Open up your mind and say, ahh...

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: Klip

Quick Pitch: Klip lets users capture, share, discover and view mobile videos on iPhone.

Genius Idea: One-minute video clips.

---

If mobile video sharing is to follow in the footsteps of its more desirable mobile photo-sharing cousin, which application will users want to use to shoot, share and discover video clips? It’s too soon to tell, but startup Klip joins the fray and is now vying for your video attention.

The startup released its application for iPhone on Monday with a focus on letting users share super-short 1-minute video clips — on Klip or with Facebook, Twitter and Youtube — and helping users discover clips from friends or other users based on topics of interests.

“Klip re-invents the way consumers experience the world by organizing mobile videos in real time and by connecting consumers with the people and the topics that interest them,” the company says.

The iPhone application boasts a few provocative quirks that set it apart from similarly-purposed apps such as SocialCam, Vlix and Viddy. You can fire up the application and shake your phone to get instant previews of all the videos on your homepage view, for instance. Or, you can slide your finger through any clip to fast-forward and take a glimpse at its content.

Klip even repurposes the hashtag concept popularized by Twitter, letting users add tags to videos and filter videos by topic or interest.

The application struggles a bit in rhyme and reason. It’s clear from the get-go that this is an app for uploading, sharing and finding videos, and its user interface is pleasant and intuitive enough. But, it’s lacking a hook — it needs an inescapable quality that grabs the user by his senses. As such, Klip will falter in converting video-sharers already tied to other applications, and it will likely fail to entice those still uncertain about the video-sharing movement.

The nascent startup, launched in April by repeat entrepreneur Alain Rossman, could still find its way. Rossman, after all, has plenty of experience in risky video endeavors — he was previously the longtime chairman of Vudu, a video-streaming service acquired by Walmart.

Klip is based in Palo Alto. The 20-person company has raised $2 million in funding.

---

Series Supported by 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.

Ben Crawford is the CEO of domain industry firm CentralNic. Prior to joining that firm in 2009, Crawford worked at various jobs which combined his love of sports with Internet technology, including serving as executive producer for IBM’s official Sydney Olympic Games website.

The final barrier to a new era for the Internet was lifted this morning, when the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) voted 13 to 3 in favor of introducing new top level domains (“TLDs”) to compete with .com, .net, .org and country codes like .ca and .mx.

The vote, held in Singapore before a thousand-strong audience of tech insiders and broadcast live online, was met with a standing ovation. A core deliverable of ICANN since its inception, new TLDs have been the subject of six years of intense debate contributing to ICANN’s bottom-up approach to policy making. As one board member put it, “every imaginable aspect has been examined six ways from Sunday.”

A hundred potential applicants have gone public over those years with their ambitions to acquire new top level domains. These range from cities like .paris and .nyc, to brands like .canon and .hitachi, to verticals like .gay and .ski. Hundreds more have kept their plans secret, particularly due to the uncertainty that previously clouded the topic.

Why the need for these new TLDs? ICANN’s mission includes introducing more consumer choice — a blessing for everyone frustrated with finding that the ideal domain name for their new project is unavailable at the existing extensions.

For trademark owners, acquiring their own TLD creates a completely brand-safe online zone free from phishing, domain spoofing, knock-off sites, counterfeiting, and the gamut of other damaging activities that plague the Internet. Plus, a .brand TLD gives marketers the choice of any domain they want ending with their trademark. No matter what name you come up with for your new product or promotion, with your own .brand, the domain is available.

---

A More Equitable Internet

---

On a global scale, the need for new TLDs derives from the drive for an altogether greater good — a more equitable Internet. Regional communities such as the Galicians in Spain, the Venetians in Italy and the Kurds in Iraq have been active in asserting their need for domains that reflect their languages and cultures.

Moreover, recent developments will permit new TLDs to be in characters other than ASCII text (the letters and numbers on English-language keyboards). These new top level domains will usher in a true globalization of the Internet, with URL support in Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic, and dozens of other scripts.

Supporting the view that the public wants new top level domains are the recent successes of “repurposed country codes” like .co (officially the TLD for Colombia, but sold as an abbreviation for “company”) and .me (officially for Montenegro, sold for “unique personal brands”) as well as new SLDs (second level domains) like us.org in the United States and .com.de, about to be launched in Germany.

---

Opposition

---

There are of course opponents to new TLDs. Complaints about the cost (an $185,000 application fee plus the cost of producing a 200-odd page application, plus the set-up and running costs) have been responded to by ICANN with the announcement of a $2 million grant program designated for applicants from developing countries. But the main objections actually come from major brands that already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars registering domains “defensively” to prevent others from using them, and which are concerned that a proliferation of new domains will cause these costs to escalate vastly with no added benefits.

ICANN has sought to mitigate this risk by introducing far more stringent protections for trademark owners than those that exist under the current generic TLDs, including a system that allows the rapid takedown of domains that abuse trademarks.

---

The Process

---

The timetable announced for the introduction of the new top level domains starts immediately with the preparation of complex application documents. As running a TLD involves taking responsibility for core infrastructure of the Internet, specialist technical providers are required to support each new TLD, and the applications must include comprehensive and fully-funded business plans and detailed policy documents governing the rules for usage of the new domains. The application window is between January and April 2012, and the applications are scrutinized by ICANN and then made public, so that objections from any quarter may be heard before the domain is granted.

The earliest we are likely to see one of these new TLDs in our search engine results is early 2013.

For new TLDs that are contested — for instance where multiple applicants apply for the same or similar domains — assuming all applications are of equal merit, the domain will be auctioned and sold to the highest bidder. As premium dot com domains occasionally sell for millions of dollars, we can expect these bidding wars to reach tens of millions of dollars. Toys ‘R’ Us paid $5.1 million for the domain toys.com in 2009. What does that mean for the value of .toys?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun

Starbucks is extending its popular mobile payment system to Android device owners, and introducing the alternative payment option at 1,000 Starbucks locations inside Safeway supermarkets — Vons, Pavilions, Dominick’s, Randalls, Tom Thumb and Genuardi’s stores included — this coming July.

By July, the coffee retailer and crossover consumer packaged goods company will be accepting mobile payments at roughly 9,000 Starbucks locations in the U.S.

Starbucks for Android will be available exclusively on the Android Market beginning Wednesday, June 15. The application has been optimized specifically for Android, and offers device owners — running version 2.1 or above of the OS — the same pay-by-phone barcode-scanning experience as those on the iPhone or BlackBerry.

The application also allows the user to manage his Starbucks Card balance, reload his card, view his My Starbucks Rewards status and find nearby stores.

“With the addition of Starbucks for Android to the Starbucks app line-up, a Starbucks mobile payment app may now be used on approximately 90% of smartphones currently in use,” said Adam Brotman, Starbucks’s vice president and general manager of digital ventures.

January marked the nationwide rollout of Starbucks’s mobile payment system. By the end of March — just nine weeks later — Starbucks told its shareholders that it had processed more than 3 million mobile payments via its Starbucks Card Mobile application for iPhone and BlackBerry.

“We we were the first to offer large scale mobile payments,” said Chuck Davidson, Starbucks category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team, during a press conference Tuesday. “And we’ve seen the demand for our applications grow.”

In addition, Davidson disclosed that he is often asked about the brand’s status on using NFC technology for its mobile payments system. “Quite frankly, we’re not willing to wait for the NFC system to mature in the United States,” he said. He anticipates that consumer adoption of NFC-enabled phones is still two to three years out.

Apple released the first developer preview of Mac OS X Lion Thursday, offering a glimpse of what can be expected from the next iteration of its desktop operating system.

Slated for release this summer, Mac OS X Lion is all about fusing the worlds of Mac OS X and iOS together. On its Mac OS X Lion Preview page, Apple sums it up best: “The power of Mac OS X. The magic of iPad.”

Some of the features in Mac OS X Lion have already found their way into Mac OS X Snow Leopard. When Apple formally announced Mac OS X Lion in October, the company showed off some of the new features that had already arrived in iLife ’11. The company launched the Mac App Store in January, and many of its UI elements (which look unusual in the context of Mac OS X 10.6) are carried over into Mac OS X Lion.

---

Multitouch, Multitouch, Multitouch

---

For the last few years, MacBook Pro (and Magic Trackpad) owners have been able to take advantage of multitouch gestures in Mac OS X. In supported applications, swiping fingers a certain way or using the pinch-to-zoom gesture will influence what you see on the screen.In Mac OS X Lion, gestures and multitouch support consume the whole OS. Swipes can initiate system-wide features — like pulling up the new application dashboard Launchpad — and can also switch between applications, application screens or zoom in on specific content.

Check out this video from Apple’s website that shows off some of the new gestures:

---

iOS Style App Launcher

---

Launching applications in Mac OS X has always been a bit odd. Yes, users can drag shortcuts of apps to the dock for easy launching — but there isn’t a system-wide menu way to pull up apps (unless one puts a shortcut to the Applications folder in the dock — which is what I do). That changes in Mac OS X Lion.

Using a swipe down gesture brings up a Launchpad that showcases every app on the system, iOS style. Users can scroll through and select apps. Similar gestures and support have appeared in the beta releases of iOS 4.3. Although those gestures aren’t expected to make the final release, it does show that Apple is working to unify how apps are accessed across platforms.

---

Mission Control

---

Mission Control is another new Mac OS X Lion feature. Apple demonstrated the features at its big Mac event in October but now we have a better idea of what the feature is and how it works.

In essence, Mission Control is the Expose feature in Mac OS X fused with Spaces. Open windows are grouped together by applications and the users gets a broad overview of every open panel and application, regardless of whether it is running full screen or not.

We’d also like to see something like this implemented in future versions of iOS.

---

Auto Saving, Built-in Versioning and Resume

---

Apple is introducing a system-wide auto-save feature in Mac OS X Lion. That should help prevent situations where a user writes a 2,000 word post in a text editor, forgets to hit save and then loses the entire thing when the text editor decides to crash. Wouldn’t it be nice if the OS itself could help avoid that?Mac OS X Lion will also create and store versions of documents as they are written. Previous versions can be accessed, Time Machine-style, from a cascading window setup and older versions can be reverted with one click.

Apple is also introducing new technology that will let users pick-up exactly where they left off even after restarting their Mac. That means performing a system update won’t require a user to open every document or URL window after a reboot.

It also means that after you quit an application, you can open it up exactly where you left off.

Mac OS X has long been the gold standard for having a solid standby/resume system for its laptops and desktops. I’ve had laptops in sleep mode for four months that have resumed exactly where they left off (after the battery was re-charged, of course).

Making resume even better should help facilitate that “always on” feeling you get using the iPad.

---

Mac OS X Server

---

Rather than sell as a separate version, Mac OS X Lion will come with Lion Server built in. This is a unusual move for Apple. Last year, the company discontinued its Xserve line, focusing instead on the Mac mini Server and Mac Pro Server offerings.We don’t think the message here is that Mac OS X can’t power a network server — it absolutely can. Instead it might be a recognition that central file servers are less necessary than they used to be. Regular laptops and desktops can be easily configured to run as a server.

In my house, we have five Mac OS X machines running at all times. We have a media server running FreeNAS in a closet. But in reality, we don’t need any server software to communicate or exchange files between Mac machines.

A very cool feature in Lion Server is file sharing for the iPad. When configured to support WebDAV, Lion Server can offer iPad users access to documents in apps like Pages, Keynote and Good Reader. For businesses that embrace the iPad, this is a great move.

---

Preparation for a Touch Based Future?

---

It’s very clear that iOS — especially the iPad — is influencing the future direction of Mac OS X.The success of the iPad, the new MacBook Air and the Android tablets indicates that the portable computing device many of us use in a few years won’t be a laptop, but a tablet. I would expect to see a MacPad — an iPad/MacBook mashup — in the next few years.

With that in mind — and knowing that Apple has some interesting patents on touch-based technology — I wonder if Mac OS X Lion is being launched as a kind of transitory OS.

There are fundamental differences in how touch-based systems like iOS operate compare to traditional input systems like Mac OS X or Windows. Not only are user interface and user experiences different, the way information is accessed is different too.

Mac OS X Lion is the first step in bridging the gap between those two universes.

What are the places and who are the people around you right now? With a new Android app called ToothTag, you should be able to get a lot more useful answers to that question.

Not only will this app find nearby restaurants, it can also tell you whether your friends are at the same party — without having to check-in. It knows where the heck you left your car. Most importantly, it is able to do all this without battery-sucking technologies like GPS.

ToothTag is a treasure trove of proximity-based information. It goes beyond regular location services and novel-but-worthless check-ins, showing you what’s in your immediate surroundings and giving you multiple options for how to make that information truly useful. Instead of GPS, it relies on Bluetooth, Near-Field-Communication (NFC), and WiFi. Power management — long the bane of innovative mobile apps — has been ToothTag’s plan from the start.

The app lets you tag Bluetooth and WiFi devices — such as headsets, laptops, mobile phones, and access points. Once these are tagged, you can set up automated actions when you’re within a given distance from them. Automated actions, such as mobile alerts or emails, can occur without your ever having to think about the app.

Here are a few examples:

• You’ve planned a night out on the town. You drive your car and street park it, using ToothTag to drop a Google Maps pin at your car’s location. When you’re ready to drive home, ToothTag lets you find your car with ease.
• You walk into an event at your favorite nightclub. You’ve tagged the joint in the app and told ToothTag to automatically check you into that location on Foursquare any time you’re there for more than 10 minutes. Hello, Mr. Mayor!
• Once you’re in the event, you open ToothTag again to find out which of your friends are already there and how you’re connected. The app shows you a Facebook friend you know well, a LinkedIn connection that you wanted to meet in person, and a Match.com prospect with a high percentage of compatibility with you — all in a single, scrollable list on your mobile.
• You’ve been trying to connect with a special someone for a while, and you’ve tagged her mobile in ToothTag. Unbeknownst to you — but knownst to ToothTag — she’s at the same event as you. ToothTag automatically rings your phone to alert you that Ms. Right has entered the building. The app also tells your phone to fire up Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” when your ex walks into the party, a clever alert you set up to avoid drama.

ToothTag is free for consumers, and it’s available right now in the Android Market. Creator Dave “Gadget Guy” Mathews says his company, NeuAer will be working on an iPhone version, but ToothTag’s system requirements aren’t entirely met by the iPhone 4.

The app is built on a unique proximity platform called, interestingly enough, ProxPlatform. This platform will allow devs to add “presence events” to their applications.

ToothTag, as a free consumer app, is meant to serve as a use case for what ProxPlatform is capable of doing. The possibilities are exciting as they are lucrative. ToothTag’s features could be tweaked for AR mobile gaming, mobile commerce and other types of mobile apps. Mathews and team hope to make money from the proximity platform rather than the consumer app. They plan to introduce a MySQL-style freemium model soon.

Android users, let us know whether or not you like it, and what features or functions you’d like to see in upcoming versions.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

Toyota plans to unveil an all-new in-car entertainment platform today at CES 2011. Called Entune, and complete with its own apps from popular providers and advanced voice recognition, it’s a shot across the bow at rival Ford’s Sync and MyFord Touch.

The system runs on a proprietary operating system that connects with a driver’s mobile phone to access Toyota’s app store, stream audio, provide safety and telematics data and download software updates.

Mobile apps at launch are Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Clear Channel’s IHeartRadio music streaming service, plus Pandora, Movietickets.com and OpenTable.

Other apps may soon become available, but they’d be vetted by Toyota first to ensure they’re not encouraging driver distraction. “We’re not at a place where it’s a completely open platform, but it’s not completely closed either,” said Jon Bucci, vice president of Toyota’s Advanced Technology Department. “We first want to make sure that the applications we develop are exactly what our customers are asking for, and parallel with that, making sure they can be delivered appropriately in a vehicle.”

Bucci also praised Entune’s voice recognition software, developed by Voice Box Technologies. “During a Bing search, where you’re searching for a location while driving, it will go offboard and use Voice Box conversational voice recognition software to allow easier operation of the search as opposed to having to memorize robotic commands,” he said. “You can talk naturally. The voicebox technology is able to understand utterances like ‘um’ or ‘uh.’”

According to Bucci, another strength of Entune is that it doesn’t require the latest smartphone to run, nor will it become obsolete every model year. “At this point right now, our goal is to maintain compatibility with feature phones that are within the past twelve months,” he said. Cars equipped with Entune will also feature satellite and HD radio receivers.

“There’s a mismatch between the cycle time and development of the car and for a consumer electronics device, and that’s been perplexing us in the automotive industry,” Bucci said. Now, with wireless updates to Entune that work just like a software update on any other platform, even an older Toyota’s system can get an upgrade. “We can push that to the customer wirelessly without having to get software reflashed at the dealer,” he said.

The system will be available on “select vehicles in calendar year ‘11,” said Bucci, and the Entune app will soon be available for download at Toyota.com in addition to iTunes, Android Market and Blackberry App World.

“At this very moment, it’s a little early for us to reveal models and specific positioning by vehicle,” he said, but expect to see Entune in dealerships shortly after CES. We’re looking forward to checking it out.

Images: Toyota

FarmVille has been unseated as the most popular application on Facebook by an application called Phrases, ending FarmVille’s long domination of Facebook’s top application charts – at least if you look at monthly active users.

In February 2010, the massively popular FarmVille game had over 80 million monthly active users, towering not only over all other games on Facebook, but also over all other applications of any kind. Currently, Phrases is on top with 54.4 million monthly active users, followed by FarmVille which has 53.9 million monthly active users. However, since Phrases – a do-it-yourself quiz and trivia application – is not technically a game, FarmVille is still the most popular Facebook game.

Digging deeper into the numbers from AppData, which tracks applications on the Facebook platform, reveals that Phrases probably won’t stay on top of the monthly active user charts for long. Looking at daily active users, FarmVille is still well ahead, and Phrases has in fact been losing ground as it recently stopped serving U.S. users. With a sharp drop in daily active users in the middle of November, Phrases is likely to lose the number one spot when the monthly user data gets updated.

It’s also important to note that Farmville is a huge time investment, while Phrases is an entirely different type of application, which doesn’t require nearly as much activity from users.

As for the rest of the list, Texas HoldEm Poker, FrontierVille and Mafia Wars – the third, fourth, and fifth app according to AppData – are also created by Zynga, which is the company behind FarmVille. Add to that Zynga’s plans to release another FarmVille-style game soon, CityVille, and we can safely say that Zynga is still the absolute king of the Facebook app platform. FarmVille’s temporary slip from the top app position won’t hurt it much, if at all.