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Ad-free Social Platform App.net Goes Freemium With Free, Invite-Only Plan

App.net, the project that emerged from founder Dalton Caldwell’s desire to build a social platform that wasn’t driven by advertising, is adding its first free option today.

Given Caldwell’s emphasis on creating a product that people are actually willing to pay for, this might seem like a step backwards, or one of those infamous startup “pivots.” However, Caldwell told me that this actually isn’t a change of plans, and to back that up he pointed to his initial blog post announcing the project back in July. The post didn’t explicitly say that that there are going to be both paid and free tiers, but the two positive examples of non-advertising companies that Caldwell cited are Dropbox and particularly GitHub, which both offer free services and then charge for additional features.

As for why he’s launching the free tier now, Caldwell said that he wanted to be careful about growth. That’s important because he learned from his past experience with music service imeem that “startups are kind of like crystals” - namely, “the microdecisions that you make early on” will have a huge effect on their ultimate shape.

In this case, that meant working out a lot of the technical kinks and building out the broader developer ecosystem before trying to attract a big consumer audience. After all, Caldwell said that if he’d offered a free option on day one, “What are they signing up for? There’s no there there.” (Besides, storage is a big part of the division between free and paid plans, so it didn’t make sense to launch the free version until App.net released its File API last month.)

Now, however, Caldwell said there are enough third-party apps that integrate with App.net in some way that it makes sense to bring consumers on more aggressively. (In the App.net app directory, which launched last fall, I count 29 apps for the iPhone, and there are others for iPad, Android, Windows 7 and Symbian.)

With a free plan, you can follow a maximum of 40 users, you get 500 megabytes of free storage, and you can upload files of up to 10 megabytes. (With a paid account, you can follow an unlimited number of users, store 10 gigabytes, and upload files of 100 gigabytes.) If you follow five people and authorize one third-party app, you get an extra 100 megabytes of storage, as does the person who invited you.

And yes, you will need to get an invite from an existing member in order to join for free, at least for now. Caldwell said that’s a way to grow “outward from the core community.” On the other hand, if you are impatient and don’t want to track down an invite, that’s fine - you just have to sign up for a paid plan.

ZTE Launches 5.7″ 720p Grand Memo Smartphone With Quad-Core CPU And Android 4.1

ZTE has just introduced the Grand Memo flagship smartphone at MWC in Barcelona. The Grand Memo has top-shelf specs, including a 5.7-inch 720 1280 TFT display, a quad-core Qualcomm 800 processor, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a front-facing camera for video chat.

ZTE is marketing this as its phablet experience, as competitors like Huawei, Samsung, and most recently Asus bet big on extra-large screens. Considering how much data and texting outweigh our voice call smartphone usage, it seems to be paying off.

On paper, the Grand Memo also stands to compete under the hood, with 16GB onboard 2GB of RAM, a 3200 mAh battery and LTE, all packed into an 8.5mm thick package.

On the software side, Android 4.1 is running the show, with ZTE’s own flavor of OEM skin, Mifavor UI, laid on top. The UI is “specifically designed for smartphones,” according to the release, so that’s a plus. However, many Android users would agree that skins in general, whether it’s Sense or MotoBlur or Touchwiz, are cumbersome and annoying.

ZTE is offering its Z Cloud service with the Grand Memo, which supports DLNA and MHL for added connectivity.

Here’s what He Shiyou, ZTE EVP and Head of the Mobile Devices Division, had to say in a press release:

We have really tried to make this device fun for use at home, and practical for use in the office. By combining both of these factors, we have created a well-rounded large-screen handset that is suitable for any situation. It’s perfect for videos, gaming and music, and also for sending e-mails, checking news and making calls on the go. For those with a busy lifestyle, the ZTE Grand Memo will be indispensable.

ZTE pledged just over a year ago to infiltrate the U.S. market with high-end smartphones, as well as its home country of China.

The company has launched a number of fine phones, but it will take more time to put a dent in Android competitors like Motorola, HTC and, worst of all, Samsung, as well as fend off Apple’s iPhone here in the U.S. Globally, ZTE is the 4th-largest handset manufacturer, according to IDC.

The Grand Memo is “expected to launch the second quarter” of this year, though pricing and country-by-country availability have not been specified.

Update: Engadget confirms that the phone will launch in Europe and China, but the U.S. is still a question mark.

Samsung sets the Galaxy S4 reveal date as March 14

If it feels like we’ve been talking about the Galaxy S4 since a week after the launch of the Galaxy S3, that’s because in one form or another that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. Samsung’s flagship smartphone has a global audience, and more importantly exists as the only Android phone that can be compared to Apple’s iPhone in terms of sales and popularity. The Galaxy S4 is expected to continue Samsung’s meteoric rise, and we will be able to take a look at the next Galaxy in less than a month.

We’ve seen everything imaginable leading up to the announcement of the Galaxy S4. Samsung engineers have been on social networks looking for ideas on the phone, fake renders and incorrect release dates have speckled the Internet for months, and all the while Samsung has kept quietly to themselves.

There’s only one other smartphone on the market that gets this kind of year long buzz, and that’s the iPhone. While the Galaxy S4 hasn’t reached a point where every single piece of the phone is leaked individually, such that you could probably build one if you were able to get a hold of the parts, the popularity of the phone is undeniable. All we have to do now is wait for March 14, where the Galaxy S4 will be shown off in NYC.

Last year, the Galaxy S3 launch was a massive global spectacle. Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S3 on stage at Earls Court in London, but this year the announcement will be taking place in the US after the company was “bombarded with requests from U.S. mobile carriers” to do so. It’s widely speculated that the Galaxy S4 will be on all four major US carriers, as well as a host of carriers around the globe.

Samsung’s 2013 offering will no doubt feature a Snapdragon 800 quad core processor with a 1080p screen and enough battery life to impress your friends all day long, but the phone will still be met with stiff competition this year. In the past, Samsung’s primary focus has been to compete with Apple. This year the company is taking direct hits from competition like Motorola and HTC, who are both trying to replicate this success with the HTC One and the Moto X phone this year.

Samsung has a serious advantage this year, especially as the popularity of their smartphones increase. The Galaxy S3 isn’t just the flagship for Samsung, but in many ways is seen as the flagship for Android in the eyes of the general consumer. The Galaxy Note exists as a phone for power users, while the Galaxy Mini soaks up the budget phone market. There’s a Galaxy for everyone right now, which sets Samsung up nicely to deliver a powerful new experience with the S4 and continue to separate itself from the other manufacturers.

Sony says every PS4 game will be available for download

Sony’s president of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, has been confirming a lot of details about the features of the PS4 since its launch. That includes the fact existing PSN games can’t be transferred to PS4, PS3 controllers won’t be compatible with the new console, and that the machine will function offline.

Now Yoshida has confirmed another feature we have already seen rolled out with the PS Vita: every PlayStation 4 title will be made available for download. So every boxed game at retail will have an equivalent download version. He didn’t go so far as to say the download will be available on release day for every boxed game, but I think that’s safe to assume.

What Yoshida also confirmed was that Jonathan Blow’s The Witness looks to be a download release only, but he used that as an example of how Sony intends to support indie developers. By releasing such games as a download it saves on a lot of cost and allows for much cheaper price points–even as low as a “couple of dollars.”

Download versions of every game will do nothing to help GameStop’s share price, but at least it’s not a download-only console. All we need to understand now is exactly how Sony intends to handle used games on the PS4. Will it be an open market just like the PS3, or will attempting to play a used title incur some kind of additional payment to Sony to unlock the game? Think Project Ten Dollar.

Now read: Why the PlayStation 4 should have Microsoft worried

International Herald Tribune renamed to International New York Times as NYT shifts focus

The International Herald Tribune, a staple of newsstands around the world that just celebrated its 125th anniversary, is being renamed as part of The New York Times Company’s continued efforts to adjust its businesses. The paper will be rebranded as the International New York Times, and the transition is expected to be completed by the end of the year. The company has offered few details on how the rebrand will substantively change the paper, but it does say in a press release that a new website will be released and that the paper’s masthead will be changed.

Sony developing Firefox OS hardware, hopes to release first product in 2014

Firefox OS just landed another major hardware vendor: Sony has announced its engineers are currently developing hardware running the new operating system and that it aims to bring a product to market in 2014. The news was part of an announcement between Sony Mobile and wireless carrier Telefonica. Both companies have signed onto a multi-year agreement that, aside from guaranteeing continued support for Sony’s Android lineup, creates “a joint technical collaboration to explore the development of a handset running Mozilla’s Firefox OS open source mobile platform.”

Sony executive Bob Ishida makes it sound as though the manufacturer is already past the exploration stage, however. ““At Sony Mobile we continue to evaluate innovative…

Obama cabinet officials issue dire warnings of sequestration’s impact

Secretaries of education, transportation and defense appear on morning talk shows in push for compromise before 1 March

The Obama administration turned up the heat on the Republicans on Sunday, sending out a slew of cabinet secretaries to issue dire warnings about the impact of $85bn of government cuts should sequestration be allowed to strike.

With five days to go before the budget cuts automatically begin on 1 March, and with still no sign of a compromise deal taking shape, the Sunday political talk shows hummed with recriminations between the two main parties over the pending sequestration. The sharpest words from the administration came from Arne Duncan, the education secretary, who said that even before the knife fell, teachers were already losing their jobs.

“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Duncan said on CBS’s Face the Nation. He said up to 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs, adding: “We don’t have any ability with dumb cuts like this to figure out what the right thing is to do.”

Further doom came from the transportation secretary Ray LaHood who has been highly visible in the past few days, warning about the impact of sequestration on civilian travel. “There has to be some kind of furlough of air traffic controllers, and that then will also begin to curtail or eliminate the opportunity for them to guide planes in and out of airports,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press, referring to the $600m cuts destined for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Similar forebodings were delivered by Leon Panetta, the outgoing defense secretary. He said that the “vast majority” of civilian employees of the Pentagon would be forced to give up one day of work a week starting in late April.

The orchestrated round of warnings from the Obama administration did not impress a coterie of senior Republicans who were similarly paraded on the talk shows, blaming the White House for having brought the country to the brink of yet another “manufactured crisis”. The governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, ridiculed the Democrats on Meet the Press, saying “they’ve rolled out this great political theater about how cutting less than three per cent of the federal budget is going to cause all these awful consequences.”

He added a message to Obama: “Stop sending out your cabinet secretaries to scare the American people.”

LaHood, speaking on behalf of the White House, countered that “we are not making this up in order to put pain on the American people”.

The paradox about the current billowing storm over the sequestration is that these were cuts that were never supposed to happen. They were devised as a sort of sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Congress members in 2011 to encourage them to reach a compromise deal on reducing the federal deficit; in the event that they fail despite the threat to reach accord, the cuts will automatically scheduled to begin on Friday.

With Congress getting back to business on Monday after a week’s recess, the search for a way out of the impasse is likely to gather pace. Obama was set to meet governors from across the nation on Sunday night which will be an important moment as the individual states are certain to be heavily hit should the cuts go ahead.

Administration figures are stressing that though the deadline is close, there is still time for serious talks on the plan Obama has presented to avoid sequestration. But to get to that point, both main parties will have to find a way out of the current stalemate in which they appear to be more focused on apportioning blame than on finding solutions.

PS4 May Not Allow Used Games After All

As far as gaining mindshare ahead of launch for next generation consoles goes, blocking used games seems to be one of the bigger issues. The Xbox 720 is reportedly deploying one such solution and the Wii U does no such thing for the moment. But as far as the newly unveiled PS4, uncertainty still looms, mostly due to Sony’s evasive responses when faced with the question from press, as well as a fairly vague statement on the matter.

The Reason Facebook Is Buying Atlas

Given the likelihood of Facebook buying Microsoft’s Atlas platform, lots of speculation has swirled around what the social network company would want to do with the ad server. The popular answer: Facebook is looking to take Atlas’ capabilities at operating across the Web, combine them with Facebook social graph data, create a new ad network and go after the third-party ad serving business. In other words, the argument goes, Facebook is looking to go head to head against Google/DoubleClick.

That might be part of the play here. But I hardly think that’s the whole answer.

To my mind, an Atlas play would really be about attribution.

After all, it is attribution that’s the biggest driver of ad dollars online since day one. Google is a perfect example here: It’s incredibly easy to draw a straight line from the keyword you advertise on, to the text you deliver to a searcher, to the landing page you send the searcher to — and finally to the sale (or failure to make a sale). It’s that ease of attribution that made Google into the most successful direct marketing property in history.

As of now, Facebook isn’t a serious contender for those direct marketing dollars. Just think about how often you’ve heard or read the question, “Do Facebook ads work?” (most common answer: Maybe). If Facebook wants to compete at Google levels for ad dollars, it needs to develop a way to let advertisers and agencies draw that direct line between Facebook ads and ROI.

That’s especially true since digital media has made the entire marketing world far more accountability-focused — to the point that some of the world’s largest agencies are shifting to pay-per-performance models. If accountability were a huge leg up for helping Google in the dot-com era, it’s likely a make or break for Facebook today.

Which brings us to the speculation about Atlas. The ad network theory makes sense because Atlas can 1) do complicated computations around which ads are served when, and 2) draw complex pictures around how users engage across different types of media — including interactions between Facebook and other media properties. Meanwhile, Facebook’s privacy changes from last May allow the site to leverage user data to serve ads to users while they’re not on Facebook.

If you put those points together, it does seem likely that an ad network may well be in the works, and Atlas may become a key piece of technology behind it. But if that’s the only piece of thinking going on here, then Facebook is essentially looking to solve the revenue hurdles of its core business by using that core business to support a side project. That’s an awfully convoluted and less strategic path to growth.

It seems a lot more likely that Facebook is less interested in using Atlas to port data out onto the Web, than it is in using Atlas to bring all those off-Facebook conversions back into the world of Facebook itself. In other words, Facebook wouldn’t look to Atlas as the backbone of a new ad network; Facebook would look to Atlas as the infrastructure for tools that show how users engage with Facebook ads, and where Facebook fits in the conversion path. Those are the tools that Facebook needs to prove that yes, Facebook ads do work. And no matter how lucrative an ad serving business or ad network would be, building those tools is infinitely more valuable.

Of course, beating Google at the ad network game may be one of Facebook’s goals (and it’s certainly something Sheryl Sandberg has the chops for). But if Facebook isn’t thinking first and foremost about its attribution problem, then it’ll never beat Google for ad dollars — ad network or no. Zuckerberg, Sandberg and company are smart enough to realize this. And if they are looking to buy Atlas, attribution is the reason.

Bill Wise is CEO of Mediaocean, a marketing technology company that powers $130B in media spending globally. Follow him at @billwise.