Hasta La Gadget!

We are pleased to announce a new set of amazing judges for our first TC Hardware Battlefield in Las Vegas this January. Based on the Disrupt Battlefield formula we will be pitting fifteen hardware companies against each other on our public stage.

First we’ve invited the (female) Bre Pettis of Europe, Karolina Bołądź of Gadgets3D and Zortrax. She’ll be adding some great European insight. Next up we have Ayah Bdeir, creator of LittleBits and a true hardware star. Finally we have the polarizing Scott Jordan of ScottEVest, one of the most experienced hardware and soft goods makers in the industry.

Those are just three of the amazing folks we’re bringing to Las Vegas with us. We’re also announcing that we’ve moved the application deadline to November 11 and we want you to apply.

Rules

We will review applications on a rolling basis, so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you are ready. Due to strong demand, we are unable to review applications more than once, so please do not submit a draft application before you are ready for final consideration. Please note that video demos are required. We look forward to reviewing your application.

It’s been a little over two years since Google announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and these days Motorola has basically become the most interesting smartphone player in the business.

To wit: the Google subsidiary confirmed earlier this morning that it’s been on what it calls Project Ara, an open hardware platform centered about building modular smartphones and the parts that snap onto them.

This, in short, is amazing.

The initiative has apparently been in development for over a year now, and Motorola has outlined some of the basics in a blog post here. Long story short, the design calls for a base unit (or endoskeleton) that makes up the frame of the device, along with a slew of additional modules that snap onto the thing to extend its functionality.

Are you a fan of physical keyboards? Attach one and start pecking out your emails. Need your phone to last a little longer? Swap out that battery module for a bigger one. The list goes on and on. If the timetable works out the way Motorola wants it to, it’ll release an alpha version of its Module Development Kit sometime this winter.

I’ve heard that Motorola is cooking up some interesting things in terms of sensors behind closed doors, too, and it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to think about how they could be compartmentalized for use with a modular smartphone. In fact, Motorola already outed one of them – Associate VP Paul Eremenko alluded the blog post to the existence of a pulse oximeter module that can measure the oxygen saturation of a user’s blood.

Granted, neither Motorola nor the fellow behind the viral Phonebloks concept (who the company tips its hat to) were the first to ponder out loud about the possibility of a modular cellphone.

Remember Bug Labs? They gained plenty of notoriety back in 2008 for its modular hardware – users could snap on LCD screens, GPS transmitters, digital cameras, and 3G radio modules to a chunky base unit to turn it into a device that approached the sort of functionality one would expect from an early smartphone. And if we’re being honest, the Phonebloks concept that went blew up had little chance of ever becoming an actual product, no matter how slickly creator Dave Hakkens presented it. It seems the timing was just right though, and Motorola plans to tap into that growing Phonebloks fan community to help it figure out where to take the concept.

For now, Motorola is inviting would-be users (sorry, “Ara Scouts”) to participate in missions that will aid in the company’s research. The first mission? Users are being asked to download an app and use it to share their thoughts and visions for what they’d want to see Project Ara become, and they’ve got exactly three days to get it done. Seems like a pretty harried pace, but that only bodes well for the rest of us – with any luck that may just mean the first prototype Ara devices get pushed out the door even quicker.

Nokia may be going through a hell of a transition period, but it released its fiscal Q3 2013 earnings this morning just like clockwork. The Finnish phone maker (for now, anyway) reported net sales of €5.66 billion (or $7.79 billion) in the quarter ending September, along with a surprise profit of €118 million ($162 million).

To put it mildly, those are big, big gains over Nokia’s past performance – the company posted a €115 million loss last quarter, and a whopping €564 million loss this time last year. Meanwhile, analysts expected the Finnish phone maker to report earnings of zero cents per share (which happens to be in line the figure Nokia put up last quarter) and €5.9 million in revenue in the days leading up to the release.

There’s been a considerable amount of movement on the smartphone front as well, as Nokia reported selling 8.8 million Lumia devices in Q3, up from the 7.4 million sold last quarter and the comparatively dismal 2.9 million back in the year-ago quarter. Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop ascribed that growth to a slew of recent product releases and some savvy over-investment during its early Windows Phone days, but it probably doesn’t hurt that BlackBerry – the dark-horse candidate for the 3rd place spot in the smartphone race – has definitely seen better days.

But it won’t be long at all before the nature of these earnings releases changes on a fundamental level – after all, Microsoft announced back in September that it would acquire the entirety of Nokia’s Devices and Services business for $7.2 billion in a deal that’ll close in early 2014, so we’ll eventually see the remnants of Nokia focusing on its network and HERE Maps segments. That said, net sales for both divisions this past quarter were down sequentially (NSN, formerly Nokia Siemens Networks, was down slightly with €2.6 billion while HERE dipped to €0.2 billion), making for some generally flat year-over-year growth. That’s far from a bad thing in this case though – as The Verge’s Aaron Souppouris points out, a smaller Nokia that focused solely on networks and mapping would be even more profitable than the beast we see right now.

Meanwhile, that hardware shift wile eventually change the fortunes of both companies. The move is a big (if unsurprising) get for Microsoft, which has been cautiously shifting further into consumer hardware and could use a considerable boost for its Windows Phone platform. Of course, the announcement hasn’t exactly been bad for Nokia either – its stock price jumped shortly after the acquisition news broke and has largely stayed at those elevated levels through today.

That’s not to say that the New Nokia will never again churn out a phone though, as the company will regain to right to sell low-end feature phones in 2016.

This is a developing story, please refresh for updates.

Well folks, Apple has just put up some mixed numbers in its fiscal Q4 2013 earnings release – $37.5 billion in revenue and $7.5 billion in net profit to be exact – but how exactly did the tech titan fare in terms of hardware sales?

This time around Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones (which it notes is a record for Q4), 14.1 million iPads and 4.6 million Macs during the quarter.

To put that in perspective, the average analyst prediction was for Apple to sell a grand total of 33.4 million iPhones in Q4, along with just under 14 million iPads and about 4.26 million Mac computers. Meanwhile, Apple sold 31 million iPhones, 14.6 million iPads, and 3.8 million Macs last quarter, and 26.9 million iPhones, 14 million iPads, and 4.9 million Macs in the year-ago quarter.

Phew.

So yes, if we’re taking those averages as gospel, Apple managed to come out ahead on every one of them. Despite that big iPhone sales boost (thanks in part to the recent launch of the iPhones 5s and 5c, iPad sales are essentially flat year-over-year – we’ll see if that trend sticks once those refreshed models start hitting shelves in November. The nature of the electronics lifecycle means that a cyclical dip or lull is to be expected though – with the holidays right around the corner, the company’s Q1 2014 earnings are going to be where the real money is.

Speaking of dips, we saw a few of them last quarter: Apple sold just 14.6 million iPads back then which was heralded as the first yearly iPad sales decline ever, and (perhaps more notably) the average selling price of the iPhone dipped from $613 to $580 sequentially.

It’s not exactly a shock then to see that both of these trends are still in effect, especially when it comes to iPhone ASPs. Apple makes it a point to never break down iPhone sales numbers by model, so at this point it’s tough to say how many 5s and 5c units have been sold (a situation that’s compounded by iPhone 5s supply constraints and the frequent assertion that people aren’t really buying the 5c). While iPhone ASP is down to $577 this time, though, it seems that the popularity of the higher-priced iPhone 5s has managed to keep the figure from eroding too much.

And what of the iPods? The music players (which eventually evolved into much, much more) were one of Apple’s first runaway hits, but the company generally seems happy to relegate them to the background. They haven’t been called out in an earnings release for the past six months, and they were conspicuously absent when Apple updated the rest of its hardware portfolio just in time for the holiday shopping frenzy. In case you were curious, though, Apple moved a hair under 3.5 million of them in Q4.

This is a developing story, please refresh for updates.

ScanZ, a product unveiled today at Disrupt Europe, combines a new, smartphone-connected device with a quantified self-style app to help teens battle acne.

The product comes from a company called mySkin, which plans to launch a $150,000 Indiegogo campaign this week to fund the launch (I will update this post once the campaign is live). (Update: The campaign is live.) Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Sava Marinkovich told me that the initial version of ScanZ will be able to answer two questions about a zit – when it’s going away, and what you can do to make it go away more quickly. And it can answer a more general question – whether or not you’re about to break out.

Over the weekend, the mySkin team demonstrated a ScanZ prototype for me. One of them scanned one of his zits (the team seems to have an unusual attitude toward acne – they almost cheer when they find a zit, because it gives them something to test) and the app then asked some basic questions about things like diet and cleaning products used. Then it provided an estimate of when the zit would go away, along with a list of recommended actions. As users commit to following more of the app’s recommendations, the estimated time until the zit’s disappearance goes down, say from four days to three.

Marinkovich repeated the demo on-stage at Disrupt, as you can see in the photo below.

He said that when users are scanning their skin, ScanZ is illuminating them with different wavelengths of light, and it’s using different image processing techniques to analyze what it finds, including below the skin: “We’ve developed most of this in-house, based on dermoscopy and spectroscopy.”

Apparently ScanZ also learns about your habits and your skin, bringing it all together in a personal “beauty map”, so its recommendations and predications are supposed to get smarter over time

I’m guessing there are a number of apps and products with dubious efficacy in this field – in fact, the Federal Trade Commission has gone after apps for falsely claiming that they eradicate acne. One way to alleviate any skepticism you might have is to consider the mySkin team, which includes Chief Science Officer Djuro Koruga, a professor who leads the nanotechnology biomedical engineering group at the University of Belgrade, and Chief Medical Officer Jadran Bandic, who is the head of ORS Hospital in Serbia. And mySkin’s advisors include Loretta Cirado, who’s director of cosmetic dermatology at the University of Miami.

Plus, marketing manager Irina Simin argued that ScanZ users aren’t just being asked to blindly follow a set of directions. Instead, they’ll get actual data about things like scarring risk and sebum levels, so they understand what’s happening and how their actions will affect their skin: “This basically tells you what is going on and you can make your own decision.”

mySkin expects to deliver its first ScanZ devices in May of next year, with a retail price of $249 (there will also be discounts for preorders). That might seem a bit steep for the teenaged audience that Marinkovich said he’s aiming for. He told me he’s actually expecting parents to do a lot of the buying, and he noted that SkinZ may appeal to other age groups too. (As a 30-year-old, even though I don’t think that my acne is as bad as it used to be, I still worry about break outs before I go on-camera or on-stage at Disrupt.)

And this is just the first step in the company’s vision. The plan is to use the technology for other skin health products, and to turn it into a platform that will allow other applications and services to access ScanZ data – Marinkovich said interested developers should reach out now.

“It’s the first open imaging platform that is device-based and that people can use,” Marinkovich said. “What the Raspberry Pi is for Arduino, it’s kind of like that for skin in general.”

Q & A With Judges

Q: You’ve raised $8 million in funding?
A: Yep, in two rounds.

Q: What’s the price?
A: It will cost $249 but there’s a discount of $169 for TechCrunch readers who order soon.

Q: I like the fact that everybody goes through this. Is there any other applciation of this technology?
A: Definitely. We’re starting in acne which is “the highest pain point” and “an emotional issue”. Once the platform rolls out, users can download different apps that use the same device, and those apps could cover things like hair, aging, anti-aging, and hyper-pigmentation.

Q: Other brands have had success with celebrity promotions. How are you approaching that?
A: In this area, “innovation until now has been primarily a marketing innovation.” mySkin is the first with technology innovation: “The market’s already primed.”

Q: How long does it take to scan? The on-stage scan took a “not insignificant” amount of time, and that was one pimple.
A: It’s going to get much faster, “a second or two max.”