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cnet:

Here’s Apple’s e-mail thread about a 7-inch iPad

Not surprising at all. It shows Apple’s execs aren’t above common sense. It *is* a good size. And it will be for the iPad.

Antwoord voor bedrijven helpt ondernemers door, naast via e-mail, chat en telefoon, nu ook via Twitter vragen te beantwoorden over wet- en regelgeving, vergunningen en subsidies. Anna Pastor, werkzaam bij Agentschap NL, vertelt.

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Keen, a mobile analytics startup, announced a $750,000 series A investment from 500 Startups, Data Collective, SK Ventures, Cloud Power Fund and several big name individual investors, including Dropbox investor Pejman Nozad, PayPal investor Jared Kopf and TechStars managing directors Nicole Glaros and Jason Seats. You can find a full list of investors on AngelList. The investors had previously invested in Keen’s seed funding. CEO Kyle Wild, a former Google Analytics employee, says that the company deliberately raised raised less than it could have.

Keen falls into a growing category of software that Gary Orenstein called “infrastructure apps” in a post for GigaOM. Not to be confused with infrastructure-as-a-service, infrastructure apps are cloud services that provide non-differentiating and easily standardized components of web applications. SendGrid handles sending large quantities of e-mail, Twilio handles voice and SMS integration, Urban Airship provides push notifications. Each of these things saves developers from having to re-build these components from scratch, and saves operations teams from having to manage and scale the infrastructure needed to support them.

Keen hopes to do for analytics what SendGrid has done for e-mail.

“The problem with analytics is that you’re constantly studying what someone else thinks you want to study,” explains Wild. For example, Google Analytics has a set of metrics that it tracks and a set of dashboards based on those metrics. You can do some customization of the reports, but you can’t teach it to gather a metric that it doesn’t monitor. So developers who need custom analytics end up having to build it all by hand. “But just collecting data is the easy part. Analysis, scaling, visualization – those are the hard parts.”

So Keen inverts the Google Analytics model. You define the events you want to track – a particular behavior or keystroke or whatever else you’d like to monitor – and send it to the Keen API. Keen processes that data and makes it useful. You just add snippets of code to your application – a one line API call for each event that you want to track. Keen collects the data and provides you with a customizable dashboard. Wild makes it clear that Keen doesn’t do any “snooping” itself – it just collects whatever app developers send back to the API.

Wild explains that at his last company, a Facebook game startup that’s still in stealth, he built a very flexible analytics tool that could track all sorts of events and metrics. The basic idea was to make it as easy for the CEO to use as possible so that Wild wouldn’t have to spend any time supporting it. Then he realized that this framework could be reused by many others.

Wild took the idea of starting an analytics-as-a-service company to two friends he’d known since high school: Dan Kador and Ryan Spraetz, both of whom were working at Salesforce.com. “We’d talked about starting a company since college, but they knew I was serious this time,” Wild says. As detailed in a post on the company’s blog they applied to both the YCombinator and TechStars incubator programs. The team ended up being accepted at TechStars and quit their day jobs, moved to Austin and eventually landed seed funding. The rest, as they say, is history.

As for the future Wild is ambitious. Mobile phones are just the beginning. “I want every vending machine, every car sending data to us.”

Apple, Google and a number of other huge technology companies have settled a suit with so-called “patent troll” NTP relating to a wireless e-mail patent that was previously used to harvest $612.5 million from RIM in 2006.

Google may have a hit on their hands with the Nexus 7 tablet. How do we know? The first hint is that they have stopped selling the 16GB version but not because of a problem. Well, it is a problem of sorts in that Google apparently underestimated demand for the 16GB version to the point that they have stopped taking orders and created a waiting list get it when it becomes available again.

Mashable reports

Demand for Google’s 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet seems to have well exceeded the tech giant’s expectations.

Last week, Google posted a message to its online store saying that shipments of the 16GB model were delayed one to two weeks. Now, the store has stopped taking orders altogether.

Those who want to purchase the $249 version of the tablet are told to sign up to be notified by e-mail when it is back in stock.

8GB Nexus 7 tablets are still available.

Here is what is believed to be the first ad for the tablet to help you see what you my not be able to buy. It emerged on YouTube (Hat tip to The Verge)

Google has just acquired Sparrow, a company that has gained notoriety for its innovative iOS and Mac e-mail clients.

“We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience,” Sparrow CEO Dom Leca wrote on the company’s blog this morning. “Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.”

Sparrow’s apps have gained a devoted and vocal fan base, thanks to the their clean design and elegant functionality. The apps integrate particularly well with Gmail, so it’s not too surprising that Google was interested in snapping up Sparrow. On iOS, Sparrow filled the gap for a truly powerful Gmail client (Google released its own Gmail iOS client in November, but it had a very rough start).

It’s unclear what the acquisition means for Sparrow’s existing apps. Google likely won’t invoke fan wrath by killing the apps, but the developers likely won’t have much more time to spend on tweaking the iOS and Mac apps. We’ve reached out to Google and Sparrow for additional comment.

Sparrow is based in Paris and has received seed funding from Kima Ventures.  Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat

Count me very happily surprised.

I was ordering a gift card for someone, and figured – what could be more universally-loved that some luscious Vosges chocolate? (if you’ve tried it, you know – if not, well, what are you waiting for??)

So I go on their site, and the ordering process is easy, with one interesting chocolate-centered twist – when you plug in the zip code of the recipient, the site does a quick calculation about the destination and the time of year, and if it’s going to be a hot trip, Vosges automatically adds some cooling materials for 10 bucks. After all, you don’t want to receive a gooey mess in July, do you?

Except plastic gift cards don’t melt like chocolate. Oops.

A bit frustrated, I filled in the on-line form for Questions and explained the dilemma. I wanted to order, but…and I went off to walk the dog, grumbling under my breath that:

1. I would probably not hear from anyone in a timely fashion;
2. Any response would likely be some canned apology with no resolution;
3. I was going to have to abandon the shopping cart and go buy something else.

Wrong, wrong, WRONG, you overly cynical consumer from New Jersey!

While still out strolling with my black lab Mystic, I received an e-mail from a “Chocolate Concierge” named Anna. In that message, she apologized for the problem (and promised to alert the web team so that it can be fixed), and provided two avenues whereby we could complete the process, including a direct phone call. Speed and a pathway forward – problem solved. Customer happy.

I’ve talked up and given away Vosges chocolate bars in the past, but now they’ve really won my heart. How’s your responsiveness? Is it personal, and fast, and blog-worthy like Vosges’ is?

Well-played, Anna and Vosges. That’s some pretty sweet customer service!

___________

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Jij gaat de huidige marketingstrategie vertalen naar gerichte online campagnes voor de Nederlandse, Duitse en Vlaamse consumentenwebshop. Je bent sterk in het analyseren van cijfers, doelen bedenken om KPI’s te realiseren. Daarnaast ben je creatief in het bedenken van communicatieboodschappen en promotionele acties die passen bij het merk Expresso, je kunt artwork beoordelen.  Als online marketingtools heb je ter beschikking: een vaste klantendatabase waar je e-mail campagnes op los laat, een SEA en SEO-plan dat je uitvoert en de Expresso Hyves, Facebook- en YouTube-pagina’s . Je houdt contact met externe netwerken voor affiliate afspraken en andere promotionele acties. Je bent in staat om externe partijen duidelijk te briefen. Je bent gewend om verantwoordelijkheid te dragen voor de inhoud en de resultaten van de campagnes. Je gaat ervoor om de traffic naar de webshops te verhogen en de conversie te verbeteren op basis van KPI’s. Je hebt analytisch, creatief en commercieel inzicht. Lees meer over: Vacature: Online Campagne Marketeer bij Expresso Fashion.

Stuurdieshit.nl is een website die het mogelijk maakt om bestanden tot 10GB gratis te versturen per e-mail. Roham Rahimi, betrokken bij Stuurdieshit.nl, vertelt. Lees meer

Angry Birds is famous for two things: It’s cheap, and it’s a downloadable title. So it’s bizarre that Angry Birds Trilogy, a collection of the original Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio, is neither of those things.

Publisher Activision will release the game through retail for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo 3DS. The console versions will cost $39.99, while the 3DS one will go for $29.99, according to GameInformer. For comparison, iTunes sells each separate title in the trilogy for 99 cents. All you’re getting for the extra money is support of each system’s special mechanics.

“With Angry Birds Trilogy, every version supports the unique experience tailor-made for the platform,” said Petri Järvilehto, the executive vice president of Rovio Entertainment, Ltd. in an e-mail sent to GamesBeat, ”In addition to normal gamepad controls, with Xbox 360 we support Kinect for easy, family-friendly game play. We’re seeing that resonate strongly, especially with the younger audience. With PS3 you can play also with the Move controller. On Nintendo 3DS we’re supporting stereoscopic 3D and Streetpass.”

Activision will release Angry Birds Trilogy this holiday season.

Filed under: games