Qik Enables Live Video Streaming From 3G iPhone

Jason Kincaid

31 comments »

Qik, the startup that allows users to stream live mobile video from their cell phones, has released an application that allows users to use the service from their 3G iPhones. Unfortunately, the application isn’t available through Apple’s sanctioned App Store, so users will need to jailbreak (hack) their iPhones to use it. And because Apple has yet to enable video capture on the iPhone, we probably won’t be seeing a “legit” application any time soon.

Last week Qik released support for iPhones running the old (1.1.4) firmware, which was made obsolete by the 2.0 software that was released in July and gives users access to Apple’s App Store. This new release also supports the older iPhone, but users won’t be able to stream over the slow EDGE network.

The following instructions are included in the company’s blog post:

You can get Qikking with the iPhone 3G (and earlier models running iPhone OS 2.0!) by doing the following:

1. If you have not already, you’ll need to sign up at http://qik.com/sign_up and receive an SMS from us to activate the application.
2. Launch Cydia.
3. Go to the “Sections” tab at the bottom and scroll down to “Multimedia.”
4. Under Multimedia, you will find Qik. Tap on it then select “Install” at the top right, then in the same spot tap “Confirm.”
5. Now you will see Qik get installed. You may hit the “Return to Cydia” button at the bottom or just quit Cydia when it is done installing.
6. You’ll now notice a “Qik” icon on your home screen - Go ahead and launch it.
7. As long as your initial signup SMS/text message is still in your inbox for the first launch, your account will be linked to your device.
8. Make sure you have 3G service or are on WiFi (edge is not sufficient enough to stream video) before you begin broadcasting.
9. Hit record and enjoy Qik!

Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience

Gregor Hochmuth

61 comments »

Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time ago. But regardless of your own use, it’s hard to dismiss the phenomenon itself and the passion of so many that has built up around it.

No matter how long the outage du jour, Twitter users continue to stay attached to the service despite an ever-changing backdrop of alternatives.

Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.

What explains the Twitter phenomenon then? What produces the positive feeling and the strong attachment among those who tweet? And moreover: How can other systems learn from this?

The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.

FeedBurner’s subscriber count only provides the equivalent of Twitter’s opaque follower count and MyBlogLog didn’t solve this problem either.

So it’s not surprising that the majority of blogs are abandoned — the most-cited reason being “No one was reading it.” No one might be following your Twitter stream either, but Twitter is designed for network effects to take hold and given the natural reciprocity among groups of friends, it’s likely that most people have at least a handful of followers they know.

Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).

Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.

Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.
Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.

Sharing with the News Feed: Did it ever reach my friends?
Facebook was the first major social network to introduce the News Feed concept, which has since become a standard sauce for stickiness in many places (although not StudiVZ surprisingly). But Facebook’s implementation of the News Feed doesn’t capture the full power of designing for Audience: While Twitter distributes every message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is shown to whom. Algorithmic filtering is nice in theory, but such black-box behavior is simply unpredictable for the user.

“When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”, one might wonder. And conversely: “Have my friends posted something that I’m not seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care about.” Anything that’s unpredictable produces a feeling of uncertainty — and that’s never a comfortable feeling.

Even with Facebook’s recent attempts to introduce smarter filters, users only have relative means to customize their feed (more of this, less of that). Furthermore, there is mostly just one kind of feedback that users can give on the News Feed: comments. Imagine a concert, in which you could only leave written notes as you left — no clapping, no booing.

Because users don’t really know who’s listening on Facebook and who isn’t, the platform hasn’t been embraced as a place to publish proactively. Publishing events or photos is mostly push-driven (and generates an email — “you are invited to an event” or “tagged in a photo”). But for everything else you share, do you know if it ever reached your friends?

Who capitalized on this gap? FriendFeed.
It’s the same setup as Twitter, but with more content: You know who’s listening and you choose the people you listen to. A useful premise but it also has a catch: the word “more”. Too much content, too many people — which is exactly the problem that Facebook is trying to address with its algorithmic feed. But what’s a solution then? It’s not the “middle ground” and it has nothing to do with smarter filters.

design for Audience.

Stitcher Launches Personalized Radio iPhone App In Private Beta

Jason Kincaid

16 comments »

Stitcher, the personalized streaming radio service, is releasing its native iPhone application in a limited private beta. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to submit their email addresses here will be eligible to participate. Note that you’ll have to submit your iPhone’s serial number, which is required by Apple’s Ad Hoc beta program (as is the 100 user limit).

Stitcher can best be described as Pandora for everything but music, allowing users to compile a playlist of audio feeds from hundreds of sources, including news sites and radio stations. The site also employs a small team to read popular blogs and websites aloud so you can listen to them on the go.

When I first covered Stitcher in May, I wrote that the site’s mobile service had a lot of potential, but that its iPhone web app was slow and clunky (which was more an issue with Mobile Safari than Stitcher).

The demo video below shows that Stitcher’s native app has resolved these issues - there’s no longer any lag when switching stations, and the interface is much cleaner and more intuitive. Once it launches on the App Store, Stitcher will see no shortage of competition from other audio streaming apps including Pandora (one of the most popular apps in the store), AOL Radio, and a number of others.

You can see a demo of the app below. Note that Stitcher is a work in progress, and that the team is still making improvements as it builds up to public release:

credit  - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/08/stitcher-launches-personalized-radio-iphone-app-in-private-beta/

With MobileMe, Apple Bites Off More Than It Can Chew

Mark Hendrickson

17 comments »

When Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, introduced MobileMe onstage at the WWDC keynote in June, the audience was wowed into believing that the most stylish hardware and software company had transformed itself into a formidable Internet service provider right before its eyes.

MobileMe not only promised to be exceedingly functional - an “Exchange for the rest of us” that would synchronize our emails, contacts, calendar appointments and photos across devices using push technology - it was also exceedingly beautiful. By applying its legendary design expertise to the SproutCore JavaScript framework, Apple had created a browser-based hub that not only empowered consumers with device flexibility; it also raised the notion that Apple would become a major player in cloud computing, even if MobileMe was technically only an upgrade to the six-year-old .Mac service.

But alas, the transformation has proven itself to be more of a slog than Apple had hoped. After a false start, persistent outages, and all-around bugginess, Steve Jobs has admitted to employees in an internal email that “it was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” and “the MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services”. This is an atypical admission by a company known for its well-maintained image of impeccability. It also raises the question of whether Apple will be able to metamorphize as services and software move online around it.

Apple is certainly not without its previous Internet successes, namely the iTunes Store with its paid music and movie downloads. The store’s success appears to be why Eddy Cue, Apple’s VP of iTunes, has been put in charge of all Apple Internet services following the MobileMe mess. But it has yet to be seen whether Cue can translate his experience deploying an Web-connected desktop app within a proprietary framework (iTunes) into a more distributed, browser-based platform that competes with the likes of Live Mesh and SugarSync. And then there is the question of whether Google will ever add desktop syncing to its webtop services, competing even more directly with the MobileMe offering.

credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/05/with-mobileme-apple-bites-off-more-than-it-can-chew/

Foxconn Building 800,00 iPhones a Week (But Quality Control Might Not Be Great)

Citing a source "close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers," TechCrunch is reporting that the company who makes the iPhone 3G for Apple, Foxconn, is pumping them out a rate of 800,000 phones a week. At that rate, that's 40 million iPhones a year. Dandy, except that TechCrunch says "there may be some concerns with quality control."

So it might not be your imagination if your phone acts like it came across the ocean on the back of a diseased water rat. Worse, 40 million was the upper limit of Foxconn's demand estimate for the year, but they've been told to set it a lot higher, meaning they're going to be building them even faster. So, it's probably not going to get any better. Just remember to cross your fingers before you open the box. [TechCrunch]

credit - http://gizmodo.com/5032746/foxconn-building-80000-iphones-a-week-but-quality-control-might-not-be-great

Apple Releases Push Notification Services Developer Kit, Background Apps FTW

Peter Ha

0 comments »

I think it’s safe to say that iPhone OS 2.0 is far from perfect and anyone saying otherwise must be on Apple’s payroll. Other than the horrendous battery life (on the iP3G), what else do we all hate about the OS? The inability to run background apps! Sure, Apple’s argument against a Windows Mobile-like task manager makes perfect sense, but the ability to run background apps is something we’ve all grown accustomed to and it would be the ‘killer app’ as they say around these parts, right?
Read More

Oh, and is anyone’s white iP3G starting to crack?

credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/31/apple-releases-push-notification-services-developer-kit-background-apps-ftw/

Facebook’s iPhone App Has 1 Million Users

Jason Kincaid

35 comments »

Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook, just announced at our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable that Facebook’s iPhone/iPod app has reached 1 million users.

Facebook is currently ranked as the 6th most popular free application on Apple’s App Store, and has been among the store’s top applications since the store’s launch on July 10. We posted initial download numbers for the apps soon after the store’s launch (Facebook had around 9,000 downloads at the time). Since then, Apple has changed its policy and no longer posts the number of downloads for each app, so we need to rely on developers to report their figures.

We’ve asked MySpace for their corresponding numbers. Off hand, John Faith, GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace was able to tell us that their mobile WAP site sees 1.7 million uniques a day (users can access the MySpace WAP site without using the native application). This is certainly a large figure, but it doesn’t provide a direct comparison. We’ll update the post when we can get more comparable numbers.

At Facebook’s f8 conference this week, the company announced that it would soon be open sourcing its iPhone application, so we can expect to see a number of copy cats in the near future.

credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/25/facebooks-iphone-app-has-1-million-users/

Mossberg, Levy And Arrington Talk iPhone, Yahoo On Charlie Rose

Erick Schonfeld

10 comments »

Our own Michael Arrington joins Wired’s Steven Levy and the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg on last night’s Charlie Rose show. Most of the discussion was on the iPhone 3G and how Apple continues to turn the mobile world on its head. At the end of the discussion the trio also talk about Yahoo’s future.

This is Mike’s third appearance on the show this year. See his March and May conversations with Rose as well.

credit -

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/7/23/2/a-discussion-about-the-iphone-3g