Posts tagged Extends
Yandex Extends Map Capabilities To 4 More Continents
Jan 31st
Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia, has expanded its mapping capabilities by purchasing from NAVTEQ a license for digital maps of Europe, North America, Australia and developed countries in Asia to expand their Yandex.Maps product.
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SEO Positive Extends Copywriting Team – PR Web (press release)
Jan 29th
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SEO Positive Extends Copywriting Team
PR Web (press release) To cater for an increase in demand for its copywriting services, UK-based internet marketing agency SEO Positive welcomes an extra member of staff to its copywriting team this week. Often regarded as the United Kingdom's most forward-thinking search … |
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Google Extends Lifeline to Mozilla’s Firefox [Infographic]
Dec 22nd
Due to the competition that currently exists between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, many analysts were predicting that Google would not renew its agreement with Firefox. Yesterday, Google and Mozilla reached an agreement to extend the partnership for another three years. For the 2010 year, over $100 million of Mozilla’s $123 million in annual revenue [...]
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Google Extends Its Reach With Free Gmail Voice Calling
Dec 13th
Google announced today that the free phone calls through Gmail added in 2010 have been extended for another year. Domestic calls in the U.S. and Canada are free, and international calls have a low fee schedule starting at $0.02 per minute. Users can also choose to link this to a free Google Voice account to receive inbound calls.
It’s no surprise that Google has extended this service, since it just added it to Google+ Hangouts two weeks ago. Google has made several changes to Gmail chat to unify it with Google+, and this voice calling extends the reach of Gmail and Google+ to vastly more users.
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In November, all Google chat widgets were reorganized to use Google+ circles instead of email addresses. This includes the Gmail chat box where voice calls are made. Last week, the integration of Gmail into Google+ went further, bringing filtering by circles, people-circling and G+ sharing into Gmail.
In the meantime, Google brought the same free voice calling feature into Google+ video Hangouts. Google is putting hooks into its new social world everywhere it can, and free voice calling is a powerful one. Existing users can reach more people, and those they call will get the pitch, “I’m calling you from my email!” It’s a clever way for Google to extend the reach of its services.
Have you ever made a voice call from a Google Web service before?
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Brightcove Extends Its Video Platform to Host HTML5 Apps
Dec 1st
For the last three years, Brightcove has been implementing a steady transition from a YouTube alternative, to a premium video services provider, to a Web functionality provider. The last critical step in that transition may have taken place yesterday, as the company once considered a Google takeover target makes its move in the fast-growing HTML5 apps platforms market.
Unlike appMobi, whose mobiUs ecosystem uses a utility model for billing customers on a granular scale, Brightcove’s new App Cloud will be a premium Web apps host. It will provide APIs that aim to fill in HTML5′s many device-specific gaps, including for accessing tablets’ built-in cameras, accelerometers, and location finders. And it will charge developers fees starting at $15,000 per year once their apps go live.
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“Pure HTML5 web apps cannot appear in app markets like the iTunes App Store or Google Android Market, but these apps can because they have that native wrapper,” reads a corporate blog post yesterday from Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s chief marketing officer. “This wrapper also gives these apps access to native capabilities like the camera, microphone, contact list, or notification system that are off limits to the browser.”
It’s the wrapper that substantiates Brightcove’s value proposition. It will enable member developers to build their own custom templates – effectively, wrappers within a wrapper – enabling them to provide multiple services in a uniform, company brand-specific fashion. This way, companies such as content providers (one example being AMC, pictured at right) can reuse their custom wrappers for apps that present or publicize multiple titles (shows, movies, video games, other apps), letting them create their own destination points for monetizable content outside of the iTunes App Store.
Whatcott pointed to Adobe’s buyout of Nitobi, maker of the PhoneGap framework, last October; and Facebook’s buyout of Strobe, maker of StrobeJS, the following month, as clear indicators that a market is being created outside of the market Apple already created.
“The crazy thing about this new hybrid app approach is that the app economy wasn’t supposed to be this way,” writes Whatcott. “Apple’s original vision for apps drew a bright line between Web apps and native apps, apparently under the belief that native code was going to yield the best end user experiences and monetization opportunities… Unfortunately for everyone, platform-specific native app development has turned out to be relatively expensive.”
Thus the change in tune he perceives toward hybrid apps: HTML5 cores written to utilize device-specific APIs and wrappers. He goes on to argue that while “Open Web” proponents assert that standardization will eventually flatten all Web development beyond the need for any hybridization, the need for businesses to monetize mobile apps in a market full of unique devices is driving development trends more heavily toward a somewhat less flat model.
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Flurry Extends Its AppCircle Into Crowded Mobile App Engagement Market
Oct 31st
Mobile analytics firm Flurry is expanding its product offering with an announcement today of AppCircle Re-Engagement, a tool for iOS developers to attempt to energize users who have downloaded apps but may not be using them. Flurry has correctly identified one of the main problems with the native app ecosystem in terms of engagement and now enters a crowded and growing space of tools for developers to increase app participation.
Flurry is extending its analytics program to target specific demographics. The company couches this ability as a new offering for developers. In reality, it is not. There are a variety of companies that provide analytics and ways to market from actionable data.
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AppCircle Re-Engagement
You cannot really blame Flurry for its marketing and public relations efforts. It uses words like “first” and “revolutionizing” in terms of mobile analytics and monetization for developers. It is akin to a sports star saying, “I am going to be the next Joe Montana.” If you are not confident with what you are selling, you are destined to fail.
AppCircle Re-Engagement is a new layer to Flurry’s monetization platform for developers and advertisers to target users by age and gender demographic. It is designed to bring users back into the fold after downloading an app and watching its engagement levels fall month over month. For instance, after 12 months, Flurry claims that only 4% of users are still using the app they downloaded. See the chart below.
What Flurry is doing well is turning its actionable data into a Cost-Per-Click-like engagement model for advertisers starting at $0.50 for a single CRP (Cost-Per-Reengagement).
The Growing Vertical For Actionable Data & Engagement
The problem with Flurry’s campaign is that it is not really a new model. It is tying its AppCircle to advertisers and developers with notifications within apps across properties from publishers.
In terms of creating analytics and engagement for actionable data for monetization purposes, there are several companies in this realm. PlayHaven does this for games, Flurry competitor Localytics focuses on notifications within apps aimed towards more premium consumers and publishers, BeInToo provides data through gamification, Socalize increases engagement with a social layer and provides actionable data, Apsalar has a model it is working on for publishers to do something very similar to Flurry. Claritics provides social data. Tapjoy is pivoting to create an advertising and virtual currency model between publishers.
Creating engagement and monetization opportunities for developers is the next step for any startup or established company working in the mobile analytics segment. These companies are all on similar tracks and Flurry’s new offering is the natural extension.
Developers and advertisers – are you more likely to use Flurry’s AppCircle Re-Engagement over a different flavor of the same thing? Users, what do you think about the growing trend of push notifications and messages within apps pushing you to do something? Let us know in the comments.
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VMware Improves View, and Extends Horizon
Aug 30th
Yesterday’s VMware announcements were all about the data center and the global cloud ecosystem. Today the announcements are more end-user focused. Today the company took the wraps off VMware View 5 and updates to VMware Horizon.
Aside from a scenic theme to the announcements, what’s going on with View and Horizon? VMware View lets organizations provide personalized virtual desktops to users as a managed service. Users can get their desktop on a mobile device, laptop, desktop, or thin client.
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Thanks to improvements in View 5, they can get them faster and with less bandwidth. VMware has enhanced its PCoIP delivery so that you can get up to 75% bandwidth improvement. Better compression, client-side caching, and the choice of lossless options. They’ve also added performance optimizations that are supposed to reduce the load on CPUs by 5 to 10%.
View 5 also promises to deliver better graphics overall, by using View 5 with vSphere 5. This means that users that get their desktops via View will have the option of using Windows Aero or other 3D applications that require Direct-X or OpenGL support. And users can have displays that are up to 1900×1200. Two of them, actually.
The real biggie with View 5 is persona management. This preserves the user’s profile between sessions – that includes user-specific desktop settings, application data and settings, and other Windows registry entries configured by applications. This doesn’t look quite as comprehensive as the technology Citrix picked up from RingCube, but should be a big boost for shops that are already invested in VMware View and vSphere. VMware’s Scott Davis has blogged extensively about the “flavors” of persona management.
There’s also an update to the VMware View Client for iPad on the, er, horizon. Pricing for View 5 is $150 per concurrent connection for the enterprise edition and $250 per concurrent user for the premier edition. Both editions include vSphere 5 for desktops, vCenter Server 5 and VMware View Manager 5. Premier adds View Client with Local Mode, ThinApp 4.6, and View Composer and vShield Endpoint.
On the Horizon
In addition to updating View, VMware announced updates to VMware Horizon. Horizon is meant to serve as an “identity-as-a-service” hub to extend user identity from systems like Microsoft Active Directory into the cloud. It consists of Mobile Manager and the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) Mobile Manager is a console for monitoring, updating, and provisioning/de-provisioning virtual workspaces on mobile devices. The MVP is to allow users to run a virtual work environment on their mobile phones that’s separate from their personal environment.
This isn’t entirely new, VMware previewed MVP earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress. The announcement for this week is that MVP now works with LG and Samsung phones. LG was announced earlier this year, Samsung is new to the family of supported devices.
This is good and bad news for users and organizations. Good in that if they have a supported phone, they can use one phone for everything. Bad in that they’re saddled with a limited set of Android devices. And iOS isn’t on the list yet, though Raj Mallempati, director product marketing, enterprise desktop solutions for VMware says it’s “technically possible” to support iOS. It seems to be more a matter of getting Apple’s cooperation. Mallempati says he can’t say whether it’s likely or not that the iOS version will come to market.
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Citrix FOSS Cloud Infrastructure Extends to VMware, Oracle
Aug 29th
The cloud looks less cloudy by the week. This week’s story line for the VMworld 2011 conference in Las Vegas, which opens today, appears to be “cloud definition.” One of this week’s most defining moments may have already happened, as Citrix Systems made good on its pledge last month, in acquiring cloud infrastructure firm Cloud.com, to extend its CloudStack infrastructure platform to a broader array of customers.
This morning, now that Cloud.com has completely been absorbed into Citrix, the cloud infrastructure project is announcing it is completely folding its commercial tier into the open source community. This makes CloudStack officially 100% FOSS. What’s more, the latest version will add support for Oracle VM hypervisors, in addition to its existing support for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. Preview release 2.2.11 is available now (warning: it cannot be used to upgrade GA installations).
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“We’re introducing bare-metal provisioning into the product,” adds Peder Ulander, in an interview with RWW. “This is specific to enterprises interested in having cloud-like functionality delivered on top of bare metal, versus using virtualization. And finally, we’re publishing a roadmap that gives us [Microsoft] Hyper-V support by the end of the year.” Ulander led Cloud.com, and now leads CloudStack for Citrix.
“What we bring is a fairly open, robust, high performing cloud platform that competes aggressively with vCloud,” Ulander adds. “By CloudStack as your cloud operating platform, you now have the opportunity to have one of the top cloud platforms already running in your VMware environment, with all of the tools, knowledge, and experience that you know, but you can also mix and match additional virtualization technologies into the platform, so now you can prioritize workloads and budgets around business needs.”
Citrix had already been heavily invested in one open source vSphere competitor, OpenStack, as the cornerstone of its Project Olympus which also incorporated a cloud-optimized XenServer. After last month’s Cloud.com acquisition, observers pondered just what Citrix would be planning with both OpenStack and CloudStack, and whether the former would fall by the wayside. As it happens, the two projects are seeking greater alignment with one another, and OpenStack leaders have shown nothing but praise for their new brethren.
Writes former Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, who left that company in June to form his own startup called Bromium:
Everyone knows that the future for proprietary cloud stacks looks rather bleak, given the enormous industry focus on developing a community owned, massively scalable open source cloud stack – OpenStack. Cloud.com was therefore quick to jump aboard the OpenStack community development model, and has led some of the key contributions to OpenStack, including support for Hyper-V. Citrix can use the cloud.com acquisition to accelerate its own Project Olympus, which will be OpenStack based, and in so doing it can offer existing cloud.com customers a roadmap that is far richer than could ever be created by a single vendor following its own development path. Future versions of CloudStack (or whatever it ends up being called) will be able to scale better and offer a far richer networking model, storage infrastructure and so on, courtesy of the incredible contributions being made by over 50 vendors to OpenStack.
CloudStack’s strategy is to restore warmth and good feelings to the “embrace and extend” metaphor. “If you think about the way clouds are built today,” Peder Ulander tells RWW, “you have underlying hypervisor technologies and then you layer in more administration and management on top of that. Every single company that I’ve engaged with has a multi-vendor hypervisor cloud approach, meaning that they will most likely have an open source cloud and a VMware cloud. The open source cloud is designed to create more predictable, manageable business models. So for customers who are running VMware, if they go down the vCloud Director path, they are locked into one cloud platform, and their open source platform becomes completely different. They’re managing two sets of resource pools, two sets of data center environments, two sets of interfaces, two sets of applications.”
So CloudStack will run completely on top of vSphere for free, the Citrix VP explains. Customers will then have the option to continue to run on VMware, or to fold in additional hypervisor functions from KVM, Hyper-V, OVM, or XenServer within the same architecture.
“Citrix has always had the fundamental belief that customers want choice in virtualization. Therefore, technologies like XenDesktop and XenApp have always been available on technologies like VMware. In fact, the leading desktop platform on top of VMware is actually from Citrix. At Cloud.com, we were already building this functionality into the product – multi-hypervisor capabilities. But as a 40-person startup with a limited budget, we weren’t able to get the message out as far. Today, Citrix’s biggest message coming in is, ‘We never met a hypervisor we didn’t like.’”
Perhaps CloudStack’s highest-profile customer to date has been Facebook games developer Zynga, the creator of virtual little-people “-ville” worlds. As analyst David Cahill wrote earlier this month, Zynga had launched its games service on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, but quickly discovered it couldn’t support the tremendous volume. Using CloudStack (which isn’t actually named in Cahill’s report, but is implied), Zynga was able to construct its so-called zCloud infrastructure, and later manage it using RightScale commercial provisioning software, which Cahill says can spin up 1,000 new servers in 24 hours.
Building new Zynga-scale customers in record time means Citrix needs to implement some very creative training – a personal angle which Ulander contends his commercial competitor fails to provide.
“When it comes to VMware View, vCloud Director, or even Cloud Foundry, there is no training, certification, or education from VMware on those technologies. Those customers are getting a little bit of frustration from the fact that that higher-level pieces that are helping them move their businesses forward are not as clean and as easy as where they stand today with their core virtualization platform. For that reason, we see an opportunity.”
Citrix will be offering customers “Build-a-Cloud Days” on-site training for negotiable fees, as well as inviting them to attend these trainings for free at trade shows – for instance, Ohio LinuxFest, scheduled for next week in Columbus.
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Gmail Calling Extends to 38 Languages, Rates Drop
Aug 3rd
As part of their Gmail pitch, Google has expanded the in-email calling feature to a total of 38 new languages. Simultaneously, the company lowered their calling fees.
The Updates to Gmail Calling
Google’s expansion into 38 new languages covers a large portion of Europe and the Asia Pacific regions. While the translation of the Gmail calling box and accepting new currencies is part of the effort, the bigger deal is the support for dozens of additional countries.
It seems clear that Google is improving their voice and data infrastructure (or, at the very least, the partnerships that provide it). It seems this has also allowed Gmail to drop their rates and waive their connection fees. India, France, and Mexico have especially good rates when compared with standard long-distance plans, and calls made from inside the U.S. or Canada to landlines or mobile phones in the U.S. or Canada will remain free at least until the end of the year.
Just days ago, Google also launched an “email intervention” campaign to promote Gmail. The campaign centered around voice and video calling. It’s clear that Google is prioritizing this feature, and has every intent of making it a long-term element.
The Loyalty War
Why would Google invest in a high-cost endeavor like global voice expansion? While there are some who theorize that Google could turn into its own multinational cell phone carrier (it’s a fun thought), the more likely reality is a continued push for user loyalty. Statistically, those who use Chrome and Gmail are more likely to use Google search and other Google services. By using voice as an incentive, Google can win users on Gmail and use that brand loyalty to lead the customers to other more monetized services.
[Sources include: The Official Google Blog]
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Gmail Calling Extends to 38 Languages, Rates Drop
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Layar Extends its AR Platform with Computer Vision Capabilities
Aug 2nd
Layar, makers of the Layar augmented reality platform for mobile, has today announced Layar Vision, a platform extension that enables phones to “see” and recognize real-world objects, including posters, magazines and newspapers. With Layar Vision, the goal is to provide brands and print media publishers’ with new ways to engage their audience using augmented reality experiences.
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About Layar Vision
To use Layar Vision, developers must first upload reference images to Layar’s servers. Those images are then used to extract the fingerprint of the object so it can detect, track and augment the object with audio, video and/or animated 3D objects, as specified. Currently the system only supports 2D images with 3D models on the target objects. Layar Vision will be able to instantly detect up to 50 target objects at launch.
The company says there are some limitations to what the technology can recognize and track. It works best on planar surfaces, like posters, magazines and newspapers, as mentioned above, as well as billboards, flyers, book covers, CD covers, paintings and other surfaces with “a minimum amount of discriminative texture and detail.” This is different than Qualcomm’s recently released AR SDK for iOS (the Android version was already available), which can track both planar objects as well as simple 3D objects like a box.
The Layar platform is already in use by over 10,000 developers who work to build AR experiences for smartphones. These experiences exist both as layers within the Layar smartphone application itself, as well as in 3rd-party apps using the Layar Player. The Layar app has been installed 10 million times, and now has over 2,500 layers, the company says.
Where and When
Developers can expect to see Layar Vision included in the newest beta of the Layar Platform, arriving in the coming weeks, says the company, but no exact date was given for the launch. For developers using the Layar Player in their own apps, they can expect to see Layar Vision in the Q4 release, on both iPhone and Android.
In addition, to kickstart development, Layar is hosting a contest called the “Layar Creation Challenge,” offering a total of $55,000 in cash prizes. The top 10 developers with the best and most useful concepts for Layar Vision will receive between $2,500 and $15,000. You can learn more about Layar Vision and the contest here.
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