SpokenLayer Wants To Ad...

What if you couldn’t just read an article on your favorite blog or news site, but also listen to it being read out aloud by the author or professional voice talent? That’s what SpokenLayer , which is launching its public beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt , is working on. The New York-based startup is partnering with a number of well-known publishers, including The Atlantic, National Journal, Engadget and TechCrunch. SpokenLayer is currently only available as an iOS application, but the company plans to add other platforms soon. What makes SpokenLayer different from your run-of-the-mill text-to-speech engine is that the company is working with professional voice talent and also lets authors record their own articles. Writers can use the company’s iOS app to just record their articles or, if they have better audio equipment at home, through SpokenLayer’s website. As the company’s founder and CEO Will Mayo told me last week, SpokenLayer plans to sign up more premium publishers in the near future, but is also working on its self-service platform at the same time. Working with voice talent, after all, doesn’t scale well in the long run (despite the fact that New York has a deep pool of local talent the company can draw from). The company also encourages authors to record their own text. This, says Mayo, allows readers to form a more intimate connection with the writers, who can also use this tool to emphasize some of the nuances in their texts. As there is obviously a bit of lag between the time a story is published and the time SpokenLayer can record it, the company first makes a basic text-to-speech version of the article available to listeners and the replaces it as soon as the recording is available. Mayo told me that he is quite aware of the speed at which stories move on the web these days and promises to get the high-quality recordings out before a story ever has a chance to go viral. As Mayo told me, the idea behind SpokenLayer was born out of his own needs. Dealing with dyslexia himself, he grew up listening to books and textbooks as audio. Then, after finishing graduate school, he started working on SpokenLayer, which he hopes will make “something [he] found so useful available for the largest body of content ever published, the web.” So far SpokenLayer has been bootstrapped and currently has four employees. Disrupt Q&A: Q : How many languages do you support? A : Currently it’s only available in English. Q : Why do you think podcasts never fulfilled their promise? A : Distribution was a problem and it never quite hit the mainstream Q : How difficult is this to add to publisher’s site? A : Listen buttons will be available for publishers, but the easiest way is for publishers to give SpokenLayer their RSS feed and be featured in the app. Q : Do you need publisher’s permission to record their texts? A : It’s a gray area, but that’s why SpokenLayer is working with a small set of publishers. Q : How did the founders meet each other? A : We ran into each other by coincidence and met at various hackathons and other events.

Begun, The Retina Wars ...

As we approach the E3, the electronic gaming show in early June, I suspect that the value of “retina” high-resolution displays will soon become apparent. While the prospect of retina Macbooks is all but inevitable, we have reached a plateau when it comes to general computing and, more important, living room media. The first question is, in short, why do we need a retina Macbook ? Presumably it would be a superior experience for video and photo editing and offer designers far more real estate on a large screen, especially when viewing photos at lower resolutions. As evidenced by the iPhone’s retina display, gaming will become considerably more compelling. This presupposes a rich and vibrant OS X gaming ecosystem. The second question is also quite interesting: If console manufacturers begin to promise 4K (4096 × 3072) video output, what does that mean for TV manufacturers? As we well know, the 3D craze was, just that, a craze. 3D hype was far overblown but 4K hype will be even crazier. Selling a few 3D screens would have been nice. Selling millions of 4K screens is a necessity. After all, 4K displays will be considerably more expensive and far less initially popular than even 3D. 3D was an iterative update, but 4K is a massive investment. The market expansion of higher resolution displays is contingent on a few things. First, manufacturers need to be able to retool previous manufacturing facilities to produce 4K screens. This isn’t difficult, just a concern in a situation where 1080p and other resolutions are still widely popular. Second, the global economy will need to be able to support a full upgrade from 1080p to 4K. Hard-core gamers will most definitely flock to the new resolutions, but will general users? Although the retina Macbooks will be sort of a gateway drug to higher resolution, convincing a cohort of television owners to upgrade will be tough, especially if they’ve just been burned by Blu-Ray (a dying, if not dead, format) and 3D. It will also be delightful to hear all of the marketing-speak behind newer displays. While “retina” is out, expect HP, Samsung, and Dell to offer “High-Rez” laptops and maybe even “SuperPlasmaWonderDisplay” phones. Display marketing will depend less on pixels and more on arbitrary words stuck together. We still have a while to go before 4K is even a “thing,” higher resolution screens are coming and console makers and gaming PC manufacturers will probably be the first to push it through into the mainstream. Whither go gamers, the public follows and, although this is just a guess, I suspect the first “cheap” 4K screens will arrive around CES 2015 and really hit stores by 2016 – plenty of time to get the last few years of use out of your PS3 and Xbox 360, not to mention your heavy-duty gaming PC.

“In the Studio,” Shasta...

Editor’s Note:  TechCrunch  columnist  Semil Shah  currently works at  Votizen  and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter  @semil “In the Studio” continues this week with an mechanical engineer who built and tested materials used in spacecraft, spent years on Sand Hill Road as a venture capitalist focused on semiconductors, software, and networking industries, and out of a desire to build something new in his career while in Silicon Valley, co-founded a new venture capital firm to invest in what he and his partners believe represents the next mass wave of innovation. Rob Coneybeer isn’t your run-of-the-mill venture capitalist. You wouldn’t know it from first glance , but Coneybeer has a deep technical and operating background, and spent time in industries which provided him a foundation to understand technology platforms across many different sectors over long periods of time. After spending nearly a decade as an investor, Coneybeer didn’t want to spend his career in the Valley without getting into the game himself, and thus he and his partners co-founded Shasta Ventures , a venture firm focused on software, mobile, and collaborative consumption and which has made stage-agnostic investments across an impressive array of companies in a short period of time. I invited Rob into the studio because I’ve been reading his blog for a while, and he’s always thinking about new themes and matching investments to those themes. One of those areas which we focus on in this video is what many refer to as “an Internet of things.” This means different things to different people, and even more mainstream brands like McKinsey & Co. and The Economist have been exploring the intersection of connected devices and “things.” In Coneybeer’s view, this comes down to three inputs: mobile devices (phones or tablets), sensors, and what he refers to as “actuators,” the pistons that route information between things, such as ifttt . We are seeing this come into the mainstream via consumer products such as the Nest thermostat (Shasta has invested) and the Jawbone Up wristband. In our discussion, Coneybeer dives deeper into his thesis, and explains the internet of things in greater detail. We also go so far as to touch on advanced in unmanned aerial drone aircraft (sadly, no Tacocopter) and eventually end up at the self-driving car. For any technologist or entrepreneur working on the intersection of connected hardware and mobile control interfaces, take a few minutes and see how Coneybeer envisions the “Internet of things.” Subscribe to the “In the Studio” series via RSS:    http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunchTV/In-The-Studio

Amazon Appstore’s Reven...

TinyCo , a mobile gaming startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz , is yet another major game developer that has come forward to show that revenue per user on Amazon’s appstore is tracking much higher than it is on Google Play. The company looked at its title Tiny Village , a prehistoric-themed simulation game that’s available on iOS, Google Play and Amazon Appstore, and found that when you break it out by platform, Amazon’s store monetizes 80 percent better per user than iTunes. If you break out the tablet market, Amazon Kindles monetize 43 percent better per user than iPads do. So Amazon is doing even better than Apple is, according to their numbers. This is not to rag on Google Play though. TinyCo’s numbers are actually not that bad when looking at Google’s store. When you look at just Android phones (which would exclude any Amazon devices since they don’t offer a phone), these devices generate 82 percent of the revenue-per-user that iPhones do. TinyCo’s numbers are a little bit different from recent data out of mobile analytics provider Flurry , which looked at a basket of apps that were available across all three stores . Flurry found that for every $1 generated per user in the iOS store, Amazon’s store generated $0.89 and Google Play produced $0.23. Another big, independent developer also shared some promising stats about Amazon’s Appstore a few weeks ago: Storm8 said it generated $700,000 in revenue during its first month in Amazon’s store. There are a couple things to think about with any early data out of the Amazon store, however. 1) Google hasn’t had the years experience that Amazon has in processing payments and managing an e-commerce-centric revenue model. 2) They lack the database of credit cards that both Amazon and Apple have, which creates extra friction for consumers when they want to pay and have to enter in their personal information. 3) It’s still early days so Amazon Kindles may just be selling to early adopters, who have more disposable income. Over time, revenue-per-user numbers may trend downward as a device or platform crosses over into the mainstream. 4) Amazon’s Appstore is still only available to U.S. consumers. So the iTunes and Google Play numbers are averaging in customers from less lucrative international markets.

Windows 8 Will Come In ...

Microsoft just announced that Windows 8 will come in three different flavors: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT. Windows 8 will be the mainstream consumer edition. The Pro version will bring a number of features that most mainstream consumers don’t necessarily need to Microsoft’s next operating system. These include encryption, virtualization, PC management and domain connectivity. Both Windows 8 Pro and the mainstream consumer edition will be available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Microsoft will also offer an enterprise version of Windows 8. Microsoft has not shared any details about the pricing of these editions yet. Windows 8 Pro, according to Microsoft, was designed “to help tech enthusiasts and business/technical professionals obtain a broader set of Windows 8 technologies.” The RT edition – which is meant for machines that run on ARM chips – will come with touch-optimized editions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. While there will likely be desktops that will run Windows on ARM, this edition is mostly geared towards tablets (though the other Windows 8 versions can obviously also run on x86-powered tablets). Until now, it also wasn’t quite clear if Microsoft also planned to include its Media Center in Windows 8. Judging from today’s announcement, Media Center will only be an option for Windows 8 Pro users and will be “available as an economical ‘media pack’ add-on.” Microsoft will also offer an enterprise version of Windows 8 that will include all of the features of Windows 8 Pro. This version will also feature a number of tools “for IT organization that enable PC management and deployment, advanced security, virtualization, new mobility scenarios, and much more.” While this new lineup doesn’t quite offer the simplicity of Apple’s approach, it does at least cut down the number of choices compared to Windows 7. For Windows 7, users currently have the choice between Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. Microsoft also offers an enterprise version of Windows 7, as well as a Basic version for low-end machines. You can find a full feature comparison on the Windows blog .