Digital wealth management company Personal Capital raised $50 million in a Series D round, said a company news release Wednesday. The funding round was led by Corsair Capital, BBVA Ventures and USAA, it said. Personal Capital offers software and apps for individuals to manage their investments, it said. The company’s technology helps more than 600,000 customers track more than $100 billion, it said.
Early 2016 may still be too ambitious of a schedule for the TV incentive auction, Credit Suisse said Wednesday in a research report. “Given the forward and reverse structure of the Incentive auction, it is the most complicated of the spectrum auctions so far,” the firm said. “These complications in addition to the broadcasters' challenges are likely to delay the auction further, in our opinion.” The FCC recently delayed the auction's start to early 2016 (see 1410240048). Mid-2016 seems more likely, the firm said. Credit Suisse also said there is a “moderate chance” the FCC will opt for a “full blown” Title II Communications Act reclassification of broadband. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler “could look to apply Title II or some form of Title II to broadband services, but will face much less of a challenge if he can find some middle ground with the broadband providers,” the firm said.
Mobile messaging company HeyWire Business is implementing text-to-911 capabilities for its Business Messenger app, a month ahead of an FCC deadline, the company said in a news release Wednesday. The app allows users to send and receive texts from their office phone numbers.
Larger smartphone screen sizes correlate with longer sessions of app usage, said a report from IHS and Mobidia Technology. The report covered more than 25 smartphone models and usage in the Germany, Japan, South Korea, the U.K. and U.S. Smartphones with higher-resolution screens have higher data consumption, but resolution is less important than physical screen size as an indicator of higher data use, the report said. "Companies building apps for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus need to know what greater engagement these large screen iPhones will deliver for their genre of app, because higher engagement means more revenues through in-app purchases and advertising," said Ian Fogg, IHS senior director-mobile & telecommunications. The prevalence of large screens within the Android world means that “Android becomes a significantly more attractive platform than in years past,” it said. Streaming video and social networking apps have a stronger link between increased data consumption and screen size than do mobile games or chat apps such as WeChat and WhatsApp, the report said.
Clarification: Tidal Music, the lossless streaming service that launched Tuesday as the U.S. and U.K. versions of WiMP (see 1410280037), calls itself a “high-fidelity” and "high-quality" music streaming service, not a high-resolution audio service. Though industry pundits have commonly referred to lossless-music streaming services like Tidal generically as "high-resolution" (see 1403260064), the specs for Tidal posted in a video at the Tidal website are below those of the formal industry definition for High-Resolution Audio announced in June (see 1406130065).
Despite the continued surge in photo sharing through social media sites, nearly six in 10 consumers who were canvassed in four countries said they had bought printed photo products in the past 12 months, Futuresource Consulting said Wednesday in a research report. The firm canvassed 4,000 consumers in France, Germany, the U.K. and U.S. to ask how they share digital images and use specific websites and smartphone and tablet apps, it said. It found that 57 percent of those surveyed in the four markets had bought a "personalized photo product," such as photo prints, photo books, calendars, posters or cards, in the past year, it said. Photo prints were the most popular item, having been purchased by 42 percent of the sample, with photo books in second place at 23 percent, it said. However, "when it comes to sharing photos electronically, consumers have now turned to the smartphone as the primary device to share photos with friend and family, taking over from last year's number one device, the laptop screen," it said. "In terms of online photo sharing, email remains a popular platform to share photos and this could be due to the perceived higher level of security/privacy. If this is the case, we can expect this to remain true for the future." When asked which websites or apps consumers use to share photos, Facebook was the most popular choice in all four countries, but Snapchat was the fastest-growing, it said. The firm said smartphones have become the devices most often used to take photos, because smartphone cameras "are constantly improving in terms of lens and resolution, as are the weight and battery life of smartphones themselves, making them far more suitable as substitutes for fixed-lens cameras." That’s in contrast to last year's findings, in which use of fixed-lens cameras for taking pictures was "marginally higher" than smartphones, it said.
A Strasburg, Virginia, company called Genius SmartWatch needs to raise $100,000 through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to bring to market what it calls a "new generation" of smart watch containing an "advanced" micro-projection display technology, the company said in an announcement Tuesday. The display function on the wearable device it has developed, also called the Genius SmartWatch, increases the size of the image on the back of the hand using the newest LED technology "that works both day and night," the company said. It can also be personalized by changing the color of the projection image. The watch can be synched with a smartphone or tablet using a special Genius software app that enables the watch to display notifications, reminders, incoming calls, text messages, social media and a "wide variety of other customized projections," it said. "As part of the user-friendly functionality, you simply shake your wrist to dismiss a notification." The $100,000 raised in the crowdfunding campaign will be used for engineering, software development, testing, manufacturing and shipping, it said.
Swedish high-resolution music service WiMP HiFi launched Tuesday in the U.S. and the U.K. as Tidal Music. In an email, the company offered customers who had expressed interest in the service prior to availability a free 30-day VIP trial of the premium service, after which the monthly subscription fee of $19.95 would kick in. Non-VIP new subscribers can sign up for a seven-day free trial, according to the email. The service initially will be available via web browser through Google Chrome only. A customer support representative told us the company is working on availability on other browsers. Tidal Music expects to be available on Sonos and Bluesound networked music systems “hopefully within a week or two,” he said, along with Auralic, Bluesound, Denon, Harman Omni, HEOS, Meridian, NAD and Sonos, among others. High-res files are available in the ALAC (Apple Lossless) format, according to the company website. The music streaming service claims a music library of 25 million tracks in lossless audio.
The number of home broadband subscriptions is expected to surpass the number of home pay-TV subscriptions over the next few months, said a report by The Diffusion Group. While residential broadband penetration will soon top 100 million U.S. households, "legacy pay-TV subscription services have peaked and are in decline," TDG said Tuesday. The report, "Pay-TV Refugees," said 14 percent of adult broadband users don't use a legacy pay-TV service. That's 9 percent higher than the amount in 2011, said TDG. The consumers "provide an excellent opportunity for new video purveyors," like Netflix and direct-to-consumer TV networks, it said.
Customers of the largest U.S. consumer-facing Internet service providers “experienced dramatically poor performance” when connecting to core Internet transit infrastructure, according to a report by the Measurement Lab Consortium. The performance was often “well below" the FCC’s four-year-old "definition of 'broadband,'” said a New America Foundation Open Technology Institute news release about the report Tuesday. “The careful work done by M-Lab researchers exposes patterns of severe Internet performance degradation across the US, and suggests that ISP business relationships are a source of these problems,” said Vint Cerf, M-Lab steering committee member, in the release. “This is the first work of its kind, using open data and reproducible methods to expose complex performance issues at scale.