Courtesy Fingerprint Cards

Fingerprint-authentication sensors are expected to show up in mobile phones this year.

Mobile phones will soon know your touch.

Fingerprint Cards, a Swedish biometric-security company, said a Japanese electronics maker plans to introduce mobile phones with fingerprint sensors in the third quarter of this year. The technology, which identifies a person’s unique fingerprint when placed on a reader, can be used to prevent unauthorized access to a device.

Japanese phone makers placed a total of three orders for Fingerprint’s components in the fourth quarter of last year. One of those purchases was for at least a million phones, my colleague Niklas Magnusson reported. The demand from Japan has prompted Fingerprint Cards to open a sales and support office in Tokyo. The news sent the company’s stock soaring to its highest level in more than five years.

For Japan’s electronics makers, the big bet on biometrics could be an attempt to differentiate their phones from the myriad other black rectangles on the market. Those companies could use some help. Kyocera, Panasonic, Sharp and Sony are among the nation’s largest phone makers, yet none of them has captured enough global market share to rank among the top five mobile or smartphone manufacturers, according to research firm IDC. Fingerprint Cards declined to name its customers in a press release last month.

But the Japanese companies may have some competition from the world’s second-largest smartphone maker. In August, Apple agreed to pay about $350 million for AuthenTec, which has its own fingerprint authentication and encryption technology. The Cupertino, California-based company has also filed patents of its own for biometric technology. Silicon Valley-based SecuGen and Validity Sensors are showing off their fingerprint tools this week at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

As we cram ever more sensitive information into our smartphones, stronger security should be a welcome addition. But let’s make sure that, like with the passcode lock on today’s smartphones, there is some way to get around these biometric walls in case of emergencies, or when I accidentally mangle my thumb in the car door.

Original post is Mobile Phones With Fingerprint ID Coming This Year by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Jasper James

Koozoo, a San Francisco-based startups, is aiming to offer free live video feeds from people's windows all over the world.

As the Internet began to take off in the mid-1990s, several dot-coms tried to strike gold with the same idea: Show what’s happening at locations around the world by connecting to live video feeds from webcams.

The market never really materialized then, but Silicon Valley venture-capital firms New Enterprise Associates and Tugboat Ventures are betting that now is the time for on-demand video of public places. Together they led a $2.5 million round in Koozoo, a San Francisco-based startup with a new take on the concept.

Instead of relying on webcams, Koozoo is turning to those old, spare smartphones laying around in people’s homes. The startup wants users to download its software and point their devices outside the front windows at home. Anyone will be able to use Koozoo to then view the live video being captured by clicking on each stream’s location, marked as a pin on a map.

About 100 people are broadcasting views of their neighborhoods as part of a trial of the service, said Drew Sechrist, who co-founded Koozoo in 2010. The company, which has around a dozen employees, doesn’t display the names of users alongside their videos by default on the website to protect their privacy, he said.

“If you have an old smartphone, and you know how to download an app, you can participate,” he said.

Of course, not everyone has a smartphone, let alone one to spare. Koozoo, which plans to release the app globally early next year, will start by targeting gadget fans in its hometown. It’s a group more likely to have an extra iPhone or two in a drawer at home, as well as a Wi-Fi connection. It’s a demographic that also might think to check the feeds for weather conditions before heading to the beach or to see how long the line is outside their favorite restaurant.

“When we started the company, the concept of old smartphones didn’t really exist,” said Sechrist, who spent about 10 years at Salesforce.com before starting Koozoo. “We’re kind of at this magic confluence of a bunch of things. The cost of bandwidth is dropping so that it’s becoming a negligible expense.”

David Bohnett thought the world was primed for a similar service nearly two decades ago. His company, Beverley Hills Internet, stationed webcams in tourist hot spots around Los Angeles. “I was fascinated by the technologies of the early Web cameras,” he told me a few years ago. He eventually abandoned that to help start GeoCities, a web hosting company that sold to Yahoo for more than $3 billion.

Some ventures from that era still exist. EarthCam, founded in 1996, is one of the most popular live webcam sites even today with broadcasts from locations as varied as Times Square and the panda exhibit at Zoo Atlanta. The site gets about 1.1 million visitors per month, according to research firm Quantcast. The streams help promote the company’s security-camera business.

Jon Sakoda, the partner at NEA who arranged the investment in Koozoo, doesn’t want to let this one go.

“Wi-Fi adoption is now pervasive,” Sakoda said. “It’s a much easier and more compelling experience than having to buy a webcam and string a 17-foot ethernet cable over to your window.”

Original post is Have a Spare Smartphone? Koozoo’s New Angle on Public Webcams by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Pete Saloutos

Tech companies are mapping the insides of stores to help smartphone users find where products are shelved.

While mobile maps have made it easy for people to find their way to a store or shopping mall, the options are limited once they’re inside. Now, a new breed of cartographers are venturing indoors to help consumers find where products are shelved.

One startup that develops interior maps for retailers is Point Inside, which recently raised $3.2 million from private investors, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Bellevue, Washington-based company plans to hire at least a dozen software engineers in the next three months as it rolls out two big retail partnerships and expands into grocery stores, said Chief Executive Officer Josh Marti.

“We’re in the middle of a big growth spurt,” he said.

Several other startups are focusing on the indoor market. Aisle411 partnered with Walgreens this summer to add interior maps for all 7,900 or so of the retailer’s U.S. stores. WifiSLAM, which taps into a smartphone’s various sensors for pinpointing a user’s precise location within buildings, raised $1 million.

Big companies are eyeing this area as well. Google has already mapped the insides of 10,000 museums and other locations. Last month, 22 companies, including Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Sony and Qualcomm, formed the In-Location Alliance to pool resources for developing indoor maps.

Advertisers and retailers are increasingly turning to mobile apps as a way to get shoppers to spend more when they’re at the stores. Some apps reward consumers just for walking in, while others may alert users to special deals or provide them with coupons.

“Retailers are going to need to be more connected with their customers by using mobile shopping apps,” said Doug Tudor, a San Mateo, California-based investor who put an undisclosed amount into Point Inside’s funding round. “How many times have I been in the checkout line and forgotten one thing, and you’re sprinting up and down the aisles?”

Original post is Mobile Maps Focus on Helping Lost Shoppers Find the Right Aisle by Tech Deals.

Xiaomi Tech, the Beijing-based maker of cell phones, secured the largest investment with $216 million, according to a recent report from Rutberg & Co. India’s Sistema Shyam, a mobile services provider, followed with $158 million in funding.

Out of the 25 largest venture capital investments in mobile, Chinese companies claimed three spots and India accounted for two. Still, American companies dominated the rest of the list with 17 companies, the vast majority of them based in California. The top 25 specialize in everything from mobile payments to advertising to social networking.

Investments in mobile rose 30 percent to $3.9 billion globally in the first half of 2012, up from $3 billion in the same period of last year, according to Rutberg, an investment bank. Mobile-related investments accounted for 46.3 percent of all technology investments by venture capital firms in the first half of the year. That’s up from 16.9 percent in 2009.

Original post is Chinese, Indian Companies Land Largest Mobile VC Investments by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

Motorola Vice President John F. Mitchell shows off the DynaTAC portable radio telephone in New York City in 1973.

(This blog was corrected. An earlier version misattributed a comment in the 16th paragraph.)

With Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility now complete, a saga that Brad Stone and I explored in this week’s issue of Businessweek, a closer look at the history of the cell-phone maker — formerly one of the most admired companies in the world — could serve as a lesson for the online search giant as it maps its future.

In many ways, Google is the old Motorola. These days, Google is known around Silicon Valley as a company willing to invest in seemingly nutty ideas — from archiving the world’s books to inventing driver-less cars. For more than half a century, Motorola was also famous for making big, audacious bets.

In the 1930s, after two failed attempts to start battery companies, founder Paul Galvin hit pay dirt with the car radio (“Motorola” is derived from “motorcar” and “Victrola”). It dominated the two-way radio market, from walkie-talkies to the one Neil Armstrong used to proclaim his “giant leap for mankind.”

Again and again, the company was at the forefront of important new tech markets. It was a leader in TVs from the 1950s until it sold its Quasar brand to Panasonic in 1974 (a textbook example of knowing when to get out of a maturing tech market). It was a major force in semiconductors, including the microprocessors that powered Apple’s computers from 1976 through 2006. Motorola pioneered the two-way pager, and for years has been one of the top makers of cable set-top boxes.

All of these paled next to Motorola’s greatest hit, the cell phone. Then under the leadership of Paul’s son Bob, who was chief executive officer from 1964 to 1986, the company began investing in mobile phones in the 1970s, without so much as a focus group to check on demand, said Martin Cooper, who ran the division.

“Bob used to always say that you can’t build products that people ask for, because they don’t know they need them,” Cooper said.

At the time, few shared Motorola’s optimism. Chris Galvin, Bob’s son and the CEO of Motorola from 1997 to 2004, recalls that in 1978, McKinsey & Co. did a study suggesting that the cumulative number of cellular subscriptions through 2000 would be just 900,000.

Even after the company rolled out the first commercial cell phone model in 1983, many managers advised a go-slow approach, said Sandy Ogg, formerly Motorola’s senior vice president of leadership, learning and performance. Ogg now runs operations for private equity firm Blackstone Group.

Bob Galvin didn’t listen. By 2000, “the cellular industry was manufacturing 900,000 cell phones every day,” said his son.

The success was far more than just financial. Motorola’s stolid, Midwestern exterior may look stodgy relative to Google’s hipper vibe, but both were forces of progressive management thinking. In the late 1980s, Bob Galvin championed the Six Sigma quality management program that helped U.S. companies beat back competition from Japan Inc. Internally, the company coddled its innovators, giving them the freedom to pursue projects that is reminiscent of Google’s well-known 20 percent rule.

“If someone made a mistake when they were introducing something new, the Galvin philosophy was that they’d just become worth tons more to us than they were before, because we’d paid for their education,” said Chris Galvin.

No doubt, audaciousness can be expensive when the bets don’t pay off. Take the Iridium project, a phone service powered by a network of 66 satellites designed to be an “electronic skin around the earth,” in Bob Galvin’s words. While prescient, Motorola ended up losing billions of dollars on the project before selling it out of bankruptcy for $25 million.

But it was the lack of audaciousness that contributed to Motorola’s decline. As the cell phone industry went digital in the mid-1990s, Ogg recalled how some Motorola executives argued that consumers wanted analog, not digital, because it sounded better. Within just a few years time, Moto handed its market share lead to Nokia.

Then in 2004, Motorola designers came up with a bold, thin new design called the Razr. With good looks and an edgy TV ad campaign, it was enough to stand out in the final days of the pre-iPhone era. The company would sell more than 100 million of them over the next few years, lifting the company’s sales to an all-time high of $43 billion in 2006.

Still, Motorola would lose its way in the age of versatile devices such as the iPhone, even though it had been dabbling with touch screen-based models for years. It had even acquired a team of talented Silicon Valley techies from Good Technology to develop phones based on Google’s then-nascent Android software. Despite this, management stuck with the Razr and cranked out cheaper, less innovative versions that didn’t catch on and resulted in big losses.

“From where I sat, it looked like the starship had been turned into a crop duster,” said Jim Phillips, a former Motorola executive who is now CEO of NanoMech, a nanotechnology manufacturing company.

Motorola Mobility “has long been focused on making leaps forward in innovation,” according to a statement from Jennifer Erickson, a spokeswoman for the company. Beyond the world’s first cell phone and Razr, she also pointed to hit products including the Droid.

Google’s acquisition doesn’t mean the end of the Motorola name. The search giant will use the name on its phones, and telecom equipment maker Motorola Solutions remains.

Still, the fall in prestige is shocking to those who remember the better years.

“It was a heartbreak for me; I started that division,” said Cooper, widely considered the “father of the cell phone.”

When Bob Galvin, a tech superstar during Motorola’s heyday, died last October at age 89, the news coverage didn’t come close to the media attention given to Steve Jobs, who had passed away a week earlier.

Former Motorola President Mike Zafirovski said the passing of Apple’s co-founder overshadowed the loss of Galvin and his accomplishments.

“Bob deserved more,” said Zafirovski.

What’s the lesson for Google? To avoid being overshadowed itself someday, it needs to keep placing those big bets.

That’s certainly the philosophy Google has adopted so far. But learning from success is one thing. As it begins re-creating Motorola for its purposes, Larry Page & Co. can learn first-hand how a once-proud company goes from great to — in the case of Motorola’s cell-phone unit — gone.

Original post is Motorola’s History Lesson for Google by Tech Deals.

After accepting $41 million from investors for an application that failed to gain popularity, Color Labs Inc. has been held up as an example of Silicon Valley excess and a looming tech bubble. Just saying the company’s name can get a laugh.

“It sucks and it hurts my feelings, but it hasn’t stopped me from taking risks,” said Nguyen, who sold online music service Lala.com to Apple Inc. in 2009. “I have this faith that we’re going to get there, that we’re going to pull it out.”

Nguyen said many have been asking what he’s doing with all that money. Now, after months of not releasing a new product, Color today announced a partnership with Verizon Wireless to have its application pre-installed on many Android smartphones running on the carrier’s next-generation LTE wireless network.

The application allows people to broadcast 30 seconds of video from their phones that others can watch live. When sharing a video live, a user can send an alert to friends through Facebook or a text message, Nguyen said.

Color is among several companies with products for sharing video. Viddy raised money last month from investors including Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

The company, which has about 50 employees at its offices in downtown Palo Alto, California, has created a new file format so users can both stream the videos live and then store them on Color’s network to view or share later, according to Nguyen.

For Verizon, the arrangement provides a way to promote its new 4G wireless network and offer a feature that differentiates its phones from those running on rival carriers such as AT&T Inc. Sharing video with audio via Color is only possible on the faster network, Nguyen said.

Adding Color also is an example of how phone manufacturers and wireless carriers are trying to add features to stand out in the crowded smartphone market. Samsung Electronics Co. announced a partnership with the Web-storage company Dropbox last week, while HTC Corp. last year bought a 51 percent stake in Beats Electronics, the maker of high-end audio gear co-founded by rapper Dr. Dre.

Color is hoping Verizon, which has more than 90 million subscribers, will give them a boost in users. The announcement is the third evolution of Color since its debut in March 2011. The company started as a way to view photos taken by others using the app within the same proximity. The company then shifted to to be a way to share video on Facebook. Neither features were popular for users, with Color having just 30,000 daily active users, according to AppData.com.

Nguyen said Color will be on ‘‘most, if not all” of Verizon’s 4G smartphones, though he declined to discuss the financial details of the deal. One phone that Color won’t be on is Nguyen’s former employer; Apple decides what applications are pre-installed on the iPhone.  Nguyen said he feels conflicted about switching teams to lend support to Google’s Android operating system.

“I have mixed feelings,” said Nguyen, whose main phone is an iPhone. “It’s not easy for me.”

Original post is Founder of Color Still Has Faith, Partners With Verizon on Android by Tech Deals.

Courtesy Tap Tap Tap

Twitter executives talked with Tap Tap Tap, maker of the photo app Camera+, about a possible deal.

Soon after Facebook agreed to pay $1 billion for Instagram, social networking rival Twitter considered acquiring a mobile photo-sharing application called Camera+, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said.

Twitter executives held several meetings with Camera+ developer Tap Tap Tap, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private. The talks broke down before Twitter could make an offer because the startup’s far-flung workforce was reluctant to relocate to San Francisco, they said. While 10 employees are already based there, Tap Tap Tap has 20 others in Austria, New Zealand, Spain and elsewhere.

Like Instagram, Camera+ lets users take photographs with an iPhone, tweak the colors and share them on its own social network or through Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter had expressed interest in buying Instagram in recent months, the New York Times reported last month. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and executive chairman, had invested in Instagram, and frequently posted pictures using the app. He said in an interview with Charlie Rose last week that Instagram has more in common with Twitter than with Facebook. His point was that people rely heavily on Twitter and Instagram to post items instantly from mobile phones.

Two hours before Facebook announced its deal on April 9, Dorsey uploaded a photo on Instagram of a San Francisco bus. Two days later, he added his first picture to his Camera+ profile, and hasn’t posted to Instagram since.

Dorsey helped lead the negotiations with Tap Tap Tap, according to the people with knowledge of the talks. Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo wasn’t directly involved, they said. Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Costolo told reporters in Japan two weeks ago that Twitter wouldn’t alter its strategy or seek to acquire an Instagram competitor to counter Facebook’s move.

The Camera+ iPhone app, which costs 99 cents, has been downloaded 7.5 million times in about two years. Instagram, which debuted four months after Camera+, has 50 million people signed up to use its free software that runs on Google’s Android system and Apple’s iPhone.

–With assistance from Naoko Fujimura in Tokyo.

Original post is Twitter Said to Have Considered Buying Mobile Photo App Camera+ by Tech Deals.

Courtesy Tango

Tango's video calling service has grown to 45 million users since launching in 2010.

Tango, a startup that offers mobile video calling, has raised $40 million from investors including Qualcomm Ventures and Access Industries, the company said today in a release.

The service, which lets users make video calls across Apple, Android and Windows Mobile phones, has grown to 45 million users since launching in 2010.

Even though the company has yet to spend all of the $42 million it raised last July, it wanted to take more cash now because new investors offered funding at an attractive valuation, Chief Technology Officer Eric Setton said in an interview.

“There’s a lot of interest right now around mobile companies that do well,” said Setton, who co-founded the company with fellow video technology veteran Uri Raz. “Unlike most companies in our space, we actually generate revenue.”

Setton said Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram earlier this month helped raise investor interest.

Tango has raised a total of about $100 million from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Michael Birch, Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Hambrecht.

The company would not disclose its valuation, which was previously at $160 million when it took funding last year, two people said at the time. Setton also would not specify how much the startup has made by selling extra storage for video messages and animations that play on the screen during calls.

When Tango began offering its app for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phones last year, it became the first video calling service to span all three major mobile platforms. It’s still the only mobile video service to do so.

Microsoft, which bought Skype for $8.5 billion last year, has not developed that video service for use on its own mobile operating system.

Update: Corrects amount of funding raised and when it occurred last year.

Original post is Tango Raises $40 Million to Vie With Skype in Video Calling by Tech Deals.

Courtesy Pebble Technology

Pebble's new watch is supposed to display messages from your smartphone.

When it comes to the road to success in Silicon Valley, Eric Migicovsky was definitely on the right path.

His idea for creating a watch that can display messages from your smartphone was embraced by Y Combinator, the prestigious business incubator. While completing the program, he outperformed others by actually generating revenue. He later raised $375,000 from four angel investors, including Paul Buchheit, a partner at Y Combinator, and Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money. Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods.

So Migicovsky posted his watch on Kickstarter, a “crowd-funding” website where anyone can pledge money for creative projects that have yet to be completed. In the last few days, roughly 26,000 people plunked down their cash, with many pledging hundreds of dollars and about a half dozen folks promising $10,000 or more.

In return, they get a discount on the watches. The startup, Pebble Technology, plans to ship the first batch in September. However, like all projects on the site, there’s no guarantee that the creator will follow through. Backers could lose their money, but Pebble has been making BlackBerry-compatible watches called inPulse for years, unlike the many Kickstarter hopefuls with little more than an idea.

So far, Migicovsky has raised more than $3.8 million, making the watch the highest-grossing project since Kickstarter was founded three years ago, a spokesman for the website said. The fundraising will go for another 31 days, and then Pebble gets to collect the money it has raised.

Kickstarter takes submissions from aspiring authors, hardware tinkerers, thespians and video-game developers with good ideas and video cameras to shoot their pitches. Some 1.75 million people have given more than $185 million to 20,000 projects on Kickstarter, a spokesman said.

Migicovsky said he’s more adept at pitching to consumers than to venture capitalists.

“With VCs, they worry about models and size of market and stuff like that,” he said. “With consumers, one of the things I love about the videos, we just showed how you’re going to use it.”

Pebble’s promotional videos show people using the watch to track their time and pace while running and bicycling, and having text messages delivered to their wrists. Oh, and it also tells time.

The money has allowed Palo Alto, California-based Pebble to double its staff in the last few days to 10 from five, he said.

“It’s very clear that the Kickstarter guys have that viral path down pat,” said Migicovsky, who graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada. “When a cool project shoots up, it shoots high.”

In his pitch to potential new hires, he tells them to check Pebble’s Kickstarter page at the beginning of the phone interview to see a live tally of investments.

“After we stopped talking,” he said, “I told them to refresh.”

Update: Corrects when Kickstarter was founded.

Original post is Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Raises $3.8M on Kickstarter by Tech Deals.

Photography by Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo

In this April 7, 2011 photo, CEO Kevin Systrom, at left, works alongside engineer Shayne Sweeney at Instagram in San Francisco.

One thing we know about Mark Zuckerberg is that he’s a big fan of eyeballs. That would explain the $1 billion the Facebook CEO just shelled out for Instagram, which is currently more popular on Apple and Google devices than Facebook.

Instagram just launched its Android product last week and it’s already the top-ranked free app not made by Google (No. 3 overall, behind Google voice search and maps). Facebook ranks No. 8 on Android. And in the iPhone App Store, Instagram is second among free apps, while Facebook is 26th — even though it’s the most popular of all time.

Instagram may not be making money, but anyone who has followed Facebook’s progress over the past eight years knows that doesn’t concern Zuckerberg. He just wants users by the boatload, because without popularity, there’s no money.

Original post is $1B for Instagram? For Zuckerberg, That’s Just the Price for Popularity by Tech Deals.