CrunchGear |  |
- Applifier Hits 100 Million Installs, Brings Social Game Discovery Bar To Mobile
- Google+ Ad On Facebook Is Banned
- Trimit Summarizes Emails, Blog Posts, And More With A Shake Of Your iPhone
- … On Twitter
- Google+: One Hell Of A Trojan Horse
- Fighting Ticketmaster, The Edge Invests In Ticketing Startup
- The Endless Bubble Debate: Kedrosky Vs. Wadhwa
- Just When You Thought It Was Safe: Skype Vulnerabilities Emerge
- Whoops! Sears.com Accidentally Lists iPad 2 For $69
- Rugged Pocket Cam Round-Up: Toshiba BW10, Samsung W200, Kodak Easyshare Sport And Playsport
| Applifier Hits 100 Million Installs, Brings Social Game Discovery Bar To Mobile Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:50 PM PDT Applifier, the cross-promotional network of social game publishers, announced today that it has delivered over 100 million game installs for free on Facebook. Launched in 2010, Applifier set out on a mission to help game publishers find new users and get their games discovered on the social network, and has since grown like a weed. Now connecting over 800 games, Applifier gives publishers the tools to promote their games across their network of over 150 million monthly active users, via bookmarks and retargeting, and “featured spots”. Of course, the best part about Applifier is that developers don’t pay anything to use the service, they can take advantage of the startup’s paid user acquisition campaigns simply by adding 5 lines of HTML to their Facebook pages or browser game. Just as it is on the Web, the mobile game space is becoming crowded with games, and gamers are always looking for new games to whet their appetite, so today Applifier launched a cross-promotion solution for iOS. Android is set drop later this summer. Like its web version, Applifier Mobile is free. The mobile version will display recommended games on its bar, where users can click to get more information on the game or scroll to view other games. It’s a great way for gamers to find new games and for publishers to have a way for their games to be discovered in the crowded sea of social games. It’s a similar model to the App Store’s “Featured Apps”, which is really one of the few options app developers have in the attempt to get their apps discovered on iOS, besides spending tons of cash on marketing and publicity. Smaller game makers don’t have access to those kinds of funds, and so Applifier’s free-to-use platform offers a great alternative. As Apple recently banned the pay-per-install incentivized apps from the App Store, the fact that Applifier doesn’t pay its users to try out a new game is another leg up. While that may be disappointing for some gamers, it keeps things honest. After all, the company just wants gamers to have another way to find new games that they would enjoy playing. And help the people who make those games find them. “Our value proposition for the players is simple: Hey, you like games. How about some more?” said Applifier CEO Jussi Laakkonen. Back in January, Applifier raised $2 million for its cross-promotional platform, which it has used to help launch its new mobile outfit and help independent game makers compete against Zynga and its cross-promotional tools. It’s been an uphill battle, but with over 150 monthly active users, 100 million installs, and 800 games, it seems to be working. For more, check out Dean Takahashi’s early review of the service.
       
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| Google+ Ad On Facebook Is Banned Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:31 PM PDT What happens on Google+, stays on Google+. At least that’s the way Facebook would like to see things. Web developer Michael Lee Johnson found that out the hard way. He was trolling for Google+ friends on Facebook by running a Facebook ad asking people to add him to their Circles on Google+. Facebook, apparently, did not like him using its site to build his own social network somewhere else. So it pulled his ads. He writes on Google+:
Yeah, Facebook frowns on people promoting competing products with Facebook ads. It’s even in its Terms of Service. But seriously, where else is he going to find friends for Google+?        
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| Trimit Summarizes Emails, Blog Posts, And More With A Shake Of Your iPhone Posted: 15 Jul 2011 07:46 PM PDT Attention spans are short these days, and some might even say the Web isn’t helping this phenomenon. Regardless, time is money, and people are ever-looking for more useful ways to maximize what time they have. Many have little tolerance (or time) for long-form digital content, and we’re seeing the proliferation of the “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) mentality as it sweeps the Internet nation. And, for those addicted to Twitter, content that comes in 140 character chunks is the norm, if not the preferred way, to express something shorthand. (Other than emoticons, of course.) Enter the Trimit time-saver. Trimit is a 0.99-cent app for iOS that allows you to condense content into 1,000, 500, or 140-character summaries. Essentially, Trimit is a text auto summarizer designed to fit all those things you’re reading on a mobile device into concise synopses and share those over SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter in .txt form — all with a few clicks. And this is pretty nifty feature: Trimit can summarize your text just by shaking your device — like the opposite of mobile Boggle. No longer will your friends have to scan through your wordy Facebook status updates about your cats; just shake your phone to condense all those emotions into 140 characters. Apparently Apple likes the idea, too, as it just featured Trimit in the app store and mentioned it on Twitter. Today, Trimit gave TechCrunch a little piece of exclusive news, announcing a bookmarklet for the Web, (which is currently in beta and will be available for download within the week) so that you can get all the benefits of the app on your browser, too. For both web and mobile, text can be directly imported from any URL right from within the app using Trimit’s HTML parsing secret sauce. The bookmarklet has many of the same sharing features as mobile, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as URL sharing with a shorter summary to Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and more. You can print and save as a .txt file, sync with your computer, and import files from other devices to get at that summarizin’. Trimit Founder Nick D’Aloisio, a 15-year-old Australian transplanted to London, said that he, like me, can sometimes be a bit of a waffler, which is where the inspiration for Trimit comes from. And now, through his team’s app and bookmarklet, he’s bringing pithiness to articles and blogs, to email, text, and Tweet composition, and to the transferral of desktop documents to mobile. (Trimit would have been a huge help for those poor souls who had to read my thesis in college.) In the spirit of text summarizing, I should cut it off here. But readers may be curious as to how the auto summary works, and to that end, whether it works well or not. D’Aloisio was willing to share some of the juice behind the app, so here’s a peek. If you’re a words dork like myself, you may just like this. The algorithm uses a process of “extraction” to create a summary of the text to one of the three specified lengths. Without completely revealing the secret sauce, the algorithm scans the text using a precise keyword search to find prominent topics within its content. It disregards general words and fillers, like articles and linking words (“but”, “and”, “when”) and gives words and phrases that are signals of importance, like time and/or place adverbials (the where’s and when’s, like “in California”, for example) greater weight. Trimit also uses what is called “verb stemming”, which allow particular verbs in different conjugations to still be counted by the algorithm, like “speak” versus “spoke”, for example. This makes sure that past conjugations stay that way and don’t somehow pop into the future tense. The algorithm counts the occurrence of key phrases as well, taking into account the position of those phrases in the passage, so that they remain in order when summarizing. And though linking words are often dismissed, contradictory conjunctions like “however” are given more weight because they often are included in overviews, just as facts, figures and quotes are valued higher as well. As you may have guessed, it all works on a points-based ranking system, and the words and phrases that are ranked highest, show up in the summary. I’ll leave it at that, but you can learn more about Trimit in the video below. The Trimit team is currently in the process of raising a seed round.        
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| Posted: 15 Jul 2011 05:53 PM PDT Philosophically there is no more arbitrary milestone than the passage of time, each year we celebrate the passing of another year, see what I mean? That’s why Twitter's second five-year anniversary milestones of 350 billion tweets delivered and 600K users signing up daily fall a little flat (Twitter celebrated its first five year anniversary — commemorating when the first tweets were sent — back in March). The torrent of tech announcement posts about INSERT COMPANY HERE hitting 100K users or downloads or "shares" or tiddlywinks or badges is perpetual enough that all tech news sort of blends into a river of user numbers and APPLE VS. GOOGLE VS. TWITTER. Sigh. It is amazing to think that Twitter launched publicly five years ago today. When Mike Arrington first wrote, “Odeo releases Twitter” in 2006 he had no idea that one day the TechCrunch Twitter account would be nearing a 2 million-follower distribution channel and that he himself would reach 82K. Very few would have predicted that the SMS notifications system with no vowel in its name would turn into a seven billion dollar company employing 500 people. "If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I'd give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea," Mike wrote at the time. Mike's Twttr launch post is striking in its simplicity, at 327 words it’s sort of like the blogger version of the calm before the storm. The social network (?) microblogging platform(?) new form of mass media (?) has been the subject of incessant free press throughout its upward trajectory. There was a period of time after its breakout at SXSW 2007 where everywhere you'd look you'd see an "… On Twitter" headline: “Man Proposes To Wife … On Twitter.” “Woman Gives Birth… On Twitter.” “Shaquille O’Neal … On Twitter” “Man Tweets From Space … On Twitter.” “Bronx Zoo Cobra … On Twitter.” At this point it's news if something doesn't happen "… On Twitter." So why can’t we shut up about it? In a sense Twitter is a mirror for life and human connection. There is a unique feeling one gets watching the flood of tweets from strangers pour in for the #iranelection, #WorldCup, #WWDC or any microhashtag on Twitter. A crucial part of my morning ritual is catching up with news on Twitter watching the quips made by friends pour in on equal footing with commentary made by media luminaries. Thus I've been asking people all morning (on Twitter) about what Twitter, a service built essentially to communicate spurts of human activity, means to them. I've gotten back so much information it is tough and kind of meta to process, kind of like Twitter itself. A sampling of important Twitter moments I’ve heard so far, in more or less chronological order: When Apple released iTunes podcasting (because it forced Odeo to pivot), March 2006: the first tweet, July 2006: we cover Twttr, Twttr becomes Twitter, March 2007: it’s the breakout hit of SXSW, the fail whale supplants the fail cat, the #hashtag is invented, a plane is Twitpic'd landing in the Hudson river, CNN and Ashton's race to a million followers, Oprah joins, the co-founders play musical chairs, Twitter buying mobile client Atebits (signaling the end of friendly developer ecosystem relations), #new Twitter, more downtime, the Iran riots, the time Twitter was hacked and so on and so forth. The most striking thing is that most Twitter users have their own unique list of moments that cemented Twitter's importance (for those that can tolerate slideshows Business Insider has a really good one here). If you suspend disbelief on what percentage are spambots, Twitter has 200 million users whose #1 Twitter milestone is “Just setting up my Twttr" or the day they set up and account. The company hopes by the end of 2013 to have 1 billion users (more than Facebook) in addition to $1.5 billion in revenue and an over 5,000 person staff. Just typing out that sort of ambition is sort of painful when the service still shows me that I’m following people who I’m not and is all over the place with regards to a steady revenue stream. For what it’s worth I’d pay Twitter $10 bucks a month just to archive and thread my DMs. In fact, I think there's many that would do the same and today we're all wishing Silicon Valley’s charismatic but sort of flakey friend a very happy second birthday; Because honestly we’re all rooting for them.        
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| Google+: One Hell Of A Trojan Horse Posted: 15 Jul 2011 03:42 PM PDT There’s no shortage of Google+ in the air these days. Overeager pundits and soothsayers are hoping to be among the most visible voices on the net saying which service or company it’s going to topple, why it’s going to fail or succeed, and why it should or shouldn’t be more like this or that. It all seems awfully premature, considering Google+ is just getting started, and I don’t mean in user numbers. We’re all familiar enough with Google products to know that practically everything they’ve ever done was launched early and incomplete, whether it went on to succeed (Gmail, Android) or not (Orkut, Wave). Most if not all of the big talk surrounding the network right now will have to be adjusted in a month, six months, and a year from now. It’s fun to speculate, but Google is always playing the long game. Google+ isn’t just half-baked; they haven’t even put it in the oven yet. Let’s not judge the cookie by the dough. Is it an alternative to Facebook? Yes. To Twitter? Yes. To Yammer, to productivity suites, to Skype, to Office, to Microsoft, to Apple? If it isn’t now, you better believe it will be. Google is like a kind of Troll-Borg. You think they put out something that stands on its own, a “Facebook killer” or an “iPhone killer” — but it’s only later that you realize that the separation from the mothership was just an illusion, and the entire bulk of Google was right there the whole time. But it’s too late — you’ve been assimilated. Problem? I wrote a long time ago about how all these little projects of theirs would be connected and unified, the way the Romans unified their empire by joining all the little roads to their big roads. I thought it was going to happen with Chrome OS, but a tumultuous mobile market meant a late start there; Google+ is more of a clear step in that direction now. The thing is, as I wrote then, you can’t take the measure of Rome by looking at just one of their roads. And you can’t take the measure of Google+ right now, because it’s just the first mile. The best way to debut the connecting tissue of their web empire wasn’t to make an OS — the market wasn’t ready for that. So after an OS, what is the most popular and accessible platform? Mobile (check) then Facebook, around which there’s growing enmity, distrust, and boredom. Iron: hot. Pile all the Google services into that big wooden horse and say “here’s a nice, secure alternative for sharing things with your friends.” Don’t mention the fact that lurking inside it (waiting for a reveal a few months down the line) are a hundred ways of sucking users away from their existing services — in ways that neither Facebook, Microsoft, nor Apple can. Is it about social? Yeah, because that was the face Google needed to wear this week. Beware of geeks bearing gifts. I suppose I’ve done what I cautioned everyone else not to do: speculate on a product that’s barely even there. 10 million users is great, but the meteoric rise and fall of countless web services can bear witness to the fact that the first month is probably the least important in a service’s lifetime. Around Thanksgiving we might be talking about how silly we all sounded talking up the ghost town that is Google+. Or maybe some of us will be calling an emergency meeting in the board room because Google just ate our business model alive. Whatever the case, I feel confident in saying that Google’s long haul plan for + is subtle, sinister, and far-reaching. Not evil, exactly, but cunning and ruthless. Sure, right now it seems like it’s aimed at Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter, but when the stakes are this high, you better believe they’ve got guns pointed at everyone in the room. Comparing features with its immediate competitors misses the point, and at any rate the landscape shifts so frequently that such comparisons are fleeting to begin with. Think big, and think sneaky. Eric Schmidt seems like a nice guy, but I sure would rather have Zuckerberg or Ballmer for an enemy. I guess we can continue to talk about it, but personally, I’m getting some popcorn first.        
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| Fighting Ticketmaster, The Edge Invests In Ticketing Startup Posted: 15 Jul 2011 02:30 PM PDT Ticket Text, the makers of Ticket ABC, a white label mobile ticketing solution, announced today that they have raised $350,000 in seed funding from The Edge, a.k.a. David Evans, or the guy who plays guitar for U2. Several other Dublin and London-based angels participated in the round, with Ticket Text’s total investment now at just over $1 million. The Irish startup will use this infusion of capital to expanding its service in Europe and eventually to the U.S. Ticketmaster has long been a source of grief for consumers, with its high fees and charges, especially considering the ticket company has long had a nearly monopolistic grip on music ticketing. Today, venues, promoters, and artists are looking to bring their ticketing solutions back in-house — out of the reach of the ticket agencies that control pricing, customer data, etc. But existing choices really just consist of outsourcing to an agency or using a licensed ticketing solution. Ticket Text wants to change all that by providing a low cost white label ticketing and venue management solution that attempts to put the control over ticketing back in the hands of the little guy. For starters, there are no upfront, annual or customization costs, and all the data is owned by the client. The solution also offers an automated refund process, and Ticket ABC users can reissue their tickets, both pain points for a number of ticket solutions. Ticket ABC also offers an integrated wireless solution that enables clients to scan mobile and eTickets at multiple places within a venue. Founder and CEO of Ticket Text Mark McLaughlin said that the team has made a point to architect mobile into the core of the Ticket ABC solution, because they believe that ticketing will become commoditized, so the key for venues and ticketing companies in the future will be to know where their customers are at the venue when they scan their ticket, so that they can communicate with them there and up-sell. Ticket ABC has also been optimized for mobile so that consumers can purchase tickets from mobile browsers and apps. Other great features include the ability to create seat maps, set zone prices, seat statuses, and seat rankings — and for the consumer the ability to choose seats when buying tickets — all baked into the solution’s UI. And because Ticket ABC recently added support for another payment service provider, if there are outages or problems, the solution has the ability to switch providers. Always good to have a “Plan B”. Lastly, Ticket ABC comes with social features that allow its clients to promote their events on Twitter and Facebook, so that users can share what events they’re attending and when they plan to purchase their tickets. The solution also adds a “Buy Tickets” button to a venue or business’ Facebook page, which is a nifty little feature. And because venues may not want to create a whole new separate site for ticketing, the solution provides an embeddable widgets to that ticket providers can add the solution to their own site. As to the cost of the solution, there is a flat fee of 5 percent, plus a 99-cents per transaction, which includes payment service provider costs, credit card and hosting fees. Ticket Tex hopes that by charging transactional fees rather than charging upfront, annual or customization fees, the pricing will allow client revenue to be generated proportionally to the costs of using the solution. Ticket ABC’s current clients include fabric, Pacha, and Bird On The Wire. For an example of a Ticket ABC solution, check one out here.
       
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| The Endless Bubble Debate: Kedrosky Vs. Wadhwa Posted: 15 Jul 2011 02:03 PM PDT  With valuations for tech companies going through the roof from Facebook on down to Dropbox, the endless bubble debate sees no end. Paul Kedrosky and Vivek Wadhwa recently got into it on Bloomberg West TV. Professor Wadhwa thinks it will all end badly with Grandma losing her piggy bank. Kedrosky points out that bubbles usually occur at the tail end of a market run-up, and he predicts we have at least a good 4 to 5 years left for this one. He compares Wadhwa to a central banker trying to take the punch away at a party before the party even begins. Wadhwa sticks to his guns and that “when this little bubble around social media bursts” it will take down all tech valuations. It’s a spirited debate. Watch the video and tell us who you think is right in comments.        
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| Just When You Thought It Was Safe: Skype Vulnerabilities Emerge Posted: 15 Jul 2011 01:31 PM PDT Silly hackers are always trying to ruin the Internet and they have found yet another target in the form of popular VOIP software Skype. According to the sweetest text security report ever, linked from h-online’s recap:
I love that—output sanitization. Basically what this means is that an attacker can embed JavaScript in the mobile phone field of his or her profile description. Skype doesn’t filter this field which means this JavaScript can be executed when a contact of the attacker logs in. From there, all kinds of bad things can happen like account access or even system level access. According to Levent Kayan, the current version of Skype is affected (ver. 5.3.0.120 ) and Skype is aware of the issue and should have a patch available next week. Skype is downplaying the issue a bit noting that “the attacker must appear in the victim’s list of frequent contacts” in order to take advantage of the security issue. What is the moral of the story? Until next week, remember that your mother-in-law overseas (with whom you Skype on a regular basis) can now compromise your system and bring you down! Beware! [via The H Security]        
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| Whoops! Sears.com Accidentally Lists iPad 2 For $69 Posted: 15 Jul 2011 01:05 PM PDT Anyone looking for a $69 16GB iPad 2? Apparently, some IT guy over at one of Sears’ third-party resellers, GSM On Sale, had a bit of a face-palm moment: the site temporarily listed the iPad for $69. Oddly enough, the listing claims that you'll save a whopping $30 by taking advantage of this deal, posting an original price of $99.99. Honestly we'd snatch up an iPad at either of those price points, if at any time, in any world, it was possible to do so. Sadly, it is not. The item has been de-listed, even though the page still remains if you have the right link. Right now Apple lists the 16GB iPad 2 for $499.99, so you'd actually see savings of almost 85 percent had this deal been for real. We're not sure if purchases made before the de-listing were honored, so if you're one of the lucky few who stumbled upon the page early, let us know if they held up their end of the accidental bargain. We'll be sure to keep your name confidential so the millions of people who paid $499 and up don't come after you in your sleep.        
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| Rugged Pocket Cam Round-Up: Toshiba BW10, Samsung W200, Kodak Easyshare Sport And Playsport Posted: 15 Jul 2011 12:52 PM PDT Summer is here, and there’s a good chance some of you are thinking of picking up something to document your vacations with. iPhones and point-and-shoots are all well and good, but if you want to take it to the pool or the beach, it’s nice to feel sure that an errant splash isn’t going to disable your camera permanently. We’ve got a few water-hardened Flip-esque pocket cams here for you to choose from, but which deserves your hard-earned cash? I’m not including image samples because to be honest, all these cameras have tiny sensors and small, weak lenses, which combine to produce noisy images with poor sharpness and so on. But they’re cheap and vacation-proof (i.e. immune to trips in shallow water, sand and dirt, and short drops). You can’t have everything.
Here they are, in no particular order:
Pros:
Cons:
I liked the old Playsport, and the new one seems to be an incremental improvement. It’s more compact, and has an ostensibly ergonomic layout — for right-handers, at least. There’s less of a plastic-y feel than the other devices and personally I think it looks the best. It’s much heavier than Samsung’s similarly sized BW10, but the shape is better.
There are several extra video options: in addition to 1080p/30, there’s 720p at 30 and 60 fps, and a WVGA (640×360) mode for more manageable file sizes and SD playback. Navigating the menu is an exercise in patience, however; the d-pad is stiff and moving between selections is slow. The LCD, while small, is easily the sharpest of the cameras. I found it was a bit too easy to open up the areas where the device’s ports are. A simple slip of the hand (or a could pop open your SD door and in goes the sand. The other cameras have significantly more security in this area.
Pros:
Cons:
The W200 is easily the biggest of these devices. It’s still fairly small, of course, but it feels more bulky. It also feels nice and solid, and that feeling extends to its port doors, which are too easily opened on the Playsport and too fiddly on the BW10. The W200′s doors are spring-loaded and open only with effort — but the good kind of effort. They open when you want them to.
The screen is the biggest of the lineup here, not by much, but it’s worth mentioning. The extra space is used to display info in black bands above and below the picture. The menus are attractive and quick to navigate. The d-pad feels stiff but actually responds very well. Unfortunately the middle button is very deep, as it is used in photo mode to set focus, and you have to press it in quite a ways to make a selection. Not a truly substantial issue, but it bothered me. There’s a flip-out USB plug at the bottom, which is handy if it works for your setup, and a pain if you’d just rather have a port to plug a cable into. There are only two video modes, 1080p/30 and 720p/30, which is too bad. It has the admirable ability to “pause” the recording without creating a new file, which will be welcomed by many who don’t feel like editing after the fact. It felt better taking still pictures than the others, the camera-shaped Easyshare Sport included. Also it just about gave me a heart attack suddenly making a droplet noise for its auto-off procedure. You can turn that off.
Pros:
Cons:
The BW10 is the simplest to operate of these devices, all of which are pretty simple to operate. But the BW10 is ready to take a picture or video at any moment, and you can take pictures while you’re taking video. The LCD has two modes, one showing just what you record and one showing the whole picture with guidelines showing what the camera will actually record. Wait, what?
Yes, apparently Toshiba felt that instead of recording everything it can see through the wide-angle lens, the BW10 should cut off the edges and only record the middle. Anything outside the boundary of the box won’t be recorded – even though it’s there. What the hell? I’m pretty sure I’m not mistaken about this, and it’s just a really dumb limitation. The BW10 also takes a long time to recover from lighting changes. Going from outdoors to indoors, the shot will be dark for several seconds while the camera ratches open the aperture. It takes a long time and actually also affects the cast of the image, going from warm to cool as the aperture opens. The port doors are very secure — too secure, I might say, since the tiny switch you need to hit can’t be done easily with a finger. Not a big deal really, but it’s annoying that opening the door should be a precision action.
Pros:
Cons:
The Easyshare Sport is more of a budget point and shoot that happens to be waterproof, but it seems to fit in with these guys more than other point and shoots. The trouble is it’s just not very good. There’s a big grip in which fit the AA batteries that power it, but the shutter button isn’t on top of it, where you’d expect it to be. The control layout is a bit arbitrary overall. Why aren’t the zoom buttons mapped to the D-pad, for instance? Why is the D-pad so small, and the center button so hard to hit, that I end up hitting every direction at once when I try to select a menu option? Why isn’t video next to “auto” in the mode select? The whole thing gives an impression of being thrown together with no design at all.
The quality isn’t impressive, either. It looks like it has a real lens but it’s more or less a pinhole, like the rest of these cameras (which also go to some length to make it look like they have real, round lenses), and its slowness shows in the choppiness of the image on the LCD. Even in a well-lit room the image was dim and jumpy. There is only one video mode (two if you count underwater, but I don’t) and I don’t trust it. To get at the USB port you have to open the bottom panel where the batteries and SD card go, and it’s a pain in the first place. No grip and having to press in two directions at once means if your hands are wet, forget about it. Not really user-friendly. Our pick
The Toshiba makes too many compromises, and I wouldn’t pay a dollar for the Easyshare Sport. So it’s between the W200 and the Playsport. Here’s how it breaks down in my opinion: Playsport
W200
I can’t tell you which is the best choice for you. If I absolutely had to choose, I’d go with the W200 simply because the end product is better — none of these cameras produces good images, but the Playsport was significantly less sharp in images and video. They have the same MSRP, so think hard about what part of the camera is important to you and make a choice based on that.          
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