DirecTV adds live video streaming on iPad


The DirecTV app for iPad got a significant bump in capabilities today by adding live streaming to giving you essentially a portable TV you can take to any room of your house.

You have to be on the same network as your DirecTV receiver, and not all channels are available. I'm not seeing the pay movie channels, or the local channels, which are all a matter of rights with the owners of those channels. I counted 38 available channels for streaming, including CNN, Fox News, National Geographic, FX, History Channel, Discovery and many more. You can watch the video in a window hovering over the program guide, or watch full screen.

With my multiple tuner DVR I could be watching one channel on the iPad while someone else could be watching another channel on that same receiver, which is pretty handy.

This new update also allows you to change start and end times of a recording if you think a program time needs adjusting. The app has also added an option to set parental controls on your receiver from the iPad.

Other TV providers, notably Comcast, have been working on streaming live TV to the iPad. The app is free and requires iOS 4.2 or later.

Go get it. It's a worthwhile update.

DirecTV adds live video streaming on iPad originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Create & Publish a Web Page in Seconds with Pen.io



The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Pen.io

Quick Pitch: Pen.io is the fastest way to publish content online.

Genius Idea: Create pages in seconds.


What started as a fun weekend project back in February has literally become the quickest way to publish on the web. No joke. I’m talking about Pen.io, the three-person San Francisco-based startup re-imagining what it means to create and publish content online.

“The original project and idea was simply to create the fastest way to put a piece of content online,” Pen.io founder Anthony Feint says. “I was looking at WordPress and thinking it was quite complicated just to put a recipe or quote online,” he adds. “I didn’t necessarily want to start a whole new blog just to quickly put up a single piece of content.”

The premise behind Pen.io is to allow anyone to publish on the web without having to create an account, go through a signup process or possess any technical skills, Feint explains.

And that’s exactly what it is. Navigate to Pen.io and you’ll find that your next webpage is just two fields — page name and page passwords — away from being live on the web. Just hit the “Create The Page” button, and you’ll get your own tabula rasa to fill in and use as you see fit.

That may not sound remarkable at first, but think about it for a second. You’ve just created a permanent webpage without having to register a domain, set up a new blog (which is far more arduous than it should be) or even sign up for an account. Better still, you can go on to create as many pages as you’d like and continue to avoid all those tedious steps in the process.

Okay, you say, but what the heck am I going to do with a blank web page? The answer, says Feint, is anything you’d like. Quickly publish a personal recipe, research project, essay, poem, song, diatribe or make a basic “About” page. You can even drag and drop photos and add YouTube video URLs to add a bit more personality to your pages.

Pen.io is proving to be quite popular. It already sees 300,000 visitors a day. Teachers use it, students love it and professional content creators are quite enamored with it, Feint says.

Part of Pen.io’s early appeal is that you can use it completely anonymously, which means the service is becoming a publishing tool and online outlet for those who are limited in what they can say on the web. Case in point: 40% of visitors to Pen.io come from China.

The simplicity and ease of Pen.io’s page publishing tool is like nothing we’ve seen before. It’s not a blog — in fact, it’s almost the anti-blog. Nor is it a social media platform. But Pen.io is a fast publishing platform, which puts it in the same category of services as WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr and Twitter.

So, where exactly does it sit and what could this become? Mashable put the question to Feint. It’s a rival to WordPress and Posterous in that it appeals to folks who don’t want to commit to starting a blog, he says, and it’s a compliment to Facebook and Twitter.

“WordPress and Posterous aren’t as relevant as they were before. People are definitely using Twitter and Facebook more, but they still want a place to put their content,” Feint says. “So used in conjunction with [Twitter and Facebook], Pen.io is great.”

The startup will work to better integrate with Twitter and Facebook to show off this greatness, he says. In the near future, users can also expect premium Pen.io packages with privacy, video hosting, analytics and themes for a fee.

Also coming soon is a new page editor. But, promises Feint, “we will never have a complex editor like you might find in WordPress or the other blog engines.”

Pen.io has raised $100,000 in seed funding and is actively working to raise another round.

Image courtesy of Flickr, sparkieblues


Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, spark-of-genius, Startups

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How the U.S. Consumes Real-Time Entertainment Online [INFOGRAPHIC]


For years, media industry observers have talked about convergence, with video entertainment someday moving completely online, morphing into an all-streaming entertainment cornucopia that’s only a few years away.

When you look at this infographic from Sandvine (a company that makes devices that assist broadband providers with throttling the connections of their users, so they should know about high bandwidth usage), you’ll see how the long-heralded convergence of broadband and entertainment is almost there. It’s not all-streaming yet, but close to it.

In fact, according to Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report for Fall 2011, if you’re subscribing to broadband Internet service, 96% of you were using some sort of real-time online entertainment each month.

Beyond that, using some combination of broadband-tapping devices such as smart TVs, gaming consoles, settops, smartphones and tablets, “55% of all real-time entertainment traffic” is coming from sources other than cable or broadcast TV, says Sandvine.

That number is only going to get bigger. Will streaming ever completely replace broadcast and cable TV?


Infographic courtesy of Sandvine

More About: broadband, infographics, Sandvine, streaming

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Is There Room for a Klout for Professionals?



The 3-year-old Klout has already become the industry standard for measuring social media reach and influence, but the company no longer has that market to itself.

The Sarasota, Fla.-based PROskore is testing the waters for a sort of Klout for professionals, though PROskore CEO Bill Jula would likely recoil at the comparison. Jula says that the main difference between PROskore and Klout is that his company takes into account more than just social media.

That is one component of a PROSkore, but others include your background and your engagement on PROSkore’s network. The hope is that recruiters and businesspeople will look at your PROskore as a quick measure of your networking prowess and your skill at your chosen profession. Jula says, however, that scores — measured on a one to 100 scale — should be taken in context.

“Someone could live in a remote city and 20 would be pretty good,” he says, referring to the PROskore. Jula says that for people in big cities “anything above a 50 or 60 is doing pretty well.”

But how does PROskore get those numbers? Partially by filling in details about their business and profession, but PROskore also culls data from Twitter, Facebook, Klout and LinkedIn, though the score is weighted to give the latter more influence.

Jula evolved PROskore from Fast Pitch!, a network for small businesspeople that had been around for five years. Eyeing an opportunity, he rejiggered the site to provide rankings and launched it earlier this month.

Garth Holsinger, VP of global sales and business development at Klout, says he’s not worried about the competition. “I”m actually kind of intrigued,” he told Mashable, “there are copycats out there, but we consider ourselves the standard.” Holsinger says Klout has eight Ph.Ds working on the company’s scoring and he considers Klout to be in a good position “as long as the science is sound.”


BONUS: What Klout’s New Topic Pages Look Like


Klout released a new feature last week that lets users gain insights on top content influencers as well as users who have received the most +Ks for respective topics.

To populate a user’s Topic Pages (see screenshots below), Klout analyzes the user’s content created across the 11 networks it calculates.


Clickable Topics on Your Dashboard


On your Klout dashboard, you can click on a topic to open its Topic Page.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: klout, PROskore


Schmap Releases Tool to Break Down the Demographics of Your Twitter Followers



The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name:Know Your Twitter Followers

Quick Pitch: Know Your Twitter Followers takes Twitter one step further.

Genius Idea: Providing a demographic analysis of your Twitter followers.


Do you ever wonder who your Twitter followers are? Are the majority male or female, models or comedians, interested in flying planes or listening to Taylor Swift?

Whether you have millions or hundreds of followers, now you can obtain a full analysis that allows you to find out who they really are. Schmap, the social website that introduced the first real-time city guides covering more than 400 million locations worldwide, this morning launched “Know Your Twitter Followers,” an automated freemium service that allows any individual, company or brand immediate access to acquire a demographic analysis of their Twitter followers.

“If you are an individual Twitter user, you are naturally curious to know who is following you and where they are,” said Paul Hallett, CEO for Schmap. “Know Your Twitter Followers fills the void for audience measurement in social media and provides a breakdown of your followers so that you can understand how to target your audience.”

Schmap, which has raised $3 million in funding, demonstrated the new insightful service by generating follower profiles for a range of Twitter’s top celebrities, including Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Sheen, Sarah Palin, Justin Bieber, Tiger Woods and Donald Trump.

Schmap’s analysis revealed the following entertaining facts about our favorite celebrities:

  • Charlie Sheen’s followers are iPhone users, tweet a lot and like to party.
  • Sarah Palin’s followers are religious married parents who like reading books.
  • Donald Trump’s followers are fitness fanatics.
  • Twitter users who keep pets are fans of Wolf Blitzer but are not fans of Tiger Woods.
  • Firefox users follow Bill Gates.

Shmap also generated a full analysis of Mashable’s approximately 2.5 million Twitter followers. It found that Mashable has Twitter followers across the globe, but also that the majority of followers are female, are in sales/marketing professions and are interested in technology and music.

“If users are using Twitter for fun, they will gain an understanding of who is reading their tweets,” said Hallett. “If they are using it for business, they can gain valuable insight into their audience that they can use commercially to produce content and services to their followers.”

Sample Analysis of @StarbucksSample Analysis For @Starbucks Twitter Followers

Know Your Twitter Followers is the only web service that allows Twitter users to generate a complete analysis of their followers. Some sites like Twittercounter.com only provide statistics on your Twitter usage, and other sites like Twitterfollower.com and twiends.com help you obtain more followers.

If you’re interested in finding out who your Twitter followers are, here are the details: the free summary analysis generates a breakdown of followers by gender, marital status, profession, likes and interests, and location by country and U.S. state. The price for the full analysis depends on the number of followers and category of users – ranging from: $39.95 to $149.95 for most corporations/brands; and $4.95 to $24.95 for most individuals, charities and local merchants.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Shawn Campbell


Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, Know Your Twitter Followers, Schmap, Twitter

For more Business coverage:


SoundCloud iPad app out now


Music sharing site SoundCloud has had an iPhone app for a while, but the company has just released a version of the service built specifically for the iPad. SoundCloud generally opted for the dual-pane look in the app, which means you can browse around your friends and their shares, all while listening to and learning about any music you happen to pull up on the side of the screen.

A video of SoundCloud's app runs through the main features, but you might as well just download the app for yourself -- it's completely free, just like the rest of SoundCloud. There are quite a few apps out there that will let you listen to and browse socially around your favorite music, but if you happen to be a SoundCloud fan or just like the heavy social network integration, you might be excited try this app out.

SoundCloud iPad app out now originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Level Up Your Git Skills


“Achieve Git enlightenment” is part of the message of the new website/tutorial/guide Think Like (a) Git

Even if you use Git every day, you might not know what you’re doing. You can understand enough basics to get work done, but typing commands or using a GUI client feels a bit like casting spells or incantations. 

This guide is a bit different. It doesn’t teach you commands, it teaches you how to think like Git thinks, how to understand what it is doing under the hood- all without getting too, too technical. You can expect to see things like this:

If you’re already using git and know a few commands, but really want to “level up” your understanding and skills, we recommend spending some time learning to Think like (a) Git.

From Rejected to TechStars Demo Day to Funded: You’ll Get More No’s Than Yes’s


Getting into TechStars is hard. The acceptance rate is something like .000001% (lower than Harvard’s apparently). It was most certainly hard for Promoboxx because like most applicants, we didn’t get in. Well, we didn’t until we used this rejection as motivation to forge ahead, and then to our surprise we were accepted into the very program that rejected us.

Forget your logo, investor presentation, business model, or background. I’m here tell you that the single most important attribute of an entrepreneur is the ability to take a NO, then bank it, move forward, and use it as motivation. We didn’t even begin to learn this until we got our first big NO, from TechStars.

The Rejection

Just a few weeks after making the final selection group for TechStars Boston 2011, we got the super-nice “it’s not you, it’s a competitive program” rejection email from Boston director Katie Rae. We were shocked, we felt that we fought hard to get in. The team attended events, created a video, and sent weekly updates on our real business progress. Still, we hadn’t done enough to prove ourselves, and we had to accept our rejection. But, did we have the guts to rejoin the fight?

I first turned to the team, my co-founders Dan Koziak and Sonciary Honnoll were awesome. After a quick commiseration and a “oh well” they went about moving the company forward. They were still 110% committed. Then I had to look in the mirror. As CEO, I needed to get better. Investors (like TechStars) want a great team, but most investment choices come down to the CEO, and I had to step up my game.

The Opportunity

Ok, if we couldn’t get into TechStars we’d at least adopt the model, by attending events, connecting with mentors, and raising money. At our first event, David Beisel’s WebInno, I ran into Katie Rae. Instead of awkwardly ducking my head and avoiding Katie, I went right up and thanked her for considering us. Her response was amazing, she was excited to help and suggested other area programs such as Dogpatch LabsMassChallenge and Open Angel Forum. In fact, there was an available slot to pitch at Open Angel that same week. After a quick email connect with OAF organizer Reed Sturtevant, we were on the docket.

I spent four strait days practicing my “I can’t believe you didn’t choose us” revenge pitch. Once I arrived at the event, I noticed that not only was Katie there, but also TechStars founder and CEO, David Cohen. Oh, it was on! I was determined to show TechStars – and everybody else in that room – that Promoboxx was for real.

When it came time for our pitch, I had to rely on my practice because I was way too pumped. It felt like being football player playing his first game against the team that cut him. With Dan operating the slides, we made it through. The post pitch feedback was OK. Most liked us, but we were missing that special ingredient. It was our first pitch. We were locked in and looking for more.

The Call

The next day, I sent Katie a quick note of thanks, simply expecting the standard response.  What I got instead was a call that if it were part of a John Hughes movie, it would have been a bad one. I mean, the plot would be so ridiculous. Katie started in with, “We’ve never done this before, but…” (cue 80′s music). They wanted us to join TechStars! I could hardly believe it.

But, there was a catch. We had just 30 minutes to accept, and an hour to get down to Kendall Square for orientation.  I called the team and we unanimously agreed to join.  A scramble ensued, I headed right for the door and jumped on the T, Dan quit his job (also turning in his brand new iPad2), and Sonciary broke all sorts of traffic laws heading down from New Hampshire. Like some tech keystone cops, the Promoboxx team all converged on One Cambridge Center as fast as possible.

The Program

When we walked into that packed TechStars orientation session, the first to greet us was David Cohen who deadpanned “we had a case of non-buyers remorse” and then shook our hands. It was one of the coolest moments of my career. As for Katie Rae, we can’t say enough about what she did for us. On the day of her first TechStars class, she went way out on a limb to give us a chance. Katie truly is a Boston angel.

After three months at TechStars, we hit Demo Day a changed company. We not only pitched better, but we discovered that special ingredient to our company (apparently it’s called a business model). Those months of intense mentorship by some of the smartest tech entrepreneurs in the world had unified us as a team with a stronger product. We were a real company.

Since then we’ve raised our seed round (announcement soon) and landed clients like Wolverine WorldwideMattingly SportsFlooring AmericaCAT Footwear, and PrimeSport to name just a few. We’ve had dozens of NOs since that first one from TechStars, and we still have hundreds (hopefully thousands) of NOs still left in us.

The Disclaimer

Please don’t try this at home. If you’re looking for the best way to get into TechStars, please read my buddy (and Kinvey CEO) Sravish Sridhar’s recent article. They did it right. But, if you do take away one thing from this article, take this: If you believe in your team and your business don’t ever, ever, ever give up.  I can absolutely guarantee that you’ll get more NOs than YESes.  Just take your hit, bank it, and move forward. Good things are bound to happen.