resolve bad trades.

But there is nothing like a good old-fashioned grilling of money makers and Internet zillionaires for the cameras of C-SPAN to make the summertime barbeque complete.

Eat it up, folks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120523/can-congress-resist-a-juicy-facebook-ipo-hearing-of-course-not-its-an-election-year-people/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/a-brief-rant-about-recapitulation-comic/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/a-brief-rant-about-recapitulation-comic/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 23:45:25 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=211770

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120523/a-brief-rant-about-recapitulation-comic/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/pandoras-loss-widens-but-sales-jump/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/pandoras-loss-widens-but-sales-jump/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 23:21:29 +0000 Tess Stynes http://allthingsd.com/?p=211809 Pandora Media Inc. on Wednesday reported a wider loss for its fiscal first quarter on higher costs, but its revenue jumped 58 percent and the Internet radio company raised its outlook.

Its shares rose 11 percent to $11.45 in after-hours trading.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120523/pandoras-loss-widens-but-sales-jump/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/rims-head-of-sales-leaves-for-a-new-gig/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/rims-head-of-sales-leaves-for-a-new-gig/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 22:51:32 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=211777 Longtime Research In Motion executive Patrick Spence is leaving the company, the BlackBerry maker confirmed on Wednesday.

Spence, RIM’s head of global sales and a 14-year company veteran, “will be taking on a leadership position in a different industry,” RIM said in an email to AllThingsD. His last day will be June 15.

“The sales function will report directly into Kristian Tear, our newly appointed COO, when he starts this summer,” RIM said in a statement. “In the interim, the sales function will report to Thorsten Heins.”

Spence is the latest RIM executive to depart the company in recent months, following January’s appointment of Heins as CEO. In March, the company announced the departures of software CTO David Yach and Chief Operating Officer Jim Rowan.

The company has also announced two key hires — Tear, and new marketing chief Frank Boulben.

Spence’s departure was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120523/rims-head-of-sales-leaves-for-a-new-gig/feed/ 0