Google to Face Legal Vu...

Google is getting ready to face the legal music for its latest dalliance with regard to privacy. That makes sense only in a world where lawyers run the show. I don’t understand the process of how these things work. I am not a lawyer and I did not spend the night in a Holiday Inn Express so I am SOL in understanding what is about to hapen. Fortunately, Jeff Roberts of paidcontent.org, IS a lawyer and wrote a post explaining what Google is about to get tangled with for the right to continue doing business like everyone else. In a case filed on Friday, a Missouri man says Google violated the Wiretap Act and asked for damages on behalf of 62 million users. The case names only Google and not the handful of advertising agencies who allegedly performed similar actions. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reports that a similar lawsuit has been filed against Google in Delaware. The seriousness of the new lawsuits will be determined by which law firms step up to join the suit. In the world of class actions, lawyers have a list of plaintiffs at the ready and then race each other to the court house in the hopes of filing the first claim. The early-birds typically become “tag-alongs” eligible for a pay-out when bigger law firms join the fray. Warms one’s heart, doesn’t it? My question is the same one I raised yesterday to some degree. If EVERYONE is doing this same thing will we also see the rush to the courthouse to put Facebook and others in front of a judge as well? This doesn’t need any more “analysis” because it is very early in this process. There is a lot that will happen between now and the decision as to whether this kind of case holds any water or it sinks. In the meantime, I think we all need to be asking every other site that is doing the exact same thing whether they feel they should be dragged into court as well. Fair is fair, right?

7 Out of 10 Children Us...

There’s a new TV commercial with a mom and dad having a spell-talk discussion about whether it’s okay for their child to use their Pantech Element tablet . Dad’s concerned, but mom assures him that it’s okay, because it’s w-a-t-e-rproof. Then there’s the new Kindle commercial with the sexy woman at the beach. She’s reading on a Kindle and she gets approached by a man who tries to prove his prowess by telling her about his expensive tablet. She instantly cuts him in half stating that her Kindle makes reading easier in the sunlight, and for less than he paid, she also bought a Kindle Fire so her KIDS can watch movies at the beach. Take that, fella. As these commercials aptly illustrate, tablets aren’t just for grownups anymore. Nielsen surveyed tablet owners with kids under 12 and found that 7 out of 10 kids were allowed to use the tablet. This was a 9% increase over the previous quarter. The majority of the kids, 77%, used the tablet to play games. 57% said their kids were using it for educational purposes (and we believe them, don’t we?) The tablet also makes an excellent babysitter, with 55% of parents saying they keep their kids entertained while traveling. 41% use them to quiet the toddlers in a restaurant. Only 15% of kids use tablets for social media and there’s no word on how many six-year-olds use it to shop. Don’t laugh. It’s coming soon. Imagine age appropriate catalog apps. Kids touch what they want and it goes on their holiday wish list. How about virtual dress-up dolls that wear the clothes from a specific store. Maybe a kid-themed grocery app where they select what they want for dinner. Sounds like a market that’s ripe with possibilities. But, statistics aside, I want to make one thing perfectly clear –  in my household nobody touches mommy’s iPad but mommy. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Zynga Ramps Up Private ...

As mentioned in yesterday’s earnings call, Zynga revealed that the company’s zCloud, its private cloud infrastructure has been scaling significantly in the past year. At the start of 2011, only 20% of Zynga’s daily active users (DAU) were in the zCloud. A year later, nearly 80% of Zynga games’ DAU reside in zCloud, and 20% in the public cloud (powered by AWS). Today the company is revealing additional information about the zCloud and how much data is being transmitted through its infrastructure. Zynga has been quietly investing in powering up the zCloud over the past few years, explains Allan Leinwand, Zynga’s CTO of Infrastructure. As Leinwand explains, the infrastructure looks, feels, and operates similar to the AWS public cloud, but allows for greater performance, scale and reliability. zCloud physically resides in Zynga’s private datacenters and is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability and performance. And Zynga has created tailored automation tools for large server environments and built custom monitoring and management tools. As GigaOm reported last year, xCloud was built using Cloud.com’s CloudStack software. And startup RightScale provides a management console for Zynga’s public cloud (powered by AWS) and the private cloud. Between 2009 and 2011, Zynga says that it doubled down on increasing physical server capacity in order to move games over to the private cloud. For Zynga, this increased not only the ability to scale but also reliability. For social games specifically, zCloud offers 3x the efficiency of standard public cloud infrastructure. For example, games in the public cloud would require three physical servers, zCloud only uses one. Last year, Zynga began to launch games directly in zCloud instead of in the public cloud. The first new Zynga game to launch in zCloud was CityVille Hometown in June 2011. Since then, every Zynga game has launched in zCloud. For example, CastleVille, which holds the record for the fastest growing Zynga game was launched and scaled in zCloud. Currently, Zynga stores 1.4 Petabytes of data at any time and has the ability to deploy up to 1,000 servers in a 24 hour period. The company says the power they deployed for zCloud alone during the second half of 2011 could’ve kept 166 international space stations in orbit. 36 billion gifts were gifted during the holiday season in 2011, and Zynga has increased its server capacity by a 100 times over the past year (see infographic below). For now, Zynga has no plans to eliminate public cloud powered by AWS. But clearly, this infrastructure is being used sparingly.

Geek Love: Send Your Va...

Back in May, a startup named Desmos launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC with the hope of addressing the fragmentation inherent to education by way of platform-agnostic software that allows users to build and share their own rich educational content. In application, this meant that, like Inkling, Kno, Apple and more are doing for textbooks, Desmos wanted to reinvent the whiteboard by making it browser-based and interactive. Of course, the real highlight of Desmos’ whiteboard has been its original, interactive online calculator, which graphs equations as you write them. Desmos Founder Eli Luberoff was a double math and physics major at Yale before launching his startup, and his experience has led him to believe that we may all be better off with a web-based calculator — because it means that you’ll never have to use a Texas Instruments abacus again. Due to its popularity, the calculator began operating as a standalone feature, because, hey, it’s free, color-coded, boasts realtime updating, and users can share their graphs through simple Bit.ly links. It was this kind of neat, lightweight design that led to the startup closing an $800,000 seed round from Mitch Kapor, Learn Capital, and Kindler Capital during Disrupt. But, more importantly, it’s Valentine’s Day, and in the spirit of love, affection, and all things heart-shaped, Desmos (at abettercalculator.com) is offering a special V Day gift for all those geeky lovers out there. Today, Desmos users can choose a romantically-themed graph, add their own caption, and then email or tweet it to their special, graph-loving someone. Eli says that the inspiration is simple: Math and love are the two universal languages, but together, their power could be unfathomable. What’s more, the founder says that the team has noticed that a surprising number of graphs being built on the site and shared are heart-shaped. So, Desmos is using the holiday to announce some updates to its flagship product; it has completely rewritten the product from the ground up, which means that it now has full HTML5 compatibility, including the biggest part of that — it works on your iPad’s browser. What’s more, that means pinch-zooming, sliders for paramaters, tracing by clicking and dragging along a line, the option to create an account and save graphs to view later. Oh, and everything is still free. If it can be said that, like love, math is beautiful, then perhaps the tools that make it sing should be just as beautiful. Luberoff says that, while technology has seen huge leaps and bounds in the last 20 years, the calculator has been left behind — in spite of the fact that it has really become the door through which the majority of middle school students interact with math on a daily basis. Through Desmos, Luberoff wants to keep testing the limits of the calculator, playing with interactivity, modeling, and fundamentally trying to create a calculator that can live everywhere while porting its new functionalities. Desmos will be pushing its calculator out on more platforms soon (Desmos’ revenue comes mainly through partnerships, some of which will result in the startup’s software popping up in new places in the near future), but they will be keeping it free for students and teachers alike. Check it out.

I’m Already Bored With ...

The iPad 3 is coming next month. Or so says the endless rumors. These rumors also state the next iPad will have higher resolution screen and high-speed data connection. But I couldn’t care less. The iPad 3, if that’s really its name, sounds like a stop-gap upgrade to me. You see, I’m perfectly happy with my iPad 2. Save the addition of an SD card slot, there isn’t a single feature I can imagine that will make me trade up to Apple’s new hotness. I guess the iPad 3 sounds great, but it also sounds boring. That’s not saying Apple won’t sell a zillion iPad 3s. It will. But it’s going to take more than a spec bump for me (and likely many others) to upgrade from the iPad 2. Prior to most Apple events, rumors swirl, promising a revolutionary device that will change life on planet Earth forever. But then the iPhone 4S launches. A fine piece of hardware, sure, but far from spectacular. But there hasn’t been any wide-eyed iPad 3 rumors but rather just predictable leaks stating there will be a slight hardware bump. Part of my dystopian outlook is that I’m pretty damn happy with the iPad 2. I passed on the original iPad, annoyed over the lack of external storage and USB support . I instead waited for the Android tablets but quickly discovered Honeycomb’s main fault involves trying to replicate a desktop environment rather than creating a mobile one. I have a dozen notebooks for traditional mobile computing. So I got a 16GB Verizon iPad last summer. I’ve never been so happy with a device. I’ve had it since July 2011 and still use it hours a day. Apps make up 95% of my usage — the majority of which are not available on Android. I fire up Safari just to check TechCrunch and Techmeme. A prettier screen is not going to change or increase my usage unless Apple backsteps and includes a SD card slot — which it won’t. When the original iPad launched, I dreamed of using it as a on-location photo viewer. I imagined using the tablet in conjunction with a cloud service for iPhoto. But instead Apple released a lame Dock Connect adapter which falls short of my expectation. The current screen looks great. Have you played Infinity Blade 2 or Rage? Awesome. It’s important to remember that Apple doesn’t need to reinvent the iPad. The company makes piles of cash by outing successful products and keeping them on the market as long as possible. The iPad 3 will likely be just a spec bump to stay competitive for 2012 and 2013. It will match (and outsell) future Android tablets, causing companies like Samsung, Asus and Motorola to quickly redesign and release an even more “powerful” tablet just to get a bit of an edge. Apple didn’t need to release the iPhone 5 in 2011 because the iPhone 4 was still outselling most other phones. Instead, Apple released the iPhone 4S, which while packing some new innards, is mostly a stop-gap solution allowing the company to milk additional revenue from supply contracts on aging components. It worked. Apple sold 17.1 million iPhones in the last part of 2011 on its way to be the most valuable company. The iPhone 4S gives Apple even more time to refine the iPhone 5 while negating more favorable manufacturing and supply deals. The same thing could happen to the iPad 2. Apple could release the iPad 2S. It would be faster, packing LTE data and a quad-core A6 CPU along with featuring a higher-res screen. Of course there would probably be a new camera and new software to take advantage of the quad-core CPU — the software would likely be exclusive to just the new model, though. The WSJ reports that Apple is playing with an 8-inch iPad . But once again, Apple doesn’t need to release an 8-incher right now. Sure, the Kindle Fire is scooping up plenty of marketshare but the tablet scene is far from saturated and the Fire helps bring attention to the product type. If Apple releases a stop-gap iPad in the coming weeks, I fully expect the company to completely reinvent its mobile line before the holiday season including a smaller, cheaper iPad. I’m sitting the next iPad out. My iPad 2 works just fine and none of the rumored iPad 3 features justify upgrading to me. Apple will likely hype a meaningless feature during the keynote, deeming it a game changer. But I’ve learned my lesson. Heads will stop spinning shortly after the event and reality will set in. Avoid the Apple spin zone. It has a tendency of sucking credit cards towards pre-order buttons.