Islamic State video shows killing of teen accused as Israeli spy

(GNN) - A video posted online by Islamic State militants on Tuesday showed a boy fatally shooting Muhammad Musallam, an Israeli Arab accused by the group of having signed up as a jihadi to spy for Israel's intelligence service.

The video, published by the group's Furqan media outlet, showed Musallam, 19, sitting in a room wearing an orange jumpsuit, talking about how he had been recruited and trained by Mossad. He said his father and elder brother had encouraged him.

After that, it showed Musallam being escorted to a field and then being shot in the head by a boy, described by an older, French-speaking fighter as one of the "cubs of the caliphate".

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the footage, which also appeared on Twitter feeds used by Islamic State supporters.

Israeli security officials said they were aware of the video but could not confirm that it was authentic.

The video, which was about 13 minutes long, showed Musallam on his knees as he listened to the older fighter delivering the verdict in French.

Then the boy, wearing a military uniform and armed with a pistol, stands face to face with Musallam and fires one bullet into his forehead. After Musallam collapsed, the child shot him three more times and chanted "Allahu Akbar!" (God is greatest).

In the video, Musallam repeated what he had said last month in an interview published by the group's English language magazine Dabiq, in which he said he had joined Islamic State to report to the Israelis on weapons caches, bases and Palestinian recruits. Israel and his family denied that he was an Israeli spy.

"I tell my father and my son: Repent to God. I say to the spies who spy on Islamic State: You will not be successful, they will expose you," Musallam said in the latest video, in Arabic.

An Israeli security official had said Musallam went to Syria to fight for Islamic State in October last year.

Musallam's father has denied his son was a spy, saying a month ago that his son had gone missing while on a tourist trip to Turkey.

Said Musallam and the youth's mother, Um Ahmad, wept at their home in East Jerusalem when they learned of his death. Clutching her son's photograph, Um Ahmad told reporters: "A spy of 19? How is that possible? Why would he have gone there if he were a spy?"

Said Musallam said his son had been trying to return home when he was captured. He accused the militants of forcing his son to say he was a spy before killing him just for show.

"Mohammad was told by them to say about himself that he works for the Israelis," Said Musallam said. "They took him as a victim, only to show the world, so the world would be afraid of them."

(Reuters) (Reporting by Mariam Karouny and by Ali Abdellati in Cairo; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Ken Wills)

Al Qaeda supporters in Yemen pledge allegiance to Islamic State: group

(GNN) - A group of Islamist fighters in Yemen renounced their loyalty to al Qaeda's leader and pledged allegiance to the head of the Islamic State, according to a Twitter message retrieved by U.S.-based monitoring group SITE.

The monitoring group could not immediately verify the statement distributed on Twitter purportedly from supporters of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) based in central Yemen.

AQAP is considered the most powerful branch of the global militant network headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and has previously rejected the authority of Islamic State which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic theocracy, in swathes of Iraq and Syria.

State authority in Yemen has unraveled since a Shi'ite Muslim militia formally seized power last week and the Sunni AQAP has sworn to destroy it, stoking fears of sectarian civil war.

"We announce the formation of armed brigades specialized in pounding the apostates in Sanaa and Dhamar," the purported former AQAP supporters wrote, referring to two central provinces.

"We announce breaking the pledge of allegiance to the sheikh, the holy warrior and scholar Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri ... We pledge to the caliph of the believers Ibrahim bin Awad al-Baghdadi to listen and obey," they said.

Militants in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Libya have also joined Islamic State, signaling a competition for loyalty among armed Islamists battling states in the Mideast and North Africa.

(Reuters) (Reporting By Noah Browning; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Blinq Enhances Your Favorite Messaging Applications With Extra Information

(AsiaTimes.ga/Tech) A new mobile application called Blinq is launching today into public beta to add a layer of contextual information to your favorite mobile messaging applications. Founder Yossi Ghinsberg, who’s better known for his adventures in the Amazon (not Amazon.com, but the actual unchartered wilderness), described Blinq as “more of a hack than an app,” saying that people are tired of trying yet another mobile application. Blinq offers something different, he says.

Instead of delivering a full mobile app experience you launch by tapping an icon, Blinq is designed to augment the apps you already use. Your normal behavior doesn’t have to change.

Once installed, Blinq appears as a small white dot that pops up inside mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Skype, and SMS, for example, alerting you to new information about the person you’re communicating with. This additional information is pulled from a variety of other networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.

Blinq shows you status updates, photos and other recent activities, but its algorithms focus on highlighting the more important content. That is, if your friend recently posted two updates, one about what they had for lunch that day and another, more heavily liked update about a major life event, Blinq would only alert you to the latter.

The idea for the app, explains Ghinsberg, stems from his longtime interest in the concept of digital identities. He found that information about people was scattered around the web, and it was hard to access it when you needed it.

“We’re looking at the integrated, whole person instead of the fragmentation that’s caused because of the different platforms, the different channels and the different networks,” he says.

After teaming up with a technical co-founder Gal Bracha in 2013, the two first experimented with a larger solution, but realized soon that what they had built was too complicated and required that people change their habits. That didn’t work.

Right as they were accepted into the 500 Startups accelerator program, the team pivoted to build Blinq instead.

“We took the big idea, and reduced it,” says Ghinsberg. “Blinq is just a small white dot.”

While the app itself is consumer-facing, the concept could also work in business use cases where it could serve as something like a lightweight CRM tool. In that case, it wouldn’t be all that different from something like Rapportive or FullContact’s solution for Gmail. Those add-ons also aggregate content from a variety of networks in order to include personal and business information alongside social updates in Gmail’s sidebar.

Blinq just does this for mobile messaging apps.

The app that’s live today on Google Play is more of an MVP, meant more to test the how the market responds to the idea, the founder notes. That means the app may be buggy, and Blinq’s servers might be slow at times. But if successful, Ghinsberg says that the concept could be ported to other services beyond messaging.

Since its debut a couple of days ago, the company’s servers have imported over 250,000 contacts, and overnight, added half a million more followed by another million just last night. The team hasn’t publicized the app yet, but it has a few thousand downloads already.

The plan is to port the Blinq experience to iOS in the future, but there, the app will likely have to make some changes. Today on Android, the app works at the notification level, and is more deeply integrated. iOS, by its nature, will require more of a standalone experience, though Ghinsberg says he has some ideas about how to work around that.

Blinq has raised just under half a million in an advisory round from angel investors and 500 Startups, but will be looking to raise a million more starting next month.

Hackers announce 'World War III' on Twitter

(AsiaTimes) Hackers took over the Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United Press International on Friday, writing bogus messages, including about hostilities breaking out between the United States and China.

One tweet posted under the UPI account quoted Pope Francis as saying, "World War III has begun."

Another message delivered on the Post account said the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier, was "engaged in active combat" against Chinese warships in the South China Sea.

The tweets were subsequently deleted.

A Post tweet later noted that "Our Twitter account was briefly hacked and we are investigating."

The fake tweets were not just about war. One posted on UPI said "Just in: Bank of America CEO calls for calm: Savings accounts will not be affected by federal reserve decision.

The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Several media organizations have had their Twitter feeds hacked over the past two years including Agence France-Presse, the BBC and others.

A Pentagon official said the tweet about hostilities with China was "not true." (AFP, MSN)

PlayStation Network Suffers DDOS Attack, Hackers Claim To Have Grounded SOE President’s Plane

#GNN Tech - #PlayStation Network is currently experiencing mass outages for North American users, and the reason behind the downtime is a DDOS attack for which hacker group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility.

Sony says there haven’t been any personal details leaked in the attack, but the rolling outage persists in various locales, some ten hours or more after the attack began.

What’s unusual about this attack is that it also includes a security threat against the plane in which Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley was traveling today.

The plane was diverted to Phoenix and is currently having its cargo inspected, following claims on Twitter posted by the Lizard Squad group that claimed the same flight had explosives on board.

Of course, it’s still possible the plane was diverted for another reason and the claim by Lizard Squad is just a coincidence, but it would be a very convenient one given the timing on all the parts involved in this convoluted story. Suffice it to say, this isn’t your typical DDOS attack. We’ll provide more information if any becomes available.

Getting My Brain Back

#GNN Tech - I can’t do it anymore. This has been a summer of social media. I’ve used it endlessly, made plans on it, chatted, read it religiously, and watched countless friends and friends of friends go on vacation.

I’ve played a game of whack-a-mole with LinkedIn invitations and I’ve streamlined my automatic Tweeting systems. I’ve watched the world buzz by 120 characters at a time. I’ve seen hundreds of beautiful photos of beaches and old castles and bars and beers and whiskeys and sandwiches and endless cats and I don’t want to see any more. I’m done.

I’m taking my brain back.

I’ve noticed a few things happening over the past few years. First, I noticed that I primarily use social media at night, in bed, staring at the iPad while my lady wife snores beside me. When I couldn’t sleep at 4am I turned on Twitter and sent messages to people I didn’t see during the day. I read Reddit more often than I read actual books and I didn’t mind it at all. Why? Because this endless stream of social garbage is apparently far more interesting than a carefully thought-out non-fiction thesis or tersely-plotted novel, let alone the kind attention of my soulmate.

We all know how social media works: it tickles the pleasure centers of the brain, encouraging us to return day after day to get that slight endorphin rush that comes with clicking a new link. For me that endorphin rush started with email and now there’s so much more data, so many more sources for distraction.

And I know why social media is a good thing. It keeps me in touch with people I’ve known for decades. It allows me to spread the word about my projects. It’s spurred revolutions of all kinds. When it’s good, it’s great. When it’s bad, it’s exhausting. I thought I could take it all in, control my consumption, but now I can’t. I’m ready to declare social bankruptcy.

So I did a few things. I deleted Facebook and Reddit from my phone and iPad. I’ve also deleted LinkedIn. I kept Twitter because it’s more like a chatroom and I kept Facebook Messenger for chatting with my long list of Facebook friends. I still have Swarm, but that will probably go next.

I might use Facebook now that Yelp is garbage for restaurant recommendations but everything else – Path, Color, Yo, Krablr – are gone. And it’s been great.

Anecdotally five or six of my peers have already followed suit. It’s been a weird summer. I remember years when everyone was into gin all summer or everyone was on the Atkins Diet. This year everyone is into social media fasts.

One friend told me that after a nice week out in the woods he checked his Facebook feed on his phone at a gas station. His heart rate went up and he felt the blood in his head pounding. He deleted the app then and there. We don’t notice how social media ruins us until it’s gone.

Maybe I’ll reinstall some of these apps. Or maybe these social media makers will fix it so I only see the things I want to see. Or maybe they don’t care because for every social media celibate there are a million people who will Facebook all day long. But, I would argue, we’re not going to give these bastards our attention much longer.

Teens are already revolting against Facebook and Google+ is a ghost town. Twitter is valueless when it comes to direct sales and is worthless as an advertising platform. In short, everything that was supposed to be good about social media – the connectedness, the reach, the ease-of-use, the fun – has been replaced by an endorphin rush.

So I’m taking my brain back. Facebook doesn’t pay me enough for my attention. LinkedIn hasn’t gotten me a single job. All the also-ran social networks offer little in the way of true value. In the end, I need to give my attention to my kids, my writing, and my reading.

I don’t need to see your cat or your Candy Crush score. Come over and we’ll grab beers and you can tell me about your favorite movie. It will be far more rewarding and maybe, just maybe, I’ll convince you to unfriend social media.

Westboro Baptist Church Protesting SF Tech Workers This Afternoon

#GNN - The #Westboro #Baptist #Church, the group known for its hate-filled picketing outside the funerals of soldiers and those who died of AIDS, has found a new target – the tech industry.

The group plans to picket pretty much every major tech company in Silicon Valley from Facebook to Reddit this afternoon.

In what looks to be a press release created in Microsoft Paint, the WBC released a statement saying it would be condemning tech companies for supporting gay rights.

The group specifically targets several tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg because he, “…uses every ounce of his ingenuity to find new ways to cram sodomite propaganda down everyone’s throats.” The group seems to have issues with Zuckerberg for supporting San Francisco’s Gay Pride festivities.

The WBC website picketing schedules says it will start with Instagram, move on to Facebook, Google and several other tech companies on the Peninsula and then head up to the city for more tech protests, starting with Twitter.

Tech community members have put up a “Kiss in Protest” event on Facebook, inviting all of SF to counter Westboro’s vitriol with love this afternoon. That all starts at the scheduled Twitter HQ protest on Market Street at 3:50 pm.

Reddit wasn’t originally on the schedule but was added after an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Sunday that went just as badly as one would expect it to. The Reddit community encouraged folks to ignore the AMA. The WBC says God gave Alex Ohanian and Steve Huffman the power to create Reddit for his glory, not theirs. “[Alex Ohanian] should have used that opportunity to say “God ALONE is in charge of the Internet,” the site reads. The group now plans to picket Reddit HQ in San Francisco this evening at 5:35.

The WBC also plans on half hour demonstrations at Pinterest, YouTube, Skype, Google and Apple headquarters today.

OnePlus Uses A Sexist Contest To Sell Its New Phone

#GNN - In this week’s episode of totally batshit crazy things some brands do to get attention, OnePlus (the maker of a new smartphone called The One) is kindly offering a bump on the waiting list for women who are willing to enter the equivalent of an online beauty contest.

Because I literally can’t bring myself to describe a contest that is so demeaning towards women and generally ignorant, and because you can’t write this shit, I’m including the entire text of the contest (emphasis mine):

As we close in on the 200K mark for the number of registered forum users, OnePlus wants to give a shout out to the few but beautiful female fans in our community with our Ladies First contest.

In true gentlemen fashion and because chivalry is not dead, we are giving the lovely ladies of OnePlus a chance to skip the invite line and introduce themselves to us.

Ladies (and only ladies, sorry guys, ladies first), the rules are simple:
Draw the OnePlus logo on a piece of paper or on your hand/face/wherever (so we know it’s really you)
Take a photo of yourself with the OnePlus logo clearly visible
Post the photo in this thread
The 50 most well-liked ladies will receive an invite and a Never Settle t-shirt. Additionally, we will be giving out another 100 invites at random to any lady who participates in the contest. The contest begins today and ends on Friday. We will announce the winners on Monday.

Ladies, no nudity please.

Yes, please ladies, no nudity. If you can restrain yourselves from submitting pornography to the internet for the sake of winning an early invite to purchase this phone, the folks over at OnePlus would be mighty appreciative. After all, they’re a chivalrous bunch.

Young companies make dumb mistakes, but how this went from a drunken idea at a backyard barbecue to the home page of the company’s official website is truly beyond me. It’s far worse than hiring booth babes at CES or that one time HTC tried to build a purse-friendly lady phone called the Rhyme.

It’s so condescending and offensive to women, in fact, that I hope against hope that it’s sheer stupidity that brought this contest into existence.

The OnePlus contest actually has a few real submissions, but those are wildly outmeasured by dudes waiting to look at girls and folks who are mediocre at Photoshop. There are also a few ladies who are protesting the contest within the thread itself, like the young woman above.

To quote myself: No, OnePlus… Just, no.

Update: Contest cancelled.

[via The Verge]

Twitter’s Small Chance To Maim Email

#GNN - There was a time, years ago, when Twitter almost killed their direct messaging product. The thought process seemed to be that it was an odd bit of cruft around an otherwise elegant, simple product. It was also undoubtedly hard to maintain and scale alongside Twitter’s other scaling issues of yesteryear. Or, at least, to justify the resources to do so.

That would have been a huge mistake. And I think we’re about to see why.

Twitter is now gearing up to double down on its DM product. This is not a secret. No less than Dick Costolo is openly talking about it during earnings calls. And I cannot wait.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a simple option I would love as a part of DMs: the ability to easily talk shit about tweets with friends. I do this already on a daily basis, I simply do it on other messaging services. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be done on Twitter.

And in a better way. Rather than having to click on an external URL to a tweet, the Twitter DM client could embed the tweet right into the message stream for all to see. And it would presumably be easier to pull the tweet from the public stream into a chat. This should work exactly the way the new Pinterest messaging system works (except with groups too, ideally).

But the more I think about the new Twitter DM product, the more I’m excited about something else: its potential at reducing my email influx.

Everyone already knows that I hate email more than anything on this Earth. It’s the worst thing ever for about a billion reasons. But one huge reason is that anyone can email you at any time. Sure, they have to know your address. But people share those addresses freely, CC you on emails with others, there are spam lists, etc. It’s a problem that gets worse with each passing day.

The one thing Twitter has always gotten right with DMs is the connection model. Because the main feeds of Twitter are public (unless you protect your account, of course), and anyone can follow anyone, Twitter DM has always offered an alternative way to use the product on the side.

As the name implies, it was clearly meant for direct, one-to-one communication away from the public eye. But the more powerful aspect is the fact that you cannot receive a message from someone unless you’re following them (yes, I know they’ve been experimenting with removing this limitation, more on this in a second).

Basically, by following someone on Twitter, you’re opting in to the ability to receive DMs from them. Imagine this in the context of email. No one can send you a message unless you say they can. How refreshing!

Actually, I’m underselling it. Game. Changer.

But wait, that won’t work, right? How will you ever meet or connect with someone new? Well, Twitter could take a page from something Facebook has failed at.

In Facebook’s messaging product, they have the main messages feed and an “Other” feed for messages from people you aren’t connected with. But because even those you aren’t connected with still can message you in the main feed, this Other feed is basically useless and is almost all spam. But it doesn’t have to be.

With a Twitter DM product, I imagine a feed of the people I follow who are pre-approved to message me (as well as groups of those people). There could also be an “Other” feed of those trying to DM me, but Twitter could use its social algorithms to know if this is likely a DM I want to see.

This would be similar to the recommendations they serve up already for people to follow. These are usually quite good. But maybe I just don’t want to follow any more people and have their content clutter my main Twitter stream. And that’s fine, as long as Twitter is good enough with these social smarts, they could still allow you to connect with the right people regardless of whether you follow one another or not.

Another way to think about this: regardless of what you do for a living, the best introductions you get to other people are “warm” introductions. That is, someone you know is recommending to you that you connect with this other person they know. Using their social data, Twitter could do this automatically for the DM service.

And actually, Twitter recently implemented something similar in its Vine product. If you open the Messages area now you’ll see a “Friends” tab and an “Other” tab. (As an aside, Vine messages is actually quite well done and makes me even more optimistic about Twitter finally taking direct messaging seriously.)

I’m sure this solution wouldn’t be perfect. But if you could cut out 99% of the bogus messages you get completely unsolicited in email, that would be a huge, huge, huge breakthrough.

Yes, you’d still need email for attachments blah blah blah. But we all still get a good amount of email that I would best categorize as “social.” Twitter DMs already seem so much better for these types of interactions. And we all know why: because we’ve opt-ed in to seeing only messages from those we choose to follow.

But wait, Twitter DMs are only 140 characters, that will never work! In the context of email, that would very much be a feature not a bug.

Vine Competitor Groopie Lets #Vloggers Create #TV-Style #Shows Together

#GNN - #YouTube stars are more popular among today’s U.S. teens than Hollywood celebs, a recent study found. Hoping to capitalize on this trend, a new social video network called Groopie has just launched on iPhone, allowing the next generation of vloggers to record video shows with friends, which may include both scripted and unscripted content.

The L.A. and San Francisco-based startup was founded by Fuad Hawit, whose entrepreneurial drive was influenced by his father Andre, a longtime tech startup founder, who sold IDS Software Systems for $50 million in 2003, and later co-founded companies with his son, including gSoft, makers of an early Siri-like mobile assistant, and audio ad network Mixberry Media.

But Groopie is Fuad’s first solo effort, he says.

The idea for the app came to him in the pre-Vine days, he says, after watching reality TV and realizing the similarities between that style of programming and today’s social media. He envisioned a service that would let vloggers create video “episodes” together, which would be like independently produced reality TV shows.

An early prototype of the Groopie application allowed multiple users to record video from different locations (even flipping between front and back cameras seamlessly), then merge those videos into one. But unlike competitors who offer mobile video “stitching” apps, or apps like Vine which ask you to start and stop your video shoots in order to tell your story, Groopie works a bit differently, says Hawit.

How It Works: Not Stitching, But “Sync”

“Every other video editing tool is doing it like film-style, where they’re stitching multiple shots together,” he explains. “You have to be a director or script writer to be able to tell a story through multiple video shots…and the rest of those guys come from a desktop video ideology,” says Hawit.

Competitors are offering tools to do effects with video, or overlays, stitching tools, and more, he says.

“We kept it really simple…it’s not technically stitching. It’s real-time synchronization. You’re merging two real-time perspectives.”

That is, with Groopie, friends can shoot the episode at the same time, then merge their videos together with a built-in editing tool where you can select which camera angle and audio source you want to use for each shot in order to create one continuous video.

Despite the slight learning curve involved, the process is simple enough for Groupie to already have kids as users, as with the 2nd-grader Alex whose “The Little Alex Show” is already 21 episodes deep.The company has been running a private beta for the past 6 months, and has signed up 100 testers (Apple’s limit). These include a dozen or so YouTubers, and a couple of reality stars (from the shows “Shahs of Sunset” and “Bad Girls Club”). The current lineup of shows includes reality-style video programming as well as few more scripted shows.

Groopie users each get their own profile which lets them feature their shows, each of which can have an unlimited number of episodes. This setup lets viewers follow the individual shows they like, as opposed to a vlogger’s whole channel. Shows can be shared to Facebook and Twitter, but not published to YouTube, which is by design for this startup itching to become the “YouTube of mobile.”
 

 Hawit doesn’t really see Groopie as being disruptive to YouTube, however. But he could see it becoming more like Vine as another place for vlogger stars to grow their audiences.

These video creators already know each other, record Vines together and do shout-outs on YouTube, he says.

“They already work together…with Groopie, they can combine followers.

That’s going to be stronger than a broadcast channel,” he says. “You take users who have 1 million followers each and you put them together on a TV show – that’s going to be extremely powerful.”


Groopie is backed by $350,000 in funding, from unnamed Zynga, PayPal and Apple angel investors, and others.

The app itself still feels a little rough around the edges in terms of its design, and the content itself is nowhere near as polished as what you’d find on YouTube. But it’s still the early days.

Groopie is free here on iTunes.

Why Standalone #Apps Are Supposed To Fail

#GNN - It’s scary to #move a #billion #people’s #furniture. That’s why #Product #Manager Michael Reckhow tells me #Facebook built Paper. This fear has spawned the standalone app boom of 2014. Tech giants are experimenting with new user experiences outside the hallowed halls of their main apps that are too important to meddle with.
But while the press and public scrutinize the success of these different apps like Facebook Slingshot, Instagram Bolt, and Dropbox Carousel, they may be missing the point. Standalone apps are supposed to fail, at least most of the time.

They’re like a free play in football. The referee has thrown the flag but will let the action continue. The team will get a do-over if they want it. In the meantime, they can try something risky without the consequences, but reap the benefits if things go right.

The Risky Redesign
A common adage is that 1 in 10 startups succeed, but even fewer are true home runs. In consumer social apps, the odds can be even worse. Not only do you need a fun, compelling, immediately accessible product, but you have to foster a loyal community around it.

Constructing that inside another app without screwing up the original experience or burying the new one is nearly impossible. The big guys stopped trying a long time ago. At first glance, Facebook and Twitter haven’t changed in years. Navigation schemes have gotten quicker and images have gotten bigger, but they both fundamentally look and feel the same as they did in 2010.

Redesigning core features can be precarious. One false move can drive away millions of users, along with the dollars they generate. Burying powerful features in a main app relegates them “second-class” experiences, as Mark Zuckerberg told me in an on-stage interview last year. And few features are important enough to unbundle into companion apps.

Facebook Messenger has turned our propensity to chat on mobile into a 200-million-user phenomenon that’s now going from optional to the only way to send Facebook Messages on mobile. But Facebook users have mostly yawned at the high-design of Paper and are sticking with the traditional News Feed.

When giants do overhaul features or add new ones, they’re stuck so far off the beaten feed that they’re forgotten or overlooked by many. Twitter’s tinkering with Discover, or Facebook’s Nearby Friends and Nearby Places get a fraction of the following as their fellow features with the spotlight. If they do gain traction, it’s among isolated clusters or a special demographic. Instagram Direct has 45 million monthly “active” users out of the app’s 200-million-plus total, but that’s just people who at least open a Direct message. The number who actually send them is surely much smaller.

The Expensive Acquisition
While building these new apps within ones that are already exist is tough, not building them can be extremely costly.

Facebook was the biggest photo-sharing app in the world, but it wasn’t built for mobile. Instagram combined filters with a Facebook-style feed that ditched everything but photos, and it took off. Facebook would have to spend $1 billion to buy the upstart before it caused serious problems. Since, Instagram has grown from around 30 million users to over 200 million. Had Facebook hesitated, it would have had to pay much more for it later, or worse, see the app fall into the hands of a competitor.

It wasn’t Facebook or Twitter or Google that discovered the power of ephemeral messaging. It was Snapchat, which had no previous product to shoehorn its self-destructing photos into. It took Facebook a year to wise up, and the shallow clone Poke it devised in just 12 days flopped. Sure it allowed texting, which Snapchat would eventually add. But otherwise Poke was nothing special, and Snapchat was already ordained as cool among kids.

Facebook would reportedly go on to try to buy the app for $3 billion, but get rejected. Now Snapchat is said to be raising money at $10 billion valuation. Facebook was so busy building Timeline to permanently record our lives, it wasn’t experimenting with the idea that not every photo has to live forever.

So, Why Not?
Once it’s clear that it’s hard to hatch new behavior patterns in existing apps but can be expensive to buy new apps that prove users want these experiences, the strategy of building standalone apps comes into focus:

Cheap: Throwing a few designers, engineers, and product managers at an idea is relatively inexpensive for tech giants.
Fast: Since they don’t have to figure out where the product fits in an existing app and can explore new styles, development is quick.
Low-Risk: Built outside their main apps, tech giants don’t have to worry about shocking, alienating, or confusing existing users with changes.
So, why not?

Best-case scenario, the app’s a hit, and a tech giant adds another popular product to its quiver. The app can serve as an extension of the parent company’s main brand that drives lock-in for its family of apps. For example, Dropbox’s standalone photo backup app Carousel was in part designed to get people to buy more Dropbox storage space. Or the standalone can be operated and monetized independently like Instagram with help on business, hiring, engineering, internationalization, and more from the parent company behind the scenes

Even if the app is only a middling success, it can collect data and understanding about users to be applied to a company’s main product. For example, Facebook’s first standalone photo app Facebook Camera served as a testing ground for new features for the main Facebook app. Here Facebook discovered that its little guinea pigs like multi-shot uploads and filters, so even though Facebook Camera would eventually be shut down, it developed and refined critical features through the standalone app model.

Failure Is An Option
Worst-case scenario, the app is a total flop. But how bad is that really? Some good talent was diverted from important projects, but these companies have money to hire plenty of great designers, engineers and product managers. The parent company may have delayed work on including the standalone app’s use cases into its main product, but these tech giants are big enough to have plenty of teams, and they should be working in parallel to hedge their bets. This is why Facebook started its Creative Labs initiative to foster small teams building new apps outside its core experience.

The few people who had a crummy experience with the standalone app may lose some confidence in the parent company. If the app gets shut down, those still using it might be a bit miffed. But mostly forgetting about using Facebook’s standalone feed-reading app Paper or neglecting Twitter #Music hasn’t made me any less likely to use Facebook or Twitter’s main apps. That’s the whole point of it being “standalone.” Like a captured secret agent, the parent company can disavow the failed standalone app and move forward with its main app.

In the end, one of the more daunting aspects of building standalones may be the bashing a company gets from the press if an app fails. I, for one, take responsibility. There’s something snarkily joyful about watching successful companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars fail at something. Facebook’s share price has nearly tripled since December 2012 when Poke launched, but the blue Snapchat clone is still the butt of countless jokes in the tech blogs and Silicon Valley scene.

Yet maybe we journalists and pundits are missing the point. Standalone apps are designed to fail, at least most of the time. When there’s massive upside, and little downside, standalone apps can be a smart investment even if they have a low success rate.

Here’s a look at the recent crop of standalones through this lens:

Instagram’s Bolt is a super-fast photo and video messaging app where your friends’ faces are the shutter button. I don’t think that little extra speed is worth me using a new app. But maybe it becomes the way people photo message their closest friends and family.

Dropbox Carousel automatically syncs all your camera roll and new mobile photos to the cloud for easing storage and saving. It’s seen slow traction, though Dropbox was on to something with the idea that lots of people cherish but don’t backup their mobile photos.  But maybe it could have been a huge driver of Dropbox adoption if it blew up.

Facebook’s Slingshot plays on curiosity, allowing you to mass-message friends with photos and videos that can only be viewed if they send you one in return. It’s still early days for Slingshot, but perhaps reply-to-unlock just introduces too much friction. But maybe the mechanic is a viral sensation, and Slingshot helps Facebook steal attention from or box out Snapchat.

Twitter #Music lets you listen to and share the most tweeted songs, or check out jams from artists followed by your favorite celebrities. It never gained traction and was eventually shut down. But Twitter surely learned a lot about how people want to share songs. And maybe it could have made Twitter a portal for music discovery and conversation the way it is for television.

Twitter #Music is dead, Carousel has been declining steadily, many are betting against Slingshot, and Bolt may not be special enough. But that’s okay. Like I said, they’re free plays — hail mary passes after the flag. You don’t see NFL teams take flack if they go for the touchdown when there are no repercussions. So instead of harping about the low download numbers of standalone apps, maybe we should be encouraging more companies to throw for the end zone. What have they got to lose?

Google Wants To Improve Its Translations Through Crowdsourcing

#GNN - Over the years, #Google #Translate has gotten significantly better at giving its users (relatively) legible translations for most commonly used languages. It’s still far off from being perfect, though, and today Google announced a new initiative that aims to get more input from its users to improve its translations.

The Google Translate Community, which is now open for everybody, gives users who speak more than one language fluently the option to offer their own translations and validate current translations. On the service’s splash screen, Google also promises the option to match and compare translations, but I haven’t been able to bring these features up in the Translate Community yet.

Clearly, though, these crowdscourced translations will influence Google’s algorithms. “You help will enhance translations for millions of users,” Google promises new members of the Translate Community. “We plan to incorporate your corrections and over time learn your language a little bit better.”

Right now, your contributions disappear into the black box that is Google’s data centers, but the company says that over time it will give users more visibility into the impact of their contributions.

For those who don’t want to join the community, Google also recently launched a new feature directly in Google Translate that allows you to contribute your own translation when you see a mistake. Google Translate always allowed you to rate translations as helpful, not helpful and offensive, but now you can actually provide the service with the actual correction.

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BoardRounds Helps Hospitals #Follow Up With Patients After They Leave The #Emergency Room

#GNN - #BoardRounds is a #startup #helping #hospitals stay connected with patients after they leave the emergency room — co-founder and CEO Benjamin Jack said the approach is “much like Google Now, but for healthcare.”

Jack comes from the medical world — he recently received his M.D. from Cornell. He told me via email that normally, when a patient leaves the emergency room, they’re given a phone number to arrange for follow-up care, but “most patients don’t call, don’t get the follow-up they need, get sicker, and return to the emergency room which strains hospital and health insurer resources.”

So what’s the deal with Google Now comparison? Jack means that when hospitals and doctors use

BoardRounds, the app will automate the follow-up process, delivering “just-in-time recommendations for patients.” So it can help with scheduling follow-up appointments, arranging transportation to those appointments, and also setting up home care.

Jack said the company combines automation with live support. It offers analytics too, for example telling doctors how many patients actually completed their follow-on appointments. And it’s working with medical service providers to connect patients with follow-on care — for example, it has partnered with Atlantic Dialysis.

Today, the startup is announcing that it’s backed by the Dorm Room Fund, the First Round Capital investment arm that’s run by and investing in college students. (The fund normally offers around $20,000 in funding to startups, as well as mentorship.)

Other investors include Greg Pass, Twitter’s first CTO and now chief entrepreneurial officer at Cornell Tech, as well as Thatcher Bell, Managing Director at Gotham Ventures.

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#Restaurant #Tablet Provider E La Carte Opens Up To #Outside #Developers

#GNN - #Already providing an interactive tablet for every table to give Applebee’s diners an alternative way to order, pay for food, and amuse themselves with social games, the electronic restaurant management and gaming hardware and software developer, E la Carte, is now opening up its platform to outside developers.

The company wants to enable any app developer or company to be able to distribute their applications on the E la Carte platform. Ultimately the decision of what apps actually appear on a restaurant’s tablets remains in the hands of the restaurateur, but adoption of some early developers who are using the platform has been positive.

Rockbot, a company which sells a social media jukebox application that lets people select and view songs that are being played over a venue’s PA system, has installed its app on a few E la Carte tablets.

“We’re at this point where the physical experience is changing,” says Rockbot chief executive, Garrett Dodge. “When you come in to a restaurant or any other retail businesses, technology has changed that experience.”

The important thing for retailers is to create a unique customer experience that’s going to have patrons coming back. “When you’re in Ft. Wayne, Ind. and you’re thinking of something to do, now I know that if I go to Applebee’s — or whatever the brand is — I can interact with that E la Carte tablet and interact with the games and have that social experience, which is a big reason why you’re going to those places.”

Rockbot joins a small handful of companies who have put their apps on E La Carte tablets. The company’s jukebox app is also playing at The Melt restaurants across California.

(IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

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New York To Bitcoin Startups: Get Permission Or Get Out

Editor’s note: Elizabeth Stark taught technology policy at Stanford and Yale and was a key organizer of the movement against SOPA. She is the founder of Threshold, a company building new ways to fund open innovation. Ryan Singer is an active entrepreneur in the bitcoin ecosystem. Ryan co-founded Tradehill, an institutional bitcoin exchange, and CryptoCorp, a security service for Bitcoin Wallets and applications.

 Bitcoin allows people to build financial technology without asking for permission, but if New York state has its way, this won’t be the case for long.

The New York Department of Financial Services released a series of proposed regulations last week that could shut down the digital currency startup ecosystem as we know it. Deemed “BitLicense,” it may help “Big Bitcoin” go legit, but not the small startups of a few guys and girls in a garage. If only companies that have already raised tens of millions of dollars in funding can succeed, we can say goodbye to the bitcoin startup ecosystem. In effect, New York’s proposed regulations will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Regulations meant to deal with situations like the Mt.Gox disaster are being applied in a dangerously far-reaching manner across the entire virtual currency ecosystem. Ben Lawsky, the NY State Superintendent of Financial Services who released the proposed regulations, is trying to do the right thing by engaging with the Reddit community and others in the space, but the rules he has proposed are so broad as to potentially force an entire startup industry out of NY state. While we understand his desire to balance innovation with consumer protection, his current proposal does not accomplish that goal. If passed in its current form, it will only allow the regulators to accumulate even more power while stifling an entire industry.

So what exactly do the BitLicense regulations cover? Here are some of our (least) favorite things that they would require small startups to do:

Submit fingerprints of all founders (and employees) to the FBI and disclose personal financial information of founders and officers to NY State.
Require them to hold an undetermined amount of U.S. dollar funds in bonds or trusts. Startups will not be able to predict the bonding or capitalization requirements until after they apply, making it difficult to project expenses or raise money.
Conduct expensive audits and security testing that no small startup could afford.
Hand over any untouched user assets to NY State after five years as “abandoned property.”
Worse, the regulations would require every bitcoin and virtual currency-related startup to get permission from NY state before releasing any new product or service. So yes, if I have a bitcoin technology startup and I want to start selling T-shirts, I would have to get the permission of the state of New York before doing so. And there’s a clear lack of technical understanding in the regulations: for example, they require that people dealing in bitcoin retain the physical address of any recipients of transactions. That’s like saying to an email provider, you must retain the postal address of any recipient of any email. This is just not possible with current bitcoin technology.

The BitLicense regulations wouldn’t just apply to companies, either. Under the current definition, they could encompass a technology as basic as a Reddit or Twitter tip bot, an app that allows users to send each other small amounts of a currency. They could kill open source projects and community endeavors while potentially subjecting contributors to personal criminal liability.

One of the worst parts is that they would force companies that are innovating in new technology to hold their funds in bonds and trusts when they don’t even hold other people’s money. Ethereum, Blockchain.info, Counterparty and Ripple are only a few projects building an entire new generation of financial technology. What they have in common is that they don’t actually process any financial services. They write software for users to structure their own services. Because of this, they can’t control, steal, or lose your money any more than the company that makes your web browser can. Treating a technology company or a software project like a financial services company is a clear path to kill innovation.

So in order to preserve the virtual currency startup ecosystem, we have a set of proposed changes we’d like to see enacted. There’s a lot more that needs to be changed, but these could serve as a starting point for a discussion as to how to enable startups to prosper.

First, designate a “Startup Onramp,” or a period of time during which new companies are not subject to the regulation. No small company with $20K of funding from an accelerator like Y Combinator is going to be able to afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, needed for compliance. This could even be based on valuation or transaction volume so as to protect small, bootstrapped startups.

Second, create an exception for de minimis amounts of virtual currency transmission, say, for transactions under $500 and accounts under $3,000, so that small companies doing small transactions could stay afloat without being saddled with massive compliance costs.

Lastly, clarify that these rules are only to cover companies that are holding users’ money in the way a bank would, such as wallet services or exchanges, and not just to anyone building technology in the space.

For those who think this is just a New York state problem, California will likely follow suit, as well as a variety of other states, so it’s critically important to get this right. Overreaching and covering the entire startup space, including companies and projects where there’s no public interest in making them register, threatens the future of bitcoin. These policies would serve to bifurcate the market into “Big Bitcoin” — companies that want to deal with NY financial institutions and can afford to comply with heavy restrictions, and the broader startup ecosystem that will have to take pains to avoid doing business with anyone in NY state. Blocking New York IP addresses could become a way of life for virtual currency startups.

BitLicense may help to legitimize bigger companies like Coinbase and SecondMarket, but if enacted, New York will chase virtual currency startups out to Silicon Valley, or out of the country altogether. If New York is serious about maintaining its position as a hub for innovation, it will have to make drastic changes to its proposed regulations. Otherwise, startups will heed its warning and GTFO of New York.

(IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

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