Google, Vocre, Apple, And Now Raytheon Diving Into Cloud Speech Recognition

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More

If you were following along at Disrupt SF, perhaps you caught Vocre’s impressive demonstration of their near-real-time spoken translation app. As I was watching, I was picturing the gears turning behind the veneer of the app, though: the cloud transcription, translation, and speech APIs, and how there’s a nice big market for this kind of thing. Google knows it, and of course we’ve had speech on Android for a long time. Apple knows it, but took its time to release it in a more consumer-focused package.

Now even defense contractor Raytheon is getting into the game. Their TransTalk app, which has emerged from the soup of defense contracts and government research funds that is DARPA, is specifically designed for deployment in the middle east.

It’s for Android, which jives with the military’s earlier lean towards the operating system, though it look simple enough that it wouldn’t be much of a task for the defense giant to port it to a government-sponsored fork or whatever gets decided on.

The app itself (running on a Motorola Atrix) is a simple affair; it’s meant for deployment with English-speaking troops and has very little in the way of decoration. You select a language (Arabic, Pashto, and Dari are supported, as these are the primary dialects in the middle east theater), speak to it, and it prints and speaks a translation. The other speaker does the same, but pressing a different button.

So the app isn’t noteworthy for its purpose, but what is interesting is that it isn’t a self-contained app, but rather calls out to the cloud. Military applications tend to concentrate as much functionality as possible on the local device, because as you may have heard, warfare tends to be on the unpredictable side, and data infrastructure isn’t guaranteed. So cloud solutions, as practical as they may be for a consumer application, have been viewed with skepticism by the military establishment.

On the other hand, could the choice be viewed instead as shrewd, considering the efforts that DARPA and others are going to in the creation of a connected battlefield? My guess is that this isn’t actually a strategic move, but a pragmatic one: they bait the hook with a cloud solution and reel it in when they’ve got the resources to make it something locally-hosted. Last year they showed a similar app but on a larger platform. Miniaturization isn’t a trivial step, and they probably thought it worthwhile to gauge interest with this cloud version before going all in. Right now the military smartphone platform is still in flux so it would be unwise to start loading their eggs into one basket or another. But decentralized processing isn’t such a bad bet to make, and Raytheon seems to understand that.

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After A Cancelled Keynote, Benioff Strikes Back; Talks Future Of The Cloud (From A Restaurant)

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The fun continued this morning at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco. Or, I should say, the fun continued at a restaurant across the street. Fine dining and location aside, for those unfamiliar, yesterday afternoon Oracle CEO Larry Ellison cancelled a keynote that was planned for this morning by none other than his former employee and frenemy: CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff.

As we reported yesterday, Benioff tweeted last night to his followers, “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”

Though Oracle representatives were quick to say that the cancellation was simply a result of “overwhelming attendance”, and that Benioff was offered a keynote later in the week, it’s hard to say that this isn’t the result of something more than a full schedule. Puh-leeze. Then again, whether or not it betrays the simmering feud between Ellison and Benioff (and who has the keys to the “real” cloud), it was also just a genius promotional move by the Salesforce CEO. Let’s call a spade a spade.

In an address to reporters this morning at the Ames Hotel in San Francisco (ahem, not the Moscone Center, the scene of OpenWorld), the Salesforce CEO said that he had petitioned Oracle last night, specifically Judy Sim Oracle’s CMO, who Benioff says he’s known for years, hoping to win his spot back on stage. Sim was apparently not in favor, and as Benioff is scheduled to fly to Ohio on Thursday, Oracle was obviously unwilling to double back and offer Benioff the opportunity to give his keynote today.

In reference to the seemingly passive-aggressive move by Oracle, Benioff said, “normally, no one would have cared what I had to say today”, but because of the traction the cancellation was able to garner last night on blogs, Facebook, Twitter et al, many more people are paying attention to this than might have otherwise. And I daresay the Salesforce CEO was enjoying it.

Benioff said that Larry Ellison had once taught him to read and internalize “The Art Of War” by Sun Tzu, in which the high ranking Chinese military general and strategist advised readers to “ignore the anger” and use it for good. All Ellison had to do in response was say to his staff “let me know what he says, and thanks for bringing it to my attention”, he said. What’s more, according the Salesforce CEO, Oracle knew exactly what he planned to say in his keynote, as they gave Oracle the slides he would share during his keynote beforehand, which he said were very similar in nature to the talk he gave at Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference back in August.

Not to mention, as the New York Times reported last night, a keynote speech at a top conference like OpenWorld can cost the speaker up to $1 million. According to Benioff, Oracle offered him his money back. So, clearly, they weren’t particularly eager to reverse their position.

Outside of their business strategies, the Salesforce and Oracle CEOs both are quick to acknowledge their mutual respect and admiration, but when it comes to the future of technology, the future of the cloud, and the different approaches that each company takes to their business strategy and revenue models, there’s little to no love lost.

Last year at the OpenWorld Conference, Benioff seized the opportunity to take a few digs at Oracle’s philosophy and its software, most notably calling Oracle’s Exadata system “the false cloud” that is far from aligned from what enterprise customers want and need in today’s cloud computing world. And, of course, Ellison was not one to retreat from the jab, using his keynote to express problems with, in particular, the security of Salesforce’s architecture, saying, “You’ve got many customers and their data just coexist in the same database, and since there’s no fault-isolation, a system failure brings down many customers”. Ellison then showed the audience a slide of Benioff’s most recent book “Behind The Cloud”, that had been altered to say, “Way Behind The Cloud”.

Oh snap! Some might say that this is just “all in good fun”, or pointless drama. But today shows that there is indeed a more-than-superficial divide between these two companies, and even though Microsoft and Oracle are the dominant players in the space, as Oracle, for one, has approximately $36 billion in revenue and a market cap of $144 billion (compared to Salesforce’s $2 billion in revenues and market capitalization of $16 billion), the hardware company is certainly all too aware of how quickly the eager young upstart is gaining.

And if Salesforce is gaining, might it have something to do with Benioff’s conception of the future of the cloud? In the past — and again today — Benioff has been outspoken in his belief that IT companies must become social enterprises — that the social revolution is very real and needs to be a significant part of the IT industry’s future.

Of course, Ellison is quick to point out that Salesforce isn’t a real cloud company, because it is applications-only, rather than apps backed by that all-important cloud infrastructure. And Oracle, Ellison believes, is more typical of a cloud computing company with its end-to-end stack is far from a partial cloud, nor does it lack the virtualization traditionally pictured when one thinks of the cloud — and something that he believes Salesforce does not offer to the same extent.

On the other side, Benioff said that his company’s strategic acquisitions of Heroku, the Ruby-based cloud app deployment and scaling platform, Radian6, and Jigsaw over the last 18 months, while expensive, were important moves forward in allowing the company to realize its social future. “We can’t believe everything ourselves”, he said. In particular, Benioff was so excited about the Heroku acquisition that he led it himself — largely because of the appeal of Heroku’s multi-language and multi-tenant platform, which is what enterprise cloud customers really want, the CEO said.

Because of Salesforce’s tight integration with Facebook, with the Heroku acquisition, Salesforce has allowed developers to go straight to Facebook to build applications right on the social network that automatically integrate social features and make the Salesforce experience more in tune with the current needs of businesses.

While showcasing Chatter (Salesforce’s Facebook for the corporate customer) today, Benioff admitted that his company’s adoption of non-proprietary software and social media is “contrarian”, and many in the industry (including Ellison) disagree with this direction. Yet, he is firmly of the belief that “social technology is shaking our industry at the core” — and don’t expect the company to be pivoting on its social mantra anytime soon.

“The message of this show is proprietary hardware and software are the future”, the Salesforce CEO said, “our message is beware of the false cloud. It is not efficient, it is not democratic, it is not open”. And who does Benioff see as the main proponent of the false cloud? Take a wild guess.

It has also become clear that Benioff’s tweets from last night irked Ellison — as well as others at Oracle, as MarketWatch reported that NetSuite Chief Executive Zach Nelson criticized Benioff’s words in an email saying, “Last time I looked, Salesforce.com is built on the Oracle database, so I think Marc slamming Oracle for not being a cloud provider is a bit bizarre”. Benioff responded by saying that Oracle’s technology is one part of Salesforce’s infrastructure that also relies on technologies like Dell to make Salesforce hum.

Concluding his question and answer session with reporters today, Benioff was of the view that, today, Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference has become a “bigger venue and a more exciting conference” as a whole. While Salesforce may not have proprietary mainframes, he said in a dig at Oracle, Dreamforce is now big enough that the company no longer needs Oracle’s conference to get their message out.

Thus, in reference to his company’s future (or at least his own future) at Oracle’s conference, he concluded: “This is probably our swan song”. And just like that, the standoff takes another step forward.

But wait, did Benioff just beat Ellison at his own game?

(More on the cancellation from last night here.)

Thanks to Reuters for the Excerpt image

Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, and went public in June 2004. Salesforce has been a pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through its innovative AppExchange directory of on-demand applications, and its Force.com “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) API for extending Salesforce.

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Oracle is an enterprise IT company with a specialty in database management systems.

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Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Benioff is regarded as the leader of what he has termed “The End of Software,” the now-proven belief that multi-tenant, on-demand applications democratize information by delivering immediate benefits at reduced risks and costs. Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that...

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Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.

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The Kindle Fire Will Have A Whole New “Cloud Accelerated” Mobile Browser Called Amazon Silk

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to... ? Learn More

Jeff Bezos announced a new family of Kindle’s today, including the Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch. But he also had one more thing. The Kindle Fire tablet is coming with an entirely new mobile browser called Amazon Silk. The browser is “cloud-accelerated” in that it splits tasks between the cloud and the device.

“It is very challenging for mobile devices to display modern websites rapidly,” says Bezos. “So we wondered is there some way we can use the incredible computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate mobile web browsing.”

Amazon is taking advantage of its Web services and EC2 compute cloud. Instead of waiting 100 milliseconds for each part of a web page to load, Amazon Silk can cache most of a webpage in the cloud and deliver all the subparts at since. And since EC2 has more bandwidth than a tablet ever will, it can do the same tasks in 5 milliseconds instead of 100.

In a video explaining the browser (watch below), one Amazon engineer describes it like this: “You can think of Amazon Silk as a small store for files you access. What we have done is create a limitless cache used to render the web pages you view every day. It does not take a single byte of storage on the device itself.”

The so-called split browser essentially has two homes: on the Kindle Fire itself, and in Amazon’s EC2. Basically, when a user pulls up a webpage on their Kindle Fire, EC2 handles all the rendering to optimize it for the Fire’s screen. Images are resized on the fly, and what’s more, it tracks user’s behavior. Users who visit TechCrunch all the time, will notice quicker load times because Silk detects that pattern of activity and pre-caches the site. Or similarly, if a lot of people going to the New York Times’ homepage today then click on a set of particular stories, those subsequent pages can be predictively pre-cached and delivered faster.

Amazon calls it “Dynamic Split Browsing,” and while it’s not a terribly new concept—Opera Mini similarly optimized webpages for mobile devices—it’s one that could make a huge difference in a user’s web experience.

Launch Date: September 28, 1994

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them all in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells, or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazon’s...

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With Bitcasa, The Entire Cloud Is Your Hard Drive For Only $10 Per Month

The cloud is now your hard drive. And not just a few dozen Gigabytes, Terabytes or even Petabytes, but all of it – infinite storage – for only $10 per month. This is the incredible promise of the new TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Bitcasa.

The company is launching a new cloud storage, syncing and sharing service that blows away its competitors, including hard drive manufacturers and online services like DropBox and SkyDrive, with ease. In fact, beyond the pricing and limitless storage, the most disruptive thing about the service is its complete integration with your device. You don’t see it, it’s not an icon on your desktop, you don’t drag-and-drop files or folders into it. Instead, you write to the cloud when you save a file on your computer. The cloud is your hard drive, and your actual hard drive is just the cache.

The idea of using the cloud to store files or sync files between devices is not new. Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Docs, Amazon and countless others have been offering online storage for some time. Plus, companies like Mozy, Carbonite and Backblaze use the cloud to back up your files. Other services, like Megaupload or YouSendIt revolve around sharing files through the cloud.

But Bitcasa is not like any of those services. It doesn’t move files around. It doesn’t sync files. It deals in bits and bytes, the 1's and 0's of digital data.

When you save a file, Bitcasa writes those 1's and 0's to its server-side infrastructure in the cloud. It doesn’t know anything about the file itself, really. It doesn’t see the file’s title or know its contents. It doesn’t know who wrote the file. And because the data is encrypted on the client side, Bitcasa doesn’t even know what it’s storing.

So if you want to cloud-enable your 80 GB collection of MP3's or a terabyte of movies (acquired mainly through torrenting, naughty you!), go ahead. Even if the RIAA and MPAA came knocking on Bitcasa’s doors, subpoenas in hand, all Bitcasa would have is a collection of encrypted bits with no means to decrypt them.

If you’re still having a hard time wrapping your head around this idea, think of it like this: instead of relying on the fallible and limited hard drive in your computer (or soon, your phone), your data is stored on an array of thousands of hard drives and streamed to you on demand. And in order to deal with the “offline” problem, the files you use the most are intelligently cached on your computer, allowing you to work when the cloud goes down, which is rare, as well as when you don’t have an Internet connection, which is more common.

Sharing files via Bitcasa is simple too: just copy and paste a file’s or folder’s link (a URL, available on right-click) and send to someone via email, IM or some other service. They click the link to have the file delivered directly to their desktop.

And the pricing! How on earth is it so cheap?

That’s the easy part, actually. Explains Bitcasa CEO Tony Gauda, $10/month still gives the company large margins. The fact is, 60% of your data is duplicate. If you have an MP3 file, someone else probably has the same one, for example. Each person only tends to have around 25 GB of unique, personal data, he says. Using patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques and encryption, Bitcasa keeps costs down (way, way down, but that’s it’s secret sauce), which is what makes it so affordable. Bitcasa also explained that a freemium model is on its way with less-than-unlimited storage for free.

This service sounds almost too good to be true, leaving us with questions that need still need to be answered. Does it really work? Does it slow down your computer? Can it scale? The company is positive it’s ready, but we need to see it to believe it.

Bitcasa currently has 20 patents for its technology and plans to add more in the future. It will also offer mobile applications that run in the background to do on mobile what it does on the desktop today. And it will work on other features, like real-time video transcoding, so your movies can stream to any device, without any manual effort on your part. There are even more things in the works, too, but those are being kept tightly under wraps for now.

The Bitcasa founders include CEO Tony Gauda, Joel Andren and Kevin Blackham, whose combined work experience includes time spent at MasterCard, VeriSign, Classmates.com, Mozy and more. In total, Bitcasa has raised $1.3 million from from Andreeson Horowitz, First Round Capital and Pelion Venture Partners.

Bitcasa will be free while in limited beta trials. You can sign up for access here.

Disclosure: CrunchFund is an investor in Bitcasa. 

Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig)

MP: Sounds terrific. What’s the secret sauce?

A: We have 20 patents. Most interesting, predictive capability – knows what you need before you need it. Users don’t have to do anything differently.

DM: Market research on who needs this? (People already using online services)

A: Really about managing your data. You don’t have to worry about managing your data anymore.

AL: How to compete with Apple, Amazon, Google?

A: We’re only focused on storage. We’re cross-platform. Apple’s product would only work with Apple products, for example.

JS: Can you stream movies not cached?

A: If you have bandwidth to support it. But our cache is very intelligent. Plus, people over estimate the size of data they have.

MP: Limits to use?

Each user has own account, and can share a link (file, folder) with other users. But can’t share a file to entire Internet.

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AT&T Messages Moves Your Conversations To The Cloud

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More

To celebrate the opening of their new AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, AT&T is talking about some of the ambitious projects that they and their partner developers have been cooking up. One of the most interesting so far is AT&T Messages, which attempts to make all of your messages, voicemails, and call logs accessible from multiple devices.

Their cloud communications concept sounds quite a bit like the messaging half of Google Voice, but AT&T Messages has a few distinct advantages. One big one is the fact that it integrates with your existing AT&T phone number without any extra legwork. Any message sent to an existing AT&T number gets pushed into the cloud, where it’s viewable from any other compatible device.

Another thing: while Google Voice does an excellent job of making text messages and voicemails viewable on nearly anything with a web connection, it simply can’t deal with MMS messages. AT&T Messages plays with multimedia messages just fine, meaning that users who bounce between devices won’t have to live without all the funny cat pictures their friends send them.

A beta version of the Android app has been floating around for a few weeks, but it was just updated today, presumably to fix a few usability issues. Once the app has been installed, users can log into AT&T’s messaging portal from a computer to pick up from exactly where they left off. AT&T says that there is an iOS version in the works, and that a tablet compatible version will be released this fall.

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Cloud Hosting Company FireHost Raises $10 Million

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

FireHost, a company that specializes in secured cloud hosting, has raised $10 million in Series B funding in a round led by family-owned private equity firm The Stephens Group, with earlier backers also participating.

The additional capital will be used to scale the company and enter the European market (starting with the UK).

FireHost, which is based in Dallas, Texas, is a managed hosting provider for websites and applications with critical data protection and performance needs (think ecommerce sites and healthcare IT services).

Customers including Hewlett Packard, Johns Hopkins University, Johnson & Johnson, Duke University, LogLogic, HomeAway and Sotheby’s.

FireHost is also the company that reached out to offer virtual refuge to well-known hacker turned security consultant Kevin Mitnick, after the man proved such a high-profile hacker’s target himself that his former Web hosting partner told him wouldn’t host Web pages for him anymore.

Launch Date: September 15, 2011

FireHost is a Dallas, TX based secure cloud hosting company that delivers secure web hosting solutions to Ecommerce, SaaS, healthcare IT and security companies around the world. Specializing in protecting websites with compliance and high traffic needs, FireHost makes hacker awareness, management and prevention a standard part of every hosting plan. Advanced security combined with a comprehensive portfolio of hosting solutions helps FireHost protect companies of all sizes from threats to their websites, Web applications, and other valuable data. Trusted...

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TV In The Cloud

Erick Schonfeld currently works at TechCrunch as Co-Editor. He joined in 2007 and is based in New York. Schonfeld oversees the editorial content of the site, selects and edits guest posts, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces some TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three... ? Learn More

TV is moving to the cloud. It is inevitable, just as other kinds of media from books to music are increasingly delivered over the Internet. Netflix, Hulu, and even Apple TV are making inroads when it comes to distributing traditional TV shows and movies to Internet-connected screens. YouTube keeps grabbing more of our attention, accounting for 7 percent of total time spent on the Internet in the U.S., according to comScore.

And yet the TV (and movie) industry are proving more resistant to change than any other form of media. Change will come, but it won’t happen as quickly as it is with music, news, or books.

The TV industry is digging in. Starz is walking away from its content deal with Netflix. Hulu seems to be treading water while it tries to sell itself. Even Apple is having a hard time changing the model. It recently stepped back from its attempts to offer TV show rentals (a move we saw coming a month ago) because the TV networks ever only participated half-heartedly.

But does anyone really doubt that eventually the Internet will triumph here to smash the rigid program guide that cable and satellite companies shove down our throats? Most of us only watch a few dozen channels regularly, yet we pay for 500. If we could subscribe on a per channel or per show basis, many of would. It’s just so obvious that the better experience starts with letting people watch what they want, when they want, on whatever device they want—whether that’s their TV, laptop, iPad, or mobile phone. But that is not enough. TV in the cloud isn’t just about shifting distribution. It is about making it easier to find and share new shows, and change the way we consume them. It is about making TV smarter (did really I just say that?) In a recent post on this topic, Asymco’s Horace Dediu recently wrote:

Unlike the Smartphone which could only have emerged to leverage the Internet, TV has no “smart content” to leverage. The “smartness” has to be not in the box but in the programming.

Of course, I don’t mean there’s a lack of good programming. What I mean is that there is no innovation in what a program is–the job it’s hired to do. The way it and its distribution fits into a person’s life. TV programs have not changed for half a century. They feature the same genres, the same duration, the same business model, the same series, format and scheduling and the same value chains as when “I Love Lucy” premiered in 1951. They assume people watch TV during the same time each day (while doing nothing else.) They also assume people are equally influenced by brand advertising and that audiences are largely homogeneous.

TiVo tried to make the TV smarter, but it too was out foxed by the cable and satellite companies, who co-opted its DVR technology and stuck it in their own set-top boxes. Although TiVo is now forcing them to pay patent licensing fees, TiVo itself is in decline as a consumer brand. All you have to do is look at the chart below Ed Bott at ZDNet put together comparing searches for the term “Netflix” versus “TiVo” and “Media Center.”

Bott concludes:

You could not ask for a clearer trend line: The streaming media era began in 2008, and the DVR is an endangered species.

But bolting a computer onto a TV was never really the answer. Once video content can be indexed and streamed at will, the whole experience could potentially change. You don’t wade through a program guide on YouTube, even though it does have channels. You find videos the same you discover anything else on the Internet—either through search or social sharing. Traditional TV is still locked up in your set-top box because it remains the most lucrative place for content owners to show it. TV advertising still dwarfs all online advertising, not to mention what you pay for your monthly cable bill.

Google wants to bring these two worlds of content together not just through YouTube, but also its Google TV project. The networks who control traditional TV content, however, don’t want to play along. Apple keeps trying to build bridges via its Apple TV and iTunes, but that too has been a long, hard slog. There are plenty of rumors that Apple wants to redouble its efforts in this arena, perhaps with its own actual TV with a screen and everything.

Some observers think that Apple will never get into the commodity TV business because the margins are too low. But that misses the bigger picture. Apple doesn’t want to sell TVs. It wants to reimagine the whole TV watching experience, and if it has to build TVs to do so then so be it. The other thing they forget is that the TV is just a screen. All the value is in the cloud, because that is where the content is going to be stored, searched, streamed, and shared.

The current Apple TV box is really just a media streamer with hardly any storage to speak of. Once iCloud launches, movies and TV shows will likely be a part of it. Apple’s current model is a la carte pricing. You pay for each show. While that is not ideal, if Apple can get the best shows and movies, it could still end up being cheaper than a monthly cable bill. And just like Netflix recommends shows and movies based on what you’ve already watched, Apple could do something similar to make it easier to find something good to watch. That would be a first step towards a smarter TV.

The next step would be to create a social TV guide based on what your friends or people you admire are watching and recommending. The beginnings of this type of discovery is part and parcel of an increasing number of TV companion apps on the iPhone and iPad (BuddyTV, Dijit, Yap.TV), but there is no reason why it shouldn’t be part of the core TV watching experience itself.

Eventually TV won’t be the same unless it is online and connected to everything else. A show that can’t be shared or linked to will command less and less of our attention. Scheduled TV will go away for everything except live events like breaking news, sports, and award shows. The Internet will become our DVR, but one freed from the awful user interface of the current program guide. There is no grid large enough to contain all the video content you might want to watch, and why should your program grid be the same as mine? Trust me, it will be much better once it’s all in the cloud.

Photo credit: Flickr/zizzybaloobah

With more than 23.3 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For $7.99...

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Founded in March 2007, Hulu is operated independently by a dedicated management team with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle and Beijing. NBC Universal, News Corporation, as...

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Apple TV is a network device for both Macintosh and PC computers that allows users to download, stream, and view High Definition television shows on demand via iTunes.

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Cloud Platform Startup Morph Labs Raises $5 Million

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Cloud Platform startup Morphlabs has raised $5 million in Series C funding. The round was led by strategic partners BBT of Japan and a private, Indonesia-based investor group. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.

Morph Labs offers a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that virtualizes the application environment through the use of open source technologies. The startup offers a server appliance, the mCloud Controller, which helps clients with provisioning, billing and virtual machine management.

The company plans to use the funding to expand to the south east asia region, and will be opening data centers in Indonesia and the Philippines. Morph Labs currently has 10 data center clients.

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With iTunes In The Cloud, Apple Under-Promises And Over-Delivers

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

As the summer winds down and we near the fall, we know two things are for sure about to enter existence in the world of Apple: iOS 5 and iCloud. Given that both offer third-party developers various opportunities, both are in the process of being tested by that community. And that means things are starting to leak out. Tonight brought perhaps the biggest surprise revelation yet: iTunes in the Cloud will support streaming as well as downloading of music.

Now, before everyone works themselves into a tizzy yelling “FIRST!!!”, yes, it’s true that other music services have offered cloud-based streaming before — notably both Google Music Beta and Amazon Cloud Player this past summer. But neither of those is iTunes, the largest music retailer on the planet (online or “offline”). And there are plenty of other services that are streaming-only. It now seems certain that this fall, iTunes will offer both cloud downloading and cloud streaming.

And this is a big deal because during the iCloud unveiling at WWDC in June, Apple didn’t say a word about streaming. This led everyone to believe the feature wouldn’t be implemented when the service launched — a disappointment, for sure. But it now appears that Apple pulled the old “under-promise, over-deliver” trick. iTunes Match went live to developers for testing earlier tonight and music streaming from the cloud is already up and running.

It’s entirely possible that Apple didn’t announce streaming at WWDC because they didn’t yet have the music labels’ permission for the feature and now they do. It’s also possible that they don’t feel they need the labels’ permission — after all, neither Google nor Amazon obtained it before launching their services, and both are still live. It’s also possible that the MP3tunes decision last week affected Apple’s position. Regardless of how it happened, it happened. And that’s great news for everyone.

It also shows Apple’s prowess when it comes to the little customer delights. Apple announced iTunes in the Cloud and people were excited, but a little letdown by the functionality. But Apple was also announcing it at least four months prior to launch — something they don’t typically like to do with products. When iTunes in the Cloud finally does fully launch, Apple probably wants a few other surprises to show off at the unveiling (undoubtedly at the fall event, which typically is focused around music). One of those can now be music streaming from the cloud (though a bit spoiled by the developer leaks tonight).

Compare that to the way Google launched their cloud music service. Originally unveiled at Google I/O in May 2010, indications were that the service would launch later that year. Instead, everyone had to wait until a year later at I/O 2011 to get a rough version of the service. And I do mean rough: Google Music Beta requires you to upload all your music to Google’s servers in order to work. And there is absolutely no store attached to it for buying new music online. That’s still the case now, four months after the launch of the beta. Google over-promised and under-delivered.

Compared to Google Music Beta and Amazon Web Player, there’s now little question that iTunes in the Cloud is superior. Not only can you stream any song in your library, you won’t have to upload most of them — iTunes will match them with their files already in the cloud. The only thing iTunes in the Cloud is lacking is web support. But again, iTunes is the biggest music retailer in the world — most people who buy music have access to it. Android users may be shit out of luck, but that’s probably a feature, not a bug.

iTunes in the Cloud brings other surprises too. Notably, you can stream any TV show you’ve purchased on iTunes from the cloud as well. One has to imagine that movies will be next (though the rights may be trickier there). Again, none of this was announced with iTunes in the Cloud at WWDC.

The iTunes streaming functionality also opens the door a bit more for another possibility: the “cloud iPhone“. Rumors continue to circulate that Apple could unveil a low-cost iPhone 4 alongside a new iPhone 5 this fall. And if they do, it may come with a minimal amount of on-board storage. Instead, it may rely on the cloud for most content, including music. Now that iTunes has streaming functionality, this is possible.

Below, find some videos of the iTunes Match functionality on a computer and on an iPhone, by way of Insanely Great Mac.

Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...

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TC Cribs: A Magical Journey Through Box.net (In The Cloud)

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

We’re back for a new episode of TC Cribs, and this time we’re scoping out our first enterprise company: Box.net.

Don’t worry, despite what you may have heard about enterprise software, this office isn’t dull in the slightest. In fact, it’s loaded with lush greenery, oddly placed stuffed animals, and unicorns abound. Even better: one of the cofounders is a magician.

Stay tuned til the end for a trick that will leave you impressed and vaguely grossed out.

Also be sure to check out our previous episodes of TC Cribs:

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