This Sure Looks A Lot Like Facebook’s Project Spartan [Screenshots]

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

This Facebook mobile developers page is pretty interesting, first of all because it starts with a statistic, “350 million users access Facebook from a mobile device every month,” which was just released and then because it describes Facebook mobile web app features and includes screenshots that are unlike anything we’ve seen live.

From what I can tell from the screenshots, the app’s core components, icons for Bookmarks, Messages, Notifications, and Friend Requests, seem to match the screenshots of Project Spartan that we posted earlier this summer. As we’ve written in the past, Project Spartan is the HTML5-based mobile application platform that Facebook has been working on with 3rd party developers for a while now.

The text copy of this super-up-to-date page — like from the future — describes a Facebook Mobile App integration on iOS and Android (the screenshots visible are iOS I’m assuming), except it doesn’t seem to be a Facebook Mobile App that anyone actually has access too. And the links for further screenshots of the app on Android and iOS don’t seem to work.

The developer-focused features presented here, including Bookmarking for apps, the flow from a Notification of a friend invite to a third-party app and App Search also reek of Spartan, which we’ve heard was built with the objective of getting developers to use Facebook as the distribution platform for games and other Facebook apps.

Could this just be a really fancy revamp of the existing Facebook Mobile App? Maybe, but if so it’s some revamp. I contacted Facebook for more information as to what exactly this is a while ago and they have yet to get back to me (or pull the page down), a fact which is interesting in and of itself.

In case they do eventually pull it down, I’ve included the entire page as a PDF below.

Update: Aaaaaaand it’s down. What took you guys so long?

Update 2: And we’ve confirmed with multiple sources that this is indeed Spartan and that Facebook plans on unveiling the product next week.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Baidu Looks To Leapfrog Google With Cloud-Based Mobile OS (Update)

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More

Chinese search giant Baidu is reportedly developing a cloud-based smartphone platform in attempt to dip its toes into the mobile pool. Mobile internet users in China totaled 233 million in 2010, projected to reach 957 million by 2014. For some perspective, the total population of both the European Union and the United States was approximately 800 million last year. So in China, mobile is less of a pool and more of a vast ocean.

This should be interesting.

The company is calling its platform Baidu Yi, which translates to “Easy.” Similar to the Bing integration in Mango, this OS is all about search. Smartphones that run Yi will load up a search box within seconds of turning on the phone. Other components will load in the background, but users will be able to perform a web search almost instantly. The system will also offer up to 180 GB of cloud storage space. Sounds nice — but so did webOS. Will Baidu Yi fare better?

Baidu isn’t the only Chinese company looking to get in on the OS game. Local players like Hangzhou-based Alibaba and Shenzhen-based Huawei have announced similar cloud-based platforms recently, but as far as local competition is concerned, Baidu seems unfazed. “To us, cloud computing is much more natural than to an e-commerce company or a telecom equipment maker because we have the capability to handle data, just as Google has, that’s why they’re so good at it,” said Baidu VP Wang Jing to the Financial Times.

Baidu certainly has taken a page out of the Google playbook. But just one. The current version of Yi is based on Android, but the Android you’d see in China isn’t our Android. In most cases (not Baidu’s), it’s called Ophone, a fork of Android, and it effectively removes Google from the picture. The core Android operating system is made up of a Linux kernel, licensed under GPL, with Apache middleware and user stacks. Major components of the upper layers, such as the Android Market, are Google’s to license. Chinese carriers gladly do without those core Google software products and opt to integrate their own or third-party replacements.

In other words, Android’s success in China is a bit hollow, even if it is the basis for Ophone, and now Baidu Yi. What’s more, Mr. Wang mentioned that “it is possible that we [will] launch our own operating system in the future.” Google already has big problems in China, and Android getting left behind entirely (rather than marginally) by its biggest Chinese competitor would only make things worse.

But how does Mr. Wang feel about our other hometown hero — Apple. The company has already tapped China Unicom’s 200,000 subscribers, and reportedly has plans to launch the iPhone with China Mobile, which has a user base topping 600,000. Apple only has four (non-fake) Apple stores in the country, but China is its fastest growing market in terms of sales. With those stats, it hardly seems as though Baidu Yi poses a threat.

But nothing is ever as it seems. China is both an irresistible and incredibly dangerous market for American tech companies, and Apple faces a number of obstacles within the market. For one, the Chinese government requires special wireless internet technology (TD-SCDMA) on its mobile phones. And then there’s the massive black/grey market in China for iPhones and iPads.

Baidu’s co-founder and CEO seemed to know back in March that Apple would be one of its main competitors in the mobile space. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Li made mention of the new OS as compared to iOS.

“Right now when you power on an iPhone, it takes 45 seconds before you can do anything,” he said. “In the future, one second, you turn on the device, and you can start using the box. That’s our mission for the future of the internet.” His plan is to build an OS that uses search as the basis for everything. “The goal is to let people become increasingly dependent on the Baidu Box.”

And that’s all we really need: to be even more dependent on our smartphones. Good work, Baidu.

Update: So it would seem that Baidu Yi has gone live. The OS features include an eBooks app called Yue, a Google-places style app called Shen Bian, Baidu-powered maps, and a music app called Ting. Check out the video after the jump to see Baidu Yi in action.

[Image credit: The Register]

[Video credit: MicGadget]

Baidu is the largest Chinese language search engines. Baidu’s mission is to provide the best way for people to find information online, including Chinese language web pages, news, images...

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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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Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of...

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YC-Funded Launchpad Toys Looks To Create The Next Generation Of Early Learning Toys

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Assumptions are rarely safe. But I’m sure most of you will come with me when I go out on a limb to say that, by and large, kids love toys. Yep. And they also love cartoons. This has been true as long as either have been around, however, a more recent taste to trend among the world’s wee ones: Love for the iPad. Some even said it was the toy of the year in 2010.

A new startup from Y Combinator’s gigantic summer batch of 63 companies launching today, called Launchpad Toys, agrees that tablets are an incredibly effective educational tool for kids.

In short, Launchpad wants to bring toys into the digital age. The startup is building a suite of apps for the iPad that allow children to create, learn, and share their ideas through play in an effort to become “the Lego of digital play”. The apps the startup is creating look to bring classic toys like Play-Doh, Crayola, and Erector Sets to the iPad, but with an educational backdrop that is standardized and meets national educational standards.

The first piece in Launchpad’s suite is Toontastic, a game launched in January that enables kids to create and storyboard their own cartoons (choosing from a bunch of different characters and backgrounds) and even move their characters around the screen via touch and record audio to give them a voice. The goal is to help children learn about the art of storytelling, while getting to animate their own cartoon, before sharing it with friends and family — and even winning awards.

Toontastic has been featured by Apple four times since going live and was recently added to the App Store Hall of Fame, which in turn has seen the app attract over 40,000 paid downloads and has led to its users creating over 170,000. Check out how kids react to the app here; not surprisingly, they love it. (And so do their parents, apparently, as Toontastic was the recent winner of the Parents’ Choice Award.)

But Launchpad didn’t just want the experience to be limited to a standalone app, so the team created ToonTube, a global story-telling network, which allows kids to share the stories they’ve created on Toontastic with their family and other kids from over 100 countries. Users can browse the network from within the app, vote on the cartoons they like best, and interact with other kids. If a cartoon attracts more than 8 “likes”, then the creator of the cartoon earns a badge, while each badge collected unlocking new characters to use in their stories.

The Launchpad team, headed by co-founders Andy Russell and Thushan Amarasiriwardena (who both hail from Hasbro and the Boston Globe, respectively) said that they’ve tried to take a specific educational subject matter — in the case of Toontastic, it’s creative writing and storytelling — and match it with a form of play (puppets, in this case) to provide an experience that fuses non-pedantic educational material with the fun of games.

The subject matter in Toontastic meets with late elementary-level creative writing standards, which gives parents a sense of well being while watching their young ones on an iPad — not to mention that the iPad’s multitouch functionality gives the app a collaborative spin that encourages parents and friends to join in. Touchpad also creates a parent/teacher guide for its apps; check out the guide that explains some of the educational intricacies of Toontastic and how it matches up to National Standards for Creative Writing here.

Russell tells me that Launchpad has had some great reaction from teachers across the U.S., and though the startup designs its apps to be consumer-facing (not for classroom-only use), he says that touch devices give both educational and game developers an opportunity to design for schools and kids, which was previously difficult to do because of the barrier for entry involved in integrating game consoles, etc. into the classroom. Launchpad’s suite of apps will continue to be designed with the home in mind first, but the key, he says, is to tailor the experience so that it is optimized for both.

In terms of the future roadmap for Launchpad, the founders said that they want to continue building apps that merge learning goals with play patterns, using this formula to expand into other verticals. They also plan to enable in-app purchases in the near future, to enable kids to buy new characters and backgrounds. Using the iPad’s ability to save, share, and collaborate as a launchpad, the startup is looking to help create a new generation of early learning toys. So far, they’re off to a great start.

For more on Launchpad Toys, check them out here. Let us know what you think.

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Blue For Facebook Sure Looks Like Color’s Next Hue

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

Sometimes the need to test outweighs the need for total secrecy. I’m going to assume Color CEO Bill Nguyen shares that belief. The past two days his Facebook stream has been filled with some seemingly bland pictures. But they’re not bland — they’re test pictures. And they’re sent from a new app called “Blue”.

I don’t know much about the app itself, but I was able to dig up a little bit of information — including the logo above. Judging from the name alone, I think it would be pretty safe to assume that this is at least one of the new projects the Color Labs team is working on after Color itself fizzled out.

And there’s a bit more hinting at this being Color’s next project — namely that many of the developers listed on the Blue app Facebook page work at Color (and a number work at Apple as well, where Nguyen worked prior to Color Labs). The app currently has 29 monthly active users listed.

A bit more: it appears that they settled on the “Blue” name recently after using the codename “TestJckJck” (seriously) for several weeks. You can find that Facebook app here, again with several Color/Apple people as developers.

Nguyen has been testing TestJckJck on his own profile for some time now. Blue certainly has a better ring to it.

My guess right now is that Blue is a new mobile app with deep ties into Facebook Photos. That’s interesting since Facebook may be working on their own stand-alone app in that regard. Earlier today, Nick Bilton reported that Facebook was readying a range of photo filters to use in a mobile app. This may all be related somehow.

One more thing: the URL for Blue for Facebook contains “bluecolor”.

Update: We’ve since confirmed with multiple sources that Blue will indeed be Color’s next app.

Color is a social app for photos. You take photos and then the photos appear on the fly with other photos in your vicinity. You get to see the...

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kandenchi: Designer Mouse That Looks Like A Battery

Dr. Serkan Toto currently works as the first and only Asia-based writer for the TechCrunch network, mainly covering Japan-related technology and web companies for TechCrunch, CrunchGear and MobileCrunch. Serkan also works full-time as an independent web and mobile industry consultant with a focus on the Japanese market. He is sept-lingual, holds an MBA and is a PhD in economics. Serkan... ? Learn More

Japanese accessory maker Elecom announced [JP] the kandenchi today, a wireless mouse that’s designed like a battery. The 2.4GHz device, developed in cooperation with Tokyo-based design company nendo, can be connected to your computer via USB.

Technically, the kandenchi is really a conventional three-button mouse and compatible to Windows XP/Vista/7 and Mac OS X 10.5 and up.

Here’s how buyers would use the mouse (Elecom is using only promotion pictures that show people holding the mouse with the right hand, but I suppose this works for lefties, too):

Elecom plans to start selling the kandenchi in Japan in October for $65. Ask specialized online stores like Geek Stuff 4 U if you’re interested but live outside Japan.

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