Gearor Tech Magazine

Having conquered the terrestrial realm, today’s big money is looking to the skies for new regions to subjugate. And what was a lark ten years ago now appears to be a common hobby among a certain ambitious type of mogul not given to the habit of collecting megayachts. Their millions have produced results, however, and while the shuttles have been retiring, the private space ships have been making flight after flight.

Paul Allen and Burt Rutan worked together on the original SpaceShipOne, part of a challenge to build a reliable extra-atmospheric aircraft. The design has been refined and (to an extent) commercialized by Virgin Galactic, but Allen and Rutan want to make an entirely new aircraft. And they’re not modest about their ambition: Stratolaunch Systems, their new venture, aims to create the largest aircraft ever flown. How’s that for a mission statement?

The idea is to minimize the cost of launching materials and eventually people into space. The problem with the space shuttles, and nearly every other form of space-directed travel, is that they rely on rocket boosters to launch them straight up from the ground. When you think about it, it’s a bit primitive, isn’t it?

The solution is to get the payload into the air first, give it some speed, and then boost it with the rockets to escape velocity. The SpaceShip series of spacecraft does this, riding underneath a WhiteKnight and then detaching, boosting, and escaping. Stratolaunch hopes to build all this into a single vehicle.

Powered by six 747 engines, with a wingspan of 380 feet, and requiring a runway more than two miles long, this would in fact be the largest aircraft ever to take flight – yes, wider than the Spruce Goose, though slightly lighter than the An-225. The rocket booster (built by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies) is mounted centrally, and the pilots, fuel, passengers, and payload would be put in two pontoon-like cargo areas, each the size of a jumbo jet’s. It would take off in the traditional way, fly until it reached a suitable speed and position, then boost itself into orbit.

News of the new partnership and company has been bubbling under the surface for a while, but this is the first public announcement regarding the joint venture. Money was not mentioned, possibly because the sums involved are simply to high and too complex to break down — but to produce a spacecraft from scratch isn’t exactly a minor endeavor. They are likely looking at hundreds of millions in R&D, facilities, and manufacturing. But considering the first few hundred tickets on Virgin Galactic sold out at a price of $200,000 each, it’s probably considered a smart early-stage investment in a growing industry.

With its initial public offering coming up later this week, Zynga is making a few notable traffic gains on Facebook and mobile. Older games like FarmVille are growing, not just new ones like CastleVille. The obvious reasons include it doing more advertising and cross-promotion — and getting some extra publicity out of new launches and media events.

But it looks like there’s more going. Facebook appears to have made a few adjustments to how users see app activity within the last month or so.

One way is that stories from apps are now appearing as individual items within the news feed. They’d previously appeared as bundles, with one story from the app at the top and the rest threaded underneath. Facebook had moved apps into this format more than a year ago in reaction to the spammy feeling that over-sharing apps had created. But it had a secret whitelist to let some apps from Facebook page service providers through. The unbundling could mean the company feels more comfortable with the current design and how news feed spam is handled within it. It could also be because Facebook is trying to increase growth for third party developers.

Zynga benefits from this type of change, because it’s so big that it receives a disproportional share of the results — and because it has built its organization around being able to react and optimize these types of changes quickly.

There could be another platform benefit happening, too. Facebook has also been showing a much higher number of notifications about individual apps in the past month, too. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed at least a couple invites a day from friends playing social games recently, whereas I’d had fewer in past months. The reason, my former Inside Network colleague and serious social-game-playing journalist AJ Glasser observes, is that Facebook has ungrouped these notifications. They’d previously appeared bundled up, which had decreased their visibility to players and non-playing friends.

Facebook has also adjusted how requests appear in the left-hand navigation bar, she notes. Individual app requests are now ordered by recency, with the generic “Game Requests” tab moved from the top of the requests section to the bottom.

While these changes appear to be helping Zynga, that’s not the whole story. Facebook app growth has been relatively weak in the past year or so, and many developers have been looking to mobile platforms instead. All of the changes above could help Facebook keep developers more focused on its platform.

Here are the Zynga games seeing big gains, from AppData. The company has overall grown by nearly 1.5 million DAU in the past couple weeks to nearly 51 million. It has also gained around 20 million more monthly active users, to reach 223 million. The numbers below are for DAU, as they more closely indicate engagement and revenue as well.

CastleVille, which has been growing fairly slowly since launching earlier.

FarmVille, which has been coming back up (possibly helped by its first video short):

Words With Friends, which has also gotten a big boost from the Alec Baldwin airplane incident over the last week.

Adventure World, which just had an expansion launch in the last couple weeks.

Republic Wireless, the potentially disruptive mobile phone carrier that uses special hybrid Wifi/cellular phones, has another plan to help spur interest and drastically reduce your phone costs. We’ve confirmed with the company that starting this week, it’s going to let its users make and receive international calls to any phone, free of charge. Well, that’s their aim anyway — read on for the details.

For those that missed our initial coverage, Republic Wireless is a subsidiary of Bandwidth.com — a company that gets relatively little attention in the mainstream press, but whose sprawling Internet infrastructure is responsible for powering portions of many of the most popular VoIP services, including Google Voice, Skype, Twilio, and others.

Republic Wireless taps into Bandwidth’s infrastructure to offer a phone carrier that’s a WiFi/cellular hybrid. After signing up (they’re currently in a limited private beta), Republic sells you a special Android phone that automatically connect to your Wifi networks whenever possible and routes your call via VoIP (which is far less expensive for them than traditional carrier minutes).

If your phone can’t find any Wifi networks to connect to, it switches over to Sprint’s mobile network. And because much of your usage will be routed over Wifi rather than a cellular connection, Republic can offer its service at a rate that’s much cheaper than the likes of Verizon or AT&T: it’s only $19 a month. There are a few caveats to that, though — namely, that you can’t use too many cellular minutes (you can find more details in our previous coverage).

Which brings us back to this week’s launch, which will allow Republic members to make and receive international calls for free. To do this, Bandwidth.com has managed to acquire its own country code (as was noticed by DSL Reports), which it will be assigning to Republic Wireless.

Republic has confirmed that free international calling is indeed what the country code is for, and that it will work similarly to the way other international calls work, just without the fees. If you initiate an international call from your phone over Wifi, it’ll be free of charge, no matter who in the world you call. And when your friends abroad want to call you, they just type in Republic’s ‘country’ code, 883-5110, followed by your phone number, and that incoming call will be free to both parties as well. Pretty simple, right?

Thing is, they’re not quite there yet — that’s how easy it will be, provided Republic Wireless can get other carriers to come on board. And this is where things might be a bit tricky.

In order for these country codes to work, they have to be recognized by the various carriers around the world. If, for example, one of your friends lives in the UK and is on Orange, and they call your Republic Wireless number, that call will only be free if Orange has opted into supporting Republic’s international code. And there’s no rule mandating these international carriers to sign on board. But there are ways to encourage it — get enough people to ask for it, and the carriers may well add Republic support.

To help get the ball rolling, Republic Wireless has managed to land some notable launch partners. Namely, Google, who is integrating support for the Republic international code into Gmail’s phone feature. And Republic Wireless says additional partners will be coming soon. In the mean time, they’ve also launched this site where carriers can sign up to support Republic’s International Country Code.

To sum things up,  at this point Republic’s free international calling isn’t going to be especially useful — your inbound international calls probably won’t be free. But that will change as it (hopefully) announces that traditional carriers have started to come onboard. I’m looking at this as a very ambitious and potentially awesome experiment (which could be said of the company in general, actually).

Because if this works out, to the point that it becomes the norm for carriers around the world to support Republic Wireless’s international code, it could really change the whole game as far as international calling is concerned. Free calls, to any phone, has a really nice ring to it.

Yikes, talk about unfortunate timing. With HP having just recently announced that webOS is going open source, the last thing they need is for their (small, but surprisingly capable) developer community to start falling apart. They lost Richard Kerris, VP of Worldwide Developer Relations, to Nokia back in late October — and today, another of their Developer Relations guys is headed for the door.

Chuq Von Respach, Community Head for webOS Developer Relations who describes his job as being the “primary contact point between HP and it’s webOS application developers”, has just disclosed (via the developer relations forums, in fact) that tomorrow will be his last day at the company.

While Chuq says that his leaving “has nothing to do with any of the announcements in the last couple of weeks” and that the decision to open up webOS is one he “support[s] fully”, he says that he’d already started planning the departure after an unnamed company recruited him back in October.

Alas, this just makes HP’s already difficult mission of properly opening up webOS that much more challenging. Beyond working through a mess of licensing and somehow ensuring that they’re not shining a spotlight on vulnerabilities in existing (and potentially difficult to update) handsets, they’re starting to run low on people whose job it is to keep their developer pack intact.

Best of luck, Chuq.

If the National Transportation Safety Board has their way, talking (or texting, or tweeting) on the phone while driving would be a thing of the past. The regulatory body recommended today that use of any handheld device while driving a car should be banned nationwide.

The recommendation came about while the NTSB board discussed a tragic multi-vehicle motoring accident in Gray Summit, Missouri that began when a driver using a cell phone crashed into the back of a tractor trailer.

Several states have already enacted “distracted driving” laws that deal with what consumers can and can’t do while behind the wheel, but the NTSB’s preferred course of action would extend even farther than states have dared to go. The board’s recommendation doesn’t just stop at mobile devices — hands-free devices would also be banned as well.

NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman said of the decision that it was difficult, but “it’s the right recommendation and it’s time.”

Now, the NTSB is purely an investigative body, and doesn’t have the legal authority to enforce such a ban. Even so, when the NTSB speaks, people tend to listen (as evidenced by all play this story has gotten). It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some enterprising congressman has already started drafting a bill that mirrors the NTSB’s sentiments, although how far it would ever get is highly questionable.

Still, one can’t help but wonder what would happen if a nationwide ban ever became a reality. With hands-free kits no longer allowed, wireless accessory companies like Jabra and Plantronics would see a considerable portion of their markets disappear. In-car phone connectivity is becoming more common as the model years wear on, so would that too be subject to the ban? The nebulous wording of the recommendation mentions that exceptions would be made for devices “designed to support the driving task,” which leaves plenty of room to argue the and pros and cons of each pertinent technology.