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How Tencent’s Walled User List Ended Up Boosting Its Userbase
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Tencent’s social blogging site, Qzone, has active social network user base, with 600 million (and counting) users who log in more than twice a month. Besides Qzone, the Chinese Internet giant is perhaps better known for its flagship and the exploding smartphone messaging app. I spoke to Dowson Tong, president of Tencent’s social network group. He’s been overseeing Qzone’s evolution for the past eight years. He told me that when Qzone was launched in 2005, it was initially planned as a Geocities-style blog community, before the company decided to add social aspects by linking blogs to users’ QQ accounts. “Luckily, when we started, Facebook wasn’t common in China. There were some challenges from other platforms like microblogs such as Weibo, but these [Twitter-like channels] are quite public, and people saw QZone as a more private space,” he said. It wasn’t always supposed to be walled, but QZone inherited the company’s older QQ contact list that added people based on user IDs, not more universal identifiers like email addresses or phone numbers. And unlike what we’re used to on Facebook or LinkedIn for example, you can’t see who your friends’ friends are because of the way those lists were architected, said Tong. “For a while, we were concerned that that made it hard for people to expand their friends lists. Our legacy was closed, and we thought it hindered the expansion of the network,” he said. But it seemed to work out. “Over time, our users told us that they didn’t want to add contacts the way you do on Facebook. When everyone is added because you sought them out, you’re just adding buddies you want to share your updates with. Turns out that was a way to keep your friend circles tight, and our users are keener to share on Qzone because of that,” he said. This is the mantra of some of the “private” sharing platforms like —some with more success than others—but Tencent seems to have stumbled upon the working formula and had its popularity multiplied by the sheer volume of users coming onboard in its home country. Another way it has fueled its user growth is an early emphasis on the mobile phone. The Qzone app was released in early 2010, and included features like photo filters and the option to record voice memos. While a typical Twitter or Tumblr user would take a photo, open it in a separate app to dress it up, then open the blogging app to post it, all of this can be done within Qzone’s app, reducing the friction to post. ( was launched towards Fall 2010.) The Qzone app has also added features that caught on with Asian users earlier than they did in the West, such as decorative water marks. “Asian users like to decorate their photos, not just filter them,” he said. Qzone’s app also allows users to add a voice clip as a status update, or tag it to a photo. “That makes it feel more personal. You can send a gift and attach a voice clip from the phone too,” Tong said. When he showed me a typical Qzone page, I was boggled by how busy the page was, with animations and audio. “It’s almost like MySpace,” I say. “Sort of,” he agreed. “But it isn’t really the form factor that matters the most. Maintaining the relationship with your existing user base and keeping them happy goes a long way. You want to be on the social network that your friends are on, and always keeping it fresh means users stay happy.” It is here in Shenzhen’s hi-tech district that Tong’s 2,000 or so engineers work on Qzone. The Tencent headquarters is a sprawling skyscraper, dwarfing its myriad grey-washed neighbors. While I had problems getting my cab driver to register exactly where I wanted to be in the already famous Hua Qiang Bei cluster, simply saying “Tencent” in English got him to immediately acknowledge, exclaiming “Teng Xun Da Sha”, which translates to Tencent Plaza in Mandarin. Started in 1998, Tencent is China’s largest Internet company by revenue, and was the first Internet company in the country to break through the $1 billion revenue mark in 2009. My arrival at the headquarters was kicked off with a tour of the impressive lobby showcase area. A big, gleaming board reflected how many users were concurrently on QQ—156 million that Wednesday afternoon, with a peak of 172 million. The company counts an active user as someone who logs in more than twice a month, and by that measure, has an impressively high retention rate of 700 million out of its 1 billion total users worldwide. “This is the same tour that our CEO, Pony Ma, gave to (Chinese Communist Party general secretary) Xi Jinping when he visited,” informed my guide in impeccable English. I asked her how long she’s been working for Tencent, and she said she’s been with the company for the past two years since she graduated. “I do not consider myself young here,” she said, shaking her head. And perhaps she can’t. The average age of Tencent’s 22,000 employees is merely 26—a feat made possible by an aggressive, ongoing hiring campaign that takes Tencent to tertiary institutions in the country in order to sniff out their finest. The constant influx of fresh blood could be one of the reasons why Tencent has kept up with China’s relatively young Internet population. China’s average age across its user base is , while in the US, that number is much higher at 42. How do you juggle ideas coming in from thousands of young, enthusiastic minds? “Unfortunately, you have to cancel projects if they don’t work after a certain time, usually several weeks or months,” said Tong. “There are no bad ideas, only bad execution. So we give all ideas a fair chance, but we look for teams with bad execution and we do kill their projects,” he said.
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BBC America & Twitter Announce Content-Sharing Partnership
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
BBC America has via a tweet that it will partner with Twitter to offer the “first in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series.” News of the deal comes after a few days after a report that Twitter is to host TV clips and sell advertising on the site. BBC America’s tweet didn’t offer any specific information about the deal or which of its TV shows would be involved, but it did namecheck hit series Doctor Who and Top Gear. .@ and @ , home of & , ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series — BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) This has been a busy week for Twitter as it seeks to move beyond being a microblogging platform.In addition to the TV network tie-ups, the company also just . As Jordan Crook notes, the decision to debut the standalone app on network television is a sign that Twitter is aiming directly for a mainstream audience, instead of seeking to first build an audience of early-adopters. The company has been building out its site as a multimedia platform with a series of acquisition: Twitter Music was built by startup , while video-sharing service after Twitter bought it in a low-profile buy out.
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Google’s One Today App Aims To Make Charitable Donations A More Social, And Frequent, Experience
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Today, Google quietly ushered in a new application built on top of its . The app is called , and it’s currently invite only for Android users at this time. The aim is to get people to donate $1 to different organizations, while getting the complete information about how your donation will be used up front. This is a huge stumbling block for nonprofits usually, as people are afraid that their money won’t actually get spent on making a real difference. One Today aims to change that. Additionally, One Today has a social component to it, letting you set a cap to how much money you’ll match if your friends donate to a cause. By using Google Wallet, you can simply pay off your “donation balance” once all of your friends have used up your cap. It’s a pretty interesting way of crowdsourcing donations. When I talk to people about giving money to causes, the first problem they have is that they can’t find one that they’re passionate about. By allowing you to put the choice of who to donate in your friends’ hands, this problem simply goes away and there’s no excuse not to give. You don’t have to involve others though, as you can participate by yourself or interact with the app’s community. Currently, the landing page allows you to request an invite, even though the app itself is available for . If you open the app, you’re shown the invite screen yet again and there’s no word on when One Today will start opening itself up to users and donations. Some other interesting aspects of the app are that it’s populated only with nonprofits that is currently working with, so you know that they’re pre-screened. Other sites, such as , are filled up with organizations that have little or no information about itself or what is done with the money that they’re raising. That’s clearly not the case with this app, according to the programs that will be pre-populated: Organizations can also . From the looks of the app screenshots, One Today seems extremely polished and well thought out. This is an app that Google hopes you use daily: The reason for putting this together is addressed in the : Google has a long-standing commitment to supporting nonprofits and to do doing good. One Today makes fundraising easy for nonprofits, it also makes giving simple and fun for users. But yes, Google does collect a 1.9 percent credit card fee, but that’s not much considering that it takes care of the processing and donation routing for you. These donations are also tax deductible, of course. The idea of accepting one dollar at a time is easy enough for anyone to chew on, and get into the rhythm of daily giving, which could be a more rewarding experience than giving a lump sum to just one charity every year, for example. As you donate more, the app will start recommending other organizations that might interest you, which is a Google Play app-like purchasing experience. When you tap “give,” it’s actually a pledge, and you’ll be notified to settle your balance once you’ve pledged to a few organizations. With this approach, micro-donations could actually catch on and raise more money for these nonprofits than ever. In many situations, it’s not the actual amount that you donate, it’s the awareness that your social actions bring. One Today is an amplification tool, and it will be interesting to see how the project evolves once it opens to the masses.
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Formation 8 Raises Its First Fund Of $448M To Plug Silicon Valley Startups Into Asian Conglomerates
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
wants to bring venture capital back to its roots: investing in solutions to hard technology problems that could change the world. It its first fund of $448 million — but with a twist. Formation 8 plans to draw on its extensive network and local offices in Asia to win its portfolio of smart enterprise and energy technology companies’ huge deals with conglomerates in the region. Specifically, Formation 8 is looking for “smart enterprise” startups that can help enormous companies like those that define Asia to make sense of the vast seas of data now available. Government, finance, healthcare, and business services can all fall within this net. Formation 8 also seeks energy companies that can transform the global energy value chain. It hopes startups can become platforms to maximize scalability and take advantage of the nimbleness their small size affords. Formation 8 co-founder and partner Joe Lonsdale tells me his fund isn’t thumbing its nose at consumer markets, saying “It’s not about what’s right or what’s wrong, but about what areas we’re the most passionate about and are the best at.” As for its focus overseas, Lonsdale riffs, “If you have a company that’s trying to transform a big industry, and you’re ignoring Asia, you’re making a mistake.” Along with Lonsdale who worked at PayPal and co-founded Palantir, Brian Koo of Harbor Pacific Capital and InnovationHub, James Zhang of Softbank China Venture Capital and BioDiscovery, Tom Baruch of CMEA Capital and Intermolecular, and Jim Kim of GE and Khosla Ventures. Lonsdale will be speaking at in a couple of weeks. Formation 8 originally closed the first $200 million of the fund last year, and some and success had more limited partners lining up to fill up the full $448 million. Lonsdale tells me those include “founders of PayPal, Palantir, Yahoo, and Yammer, plus Asian conglomerates and some New York institutions. He’s already thinking about the firm’s next fund, which he says will probably be around the same size. Why raise $448 million instead of a nice round number like $450 million? Apparently, it’s a play on the firm’s name. Four hundred ty . Get it? The firm’s centers around “Large, growing and global markets with hard problems that can be solved through technology and partnership.” It wants companies with a strong technology culture that offer long-term equity incentives, make data-driven decisions, dream big, stress discipline, and have the humility to accept advice. While it invests in startups, Formation 8 recognizes that there are strengths to large corporations, too. “Corporations have scale, existing relationships, and distribution advantages in large, established industries such as energy, education, healthcare, logistics, financial services, and government services,” Lonsdale writes. “Many Smart Enterprise startups would do well to partner with large corporations that control the data, the knowledge workers, and the distribution channels.” It’s in forging those partnerships that Formation 8 really differentiates itself. The firm’s local teams in Korea, China, and Singapore can help its portfolio with relationships, sales, deployment and market knowledge. When I asked if corruption would be an issue, Lonsdale admitted some concerns with how the Chinese army mixes with Chinese Internet industries, but says most of Formation 8’s markets like Korea are exceptionally honorable. While there’s been a recent increase in deals between Silicon Valley and Asia, Lonsdale says the connection will grow, as smart enterprise and energy businesses disrupt the antiquated big company infrastructures developed 20 to 30 years ago by the first enterprise wave. He concludes: “You need really talented engineers that are really good at big data to fix the infrastructure in big industry. Obviously there’s a market for that in the US, but Asia is an even bigger market.”
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 | null |
Durex’s New Long-Distance Sexy Time Fundawear Is Exactly That
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
The thought of buying underwear from the same company that makes your condoms might sound shocking at first. But don’t be so quick to judge, especially where sex is concerned, as Durex has just announced its latest innovation. . Fundawear represents the condom company’s first foray into the land of connected devices, and the name explains quite well how it works. You put on special (read: vibrating) underwear that connect to a smartphone app. You can control the vibrations yourself with a smartphone as a remote, or pair the panties with your partner’s smartphone, so they can control the fun. Of course, this isn’t the first time that long-distance sexy time has been . There are a whole host of startups, as well as established sex toy brands, that are working to connect people digitally and physically at the same time. There’s the duo kit, which seems to be the most intense of all, with parts for both the male and female to simulate sex across long distances and still feel each other’s movements in real time. , along with various offerings from , come to mind, as well. However, this is the first time we’ve seen a condom company throw their hat in the ring, which means that a lot of R&D and resources went into the Fundawear. You know, along with careful consideration over the name. Fundawear comes in both male and female versions, so you fellas don’t have to be worried about a one-size-fits-all kind of situation. The Fundawear undies and app companion aren’t available just yet, but frisky explorers interested in joining the testing program can head over to . Warning: The following video is kind of sort of NSFW. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3tPZb6i7q8&w=640&h=360] [via ]
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Win The Stock Market With Crowdsourced Advice From New App Robinhood
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Most people are too scared to seriously play the stock market. Few amateurs know enough to confidently invest on their own. Luckily, launches today to put crowdsourced finance wisdom in your pocket. Track stocks, view advice on what to buy or sell from other users, share your predictions, and build a reputation. Robinhood could turn a new generation into investors. But it’s not just for novices. Robinhood was designed to be the best mobile stock-tracking tool in the world. Surprisingly enough, that’s not that difficult. When Robinhood’s founders asked focus groups and financial veterans what they use to research stocks on the web the resounding answer was “Yahoo Finance,” but when asked what they used on mobile, most replied “….” That’s why Robinhood’s founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt set out to combine social investing with a sleek mobile design that’s heavy on gestures. They’re the right guys for the job, since this is their third finance company. Both Stanford grads, Baiju got a master’s in math there too, while Vlad dropped out of UCLA’s prestigious math PhD program so the two could found an algorithmic trading startup called Celeris. Then they built the financial software company Chronos Research, which worked with major investment banks. These experiences revealed the senseless gap in mobile and the unaddressed consumer market.”Think about doing something intelligent with your money,” Bhatt tells me. “We find a lot of people, especially younger people, don’t do it. It’s not that they have some disagreement with entering the stock market, but they don’t know how to do it.” And no one’s really helping. If you look at the top of the finance app charts, you just see things like PayPal, Mint, and various banks’ apps. So the goal of Robinhood? To put individual human investment advisors out of business and give their jobs to the crowd who can walk each other through smart bets. And that’s an approach increasingly supported by research. Robinhood is working with teams at Stanford and MIT to prove out theories and early data suggesting crowds perform better in the stock market than even the most skilled individual. That’s convenient for people who don’t have the spare change to hire an advisor. When you first join and its merry band of investors (currently only on ), you’ll get suggestions of local and popular stocks to add to your watch list and see friends you can follow. Once finished on-boarding you’ll see your watch list that tracks the performance of the stocks you follow. The News tab pulls in the popular finance articles, which are remarkably up to date and accurate, as well as a personalized stream of articles about your stocks. Click into any of your stocks to get more info on their performance stats over time, related news, plus a crowdsourced buy/sell rating. For instance, 69 percent of the Robinhood community rates Google a buy right now. If you want to lend your thoughts, the app takes advantage of the touch interface to let you drag your finger across a chart to show how much you think the stock’s price will rise or fall over the coming weeks and months. Then you can add a short comment to support your prediction. For example, you could swipe to say Google will go up 8 percent in the next three months, and explain “The market is realizing the importance of Glass and self-driving cars, and their synergies with Google’s other businesses.” The meat of Robinhood is the Feed, where these predictions show up. You can scroll through a global feed or just recommendations from your friends, and agree, disagree, or comment on them. Rather than a broadcast platform, Robinhood doubles as a social network around stocks, where you can ask people specifically why they made a rating. Overall the app feels slick and professional, which is critical to Robinhood as its success largely depends on trust. The style comes thanks to the design team at Google Ventures, the lead investor in Robinhood. Its seed round was also joined by strategic angels including several early members of the executive team from leading electronic market maker GETCO. But how do you know which Robinhood users to believe? That’s where my favorite feature comes in. If you asked a traditional investment advisor what their track record over time is, Bhatt tells me they’d typically dodge, stating “past performance is not indicative of future results.” In other words, they get it wrong sometimes, but don’t want you to know. Well, guess what, Wall Street? The Internet’s here and it brought its buddy, transparency. Robinhood tracks everyone’s stock price predictions against real-word performance and lays them out on each user’s profile. So you can see someone has rated 107 stocks with 70.42 percent accuracy, an extremely impressive record that earns them a score in the 99th percentile of all Robinhood users, aka, this is someone you might do well to trust. The app’s Community tab even offers leaderboards of the best performing advisors, and suggestions of people to follow. Bhatt explains that along with fostering transparency and trust, the ratings are “a way for people to show they’re smart. That’s a very compelling driver of any action.” During beta tests, a whopping 25 percent of users were contributing predictions. So much participation is very uncommon for user-generated content apps. It seems there’s pent-up demand for a collaborative approach to stock research that a traditional website like Yahoo Finance just can’t provide. Robinhood is solid already and it’s just getting started. In the future the company hopes to let you actually buy the stocks you’re betting on. That would take it from its current place competing with Stocktwits’ unstructured micro-advice to more directly battling E*Trade and other mass-market investment mediums. In the meantime, it needs to watch out for buy ratings going viral, which can produce big wins for those who jump on the bandwagon early, but excruciating losses for those who buy late only to see the price snap back down. But what really excites me about Robinhood is how it shifts investing from a game of access to a game of talent and cooperation. The stock market has long been the domain of suits who spend all day researching and the clients who can afford to pay them. With this app, finally anyone can get their hunches validated or invalidated by the knowledge of a crowd that’s held accountable to their predictions. While the stock market will always be risky, Robinhood lets you know you’re not alone in facing those risks. Tenev explains his app’s name reflects that. “We understand the connotation of taking something from the rich and giving it to the poor. Robinhood is liberating information that’s locked up with professionals and giving it to the people.”
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How Mobile Personal Assistant Donna Simplifies Your Life By Combining Design And Data
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
I’ve already told you about , the from Incredible Labs. But if you haven’t actually had a chance to play with the app yourself, it’s difficult to explain how it’s different from the growing list of smart calendar and assistant apps now on the market. The good news is I got a chance to sit down with Incredible Labs CEO Kevin Cheng, who gave us a demo of Donna. The goal is to provide users with help before they even know that they need it. It’s a novel concept, and Donna actually pulls it off pretty well. “Our approach is about bringing the information to you, as opposed to having you find the information,” Cheng said. “The purpose of an assistant is to make it so you have to worry less. We don’t feel like there’s a lack of information in our lives, there’s a lack of filters. What Donna does is bring you that information when you need it.” Wanna know how? Check out the video above to see how Donna works to simplify your life and get you where you need to be.
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Former Googlers Launch Synergyse, An Interactive In-App Training Service For Google Apps
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Today, over five million businesses are now using Google Apps to help their employees collaborate and connect via the cloud. In just a few years, the adoption of Google’s productivity suite has skyrocketed and, while small businesses have long been its core customer, adoption up the chain is increasing as well. At the same time, as the Google Apps ecosystem continues to expand and evolve, with new services emerging around Chromebooks, Vault, Drive and Android, it can be tough for businesses to keep up with all the new tools, tweaks and iterations. , a Toronto-based startup, is launching today to help businesses keep up with changes to Google’s litany of web-based software services and provide an interactive training system to get employees up to speed. In principle, Synergyse has a similar goal to services like BetterCloud, which also aim to make it easy for businesses to move to and get the most out of Google Apps. However, while BetterCloud offers training videos to help employees learn how to use the productivity suite, the service caters more to Google Apps admins, allowing them to manage domains, reporting, security and compliance. Synergyse, on the other hand, focuses purely on the educational element, offering an interactive and scalable training system for employees. The startup’s training platform covers Gmail, GCal and Drive at launch, with more to come soon, offering access to training directly inside each application. Other than a few players like BetterCloud and “how-to” videos littered across YouTube, Synergyse co-founder Varun Malhotra tells us that he thinks training has been largely absent from the Google Apps ecosystem. On Main Street, most businesses have no idea what the latest features are that Google does or doesn’t offer, so the team set out to develop a training system that is accessible to the Average Joe, regardless of technical proficiency. Malhotra says that Synergyse works for each of the major versions of Google Apps, for Businesses, Schools and consumers and, because it’s a Chrome extension and built on top of Google’s Cloud Platform, Synergyse is able to integrate its training system more effectively throughout the Google ecosystem, while offering security and scalability. Or at least that’s the idea. Furthermore, Synergyse hopes to appeal to businesses by offering training from directly inside of Google Apps so that you don’t have to leave an application to learn how to use it and can take actions at the same time. The system is available to users at any time, so employees can learn at their own pace and roll through training sessions whenever they have time. For its tutorials, the startup actually doesn’t use video, the founder says, instead living inside your Google Apps account, overlaying instruction on your screen as you go, prompting people to click through Apps and input actual info from within their Gmail accounts. Malhotra also tells us that the startup wants to make sure that users don’t have to deal with constant updates and downloads, so as new products and tools are added to Google’s productivity suite, the system updates alongside it, automatically adding new training materials to the apps. Once teams have started using the extension, execs and admins can also tap into reporting options to help track and measure the success of the training system for their employees. The catalog of lessons were designed by Synergyse CTO Majid Manzarpour, who was “responsible for training Canada how to use Google Apps,” while working at Google as its “sole IT contact for the entire Canadian region” beginning in 2007, he says. In other words, he knows what he’s doing, , because they’re Canadian, the tutorials are friendly. Two of the three co-founders are former Google engineers. So there’s that, too. Synergyse pricing starts at $10/year for individuals, is free for students and costs businesses $10/employee/year. It also offers an Enterprise option for companies with more than 5,000 employees, with price set on a case-by-case basis. For more,
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Larry Page Says Google Glass Runs On Android
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Google’s CEO Larry Page revealed something during t that his company doesn’t seem to have actually spelled out before: Google Glass runs on Android. In response to a question about how much people can expect to see engagement increment with new products like Glass, he said that “obviously, Glass runs on Android, so [Android] has been pretty transportable across devices, and I think that will continue.” Many have speculated that Google Glass would run on an Android-based OS, but to date, Google hasn’t come right out and said so. Recent reports suggested that it would be ore of a , but Page’s statement today seems to indicate that in fact it will at least be a version of Android. And Android-based Glass, even if it’s a modified version of the original OS, is good news for developers, since it means they share at least a common language. That should make integration, at least between Glass and Android-powered smartphone apps easier. The comment about portability also strongly suggests that Android has the potential to power a range of devices in the future, including the . We’ve contacted Google to find out more about the Glass OS and how closely related it is to Android for smartphones, and will update if we hear more.
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Microsoft Confirms Its Plans To Bring Windows 8 To Smaller Touch-Enabled Devices Soon
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
During its Q3 2013 , Microsoft’s outgoing CFO Peter Klein noted that the company plans to bring Windows 8 to smaller devices. Until now, Windows 8 was mostly geared toward desktops and larger tablets, including Microsoft’s own Surface and RT machines. With the forthcoming Windows 8 Blue, that Microsoft would enable its OEMs to run Windows 8 on smaller devices, too. Klein confirmed this on today’s call, though he mostly talked about OEMs and did not mention whether Microsoft also plans to launch a , though that’s probably a fair bet, too. Currently, there are no sub-10-inch Windows 8 tablets on the market, but according to Klein, we will hear more about these in the coming months. During the Q&A phase, Klein also noted that Microsoft is working on “expanding and improving the experience, not just for Surface, but for Windows 8 devices at multiple price points, including lower price points going forward.” Earlier this week, Intel’s outgoing CEO Paul Otellini also that his company wants to ensure that OEMs can build Windows 8 machines for under $200 soon. In addition, Klein also acknowledged that the transition to Windows 8 isn’t easy, but the company remains “excited about the opportunities ahead of [it].” According to Klein, Windows 8 has prepared Microsoft well for the transition from desktops to touch devices. “We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we feel comfortable about where we are going.” He also expects to see more – and more attractive – Windows 8 touch-enabled devices to come on the market in the near future, too, and he thinks these will become more attractive.
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Researchers Expect To See A $6.5 Billion Market For Home Robotics By 2017
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Sure, we have our Roombas and a few AR Drones here and there, but researchers expect that we’ll have many more – and better – robots within the next few years and that the overall market should hit $6.5 billion by 2017. According to ABI Research’s Consumer Electronics Research Service, the consumer robotics market is currently at about $1.6 billion and growing. A slow economy and fairly expensive parts has stagnated things for the time being but improved devices and more interesting implementations – home helper robots, for example – could push the market up considerably. As we’ve seen in our , devices like the Mobi ball bot can move through crowded spaces and help out in unique situations. While it’s still no Rosie the Robot, I could imagine a cleaning bot that could also help move heavy objects as a team effort and robots that can inspect chimneys and drains. Interestingly, the problem of safety begins to crop up when talking about consumer robotics. Obviously the question remains: did the robots start the fire on purpose?
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Larry Page Says Mobile Apps Won’t Hurt Search: ‘The Information Wants To Be Found’
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
During the conference call discussing , executives were asked about how mobile will affect the company’s business — both the general usage of search, as well as Google’s revenue and profits from advertising. CEO Larry Page responded that he “always” gets asked about how the popularity of mobile apps affects Google search, but he’s “not super-concerned” about it. “We’ve been dealing with that issue for a long time,” Page said. “Fundamentally search is an amazing thing for publishers and software developers and other apps. I think, in general, the information wants to be found.” There will be challenges as more usage shifts to mobile, Page said, but Google will get through them. As for the effect of mobile on the company’s bottom line, Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora argued that focusing on details like Google’s current mobile CPC rates is “the wrong way” to look at these questions. ( .) “The right way” is to understand “the new reality where we have all these multiscreens.” In that new reality, Arora said Google has to deliver the right answer to users throughout the day, on any device. And if the company succeeds at that, “The pie will grow for everybody.”
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Facebook Voice Calling Now Available To All US Users Thanks To Today’s Android Rollout
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Now the Facebook can really start to replace your phone. Today Facebook rolled out its free VoIP voice calling feature to US users of Home and its Android Messenger app. That means even less reason to open your standard “phone” app, and more data for Facebook about who you care about the most. Now all iOS and Android users in the US can Facedial their friends. Previously VoIP for Android was available in 23 other countries, but its roll out to the United States makes it 24. Facebook tells me the rollout will happen over the course of today, and doesn’t require any formal app updates. To start a VoIP call in you click the I icon on someone’s profile and then tap “free call”. In , you can start a call from a Chat Head by clicking the three dots beside a person’s name, opening the conversation in Messenger, and then following the steps above. Facebook first began testing its open sourced version of VoIP with iOS users in Canada and , and has been slowly rolling it out to more countries and Android since. But today is the culmination of that rollout (excluding less critical developing markets). With VoIP finally available to all Android and iOS users in its home country, users don’t have to worry about what device their friends are using. Now we can see if the product really works at scale, and whether Facebook will dig it out of its buried spot in Messenger. Getting VoIP in place will be important if Facebook wants to win the brewing war to control messaging it will fight against Google and Apple. Google is soon expected to launch a unified messaging system that combines GChat, Google+ Messenger, Google Voice, and potentially Gmail to let you carry on synchronous and asynchronous text and voice conversations across different devices. Apple meanwhile already has its own Phone app on the iPhone, and its iMessage apps on several platforms. The big companies are all realizing that as much computing power as is getting stuffed into smartphones today, they’re still fundamentally communication devices and that activity takes up a ton of our time. Whoever controls messaging will own that time, which comes with advertising and monetization opportunities through sales of sticker packs and more. They’ll also better understand who their users are closest to, which can be used to improve targeted social advertising.
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Chris Dixon To Speak At Disrupt NY, As A VC
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Eric Eldon
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Chris Dixon is back in New York quite a bit, he tells me, even though he recently got a place in San Francisco as part of his new job as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He’ll be at the week after next, for example, to talk about his big transition from life as a founder and angel investor to his new job at a top venture firm. I’ll be interviewing him about what he’s planning to focus his new portfolio on. Bitcoin startups? Less consumer startups? More gadgets and wearable health devices? For those who don’t know, Dixon has paved the way for this generation of New York tech founders. He most recently cofounded recommendation service , which sold to eBay for around $80 million in 2011 and became an R&D office for the company in the city. Before that he cofounded SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee in 2006. He gradually moved deeper into angel investing over the years, becoming prolific over the last couple. His background and hands-on approach to helping founders got a16z’s notice and they hired him on last year (his great reputation also got him the Angel Of The Year award at this year’s Crunchies). Dixon joins of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes eBay CEO John Donahoe, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, top investor Fred Wilson, and more coming to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. . .
Partner & Co-founder, Chris Dixon is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He previously was a partner and co-founder at Founder Collective, the CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode.
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IBM’s Q1 2013 Misses On Revenue Of $23.4B, EPS Of $3.00, As Service Revenue Suffers
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
IBM announced its , reporting net revenues of $23.4 billion and earnings per share of $3.00. EPS was an improvement over last year’s numbers (of 8 percent), while revenue was down 5 percent, or 3 percent adjusting for currency. Flat software revenue and down service revenue is what led to the overall shortfall in terms of analyst expectations. Since IBM divested itself of its PC business in a sale to Lenovo back in 2004, it’s been able to focus on service offerings and build that into a strong business, which continues to prove to have been an almost prescient decision in the wake of the PC market’s continued softness. A report last year from The Verge indicated that IBM’s choice of buyer for its hardware division, Lenovo, was due mostly to the company trying to curry favor with the Chinese government. That, too seems to have paid off well for Lenovo, which has beat estimates for five consecutive quarters. Still, those normally strong areas of services and software were either flat or down compared to last year’s numbers. Lenovo’s software revenue was $5.6 billion for the year, flat year over year, and service revenue was down 4 percent annually for a total of $9.6 billion. Systems and technology, which represent its remaining hardware assets, were $3.1 billion, down year over year a significant 17 percent as the PC market continues to suffer. Total operating profit margin for the quarter was 46.7 percent non-GAAP, with net income up 3 percent to $3.4 billion. Watching how the stock performs after market is a , analyst firm Bespoke Investment Group notes, so many will be watching to see how the market reacts to this underwhelming earnings picture.
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Once Again, YouTube Prevails In Viacom Case
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
YouTube has once again in the long-running copyright case that the companies have spent the last several years fighting. This marks the second time U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton has taken YouTube’s side in the case, agreeing that the streaming video provider was protected by “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The $1 billion lawsuit was filed way back in 2007, not long after Google acquired what was then a fledgling video startup for what was then an . Viacom essentially argued that YouTube was knowingly allowing copyrighted material to be posted to its site as a way to boost its audience. YouTube, on the other hand, argued that it was merely a platform that users could add content to, and that it would take down any content that Viacom, or any other content provider, asked it to. The judge in the case first , granting a summary motion to dismiss the case. But it was revived about a year ago, when an appeals court reversed the decision, . Once again, the judge decided that YouTube was protected by the DMCA safe harbor provision, after what looks like some back-and-forth about whether YouTube willfully infringed and/or if Viacom did a good enough job of sending takedown notices. In the meantime, Viacom and YouTube have actually started working together, as movies from on the streaming site. And other Viacom properties like Comedy Central have channels on the site. Viacom says it’ll once again appeal the decision, as it hopes to get a jury to rule in the case, rather than just some judge’s summary, um, judgment. Its statement below: “This ruling ignores the opinions of the higher courts and completely disregards the rights of creative artists. We continue to believe that a jury should weigh the facts of this case and the overwhelming evidence that YouTube willfully infringed on our rights, and we intend to appeal the decision.” by
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Google Reports Mixed Q1 2013 Earnings: Revenue Up 31 Percent To $14B, Net Income Of $3.35B, Beats EPS Estimates
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Google’s last two earnings releases were made even more notable than usual because of the unexpected events that preceded them, but today’s release of the company’s was as almost as straightforward as it used to be. For this past quarter, the search giant reported revenues of $14 billion (that’s up 31% from Q1 2012), non-GAAP earnings of $11.58 per share, and net income of $3.35 billion. That means that this quarter, while mostly strong, was a mixed bag in terms of beating expectations. According to the slew of analysts polled by , Google was expected to report earnings of $10.70 per share on $14.3 billion in revenues — Google handily came out ahead on earnings, but didn’t quite meet the Street’s revenue forecasts. In the days and hours leading up to the earnings release, many a pundit implored shareholders to keep tabs on Google’s cost-per-click (simply put, the amount advertisers shell out every time a Google user clicks on an ad), with that one metric would determine whether or not Google’s stock price would rebound from a week that saw its share of dips. Last time Google released its earnings, it pointed out a 6% year-over-year dip in its average cost-per-click — this time though, Google reported that average CPC dipped 4% from its position both in the year-ago quarter and back in Q4 2012. That’s not to say it’s all bad news on the ad front, as Google’s paid clicks grew some 20% year-over-year, or 3% over the last quarter. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been much additional light shed on the Motorola Mobility which Google moved to acquire for $12.5 billion in August 2012. Back in Q4 the pricey hardware company generated (accounting for about 11% of Google’s consolidated revenues), and that number has sunk from there. This time, Motorola Mobility only managed to rake in $1.02 billion in revenue, though that isn’t much of a surprise considering that it’s mobile phone output has been noticeably low these past few months. That said, Google executive chairman did we he could to cheerlead for Motorola earlier this week when he revealed at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference that its next line of phones were “phenomenal.” Surely a little more detail wouldn’t have hurt (especially ahead of earnings time), but for now Google and Motorola’s hardware plans remain shrouded in secrecy. CFO Patrick Pichette noted in the last earnings call that Motorola Mobility still has 12 to 18 months of products in the pipeline that need to be worked through, though that revelation has done little to dampen rumors of an incoming Motorola X Phone. As always, Google’s brass will weigh in on the company’s quarterly financials during an earnings call that will kick off at 4:30 PM Eastern/1:30 PM Pacific. Here’s hoping that everyone is feeling chatty, as this release has inspired more than a few questions.
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Larry Page: Google’s Focus On Constant Iteration Will Shift Toward Big Bets Like Google Fiber And Glass
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
During today’s , CEO Larry Page gave us a rundown on exactly what the company has been up to in this quarter, as well as some insight into how he’s currently running the company. Page , and since then has started bringing all of the company’s services together, under the umbrella of helping people get access to information quickly. Page discussed Google’s current “big bets,” which are Chrome, YouTube and Android as the mature products that are important to continue innovating on. However, Page made it clear that as CEO of the company, it’s his job to focus on the future. He said: “Companies tend to get comfortable doing what they’ve always done, with only a few minor tweaks. It’s only natural to work on the things you know. Minor changes make things obsolete.” It was very interesting to hear Page gloss over its search, advertising and business offerings. He didn’t even mention Google+. He wanted to get right to the point, which was to make it clear that Google is still a forward-thinking company, and the company is executing in that way. Things that aren’t incremental changes, and future big bets are which Page says came about after co-founder Sergey Brin wanted to show how high-speed Internet access could help change people’s lives. Additionally, Page mentioned the fact that Google is now handing out the to developers, and said: “I get chills when I use technology of the future, and that happens with Glass.” Page reminded us that it’s “early days” for the product, saying that he finds the directions, messaging, directions and photo-taking as great core functionality. The developer aspect is something that he finds particularly exciting, given Google’s success with third-party apps on Android. Going back to what Google has been pushing, which is speed, means that it’s completely overhauling all of its legacy services to catch up with these present and future big bets. If search doesn’t bring you queries quickly, what good is really super-fast fiber Internet access? The other side of the coin is, why add more functionality and better quality to YouTube videos if nobody has really fast enough Internet access to see them? It seems like Google has set itself up to work on things that push each unit to better its product, chasing both the chicken and the egg. Take Glass, for example. Accessing search results isn’t the best, or fastest, use-case on the device, but seeing Google Now cards with information that is relevant to what you search for on the desktop is. During Page’s tenure as CEO, it has been clear that the teams within Google are sharing a unified vision. Google wants to be seen as an innovative company, not just an always-there utility. Being both is difficult, but it has to continue to compete with companies like Apple, which is the first company someone would name if you said the word “innovation.” Photo credit:
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Wonderville Launches An Interactive Content Library And Virtual Classroom Network For Kids
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
Last July, a group of veteran executives from eToys, eBay, Sesame Street, Discovery and Disney to create a souped-up Khan Academy for kids. But rather than a straightforward port, the learning platform, called , aimed to expand on Khan’s approach to the “flipped classroom” by aggregating educational content from a variety of third-party sources. Using eBooks, TV shows, videos and mobile apps from iTunes, Amazon, YouTube and beyond, Wonderville creates what it calls “Smart Galleries,” which consist of digital content like quizzes, apps, fact sets and so on designed to reflect what kids are studying in class. The content, which includes some fun topics as well (like Bigfoot) to keep kids interested, is vetted by Wonderville’s team of teachers to ensure quality and age-appropriateness. After nine months of development, Wonderville is officially launching its new-and-improved pilot program. The new Wonderville focuses on Kindergarten through fifth grade (as opposed to its previous focus on a wider range), allowing parents and teachers to improve their lessons through the inclusion of Common Core-aligned content. Wonderville has also expanded its scope in the hopes of becoming a platform that enables teachers and classrooms to connect, collaborate and share media — along with providing access to smart galleries of learning content. The startup has leveraged input from over 1,000 teachers to create hundreds of smart galleries, which now include more than 10,000 videos, images, quizzes and rewards — and support Common Core State Standards for K-5. Teachers can build from 2,700 lesson plans contributed by their peers, much like fellow EdTech startups, , and , each of which aims to find better ways for educators to discover, share and customize Common Core-aligned lesson plans. Each of these startups is scrambling to beef up its library of lesson plans and sharing tools. LearnZillion, for example, has 120K teachers registered and reaches over 1.5 million students, while TeachersPayTeachers doled out over $20 million to more than 5,000 teachers for sharing their lesson plans for cheap. However, in comparison to its competitors, which focus more generally on K-12 teachers and content, Wonderville has narrowed its focus to the younger crowd and may benefit from “specializing” in this way. Wonderville founder Mark Eastwood tells us that teachers in more than 50 schools across the country are participating in its pilot program, and 25 companies and institutions are contributing to its crowdsourced content model. The startup is also eager to extend its value proposition beyond its interactive library of educational content, though, by allowing teachers to create virtual classrooms on top of its content, which work in concert with whiteboards, mobile devices and PCs. Today, 30 percent of U.S. classrooms use interactive whiteboards, a number that is expected to grow to 65 percent over the next few years, Eastwood says. Thanks to its recently being accepted into the for content developers, the startup is now able to reach more than one million teachers per month by populating their interactive whiteboards with Wonderville content. The other draw for teachers is that they can use these virtual classrooms to create personalized learning “rooms” for each student, or use them to upload class pictures, video and messages. In turn, teachers could, say, choose one of Wonderville’s interactive quizzes or games, assign it to students to take home or put them up on their whiteboard during class to test students’ mastery of a specific subject. Parents and teachers can then track student development through the platform, while engaging them in ongoing discussions about everything from Bigfoot and space exploration to popular culture and Abraham Lincoln. The founder also tells us that Wonderville is standing firm in the decision to offer its learning platform (and future products as well) to teachers for free. The base product, he says, is also free for families, while parents can participate in Wonderville’s subscription plan to tap into additional features and help guide their kids along their learning path. And that’s where Wonderville will begin to monetize — if parents want to get help their kids get ahead, they’ll have to pay. Today, Wonderville has 10 employees and has been privately financed, but, as it looks to beef up its distribution partnerships (particularly by focusing on the iTunes), the startup will be looking to raise its Series A this summer. For more, find .
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Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Team Wants To Build A WebRTC-Based Pandora For Exercise
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
The Disrupt NY 2013 has been underway for a few hours now and we’re already seeing a bunch of cool projects. Team Geem is building what it calls a “Pandora for Exercise.” The service, which will hopefully be ready in time to be demoed tomorrow, will create exercise programs that are tailored for the individual user. The usual exercise DVDs, Geem believes, are just too boring and repetitive, so a web-based exercise service that’s fully customized can help break through that routine. Also, unlike DVDs, Geem could offer users a wider choice of options, so if you want to do some cardio and work on your abs, and also do a bit of yoga, Geem will have you covered. Users, the team tells me, will be able to watch pre-recorded videos, but the cool part of the service is also that it will enable ad-hoc classes that teachers can set up through the service. While I was talking to them, Geem was looking at using TokBox’s for its service. What’s nice about this is that users could also beam their video over to the instructor, so if you just can’t get that right in your yoga class, the teacher can see what’s wrong and hopefully help you from crashing into the ground in your living room. The team also plans to use the and possibly build a Roku app to get their service into the living room. It wouldn’t be 2013 if the five-member team, including Mina Azib, Sven Hermann, Livio Dalloro, Alan Johnson, Lauren Dalloro and Guanglei Xiong, wasn’t also thinking about adding some social features to its service. Users, they say, will be able to see what classes their friends are attending and receive notifications when their favorite instructors are about to teach a class (with Facebook being the social backend for the service). Users, of course, will also be able to rate their instructors. Most of the team members currently work for Siemens, and Alan Johnson is working on his own startup, , a gamified platform for music discovery, which is currently in beta.
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Backed Or Whacked: Fund These Undies
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
The mere mention of those particular articles of clothing that protect our private bits from coming into contact with our clothing (or perhaps vice versa) has long been enough to drive children into hysterics. As adults, the decision to abstain from them invokes the belligerence of a commando operation. Despite the choices of boxers, briefs, bikini bottoms and beyond, however, some still feel there is ample room for improvement. To prove this, some have been willing to break with convention and actually put videos of people in their underwear on the Internet. The three women behind Thinx underwear spent nearly three years developing their product. Accepting their ingenuity is easy as they get through their nearly three-minute campaign video using a number of euphemisms to avoid directly mentioning menstruation, the main inspiration for raising the panty ante. By incorporating moisture-wicking and a dry outer layer into a microbial fabric, Thinx is designed to offer a woman protection against leakage and stains during that period when she might have need and to look good regardless of what time of the month it is. To the latter point, the New York-based project owners are not beyond dropping trou to show off the Hiphugger design. It’s one of four variations that include a lacy limited edition by twin designers Naven, whom you’re probably talking about right now. Funds from backers flowed freely, and the campaign beat its goal of $50,000 with nearly $15,000 to spare. Addressing a male concern regarding bodily emissions, Joshua Shoemake came up with the idea of Snowballs, “the cooling underwear for conceiving men,” a year after the birth of his daughter — a celebrated event for which he and his wife had spent much time and effort. After enduring the of infertility treatments, a doctor suggested that he apply cooling to his scrotum and get tested for a varicocele, an enlarged blood vessel in the testicles that can lead to raising their temperature and affecting semen. The proof was in the procreation. Adding relief to the boxer brief, Snowballs was inspired by the difficulty that Shoemake faced cooling the center of his potency production for up to two hours per day. The recent candidate for a World’s Best Dad mug sought to create underwear that was “as close to nature as possible” (a redundant requirement in at least one sense). To fight against temperate testes, Snowballs accommodate a gel pouch that can cool the cojones for up to 30 minutes. However, despite the effort put into an animated campaign video, something other than oval organs were put on ice. The campaign cleared just over half of its $20,000 goal. New Yorker Sebastian Barone asks, “How well do you really know your underwear?” Were you once close but just don’t talk as often as you used to since you started going to therapy? Like the other undergarments featured on Kickstarter, Jockgods undies seek to be comfortable and stylish. And like many other Kickstarter projects in general, they are to be made in those North American states united. However, unlike Snowballs and Thinx, Jockgods is available for everyone. Barone takes advantage of his experience shooting underwear campaigns for 10 years by breaking into a steamy video in which two neighbors eagerly kiss and caress each other while keeping their underwear on. The video juxtaposes seductive glances with the insertion of keys into locks, which wins it the award for Least Subtle Metaphor Ever in a Crowdfunding Video. With the absence of undergarment deities in major mythologies, Jockgods failed to attract divine intervention. However, it did attract the intervention of its campaign owner, which ended the campaign less than two weeks in. At that time, only five backers had pledged a total of $130 of the $22,000 goal. If you’re searching for a personal underwear mantra, you could do worse than the one of Greg Donmayer. The Harrisburg, Penn., resident lays it on the line: “I believe the need exists for men’s underwear that is both comfortable and functional.” Indeed, instead of salacious appeals, the clothing designer takes bampaign video viewers on a relatively cerebral tour through the history of men’s underwear starting with the boxer and evolving past the boxer brief. Donmayer has addressed the oft-problematic fly with a new design that interweaves two pieces of fabric reinforced by elastic for what he claims gives men easy access to the room they need. Backers provided plenty of elbow room to accommodate for other body parts as the campaign finished up with nearly double its $2,500 goal.
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Meet Some Hackers And Their Promising Projects At The Disrupt NY Hackathon
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
It’s only been about six hours since our Disrupt NY Hackathon officially began, and we’re starting to see our intrepid hackers hit their stride. Granted, some of them are a little farther along than others — Darrell found one guy who made an for physically testing apps and devices — but there’s still plenty of time to bring some of these wild-eyed designs to fruition. Let’s take a peek at what everyone else is working on, shall we? , and are trying to create a better way to visualize your credit card purchases. The so-called Rambler web app leans on the Plaid API to access a user’s spending data and the Foursquare API for location information — the idea is that users will be able to see their purchases splayed out on a map. “By attaching geolocation and categorization data to transactions, we can hopefully see how an individual spends their time, goes on trips, and travels around the country or their city,” Hockey said. Meanwhile, , and are working on a project called FavorRabbit. They admittedly drew on the TaskRabbit for inspiration. The concept is simple enough: it’s not entirely unlike TaskRabbit, but users can request either a small, big or a huge favor of fellow FavorRabbits via a web app and leave reviews for how well they were executed. Altruistic users can replenish their favor stock by (you guessed it) searching for local favors by category and performing them for others. The notion of using favors as a sort of currency is a curious one, but we’ll soon see if these guys can make it work. One of the bigger teams I’ve come across while roaming around today is dedicated to making the process of finding flights more social. , , , , , , , and are working on a flight search engine/booking system that taps into your social graph to show you friends in places you’re thinking of traveling. What’s more, the team is trying to evaluate your social connections and highlight friends it thinks you may want to visit. It’s a tall order (especially considering they’ve got about 16 hours left to finish it), but some of them have been trying to disrupt the travel market for a while now — Morris and de Winter took home first place at THack London back in 2012. Facebook already lets its users send gifts to each other, but , , , , , and don’t think it works the way it should. To fix that, they’re working on gftr, a service that allows Facebook friends to create gift campaigns for each other. In a nutshell, gftr lets people pick one to three gifts for their friends, and invite others to contribute varying amounts to the cause. We’ll see how it turns out, but I’d much rather get one gift than hundreds of birthday greetings on Facebook. Of course, not every hacker here is trying to reshape industries — some are just looking to make our lives a tad easier. Consider WeatherLight, a project by , , , , and . By combining a Philips smart lightbulb, Ninja Blocks sensors and a pair of temperature and humidity detectors, the team wants to give people an at-a-glance idea of what the weather is like — the lightbulb changes color when it’s sunny, cloudy, raining or snowing. , , , are slaving away on a project that could help stay safe once you leave your house and hop in your car. They’ve spent the past few hours slaving away on a GM vehicle app that automatically fires off a text message to pre-determined people once you get close to their location. The app taps into the Google Maps API (for now anyway, according to Boulud) to determine the car’s proximity to its destination, while the Twilio API ensures the message reaches its intended destination. Only time will tell how these and other projects turn out, but we’ll be here documenting the development process as it unfolds. Stay tuned!
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Saturday Night At The Disrupt NY Hackathon Includes Pizza, Beer, And Dodgeball
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
It’s after 1am on a Saturday night in Manhattan, and there are still hundreds of people at our . The dedication of the attendees trying to build a cool product in less than 24 hours is both impressive and slightly disturbing. To capture some of the energy, Drew Olanoff and I took a walk around the venue at around 11pm, as the pizza and beer arrived to give the teams a late-night boost. We watched quick demos of a few cool projects, assessed the quality of the inescapable caffeine gum, and capped things off with an impromptu game of basement dodgeball. To be clear (I write, hoping not to get fired), the dodgeball game was not an official part of the hackathon, and we played no part in instigating it — that was all down to our hackathon attendees. We just happened to be there to capture the intense action on camera. And if you think folks look tired now, just wait until tomorrow morning.
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Skip Google+ Sharing And Tweet Photos Directly From Google Glass With GlassTweet
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
We’re on the ground in New York City at the Disrupt Hackathon and there are a lot of interesting things being created. Since I’m walking around wearing Google Glass, I’ve obviously been looking for teams building apps for it. I met up with , Twilio’s Developer Evangelist, and he built a quick and dirty app called , which lets you share photos to Twitter, rather than the out-of-the-box experience of sending shots to Google+. Once you’ve installed the app and connected it to Glass and your Twitter account, a new contact comes up that you can share to, called “Tweet”: The excitement about developing for Glass reminds me of the early days on Apple’s App Store. Gottfried explained: “It’s a great platform and being able to create all of the fundamental apps for people is a tremendous opportunity.” [tweet https://twitter.com/drew/status/328273445764886528] [tweet https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/328147952646373376] There are only a few people testing GlassTweet out right now, but I imagine that small apps like this will be installed by most of the community who are looking for inspiration. It would be interesting to see a photo gallery of those who are using the app as well, perhaps with some geographic location attached to the photo. You can’t tweet videos yet, but Gottfried tells me that the feature is coming soon. During the this month, Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr mentioned that Twitter was thinking about working on its own app, and it’ll be interesting to see how they adapt their service for the small screen. Surely you don’t want every mention or reply lighting up in front of your face. At least I don’t. Gottfried has built a few Glass apps so far, including ones that lets you . Let the Glass games begin. [Photo credit: ]
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Facebook Sees Increase In Parse Signups, Tells Developers “No Plans To Change How App Data Is Used”
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
Despite developers grumbling that they would ditch Parse’s mobile app backend service now that it’s been bought by Facebook, CEO Ilya Suhkar tells me signups spiked 9.4x and fewer clients are leaving than before. Meanwhile, to calm fears about Facebook spying on Parse developer data, the company issued the statement “We currently have no plans to make any changes to how Parse app data is used.” The acquisition marks Facebook’s entry into the paid B2B app development services business. However, the acquisition came as a bit of a shock to loyal developers who built over 60,000 apps on Parse’s mobile backend as a service (MBaaS). Complaints I’ve seen centered around Facebook degrading the Parse service, pushing its own social integrations and ad platform too hard, questions about who owns app data hosted on Parse due to language in Facebook’s terms of service, privacy of that app data, and worries about how Facebook might use access to that data for its own benefit. Many developers claimed they would be moving to other MBaaS platforms. And one competitor, that Parse developers can use to export their app records and import them into these other services. These developers seem to be barking louder than they’re biting, though. Sukhar tells me, “The difference isn’t even statistically significant but, in absolute terms, the number of records exported per day since acquisition announcement is lower than before. Nobody’s using this tool and there is no overall exodus.” I asked Facebook about the concerns above, and after talking for a while I came away more confident that much of the paranoia about the acquisition is unfounded. Facebook understands that developers are finicky. The social network already has a spotty record in terms of platform stability. In the past, changes have come hard and fast without enough warning, sometimes causing apps to break. Other times, Facebook’s design or feed changes can crater the traction of apps built on it. Over the last year or so, Facebook has made a serious effort to become more developer-friendly, and are . As far as ownership and privacy of data on the Parse platform, some developers may be confusing language in Facebook’s user-facing terms of service, aka the Statement Of Rights And Responsibilities, with its developer-facing Platform Policy. Facebook maintains that it can employ user data to improve its product or target ads, but doesn’t use third-party app data the same way. It seems Facebook’s intention is to run Parse similarly to how it works with apps on its canvas app platform. Essentially, it won’t be prying into private data or using it to inspire its own product development. Of course Facebook’s “currently have no plans” statement could change in the future. And despite all its mission statements and talk, it’s still a business. But I think Parse can be a powerful tool for Facebook, and even its answer to iOS and Android in some ways, without doing anything too shady. Parse will create a distribution vector for Facebook’s identity and sharing integrations as well as a way to sell ads, but that can be accomplished without being too interruptive to the Parse experience. Scrutiny will be high, though, so Facebook needs to hold true to its word if it wants Parse’s valuable client base to stick around.
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The Best Eyeglasses At The Hackathon
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
We decided to feature nerd fashion at this year’s hackathon at Disrupt NY, and what better statement is there these days than eyeglasses? Obligatory Google Glass sighting aside, these hackers definitely had noteworthy eyewear. We’ve showcased some of our favorites below. Ali Wanberg’s glasses hail from . Phil Thomas Di Giulio’s frames are homegrown: Jono from Park Slope Eye in Brooklyn. Hacker Chris Carter bought his snazzy frames at Lens Crafters. This entire table rocked cool eyewear. Derina bought her multicolor glasses from Spanish designer Hacker Kazifumi Osato rocks the traditional tortoiseshell frames. Natasha Nova’s glasses were improvised; she took the glass out of the frame. This hacker’s wraparound frames are Anthony’s glasses are from New York City-based . Twilio Developer Evangelist Jon Gottfried rocks Google Glass.
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From Idea To Development, A Few Hours In At The TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon
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Romain Dillet
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
The hacking has begun. As I write this, participants of the have been working for about six hours on what they are going to show us onstage tomorrow. We talked with a few of them to see how motivated they are. Full of energy, most of them are still enthusiastic about the long and (mostly) sleepless night ahead of them. It takes dedication to build something awesome in fewer than 24 hours, but our fearless hackers seem up to the task. Teams are now working hard to turn their ideas into a working demo. Everybody knows what he or she has to do for his or her team. In other words, the technical and hard part now begins. They will develop, iterate, make compromises and deliver. But after a few minutes talking to us, developers want to get back to what they were doing. Even after only a few hours in, there is not much time left, given the ambitious ideas of some of those teams. Enthusiasm is contagious, so we can’t wait to talk to them again in the coming hours. [gallery columns="2" ids="807431,807432,807433,807434"]
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CrunchWeek: Galaxy S4’s Mixed Reviews, Betaworks Buys Instapaper, Valleywag’s Comeback
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
At the moment we’re in New York City for next week, and the weather here is pretty amazing — so , and I decided to film this episode in Manhattan’s . Watch the video embedded above to hear us discuss the , Betaworks’ , and how we all feel about .
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Disrupt NY Hackathon Hardware Find: Robots!
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
The floor at is filled mostly with people working on software projects, but there were also some interesting hardware endeavors underway. One in particular caught my eye: a robot built from open-source components build to help anyone subject their app or device to strenuous, physical testing in a non-simulated environment. The basic bot is built from an Arduino controller, along with 3D-printable components is a test automation device for iPhone, brought by R/GA Technical Director Sune Kaae and designed/built by Jason Huggins, creator of Selenium-based open source Angry Birds-playing robots. It’s a device that Kaae says is easily programmed via Node.js, meaning it’s accessible for software developers who are more familiar with web languages. One of the big remaining challenges facing hardware startups, Kaae says, is that developers are intimidated by a perceived barrier to entry in programming physical devices. They don’t have to be, though, he explained, since it can be made relatively easy to accomplish things with programming languages they already understand. Kaae’s robot, which positions a touchscreen-compatible stylus anywhere on a screen someone wants to place it, and can run tests that just aren’t possible via simulated virtual testing, or are too costly or boring to do human testing for. It can also help with things like testing movement for the Nike Fuel + Band, which R/GA helped design. Right now, Kaae’s looking for a mathematician to help refine the product, to make sure that when you input a coordinate to hit, it hits exactly that coordinate and not just roughly the right area. But the little bot is a great example of how some people are trying to make it easier to make and test hardware to begin with.
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Draw Something With Strangers On A Train: Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Duo Building Visual Ice-Breaker App For Galaxy Note
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
The has kicked off and here’s one of the new hacker team pairings hoping to claim tomorrow’s prize after a long night of coding. Michal Shaffer, left, from New York and Peter Ma, right from San Francisco — met at the event and are now collaborating on a proximity art app that will be using Samsung’s API and the Galaxy Note plus S Pen to power random collaborative doodling. Ma, 29, explained the idea is a different take on proximity chat apps that let you talk to strangers nearby. Instead of talking to people you don’t know — which he argues is a pretty hit and miss affair, in terms of chancing upon someone who is actually on your conversational wavelength — the team is building an app for drawing with strangers. Not one person drawing and another guessing, like Draw Something, but multiple people drawing bits of a single doodle in sequence. Like the consequences word game but for would-be artists. Doodling with people nearby isn’t going to result in any profound conversations — but it’s likely to be a lot more fun than random chatting. And/or result in a lot of partial phalluses flying back and forth. But as Ma points out, the proximity element of the app means rude drawers run the risk of being identified and unmasked by whoever they are doodling with. The app will give each doodler around 15 seconds to add their flourishes to the drawing until the final, inevitably monstrous creation is born — complete with devil horns, Hitler moustache, bug-eyes, lizard tail etc., etc. The team is also looking to add a social element, so you can plug in and doodle with friends when you’re hanging out together. They haven’t come up with a name for the app yet — but the working title is along the lines of ‘doodle in a bottle’, playing on the idea of the proverbial message in a bottle. Shaffer, 22, will be working on the backend database management. The team is using Amazon Web Services for hosting and SQL Server for the backend.
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The TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon Is On And Poppin’
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
And so it begins. Another season has come and gone, and with it comes yet another TechCrunch Disrupt NY, complete with Hackathon. Sure, Disrupt doesn’t technically start until Monday, but the Hackathon is the fuel on the fire of the Disruptive flame, and it starts right now. Of all the Disrupt Hackathons that have ever occurred, this year’s NY Disrupt Hackathon is the biggest we’ve ever had, with over 1,000 hackers piling in to the Manhattan Center in Midtown NYC. But it’s not just attendance that’s up — we have some of the biggest names in tech as API sponsors and cash prizes for the winners that are out of this world. Here are some of the API sponsors our hackers will be working with: Yammer, Wrigley, Visa, Twilio, Samsung, Pearson, NewAer, Microsoft BizSpark, Microsoft SkyDrive, General Motors, Crunchbase, Appery.io, and AT&T. Most of the prizes come in the form of cash, with some API sponsors handing out up to $5,000. If you’re chilling here at the Hackathon with us, here are the important deets you need to know for the day: Network: DisruptNYC_5
Password: disrupt13 For those of you who are unfortunately not in attendance this morning, make sure to stay tuned to the TechCrunch home page as we’ll be updating with coverage from the Hackathon throughout today and tomorrow. [gallery ids="807293,807294,807295,807296,807297,807298,807299,807300,807301"]
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Gillmor Gang: Watertown
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — note the intersection of social and mainstream medias as the events in Boston unfolded in real time. What has been framed as a competition became something more, as Twitter streams, scanner apps, and local news streams meshed with CNN et al. Inspired curation by @dannysullivan produced an authoritative feed of credible crowdsourced updates. Tweeters at the scene produced wry commentary on reporter exaggeration, eventually encouraging a hybrid blend of real time speed and news judgement. Our thoughts remain with the brave and resilient people of Watertown, Cambridge, and Boston. @stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @dannysullivan, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Synergist Founder Hopes To Raise $25K Using The Company’s Own Crowdfunding Platform
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
Sites like Kickstarter have been used to crowdfund a wide range of projects, but I don’t think they’ve ever done what is attempting today — they’ve never crowdfunded themselves. The site was founded by 17-year-old Jared Kleinert, who described as a mix of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for social enterprises (i.e., organizations that aim to do good, rather than make money, but apply commercial strategies to achieve those aims). The funding mechanism is pretty similar to Kickstarter — projects need to reach their funding target in order to receive any money, and the money is given for rewards, not equity. But Kleinert emphasized that the fundraising is really only a small part of the process. “We help teams crowdsource ideas based around shared values and strengths and weaknesses,” Kleinert said. “Anyone can post an idea.” Synergist breaks the process down into three main steps — create (where you find team members and discuss ideas), collaborate (Synergist offers tools like document sharing and chat rooms so that a team can develop a project together), and share (that’s where the funding comes in). The site launched in private beta in February. (It’s “private” in the sense that Kleinert hasn’t done much marketing, not in the sense that you need an invite to access the site or start a campaign.) Some early campaigns focused on areas like kids education and music singles from celebrities, Kleinert said. None of them have been funded yet, but now he’s . He said it’s as “a very meta test to try and get out of private beta.” And Kleinert’s learned from the initial projects, he said — most importantly, that you need to do “pre-campaign” work, building up support before the campaign officially starts, in order for your crowdfunding efforts to be successful. “It’s not like you can just put it up and ta da, you have $100,000,” he said. Kleinert’s hoping to raise at least $25,000. That doesn’t seem like much money, even when you take into account his goal to keep Synergist “very lean” — like Grockit and 15Five, the startups where he interned. Apparently it will serve as a “pre-seed” round, which will go towards improvements on the site, but it will also keep Synergist going until it raises a bigger seed round — presumably through more traditional means. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ddqovgd6dk&w=560&h=315]
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Economies Of Scale As A Service
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 4 | 27 |
Don’t look now, but something remarkable is happening. Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty has only , but there are more than 35 ARM-based chips out there. They do no manufacturing; instead they license their designs to companies like Apple, who in turn companies like for the actual fabrication. and are both 200-employee hardware companies worth $1 billion…who subcontract their actual manufacturing out . Warren Buffett has long advocated investing in businesses with “ ” around their business model. Often that moat is an economy of scale; the notion that a hundred widgets cost a dollar each but a million widgets only a dime apiece. Obviously that doesn’t apply to software, or music, or other virtual goods. What’s less obvious is that as time goes by, and technology and interconnectivity advance, it applies less and less to the physical world as well. Industrial capacities that not long ago were available only to gargantuan corporations are today open to anyone and everyone. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the OpenStack providers to rent economies of scale for web services. et al essentially do the same for electronics. So what happens when this trend expands into other sectors? What happens when there are Foxconns for furniture, or cars, or houses, or retail stores? And a for transporting physical goods? What happens is that moats dry up, and are bridged, and previously impregnable incumbents start looking very vulnerable to disruption indeed. But wait. This is all too small. Let’s think bigger yet. Compare and contrast Intel with ARM. The former is, historically, a vertically integrated design-and-manufacturing monolith which owns and controls everything they do, whereas the latter concentrates on being the best at the one thing they do. I have enormous respect for Intel but it that the world is ARM’s more decoupled model, wherein their designs (like TSMC’s manufacturing capacity) are made available to any and all customers. The logical conclusion of that trend, however, is far more transformative than a mere reduction in optimal corporate size and scope: it’s this– Will ownership turn out to be largely a hack people resorted to before they had the infrastructure to manage sharing properly? — Paul Graham (@paulg) I might paraphrase that as “property isn’t theft; property is an inefficient distribution of resources.” It signifies a dichotomy between two very different modes of thinking–one where you own things, and one where you just them, and share them when they’re not in use. This is old news in the tech world, which has been dispersing monolithic dedicated channels into hordes of flexibly routed packets for decades… Fibers always come in pairs. This practice seems obvious to a telephony person, who is in the business of setting up symmetrical two-way circuits, but makes no particular sense to a hacker tourist who tends to think in terms of one-way packet transmission. The split between these two ways of thinking runs very deep and accounts for much tumult in the telecom world.
— Neal Stephenson, , 1994 …but it’s enormously foreign and disruptive, verging on revolutionary, to most everyone else. (Indeed, a whole lot of people have probably just mistaken it for communism. It’s not.) We’re getting pretty abstract here. Let me pick a particular example: by Casey B. Mulligan in the this week, which concludes that “driverless cars … will increase the number of vehicles on the road.” It’s a fairly smart piece that suffers from what I call “unidimensional extrapolation,” and so misses effects like the trend I refer to above. Widespread use of driverless cars will inevitably lead to a sharp rise in cars. A major reason for owning a car is that you don’t need to go get one when you need one. Which sounds like a tautology today, but won’t when shared driverless cars will be able to zoom to your house on five minute’s notice when you need to go to the mall for an hour. Ultimately, I’m confident that driverless cars will lead to much lower car ownership in urban areas; instead, large numbers of people will have fractional ownership of sizable pools of driverless vehicles, à la Berkshire Hathaway’s , and just summon them when they need them. This will codify and formalize the running cost of using a car…and since you won’t pay for them when you’re not using them, it in turn will lead to cars on the road. That’s just one example. More generally, I think it’s hard to deny that both industries (AWS, Foxconn, etc) and individuals (from AirBNB to Zipcar) are increasingly moving towards collective usage of large pools of widely accessible shared resources. Economies of scale as a service, as Aaron put it. So far the effects are limited to specific sectors and domains — but it’s only a matter of time before this wave of change reaches, and profoundly disturbs, entire industries hitherto untouched by its force.
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Newspaper-Backed Wanderful Media Revamps Its Local Deal Service Find&Save
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
, a startup , announced today that it’s launching a dramatically improved version of its Find&Save service. The company’s vision is to create the online version of the deal- and coupon-filled circulars that are delivered with newspapers and in the mail. The first version of Find&Save seemed to take that idea quite literally — it converted print circulars to digital and posted them online. However, CEO Ben T. Smith IV admitted, “It got interesting content out there, but it wasn’t interesting.” Find&Save was actually part of Travidia, a print-to-digital conversion company that Wanderful acquired. (Wanderful from the Associated Press.) This new version, Smith said, is Wanderful’s chance to put its own spin on the service. Basically, the revamp makes the experience more personal and social. In addition to browsing deals and products, users can now save them in lists and set up alerts for expiring sales. They can also share products and lists on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and email, as well as follow users, retailers, and product categories. Find&Save sites will also work on mobile browsers (useful for checking in the store), and the company plans to launch native mobile apps this summer. Looking ahead, Smith said Wanderful can become even more personal and helpful, because it now has lots of data, so it can tell at a local level when something is a really good deal. (That data still comes from physical circulars, as well as retailers and other digital sources.) “We know the price of a two-liter Pepsi in Los Gatos for the past two years,” Smith said. “We can make it easier and much more personal so that everybody’s getting their own experience over time. It will continue to evolve with more data.” As with the previous version, the new Find&Save is integrated as the main local commerce experience on a number of newspaper sites. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can visit the Find&Save pages for , , or .
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Twitter’s Music App Launch Reportedly Set For Friday, But Coachella Could Prove Too Chaotic For Marketing
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Twitter Music will reportedly launch on Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. Earlier today, music discovery service We Are Hunted that it had been acquired by Twitter, while Ryan Seacrest tweeted that he’d been playing around with Twitter’s new music app. AllThingsD says that Twitter’s standalone music app will suggest tracks based on data gleaned from users’ accounts, including the accounts that they follow. The app will allow users to listen to music using third-party services like iTunes and Soundcloud, or watch music videos provided by Vevo. Its acquisition of We Are Hunted and upcoming music app are the latest signs, along with Vine and its own , that Twitter is building itself out as an all-inclusive media platform. We’ve contacted Twitter for more information. A launch this weekend would coincide with the massive Coachella Music Festival outside of Los Angeles, CA. The festival carries heavy sponsorships and in the past Facebook has shown off check-in kiosks and other technology companies have attempted product launches there. Our writer Josh Constine has attended the last nine Coachellas and will be there this weekend. He’s not sure the launch of a music discovery app would work so well at the intense festival. Constine explains “Twitter launching a music app at Coachella is risky. The festival is chaotic, there’s poor mobile signal, people try to conserve battery life, and there’s a ton of distraction. Amongst the seven stages and wild crowds of 75,000 attendees, it may be difficult to find time to download and use a music discovery app. There would be no way to hear new music or watch music videos with all the noise there. The festival could be useful for raising awareness of the app, and if it was more of a music moment capturing and sharing app similar to it could see use at Coachellla. But the festival is so overwhelming, inebriating, and exhausting that people might forget about Twitter music app posters seen between sets and might fail to download the app.” We’ll be on the ground at Coachella tomorrow to let you know if Twitter tries anything.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 | null |
Electronic Arts Cuts Jobs At Montreal Studio Less Than Two Weeks After CEO’s Resignation
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Electronic Arts is laying off staffers at its Montreal office in another round of job cuts. The news comes less than two weeks after CEO John Riccitiello resigned, citing the company’s financial underperformance. EA declined to tell how many jobs are being affected, but reports that the layoffs will affect about 170 employees, out of a total of 300 employed at the studio. The Redwood City, California-based company said in a statement that the Montreal game studio is not closing and that”EA is sharpening its focus to provide games for new platforms and mobile. In some cases, this involves reducing team sizes as we evolve into a more efficient organization.” EA has been restructuring its business to take advantage of new gaming platforms. Last year its PopCap unit after a year of hiring aggressively. At the time, PopCap cofounder John Vechey said the job cuts were part of a plan to focus more on free-to-play and mobile games, and denied speculation that EA was beyond the layoffs. (PopCap was by EA for about $1.3 billion in 2011). Despite those moves, EA, along with other game makers, has continued to struggle in the face of competition from free games offered on social networking or mobile platforms. When Riccitiello left the company last month, he cited its struggling financial performance: “My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year. It currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued to the Street, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago. And for that, I am 100 percent accountable.” The company also awarded by Consumerist readers to the “Worst Company in America,” thanks to its botched SimCity release.
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Arrington Presents Evidence In Letter Claiming Abuse Allegations Were False
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
TechCrunch founder has made good on to reveal more detail in his case against accuser Jenn Allen, and from his lawyer presenting his side of the story. The document, which presents some heavy stuff, asks that Jenn Allen retract or Arrington will continue with planned legal action. The letter counters Allen’s that Arrington raped her on March 5 of last year by stating that travel and credit card records show that Arrington was in Seattle at the time, while Allen was in San Francisco. It also claims that Allen previously lied about being pregnant. “Please consider this letter to constitute a demand for an immediate retraction by you of each of the previous statements. I would appreciate the courtesy of your written response to this demand no later than close of business Monday, April 15, 2013. Indeed, failing a response by you that unconditionally retracts your false and defamatory statements, you will have left us with no choice but to proceed with legal action against you. Litigation is an absolute last resort for Michael, but we will pursue all options to undo the reputational injury caused by your misconduct.” The letter is embedded below and ends with a good amount of digital correspondence from their relationship. It is not for the faint of heart.
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After 7 Years & 50K Storefronts Created, Shopify Launches Major Redesign To Simplify Online Store-Building
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
that the online retail market will grow to $370 billion over the next four years, up from $231 billion this year — a 10 percent compound annual growth rate. In other words, the message is clear: The eCommerce juggernaut ain’t slowing down any time soon. In 2013, every business needs some kind of online presence; the problem, of course, is that many small business owners don’t have the technical know-how (or capital) to set up their own eCommerce marketplace. It’s this problem that gave rise to services like Etsy, Weebly, Wix, Zaarly and one million more, who aim to make it easier on businesses and merchants to sell online. It’s an service that , which left out a slew of similar companies (that have been around for years) in its coverage today. Founded in 2005, one of the largest players in the create-your-own-online store space is , a service that allows anyone to set up an online storefront in a few minutes, quickly adding the products they want to sell, accept payments through PayPal and others, add images and more. The company has flown under the radar of late, partly due to the fact that it’s been quietly preparing a huge update to its platform. (In fact, the company tells us that the redesign has “literally been years in the making.”) In private beta since October, today Shopify is pulling back the curtain on v2.0 and officially making it available to the public. Based on feedback from the 50,000-plus merchants who have created online stores using Shopify, the company has added over 60 new features, beginning with a complete redesign of its dashboard and the addition of a live theme editor and more intuitive administrative functions. The founders tell us that the new platform was built using a JavaScript MVC framework, which was developed in-house before being open-sourced for public consumption. The new framework was designed to be allow the company to develop prototypes and create applications more quickly, while providing increased scalability for its high-volume merchants. The new redesign is the product of the company’s $22 million Series A and B rounds as well as last year’s , which has helped the company accelerate its mobile strategy — a fundamental part of its overall redesign. The team helped develop Shopify’s new iPhone app, which was released last year, and has since focused on adding new responsive themes (i.e. templates) to the company’s theme store. Along with building out its mobile platform, Shopify is also changing up its pricing model and will now offer a cheaper “Starter” plan for businesses (which includes 24/7 support) — both of which aim to make its platform more affordable and accessible to small businesses. Of its new pricing, Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobias Lütke said: For years, Shopify’s least expensive plan cost $29/month. With the release of Shopify 2, we now offer a ‘Starter’ plan for $14/month, which gives merchants the same eCommerce platform, minus a few of the more advanced features and functionalities … The idea being that we want to offer options for merchants regardless of where they are in the lifecycle of their business, and, with our new, less expensive option, we want to remove the barriers for those who are new to selling online. On top of its new “Starter” plan, Shopify is also introducing an Enterprise plan to cater to high-volume clients, priced at $1,000/month. While one would assume that a service like Shopify would cater mostly to small businesses, big-ticket brands want access to the same functionality and are eager to reduce the cost of paying for expensive third-party eCommerce software — or having to build their own. As a result, Shopify has recently become home to a growing number of big-ticket brands, including Budweiser, Gatorade and Wikipedia, the CEO tells us, which are increasingly looking to swim downstream to hosted SaaS solutions. The two new plans bring the total to five (Starter, Basic, Professional, Unlimited and Enterprise. (Plans broken .) Beyond pricing, Shopify’s redesign includes a host of new features, including the ability for merchants to now offer partial refunds without having to use PayPal, along with improved search functionality across the site and improved admin functionality (like meta descriptions, an example of something that users previously had to pay for). The biggest additions, the CEO tells us, are features like a live theme editor, which allow merchants to build and customize the look of their store in a live preview window before publishing. Merchants can now edit colors, fonts, spacing, images and so on, instantly seeing how these changes would look. The company has also completely overhauled its order management system, which now offers abandoned checkout management, merchant-side order editing, refunds and improved fraud detection. The other key, the CEO tells us, is that Shopify has, fundamentally, re-built the platform from scratch to allow for more flexibility and to allow it to expand across all forms of eCommerce. The CEO also revealed some historical growth stats, which show that Shopify went from 18,000 active stores in 2011 to 41K active stores in 2012, and projects to hit 80K this year. Its gross merchandise value — or total sales across its storefronts — grew from $275 million in 2011 to $742 million in 2012 to what it projects will be $1.5 billion by the end of the year. Ultimately, after briefly poking around Shopify 2, it’s easy to see that a lot of time has been put into building the new platform. The design is much approved, as is the user experience; it’s much easier to navigate. As alluded to earlier, there is now a long list of competitors in this space, and Shopify may not have helped itself by taking so long to push its redesign. But it’s clear that the company is now trying to take on the “Bigcommerce” players like Magento and Volusion. Whether or not those big-ticket enterprise clients are willing to consider it as an alternative remains to be seen, but the new pricing is certainly a step in the right direction — on both sides of the spectrum.
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Medium’s Collaboration Tools Also Act As Its First-Ever Invite System
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
As we reported on Tuesday, publishing platform Medium , allowing your friends to add notes to your pre- and post-published articles. It’s a nice way of getting feedback when you want it, especially if it would have been helpful before sharing your thoughts with the world. One thing that the company left out, though, was that since you can invite any friend to collaborate on your posts via a link, once they actually post a note, they’ll be able to use Medium, too. This was confirmed in an email sent out by Ev Williams and company today to its members: Also, here’s something: They will then have access to write on Medium, as well. So, for the first time, you can invite people to Medium. (They just have to help you first.) This is interesting for two reasons: it’s a clear incentive for your friends to participate in the writing and refining of your posts and it’s a perfect onboarding experience for new users to add notes before they ever write a post of their own. Killing two birds with one stone is smart, and it’s a way for the team to get more people using the service in a controlled way. Since there hasn’t been an answer to “how can I join Medium?” until now, other than being invited by the team or being a Twitter employee, this now serves that purpose. Start writing. [Photo credit: ]
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Chief Product Officer And Early Engineer Jim Patterson To Leave Microsoft-Owned Yammer
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Earlier today, we heard that Yammer’s Chief Product Officer Jim Patterson, was planning to depart the company. We’ve confirmed with Yammer that Patterson is indeed leaving Microsoft-owned Yammer. Patterson was an early member of the engineering team at Yammer and served as a director of engineering prior to leading the product team. Yammer’s Pavan Tapadia will become chief product officer. Microsoft acquired Yammer in July 2012 for $1.2 billion in cash. The Yammer team was folded into its Microsoft Office division and continues to report to the company’s CEO and co-founder David Sacks. Yammer was just hit with two months ago, eliminating redundencies in sales and marketing. Here’s the statement from Yammer: We can confirm that Jim is leaving Yammer to pursue new opportunities. We wish him well and thank him for his contributions. We’re excited to announce the promotion of Pavan Tapadia to chief product officer. Pavan has played a key role in helping make Yammer the best-in-class enterprise social network, and we’re excited about his vision for continuing Yammer’s rapid product innovation and growth. It’s only natural that there are some changes in leadership following an acquisition, but this is one of the first major departures for Yammer’s management team. One person who it looks like won’t be leaving anytime soon is Sacks. In March, Sacks said he had to leave Microsoft.
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With Profitable Operations And 100K Stores On Its Platform, Retail Tech Startup Erply Shifts Into High Gear
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
, the company that makes cloud-based and point of sale and inventory management software for retailers, is up against big competition: Microsoft, Oracle, and RetailPro are just some of the behemoths in the same space. But three years , Erply tells us it is still in the game and seeing encouraging growth — and has hit some new milestones that show its progress. The New York City-based Erply now has 100,000 stores on its platform, with customers including names such as Elizabeth Arden Retail, The Athletes Foot, and UNICEF, co-founder and CEO told me in an interview today. The company has grown its staff from four full-timers to 40, split between New York City and Estonia. While 70 percent of its customer base is in the US, Erply’s client reach is spread worldwide across 15 countries. And most importantly, all of those numbers are translating to good things at the bottom line. For the past three quarters, Erply has had profitable operations, Hiiemaa says. The main draw to Erply compared to its big-name competitors is that it was designed for ease of use, rather than with the assumption that a store would bring in a consultant to help manage it. “You don’t need an MBA to use Erply,” Hiiemaa likes to joke. The company also is more permissive in who can use its software use license than its competitors, he said. “We have a really flexible usage model because we want it so that every person in the company can use our software without worrying if it will be costly, or if they can afford an extra user.” Looking ahead, Erply has some interesting things under development, including its own NFC-enabled hardware device to manage inventory that should be making its debut later this year. More social plug-ins are a focus, and also under development are WordPress-like tools to help customers make their own customized receipts and such. There’s buzz that Erply could take on more growth capital to fuel these projects, so we’ll stay tuned for news on that front. And while point-of-sale software and inventory management doesn’t sound like the most world-changing thing, when Hiiemaa talks about Erply, you can see how the mission is important in its own way — helping retailers make it in the new millennium. “The most important thing for me is helping retailers to survive and be successful,” Hiiemaa says. “They have stores, locations, inventory, but they lack web knowledge and algorithmic-powered tools to understand retention. Otherwise, online eats the stores.” As wonderful as online shopping can be, I don’t think I’d want to live in a world without stores, restaurants, and service providers like salons lining the streets stocked with physical things and staffed with real live people. These are the things that make neighborhoods tick, and if Erply helps them stay in business, that’s a noble pursuit indeed.
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Twitter’s Music App Is Real, Beta Testing Confirmed Along With “We Are Hunted” Acquisition
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Today, music discovery service We Are Hunted for , that it had been acquired by Twitter. Both We Are Hunted and Twitter are staying mum about what the team will be doing. And now we know that Twitter is working on a standalone music since Ryan Seacrest of “American Idol” just reported that he’s playing around with it, as retweeted by Twitter’s VP of Business and Corporate Development, , for those of us who don’t follow Seacrest: [tweet https://twitter.com/RyanSeacrest/status/322483675839221760] [tweet https://twitter.com/RyanSeacrest/status/322484344159612928] Since Seacrest also hosts the radio show “American Top 40,” there’s no shock that the app found its way into his hands. Given the fact that he points out “trending” songs, perhaps there will be some sort of integration between his show and the yet-to-be-released app. Twitter Top 40, anyone? As for We Are Hunted, they informed its users of the acquisition , giving them the opportunity to grab their favorites before their accounts are shut down, along with the site: While we are shutting down wearehunted.com, we will continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team. There’s no question that Twitter and music go well together. Artists turn to Twitter first to connect with fans, and people share and discover new songs and albums every day. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on at Twitter. This is a sign that Twitter is becoming a hub for all media: news, photos, videos and now music. All of the pieces are falling into place, and the platform is strong enough to handle all of it now, probably for the first time. Instead of relying on third-party services to bring the content to the platform, the tools are being built to share and interact with the content within the platform. Does this mean that Twitter is ?” Not really, but it is most certainly a platform that now supports all of the top media types. There are a lot of possibilities that come along with a standalone music app, most importantly a new revenue source. With enhanced Twitter Cards, fans of music would be able to find the music that their friends are sharing, buy tracks on the spot and re-share it. This is something that record labels are frothing at the mouth for. While Spotify’s special relationship with Facebook means that music can also easily be shared, it’s not always in a public way. Twitter does have a private account option, but it is seen as a public place to share what you’re up to with pretty much everyone. If you have a beta version of Twitter’s music app, .
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eBay-Backed E-Commerce Software Company ChannelAdvisor Files For $86M IPO
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
The latest technology company to join the IPO bandwagon is e-commerce optimization company . The filed with the SEC today, indicates that ChannelAdvisor could raise as much as $86.25 million in an offering (but this is a placeholder amount). ChannelAdvisor provides cloud-based e-commerce software that allows retailers and manufacturers to advertise and list products on Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook and more. The company’s offerings include automation, analytics and optimization. Users can manage product listings, inventory availability, pricing optimization, search terms, data analytics and other critical functions across sites. Customers include Eddie Bauer, Ann Taylor, Jockey, Dell and eBags. In 2012, the company said customers processed more than $3.5 billion in gross merchandise value via ChannelAdvisor. From 2010 to 2012, the company’s revenue increased from $36.7 million to $53.6 million. The company posted losses of $4.6 million, $3.8 million and $5 million in 2010, 2011 and 2012, respectively. Founded in 2001, the company has $75 million from eBay, New Enterprise Associates, Kodiak Venture Partners and a number of others.
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Flipboard Adds 3 Million Users Since Launch Of Personalized Magazines, Over 500,000 Magazines Created To Date
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Mobile magazine revealed today that over half a million personalized magazines have been created on its platform since . During this time, the company also added 3 million new users to its service, bringing its total user base to now 53 million. In late March, for its users to something else besides search, discover, read and share to social networks – it essentially turned its entire audience into magazine editors. With a “flip it” option now accompanying every story from Flipboard’s collection of content from publishers around the world, anyone is able to now create personalized, topical magazines which other readers can subscribe to directly in the iOS or Android application. Flipboard says that now over 50 percent of its users are reading these personalized ‘zines daily. Some of these have been created by publishers themselves, with a few of the more popular ones coming from Esquire, Rolling Stone, Martha Stewart Living, National Geographic and others. Meanwhile, magazines created by users are also popular – TechCrunch contributor MG Siegler’s “Reading List” mag, for example, made #3 on the most popular list. One very prolific magazine – “Modern Gentlemen’s Playground – has already seen 2,495 items added, Flipboard notes. And not surprisingly, BuzzFeed has the most flipped article – “28 Incredibly Beautiful Places You Won’t Believe Actually Exist.” Which I’m pretty sure everyone on the Internet has now read. (I think I’ve read it three times, it’s like linkbait that never fails!) The articles’s photographic content, of course, speaks to Flipboard readers’ propensity for browsing highly visual photo essays. The sharing patterns in Flipboard are also interesting. Apparently, the magazine is transitioning to become a morning news paper of sorts, with users doing the most reading around 9:00 AM, while magazine creation takes place in the afternoon (1:00 PM) and sharing peaks in the evening (7:00 PM). You can almost see the flow of the content creation to consumption process at work here, starting with reading content, then magazine creators curating the articles for niche readerships, and finally leading to those who spread content further on social networks. Oh, as for the people making the content in the first place? Um, we just work all the time. You’re welcome.
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Unfazed By Bitcoin’s Wild Swings And Mysterious Origins, Silicon Valley VCs Place Their Bets
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Bitcoin’s record highs and the ensuring surge in hacking attempts and thefts may be . However, beneath the chaos, Silicon Valley’s best-known venture firms are finally starting to make real bets around the crypto-currency. The price of a single bitcoin had more than quintupled to $265 amid a banking crisis in Cyprus and that regulators will tolerate the currency. It then settled back down to $120 . While often ends in a world of pain, there is a growing sense that Bitcoin, or another math-based currency like it, is here to stay. “It’s far from certain that Bitcoin is going to be a big deal,” said , who has made two investments in the space. “But the potential for disruption is enormous. If Bitcoin realizes its full potential, you’re talking about disrupting Visa, First Data, MasterCard, a lot of the banks, Western Union. These are huge multibillion dollars companies. It’s far from certain. But if it happens, a lot of value will be destroyed and a lot of value will be created. That’s when venture capitalists should be looking.” While , the core 31,000 lines of Bitcoin haven’t been compromised despite being available to the world’s best hackers and cryptographers for the last four years. On top of that, the currency is starting to become a speculative asset for well-heeled investors that want a gold-like hedge against U.S. dollar inflation or instability in the European Union. “My feeling is that Bitcoin has moved away from nerdy tech types and is now attracting more of the finance and Wall Street types,” said Jered Kenna, who just re-launched TradeHill, a Bitcoin exchange targeted at accredited investors and high-net worth individuals. After launching a few weeks ago, he says he’s had investors open accounts and individually send in more than $1 million to buy Bitcoin. Even the Winklevii, the twins who famously sued Mark Zuckerberg over the creation of Facebook, . They say they own 1 percent of all Bitcoins in circulation. With that growing acceptance, VCs are betting that Bitcoin will need a more reliable ecosystem of payments processors, exchanges, wallets and financial instruments. The funding rounds are still small and exploratory, ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars in seed money to a few million. But they do underscore real VC interest in the space. “Basically, payment is just a form of information and every other type of information — music, media and so on — is accessible across borders. But payments is one of these weird things that’s not,” said , who has yet to make a bet but has spent the last two weeks immersed in everything Bitcoin. It’s easy and frictionless, for example, to send a music track to a friend in Egypt, but sending money is much more complicated and there are transaction fees skimmed along the way. Bitcoin was designed to be a pure peer-to-peer currency that wouldn’t need to rely on trusted third parties like banks for transactions. It is the work of a mysterious, pseudonymous hacker called Satoshi Nakamoto who was clearly frustrated with the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis when central banks cut interest rates to zero or near zero and the U.S. started expanding the money supply through quantitative easing. In contrast, Bitcoin was designed to have a mathematically predictable, fixed supply that increases until sometime around the year 2140. In that sense, its behavior is somewhere in between that of a commodity and currency. It is even “mined” like a precious metal; to generate new Bitcoin, a great deal of computational power has to be expended to add to the currency’s public record of transactions with some Bitcoin as the reward. Bitcoin’s fixed supply has made With its recent surge, Bitcoin has behaved like a store of value, but its volatility and proneness to deflation undermine it as a medium of exchange. Yet a fervent, core following has helped Bitcoin gain gradual, broader acceptance. “I’m a huge fan of taking monetary policy out of the government and putting it back into the hands of the people,” said 24-year-old Charlie Shrem, , a platform for instant Bitcoin transfers. Few of the Bitcoin entrepreneurs fit the typical psychological profile of a Valley founder. While building the version of his Bitcoin payments processor, Shrem absconded to a remote town in Southern Norway for months while crashing with a hacker friend named Polynomial he had never met in real-life. “I wanted to be secluded,” he said. “He told me I could stay with him. I just took that risk, flew out of meet him and he was the nicest guy in the whole world.” He’s never even had a face-to-face meeting with his co-founder, a reclusive Welsh hacker named Gareth Nelson. “It’s nerve-wracking. I’m nervous to meet him,” said Shrem, who runs a team of 15 from New York’s Flatiron district. “We’ve built this relationship and this multi-million dollar business around the fact that I don’t see him. I guess I’ll go in a few months.” TradeHill’s Kenna is an ex-Marine who built the first version of the exchange while living in Vina Del Mar on the Chilean coast. In his spare time, he converted a 41-room building in San Francisco’s Mission District into a “hacker hotel” where he collects rent in Bitcoin. “I collect dollars too,” he added. “I have to be careful not to sound like a kid who wants to blow stuff up, but I’ve never been content with a normal life,” said Kenna, who backpacked through most of the “Stan” countries of the former Soviet Union after leaving the military. “I went from having no professional experience in finance to being in the industry leader in a new field and being one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on one of the oddest, most obscure assets.” Some Bitcoin founders are driven less by ideological passion and more by personal experience — especially if they grew up in countries with unstable currencies. They are keenly aware of how fragile faith in a government’s ability to repay its debts can be. (We in the U.S., Europe and Japan are lucky to grow up in countries with the world’s major reserve currencies.) Lemon’s Wences Casares Wences Casares, a Bitcoin enthusiast and miner who runs mobile wallet startup Lemon, is the son of Patagonian sheep ranchers who lost their life savings in the 1990s to hyper-inflation during the Carlos Menem years in Argentina. “I remember my parents losing everything. I was 14,” said Casares, who founded the Argentina’s first Internet service provider before moving to the U.S. He got into Bitcoin two years ago and is looking for ways to bring it to smartphone platforms. “I remember the feeling I had when I saw the web for the first time in 1992. That’s how I feel about Bitcoin. It feels like the Internet before the browser.” His company has attracted well-known firms like Lightspeed and Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership. “The interesting part of diligencing Bitcoin deals won’t be the technical part. What’s unique about the Bitcoin world is that it’s spread all over the world,” Chien said. “It’s not based in Silicon Valley and that’s partially because of the very distributed nature of the system.” Even the best-known Bitcoin exchange in the world, Mt. Gox, from Tokyo’s central Shibuya district. Because of the global nature of Bitcoin, it will be interesting to see how Silicon Valley fares as the currency matures. While the Valley has been at the center of the last waves of innovation in social networking and in new smartphone platforms like Android and iOS, it is just one geographic node out of many in the Bitcoin universe. Kenna chose to relocate from South America to Silicon Valley to be close to investors. TradeHill, which shut down two years ago amid a conflict with Dwolla over chargebacks, has been reborn as a new entity and just closed $300,000 in funding. He said he came to the Valley to do TradeHill the right way in recruiting a technical co-founder from Google named Miron Cuperman who had worked on PCI compliance and privacy. “When I looked at reforming TradeHill, I wanted three things: operating capital to do it right, regulatory certainty and a good team,” he said. “It’s hard to run a tech company from Chile when investors want to meet with you on-demand.” But others are staying where they are. Atlanta-based just processed $5.2 million in Bitcoin transactions last month and just closed a little over a half-million dollars in funding from angels like Path and Spotify’s Shakil Khan and SecondMarket’s Barry Silbert. They’re now hiring aggressively. One of the most interesting startups to watch will be OpenCoin, which has one of the most pedigreed teams. CEO was a founder of E-LOAN and peer-to-peer lending platform Prosper and co-founder Jed McCaleb, was behind eDonkey and Mt. Gox. They just OpenCoin, run by Chris Larsen, has created an alternate math-based currency called the Ripple. Along with operating an exchange for Bitcoin and national currencies like the dollar, OpenCoin supports an alternate math-based currency . The startup has a really unusual business model; the number of Ripples in the world is fixed at 100 billion but OpenCoin has bestowed upon itself a fraction of that. The company intends to give away as many Ripples as it can. If the startup develops enough support and infrastructure for the currency that people starting putting trust in it, the currency will strengthen. That in turn will also make OpenCoin’s valuation rise as the value of its currency holdings appreciates. It feels analogous to the business models of other open-source companies. “The Ripple network is like Bitcoin in certain ways. The currency exists as a public good,” Larsen said. “But we thought it was good to have a company to help nurture the development of the code.” Ripple is designed to address a few of Bitcoin’s issues. For one, it doesn’t require mining and two, it is invulnerable to what’s known as the “51% attack.” Bitcoin is secure as long as at least half of the computing power in its network is controlled by nodes that are “honest” or are not attacking the network. At this point though, the network supporting Bitcoin is so large that it would not only cost tens of millions dollars to bring Bitcoin down, the supply of hardware necessary to do Bitcoin mining is so limited and expensive that it would be logistically difficult to pull off. Even Casares had to plunk down $30,000 six months ago to buy specialized mining equipment, which now pays for itself. “The challenge would be how to get your hands on enough computing equipment. There are only so many Bitcoin mining chips in the world,” said BitPay CEO Tony Gallippi. “The bottleneck is really just the supply of hardware. Even if you wanted to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at taking Bitcoin down, you’d have to create your own semi-conductor fab line.” For investors who are still trying to figure out how to wrap their heads around Bitcoin, there are plenty of concerns: 1) regulatory risk if governments act against Bitcoin 2) security risks with so many third-party services being attacked and hacked constantly and 3) adoption risk, or whether the broader public will warm up to math-based currencies. Regulatory risk was cleared up a bit last month when the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued a statement about virtual currencies. While , it did make it clearer that individual Bitcoin users or miners wouldn’t be regulated. Exchanges, on the other hand, look like they will need to get a money transmitter license. Security is a constant concern. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and anonymous, which makes the currency an ideal target for hackers. Once Bitcoin is stolen, reclaiming it is pretty much impossible. There have been several wallets that have shut down after attacks over the past few years. In some cases, it’s not even clear whether those attacks were real like with MyBitcoin, an early wallet that controversially shut down in 2011. Claiming a hacking attack could have been an easy excuse for an unethical wallet provider to walk off with people’s Bitcoin savings. Liew have been lost or stolen at some point. Even the biggest exchange, Mt. Gox, suffered lags last week as the company coped with a massive distributed denial of service attack. Today it “You can’t trust anyone,” Shrem said. “If you’re able to stay alive by this point, hopefully you’re making some money. Everyone else that’s failed has gotten hacked, become insolvent or had bad management.” When Kenna launched the first version of TradeHill, he said he was constantly getting hit by hacking attempts out of Russia. One of the reasons he says he’s been able to relaunch and keep TradeHill’s brand name is because he returned whatever he could to the company’s customers back in 2011. TradeHill’s first incarnation shut down after their payments network Dwolla started doing chargebacks on their transactions. A suit between the two companies is still ongoing. “Shutting down was painful but I knew it was the right thing to do,” Kenna said. “When we gave people their money back, it assured people that there were legitimate people with integrity in Bitcoin.” But as I said above, the core Bitcoin protocol hasn’t been compromised, which is one reason why VCs are still interested in it. “All of modern cryptography is based on certain assumptions that could go away tomorrow,” said Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who has experience in security after selling SiteAdivsor to McAfee in 2006. “But Bitcoin’s been out there and has been battle-tested. Maybe there’s some core flaw in all of our security systems, but if that were the case, we’d have much bigger problems.” While researching Bitcoin, Lemon’s Casares hired two separate teams of hackers to examine the Bitcoin source code for vulnerabilities for about a half-year. “They are arguably the best in the world. I spent a lot of time and money on the best hackers I could find and came back from that convinced that Bitcoin’s security is robust,” he said. “What they found was very, very compelling for me.” The last investor risk is around whether people will increasingly have faith in Bitcoin itself. For now, the currency spikes with every bit of media attention and companies like WordPress are starting to accept it. Bitcoin’s estimated in the . It isn’t even a drop in the bucket, but it continues to grow. The irony is that if an ecosystem of trusted third-party Bitcoin wallets, banks and exchanges succeeds, it goes against the original peer-to-peer design of Bitcoin that Nakamoto envisioned. The point of But who knows what Nakamoto’s ultimate intent was? He mysteriously disappeared two years ago, saying that he had moved onto other projects. Nobody ever figured out who Nakamoto was. “I wouldn’t say Satoshi was full of himself. But he was sure of himself,” said Shrem, who says he corresponded with Nakamoto a few times on IRC. “He seemed to know what Bitcoin was going to do every step of the way.”
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Sqwiggle Makes Working Remotely Less Lonely, More Awesome
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Hey ! Check this one out. is browser-based group video chat built with work-from-homers in mind. It’s got the office-like immediacy that Skype lacks, but without the noise of a Google Hangout. I’m kind of in love with it. As someone who puts words on the Internet for a living, I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of the last 5 years working from my home. Awesome, right? Yeah, to a point. The first year is all about celebrating the fact that you’re still wearing pajamas at noon. By the second year, you’re talking to your dog on a regular basis. By the third year, you start getting mad that your dog isn’t talking back. There are things that help, of course. You can use chat room services like Campfire or Hipchat with your team to maintain some degree of social sanity — but for actually, you know, your team, and looking at their lovely faces, and talking like humans should, nothing really fits the bill. You could Skype each other when needed, but the whole calling process feels archaic and slow. You could sit in a constant Google Hangout, but then you’ve got to deal with the endless roar of everyone’s background noise being mashed up into a symphony of barking dogs, lawn mowers, and coffee shop chatter. Sqwiggle finds the comfy sweet spot somewhere between the two. It’s “always-on”, in a sense, but without the background noise or distractions. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O57iEHPP6aY?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] For our friends at work who can’t be caught watchin’ YouTube videos right now (Hey! You should work from home!), here’s how it works: Each company gets their own “Workroom”, with each member getting a spot in a Brady Bunch-esque grid of heads. When you’re not actively in a conversation with someone, you appear to them as a black-and-white still photo that gets updated a few times per minute. To speak with any other person in the room, you just click their face — bam, you’re connected. No ringing, no answering, just an immediate conversation. It’s sort of like turning to speak with someone in the office, except you still get to wear your pajamas. Want to talk with two or three people? Just click each of their photos, and you’ll be in a group chat. Others can tell who is already talking to who based on matching colored icons that appear next to your name. If you click on someone who’s already in a conversation, you’ll join that conversation — again, it’s like walking up and joining a conversation in the office. While Sqwiggle hopes that people will primarily use the video side of their product for conversations, some things just don’t work over video. How do you share images, or links? What if you want to send a quick text broadcast to everyone in the room? For these, Sqwiggle has a slide-out “Stream” drawer, which functions as an auxiliary chat room of sorts. Images, videos, and links are displayed in-line, and it can be used for sending quick blurps of text when a video chat isn’t necessary or practical. The Stream drawer shrinks and grows with the scroll of your mouse wheel, with the grid of talking heads scaling alongside appropriately. There’s no hard-cap on the number of people that can be in each room, though the team says things work best with 2-12 people in the current build. Of course, there are all sorts of privacy matters to be considered with a set up like this; fortunately, this is something Sqwiggle is focusing on. They’re building a privacy mode that turns your timelapsed still shot into an anonymized outline, suggesting to your team that now is probably not a good time. They’re also considering implementing some sort of face detection, which would automatically enable privacy mode when you’re not right in front of your computer. Remembering not to bring your laptop into the bathroom, however, is on you. While Sqwiggle is built to be run in the browser (it’s webRTC based, so it’ll only work with Chrome and recent nightly builds of Firefox for now), they’ve also got a super solid stand-alone client for OS X. Windows and Linux clients are in their plans, but those folks will need to use the browser offering for now. Sqwiggle is free for the first month of use, but costs $9 per month per user thereafter. If you , however, they’ll knock the price down to $5 per month per user indefinitely. They’ve just begun to let teams into the Beta last night, with plans to get everyone in within the next week or two.
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eBay’s PayPal Acquires IronPearl To Fuel Growth Beyond 123M Users
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
About a month ago, , led by Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier. They were growth hackers before the word “growth hacker” even existed. In fact, they don’t even really like the word “growth hacker.” For years, Chudnovsky had been advising companies like Goodreads, Path, Wanelo, Poshmark, Lyft and Highlight on how to acquire users. His stealth startup, was systematizing that advice. He and his partner have been building a set of optimization tools that will track a user through a site or app and test which combinations work best to keep them coming back after a week or a month — although the goal can be whatever you want it to be. PayPal, along with GoodReads (which was recently bought by Amazon), were early testers. Apparently, IronPearl’s product and the pair’s expertise was so valuable that eBay’s PayPal unit decided to just outright buy the company before launch. We hear the price in the “double-digit millions,” although neither company is talking about the price. With the deal, Chudnovsky becomes Paypal’s vice president of growth while Currier will be a growth advisor. (Currier won’t be coming on full-time.) “Creating a growth group is foundational for us,” said PayPal president David Marcus. “PayPal has grown to almost 125 million users almost organically, and we’ve never pulled the levers to grow much faster. There are only very few, world-renowned growth hackers in the world and Stan is one of them.” Chudnovsky and Currier were behind a Web 1.0 company called Tickle that did personality quizzes and tests. It was later acquired by job site Monster for about $100 million. He then got into gaming and sold Wonderhill to midcore developer Kabam. Then he got into advising before starting IronPearl. “The main reason I decided to sell is because I’ve built companies before,” Chudnovsky said. “I know what that path looks like. When you look at something like PayPal, it’s different. It’s more of a marketplace than just a sheer network. There are merchants and people transacting with each other.” Chudnovsky will lead a growth team that will focus on building out PayPal’s customer base beyond 123 million registered users.
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Creative Market Previews Its API For A Digital Asset Marketplace With Photoshop Extension
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
, the online store for creative digital assets, including graphics, themes, templates and fonts, this week introduced a new Photoshop extension that’s designed to preview the power of its upcoming API. Creative Market already offers a central web-based store that acts almost like an Amazon for digital creative professionals, but its ultimate vision is much broader – it hopes to give pros the opportunity to buy and sell their wares right where they’re already doing their work, which is what the API is all about. With the Photoshop extension, people can browse and buy assets within the application itself, making them available instantly for use in their creative work. Installation takes only a single click, and regardless of whether users buy the assets within Photoshop or from the web-based marketplace, they’re instantly available to users within the extension itself once they’re logged in. It dramatically simplifies the process of starting on a new machine, or of wiping your hard drive for a fresh install, by making sure that your fonts, graphics and more are easily available on your fresh install without having to physically copy files over. “The Photoshop extension was kind of the easiest way for us to paint the picture of how obvious this problem is, and yet it’s overlooked a lot,” Creative Market co-founder and CEO Darius “Bubs” Monsef explained in an interview. “Software that we use doesn’t actually have the assets that we use in the software, in the software. That’s something that we’ve wanted to do ever since we pivoted COLOURlovers to become Creative Market.” Photoshop was a logical place to start, Monsef says, because Creative Suite alone represents a massive potential market. Creative Market recently conducted a survey of over 1,000 creative pros, and found that on average they spend around $150 a year, which, multiplied by Adobe’s reported paying user base of 40 million customers, adds up to a potential $6 billion in annual sales. Of course, Creative Market isn’t without competition in its efforts to bring asset management and marketplaces direct to creative products. Adobe recently said that it will formally introduce and explain its , at its upcoming Adobe MAX conference. The timing isn’t ideal for Creative Market, but Monsef still thinks the approach his company is taking it better for both sellers and buyers. “Adobe has released their Adobe Exchange in-app as an extension, too, finally allowing people to buy assets inside of Photoshop,” he said. “Unfortunately, like products built by large teams focused on other problems, it doesn’t work as well as I think it could. I’ve tried using it and it’s very confusing and I think not nearly as elegant as what we’ve built.” The other big advantage for Creative Market is that once it starts working with the makers of other creative software products, assets purchased through its API and its web-based store will be instantly available within a wide range of apps, not just those from Adobe. Not being locked to a vendor in terms of where your assets are kept is a considerable competitive advantage. Plus, Creative Market plans to share its take of royalties with API partners, the first batch of which it’s in the process of selecting now. Managing creative assets is not something everyone things about all the time, but it’s a necessary element of any creative professional’s job, and the way it’s handled online is largely unchanged in recent years. Creative Market offers creators a bigger percentage of the cut than they get elsewhere, and presents media and usage rights in a simpler way that’s easier to both use and understand. If it can pull of the feat of becoming the integrated creative media library where most professionals do most of their work, it’ll make a big dent in a strong and growing market.
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LinkedIn Acquires Pulse For $90M In Stock And Cash
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
LinkedIn today that it has acquired , the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn , is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now. LinkedIn argues that it is acquiring Pulse because it wants the site to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs.” “We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” said , LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, in a statement today. “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.” Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Stanford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, . Just recently, Pulse started to dip its toes by adding a number of social features to its apps. Given today’s acquisition, chances are Pulse will put a stronger focus on this in the near future. The service currently has about 30 million users in more than 190 countries. Approximately 40 percent of its users are outside of the U.S. Kothari writes in that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.” Pulse raised an in October 2010. Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, e.ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in this round. In June 2011, Pulse raised a from , , and .
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Like A CarWoo For Used Cars, AutoRef Raises $850K Seed Round
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
Pittsburgh-based startup , which is something like a CarWoo for used vehicles, has raised $850,000 in seed funding. The round was led by an interesting, strategic investor: Deutsche Telekom, which owns the large European online car marketplace, AutoScout24. T-Venture, the venture arm of Deutsche Telekom, led the funding alongside Innovation Works, plus local angels and other investors. AutoRef.com was founded in December 2010, but didn’t really have a product until its participation in Pittsburgh’s accelerator, home to companies like , , , and . Launched in July 2012, AutoRef has now expanded to 5,200 dealerships across the U.S., largely in the northeast, and in New Jersey in particular. CEO Michael Pena, whose background is in equity trading, says he came up with the idea while working at the trading desk. “I always thought that an option platform – similar to trading or bond trading – would make a lot of sense in the car space,” he explains. Pena also grew up in the car industry, as his family owns a dealership Vegas where he had spent summers working when younger. Pena thought it would be great to use the “reverse auction” format with cars – meaning, putting customers at the center, then allowing dealerships to bid for them. That’s the same idea that the car-buying service uses today, but Pena was especially interested in employing the model for used vehicles. “New cars are easy. You get three new cars, zero mileage, and you control all the variables – color, mileage, and year. It’s really easy to just get the lowest price,” Pena explains. “With used cars it’s difficult there are so many variables – maybe the mileage is off, the color is off, or it’s even a different model…how do you commoditize that? How do you equalize that so the consumer gets the best deal?” AutoRef came up with a model where the consumer chooses a car they’re interested in, and the site then provides them with similar vehicles based on their research history. The customer then picks three cars from that list, and that information is sent off to dealers who compete for that customer. Despite how it sounds, the service is not just a lead gen operation. Traditional sites bombard consumers with phone calls or emails after they provide their contact information. “It annoys the heck out of customers and it makes it so that most customers don’t even want to go through the process,” Pena says. AutoRef works differently. It uses technology to provide customers with a “proxy” email and phone number, so dealers don’t have access to this personal information. And the buyer gets to say when the dealer is allowed to call or email. These virtual means of contact only work for up to 72 hours, and the customer can shut off access at any time. For those unfamiliar with what a proxy number is, you can think of it as something like Google Voice, for example – a virtual line that can be configured to ring your phone. And a proxy email is essentially a temporary, disposable email address which forwards to your inbox. Again, both of these work only for 72 hours, providing the customer with a bit of protection. An interesting data point about AutoRef.com, is that while the idea is to negotiate the car buying online, when customers actually show up for their test drive, over half of them end up buying a different vehicle than the one they were researching. Pena is careful to explain that it’s not a bait-and-switch situation – that is, it’s not that the dealer is saying their car is unavailable – it’s the customer who’s looking around and sees something else they like better once they’re on site. But what got the customer in the door was the relationship and rapport they developed initially, having used the service to make that initial contact with the salesperson. It’s still early days for AutoRef, which claims to see around 20,000 uniques per month, 2 percent of which convert. Of those conversions, around 38 percent end up buying a car, which averages the startup around $250 per car sold. Revenue-wise, AutoRef is making around $19,000-$20,000 per month – but revenue isn’t why AutoScout24 made this deal. The European company has been looking for a entry point in the U.S. market, Pena tells us [ ] “They loved the business model, and how we’re doing things differently – how we’re charging for things on a transactional basis, how we’re scaling, and how we’re growing,” he explains. (AutoRef is growing uniques at 20 percent per week). “You don’t see these large convertible debt rounds happen quite often…and we’re actually already in talks about putting an A round together,” he says. There’s also the potential for a revenue model based on the analytics AutoRef is now collecting, though it will need to grow larger for those figures to be reliable. In the meantime, AutoRef is focusing on growing its U.S. footprint, and scaling the business. With the funding, it will hire a few more sales people and engineers. However, because of AutoScout24’s involvement, the startup now has access to AutoScout’s developers in Germany for assistance on projects going forward. Interested used car buyers can try out the site for free.
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“In The Studio,” SoftTech’s Charles Hudson Has Game When It Comes To Gaming
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 |
TechCrunch “In The Studio” rolls on this week by welcoming a long-time Valley operator, founder, angel investor, venture capitalist, and now general partner at one of the first “super angel” funds. , now a partner with , has sat on in the startup world. With stints as an operator at Google, as an investor with In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm), and founder of companies in the gaming space, Hudson brings a wealth of experience and insights — particularly around the gaming industry — to the table. Hudson is a familiar face in the Valley’s startup ecosystem as an active angel investor, speaker, and commentator, as well as penning a great with nontraditional insights, such as this one which suggested beleaguered Zynga may going private after going public. If you’re a founder or investor in the startup gaming world, this short video is a must-watch. In this short discussion, Hudson and I talk about a dizzying range of topics, such as how Zynga was able to scale so quickly and why their value began to fall, how Zynga mastered customer acquisition and built cash machines to subsidize other activities, how Zynga had to decouple itself from the Facebook platform and how that process inflicted pain, how Zynga’s public market valuation trickles down to all corners of the gaming industry, how the angel investing climate for gaming is growing thin, and how founders and angel investors can, most importantly, look to the future for areas and platforms to focus on, such as Apple TV.
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LinkedIn Reaches 1M Users In Singapore, Or 20% Of The Country’s Population
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
LinkedIn has in Singapore, or 20 percent of its 5 million population, since the service’s launch there in 2011, the professional networking site announced today. This milestone means that about 70 percent of Singapore’s labor force and students now have accounts on the Web site, according to the company. Singapore is the home of the company’s Asia-Pacific HQ and its fourth market in Southeast Asia to surpass the one million milestone, after Malaysia (about one million), Indonesia and the Philippines (1.5 million each). Other Asia Pacific countries with more than one million LinkedIn members are Australia (4 million), India (19 million) and China (3 million). The site’s rapid growth in Singapore is not surprising because the country is an important business and financial hub. Its expanding user base in the rest of Southeast Asia also underscores that region’s potential as an emerging market for tech and online services. Indonesia in particular sees high usage of social networking services–according to , Indonesians contribute 2.4 percent of tweets, while Jakarta ranked second in terms of the world’s top cities on Facebook. According to , Indonesia saw a 58 percent increase in Internet users in 2012, superseded by only China and India. The top five industries represented among LinkedIn’s Singaporean members are IT, banking, financial services, oil and energy, and education management, while the top five international companies followed are Standard Chartered Bank, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Solutions for Emerging Asia, and IBM. LinkedIn says that globally it attracts more than two new members every second and has more than 200 million members worldwide.
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Former Groupon COO And Yahoo Exec Rob Solomon Joins Accel As Venture Partner
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
Accel Partners is making a big talent announcement today, with former Groupon COO and Yahoo exec joining the firm as a venture partner. Solomon as Accel-backed Groupon’s President and COO. As AllThingsD Solomon left the deals company in 2011. Prior to his time at Groupon, Solomon was a venture partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, which he joined after selling travel search engine SideStep to Kayak for $200 million. Before the Kayak sale, Solomon was the VP of Yahoo Shopping and a member of the company’s executive management team. Solomon also sits on the board of directors for HomeAway, and HighGear Media (backed by Accel Partners and Greylock). He’s also been an active angel investor, investing in Trippy and a number of other startups. As Venture Partner, Solomon will be evaluating early stage and growth equity opportunities with Accel. He will also advise the firm’s portfolio companies on a wide range of strategic and operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions. Clearly Solomon’s experience as an entrepreneur, executive and investor should help Accel’s portfolio companies.
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Microsoft Launches Preview Of Skype For Outlook.com
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
Microsoft that it is launching a preview of Skype for Outlook.com starting in the UK. The service will be made available in the U.S. and Germany in the coming weeks before it is rolled out to the rest of the world. With the rollout of Skype for Web, the VoIP service joins Microsoft’s suite of online tools, including . Since its , Outlook.com, meant to replace the Hotmail brand and design, has garnered 60 million users. Microsoft for $8.5 billion back in October 2011. Skype for Outlook.com requires a one-time download of a plugin, which is available for the most recent versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. Users can connect to Outlook.com using their Microsoft account. People who already have existing Skype accounts can link it to Outlook.com, which will allow them to add their Skype contacts to the email service. More details on the rollout and step-by-step instructions are available on the and the .
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Park Tag Wants To Make It Easier To Find Your Next Parking Space By Creating A Space-Swapping Community
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
Finding a parking space right next to your favourite café can seem like playing the lottery, but wants to change all that. The startup, which is exhibiting at Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley, wants to make parking social so it’s easier to find your next space. The lets users invite their neighbours and colleagues to form a community of drivers who can help each other out by posting a parking space they are using before they’re going to vacate it so that another Park Tag user can book it. In return for posting and then successfully trading their parking spot, the user who posted it gets in-app credits to redeem on future parking spots when they’re in need of a slot. “Three hundred million people globally have a parking problem every day and we help them solve it,” founder Silvan Rath told TechCrunch. He said the social parking system can help drivers save time and money and even get to know their neighbours. CO2 emissions caused by people driving around looking for a parking place or leaving the engine idling when they wait for a space to be vacated is another problem the startup is hoping to address. “We empower people to form local parking communities. They can trade curbside parking spots so they can save money because they trade curbside rather than going to a garage, for example,” Rath said. “And just imagine you have this great parking spot in front of the cafe and somebody else wants to have that spot — so you post it, and somebody else books it and you exchange it in real life,” he said. “You get to know people through it even. Just imagine all your neighbours using it, so then you meet your neighbours who you wouldn’t have met otherwise.” Rath stressed there is no money changing hands — it’s a non-financial trade, with a little added encouragement oiling the wheels because the user who trades their spot gets credits from the person they traded with that will help them find parking in the future or to redeem as coupons. “The credits raises his ability to find parking spots next time and he can exchange these credits for coupons also for standard retailers out there,” said Rath. As well as a mobile app, Park Tag said they are also integrating with car manufacturers’ in-car dashboards linking to open APIs — building apps on top of platforms from the likes of Ford and BMW so users can post or book a parking spot from the dashboard. Park Tag also wants to integrate with peer-to-peer parking vendors like and , said Rath, and is opening its own APIs for other co-branded applications who want to show parking availability. “We want to work with anybody out there. I think the user should have syndicated data. We should all exchange data. There should not be a proprietary parking app or something — people just want to have parking availability,” he added. The startup has soft launched its app in beta in January in three markets: Germany, the Netherlands and Turkey — where Rath said it has around 15,000 users. Here at Disrupt NY the startup has pushed the button on its global launch. “We just made it available on the global App Store. We’re launching on Android soon — and end of May we’re going to have the full feature set online,” Rath added.
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Koupah Does Tablet-Based Point-Of-Sale, But Also Zaps Credit Card Transaction Fees
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley company is a fresh take on the tablet-based point-of-sale space, which is growing in popularity among SMBs that want a solution that’s flexible, extensible and less expensive than legacy POS-specific hardware systems. Koupah takes the model a step further by offsetting some or all credit card transaction fees with advertising. The system works by tracking customers and keeping a record of them across Koupah systems, complete with purchase history and shopping preferences, to help create profiles that can be used to create personalized ads and offers for repeat shoppers. Those promotions will be printed directly on a customer’s bill, and each is designed to target that customer specifically, making for a greater chance it’ll become an actual conversion. The commission that Koupah takes in for displaying those ads is then used to offset the 2.69 percent fee that credit card processors put on credit payments. The Koupah system is opt-in, making users tap their devices to activate the profile. It can connect to a second, smaller device on the outward-facing portion of the Koupah terminal to check a user in and bring up their profile, which could include order history, or even favorite orders for faster ordering. Koupah is founded by David Merel who previously built the , a rewards platform that uses NFC and QR codes to track commerce behavior and provide tailored rewards. Social Passport is a key integration for Koupah’s customer profile features. Where Koupah tries to advertise to offset fees, other players in the space like have turned to LevelUp to go transaction-fee-free for its merchants. That system has different downsides, however, since it requires that customers have a LevelUp account for it to work to begin with. Whereas , Koupah is giving away three terminals per merchant for free, as well as a cash drawer and receipt printer. It makes its money via advertising opportunities and through a 3-cent-per-transaction rate on all purchases to offset hardware and technical support costs. Merel said in an interview that the system also supports purchases from mobile devices, delivery orders, take-out and dine-in, so it’s intended as a complete replacement for existing POS and retail/restaurant backends, complete with an analytics platform. The New York-based startup is accepting reservations now for merchants interested in trying it in-store.
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Virtusize Brings Its Virtual Fitting Solution To The UK, Signs Deal With Fashion Retailer ASOS
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
There are an abundance of startups trying to solve the problem of how to “try on” clothes online, with a range of different approaches and technology — a competition we’ve likened to a space race where nobody has yet landed on the moon. Today, launches its virtual fitting solution in the UK via a partnership with ASOS. After a successful six month trial, the “Fit Vitualiser” button is initially being rolled out on the product pages of over 2,000 of the online fashion retailer’s own brand clothes. Shunning which uses robots or that enables a shopper to upload and see a 3D visualisation of themselves in order to virtually dress up in potential purchases, Virtusize lets customers to compare specific measurements of an item they are looking to buy with a similar item they already own. By displaying and overlaying 2D silhouettes of both garments, the startup says that customers can more accurately compare sizes and, ultimately, choose the item that would fit them best. It’s a compelling pitch and has obvious cost savings over the up front work involved in 3D visualisation of a retailer’s entire catalog. That said, it also means that Virtusize’s solution focuses more on how a garment will fit a customer, not so much what it will look like on them. The latter is quite subjective but could also contribute to high return rates, which is what all virtual fitting solutions are trying to reduce. In addition, Virtusize’s solution requires that a customer already owns a supported garment in order to compare sizes or that they measure a favourite (and similar) item of clothing at home and enter the data manually. Presumably that’s why ATOS has chosen to start with its own brand clothing as returning customers will be more likely to own a comparable garment, and the company has the size and fit data more readily at hand to apply to Virtusize’s technology. In terms of how it approaches the virtual fitting problem, Virtusize’s closest competitors are the likes of and which recommend size based on what the consumer wears in other brands. However, these solutions lack a visual presentation and only produce a number/letter to denote size. Therefore, says Virtusize, they don’t capture how a specific style will fit as garments vary in terms of style etc. regardless of if they are technically the same size and have historically worked out well for the customer. Founded in Spring 2011, Virtusize launched with Nelly.com (the largest online retailer in Scandinavia) as a pilot customer during the autumn the same year. It makes money by charging web shops a monthly subscription fee for using its solution. The fee is determined by monthly page views on the product pages where Virtusize is available. With the addition of ASOS as a partner, the startup now claims to be the leading online fitting solution in terms of availability with over 30,000 garments at 23 web shops and approximately 50,000 users per month. Virtusize has raised £1 million in seed funding. Among the startup’s backers are Swedish listed investment company Öresund and a number of angel investors including Fredrik Åhlberg, former Head of Growth at eBay Europe. As a reference point, earlier this month Fits.me a $7.2m series A round. Meanwhile, Metail has raised £2.7m in total.
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Twitter Is Testing Out Its Official Google Glass App In The Wild
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
It’s only a matter of time before Twitter releases its own Google Glass app, as Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr dropped the hint that the company was looking into building one during . A tweet from an official Twitter Glass app has been spotted, interestingly enough by the gentleman who brought you the first . The user that it came from had no information in their bio when I looked at the profile, but it has since been deleted, along with the tweet below: [tweet https://twitter.com/jonmarkgo/status/328692024024920066] You’ll notice the “Twitter for Glass” label, which denotes which app the tweet came from. That, coupled with the fact that the account has since been deleted, shows that somebody might have let the cat, or Glass, out of the bag a little too early. I reached out to Twitter, but the company provided us with no statement or comment on its intentions for Glass. It will be interesting to see what an actual Twitter Glass experience will be, as I can’t imagine that anyone would want to see every single tweet from their stream pass before their eye. I could see the utility of getting direct messages, perhaps replies and mentions and most certainly sharing pics and videos. Expect to see a lot of Glass apps popping up from companies like Twitter and Facebook in the next few months, as the companies are trying to figure out how best to tap into a device that could increase usage and let users share a brand new perspective with media. The example that I always use with people is that Glass will be really fun at a concert or other live event, where I don’t have to take a phone out of my pocket and remove myself from the situation. It will be natural to snap a shot without disrupting my field of vision and attention. [Photo credit: ]
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MallWeGo Is A Social Shopping And Gaming Platform To Make Buying Stuff More Fun
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
is a New York-based startup launching at the Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley today with a social, gaming shopping experience for web and mobile. The company has built a virtual world for socialising with friends in avatar form, which looks like a simplified Second Life or The Sims, but the kicker is it’s built for shopping, with a virtual mall where people can visit virtual stores and browse (and buy) actual products. The app also includes a gaming element, with a free, built-in casino game through which users can win coupons to redeem at the associated retailers’ stores — as another way to encourage users to stay and spend in-world. Each user also gets their own home from home in MallWeGo: an apartment (below right) where they can view all the virtual stuff they’ve acquired, hang out with friends and do stuff like opt in to have ads displayed on their walls in order to earn more redeemable rewards. Bryan Ortiz, co-founder, said the idea is a combination of his favourite things: online shopping, gaming and social networking. “It’s pretty much taking the Amazon concept of vendors and putting together a Sims like approach,” he told TechCrunch. “That’s really what I was trying to create — something that’s fun but at the same time trying to make sure all the users are benefiting. “The more time you spend on the platform, the more games you play, the more areas you explore in the mall, I’m going to reward you for that time. If you want to watch an ad — you don’t have to, you don’t have to see any ads on our platform — but if you’d like to I’m going to reward you for that as well.” On the ecommerce side, after the user clicks to enter the 3D store, the virtual world moves into more of an “Amazon window-shopping style Pinterest experience”, said Ortiz. “If you don’t want to play [the gaming elements] at all you can just use MallWeGo as an ecommerce platform,” he added. Another feature lets users “window shop” with friends — whereby they can invite friends to see where they’re shopping from within the app and then hang out and chat about the products they’re both now seeing. For retailers, MallWeGo is both an advertising, ecommerce and shopping analytics platform. “We have extensive analytics on the back end that we’re giving to vendors,” said Ortiz. “We have a big advertising platform so we can do everything from complete brand wrapping — let’s say a product release from a larger company, we can wrap the walls of the mall, we can wrap apartments. We’re working with larger stores right now — furniture retailers… to furnish your apartment with their products.” Such virtual branded products won’t cost anything for users to put in their (virtual) apartments since they are acting as a form of brand advertising — but after a MallWeGo user has kitted out their apartment with virtual furniture from a real-world store, chances are they may fancy buying some of it in real life, added Ortiz. MallWeGo’s platform is currently in alpha, with a beta launch planned for a couple of weeks. Getting retailers — both offline and online — and malls/retail locations signed up is the priority. “We’re now talking to Simon and Westfield malls — to start doing virtual versions of their stores. We partnered up with Bryant Park so we’re going to do a virtual version of their area — so when a vendor signs up for an actual spot in the park they will get a version in our store as well. So we’ve got a little bit of everything.”
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Yahoo’s Deal To Buy A $200M Stake In Dailymotion From Orange Scuppered By French Government
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
It looks like lightning has struck on the towers of . Yahoo’s bid to take a $200 million majority stake in the video site — known as the ‘YouTube of France’ — by buying a stake from carrier France Telecom/Orange has been killed by the French government, which decided that it didn’t want a U.S. company to take a controlling stake in a French operation, TechCrunch has confirmed with a source close to the situation. Rumors of problems with the deal have been swirling around for weeks. At first it looked like the issues were because of internal disagreements at Yahoo, according to . But a report in the French newspaper last week noted that Orange had suspended the deal because of opposition from the French state, which owns 27% of the telecom company. We have confirmed with someone close to the deal that the latter is indeed the case. Our source said that Arnaud Montebourg, the French Minister of Industrial Renewal, effectively told Orange that it could not go through with the deal. “Dailymotion is considered a marquee company in France’s technology industry,” the source said. “Hence, Montebourg didn’t want to let it go to the Americans. He wanted anchorage to stay in France. It’s a shame because all of the growth at Dailymotion is international. It would have been in the best interests of the company. It’s stunning, really.” Stéphane Richard, who wants to stay at the head of Orange for another term, didn’t want to go through with the deal. In the meantime, Dailymotion won’t be able to keep up with the competition — and especially YouTube — if Orange is not ready to invest more capital in Dailymotion. The end to the Yahoo deal will have a couple of ramifications. For one, Dailymotion will likely now have to raise money from somewhere — France Telecom or the French government, or perhaps from a national business — in order to invest in its platform. estimates that the sum will need to be in the region of €50 million ($65 million). The alternative to that is to seek out another buyer, probably in France, who would be interested in buying most of France Telecom’s stake, since the carrier had already made it clear that it intended to divest itself of most of that stake when it took it on earlier this year. It’s not clear which company would be a good fit to acquire Dailymotion. The other is the question of what this might mean for investing in French companies in the future. “The strategic intent was always to find an investor to help them internationally,” said the source. “France Telecom and Dailymotion may now go back to other interested parties to instead take a minority stake, but the issue with that is if you’re a minority investor and you’ve seen the French government do this, why would you invest? It’s a terrible signal to the marketplace. Who in their right mind would go there now? From a signalling standpoint it’s highly concerning.” As a result, venture capital investments could flatten in the coming months. The government sent a bad signal to French investors. TechCrunch understands that Yahoo’s interest in Dailymotion had stretched back from before news first broke of it in March. In fact, from what we understand it was even on the table before . It may have even been the confidence of that sale going through that encourages France Telecom to step in when it did. We have reached out to France Telecom for comment and will update this post as we learn more.
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New York City Turns Out For The First Day Of Disrupt NY 2013
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
The first day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY is a wrap. The morning started with a fireside chat with Chris Dixon and Eric Eldon where the Andreessen Horowitz partner and how 3D printing could . TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington took the stage next with Benchmark’s . Gurley also revealed that he s . A rather shocking claim seeing how eBay was worth $5 billion just two years after Benchmark’s $6.7 million investment in 1997. The first day of Disrupt NY 2013 wasn’t entirely heavenly rays of sunshine. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of investment firm The Social+Capital Partnership, that the tech world should be “utterly ashamed,” because “we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started.” Yep, Palihapitiya calls it as he sees it. Jonah Peretti took the stage to deliver a keynote. He talked about , , and explained why . When Dennis Crowley took the stage, he explained to TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor that . Location apps will get smarter, he promised. Oh, and — at least that’s what Crowley said. Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media is stepping up its ad game with . With this, Bankoff stated that the company will be profitable in 2013. Betaworks’ John Borthwick took the stage with TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis and and, although briefly, Digg’s upcoming RSS reader — a product that was apparently in the works well before Google killed Reader. Big things are in the works with Gilt Chairman Kevin Ryan and 10gen Founder Dwight Merriman who on stage that they were looking to launch one or two startups in the coming months. Flipboard is huge. , CEO Mike McCue explained to TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon that they aim to make the mobile app . The afternoon brought the first three rounds of the Startup Battlefield — a startup competition where 30 companies compete for the Disrupt Cup and a giant $50k check. Here are the video highlights of the day:
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Glide Rolls Out The Beta Version Of Its Video Messaging Android App At Disrupt NY
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
The first day of Disrupt NY 2013 is nearing its end, but we can’t end things without giving our Audience Choice winner a chance to present in front of our judges. Today, the Israel-based folks behind the video messaging app (not to be confused with Battlefield contestant ) have been voted our first Audience Choice Battlefield company, and today they’ve officially launched the beta version of their Android app here on our Disrupt stage. The team pushed the out the door earlier this year, and the concept hasn’t changed since then. Glide users can broadcast live video missives to their friends who are then able to respond with a broadcast of their own — think of it as a sort of video-centric walkie-talkie. Of course, you’re not always going to have the time to see what your friends are having for lunch as it happens, so Glide stores those conversation snippets online for you to sift through later. Perhaps one of Glide’s biggest assets at this point is how easy it is to operate — no small feat, especially considering how quickly the whole thing works. After connecting the app with your Facebook account, you’ll be greeted with a list of your Glide-using Facebook friends, and a quick tap of the broadcast button means you’re off to the races. Even if you start off with a whopping zero friends, you’ll still have quick access to at least one ‘person’ — the so-called “Glide Bot 3000” provides tips for new users when you send it a message. Once you start broadcasting your video to friends, they’ll start seeing them almost immediately — co-founder and CMO Adam Korbl says it’ll take about a second before you can see those clips. [gallery columns="4" ids="808875,808876,808877,808878"] Glide indeed makes it very easy to asynchronously video chat with friends, but you’ll still have to be fairly brief. According to Glide CTO Jon Caras, the team performed usability testing to determine the ideal length of a Glide clip — 30 seconds wasn’t long enough to get a message across, and 60 seconds was long enough to prompt some testers to skip videos entirely. After a bit of deliberation, the team settled on 42-second shareable clips, mostly because Caras is a Douglas Adams fan. As you might expect, the beta Android app doesn’t play home to every single feature that the original iOS app does (it can’t play all those snippets consecutively like some conversational supercut), and at this point you can’t switch cameras in the middle of a broadcast. Still, even at this relatively early stage, the core functionality seems to work like a charm and I still had a great time trading dorky clips with our very own Darrell Etherington and Romain Dillet as we buzzed around the Manhattan Center. Naturally, I’m not the only one who has taken a shine to the app. So far, Glide has raised $2 million in funding from former ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger CEO Orey Gilliam and ooVoo founder/CEO Philippe Schwartz — their first respective angel investments. Glide already works with text and emoji — the team doesn’t want to water down the core value proposition of the technology.
One-to-one chat is supported, but group chat is as well. It’s like video chat meets TiVo — think timeshifted conversations. The team is working on the feature now, and it’s coming on iOS. Soon users can export them from the proprietary video format to a more common format that can be viewed anywhere or saved to the device.
The tech they’ve built is patent pending, and they consider themselves first to market legally. Facebook is not an expert in the video chat space, but Glide will be a few months ahead and define the market.
Glide is a conversation platform, and Qik is about broadcasting — the Glide team thinks they’re fundamentally different. Qik also uses HTTP live streaming, which makes for 12 second latency, which is way too slow to keep up with the attention span on a modern user and doesn’t work for conversations.
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Meritful Launches A Student CRM Platform To Help Recruiters Keep Tabs On Campus Talent
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
College recruiting is becoming increasingly competitive. Companies have begun to realize that top graduates not only bring a lot of talent and energy to the table, but they also tend to cost less than more experienced prospects. But in order to successfully woo those fortunate enough to have their pick, businesses need to begin the recruiting process earlier. If they’re going to stand a chance, they have to build long-term, non-spammy relationships with students and educate them on the opportunities and culture unique to their business. This is especially true for startups and SMBs, which usually lack the campus mindshare (and budget) of the Googles and Facebooks of the world. University of Michigan and UPenn alums Azarias Reda and Lander Garcia are launching at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today to provide startups and SMBs with a solution to this recruiting problem. Essentially, Meritful aims to help the little guys start winning the Talent Wars by enabling them to build long-term relationships with top grads. To follow through on this mission, the Michigan-based startup wants to address two unique features of college recruiting. First, when companies visit campuses for career fairs and information sessions, they meet a lot of students. Second, those prospects remain in the pipeline for a number of years before they are actually ready to apply for a job. To solve these two problems, Meritful is building a student-centric CRM platform that helps recruiting teams build and mange their relationships with students over time, starting early in their careers. In an effort to create a simple, one-to-many method to engage students, the platform allows recruiters to invite their best student prospects to connect with current employees or alumni of the company. For example, a company can create challenges for students to work on, providing a way to directly test students for certain aptitudes or skills. On the flip side, the platform lets students showcase projects they are working on using multimedia displays, or ask pertinent questions to alumni from their school or those who’ve worked in their prospective, future role. This allows companies to use their best ambassadors, their employees, to show off who they are, how they’re different and help them find students who are the right fit. As to how it works: When a company signs up on Meritful, recruiting teams are asked to choose some of the employees at the company to become ambassadors and invite them to the platform. These ambassadors can be other recruiters, engineers or alumni. When companies meet promising students at career fairs or through their student career pages, they invite prospective students to connect with them on Meritful. Once connected, companies can then interact with students and keep tabs on the projects they’re working on, their challenges, successes and so on. They can also create challenges for students to work on, which could be programming, design, business or research-related, to which students can submit solutions, while interacting with ambassadors in the process. The idea is for this to become another way for recruiters to find the best talent, and the right match. Similar to portfolio platforms like Pathbrite, students can showcase projects they’re working on — in or outside of class — and ask for feedback from ambassadors. They can use source code, pictures or video to describe the projects, giving companies a fuller picture of their academic and professional abilities. Recruiters can also engage students through Q&As and share content and, over time, can keep track of their progress, projects and completed challenges, for example. Prior to launching at Disrupt, Meritful spent six months in private beta, working with companies like Twilio and Cengage learning. Going forward, co-founders Reda (who previously worked at LinkedIn) and Lander Coronado-Garcia (ex-Accenture) say that they’ll be looking to build out its roster of companies and build out its student engagement tools. Meritful recently won a startup competition at SXSW, taking home $100K in prizes, and will be looking to begin raising its seed round this summer. Megan Quinn: Will you use this for internships? A: One of the pools of students we want to engage with, want to help them build relationships with students from the beginning so they don’t necessarily have to be interns. Hilary Mason: What kind of tracking and data collection will you include? A: Tracking how long a student stays at a company, how well that company retains their talent, ongoing recruiting is definitely part of the plan. John Frankel: What’s the breakdown of internships to full-time hires? A: Either way you slice it, the key to Meritful is matching the best talent to the right company. We want companies to use this for internships, but also want it to breed full-time hires as well to build value for the company over the long-run.
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Handle Is A Priority Engine And Task Management App For Your Inbox
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
partner Shawn Carolan searched for over five years to find an investment tackling the problem of email overload. , who led investments in Apple-acquired Siri among others, personally faced his own productivity challenges, and after not being able to find a startup that addressed all the problems he felt needed to be solved, he decided to build it on his own. , which is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, is Carolan’s brainchild. Carolan, along with his co-founder Jonathan McCoy, describes Handle as an operating system for your life. There are 600 million knowledge workers who spend 20 hours a week processing emails. Many get to inbox zero several times a week but Carolan says that this achieving inbox zero by deleting, archiving and starring emails doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of prioritizing your inbox with simple interactions, and creating tasks from these emails. Handle offers a rich web app as well as a companion native iOS app that integrates with Gmail (and soon Microsoft Exchange and Yahoo) to pull in your emails. In its current state, Handle is a much better and faster way to sort through emails and create tasks at the same time. The app allows you to capture ideas, triage your inbox, plan a schedule for the day and focus on your priorities. The centralized UX feature is the ‘Handle bar,’ which Carolan says was inspired by Siri’s ability to simplify interactions with deep capabilities of a system. The Handle bar, which is patented, allows you to annotate emails with deadlines, snooze emails, create projects, cluster emails together and more. Here’s how Handle works: Your inbox flows into a JavaScript web app, and you can respond to emails inline. The basic idea is to triage your emails quickly and efficiently also being able to create a task management list. In each email you can decide whether to flag, delete, create into a project, or archive. If you decide to flag to respond later, you choose whether to flag as must do, should do or want to do and Handle will create a prioritized list of emails you need to respond to. What makes this interesting is the speed at which you can triage your email. Each action can be done by simply pressing one key (i.e. click 1 for must do, 2 for should do and so on). All of this triage takes place within the Handle bar. As Carolan explains, the Handle bar is one of the central UX elements to the application. The startup figured they could solve overload if every email you saw could be handled by expressing what you wanted done with it and it happened. Instead of dictating by voice or typing full words, Carolan and his team decided to derive intent within a few keystrokes. And Handle creates a general list of tasks that needs to be done using this data. This ‘capture’ phase is similar to existing to-do lists, allowing rapid entry of current tasks. Handle also places your priorities on a daily working calendar, assigning tasks to time, in the proper order. Carolan says that current email programs create a ‘blunt’ instrument for organizing our lives. Folders, mark as unread, and flag/stars/labels are as much as most people use. Handle makes it easy to add context to your tasks so you can execute on them more efficiently. For example, if there’s a task you want to do at home on the weekend, you can snooze it until Saturday to get it out of sight until then. Whenever a task is created in Handle, you just have to hit to expose all the possible metadata options and then continue typing. Handle’s iOS app is designed as a simple way you can access your tasks and priorities, and is a pared down version of its web cousin when it comes to functionality. You can see tasks, and send notes to yourself to add to your task list. The app itself is not an inbox but eventually will become one in the future. Currently Handle cannot replace your Gmail inbox (for example, Handle doesn’t have a search functionality yet). But in the future, it’s safe to assume that Handle will be building an arsenal of tools to allow you do much more than just triage emails and turn emails into tasks. Eventually Handle will serve as your calendar, and you’ll be able to combine your schedule of meetings with your Handle tasks. You could also envision Handle adding other types of messages into the inbox such as Twitter DMs, says Carolan. In terms of revenue, Handle plans to implement a freemium model and will eventually roll out a pro version with enterprise features. The startup has raised $4 million in funding from Menlo Ventures (Carolan is still advising the startups he supports at Menlo, and remains a partner but won’t be sourcing any new deals for the time being). The startup has quietly been testing the app with tech executives and have received positive responses. For example, David Fischer, VP of Advertising and Global Operations at Facebook says that Handle has made him much more efficient. As Carolan explains, Handle is disruptive because no one has designed a solution for the full life cycle of a user’s day. While high-powered email clients want to help you get to inbox zero, many of these clients don’t allow you to also handle productivity and task management. Handle aims to differentiate itself by focusing on the whole life cycle of email from capture, to triage, to planning, to focusing. Second, Handle spans the desktop and mobile. While mobile is valuable for triage, most of the important work still gets done at the desktop, says Carolan. Handle also natively integrates email and task functionality, without the need to forward emails to task managers. He admits that it takes a little bit of time to get used to the shortcuts, the UI and general behavior around Handle. But he firmly believes that Handle is presenting a new way of thinking about modern work that maps to how the world’s most effective people get things done. As we mentioned above, Handle’s aim isn’t just to help you handle your professional email and tasks in a more efficient way, it’s designed to add productivity to your entire life. It’s not just for the executive, it’s also for the busy mom, or the college student. Sam Yagan: Are there any one of these features that are a gamechanger? SC: It’s the package of features, called the Handle Habit. You need to use the features together. John Frankel: Is this a product for enterprises or consumer? SC: Initial product will be free. Over time, we imagine going after enterprise features over time. Frankel: My suggestion is get to revenue early and find out what people will pay more for.
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Major League Baseball Brings Archives, Highlights And Live Streaming Games To YouTube (But Not In The U.S.)
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
Major League Baseball has always been very strict about its content appearing on YouTube and other video streaming sites. Peruse YouTube for highlights from your favorite players and teams, and you’ll find it nearly impossible to find quality footage. As soon as a clip from a game goes up on YouTube, it’s taken down. Up until now, it’s just a collection of slideshows and footage uploaded from fans’ shaky hand-held cameras at the ballpark. Finally, Major League Baseball is stepping up its effort to tear down those walls. , the company announced that MLB is finally bringing baseball to YouTube. While this is a significant partnership for YouTube, which continues to , don’t expect it to be fully baked quite yet. Through its YouTube channel, MLB will begin offering game highlights from the current season, which will be uploaded 24 to 48 hours after the game. Not only that, but it will be offering classic fare, with thousands of hours of archived games going back to 1952, along with clips from “Baseball’s Best Classics” and “Best Moments.” MLBAM first began putting full-game archives and highlights on its YouTube channel back in 2010, which were only available to viewers in Australia, Brazil, Japan, New Zealand and Russia. The new channel update will now bring that content to an even wider, global audience. However, it is missing a few key markets. Under YouTube’s new partnership with MLB, viewers will be able to watch two live games per day during the regular season. For free. However, for baseball fans living in the U.S., Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, we have some bad news. No two-live-games-per day for you. Naturally, it seems a little ill-conceived for the partnership to be announced without the ability to air in the U.S., Japan or South Korea, which happen to have two of the largest markets for baseball in the world. That being said, it’s a great start, and baseball fans will appreciate the ability to find highlights from their favorite players and teams on YouTube, just one click away from cute cat videos.
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AppArchitect Lets Anyone Build iOS Apps, No Coding Or Templates Necessary
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
Easy app creation, outside of the land of Ruby and Python, has become a huge phenomenon in the last year. And the latest company to join the fold, , is launching straight from our Disrupt NY stage. AppArchitect lets you build custom iPhone and iPad apps using a simple drag-and-drop interface. That’s right — you need zero coding experience to build your own iPhone app. It’s a brand new world. Once you log in to the AppArchitect system, you’ll be asked whether you want to make an iPad or iPhone app. From there, you head straight into a dashboard complete with a Screens tab, Library tab with default background and picture options, and a Properties tab where you can handle styling. You can drag and drop backgrounds, images, add text, maps, or links. From there, you can test and review your app before submitting it to the App Store for approval. According to co-founder Ilya Zatulovskiy, AppArchitect is unique within the competitive landscape because the app gives you the option to do your own thing, without any templates to get in the way. Of course, you can always choose to use a template if you’d like, but people who want to get really creative have the freedom to expand outside of the template format. In fact, one of the few apps you probably couldn’t build within the platform would be a game. “The platform is fully extendable,” said Zatulovskiy. “Since each plugin is written in Objective C, any feature requirements can be implemented via our SDK.” [gallery columns="4" ids="807806,807807,807808,807809"] The idea for AppArchitect started at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in 2011, where the first lines of code were written. Since then, the company went through the accelerator and so far raised a total of $325,000 from , , DreamIt Ventures and angel investors, with plans to raise another round soon. The app creation industry has been blowing up lately. Services like and have been focused on niche use cases, such as weddings or events. On the other side of the spectrum, is using similar drag and drop tools to build all kinds of personal apps in a snap. However, AppArchitect is one of the first services to offer web-based tools without any of the limitations of a template-based system. The company has been in a private beta for the past 4 months with over 400 testers using the service, but today it’s open to everyone. At launch, the AppArchitect service will remain free for the first few months. The business model includes a publishing fee to send the app to the App Store, and potential for subscription services for apps that use push notifications, backend services or analytics. Professional monthly plans that offer access to everything for a flat monthly fee are also in the works. For now, is only available for iOS but will expand to Android and other platforms soon. Q: Who are you selling this product to? A: We want to focus on design agencies and marketing firms who already have existing clients. We see ourselves as fitting in with the same group of people who use PowerPoint and PhotoShop. Q: In the past few years I’ve seen similar presentations. How do you differentiate? A: We want to partner with the leading companies that already have relationships with existing customers. Museums and galleries are a big focus for us, as we already have partnerships with 100 museums in eight countries. We want to leverage industries that have little technical experience but relationships with big companies. Q: What’s the pricing structure? A: It will be free for the next few months. You can use the Express package, which lets us publish for you under our account. There are also Professional packages that lets you publish under your own account. Q: What is the consumption experience?
A: It’s a browser software as a service. (he seemed to misunderstand the question) Q: The falls into the service as a software company. We tend to have trouble investing lots of Venture in companies like this because it’s difficult to scale. That said, how do you feel about taking outside money?
A: It’s all about making big bets on what you think will be the next big thing. Years ago, the people who built web publishing platforms had huge exits. If I believe in mobile, I think AppArchitect will be a big opportunity for our company and the industry as a whole. Q: How is the platform evolving?
A: We want to extend it to other developers to build on top of it. We want to make sure there is a community of developers offering up a huge number of templates and themes.
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Yahoo Announces New Ad Formats: Mobile-Friendly Native Ads And A Big ‘Billboard’ On Its Front Page
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
Yahoo is hoping to bring in more advertiser dollars with two new units that it’s announcing today as part of the . Vice President of Product and Media Mike Kerns pitched the new formats as the flip side to the that the company rolled out in February. Now that Yahoo has improved its consumer experience (or at least one of the main parts of the consumer experience), he said “the next big push” will include new ad products. “The main message is, we want to commit to investing in new advertising experiences,” Kerns said. The first units are Yahoo Stream Ads — as the name implies, they’re going to be be sponsored posts that show up in a stream of content (across desktops/laptops, smartphones, and tablets) including the news stories in . In other words, this is Yahoo’s take on . Kerns described the Stream Ads as taking “a very broad approach,” allowing the company to “let the market and let data tell us” how to refine the formats. However, he did say that he wants to keep the pricing as simple as possible, and that he’s committed to ensuring that the ads “mirror the content.” The other unit, meanwhile, is going to be something a little more traditional — a big “billboard” that sits on top of the Yahoo front page for an entire day. With the announcement, Kerns said Yahoo is covering “both ends of the advertising spectrum.” The native ads should be accessible to a broad swath of the advertisers, while the billboard is aimed at bigger companies with deeper pockets. When I asked how the new ads will affect the consumer experience, Kerns didn’t say specifically, but he did note that’s something Yahoo will be tracking — specifically how the ads affect the consumer engagement numbers on its properties. The company has already been talking to some advertisers about its Stream Ads, so Kerns predicted that the first campaigns will start running this week. And while it hasn’t talked to advertisers about the billboard unit, Kerns said it probably won’t take long to get campaigns up-and-running there, too.
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 11 | null |
Apple’s Jony Ive Said To Be Bringing The Flat Design Fad To iOS 7 With Visual Overhaul
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
iOS 7 is probably right around the corner, at least as a preview coming at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in June, and it looks like it might be the most exciting change to Apple’s mobile OS we’ve seen in a long time, at least on the surface. iOS 7 will get a flat visual look, which is all the rage these days, at the hands of Apple’s chief design guru Jony Ive, according to a . The blog’s sources say that it’s “very, very flat,” losing any evidence of computer-generated shine, glare or the skeuomorphism reportedly favored by deposed iOS chief Scott Forstall. That means you won’t see things that are leather-bound, faux yellow notepads, or lighting effects that make buttons and controls look like they’re crafted from actual metal. It’s a radical enough redesign that one source said it resembles Windows Phone, which is a big change from earlier comments that . Operation of apps and services remains relatively unchanged despite the big visual changes, though all default icons get updated looks, as well as the user interfaces themselves. The changes would likely be welcomed by most, though they could result in a negative reaction from users who’ve grown used to the current Apple way of doing things. If functionality remains unchanged, however, that should help ease the transition for existing users, and a new look would go a long way toward enticing new ones and injecting some fresh energy into Apple’s mobile efforts. The look and feel of iOS has undergone only minor changes since its original launch. Windows Phone was mentioned as an example of a mobile competitor that looks a lot more modern, but Google has also been moving in that direction with Android, as you can see from the design of ). Another source speaking to 9to5Mac says Apple is also testing an at-a-glance information display, but it isn’t clear if that’s coming with iOS 7 or just being talked about at an early stage. For now, a brand new look with a strong separation from the existing version will likely be enough to draw a lot of attention, from both existing users and new, to Apple’s mobile OS.
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Fashion-Focused Startups Stylit And Black Tag Offer Free, Personal Shoppers For Both Women & Men
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
E-commerce is booming, but shopping for clothing online can still be a challenge. Unlike many consumer products, clothing is personal and often needs to be tried on for fit. Plus, there are numerous options available via the web, so sometimes it’s tough to even know where to begin with an online shopping expedition. Two companies from TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley are addressing these problems by offering personal stylists and recommendations online. One, , is targeting women and another, , is focused on men. Stylists-as-a-service? Yep, it’s that kind of thing. Tel Aviv-based Stylit’s co-founder and chief stylist Maya Kramer has a decade’s worth of experience in the fashion industry: She’s worked as a stylist herself, as well as a personal shopper, photo shoot producer, boutique owner, fashion writer, styling instructor, model and even TV personality. Her clients have included Vogue, Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Microsoft, Glamour, Target, Victoria’s Secret and various celebrities, designers and artists. Others on the founding team include CEO Yaniv Nissim, CTO Michael Gutkin, and lead engineer Shilo Ayalon. “We feel that personal styling was not accessible to everyone,” explains Kramer. “Stylit solves this.” After signing up on the website, users are prompted to fill out a questionnaire, detailing their budget, body type, and personal tastes. Stylit’s personal shoppers will then curate a selection of outfits based on these answers. The outfits, sent out on a weekly basis, don’t just include the clothing, but also accessories like shoes, bags, hats, jewelry, etc. Users can choose to buy the outfit and/or the individual items, or just pass altogether. But to help the stylists better learn their own personal tastes, users are also asked to rank the outfits they’re sent, allowing the recommendations to improve over time. Unlike with many stylists in the offline world – and even some found online – there’s no charge to use Stylit’s personal shopping service. Instead, the company is monetized through affiliate sales for now, though Kramer explains that longer-term, the company could work with brands directly to help them connect with those who best fit their target demographic. In addition, the company wants to eventually build each of their users their own personalized stores that provide items that fit their body type and style preference, says Kramer, who calls this bigger vision a “Pandora for online shopping.” The stylists work for the site on a freelance basis. This differentiates the service from those offering more of a crowdsourced approach to fashion inspiration, because it’s about making a personal connection and learning about a user’s individual tastes to find unique outfits built just for them. Founded in April 2012, Sylit launched into beta this January and now has around 1,000 users. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH4zH1ep53E?feature=player_detailpage] Meanwhile, Palo Alto-based Black Tag takes a similar approach with online styling but with a service that’s targeting men and their fashion needs. Explains co-founder and CEO Damon Pace, “I hate shopping and have a hard time finding products that fit me because of my height,” he says. “People should be able to shop together and it should be more personalized.” He and co-founder James Greene have been working together on various products since 2005, and decided to build Black Tag to scratch their own itches, so to speak. The service just launched today. After signing up, users fill out a quick profile offering details about their budget, height, weight and body type, among other things. They can then follow brands and other personal shoppers on the service who can recommend items, and they can also make requests for specific items, such as a tan blazer or a blue sweater, for instance. Users can also sign up to become personal shoppers themselves, which makes the service a bit similar to the female-focused shopping site The Hunt, which also defers to the crowdsourced model of connecting passionate online shoppers and fashionistas with those in need of hope. The site also features a social shopping component, which allows users to shop with their spouses, friends or others with similar interests. Before today’s launch, Black Tag had run a private beta with some 750 users. The site currently offers more than 700,000 items, from 6000+ brands and more than 60 stores. Like Stylit, the service is free to use and generates revenue through affiliate sales. But, adds Pace, “we believe there are many different business models in e-commerce that have yet to be discovered.” is a bootstrapped service and still needs a little polish in some areas. But given its target demographic, how “pretty” the site looks right now may not be the top concern, just so long as it works.
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Bidzy Launches As An E-Commerce Platform At Disrupt NY For Local Services Firms To Grab New Customers, One Last-Minute Bid At A Time
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 |
, a new platform for connecting local services businesses with customers who need the service they offer in the next few hours, is launching at today. Like the best ideas, Bidzy’s premise is simple: allow the customer to specify exactly what they want and the amount they are willing to pay and then let the individual businesses decide if they’re happy to take on a spot of last-minute work on those terms. Job done. Or, rather, credit card charged. Bidzy’s platform sits in the middle, connecting the right customers to the right local services and holding payment until the work is completed – much like TaskRabbit hooks up consumers with time/skills to offer to other consumers (c2c) who have a task that needs doing. Except Bidzy’s focus is solely c2b – with its twist being that it allows customers to specify what they’re willing to pay. “I actually don’t think there is anybody else who is allowing customers to name their own price,” says co-founder Dave Thawley, when asked about Bidzy’s competitors. “Or to put a credit card behind their bid… Bidzy is actually reaching out to the merchants on customers’ behalf, saying ‘hey are you free at two o’clock today, are you willing to cut my hair for $35?’ So we feel like we’re the first company to put the equation that way in the personal services space.” There’s undoubtedly some crossover between Bidzy and Zaarly but Thawley argues that’s “more of a traditional storefront business versus the kind of marketplace that we are today.” Other rivals he cites are Craigslist and “vertical-specific online booking tools” – but, in the latter’s case, he points out that merchants have to provide availability data, something Bidzy does not require them to do. The main knot Bidzy is trying to work out of the local business ecosystem is the amount of time and sweat it can take consumers to track down a service that suits, especially if they have a last-minute need for it — whether it’s a back massage after a sports injury, a quick haircut when a work meeting is cancelled, or an overlooked oil change before heading off on a road trip. Or a dog walker when you’re presenting on stage at Disrupt. The idea for Bidzy was sparked after just such an incident. “One of the reasons why we chose to do the service category was based on personal experience where I had been out kite boarding in the day, hurt my back and it was 8PM,” says Thawley. “I was trying to find a massage studio to give me a back massage and I ended up having to call about 20 merchants before I finally found somebody. Instead of a customer with a last-minute service requirement wasting time trying to track down a business that can fit them in, Bidzy’s platform lets them broadcast a request to relevant businesses in their area. All they have to do is wait for a merchant to accept their bid and the appointment is booked and paid for. For the consumer it’s a low hassle way of ticking tough-to-schedule items off a to-do list. To make a Bidzy bid, a consumer enters five criteria: the category of service they’re looking for; how far they’re willing to travel; the time they have available for an appointment; the star rating of the business they want to use; and how much they are willing to pay. At launch, Bidzy is using an amalgamation of public-review data to generate its own star rating for businesses, but, as consumers conduct transactions through the platform, it will be able to feed its own data in. Once the consumer’s bid is submitted, merchants who meet the customer’s requirements are pinged by Bidzy — and each one can decide if it is happy to accept the customer on their terms, with no obligation to do so. The first to accept gets the business. Bidzy will also be able to show customer data to merchants to help them make a decision on whether to accept a bid – such as how many bids the customer has submitted before, and the star ratings they have left. Bidzy’s founders are keen to point out that, unlike daily deals companies like Groupon – which cast a long and rather chilling shadow over the local services space with their deal-driven customer acquisition model — Bidzy does not place margin-battering requirements on businesses to accept hundreds of customers at a particular offer price. Local merchants with modest means are able to choose to accept each potential sale on a case by case basis. [slideshow ids=”805577,805578,805579,805580,805581″] “A lot of the negativity from merchants towards Groupon is that you’re required to sell 200, 300, 400 appointments in a single Groupon deal,” says Thawley. “What that means for them is for a very long period of time – sometimes upwards of six months – they are just having a very challenging issue pushing all of these Groupon deals through their system without disrupting their traditional customer flow.” So while Bidzy’s platform may inevitably encourage customers to haggle and perhaps try their luck at getting a discount price, it’s not a like-for-like competitor with daily deals since merchants retain control over whether they take on each new customer. For them it’s a zero risk, low hassle way to get new customers through the door at times when they specifically need them, increasing utilization rates and supplementing their normal cash flow. And at the end of the day, if a customer is trying their luck asking to pay too little, the merchant can just ignore them and wait for a better bid to drop in. Having talked to plenty of services business in the course of setting up the business, Bidzy’s founders point out that most operate at less than full capacity at certain times of day – “lots operate at 50 percent utilization” overall, says Thawley. And that’s the pretty big business problem Bidzy is aiming to fix — as well as offering consumers a more convenient way to get stuff done. “Bidzy allows local services businesses to monetize what was previously un-utilized time, and to augment their existing customer base in a very bite-sized manor,” he says. The startup is launching in one city — San Francisco — and targeting personal services categories including hair and beauty, nails, fitness, massage, automotive, and home and pet, which it believes are best suited to the last-minute service/convenience problem it’s aiming to crack. Once usage data starts flowing in it can of course look to adjust the categories it covers, based on where traction is and isn’t taking place. “We’re the first people to acknowledge that it’s never going to be 100 percent of [local services] appointments going through the Bidzy platform,” says Bidzy’s other co-founder Sven Jensen. “There’s certain situations where people on the consumer side do want more control… The woman who’s going to get her haircut the morning of her marriage is probably going to want someone she’s spent a lot of time researching.” But for every pre-wedding hair cut there are undoubtedly scores more consumers needing a quick short-back-and-sides on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. And that’s where Bidzy is positioning itself to take a percentage cut of all those extra transactions it makes possible. Although it’s just the beginning for Bidzy’s platform — which today launches as an iOS app and website (an Android app due in six to eight weeks’ time) — the startup has managed to sign up around 15,000 merchants in the Bay Area already, with relatively minimal levels of merchant outreach (and no paying customers yet). Thawley and Jensen, have been bootstrapping Bidzy to the tune of just $70,000, which makes its merchant acquisition efforts all the more impressive. Bidzy’s permanent headcount is currently just the two co-founders, although they have used contractors to help get the initial swathe of merchants signed up. The founders met in San Francisco about five years ago, through another startup Jensen was working on, and started talking about setting up “a platform for what a buyer wants” early last year. They both have retail experience to draw on as they build out Bidzy. After a stint in the Air Force, Thawley headed to business school and went into business strategy consultancy — where eBay become a client. Jensen worked in investment banking before doing the sports equipment marketplace startup which is where he met Thawley. After the buzz generated by launching at Disrupt, the founders say they intend to start looking to raise their first round — to build out the Bidzy team and technology, ramp up customer and merchant acquisition and start expanding geographically. Fittingly for Disrupt NY, New York is the next city on their roadmap, but they also see a lot of potential for Bidzy in less well-served parts of the U.S. “We built our technology to have a very rapid rollout across the United States. And our hope is to go from San Francisco to New York, and once those two markets are operating comfortably we think a lot of the value is actually getting into middle America where a lot of these solutions are much less prevalent,” says Thawley. “We’ve got a very automated means of merchant outreach – we spent a lot of time building out our North American database – it’s stuff that should hopefully happen very quickly.” Judges: ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ).
A: That’s mainly based on star rating. So if you are submitting a bid for a five star hair cut then that’s automatically going to be pushing out to the group of merchants who receive those ratings on traditional online ratings forms so when you submit your bid and if a merchant qualified it, based on their geolocation and their star rating, it’s actually the first merchant to accept the bid that earns your service. This is how Bidzy’s operating on day one. Further down the line — assuming we have merchants that are auto-accepting or accepting at a very fast rate then we’d use our own algorithm to decide what’s going to provide the best experience for the customer.
A: I think different people are going to have different products that they use. Some people would be fine with getting a haircut and using Bidzy to get that last minute haircut when you need something quick and simple. Other people wouldn’t let us go near their hair but maybe something like a manicure, or maybe something like dog walking — or even something like getting your house or apartment cleaned — you as a customer think of more as a commoditised experience. Consumers can still set a star rating to have a level of quality assurance but the more commoditised the experience, the easier for the customer to get their head around it.
A: It’s the chicken and egg problem but we think our chicken lays a lot of eggs. Speaking specifically to the merchant side, we’ve got two main answers to that: we’re offering them a customer at 2pm today whether they want it or not. On top of that, in order to reduce this friction and not have this problem of a lot of boots on the ground in order to sell Bidzy into these businesses we’ve developed a proprietary app that regardless of whether the merchant’s on our platform or not when you submit that bid for the oil change, every merchant in the local area receives a telephone call, an SMS and an email notifying them that this appointment’s available. And they can choose whether or not they log on to the Bidzy platform in order to find out more. On the consumer side it’s a little bit more of a traditional playbook. We’ve got all of the normal social hooks built into our app and our website. There’s Facebook and Twitter sharing. We already have a refer a friend program — if I tell you about it and you enter a code, I’m getting $10 to spend on my next bid.
A: We’ve launched about three hours ago. So far the numbers are really through the roof! We’ve been developing for approx. 7 months. The business has been in place for 10. We spent first few months mainly doing research. The team right now is Sven & myself, as well as a team of contract developers but post-TechCrunch we’re hoping to raise a round of funding an build out a more significant sized in-house team. And then we’ve built out the technology to date so we can rapidly deploy across all U.S. cities although we’re launching today in San Francisco
A: We start off by making the customer put bids in our buckets. It’s not a Craiglist format where you can type in free-form text. The customer is pushed in an avenue to structure their data. There’s very few points where you get to put in unstructured data. There’s some bids that we’re never going to be able to offer — if you’re looking for something very specific at two o’clock in the morning and merchants aren’t working at that point. We’re not going to solve that problem; nor is anyone. But speaking to these merchants, a lot of them are small businesses, a lot of them are desperate — they’re working at about 50% capacity. We’re giving them a new channel to get a customer. They know how much they’re going to get, they didn’t have to do anything in advance of it and they get extra money.
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China’s E-Commerce Market Grew To $190B In 2012, Driven By Mobile Users and Social Media, Says CNNIC
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
China’s e-commerce market racked up a whopping 1.3 trillion RMB ($190 billion USD) worth of transactions in 2012, according to (linked article is in Chinese), an increase of 66.5 percent over 2011’s total. Last year, 242 million Internet users purchased goods online, and e-commerce transactions accounted for 6.1 percent of total retail sales of consumer goods. The growth was driven in large part by mobile users: during the last half of 2012, 40.7 percent of online shoppers used a mobile device to browse e-commerce merchandise. More than half–53.6 percent–browsed a merchandiser’s mobile app instead of accessing its main Web site through their device’s Internet browser. 53.3 percent of the respondents who used their mobile devices to shop said they did so while at home, and many stated that their smartphones had begun to replace their home PCs. 26.2 percent said they browsed items on their smartphones while at work or school, and 10.6 percent said they spent their commutes or time waiting in queues to shop. In addition to mobile, social media platforms also drove e-commerce sales. 41.8 percent of shoppers said they had first seen information or promotions for a product on a social media site before deciding to purchase it. Each shopper spent an average of 5,203 RMB (or about $843 USD), an increase of 1,302 RMB ($211 USD), or 25 percent, from the year before. According to the report, the most frequently purchased items were clothing and shoes, which 81.8 percent of online shoppers bought during the last six months of 2012. General merchandise accounted for 31.6 percent of sales, while consumer electronics made up 29.6 percent of the total. While the latest figures from CNNIC are impressive, China’s e-commerce market still has plenty of room to grow and . As this Economist story notes, the Chinese e-commerce market is , which last year handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion USD) in sales through two of its portals, Taobao and Tmall, and is on its way to . Taobao is a C2C marketplace with more than 800 million product listings and 500 million registered users, . B2C platform Tmall counts major international brands like Microsoft, Nike and Unilever among its 50,000 merchants.
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Huawei & ZTE Under Scrutiny Again, This Time By The European Commission For Unfair Competition
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Another round of headaches for Chinese telecom equipment makers Huawei and ZTE–after previously facing scrutiny over security concerns in the U.S., the two companies are now being targeted by the European Commission. The European Union’s executive body is seeking to investigate Huawei and ZTE for undercutting European firms by receiving state subsidies, and wants the backing of EU states to move ahead even without a complaint from domestic manufacturers, according to sources . Reuters reports that European manufacturers Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia Siemens Networks have refused to cooperate with the Commission or file a complaint because they fear being shut out of the lucrative Chinese telecoms market. In turn, Huawei has denied receiving unfair subsidies and says it complies with international laws and does not engage in espionage. Huawei is the world’s second largest telecom gear maker after Ericsson. According to the report, EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht intends to move ahead and bring up the issue with EU trade ministers at a meeting in Dublin this week. An internal EU report last year recommended that EU take steps to limit the growth of Chinese telecoms equipment maker, citing competition against domestic companies as well as threats to security. The Commission’s complaints are similar U.S. concerns about the Chinese companies. Last month, Sprint Nextel and SoftBank , though that to compete with SoftBank’s previous offer of $20.5 billion. Huawei after a U.S. congressional report last October found that U.S. national security interests could be undermined if Huawei and ZTE provide gear for critical infrastructure. But EU companies have not taken a unilateral stance. In Britain, Huawei has been subject to scrutiny by the government over security concerns, though the company is also seen as a major job provider both there in the Netherlands. Germany, however, stopped Huawei last year from providing infrastructure for a national academic research network.
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Instart Logic Raises $17M From Andreessen Horowitz And Greylock To Improve Web And Mobile App Performance
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
, a company that provides a cloud-based service for web publishers to improve site performance over both mobile and Wi-Fi networks, has raised $17 million in Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tenaya Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $26 million. Manav Mital, CEO and co-founder of the company, explains that Instart solves a major pain point for publishers and site owners, which is having users be able to access their sites over congested mobile and Wi-Fi networks. What Instart Logic offers is a cloud-based, easy-to-deploy service that can be used by web publishers to improve responsiveness of applications and create faster load times for pages. As he says, web applications continue to grow in size and complexity, as static web sites are supplanted by immersive, interactive applications. And more people are accessing these sites and apps from mobile and web. Many sites are suffering from major performance issues. Instart Logic resolves these issues. “Today’s web and mobile users expect near instant delivery of applications, but the explosion of apps combined with the proliferation of mobile devices has resulted in debilitating performance issues that degrade the user experience,” said Peter Levine, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a release. “Enter Instart Logic, which has developed a unique and elegant solution that was built from the ground up to resolve the mobile bottleneck and transform the user experience.” While the company isn’t ready to reveal exact numbers yet to the public, Instart Logic says that the load times and performance management of web sites improves dramatically The founding team, which includes Mital, Hariharan Kolam and Raghu Venkat, all came from the engineering group at Aster Data, the big data analytics company acquired in 2011 for $263 million by Teradata Corporation. Other early employees hail from Google, Facebook, Amazon, VMware, Citrix, Akamai, Adobe and Mozilla. The company’s product, which Mital says takes 15 minutes to deploy, completed its beta program in December 2012. Customers include a Fortune 500 companies and other paying clients in retail, travel and hospitality, enterprise SaaS, online gaming, and media. While the product is still in limited availability, it will be released to the general public later this year. While there are many on-premise offerings that compete with Instart Logic, Mital says that what’s disruptive about the company’s product is its ease of use and deployment.
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Google Ventures-Backed Messaging Startup, Just.me, Launches iOS App In 155 Countries/32 Languages, Aiming To Rattle Social’s Cage
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Following its at the end of January, , the mobile messaging startup from , co-founder of TechCrunch and partner at incubator , has , available initially for iPhones and iPod Touch. Just.me had planned on an earlier release of the app but said today it held back so it could launch at to garner more attention. As with any messaging app, just.me’s usefulness is commensurate with the number of friends fully on board with the service so getting the word out to drive app downloads is now priority number one for its founders. Just.me does support messaging going outside its bounds, to non-app users, but to access the full suite of features conversation participants need to join in. Just.me also has a more complex feature-set than the average messaging app, so arguably has more work to do to educate potential users and convince them it’s worth sticking with it through the learning curve. Rather than focusing on selling itself as just a (free) messaging service, as some of its messaging rivals have, just.me has grander ambitions: it’s agitating to replace centralised social networks with the contacts in your phonebook plus its tabbed sharing structure. The app supports private one-to-one messaging; contained group messaging; and public broadcasts, the latter on a public (similar in concept to Twitter or Google+). It also allows users to talk to themselves by using the app as a private journal and/or storage service, a la Evernote. So it’s offering a spectrum of messaging types, private and public, all within the same service. These features make it a lot more ‘high concept’ than the average messaging app — closer, perhaps, to the likes of NHN Japan Corp’s , which is also styling itself as a and also offers multifaceted sharing options. Unlike Line, though, which is replete with stickers and cartoonish mascots, just.me is not so heavily targeting the youth market. Just.me has a clean, professional look (see screenshot gallery below) with a focus on displaying users’ own photos that’s most reminiscent of Path or Facebook Home. Add to that its ability to function as an email-plus-multimedia-attachment replacement and just.me seems most likely to appeal to older, professional power users — who are seeking to collapse the functions of multiple apps into one low-friction interface. Since just.me’s beta debut at the start of the year the competitive mobile messaging landscape has shifted a little, with Facebook launching its . Home is a skin that sits between the OS and third party apps, the user’s main sphere of attention. Just.me is not currently competing with Home, since Home is not ( ) available on iOS. But Teare & co are working on an Android version of their app — due in six to eight weeks — so will be rubbing up against Facebook’s new-look mobile face soon enough. Asked whether Facebook Home makes just.me’s user-acquisition task harder than it might otherwise be, Teare argued the opposite, telling TechCrunch: “Facebook Home really makes things easier. People will understand a user-centric approach with an app that caters for multiple user needs. “Facebook Home is a step forward for mobile software. It represents an attempt to support multiple user goals on a single platform. We can see the end of single use apps in this move. shares this vision of a combined messaging and social media app capable of supporting all of a users goals. We are happy to be in the same company as Facebook here.” While conceding it’s an inevitable challenge for a 14-person startup to compete “in a field that contains giants”, Teare said just.me’s distributed openness vs the “walled garden clubs”, its range of sharing features and an initial rollout that encompasses “155 countries from day one, in 32 languages” (albeit, on only one mobile platform) will help it stand out. And rattle some cages. “We do not see ourselves as competing with Facebook Home. We are far ahead feature wise and very different in that we are an open and distributed network, not a centralized one. We rather see ourselves as offering users features and controls that others have yet to build,” he said. “We want to be a major player in delivering multi-faceted messaging to users.” Just.me . Its investors include Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, CrunchFund (which is of course tied up with TechCrunch in several ways, including the fact that our parent company AOL is an investor), and individuals including Don Dodge and Michael Parekh.
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HackerEarth Screens Developer Candidates For Startups Through Programming Challenges
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
The hunt for great engineering talent is global. It’s not just in Silicon Valley that the competition is so fierce that or It’s true in India too, where multi-nationals and emerging startups headhunt for the best engineers. , a startup out of the , is looking to make the process of assessing technical talent easier . On the flipside, the startup is also looking to help fresh engineering graduates and more experienced developers become better acquainted with growth-stage startups in India. Over there, startups don’t quite have the same glamour than they do in the U.S. as college grads feel cultural pressure to find jobs at multi-national companies. “Engineers are hugely in demand here in India. There’s a shortage of talent and yet, people don’t know what kinds of opportunities they have,” said co-founder Sachin Gupta, who left Google to start the company. “They often end up working for service companies like Wipro and Infosys. It’s quite different from the Valley, where you’re exposed to startups all the time.” Gupta said HackerEarth has built an online engine that does real-time evaluation of technical skills from programming challenges and problem sets. They either design challenges in-house on skills like front-end development or hire freelancers and professors to design them. Since launch about five months ago, the company has processed about 200,000 code compilations and has registered 20,000 developers on the platform. Of those, about 7 to 8,000 are active. They check for basics like the logic of the programming work — whether it produces the right output given certain inputs. Then they also look at run-time, memory usage and code size. “With resumes and traditional sourcing methods, you might end up with thousands of CVs and everyone will say they’re a Java engineer or Python engineer. But are they really?” Gupta said. “We very strongly believe if you know something, you should be able to prove it. Because of all this noise, the conversion rates are very low on these traditional recruiting techniques.” The company has two models. They either source the candidates, assess them and then directly connect them to companies, earning a recruiting fee. Or they have an enterprise SaaS model, where they provide their assessment engine to companies that are hiring for a fee. They charge about $2 per test taken or about 40,000 Indian rupees (or $740) per hire. HackerEarth has three full-time people and is backed with seed funding from GSF India, which is positioning itself as a TechStars or Y Combinator for India. They face off against , which Gupta said that HackerEarth is a bit different. “We’re structuring our platform as a job or talent discovery platform,” he said. “They have kind of pivoted toward a hacker ranking system. We are very clearly a place where people can first discover great companies to work at.” He added that the Indian market for talent is much more fractured than it is in the U.S., where developers might congregate on Y Combinator’s Hacker News or here on TechCrunch. In contrast, he said recruiters have to foster much closer relationships with college campuses around the country. “Online media penetration is low and there’s definitely a communication gap. We have to actively reach out to college students,” Gupta said. “Even me — I didn’t know about InMobi before coming to Bangalore.” (The mobile advertising network, InMobi, is one of the flagship startups out of the Indian ecosystem and has gotten around $216 million in funding from investors like Japan’s SoftBank and Kleiner Perkins.)
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HealthKeep Launches An Anonymous Social Network To Let You Share And Track Health Information
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Services over the last year as a way to let anyone with questions about their health connect with real, licensed physicians online and avoid the pain of waiting in line at the doctor’s office. While HealthTap and others are building up their health information databases to let people quickly find answers to a variety of health questions, the demand for personalized health information continues to grow. While we use services like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter every day, these social networks are far from being the best places to ask health questions and connect with others experiencing similar symptoms, conditions, taking the same medications or receiving similar treatments — for privacy reasons, among others. That’s why Lyle Dennis, a practicing physician and neurologist, created — a social network designed to connect people with similar symptoms and conditions and help them better track, manage and understand their health. HealthKeep provides a forum in which everyday people can post about their health and medical issues and search for potential treatments. Unlike most social networks, i.e. Facebook, the service allows users to register anonymously and does not collect names, which means that its HIPAA-compliant. Once members register on the platform, they can create “Health Timelines,” where they can share any new symptom, medication, diagnosis, doctor visit, procedure or test result. A la Facebook, the timeline is updated in realtime, stream-style, allowing users to view updates and graph their health at any point. Once a user adds an element to their timeline, they are automatically linked to every other member in HealthKeep’s community that has shared that element. An announcement is made each time a new member is added to that group, whereupon the community can then discuss their symptoms and treatments and share information, all of which takes place within feeds dedicated to those specific items. Members can create private profiles that can be viewed and searched for identification purposes if they so choose, while doctors have public profiles and can contribute to feeds of interest to them and the patients that follow them. Lyle tells us that, at launch, HealthKeep contains a profile for nearly every U.S. doctor (including name, address, phone number and fax), every FDA-approved medication and thousands of diseases, symptoms, procedures and health goals in its database. [Check out an .] These profiles are subject to change when doctors actually claim their profiles, at which point they can change the picture associated with their profile, add custom content, and their profile will display everything they follow and post, and everything that other users are saying about them. As people add their doctors, Lyle hopes that “follower numbers” will grown, and once they hit a certain threshold, the startup will reach out to them to help provide more information on how to optimize their profiles. As to the “following” mechanism on HealthKeep, Lyle says, “as a practicing physician myself, I see the fact that patients often like their doctors, they like to discuss them and recommend them to
others. So, following them on HK gives them a sense of community and they can actually relate and communicate with other patients of that doctor anonymously, through the system. In turn, it gives the doctor a public platform to announce to all his patients news items of interest or importance to them.” The founder also said that he thinks that HealthKeep provides an easy way for both everyday people and doctors to stay connected to the latest news, research and findings as they relate to particular diseases or health categories. In the big picture, Lyle says that many doctors and MDs aren’t particularly active on Facebook, Twitter or other social networks, so he wants to help change that, while giving people their own “personalized medicine news feed.” As to the opportunity going forward, the HealthKeep founder says that he sees the service as another approach to the Quantified Self movement that has taken off over the last few years, as its Health Timelines provide a personal health record through which they can keep track of and follow their health variables, both good and bad. At this point, people can enter and graph any element of their health information manually, but, next, the founder wants to begin connecting the platform with the APIs of fitness-tracking devices like Fitbit, Nike+ and Withings to automatically upload user health information. “It’s easy to forget when and what symptoms we’ve had in the past, what a test showed and what a
doctor told us a year ago during an appointment. With HealthKeep, we want to give people a realtime, interactive social health dashboard that people can set up for themselves or for their children or grandparents.” Up to this point, HealthKeep has been bootstrapped and self-funded, but as the platform begins to scale, the founder says the team will look to begin raising a Series A round later this year. While there’s plenty of room in the burgeoning online and mobile health space for multiple players, HealthKeep will have to contend with health and doctor-focused professional networking services and , as well as health information tools , Quantified Self-style databases and mobile Q&A services like HealthTap — among many others. It will be an uphill road, but there’s plenty of opportunity if it can hit scale. For more, find
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Japan’s KDDI Closes Their Twilio Clone, Partners With Twilio Instead
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Back in April of 2012, KDDI Web Communications (part of KDDI, Japan’s second largest telecoms company) launched . Meant to allow developers to build services that ran over phone lines (like, say, a basic call center), it was sort of like a less-awesome Twilio. One year later, the company is shuttering boundio and replacing it with… wait for it… Twilio. We first noted the budding KWC/Twilio , though it was unclear at the time exactly what it meant for the company’s own competing offering. At a press event in Japan today, the company disclosed that registrations for boundio have been closed, and that all existing boundio customers will be moved over to Twilio’s platform. While I tend to be the last person to care about B2B partnerships like this, this one is actually pretty friggin’ huge for Twilio. Here’s why: To step into a bit of a tangent: boundio is just the latest of many carrier-built software efforts to fall. — a “unified open platform” that was being built as a joint effort between AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile, Sprint, and others — imploded . Orange quietly killed off all of their API efforts , and mentions of things like Telefonica’s seem to come up once every never. Developers, it would seem, just don’t care to work with carriers when they can avoid it.
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Heyzap Launches An AppData-Like Leaderboard For Mobile Games With User Counts
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
While Apple’s app store and Google Play have long had leaderboards for the most downloaded and lucrative apps, there hasn’t been that much transparency around engagement after the download. , a Union Square Ventures-backed startup that runs a mobile gaming network, has stepped in and decided to build one. The startup, which was founded about four years ago and originally centered around Flash games, (pretty much like every other game developer over the past few years). They have an app on Android with about 10 million installs that lets gamers add friends in their favorite titles and share tips and badges. From those 10 million installs, they say they’ve been able to gauge the size of different developers’ active userbases. So from that, , a live leaderboard that estimates active usage. The standard iOS and Google leaderboards mainly focus on downloads or installs and then revenue over specific time periods (although Google Play’s rankings are said to factor in some engagement data). They say they get play data for about 80,000 games on the Android platform, which is shared by people who have the Heyzap app and are logged into it. Even games that aren’t integrated into Heyzap’s network get their play data recorded by this, said co-founder Immad Akhund. That’s partially because of Android’s open nature. “The openness of the Android OS is allowing for more unique and interesting experiences for users,” he said in an e-mail. “I think this is going to be a trend going forward as mobile apps reach maturity and differentiate through deeper experiences hooked in to the OS layer.” (As a sidenote, Facebook’s Home app is a perfect example of this openness.)
To me, the data seems reasonable. Heyzap’s leaderboard, for example, says that King, the European arcade gaming company, has 54.7 million monthly active users. Last month, King . Similarly, Storm8, a Silicon Valley-based freemium gaming company that runs a label called TeamLava, has about 14.2 million daily active users, according to the leaderboard. Also, Subway surfers apparently has 7.6 million daily actives on Android and its maker, the Danish developer Kiloo, Just to make a note, Heyzap’s numbers are non de-duplicated. That means if the same person plays more than one game from a single developer, they’re counted more than once. It’s not an unusual metric: even when Zynga reports daily actives in its quarterly earnings reports, those figures are not de-duped. Instead, they report a separate metric called “monthly unique users,” that doesn’t double count people. Akhund said they might do non de-duped counts in the future. We “…felt for now it made sense to count the user twice as it is double the engagement and monetization opportunity,” he said. Heyzap is backed by $8 million in funding from Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Joshua Schachter, Christina Brodbeck, Founder Collective and Qualcomm Ventures. This “Trends” project faces off against other companies like Sequoia-backed Onavo, they collect through mobile data compression apps. They are for now, iOS only. Heyzap Trends, in contrast, is games only.
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Facebook Tests Its First Graph Search Ads, But They Aren’t Targeted To Your Queries
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Investors hope Facebook will eventually sell lucrative demand-fulfillment search ads, but it’s starting conservatively. Today it begins a small test of its first ads on Graph Search, but they’re not targeted to your search queries. Instead, they use standard Facebook targeting and retargeting, look like its sidebar ads, and appear at the bottom of the page — and only if there is more than one page of results. [ : Facebook says it has concluded this test of Graph Search ads.] Mark Zuckerberg when he answered my question about monetization at the launch event for the new internal search engine for people, places, and interests. He said “You build a good business by building something people want,” but noted that Facebook’s old search typeahead ads “extend quite nicely to this.” Zuckerberg stressed that user experience comes first at Facebook, but admitted search ads “could potentially be a business over time.” But instead of search typeahead ads that let companies appear above their competitors or related businesses in the drop-down menu of real-time Facebook search results, the first Graph Search ads are really just a new placement. Facebook tells me that for now they’ll only appear to a small subset of users who have Graph Search, which itself is only rolled out to a small fraction of Facebook’s full user base. When people in the test do a Graph Search and wind up on the results page, if there are more results than will fit on one page, they’ll see two or three ads in a row below the fold and just before the second page of results auto load. The ads look like Facebook’s sidebar units with a headline, thumbnail image, body text, and that link to an on- or off-Facebook destination. The Graph Search ads rely on the same targeting techniques as most of Facebook’s ads: biographical characteristics like age, gender, current city, and employer; Likes, Open Graph activity, and retargeting based on cookies from websites they’ve recently visited. If the tests go well and the ads lead to clicks and brand lift, they’ll likely be rolled out to all Graph Search users. The question remains whether Facebook will then start letting advertisers target based on the keywords people search. If combined with Facebook’s other targeting techniques, Graph Search ads could let businesses reach users as they’re making a decision about what restaurant, retail store, or professional service to go to. Right now Graph Search ads can only be targeted by demographic, interest, and browsing history, but eventually you might get ads for dentists when you search for “Dentists nearby.” This bottom part of the purchase funnel is worth a lot more than the demand generation top of the funnel because the ads can be directly linked to purchases and return on investment. That would let Facebook charge more for them, and gain access to huge budgets reserved for Google and other search advertising. It’s this new category of ads, rather than subtle improvements to its existing revenue streams, that really get investors excited and could finally pull $FB (which closed today at $26.92) above its $38 IPO price.
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Last GroupSpaces Founder Calls It A Day After 7 Years, Departs To Build Stripe In The UK
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Tonight there came a moment that you might call the end of an era in the U.K. tech startup scene. One of the first of the ‘new wave’ of startups from the mid-2000s lost its last founder, as Andy Young (pictured left), co-founder of the group management startup , he was leaving to join the payments startup Stripe to be a core part of its “expansion into the U.K. and beyond.” Evidently he came to this decision – after seven years of building the startup – that GroupSpaces was not about to fulfill the hopes of its founders as the next big thing in managing group activities, and he has written a to that effect. His co-founder David Langer last May to start a new venture, called , in SF. GroupSpaces was founded by the two young men in their college dorm and went on to raise money from both U.K. and U.S. institutional investors. Young says GroupSpaces will continue to operate “as a sustainable small business” and while he is “hugely proud of the contribution and impact we’ve made” and remains “dedicated to seeing GroupSpaces continue to thrive and achieve the best it can” he admits that growth had been “slower than we hoped in financial returns” and did not become the “proverbial billion dollar success” as they’d hoped. It will now be managed by existing employees until a new strategy is put in place to partner or exit. GroupSpaces raised $1.3 million in a Series A round from Index Ventures, 500 Startups and a number of high-profile Angels, including Chris Sacca – and all this during the Series A crunch of 2010. However, despite reaching well over half a million users, and being used by many professional associations and sports clubs, it never managed to create that high-growth business required by VC investment. It’s something Young pores over in detail in his post. Some highlights include: how they failed to appreciate “a lack of product-market fit as we moved into new markets,” insufficient focus, a confused strategy, premature scaling and “moving too slowly after we raised our Series A.” However, they did create a real business that “provides significant value to our many loyal users, and more continue to sign up as customers each day” and who “currently rely on the unhappy marriage of a Yahoo/Google Group coupled with an Excel spreadsheet/google doc for member records, in addition to their own website and other services for events or payments.” I think many observers would agree with that statement. Here’s an interview I did with them two years ago:
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Live On 17 Campuses, Endorse.me Launches A Private Platform To Let Students & Employers Connect, Share Confidential Info
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
It’s a tough job market out there for college job applicants, and students are looking for anything that can help them stand out from the crowd. While an increasing number of students look to apply to jobs online, the information that might give students a shot at improving their candidacy and landing a job isn’t something they want to share publicly, it’s confidential. As a result, most of this confidential information — whether it be recommendations from professors or expiring job offers — is shared offline. James Ingallinera and Trey Griffith founded last year to give college jobseekers a secure, online platform through which they can share confidential information with prospective employers, and, in turn, give companies a better way to identify and hire top collegiate talent. Endorse.me is officially launching today at 17 campuses across the U.S., including Stanford, Notre Dame, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, UVA, Berkeley and Brown, to name a few, with plans to expand to more colleges in the upcoming academic year. The fundamental idea behind Endorse.me, Ingallinera tells us, came from his years of experience working in the financial sector. Today, with so many students and recent graduates struggling to find work — and the influx of job applications — the standard, one-page resume is no longer enough. It’s the same philosophy behind services and many more. Ingallinera says that, today, students are looking for ways to stand out in applying for their dream jobs, and to share the kind of information that carries more weight than the standard CV. To do this, students are asked to apply to Endorse.me and, once approved, they can add their resume, recommendations from professors and expiring job offers to their confidential profiles. Students can then create a list of their chosen employers and, after reaching out to professors for recommendations, they can choose the companies with which they share that information. Endorse.me will then notify those companies of the student’s interest, giving them a complete list of all the students looking to apply to help get their profile information in front of hiring managers. Students can also update their job status on their profile to give employers of interest an opportunity to see interview and job offers they’re receiving — the idea being to allow them to unlock further opportunities once companies see that their competitors are interested. In turn, students can upload their resume and list the firms they’re interested in, so that they are targeted by them throughout the coming year when new job opportunities arise, regardless of whether the company is actively recruiting at their college. On the flip side, the more students it attracts, the more value Endorse.me thinks that it can have for employers. Hiring managers can use the platform to view the top-ranked students in their industry, according to their supervisors and professors, which Ingallinera says can be a stronger indicator of on-the-job performance than a one-page resume. By allowing students to express intent and share job offers, Endorse.me allows employers to see where students stand in the hiring process with their competitors, and gain access to and view profiles and resumes year-round. At launch, the founders tell us, Endorse.me is targeting the financial and technology sectors specifically, but plans to expand its scope in the coming year. That means, at this point, hiring managers from companies like 10gen, Airbnb, Blackstone, Citi, Codecademy, Credit Suisse, Eventbrite, General Catalyst, HubSpot, Indiegogo, Mozilla, Pinterest, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, Spotify, Twitter and Zaarly are currently on Endorse.me and looking for candidates. Today, Endorse.me is available exclusively as a cloud-based online service, but over the summer, the startup plans to begin developing mobile apps, which it expects to have ready in the fall. The service is currently free for students, employers, and all those intermediaries who choose to write recommendations for students. Again, the service is currently free for employers, but as the startup looks to monetize down the road, it will eventually began charging employers for access to student info. Endorse.me raised a small round of $300K in seed capital last year, and will look to begin raising its Series A later this fall. For more,
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Snapchat Experiences Spammy Growing Pains After Passing 150M Snaps Sent Per Day
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Picture-messaging sensation Snapchat seems to experiencing some growing pains. CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said today that over flow through the auto-destructing photo-sharing service, but as the service gets bigger and gains more attention, the worst parts of the Internet are sure to follow. According to , some Snapchatters experienced a bit of a spam attack this morning from someone who appears to have created multiple accounts and spam to Snapchatters with accounts marked as public. According , that spam seems to be nude-flavored. Snapchat offers users two security options. You can receive Snaps from “only friends,” which means you’ve accepted them as a friend or added them yourself, or you can accept snaps from everyone. Snapchat suggests using the private mode for now while the team comes up with a long-term fix for the issue, which is common among social services with quickly growing audiences. When Snapchat first heard about the spam, the company turned off account creation entirely so that no new users could join the service or create accounts, spam or otherwise. They also shut down snaps sent between public accounts until the problem accounts were terminated. Obviously, this is a short-term solution to a long-time problem, but Spiegel owns up to that in the blog post. Spam is a problem on many services with large audiences. We know spammers totally suck and we’re working on a long term solution to prevent spam from entering your feed. In the meantime, please adjust your settings to determine who can send you snaps. For a spam-free experience we recommend “Only My Friends” :) A few months after Snapchat started to gain traction, many labeled the app as a “sexting” service, since the notion of sharing images that don’t last is relatively new. That general concern has died down though, as seems to prove that all 150 million messages sent through the service each day (most of which are sent during the day time) can’t possibly be nudies. This latest nude spammer, however, does bring up the issue of unwanted sexts as opposed to wanted sexts. And that’s just the latest in a line of distractions for the company, including incredibly rapid growth, potential revenue streams, and from a who claims to have come up with the idea. But distractions aside, it’s hard to argue with a service that has users sending . Consider this: Instagram users post an average of 40 million pictures a day.
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Tallygram, OkCupid’s Foray Into Friend Finding On Facebook, Hits The Deadpool
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
, a Facebook-based friend-finding app created by dating site , has shut down, saying that the community never grew large enough to sustain the site. Tallygram, which originally billed itself as “ ,” first opened for business in . Now the site, in a note to existing users (below), is referring to itself as an “experiment.” Those existing users have an option to from the service by May 15. With sites like Facebook continuing to build out its own ways of mining its massive database of users and information, such as Graph Search, and many other ways to discover new people (three examples are Badoo, OkCupid and Tinder, which like OkCupid is also owned by IAC) it’s perhaps not too surprising that Tallygram found it hard to pick up traction. The service, which came out of OkCupid Labs, had a similar concept behind it as OkCupid, founded by four mathematics grads from Harvard: “We use math to figure out who your friends or enemies are. See what they really think,” is how the described itself on its . That process involved helping identify like-minded souls using algorithms combined with some parameters that users set themselves by answering questions about their feelings about things like cats, patent litigation, and their concept of themselves. It then matched this up with other users’ data and their Facebook profiles to find friends of friends — interesting-enough sounding tech, and relevant to how many interact and meet today, so it may end up somewhere else within the company. Full statement from Tallygram below: We’re sad to say that, after working on Tallygram for the past year, we’ve decided to put our experiment to rest. We hope you had as much fun using it as we did building it, but the community never grew large enough to sustain the site. We really appreciate you giving the site a shot. If you want to keep an archive of the answers you’ve written on Tallygram, we’ve built an exporter so you can . The site and archive tool will remain up until May 15, 2013. While we’re never happy to shut down a product, soldiers on. We’re already hard at work on more fun experiments. You can that are already live or sign up to be an and be the first to know about new projects. We need your help to go from potential awesomeness to actual awesomeness.
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Unveils The First Results Of Its Hot New Summly Acquisition
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
In March, made a big splash in its already dazzling list of acquisitions when it , a UK-based mobile startup led by 17-year-old founder Nick D’Aloisio that summarizes long texts to make them easier to read on mobile screens. Today, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled the first official fruit of that acquisition: A 160-word summary of her hour-long, 2013 Q1 earnings presentation (original length, 2,000+ words). So for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to read the whole results transcript, or one of the many , but are still interested in what’s going on at Yahoo, here it is: I’m pleased with the continued execution I see every day — our teams have been working very hard, especially in Q1. As a result of these initiatives and many others, the talent is undeniable — today, more applicants want to work at Yahoo, and more employees are staying. These teams bring an incredible mix of engineering and technical talent, which will help us accelerate our efforts in mobile development and contentpersonalization.The teams are already moving quickly to amplify the entrepreneurial spirit that’s so prevalent at Yahoo right now.
Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo experience is all about users’ interests and preferences. Yahoo is a consumer Internet company, and the consumer Internet is a growth industry. We’re on course to do what we said we would do — stabilize, and grow with the market.
[Did not make the cut: Yahoo’s advertising revenue declines; the fact that search has outstripped display revenues; and that Yahoo currently has 300 million monthly active users on mobile as it gears up for a bigger push on the platform.] In addition to Summly, which was acquired reportedly for , Yahoo in the last quarter also bought , and , “accelerating the Company’s efforts to build world-class technology and engineering teams in mobile and personalization.” That’s in addition to the wider push the company has also made to and appoint a new raft of executives. It now has 11,300 employees on the books. Read our full Yahoo earnings report .
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Streaming Set-Top Maker Roku Hires Logitech Exec Erik Bardman As Its New CFO
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Streaming set-top box manufacturer Roku has hired a new CFO today, bringing in an executive who had cut his teeth at Logitech and eBay. Erik Bardman, former SVP of Finance and CFO of Logitech International, is joining the company as it seeks to expand globally and also work out more deals with cable and satellite providers. Bardman has been a part of Logitech since 2009, and plans to leave the peripheral hardware manufacturer at the end of this month. He’s also served as a board member for Trulia, a seat he’s planning to continue holding while at Roku. Prior to his Logitech days, Bardman spent six years at eBay, where he served as CFO for eBay Marketplaces. And before that, he was at GE, in a variety of roles. The new CFO joins Roku as the seeking to expand not just its product line, but also its availability around the globe. Last summer, in funding from a bunch of strategic investors, including News Corp, British Sky Broadcasting, and . Since then, it’s been working to make a wider variety of cable and satellite TV content available through its streaming set-top boxes. It’s also working to expand and improve its product line. Earlier this spring, the company , a more powerful set-top box with an improved user interface and universal search capabilities. In addition, Roku is pushing its as a way to make it easier for device manufacturers to quickly add streaming video capabilities to their TVs, without having to build the technology into the devices themselves. The company has sold more than 5 million of its streaming devices to date, but it’s probably looking to increase that number. And it’ll probably do so as the big cable companies are trying to lower the cost of their own set-top box deployments. By providing a way for subscribers to stream video to the second or third room in a user’s home without having to introduce a new device into the home. And, of course, there’s the opportunity to cash in on the number of users who are streaming TV, rather than just watching it through a cable subscription. This is the idea that Roku started with, after all, as a division within Netflix. But as companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime bring on more original programming to appeal to users who don’t pay for TV, streaming devices like Roku’s boxes and the Apple TV are becoming more widely adopted. Full text of the release is below: Erik Bardman to Join Roku as Chief Financial Officer
Trulia Board Member and Logitech Executive Brings Strong Expertise as Leading Streaming Media Platform Scales Saratoga, Calif. – April 15, 2013 – Roku® Inc. today announced that Erik Bardman will join the company as Chief Financial Officer. Bardman was appointed Senior Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer of Logitech International (NASDAQ: LOGI) in September 2009 and will depart the company this month. Bardman was elected to Trulia’s Board of Directors in June 2012 and will continue to hold that seat while at Roku. “We look forward to having Erik Bardman join the Roku executive team,” said Roku Founder and CEO Anthony Wood. “Roku is a fast-growth company in a rapidly changing industry and Erik brings a wealth of relevant experience to our mission of leading the streaming era.” “Roku is a dynamic company with outstanding products, a strong competitive position and compelling avenues for growth,” said Bardman. “I look forward to joining the business and helping it achieve significant scale in the years ahead.” Prior to Logitech, Bardman spent six years at eBay and served as the Chief Financial Officer for eBay Marketplaces, the company’s largest portfolio of businesses. At eBay, Bardman led a large global team focused on financial strategy, acquisitions, resource allocation and performance analysis. Prior to joining eBay, he was with General Electric for 15 years in a variety of roles, focused on consumer financial services, international finance and mergers and acquisitions.
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Monkey Island’s Creator Describes The Sequel He’s Definitely, Positively Not Making (Yet)
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
With the gash left by still a bit raw, this one’s either going to feel like salt in the wound or a spark of hope. Ron Gilbert, creator of LucasArts’ much-loved series, has published a list outlining the sequel he’d make if he could. The bad news: he swears up and down that he’s not making it. Yet. For those of you who keep track of where legendary game developers end up (Hey! Everyone needs a hobby), here’s what you need to know: after leaving LucasArts in the early 90s, Gilbert went on to found Humongous Entertainment (remember Putt-Putt or Freddi Fish? That was them), which is now owned by Atari. In 2010, he joined DoubleFine, the game development house which you’d remember as having , led by fellow LucasArts alum and industry legend Tim Schafer. Last month, Ron parted ways with DoubleFine to “ “. His (and absolutely worth reading), but to recap some of the bigger points: Gilbert goes on to suggest that he might consider using something like Kickstarter to get it done. Interestingly, he then prods a bit at campaigns with “fancy videos,” “crazy stretch goals,” “ridiculous reward tiers,” and the accompanying “hype and distractions”… which, you know, sort of describes DoubleFine’s hugely successful Kickstarter down to a tee. It’s particularly interesting to watch the way Gilbert’s tone begins to shift as he continues through the post. While he starts by dedicating not one, but points to clarifying that he’s working on a sequel, he ends with talks of theoretical Metacritic scores and statements like “If you let me do those things, you will love the game.” This is clearly something he wants to do — he just can’t. The very day Disney announced that they’d acquired LucasFilms (and in turn LucasArts and all of its game properties), Gilbert quite publicly disclosed that he wanted to buy his game back: Dear Disney: I would like to buy the IP for a game I created called Monkey Island from you. — Ron P.S. I have no money. — Ron Gilbert (@grumpygamer) While he mentions having no money, that’s not a problem without a clear solution. If Disney sell him the IP for anything resembling a sane amount, the fans have already made it quite clear that they’d be willing to throw a small mountain of money his way. (What the hell is Disney going to do with the license, anyway? They’ve already got the similarly piratey but larger property. Plus, Disney could use probably some positive PR surrounding the LucasArts acquisition/shutdown right now.) Back in December, Gilbert mentioned in an interview with PCGamer that he still wanted the property, and that he planned to contact Disney . Could this be his way of getting that ball rolling?
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An End To The Aggregation Debate? Repost Makes It Easy To Embed Articles
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
A new startup called aims to make it easy for online publishers to distribute their articles via embedding — the same way I can share a video from YouTube or a document from Scribd directly in a blog post. Right now, if I saw an article that I thought TechCrunch readers would find valuable — from Repost founder and CEO John Pettitt — I could share a link on Facebook or Twitter. But what if I wanted to share it on TechCrunch itself? After all, while TechCrunch does plenty of original reporting, we also build on stories that broke elsewhere, and we point readers to announcements that companies have made on their own blogs. In those cases, I could include a link, but according to Repost, there’s only a 2 percent chance on average that readers will actually click. Pettit elaborates: Yes, there are lots of sharing services. But here’s the thing, they don’t actually share the content. They share links to content. VERY different. If you want to take an article from one site and publish it on another, you have to find a person, get permission, and then manually copy it. Assuming you don’t break all the formatting in the process, you’re still not in good shape because you still have to worry about search engines seeing it as duplicate content. With Repost, I can just copy-and-paste an embed code into my post, and then you get the full article, with all the formatting and images preserved. You can see an example at the end of this post. ( Apparently there are still some issues with how Repost integrates with TechCrunch’s specific WordPress installation, so what you’re seeing is actually a stripped-down version of the embed.) That means the original publisher gets their content presented with clear attribution and their own advertising. It also integrates with existing analytics systems, comScore counts the embed views as part of the publisher’s traffic, and since the article is rendered in an iFrame, it doesn’t look like duplicate content to a search engine. The new publisher, meanwhile, gets to present the full, most up-to-date version of the article to their readers. Since the author is basically saying, “Please share this article!” it should help avoid a lot of the tedious arguments about whether one publication is “aggregating” another site’s content. In outlining his solution to the content distribution challenge, Pettitt drew parallels with the video world. He said that initially, if you had told the video industry that you wanted to add a button to their content making it easy to embed those videos anywhere, “They would have told you you were crazy.” Yet those buttons are “ubiquitous” today, because video publishers realize the value of broad distribution, and they can monetize that distribution by including their own ads in the embedded videos. Repost says it already enables embedding for 3 million articles from more than 4,000 publishers, including , , , and . On average, Reposted articles see a 5.7 percent clickthrough to the original publisher, and they make readers read three times farther down on the page. Pettitt estimated that around 75 percent of those publishers aren’t just using Repost as a way to share their content, but also to find outside content worth posting on their own sites. Future plans include adding e-commerce features, such as automatic insertion of affiliate links. The Repost model could even work for paywalled sites, Pettitt added — in fact, the company is working on a partnership with one such site right now. Publishers could enable Repost sharing for their free content, or sharing of a snippet of their paywalled content. “Fundamentally, the best ad for your content is your content,” he said. Pettitt isn’t the only one who thinks this could have a big effect on web publishing. Jeff Jarvis, a well-known media pundit and associate professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism/Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, recently joined Repost’s board of advisors. “Repost should end the wars over aggregation and copyright,” Jarvis said in the press release announcing the company’s launch. “The Repost technology changes the fundamental architecture of content distribution on the net, and reinvents and reverses the idea of content syndication.” Yes, there are lots of sharing services. But here’s the thing, they don’t actually share the content. They share links to content. VERY different. If you want to take an article from one site and publish it on another, you have to find a person, get permission, and then manually copy it. Assuming…
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Twitter Is Exploring New Ways For Android Users To Discover Tweets, Says Product VP Michael Sippey
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
Facebook boldly moved to expand its presence in the mobile space with its Android-only replacement last week (with mixed results), but it’s far from the only company who has shown interest in Google’s mobile OS as a springboard for better social connection. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Mobile, recently installed Twitter VP of product Michael Sippey seemed intrigued by the sorts of experiences others have been able to build on top of Android and confirmed that the company has been mulling over how to improve the process of using Twitter on Android. “There are a lot of things we’re looking at on Android to make it easier to discover tweets,” Sippey remarked in response to an audience question. He went on to mention that he finds Facebook Home to be “a very interesting product,” and that he “would like to see tweets there.” As you might expect, Sippey wouldn’t say anything further about what sorts of Android-centric Twitter experiences employees have been fiddling with behind closed doors. He did however point out the importance of Twitter’s internal hack weeks, quarterly events that see cross-disciplinary come together to jam on some interesting projects. Rough though they may be at first, some of those hacks have grown into full-fledged features that have ultimately been baked into Twitter proper (downloadable tweet archives are probably the most notable example). Given the role that these sorts of wild-eyed hacks can have when it comes to product development — Ellis Hamburger points out that Facebook Messenger’s Chat Heads began as once such — it wouldn’t be surprise to learn that some of Twitter’s potential Android enhancements came about thanks to this internal drive to occasionally cobble things together en masse. For now Twitter is more than happy to keep these cards close to their collective chests, but Sippey stated that the team wants to “build the best Twitter” they can, and taking a tighter approach to integrating into an immensely popular mobile OS wouldn’t be the worst move Twitter could make.
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Oovoo President Opens Up About Forthcoming Features As The Video Chat Sensation Crosses 75M Users
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 |
has been on a tear of late, tripling its user base in the past year with Jay Samit at the wheel as president. We brought him into the studio to chat about Oovoo’s growth, the video chatting space and forthcoming features on the Oovoo platform. He was surprisingly forthcoming. He hinted at a feature that would let users preview how they look before they begin a call, explaining that the number one reason why most people don’t video chat is because they don’t like how they look. After previewing your looks, you can also apply a filter to make you look even better. “Think Instagram,” he said. Samit also hinted at a video voicemail-type feature, which would let users enjoy video chat in an asynchronous way rather than having everyone participate in realtime. After all, not having someone to chat with is a pretty big deterrent in the world of video chat. The company has almost crossed 75 million users, and Samit attributes much of Oovoo’s incredible growth to the global shift toward mobile. And to him, it’s not just about being available across multiple platforms, as Oovoo is with , Mac, PC, iOS and Android. It’s also about having the very best quality application at the right value. Since Oovoo isn’t peer-to-peer like its biggest competitor Skype, the app performs much differently from a user perspective, and thus the usage is quite different from one app to the other. “Skype was a great technology 10 years ago,” said Samit. “Since we host our service in the cloud, we adjust bandwidth to particular users’ constraints and use 60 percent less battery.” Because of this, says Samit, users don’t go to Oovoo to triage scheduled international calls or have professional meetings like they do with Skype. Instead, Oovoo users tend to skew much younger and typically leave the service running in the background, chatting with groups of friends as they do other things. This struck a chord with me, since video chat has never really taken off the way it was expected for that very reason. Though people are used to being able to multi-task on the phone, that freedom doesn’t translate to video chat, and so people tend to steer clear. I asked Samit why Oovoo users feel different, and he said it comes down to age. “Younger people don’t have the same ingrained habits as older generations,” said Samit. “Voice communication was only a habit after Alexander Graham Bell created the telephone, but for thousands of years before that we were visual people. Since younger generations have used text more than calling, they don’t have the same habits as older people and feel more comfortable in the visual environment of video chat.”
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 29 | null |
Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei Insists His Company Is “Completely Transparent” In An Internal Email
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
An internal email written by Huawei founder Ren Zheng-fei and (link via Google Translate) sheds light on the secretive Chinese firm’s future. In it, Ren downplays his company’s reputation for opacity, which has fueled charges that Huawei, the world’s second largest maker of telecom equipment, is involved in espionage for the Chinese government. Ren, who is 68 and rumored to be near retirement, also insisted Huawei will not go public in the next decade and that he will not hand over Huawei’s reins to a family member. With sales of $35.4 billion last year, Huawei is the second-largest telecom network equipment seller in the world after Sweden’s Ericsson. It is also the world’s third-largest maker of smartphones, trailing after Samsung and Apple with a five percent share of the global market, . Concerns that Huawei is involved with espionage, however, have kept it from advancing in the U.S. market. Last October, a fingered Huawei and Chinese rival ZTE as a threat to national security, calling on U.S. government and private sector companies to avoid buying equipment from both. At the end of March, Sprint Nextel and Japanese telecom SoftBank . Last week, Huawei’s executive vice president Eric Xu reportedly said that Huawei is , but the company later said that Xu’s remarks had been misinterpreted. Part of the U.S. government’s concern revolves around Ren’s past as a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army. Huawei has repeatedly denied, however, that it is a security threat. In his email, Ren insisted that his reputation for secrecy is overstated. “With regards to the media, I have always been completely transparent,” Ren wrote. He pointed to the number of articles he has authored himself over the last 20 years, as well as speeches he has given at various venues, including the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Huawei’s founder was equally blunt in insisting that his successor will not be a family member. The New York Times that Huawei is “undergoing an unusual, American-style effort to decentralize Huawei’s management, including a high-profile, public search for his successor.” Ren wrote in his email that he is looking for someone who not only has “vision, character, and determination,” but also takes a long-term strategy toward the company’s development and who is able to navigate the current business environment. “None of my family members have these skills, so none of them will ever succeed me,” wrote Ren. Ren’s daughter Cathy Meng, Huawei’s chief financial officer, has previously been named as a potential heir to her father’s position, but that seems less likely given what he wrote in his email. More likely candidates include Ken Hu, one of the Huawei’s three rotating CEOs, who previously served as chairman of Huawei’s U.S. board operations. The other co-CEOs are also in the running: Xu, who has run Huawei’s strategy, marketing, products and solutions businesses and Guo Ping, who ran Huawei’s devices business. Reports have that Huawei will launch an IPO, but Ren insists that his company will not be publicly listed within the next five to 10 years, echoing recent statements made by executive vice president Eric Xu. Ren said that Huawei’s board of directors has never focused on going public because they don’t believe it’s in the best interests of the company’s development. Photo credit:
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Square Updates Its Register iPad App With Kitchen Tickets, Ordering Features To Better Serve Restaurants
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Square’s point-of-sale technology and is getting a big update today targeted at better serving restaurants. New features in the release include custom order modifiers and customizable kitchen tickets that allow restaurants to make taking orders and serving food more efficient. Square Register is a point-of-sale system based on the iPad and not only allows merchants to accept payments, but includes the ability to customize permissions for employees on the register, access to sales reports, and the ability to wirelessly print receipts or open a cash drawer to make change. Analytics allow merchants to segment consumer payments data and transactions, and users can access data around number of payments, subtotals, tax, tips, refunds, account deposits, etc. The focus of the new update to Square Register is helping optimize the experience at the counter beyond just the payment. Merchants can now customize orders with order modifiers, allowing cashiers to add specific information to orders so that a kitchen can be aware of any modifications. So if you wanted no foam on a latte, a cashier could create and add an order modifiers to the coffee order. Custom kitchen tickets allow merchants to attach a number or a customer’s name to an order. Square Register can be connected with printers so that receipts can be printed as tickets to be placed in the kitchen. Square says that there are tens of thousands of merchants in the food industry adopting Square and in the past year, the number of food-related businesses that use Square has almost tripled and the amount of money they process has more than quadrupled. While this is a small update, it represents one more feature that helps turn Register into a full-fledged point-of-sale terminal. Restaurants, especially , are starting to catch on to Square and the iPad cash register movement. Having features that are geared towards making the ordering and deployment system more seamless and integrated should only increase the adoption of Square Register amongst restaurants. You can watch the new features in action below: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeVkbjeL1Lk&w=560&h=315] There are already tens of thousands of merchants in the food industry increasingly adopting Square for its simple interface, smart analytics, continuous updates, and low processing fees. In the past year, the number of food-related businesses that use Square has almost tripled and the amount of money they process has more than quadrupled.
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Spotify Quietly Starts Rolling Out The Discover Tab In Its Web App, First In The UK And Nordics
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Back in , music streaming service provided an update on how it was going to double down on social recommendations to increase music listening on its platform by launching two new features, Follow and Discover. While the Follow feature, aimed at friends, started to get rolled out in and , it turns out that Spotify has also been rolling out the Discover feature. Spotify actually in a very short post some two weeks ago on one of its community forums, just in time to coincide with the launch of another music discovery app, . On a thread originally started in December when the features were first announced, Spotify community manager Rorey Jones wrote earlier this month: “We know you’ve all been eager to see the discover features rolled out so we just wanted to let you know we’ve begun rolling out the brand new Discover tab to a very small percentage to folks in the UK and Nordic countries on the desktop application of Spotify. We’ll be rolling it out to more customers in the coming weeks.” We are reaching out to Spotify for more details about Discover and where it might roll out next. : Spotify confirmed the rollout has and said that it would continue to expand it, like the Follow beta, but declined to say where next: “We’ve started to let a small number of users try out a beta version of our new Discover page which we announced in December. We’ll continue to add more and more users in the coming weeks as we gear up for a wider rollout.” Spotify also lists documentation for the feature on its . We have two screenshots of how the Discover feature looks, one from a reader and another posted in that community forum, with both from its desktop browser app accessed via : and… These look similar to the preview that Spotify offered us of the Discover feature . Here’s what we can see about how it works so far. While Follow, as Josh wrote in March, will help users adopt Twitter-style followings to pick up recommendations and playlists from friends, Discover will be another way to learn about new music, and spend more time in Spotify. This time, however, the focus is on third-party apps, which Spotify will now be able to highlight and promote to users — providing a service to the app developers, and hopefully increasing time spent on Spotify in the process. In effect, what Spotify does is like Twitter, except that all algorithms and features lead back to its own platform and its own music catalog. “Discover,” it seems, will be replacing the “What’s New” tab, with a more interactive, Pinterest-style montage of new releases, trending playlists, trending songs, music trending in your area, songs directly in the stream, with options to save music to existing playlists, save new playlists, and to follow playlists. What seems to be the case is that while Discover continues on a limited rollout, Spotify is still tweaking it. One app maker, Share My Playlists, is working on a new feature for the Discover tab that it has yet to launch: playlist reviews within the Discover tab. “The idea is to offer an extra layer of curation and discovery for users: we will hand select the best of our playlists and write a review for them,” noted founder Kieron Donoghue. “These reviews will be surfaced in Discover if the content of the playlist we have reviewed is deemed to be of interest to the user by Spotify.” A mock-up of how that will look is here: According to one Spotify app developer we contacted, Discover has a two-fold purpose. Yes, it’s there to increase music listening, which is important for Spotify’s business model around advertising, as well as to attract more users for subscription services, and more engagement potentially for other paid services that it launches down the line. But it’s also a way to help apps get discovered, something which has been an issue up to now for some of them. “One of the reasons why Spotify launched the Discover tab is to make the Spotify apps more visible to users. A lot of Spotify’s users don’t even know apps are there,” he said. “So by making Discover the default ‘homepage’ for all Spotify’s users and surfacing relevant content from the apps, Spotify hopes that more people will use [the apps] and of course stay in Spotify longer, increasing engagement and usage.” Users do not need to be signed up for these apps for them to get recommended. Interestingly, more than one developer TechCrunch talked to didn’t have a firm idea of how, exactly, Discover worked. At what point does one app get priority over another in Spotify’s recommendation engine, for example? “It’s a good question,” one developer replied. “No one really knows. I think it’s very manual right now.” Another emphasized the use of a recommendation engine based on your own listening history. “I think Spotify simply selects whatever content it deems to be most appropriate to you, based on your listening habits. It will have content from all partners and whichever is most relevant, you will see. I guess that’s the fairest way, too.”
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Jarvis Is A Personal Assistant That Goes Beyond Siri To Embrace The Connected Home
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
If you’re an Iron Man fan, you already know about Jarvis, Tony Stark’s personal assistant (who’s either a human or a virtual AI, depending on how long you’ve been following the comic). Jarvis is the glue that keeps Stark’s business, personal and super hero lives running smoothly. Which is why Jarvis is a perfect name for the digital assistant built by a team at this year’s Disrupt NY Hackathon. Hack co-creator Felix Rieseberg talked me through how Jarvis works, using APIs provided by Twilio, Weather Underground and Ninja Blocks to help you control your home and check the current conditions, headlines and what’s making news, and more, all just by dialing a number from any telephone and issuing voice commands, It’s like a Siri, but housed on Windows Azure and able to plug into a lot more functionality. Rieseberg says that a practical Jarvis is still quite a ways away, since it’s not a true AI and could get easily frustrated in real-world conditions. But the appetite is clearly there: he said he was already approached and offered seed investment based just on the quick demo that was shown of onstage, where Jarvis turned off a Ninja Blocks-connected Philips Hue lamp. What Jarvis embodies is a natural next step for the connected home and digital personal assistants, but Jarvis is more a proof of concept than a shipping product. Still, one day soon controlling your home from anywhere and gathering information will be just as easy as making a phone call, and Jarvis is a suggestion that day isn’t too far off.
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Google Will Sunset The Meebo Bar On June 6 To Focus On Google+ Sign-In and Plug-Ins
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Google that it is bidding adieu to publishing tool in order to focus on projects like Google+ Sign-In and plug-ins. The Meebo Bar will be retired effective June 6. Founded in 2005, Meebo was . At that time, TechCrunch learned that its product team would use its expertise to help build publisher tools for Google+, with the expectation that existing Meebo properties would be integrated into G+ or closed down. In fact, many of Meebo’s features, including Meebo Messenger, Sharing on Meebo, MeeboMe, and all of its mobile apps, were largely , but , with Google+ sharing options. With the Meebo Bar’s retirement, however, it looks like our original prediction has come true. The Meebo Bar not only gave website developers a way to integrate chat, sharing features and ads, but also a means by which to monetize their sites. According to a comScore report from December 2011, before its acquisition by Google, Meebo was getting around 100 million total users per month. But now it’s the latest target of Google’s spring cleaning–other have included Google Cloud Connect, Google Voice App for BlackBerry and, of course, the much mourned . The product retirements are part of the Internet giant’s ongoing efforts to focus on products that not only have a larger amount of users, but also fulfill its . After June 6, the Meebo Bar will stop loading on sites and Google recommends that developers remove the inactive code as part of a “general code housekeeping task.” Check for more info.
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Android Took 64% Of All Smartphone Sales Globally In Q1; Windows Phone Continues Modest Gains, Says Kantar
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Google’s mobile OS Android continues to power ahead as the world’s most popular smartphone platform, according to figures out today from , the WPP-owned market research company that tracks sales of handsets across key markets on a 12-week rolling cycle. In the nine markets surveyed by Kantar — Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK and the U.S., all detailed in the table below — Android on average accounted for 64.2% of all handset sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 31. The only market where Android did not dominate was Japan, where Apple’s iOS just about eked out a lead against it (49.2% versus 45.8% of sales) for the three months ending March 31. Elsewhere, the figures indicate that regardless of whether the market is developed (U.S., UK, Germany) or emerging (China) or struggling financially (Spain), collectively, Android handset makers are winning them all, with sales figures for the platform reaching their high point in Spain, at 93.5% of all smartphone sales. As you can see below, when it comes to smartphone penetration of actual devices in use, Android is leading everywhere. Kantar — which bases its figures on (as samples) 240,000 interviews annually in the U.S. and some 1 million across Europe — believes that Android’s lead will only grow more in the months ahead, with the ongoing roll out of two new Android handsets, the Galaxy S4 from Samsung and the HTC One, driving sales of the platform. “We expect to see a further spike in [Android’s] share in the coming months, as sales from the HTC One start coming through and the Samsung Galaxy S4 is launched,” writes Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. “This will pile pressure on Apple, BlackBerry and Nokia to keep their products front of consumers’ minds in the midst of a Samsung and HTC marketing blitz.” Indeed, in the U.S., without a strong handset launch in the last twelve weeks, and little sign of a new one on the horizon after the launch of the iPhone 5 last autumn, iOS declined by almost one percentage point to 43.7% of sales compared to Android’s 49.3%, which was up by 1.4 pp, a strong contrast to the period that Symbian is now nearly totally out of the market, with only 0.2% of sales. BlackBerry’s BB10 launch has so far had very little impact on the company, which gained only 0.2 percentage points, to 0.9% of sales, compared to last month’s figures of 0.7%. Kantar’s figures show that the only other platform besides Android in the U.S. market to see any gains was Windows Phone — a repeat of the . Microsoft’s platform was up by 1.9 percentage points to a still-modest 5.6% of sales, with Nokia accounting for the vast majority of those. Elsewhere, the pattern of Android domination and modest Windows Phone gains was repeated. Across the 5 European countries covered, Windows Phone accounted for 6.5% of sales, up 2.5 percentage points; with Android at 68.8% of sales, up over 10 percentage points. Similarly, in Australia, Android was nearly 63% of sales, up 8.8 pp, while Windows Phone was up 0.8 pp to just over 4% of sales. Part of the reason, according to analyst Mary-Ann Parlato, is that WP handset makers (namely Nokia) have made a lot of effort to create and promote devices aimed at first-time smartphone buyers. Although we have now just reached a for smartphones shipped, and while smartphone sales are now exceeding those of feature phones, when it comes to active ownership there are still more feature phones than smartphones in the market. And Kantar’s theory is that the accessible, colourful, and cheap Lumias that Nokia is pumping out are appealing to those buyers, with feature phone owners representing 52% of Windows Phone buyers in the U.S.. In contrast, the majority of Android (51%) and iOS (55%) buyers previously owned other smartphones. If this purchase pattern continues, as smartphone penetration grows, Windows Phone could find itself with a growing advantage. And the UK is one case in point. There, smartphone penetration is now 63%, Kantar notes, and it’s also one of Windows Phone strongest (if modest in relative terms) markets: accounting for 7% of all smartphone sales in the 12 weeks. Kantar only breaks out specific handset model popularity for the UK market, where, although iOS is not the most popular platform, the iPhone 5 is the most popular phone, at 15% of all sales. When you break it down by handsets, it’s clear just how much iPhones and Samsung devices dominate the space, and how Samsung’s strategy to launch often and widely, across a spectrum of prices and models, has worked out for it (but perhaps with more sacrifice to margin than Apple). “Kantar Worldpanel ComTech data clearly shows that different Samsung models are appealing to a very different type of consumer. The Galaxy Note II is popular with affluent 25-34 year old males, the Galaxy SIII Mini appeals to younger females, the Galaxy Ace to older females while the Galaxy SIII has broad appeal,” writes Sunnebo. “The fact that Samsung has so many models available in the market is not indicative of a scatter gun approach, simply a realisation that different consumers demand very different handsets, both in functionality, design and price.” Kantar only breaks out how individual carriers perform in the U.S. market, but the figures provide a telling picture for what may be happening elsewhere, too. Kantar notes that Verizon has solidified its lead against AT&T with 37.2% of smartphones sold, with AT&T holding steady at 27.9% and Sprint in third with 12.3% of sales and T-Mobile drooping down more than 3 percentage points to 9.5%. It looks like at least part of the story for Verizon’s gains is because it seems to have a healthier mix of Android and iPhone devices, which are roughly equal in terms of how well they sell at the carrier. AT&T’s mix is still heavily weighted to the iPhone, meaning if that device does less well, so does the carrier. All the same, the iPhone (and Metro PCS) could not come soon enough for the number-four carrier to boost figures.
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