The new company is focused on protecting and managing personal digital data. It will continue to offer Mozy’s personal backup product and will add new products over time. The Mozy platform has over a million users, 200,000 of which are paying customers.

There isn’t much information on what new applications the company will launch. But if PI Corp. is anything to go on, look for rich metadata and contextual information to be a part of it. PI Corp. was acquired before launching their flagship storage/backup product. But their website suggests they are far more focused on managing, organizing and searching files than simply backing them up - something Mozy never tackled. The combination of the two platforms is more than interesting.Source:TechCrunch

Adobe’s Flash Player is on 98 percent of all desktop computers, but it is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones. If you want Flash on a mobile device, right now you have to settle for a compromised version: Flash Lite. But Adobe is committed to bring the full Flash Player experience to mobile phones, as evidenced by its Open Screen Project. On Monday, at its Adobe MAX developer conference, it will demonstrate Flash Player 10 running on a Windows Mobile phone. (However, Flash won’t actually ship on Windows Mobile until late next year). Product manager Michele Turner tells me:

We will be showing the first delivery of Flash on mobile phones, on other platforms. You will see it on Windows Mobile.

Turner also indicates that an “Android port” is coming. But what about the iPhone, which famously doesn’t use Flash? (Although there’s been some talk of that happening). Turner will only say:

Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday. One source says they’ve had little direct contact with Apple during the review, instead getting their updates via the standard iPhone developer tool, which has said “in review” for the last few days.

Who knows why Apple delayed the application, or why they tend to treat every application developer equally poorly.

But in this case Apple really screwed up in our opinion.

This is an extraordinary event. Other search app providers have told me they’ve been kept waiting months for approval of their app, with no explanation from Apple. But Google and Apple are close, even sharing Google CEO Eric Schmidt as a board member. Something definitely went sideways, most likely involving Apple throwing a fit of some sort (Apple is just plain weird about press).

Note our report last week that Apple seems to be working on some sort of search product of their own for the iPhone.

The most important ad for a company or brand is its Website. So why not use that Website to generate ads? Dapper, a startup that can create a feed from any Website, is applying its technology to generate contextual, display ads from the constantly changing content on an advertiser’s own site.

The new service is called MashupAds. It is currently in private beta. The first 150 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get an invite (mention TechCrunch in the comments)>

Everyone from Google to Yahoo is working on contextual display ads in an attempt to make display ads as relevant as contextual text ads. Like those efforts, MashupAds takes its cues from the content on the page where the ad is being served. So if you are researching what to do in Chicago on Fodor’s, you will get display ads for hotel rooms in Chicago. Where Dapper takes a step further is that the creative content in those ads are pulled directly from the relevant portion of the advertiser’s Website. Website is the ad (even on other sites).Source:TechCrunch

When it comes to charging for mobile apps, payments usually have to go through either the carriers or one of the emerging mobile app platforms such as Apple or Google’s Android. The problem with charging for an iPhone app through iTunes is that Apple takes 30 percent. A startup called Billing Revolution wants to charge about one tenth as much for a seamless, mobile one-click shopping experience. Already available on other phones, Billing Revolution is announcing availability today for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android apps.

Once a consumer signs up to pay for things through Billing Revolution, he is presented with an Amazon-like one-click payment option no matter what app is using it. (Didn’t Amazon patent that?). Billing Revolution charges a 3.5 percent transaction fee plus 50 cents per transaction.

Source:TechCrunch

When the economy takes a hit, so do cell phone sales. Last quarter, mobile phone sales in the U.S. dropped 15 percent to 32 million units, according to market research firm NPD Group. But in hard times, the strongest brands also take share. And that is exactly what Apple did.

The 6.9 million iPhones it sold last quarter catapulted the $200 device into the top spot among all cell phones, even beating out the much cheaper and still-popular Motorola Razr. (Yes, they still sell that thing. They just don’t make any money off of it.)

The session jumped right off with Heilemann saying the Internet played a disruptive role in the 2008 election in the same way television played a disruptive role in the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy to president. Neither medium was new in the respective elections, but both “came of age” and swung the election towards the winning candidate. Kennedy, in particular, used television ads extensively in his campaign to reach the American voters directly.

Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean campaign, but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social networking and fundraising.Source:TechCrunch

The iPhone is twice as reliable as the Blackberry after one year of ownership, a new study by SquareTrade finds. SquareTrade, which sells extra warranties for cell phones and other devices, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the Blackberry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.

Surprisingly, battery problems is less of an issue for the iPhone than for the other two brands. Less than 0.5 percent of iPhone malfunctions are due to the battery dying, compared to about one percent for the BlackBerry and iPhone. The iPhone also has fewer call quality problems than the other two. The biggest problem for all three phones are malfunctions involving the touch screen or keyboard. For the iPhone in particular, this is an area that needs work. According to the study, “one third of all reported iPhone problems were screen-related.” Many of these were dead spots in the older 2G phones, but the 3G phones have their own screen issues.

If you own an Apple TV, you’re probably frustrated by the fact that most videos you download from various parts of the Web aren’t compatible with it. If they were, it would be a mere matter of seconds between the time you finished the download and sat down to watch the video in your lounge room.

There is a way around the hassle of constantly converting videos, though, with a bit of software and trickery. We take you through the steps to automating the conversion process and show you how to fix video metadata in iTunes, which is infamous for not allowing you to change the video kind from movie to TV show or music video if you acquired the media from anywhere but the iTunes Store.

Here’s what we’ll do:

- Define a download folder for your videos.

- Monitor this folder for new videos and convert them to an Apple TV-friendly format as soon as OS X sees new files in the folder.

- Automate the process of adding the file to iTunes.

- Make sure the original files are thrown out to prevent wasting disk space.

- Change the video type, show name, and add season and episode numbers and titles.

Thanks to Automator, this becomes a really nice and easy process. Automator is probably one of OS X’s most underrated applications.

1. Get the QuickTime Compression Library for Automator

When I first discovered Automator after switching to the Mac a few years ago, I was (shamefully) giddy with excitement, which I suppose isn’t totally unexpected. I went on a downloading splurge over at Apple’s Automator Actions download section and discovered the QuickTime Compression Actions file that would serve me well several years later. You can get it here, and poke around the other files in the section while you’re at it.

Install the files so the actions are ready for use.

2. Create a New Automator File

Open Automator and start a blank workflow. Save it somewhere you’ll remember.

If you’re not familiar with Automator, you should take some time to get to know it so you don’t get tripped up during the tutorial by a lack of familiarity. I don’t think I’ve missed anything that’ll make it hard for a beginner to follow along, but I always recommend fiddling with the software for a bit just in case!

3. Get Selected Finder Items

Since we’ll be saving this as a folder action, the first step needs to be Get Selected Finder Items. You can find this under the Files & Folders menu in the Library pane to the left.

4. Get Folder Contents

The next step is to tell the workflow to grab the contents of the folder (the folder being the selected finder item in the first step). You can find this action under the same Files & Folders menu.

5. Filter Finder Items

Now, we’ll need to filter out files that are already in a friendly format. No need to waste time converting files that are already good to go! Under the Files & Folders menu, insert the Filter Finder Items action.

The “Whose:” section specifies the filter. Select “Name Extension” and “Contains” under the first two menus, and then time m4v in the empty text area.

Now click on the “+” button next to the text field, and repeat those last steps, but add mp4 instead of m4v.

6. Compress With QuickTime

Under the Movies menu in the Library pane, select “Compress QuickTime Using Most Recent Settings” and, under “Choose directory for converted files,” select a location for the Apple TV compatible movies.

7. Get Specified Finder Items

Now, from the Files & Folders action menu, insert Get Specified Finder Items into your workflow. In the action pane, click the “Add” button and find the folder you’ve specified for the converted movies.

Now go and grab Get Folder Contents, the same as in step four, and place it after the Get Specified Finder Items action.

8. Add Any File to iTunes

Under the Movies library menu, add the Add Any File to iTunes action. This will take the contents of the specified folder—your converted files—and throw them into your iTunes Library. You’ll need to ensure that iTunes is set up to copy files when they are added to your library so this folder can be safely emptied into the trash later.

9. Create the Drop Box Folder

Create the Drop Box folder you intend to use to put raw, unconverted movies in—if you want you can always add an alias on the desktop or in the dock to make it easy to drop things in.

10. Send the Redundant Files to the Trash

This is obviously optional if you want to keep the videos in their original format for some reason, or keep the converted files that were created before iTunes made copies in its own folders, but I recommend it as a nice and easy way to prevent your hard drive from filling up too quickly.

Add the Get Specified Finder Items and, using the “Add” button, find both your original drop box folder and the converted files folder.

Then add the Get Folder Contents action, just like we did earlier, and finally, throw in Move Finder Items to Trash which is in the Files & Folder menu as well.

11. Save as plug-in

Go to the File menu and select “Save as plug-in.” Give the action a name, and under “Plug-in for,” select Folder Actions. Under Attached to Folder, select your drop box.

12. Set Up QuickTime Conversion Parameters

Since the workflow grabs the last used conversion parameters from QuickTime, before you run this you’ll need to go and convert a test file with your desired settings. There is an Apple TV conversion preset, so if you don’t want to customize anything to your personal tastes I suggest using this one. If you do convert anything else via QuickTime for other reasons, remember that you’ll have to run a test file using Apple TV parameters before converting videos again.

This works fine for me because I only ever convert videos so they can be viewed from the Apple TV, but it may not be very convenient if you work with video from QuickTime frequently.

13. Set Metadata Correctly

So now you have some cleanly converted files in your iTunes library. My biggest pet peeve is seeing these appear under the “Movies” section; I like them to be found under TV Shows, correctly organized by season and episode number, with the correct episode name.

Grab Set Video Kind of Selected from Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes, and install it as per the provided instructions. Now, head to iTunes and select a video. If you’ve imported several episodes of a television show and all episodes are in order and in the same season (say you have episodes 1 through 5 from season 3), you can select them all so that you don’t have to set the details one by one.

Now go to the AppleScript menu in iTunes and choose Set Video Kind of Selected. Specify the video as a TV Show under Video Kind, and add the show’s name. If you have selected just one video, set its season number and episode number. If you’ve got multiple episodes, set the season number, then under episode number, type in the number of the first episode in the selection (episode 1 using our example). The script will automatically add the rest of the episode numbers.

Flick down to the TV Shows section of iTunes. Go into the series listing, and right click the first episode, click Get Info and flick over to the Video tab. Here you can add the Episode ID—the name of the episode. The other details should be filled in. If you’re really anal about metadata, you can add the episode description as well, which will show up on your Apple TV. Now, you can simply rinse and repeat for the rest of the videos you added.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:iPhone to Offer YouTube VideosComing Soon: Personal HD Downloads for Apple TVYouTube on Your Tube through Apple TV1 Million iPhones. 74 Days.Eminem Sues Apple for Music Rights800 Apple Employees Lose their iEmploymentApple’s iWeb Gets Google AdSense and Maps Integration

This story comes out of Berlin, Germany. A 21-year old Web developer created an iPhone application that uses the GPS in the iPhone to help you find the nearest public transportation U-Bahn and S-Bahn (subway) stations. If you are onboard a train you could watch the transit map move live. The application has been downloaded over 20,000 times to-date.

The German BVG agency which is responsible for public transportation, had the application removed from the iPhone App Store. BVG spokeswoman Petra Reetz said that they want "but only the best for passengers". In speaking with one of my German contacts, he believes the fear for the BVG is that if the app data is wrong, German citizens may sue BVG. So rather than deal with that potential issue, they had the app shut down.

This type of mobile application would be awesome for many cities around the world. While it would only work where there’s mobile coverage, it could be a huge help in getting more people to take mass transit. 

You can read the full story (in German) on Heise Online.

Update from madam3181 via Twitter: "The iPhone app "Fahr-Info Berlin" is still available from the iTunes store however the current version has the maps removed"

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This story comes out of Berlin, Germany. A 21-year old Web developer created an iPhone application that uses the GPS in the iPhone to help you find the nearest public transportation U-Bahn and S-Bahn (subway) stations. If you are onboard a train you could watch the transit map move live. The application has been downloaded over 20,000 times to-date.

The German BVG agency which is responsible for public transportation, had the application removed from the iPhone App Store. BVG spokeswoman Petra Reetz said that they want "but only the best for passengers". In speaking with one of my German contacts, he believes the fear for the BVG is that if the app data is wrong, German citizens may sue BVG. So rather than deal with that potential issue, they had the app shut down.

This type of mobile application would be awesome for many cities around the world. While it would only work where there’s mobile coverage, it could be a huge help in getting more people to take mass transit. 

You can read the full story (in German) on Heise Online.

CN Sponsor: CloudContacts - make your business cards work for you!
Other CenterNetworks Coverage: iminlikewithyou, FriendFeed, Web Jobs

So we’ve bought about 10 of them, all of them have awful problems recognizing clicks. The trackpad has a bug where it does not click about 60% of the time.

Anyone else having this issue? It seems posters at the Apple Discussion board are experiencing it fairly consistently.