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Squirrel Evernote Hack Creates A Personalised Newsletter From The Cool Stuff You’ve Saved To Read Later
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Another simple but neat that came out of the 24-hour Disrupt NY Hackathon earlier today was Squirrel. Created by coder duo Zainab Ebrahimi and Jabari Bell, the hack turns articles that Evernote readers have saved for reading later into a personalised newsletter. So, unlike the average email newsletter, Squirrel is populated with content the user actually wants to read. A sort of anti-spam if you like. Bell explained he uses Evernote for saving articles to read later but wanted to come up with a neat self-reminder that resurfaces content which he hasn’t gotten round to reading yet. The problem Squirrel is attacking is the sheer volume of new stuff that’s clamouring for our attention online, drowning out the good stuff we genuinely want to pay attention to. Squirrel creates both a neat summary of articles an Evernote user has earmarked, and acts as a gentle reminder to dive in and read them. With so much digital content being generated, great stuff easily gets buried, said Bell. Squirrel digs it back up. (The name of the hack is a clear reference to how squirrels store nuts for eating later by burying them in the ground — yet oftentimes forget where they buried them so never end up getting to eat them.) The Squirrel hack lets users set the frequency with which they want to receive an email newsletter, and presents around 10-15 articles per email. While the duo have used Evernote’s API for their hack, it’s easy to envisage other cloud storage services being plugged in. And with so much content out there stored in people’s personal clouds the whole is looking pretty hot. Add to that, apps like which are designed to help people reduce content clutter and Squirrel’s hack is definitely tapping into a ‘reload my information/information overload’ trend. Here’s Squirrel’s on stage presentation:
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Game Of Tones, The Game That Could Eventually Teach You To Play The Actual Guitar
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Hot damn, the Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon was great. Even with the hackathon over and the winner declared ( ), we keep finding more projects we want to highlight. Built in just 24 hours, is a proof-of-concept game that, with a bit of work, could teach you to play the actual guitar (versus, say, Rock Band — which, while a great game, is about as effectiv works in unison with a real-life electric guitar, paired to the computer through a line-in converter. As you strum, notes are fired from the neck of your on-screen hero’s guitar. Different chords result in different attacks, currently represented as notes of different hues. Strum an A, and blue notes fire out; strum an E, and red notes are fired. In its current, proof-of-concept state, is a bit simple, but the team says they want to build it out into something bigger. Right now, your character (modeled after the game’s co-designer Jeff, which fellow co-designer Roman says was a change that came “while he was in the bathroom”) stands in place, firing notes to blast away at a pile of physics enabled boxes. The focus of the first 24 hours was to get the game’s engine (Unity) recognizing the guitar input and differentiating the different chords. The team says they’d like to expand the concept into something more, mentioning the possibility of some sort of forever-runner platformer with enemies vulnerable to different chords, or a multiplayer shredding battle. Check out the team’s on-stage demo below. While Murphy’s Law went into full effect when a wiggled cable lead to some technical woes, I made sure to pull ’em backstage for a better look — be sure to check out that video, as well.
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StoryKid, Created By Literature PhDs Students, Is An App That Helps Young Ones Tell Stories (And Their Parents, Too)
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Children are known for how much they love to play make-believe, and StoryKid, an app introduced today during the Disrupt Hackathon in New York, takes this and gives it a new twist by offering a series of pictures as visual cues for a child to tell a story based around them. StoryKid is aimed at children aged 2 to 5 who are already talking but may either be too young or are just starting to write. Created by two comparative literature PhD students from Columbia University, the idea is that this will help bring children into the world of story telling and literature. And as co-founder Tianjiao Yu tells me, it can also be used by parents when they’ve run out of inspiration for their own made-up bedtime stories. Yu, left, says that she learned to code to create the app, while her co-founder Lu Xiong, right, boned up on design and user experience to work on the visual elements. Their motivation to do this was to take what they’ve been learning out of the ivory towers of higher learning. “Both of us are interested in the humanities and making them accessible to everyone,” Yu says. “We find creating an app is the perfect way to do this.” StoryKid is one of three ideas that the pair have to make literature more accessible to people. The other two, however, are more about discovery of existing literature rather than creating new things. The two are on the lookout now for a third coder who can help with creating these. Indeed, even StoryKid, as it was created this weekend in the Hackathon, is still at an early stage of where they would like for it to be. The pictures, she notes, for today’s demo were sourced from visual search engine but they will come from other sources when the actual app launches in about 1.5 months. And the idea will be to also add in more of the to co-founders’ literary knowledge into the narrative structure. “You learn a lot of theories about how to analyse the elements of a story,” Yu notes. “We want to use them here to help generate stories instead, how to help people figure out relationships between people and places, or the connection between two characters.” Then they would also like to add recording elements, in audio and video, but also in terms of preserving the pictures, to be presented almost like e-books of their own for retelling a story later. These could also link up with other programs like Evernote, which has developed a whole sideline in helping users keep track of what they have read and seen on the web, “a record for parents to know and remember what their kids have been thinking about.” And although the app, such as it is now, is aimed at toddlers making up their own stories, you can see, too, how this could also be used for older children who are writing more, to write down their narratives once they have them together. That sounds like schoolwork disguised as leisurely app time, but Yu emphasizes that the “main idea is to have fun, and to make literature fun.” I for one look forward to introducing things like this to my kids to see what they think.
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Pay With Bits Wants To Be The Square For Bitcoin
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Considering the around peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin, it’s not surprising that one of the hackers at the Disrupt NY hackathon created an application around the currency. was to be a Square for Bitcoin. The startup essentially allows Bitcoins to be transfered between parties via their mobile phones. The idea is the brainchild of Cody Byrnes, Prateek Gupta, Jon Bardin, Ben Daniel, Brett Mascavage, and Brad Smith, director of engineering at RadiumOne. The original idea came from Byrnes, a Developer at COG1 Interactive in San Francisco. Smith , which launched at , to RadiumOne in 2011. The rest of the team (Prateek, Cody, Jon, and Ben) developed FreshTag.me in June of last year. Smith explains that the team wanted to find a way to make Bitcoin accesible to the masses. You simply enter your Bitcoin account information on Pay With Bits, and you can send money via text message to any other party who also has entered their info on Pay With Bits. Pay With bits serves as a node on Bitcoin network, Smith adds. Smith says that using Pay With Bits, Bitcoins can be transferred internationally in a secure way within minutes. Because there are no interchange charges from a bank or credit card, Pay With Bits only incurs fees that are a fraction of a percent. In the future, Smith wants to add NFC capabilities as well. Pay With Bits adds to the growing number of startups in the Bitcoin world, including and [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyhkiz8BSCM&w=560&h=315]
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The Smell Of Coders In The Morning, Or, 10:30AM At The Disrupt NYC Hackathon [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Watch the video embedded above to take a walk back in time to 10:30am Eastern Time this morning, 30 minutes before the presentations began. Bagels and coffee were the fuel of choice for our hackers, many of who were frantically putting the finishing touches on their projects and getting ready to take the stage and present their apps to the judges and their peers. The crowd moved quickly from the third floor to the seventh floor, and the Hackathon’s energy palpably shifted from build mode to show-and-tell. Check it all out in the video embedded above.
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Startup Common Application Wants To Make Startup Job Applications More Efficient
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Startups still have a hard time finding the right applicants for their jobs. During our Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, engineer Bob Ren wrote a little web app that takes the Common Application for college admission as its inspiration. Just like high school students can use the to apply to multiple colleges simultaneously, will take your application and then submit it to multiple startups. Large companies typically have a huge pipeline with job prospects, but startups “naturally suffer from not having the big pipelines that big companies have,” Ren told me – and for a small startup, it’s even harder to find the right applicants. Currently, startups either rely on email, or , but the system is still very inefficient, especially for the applicants. You often spend hours getting your applications ready and submitted, but a system like Startup Common Application could just automate all of this for you (and you don’t even have to pretend that you really personalized the system). Common Startup Application runs on top of Heroku and Ren is working on a number of scripts that will take his users’ data and then auto-submit it to more startups. In the spirit of the Hackathon, Ren coded until 6 a.m. and then slept an hour before getting ready for his demo this afternoon. Obviously, this is still a hack, so Ren will surely have to work on the design a bit more, but he’s definitely tackling an interesting problem. Given that he can automate much of it, what he really needs right now, of course, is support for as many startups as possible, but there are some pretty obvious ways he could monetize this service if he decides to continue working on it.
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Laser Mountain Played Laser Tag Onstage With Nerf Guns, Android Phones And A Node.js Server
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Romain Dillet
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Carson Britt and Matthew Drake convinced everyone with their onstage demo of at the . They attached Android phones to the Nerf guns (that TechCrunch gave away yesterday) to recreate a laser tag game with a real-time score server. After receiving the Nerf guns, they started working right away on Laser Mountain. “We already had the domain name lasermoutain.com, so we didn’t have a choice,” Britt said. When asked why they bought this domain, Drake answered, “I pick up domains all the time.” The Android phones track movements using the built-in gyroscopes and then transmit the information to a Node.js server. To register when someone is firing, they use the phone’s microphones and the Nerf gun’s loud firing noise. Last night, the team of two didn’t sleep at all to finish their hack on time for the onstage demo. It wasn’t their first hackathon but it was the first time at the Disrupt Hackathon. But it’s not the end for Laser Mountain. “We are going to Kickstarter it,” Drake said. With fewer than 24 hours of development, the team is certainly talented enough to succeed. You should watch the two developers play laser tag onstage:
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EverSlide Turns Evernote Notes Into Slideshows
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
is a basic, but potentially very useful, hack built over the weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon. As you might guess by the name, the service turns your Evernote notes into slideshow presentations. And it’s crazy simple to use, too. The first line of text in your Evernote note becomes the slide’s title, the second line becomes the slide’s content, and to create a second slide, you just insert a horizontal line from Evernote’s editing menu at the top. Then, boom, instant slideshow! The hack was created by computer science student Michelle Fernandez and Andrew Leung, who’s currently in between work. The team met at the hackathon, and said they got the idea for the project by reading the Evernote forums where employees had posted ideas for hacks. (And word has it, the Evernote staff here, too, got pretty excited for this idea as well – they told EverSlide’s founders that they talked about the hack amongst themselves for some fifteen minutes after hearing about the team’s plans.) The service is very minimal right now, given it was built over the weekend in between those midnight Nerf Gun wars and all, but the plan is to add more customization options in the future, including the ability to edit the fonts or colors of the text, perhaps, the ability to add photos, and more.
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Rambler Takes Home The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Grand Prize, Learn To Drive And Radical Are Runners Up
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
The past 24 hours have just flown by for the hundreds of hackers here at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, but the sun is finally up and it’s time to pass judgment on their caffeine-fueled projects. As it turns out, there’s a ton of them here — with 164 registered projects this is our biggest Hackathon yet, and each presenter only had 60 seconds to wow our judges (not to mention the rest of the audience). As you might guess there was no shortage of amazing projects that came together in a single day, but our judges could only choose one team to take home our $5,000 grand prize. Anyway, that’s enough out of me — meet our newest Hackathon winner! , created by William Hockey, Zach Perret and Michael Kelly, is a web app that lets users view their credit and debit card transactions on a map. During the dev process, the team tapped the Foursquare API for locations and the Plaid API to access user spending data. Learn To Drive, created by Jared Zoneraich, Jemma Issroff, Kenny Song, and Nicholas Joseph, is an app for the GM vehicle platform that acts as a virtual driving instructor by speaking driving instructions aloud and displaying driving statistics, such as miles driven, hours driven, and hours driven at night. , created by Sam Saccone, Carl Sednaoui, and Jeff Escalante, allows users to create attractive calendars and embed on webpages with a single line of code. These three teams will also demo their projects on the main Disrupt stage on Wednesday afternoon, but that’s not to say everyone else is going home empty-handed. Hackathon sponsors Appery.io, AT&T, CrunchBase, General Motors, Microsoft Bizspark, Microsoft Skydrive, NewAer, Pearson, Samsung, Twilio, Visa, Wrigley and Yammer have also graciously doled out prizes of their own for the most innovative and interesting uses of their APIs and services. And just who decided the fate of these sleep-deprived hackers? Our panel of judges includes Mahaya CEO Tarikh Korula, Path101 co-founder Charlie O’Donnell, founder/CEO of The Muse Kathryn Minshew, bit.ly chief scientist Hilary Mason, FuturePerfect Ventures founding partner Jalak Jobanputra, and BoxGroup Managing Director David Tisch.
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Kar Nanny Helps You Track Your Kids And Cheating Spouse Using GM’s App Platform
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Thanks to GM’s new app platform, keeping track of family members, as well as learning their driving history, is easier than ever. One hack from our Disrupt NY Hackathon, called Kar Nanny, seeks to let users see where their kids are driving and get notifications if they’re being unsafe. Or you can see where your spouse is. Or, if you own a car rental fleet, this will give you the opportunity to keep tabs on how renters are using your cars. The app can be installed on the GM infotainment system, but it runs transparently in the background. The real power of Kar Nanny comes from mobile apps that connect with the on-board system to grab info and display it on users’ mobile phones. In addition to real-time location data, it also keeps track of driving history, so you can see how fast your kids were driving or how much gas is left in their tank. Users can also receive alerts based on user-defined criteria. So, for instance, parents can get texts if they know that their kids were driving over the speed limit. Or they can set a geofence and find out if their kid drives into the city with the family car. For fleets, the app can provide a history of renters that have driven aggressively. And if there’s ever an accident, the app can help to reconstruct what happened, showing the speed the car was driving at impact or whether there was sudden braking, for instance. The revenue model is to have a monthly subscription, $5 for every car and driver per month that are monitored. While Kar Nanny will have a freemium model for the first driver in a family situation, the team expects that fleet monitoring is where they’ll actually make their money. Of course, Kar Nanny used the GM API and app platform to get info related to a user’s driving history. The team used to prototype the mobile app and ‘s real-time messaging API to send mobile notifications. The team is made up of , a software engineer at Dailyburn; , a software engineer by day at the digital audio ad network TargetSpot; , a full-stack software developer who’s working as a senior technologist in an innovation lab making mobile apps for the hospitality industry; and , former director of community for the Huffington Post.
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Dosi.io Makes LinkedIn Stalking Better With Info From GitHub, AngelList & CrunchBase
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
is a new Chrome extension that builds a better dossier at the top of LinkedIn profiles where it helps you determine who’s worth your time. Once installed, LinkedIn stalking gets a lot more interesting, as Dosi.io displays more information about the person in question by pulling in additional data from CrunchBase, GitHub and AngelList. It also displays a score indicating that person’s importance to you in terms of how well they match your networking goals. The extension, built here at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, is currently designed for the developer crowd, but the creators intend to bring it to other communities in the future. You can think of Dosi.io as something like a Rapportive for LinkedIn, explains co-creator Niles Brooks, who’s also the co-founder of sustainable restaurant guide . He says he came up with the idea for the extension the midnight before the hackathon’s start. Kenneth Chen, a software developer in the finance industry, had been thinking about things along the same lines, he tells us, and decided to team up on the project along with third member, Vijith Assar. In a nutshell, the extension’s secret sauce is a combination of the number of followers a person has and the general impact they might have. From AngelList, it knows whether or not you have an account – a signal in and of itself – as well as the number of followers you have there. That information also helps Dosi.io know what companies to query up on CrunchBase, where it learns about the investments a company has, the sale price of a company, and the total amount of funding a person has raised over their lifetime. And on GitHub, Dos.io learns the commits you’ve made, the number of public repos you’re involved in, and again, the number of followers the person has. All of this data is boiled down into a simple visualization that appears directly above LinkedIn profiles, which also shows you a person’s overall Dosi.io score. Ranging from 1 to 10, the score is meant to convey how much of your time that person warrants. Brooks says he imagines this score becoming even more useful one day as a Google Glass application using facial recognition, where it could help users better network while at conferences and other events. (Nope, not creepy at all!) The extension today is client-side JavaScript, and though it’s live, they’re running into rate limits and other issues. In other words, it works, but it doesn’t work right now. That should change soon, though. Going forward, the team plans to continue Dosi.io’s development, bringing it to email inboxes, other browsers, smartphones and yes, even other industries.
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Gftr Wants To Stop Wasting Birthdays With Social Network Crowdsourced Gifts
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
My calendar is mostly filled with Facebook birthdays, these days, and at best those notifications will prompt me to post on someone’s wall once a year. Gftr, a project from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013’s Hackathon, wants to use those birthdays to power more meaningful gift-giving, thanks to crowdsourcing and the one day every year when people have the most goodwill directed towards them. Other companies have created crowdsourced gifting platforms in the past, but Gftr wants to make it possible to not just split a hugely expensive thing equally between a group of friends, but also to pull in contributions of varying amounts from your entire social graph. Currently, Gftr works with Facebook, meaning that maybe your friend from grade school who you haven’t seen in 15 years throws in $2, but your significant other offers up $300, all with the goal of getting you a brand new DSLR, for instance. The team behind Gftr includes Anthony Guidarelli, Vishal Gupta, Andrew Emerson, Aaron Lu, Cyrus Rahman, and Pat McCreary, and is composed of designers and hackers from Avenue B Labs, a New York-based group of entrepreneurs. They say they plan to actually build Gftr into a full product, and will work on extending it across other social media platforms, including Twitter. There’s also a charitable angle, as Gftr says they could build in a function where any contributions to a group gift above the total required value would go towards a charity of the gift-giver or gift-receiver’s choosing. This could help people with huge social media followings not only get gifts they actually need, but also use their considerable influence to do some good at the same time. Getting gifts is nice, but the power for any one person to get somebody something they genuinely need and will enjoy is greatly diminished compared to a group pooling their resources. No other startup in this space has really become a runaway success yet, so it isn’t clear that people are all that interested in coming together to get someone something awesome, but the way Gftr tries to make the investment required negligible could help it succeed where others have failed.
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 16 | null |
Scaffold Wants To Bring Financial Advice To The People Who Need It Most
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
That’s where , an app built over the past 24 hours at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Hackathon, wants to help out. Scaffold aims to be a financial advisory platform that can give actionable insights to lower income users who are particularly vulnerable to financial risk, such as people just coming out of homeless shelters or single mothers who are coming out of battered women shelters. As you can see in the video of the one-minute onstage demo embedded above, Scaffold lets people set up web video meetups with financial advisors to give them targeted, personalized metrics about their financial risk. The site will also show in plain English the client’s biggest risks through “stress tests” that show what would happen if he or she lost a job, or had an accident — these make it clear to people who aren’t necessarily money-savvy just how important it is to get their financial houses in order. It’s a somewhat more serious-minded app than you might expect to come out of an overnight hackathon, so it’s not as fully baked as others launching here today: Scaffold’s creators Gabe Kneisley and Kevin Wolkober told me that at the moment the app does not actually let you fill in your financial information, since they haven’t had the time to make sure it’s completely secure. But it’s fun to see a big idea that’s aiming to have an important impact taking root here in a matter of hours. I talked to Kneisley and Wokober backstage, and you can watch that in the video embedded below.
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Hack Team’s Voice-Guided Learn To Drive App Makes Learning With Mom & Dad Less Domestically Disruptive
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 |
Jared Zoneraich and Nick Joseph are two high school students who’ve spent the night here at the Disrupt NY 2013 coding an in-car app for learner drivers using GM’s API. The pair got a great reception on stage during their presentation for Learn to Drive — not least for the in-car dashboard app’s killer feature: a voice warning that booms out when a learner is going too fast — which saves having a blow-out argument with mom/dad over who is right about the speed. Learn To Drive has just been announced as runner up in the Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon competition. The basic idea is to provide voice guidance to help learner drivers when they are practising with a driver other than their instructor, providing easy to follow voice instructions for a variety of driving manoeuvres including parallel parking and perpendicular parking. The app also keeps a count of how many times the learner has performed each of the manoeuvres, based on how many times they have requested voice guidance, and tracks other data — such as how many hours and miles of driving the learner has clocked up, and at what time of day. Using this data, the app also indicates how much more practice they need as they work towards taking their test by displaying a progress bar plus percentage to show how close they are to hitting the minimum required amount of hours. During a back stage interview the pair told TechCrunch they hope to submit Learn To Drive to GM’s app store once they’ve added a few finishing touches — such as the ability to pull driver data off to Microsoft SkyDrive. Learn To Drive is actually a four-strong team: the two other members are Kenny Song and Jemma Issroff. Back stage interview follows below:
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SMB Inventory Management Startup TradeGecko Partners With Xero Accounting
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Cloud-based inventory and sales management developer has announced that it is now integrated with online accounting system Xero. The Singapore-based company says that the partnership will allow its clientele of small- and medium-sized businesses to monitor financial transactions in real time. The integration links invoice, stock and customer data automatically, and allows businesses to save time by eliminating manual data entry and reducing the risk for errors between separate IT systems. “Xero inventory management has been one of our most requested features, and anyone whose run a growing business will understand why,” said TradeGecko CEO Cameron Priest. “Linking TradeGecko and Xero makes staying in control effortless and means our customers can grow without needing to increase headcount in the back office.” Based in Singapore, TradeGecko launched in September and was founded by former clothing designer Carl Thompson. Its cloud-based inventory and sales management system was developed to emphasize user experience with intuitive data displays. The company’s WaveMaker Labs, Golden Gate Ventures, and the Singapore National Research Foundation. Xero’s partner program gives developers access to its API and connects them to Xero’s 150,000 customers, as well as the company’s network of accounting and bookkeeping partners. “Any small business can run their accounts on Xero, but to get real value, we want to allow our customers to connect all their other applications: CRM, e-commerce, stock, job management etc. If it touches finances or your customer and supplier data, then we want to help developers integrate it,” said Xero Developer Partner Program manager Ronan Quirke. TradeGecko will continue to integrate with other cloud services this year to allow businesses to connect their back-end systems and automate their administration process.
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HTML5 WebSocket Developer Kaazing Raises $15M From NEA, Columbus Nova Technology Partners
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Kaazing, a provider of live Web and mobile communication and the developer of HTML5 WebSocket, has raised $15 million in funding, bringing the company’s total financing to $39 million. New investors this round include New Enterprise Associates and Columbus Nova Technology Partners, as well as existing investors. Kaazing says it will use the money to drive its plans for corporate growth. “This influx of new capital will fuel our global expansion and further validates our market momentum with an enterprise-grade web communication platform built using the HTML5 WebSocket standard,” said Kaazing CEO and co-founder Jonas Jacobi in a statement. “With iPads and other smart mobile devices rapidly displacing PCs and accelerating cloud adoption, enterprise application modernization is increasingly urgent. Today’s static web architectures are expensive and ineffective in supporting this huge market shift – Kaazing’s leading communication products are critical to the emerging cloud and mobile architectures. We are excited to be investors in the leader in this space,” added NEA partner Rohini Chakravarthy. The company’s , when it raised $17 million. At that time, Kaazing said it would use the funds to fund opportunities for using WebSocket technology to power real-time communications. Last year, Kaazing also brought on Cisco veteran John Donnelly to expand its sales and business development channels. Based in Mountain View with additional sales offices in New York City and London, Kaazing helps drive the real-time Web and mobile communications of Intel, Google, Bechtel, Oracle, and HSBC. The company was created in 2007 and its founding team helped design the HTML5 WebSocket protocol in order to enable a “full-duplex pipe” between participants, rather than the legacy infrastructure that required a request and response between two users.
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Disconnect 2 Brings More Privacy To Your Browser, Lets You Block 2K+ Sites From Tracking Your Activity Online
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
With the Era of Over-sharing and the Social Fire Hose upon us, the heft and value of privacy is changing — and, for better or worse, many argue that it’s diminishing. Perturbed by the access many companies (inconspicuously) have to our browsing history, former Googler Brian Kennish developed a Chrome Extension to address the browser privacy issue. , as it was called then, disabled traffic from third-party sites to Facebook, while still allowing Average Internet Surfers like you and me to access Facebook. Thanks to the near-immediate success of the extension, Kennish left Google to focus on the project full-time, and soon launched Disconnect — to apply the same concept to other popular platforms like Google, Yahoo, Digg and Twitter. quickly turned into a full-blown company, and Kennish recruited the help of another former Google engineer, Austin Chau, along with consumer rights advocate, Casey Oppenheim. The driving principle behind Disconnect, , was to ensure that personal data remains under our own control and not that of corporations and to allow users “to control who does what with their data online.” With cybersecurity becoming a hot topic, CIPSA, the reintroduction of the Do Not Track Online Act, and the seemingly ever-present outrage over Facebook (and others) using our online data to target ads (even offline), the concern over privacy and security has only increased since Disconnect’s launch. So, this week, the startup released version 2.0 of its Chrome extension, significantly expanding its coverage of the sites we use most frequently (and its speed), in an effort to keep up with the increasing complexity and pervasiveness of the variety of stuff that can potentially infringe on our online privacy. Again, ask the founders and they’ll tell you that the Web today is littered with analytics, advertising, social widgets and the like that gum up the gears that make page load speeds hum, while quietly redirecting your personal browsing data to tracking companies. They believe that this stuff, in turn, increases your exposure to malware and other nefarious, Web-born attacks. And they’re not alone. Disconnect 2 updates the privacy extension so that it now allows users to visualize and block over 2,000 third-party sites and track what they do on the Web, which they claim is twice the number of tracking sites covered by other, similar apps. The founders have also optimized Disconnect for speed and, based on benchmarks of the 1,000 most popular sites, pages use “an average of 17 percent less bandwidth and load 27 percent faster” with the app, they tell us. This has increasing application today with the proliferation of digital advertising strategies like re-targeting, which companies like Facebook continue to refine to allow them to serve more relevant, personalized ads based not only on what you do on Facebook, but your activity outside of it. Besides the creepiness factor, the tools these companies use to track our behavior slows down our experience of these sites. Plus, advertisers are naturally inclined to resist standards that would limit their ability to tap into our data. So, unfortunately, even though most browsers allow you to flip some kind of switch to go “Incognito” or limit tracking, most people fail to recognize that this isn’t a failsafe and advertisers don’t have to oblige them. attempts to limit advertisers’ ability to use tools like re-targeting and put a stopper on the flow of your data into their databases. So, the new version not only allows users to block potential sources of malware, but encrypt the data they do exchange with third-party sites so companies can’t steal their data or hack their accounts over public WiFi. This kind of functionality puts Disconnect (broadly) in competition with site optimizers and , among many others, along with a host of security apps and services, particularly with personal data protection tools like . Disconnect 2 offers a toolbar button to let user view the number of tracking requests they receive on each page and choose which ones they want to block, along with a browser dropdown that shows you tracking requests by company, with green meaning they’re blocked and gray meaning they’re unblocked. As it always has, Disconnect still allows you to block popular sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter, but now allows you to view other sites by category (like “Social,” “Advertising,” etc) and pick and choose what you block via check marks. But, unlike many other services, Disconnect is taking a pay-what-you-want approach to its new service. Users can choose from four standard pricing options, or enter how much they want to pay for the service. They can also choose, via sliding scale, how much of that payment they want to go to Disconnect and how much they want to go to charity. At this point, Disconnect supports four different charities, like ProPublica, The Center for Democracy & Technology and The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, with plans to support more going forward. Users can pay by credit card or test the service out for themselves before paying. All in all, this a la carte, flexible pricing model gives the startup a better chance and monetizing without detracting from the user experience, making it, I’d argue, that much more appealing for those who might be on the fence about using it in the first place. Disconnect 2 is currently available as browser extension for and , while the company’s other apps (like Facebook Disconnect) are available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. For more, find the
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Good Morning America Says Twitter Will Make A ‘Big Announcement’ On The Show Tomorrow
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Good Morning America has that Twitter will be making a major announcement on the show tomorrow. Tomorrow on : @ will be making a BIG announcement… tune in! — Good Morning America (@GMA) So what is Twitter planning to unleash tomorrow? The most likely guess is the official launch of Twitter Music, after more than a week of hints, including . The microblogging platform is also with with Viacom And NBCUniversal for a content-sharing agreement, but since Good Morning America is on ABC, the company probably won’t be announcing a deal with rival networks. While a TV show might seem like an offbeat place for an online social networking platform to announce major news, Twitter has done so before. Back in September, it .
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Tribeca Film Festival Narrows Down #6SecFilms Submissions To A Short List Of 40 Awesome Vines
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Less than a month ago, Tribeca Film Festival opened up a sub-competition within the festival for those of us with a knack for brevity: the Tribeca Film Festival’s #6SecFilms competition. Partnering with Twitter’s new darling and video-sharing app Vine, TFF made a call for submissions from filmmakers who’d like to use the Vine platform to be featured on TribecaFilm.com, along with a nice cash prize of $600. Today, TFF has narrowed down its submissions to a short list of 40 submissions from all four potential categories, including Series, Auteur, Animate, or Genre. Finalist submissions will now go before the panel of expert judges, including Penny Marshall and “King of Vine” actor Adam Goldberg, who’s made quite a name for himself on the video-sharing network. Vine to much fanfare, offering users a new way to share video. The app lets you create six-second, looping videos of various clips strung together. It’s a lot like Instagram for video, and it’s clear that advertisers are chomping at the bit to leverage the platform. So far, we’ve seen an ad agency out of the UK create VineTune, a way to promote music artists by building a music video out of Vines hashtagged with words that correlate to the lyrics of the song. It’s a hoot. We’ve also seen a using Vine, and a much more , which makes you wonder if there’s some sort of unannounced VIP access brands can tap into. Though most of the interesting initiatives around Vine have been brand-centric, Tribeca Film Festival’s #6SecFilms competition truly centers around users and creators. It’ll be quite interesting to see how additional brands and organizations try to leverage the fast-growing social network, but in the meantime, feel free to peruse a few of my favorite submissions that made the short list, or check out the . #AUTEUR
#GENRE
#SERIES
#ANIMATE
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Samsung Considering DRAM Chips From SK Hynix, An Apple Supplier
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Samsung Electronics may purchase mobile memory chips from South Korean rival SK Hynix for devices including the Galaxy S, , head of Samsung’s mobile business. If the deal goes through, it will be a boon for SK Hynix, which currently counts Apple as one of its top DRAM chip customers and saw it shares slip 2.8 percent on Thursday after another Apple chip supplier, Cirrus Logic, of a reduced product forecast from one of its customers. Though Cirrus Logic did not name the customer, the company is seen as a key indicator of demand for iPhones and iPads because at least 90 percent of its business comes from Apple. Samsung is itself the world’s biggest maker of DRAM chips and has counted on its own internal supply of memory chips for Galaxy series smartphones, but chips are in increasing demand, with price rising and supplies dwindling as more mobile device makers prepare to upgrade their flagship products by boosting memory storage capability. Turning to SK Hynix means that Samsung can avoid supply disruptions for its Galaxy S4 smartphone, which is set the launch this month. Its predecessor, the Galaxy S3, shortly after its launch, but in that case the components in question were parts like handset casings, not chips. Ensuring that there are enough Galaxy S4 handsets to meet consumer demand is vital if Samsung wants to meet the upbeat sales forecast for the phone, which is seen as the main challenger to Apple’s iPhone. Jefferies analyst Peter Misek has , and that the component and manufacturing needs for the Korean tech giant’s flagship smartphone may take resources away from the iPhone.
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Q1 Venture Capital Spending And Number Of Deals Down, M&A Activity Drops 44 Percent And Pre-Money Valuations Plummet
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Dow Jones Venture Source released its quarterly report on the state of venture capital, including data on number of VC deals, funds raised, M&As and IPOs in the technology sector. According to the report, U.S.-based companies raised $6 billion from 752 venture capital deals in Q1 2013, an 11% decrease in capital and a 6% decrease in number of deals from the previous quarter. Compared to the same period in 2012, there was an 11% decrease in deals and a 12% decrease in amount invested. Additionally, median pre-money valuation dropped 79% from 4Q 2012. Deals in Information Technology (IT), Healthcare, Energy and Utilities, and Industrial Goods all declined, and deals in Business and Financial Services, Consumer Goods, and Consumer Services investment increased from the previous quarter. The largest funding deals in the Internet and IT sector included Pinterest’s and Living Social’s . By VC firm, NEA was the most active investor with 22 deals, followed by 500 Startups, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and Greylock Partners, respectively. In terms of VC funds, 43 funds raised $4.2 billion in Q1 2013, a 16% increase in number of funds and 65% increase in amount raised from prior quarter. The big raise for the quarter by a VC fund was Battery Ventures X LP, the largest U.S. venture capital fund of the year, raised $650 million, accounting for 15% of the total amount raised in the quarter. Spark Capital announced a new $425 million fund and Redpoint raised $400 million in the quarter. The median U.S. fund size for the quarter was $143 million. Despite a 16% drop in raised capital, healthcare saw the largest investment allocation by sector with 162 deals raising $1.9 billion and accounting for 30% of the total venture capital investment. IT reported a 30% decrease in amount invested with $1.9 billion in 256 closed deals, 10% drop in number of deals compared to the previous quarter. M&A activity declined in the first quarter of 2013, with the fewest exits since the first quarter of 2009. Acquisitions totaled $4.3 billion, a 44% decrease in M&A activity and a 24% decrease in capital raised compared to the previous quarter. In terms of IPOs, Nine venture-backed companies raised $643 million through public offerings in 1Q 2013, a 55% year-over-year drop from $1.4 billion raised by 20 IPOs in 1Q’12 and a 47% decrease compared to the previous quarter. The largest IPO of the quarter was Marin Software, which completed a .
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LinkedIn Updates iPhone, Android Apps With A Personalized Activity Stream, Better Navigation, And Ads
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
With the ink still drying on , continues to double down on mobile, the fastest-growing consumer service among its 200 million members. Today it’s announcing a major update to its and apps — the first big upgrade in . And, to take advantage of the traffic it’s seeing on mobile, it is also introducing ads, in the form of sponsored content in the LinkedIn stream. With the sponsored content introduced as a “small test” on LinkedIn’s desktop and iPad versions in January, “We’re now expanding this test into the mobile phone experience,” says Joff Redfern, head of mobile products for LinkedIn. Redfern says that the two new, free apps being launched today were created out of the feeling that the originals “were just not as shiny as they were one year and eight months ago,” when they were . After LinkedIn created the new apps, it used its own staff as guinea pigs. “We’ve had the whole company using it,” Redfern says. “And they have given us 10,000 individual pieces of feedback.” The products of that trial are the two apps being launched today. The new look is focused primarily around an upgraded, and more interactive, activity stream. As with the desktop app, the stream continues to bring in content posted by people in your network; but it also includes posts from “influencers” as well as news from within your network (the montage of job changes at the top of the main illustration here on the left is one example). It also has bigger, less statically-placed pictures and a generally slicker look. Like the desktop app, LinkedIn uses algorithms to help personalize this experience to each user. The new apps also give users the ability to comment on items in their stream, as well as endorse items, by way of a new thumbs-up icon that glows and grows when you tap on it (you can see it in the video below). Here’s a look at how the old and new apps compare: The new apps also let users more easily toggle between this new stream and several other features. A swipe from the left side of the screen to the right brings up a menu of options that include accessing your private messages, connection invitations, calendars, jobs from your job searches, groups you belong to, and more. And the “in” icon at the top of the screen, near the search, also serves as a way to notify you when you have a message pending. As for the sponsored story test: there have been a lot of signs pointing to LinkedIn introducing more of this in its mobile apps. Not only are the apps free to use, but LinkedIn has been increasing how and where it uses paid promotions on its desktop version. Competitors like Facebook are also seeing a lot of interest, and good user response, to its mobile ads. And, of course, there are the mobile traffic numbers: LinkedIn says that 27% of its 155 million monthly users visit LinkedIn via mobile apps (up from just 8% two years ago); and weekly mobile page views have jumped 250% year-over-year. So while users typically only stay in the mobile app for 2 or three minutes at a time, there are a lot of them doing that, day in and day out. The trade-off for possibly seeing more ads are more features in the apps. Kiran Prasad, head of mobile engineering for LinkedIn, says that both versions will be upgrading and expanding their features a lot more frequently going forward. The company continues to tinker and work with what he calls the “personalization aspect.” “It’s hard to get everything that LinkedIn does on to a single application on a small screen,” he says. All the same, he says that this is the “first time that we are leveraging in the app the data that we have about our users. This is not just to make the stream more relevant but also the application as a whole.” He says LinkedIn has built the app using Hadoop and Hive “to find the best areas recommentded for you to navigate.” To get a sense of where its mobile apps are going in terms of new features, it’s worth looking at what LinkedIn has been doing on the desktop. Since last summer, LinkedIn has been making a number of upgrades to its desktop version — releasing a ; adding more interactive, social features like , easier content sharing and the ability to tag users in ; and building a completely new . The mobile apps that are launching today are laying the groundwork for more of those changes to make their way to the smaller screen. These are only coming over time, however. The search feature, for example, is still focused only on giving people results, leaving out jobs and companies. “Right now search on the apps is very much focussed on people search,” said Redfern, pointing out that at the moment LinkedIn sees 26 people searches, and 90 profile views, per second on mobile devices. Part of the reason for sticking to people results is because of how LinkedIn sees its mobile app getting used. “We think of people doing pre-meeting intelligence on a person, seeing their education, connections and work experience so that it’s easier to start a conversation,” he says, adding that additional search capabilities for companies and jobs — as exists on the desktop search — will be “in one of the later versions of the mobile apps.” But one area where LinkedIn will be investing too much more, it seems, is in HTML5, for now at least. Prasad and Redfern both said the HTML5 app took up too much memory to run and ended up crashing. “We were seeing that people are engaging a lot more on mobile, and so we wanted to make the experience more efficient,” says Prasad. “That meant moving away from an HTML5-based app and to more of a native app experience.” Redfern points out that even small things, like that new “like” icon, would not have been possible. “Plus, we need to go where our users are,” he says, and that is on native apps for Android and iPhone handsets. LinkedIn is following its users in another sense, too. The company says some 64% of its overall member base now comes from outside the U.S., and so to make sure users in its biggest international markets are not being left out of the mobile game, the company is also adding support for several different languages, taking the total to 15, including Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, English, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Dutch, Norwegian and Turkish. With today’s news focused on iPhone and Android, the next step will be to see how and if Pulse makes its way into an update of the LinkedIn iPad app, and when the company may next revisit Windows Phone and BlackBerry. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k32xyP3KuWE&w=560&h=315]
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Andreessen-Backed MinoMonsters Follows Rovio’s Lead, Signs Book Deal, Releases Trailer As It Plans Move Into TV, Film, Toys
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
launched in early 2011 on a mission to become the Pokémon of social games, allowing gamers to explore a world inhabited by bite-sized, furry monsters, taking them on quests and battling their friends. For this reason — and because founders at 18 and 17-years-old, respectively — the startup found some early buzz. And big things were expected. But, as it goes with startups, there have been some ups and downs. Last summer, , it significantly altered the gameplay, doing away with quests to focus exclusively on one-on-one battles. As a result, Buckley decided to trim down the staff and start fresh, while Diaz left the startup to work on new projects. Since MinoMonsters re-focused last year, things have moved forward pretty quickly, Buckley tells us. The startup’s iOS app now has 2.5 million downloads (adding 1 million players ), and became one of the top 50 grossing apps in Apple’s App Store this past weekend. That is largely due to an update to its app that was released last week. Revenue has since doubled in the past week and has increased 1,000 percent since December, Buckley says. While the founder declined to share specific numbers, he did say that revenue is now “in the millions” and growing. Buckley attributes this to a “huge gap in the market” when it comes to companies looking to create the next Pokemon; however, although they’re targeting different age groups, Mind Candy and its . Nonetheless, to capitalize on the growing demand among young(er) gamers, MinoMonsters has now raised $2 million in funding (led by Andreessen Horowitz) and is looking to follow the Angry Birds path — to become an entertainment company, not just a gaming company. To this end, the startup just signed with William Morris, one of the largest agencies in Hollywood to help MinoMonsters make the jump to TV and film. At present, the startup has already signed a book deal through WME, but Buckley doesn’t want to stop there. The founder tells us that the startup’s focus now is on moving quickly into licensing and merchandizing, and this year, he expects the company to launch lines of toys, books, trading cards and even clothes. In the meantime, MinoMonsters is taking a page from Angry Birds, and, like its predecessor, is looking to create an animated series of cartoon shorts over the next couple of months, presumably aimed at developing interest in an animated TV series. You can see the first of these cartoon trailers made by its in-house animation team below. The startup has also acquired a small HTML5 game design firm to help it beef up its monster battles on iOS. Over the long run, Buckley says that he wants MinoMonsters to not just take on Pokemon, but become the next Disney. It’s an ambitious goal, if not a bit over the top, but the founder says that he thinks the next-gen Disney will start with a design-centric, character-focused mobile game. And given the inroads Rovio has made in becoming a cross-channel brand, it’s not impossible. Trailer below:
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MediaWire Mobile Helps Print Publishers Build Apps Affordably
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
There’s been a lot of excitement around the possibilities that smartphones and especially tablets offer to traditional publishers, but they also present a big challenge — the costs are often too high, said CEO Clifford Hoffer. That’s why MediaWire is launching a new product called MediaWire Mobile, which allows publishers to launch their own branded apps on the Apple Store, Google Play, and the Apple Newsstand. To release a new issue digitally, they just upload a single file. Pricing is based on the publication frequency, starting at $199 per month (for quarterly titles). And MediaWire doesn’t take a cut of the subscription revenue. The company had previously offered a product specifically for launching apps on iOS. The new MediaWire Mobile is cross-platform, Hoffer said — as noted above, it supports iOS and Android, plus Windows and Blackberry are also under development. Eventually, MediaWire plans to merge this with its desktop product, so you can start reading an article on your computer and then continue on your phone after you head out on your commute. Other startups like , but Hoffer argued that “the native experience is still the best way to appeal to the user and keep them engaged.” He also acknowledged that MediaWire Mobile doesn’t have “a lot of bells and whistles and stuff,” but it’s not just presenting readers with a PDF, either. Publishers can add hyperlinks, YouTube videos, bookmarks, and social-sharing features. Behind the scenes, they get access to analytics with information like subscriber reading habits, geography and demographics. Over time, Hoffer said he also wants to expand MediaWire Mobile’s ad targeting capabilities. There are about 40 new MediaWire Mobile apps in development, he said.
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Twitter’s Kevin Weil Says The Big Advantage Of The Company’s New Keyword Targeting Is Timing
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Earlier today, Twitter . I had a brief conversation with Senior Director of Revenue Products Kevin Weil who laid out Twitter’s perspective on the announcement’s significance. “People always say that you are what you tweet,” Weil said. (Always?) At the same time, he noted that the content of those tweets haven’t been a significant part of Twitter’s ad targeting — instead the company uses things like your device, geographic location, and . With today’s announcement, he said the content in public tweets have now become a “first-class citizen.” Coverage of the announcement, including TechCrunch’s, has emphasized the ability this gives Twitter to target ads based on purchase intent, similar to Google’s search advertising. Weil made a similar point, but with a slightly different spin. He said that Twitter’s current interest graph targeting allows advertisers to find the “who” — in the other words, the audience that’s likely to be interested in the topics that they want to promote. “With keyword targeting, you get the when,” he said. So an advertiser isn’t just targeting based on your general interests, but also what you’re interested in right now. described this as reaching an audience “at the right moment, in the right context.” Weil said that this shouldn’t change the experience for the user. They won’t see more ads — it’s just an extra way to target those users. Nor does it change Twitter’s emphasis on only showing ads that are genuinely engaging to users, he argued. Engagement rates for Twitter’s ads are usually 1 percent to 3 percent, but they’ve been significantly higher in early tests of ads that also use keyword targeting. He added that this is something that could be useful to both small and large advertisers. For example, if there was a big sporting event, a large brand advertiser might want to run an ad targeting anyone who’s talking about the game. A neighborhood bar, on the other hand, could advertise their happy hour deal by targeting similar keywords, then use geotargeting to limit their audience to users nearby. Weil will be speaking on , and I hope to get more details about the program from him then.
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With Its Biggest Update Yet, Ness Debuts Instant, Personalized Restaurant Recommendations, Says Events, Nightlife Are Next
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
, the restaurant recommendations app that uses social data combined with machine-learning techniques to offer personalized suggestions, has released today, now focused on what it’s calling “instant recommendations.” In the earlier version, Ness relied on user-initiated searches and a setup wizard that asked users to select their favorite cuisines and rate restaurants. Today, users are instead taken directly to the app’s homescreen for immediate recommendations based on time of day, location and popularity. When new users first launch the revamped app, they’re shown only a couple of explanatory screens before seeing the list of popular places nearby. Going forward, training the app to learn your tastes by rating venues or liking cuisines is now an optional feature, accessible through the “Personalize” setting. While this onboarding process obviously makes Ness easier for newcomers testing the app out for the first time, it also allows Ness’ previous users a more “lean-back” type of experience, as well. Now they don’t have to launch the app then kick off searches; Ness will just know what they like and make suggestions. Ness co-founder and CEO Corey Reese tells us that even if users never dive into the “Personalize” section, the app is now able to improve its recommendations in time. It also lets users rate places from restaurants’ cards themselves, slowly building up a database of user likes and dislikes. However, Ness can implicitly learn a user’s tastes, too, says Reese. “Let’s say you don’t tap on Vietnamese places ever – Ness will pick up on that. It will start showing you fewer Vietnamese places,” Reese explains. “But let’s say that every time you see a Japanese restaurant, you tap on that, and take a look at dinner time, it will start showing you more Japanese restaurants at dinner time.” It’s a simple enough concept, but it has taken the company two years of building to get to this point. The company has spent a large part of that time combining the data it licenses from various vendors and matching it up with data normalized across social services, including Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and OpenTable. Ness also now uses social data, among other things, to explain why it made the recommendations it did. For example, it might tell you that several of your friends have tried this sushi place. Or it might be more of a matter of two places being similar (e.g. you liked X so you might like Y). Reese says there are more than 40 different types of unique explanations provided to users in the new app. adds a couple of other features, as well, including the ability to add places to lists, share places via email or text, and, in this same screen, the ability to swipe to call, get directions or reserve the table via OpenTable. With its ability to offer fast, personalized recommendations by cuisine, proximity, popularity and time of day, as well as that informed by social data, Ness 2.0 is starting to look more like Alfred, the local recommendations app . (That app hasn’t been updated on Android since then, though the version was updated last year to sync data via Google to different devices). Also like Alfred, Ness is preparing to expand into other verticals beyond just food. This year, the company will use its same technology to begin powering recommendations for nightlife spots, as well as activities and events. Other verticals may follow. The company is also weeks away from a new web version of its service, which will build out Ness 2.0’s list feature even further. “You’ll be able to more easily pull things into lists, share them and syndicate them across your social networks,” Reese notes. The web version will also be built with a responsive design, he says, allowing it to work on Android, where Ness doesn’t offer a native experience today. The hope is to also go live on Android before the year is out. Ness , and has now grown from 3 million user-provided ratings at that time to 4.5 million today. Reese compares this to Yelp’s 7 million+, saying he feels the app is on a good path. The company has also seen more than 300,000 downloads, over 3.5 million user searches, and 30 million+ recommendations served to date. Its restaurant database today includes more than 500,000 venues across the U.S. The new iOS application is available for .
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Chinese Gaming Publisher Yodo1 Raises $5M In Round Led By Singapore’s SingTel Innov8
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
, a Beijing-based company that works intensively with Western game developers to bring their titles to the Chinese market, raised $5 million from , the corporate venture arm of a mobile carrier. An earlier investor, Changyou Fund, also participated in the round. Yodo1 has a co-production model where they actually get access to the code base of a Western developers’ game. They modify the graphics, virtual goods and music for local Chinese tastes. An example CEO Henry Fong points to is Ski Safari, a game from Brisbane, Australia’s Defiant Development. In the platformer title, a character races up and down ski slopes (kind of like last year’s indie hit Tiny Wings out of Germany). For the Chinese version, they made the architecture of the houses in the background more Chinese, added a zither to the music and put in terra cotta warrior outfits. “We’re a full blown co-production team,” Fong said in an interview a few weeks ago at San Francisco’s Game Developer Conference. “We deeply culturalize the game.” Yodo1 says it now has 25 million monthly actives in China for games that it co-produces, including XMG’s Powder Monkeys, HandyGames’ Clouds & Sheep, and Robot Entertainment’s Hero Academy. The company is also adding five to six million new players each month, and daily actives and revenue are doubling month-over-month. That reach comes at a time when the Chinese smartphone market is finally reaching maturity. was the month when China finally passed the U.S. in terms of the number of active Android and iOS devices. At the same time, local payment options are getting better. In late 2011, , which cut down on fraud dramatically. Fong also said that the country’s three major carriers, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, did a re-start with local carrier billing that made it easier for mobile developers to monetize their users. A rival, CocoaChina, which does both first-party games and publishing, do between $10 million and 15 million in revenue per month in China this year. Fong chose SingTel as a lead for strategic reasons. The parent company of the fund has about 450 million mobile subscribers across Southeast Asia, which makes for a nice potential base of future customers. Here’s a presentation he recently did on how to break into the Chinese market, and its unique distribution and monetization hurdles: [slideshare id=17728503&style=border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px&sc=no]
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 4 | 28 | null |
A Day With Glass: First Impressions Of The Early Days Of Google’s Latest Moonshot
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
As we shared yesterday, the process to actually pay for the Glass Explorer Edition . The next step in the process is picking up your device at either the Mountain View, Los Angeles or New York City Google Campus. Of course, you can opt to have them shipped to you if you’re not in one of those areas, but what’s the fun in that? I picked up my Google Glass today in Mountain View and was told only that I would receive a bit of a walkthrough and proper fitting. I want to warn you, this isn’t a review, there won’t be any , you can find the and there will be no pass or fail grade on this first iteration of Google Glass. If you buy into the potential for the device, and, more importantly the platform, then you know that this will be a true exploration into what Google has come up with here. Some will see this device as a fad, something that isn’t really “necessary” in today’s world, and others will see this as the beginning of an adventure for users, developers and Google, of course. I tend to lean towards the adventure side, as it’s not fully known what impact Glass will have on society, your day-to-day activities, or the future of technology and hardware. I arrived at the Googleplex and a few members of the Glass team greeted me. It’s been almost a year since Google’s last I/O conference where 2,000 developers signed up to be a part of the Glass Explorer program, and this is naturally the day that they’ve been waiting for. When I sat down to unbox my Glass, I was shown the proper way that they should sit on my face. The glass itself, where the screen is projected, should sit above your right eye and not in front of it. It’s easy to mess around with the nose pads to get the right fit. The second step is to pair your Glass with your device, using the . Since Glass pairs to your phone through Bluetooth, the device is pretty much useless until that’s done. You log into the app using your consumer, not business, Gmail account, and then you’re off to the races once you’ve paired: Something to note, all of these screenshots are coming from the handy “screencast” tool within the MyGlass app. It shows everything that you’re seeing on Glass. You’re paired, account is connected, Wi-Fi or mobile network is chosen, and you’re ready to use Glass. As you swipe your way through some of the screens on the touchpad with your finger, you’ll notice Google Now cards (if you choose to turn them on), a settings screen, and of course, the all-important command screen that pops up after you say the magic phrase “Ok Glass.” With these voice commands, you can Google things, find directions, send someone a message shoot a video or take a picture. There’s also a button on the top of Glass that lets you snap photos and shoot video as well. The audio, which comes out right by your ear, is crisp and not too loud. The Glass team tells me that looking at the screen takes some time to get used to. Some of the folks who work at Google say it took them up to a week to be able to focus on the screen properly. Let’s be honest, looking up and to the right isn’t a natural movement for our eyes. I’ve found that as I’ve worn them longer, I can glance up pretty quickly and see what I need to see and go back to what I was doing. One trick is to use the screencast function of the app so that you can understand fully where each screen goes and what it does. Let’s start with what Glass isn’t. Glass isn’t a replacement for your cell phone, since you have to pair the device with the one you have for cellular functionality. It’s not a device for watching movies or YouTube videos and it’s not going to replace your computer. You won’t be able to read full search results on the tiny screen, but you’ll be able to get to really relevant information quickly. What Glass seems to be, in the few hours that I’ve spent with it, is a device that picks up some of the things you do throughout your day and makes that information more easily accessible. Currently, the only built-in integration for a third-party service is Path. For example, how many times a day do you pick up your phone to check the time or to see if you have any missed calls or text messages? I couldn’t count the times that I’ve wasted that arm motion, in the sense that it has taken attention away from things around me. Every single time you take your phone out, you’re telling the people that are around you that you have no interest in interacting with them for at least 30 seconds while you dive into your phone. Now, am I saying that having a screen above your eye is any less socially awkward? No. But it lets you access the same information quicker without having to stop what you’re doing. If you look at Glass in its existing state, it’s quite impressive that all of this was fit into a tiny package that sits on your face. Will I get weird stares for a while when I’m out wearing them? Probably. Do I care? Not really. But care how it affects others, and that’s something that nobody will be able to talk about for sure until these things are in the wild for a few weeks. Now mind you, this is the Explorer Edition of Glass, and it comes with the barest bones of “apps.” The real magic is going to be what developers start building on the platform. This is where things get really interesting. As we covered last week, there are to put money into developers who are building apps on top of Glass. The possibilities are actually quite endless, starting from potential uses in hospitals for doctors to a new way for teachers to interact with their students. As far as how we interact with the world around us, being able to take pictures from our own vantage point, without setting up a shot for perfect light or shade, is something that has yet to be uncovered. Glass can do that. Being able to join a Google+ Hangout and talk to your friends with nothing more than a device that sits on your nose is pretty cool, too. It all goes back to the developers, though. They have the minds to push Glass forward as not just a geeky novelty, but as a platform to enhance our lives. I’m not going to sugarcoat it — this product has a lot of bumpy roads ahead of it. We have to assume that there are developers who can come up with big ideas, that consumers are ready for it and whether it can be at a price point that middle-America can afford. In its current developer-only state, it’s not that hard to grasp how to use it once you get past having something new on your face. This is only a first step, and it’s going to be an interesting ride. Not only can I not wait to build my hands-free recipe app, I’m looking forward to speaking with developers who are forward-thinking enough to see Glass for what it is — not a futuristic gadget, but something that can help us explore the world in a new way. It’s going to take time, though. I mean, even my dog thinks it’s weird:
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Fits.me Closes $7.2M Series A To “Aggressively Expand” Its Virtual Fitting Room Tech In Europe, Start Prepping For U.S. Push
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Try-for-size-before-you buy virtual fitting room startup has closed a €5.5 million ($7.2 million) Series A round. It’s not all new money — we the first €1.5 million tranche, back in January 2012 — but the startup has now added €4 million to complete the round. Backers include existing investor , plus new participation from , Fostergate Holdings Ltd and . Commenting on the Series A round, in a supporting statement, Conor Venture Partners’ Manu Mäkelä said: “Fits.me has a sophisticated solution that works, delivers provable results, is easy for retailers to deploy and has been signed up by a growing band of respected retailers and brands, on an international basis. From an investor’s point of view, there is tremendous growth potential.” We first wrote about the Estonian startup, which is based in London, when it closed a seed/early-stage/grant funding round (not its Series B, as we reported then). That early-stage funding — totalling €2.6 million — also came in two tranches, dating back to May 2009 and August 2010. All told, Fits.me has raised just over €8 million ($10.5 million) in just under four years. Customers for its clothing fit recommendation SaaS to date include Adidas, Avenue32, Barbour By Mail, Boden, Ermenegildo Zegna, Hawes & Curtis, Henri Lloyd, Hugo Boss, John Smedley, L.K.Bennett, Mexx, Nicole Farhi, Otto, Pretty Green, Superdry and Thomas Pink. With its latest funding round in the bank, Fits.me told TechCrunch it is preparing to “aggressively expand” throughout Europe (it currently has offices in Munich and Paris, as well as London), and to scale up capacity to support its expansion plans. It is also planning for “a major push into markets outside Europe” — including the U.S. — and is in the process of opening a New York office to kick things off across the pond. A likely U.S. launch timeframe is towards the end of the year, after which it will be looking to raise a Series B round. Fits.me is one of a raft of startups trying to oil the wheels of online clothes retailers by making it easier for buyers to figure out what fits and suits them before they click to buy. Returns are a huge cost sink for sartorial e-tailers — Fits.me describes clothes returns as a “£7.4 billion problem globally” — so the size of the business opportunity has encouraged scores of startups to try their luck at fixing the disconnect between what a shopper thinks will fit them and what actually fits. Fits.me names its main competitors in the space as , , and — but there are lots more. Another — . But although it’s sitting in a crowded market, Fits.me doesn’t sound like it’s preparing for an exit. Co-founder Heikki Haldre is bullish about its prospects and dismissive of the competitive landscape — pointing to Fits.me’s ability to offer not just size recommendations but also style preference by allowing users to select a snug, regular or loose fit option across various body parts. “On the fitting room, we are the only solution that can provide the retailers and the customers alike the visual information — how the clothing fits. There’s no other solution in the market,” he told TechCrunch. “Fits.me today is commercially the only successful solution that does address [the high number of clothes returns online] and resolves this for the clothing online retailers.” Fits.me has developed two products to sell to retailers. Its high-end Virtual Fitting Room offering users robot mannequins that can be adjusted to take on different body shapes and sizes. The mannequins are then dressed in each garment and thousands of photographs are taken so that shoppers with corresponding body measurements can see a visualisation of a garment’s fit displayed on a virtual model. This system requires users to enter a set of body measurements in order to pull up the correct images from Fits.me’s database. And with 1,500 to 2,500 photographs required per garment — and a cost that’s in the “mid to low £100s” to capture all the data required for one garment in all its size permutations — it’s not cost effective for every type of garment or scalable for every fashion retailer. Fast fashion mass market retailers, for example, who opt to sell a lot of garments quickly and at relatively low cost with a high turnover of stock and styles, may not look like obvious Fits.me customers. (Its current customer list certainly looks weighted towards prestige/small collection brands.) To bridge the scalability and cost gap, Fits.me has developed a second lower cost, photography-free system, called Fit Advisor (pictured below). Instead of visualising the clothes on a virtual model, it advises the user which size to buy by comparing their body measurements to measurements taken directly from the clothes. The availability of that data varies by retailer, it said, with retailers generally likely to be able to most easily procure measurements from any own brand clothing lines they stock. Fits.me said Fit Advisor is mostly being used in combination with its Virtual Fitting Room tech, with a retailer offering a portion of their garments within the virtual fitting room, but other (perhaps less expensive) items having only its measurement matching system. “The majority of clients will be using Fit Adviser in conjunction with the Virtual Fitting Room,” said Fit.me’s VP of sales, Pete Rankin. “A lot of our clients have got ratios of say 10% of their product equals 90% of their sales. Or down to 30%: 70% and we’ve focused the photographic version on those best sellers and worst returners, and then the long tail products we would then supplement with the Fit Advisor. Only one client so far has signed up for just the Fit Advisor.” Another way Fits.me can lower the cost of its SaaS to retailers is by aggregating garments that have the same sizing to reduce photography/processing costs, it added. On the performance front, for the “normally” 15%-20% of website users who opt to use its Virtual Fitting Room tech, Rankin said its “benchmark” data shows a doubling of the retailer’s conversation rate, while the returns rate for these same users is divided by 2.5. It added that individual retailer performance can be better than the benchmark — with Pretty Green, for instance, reducing its overall returns rate from 13% to 3%. Although it’s currently relying on users to input their body measurements, Fits.me said it has a “technology agnostic” philosophy to capturing sizing data, suggesting that it could be open to using other technologies to do this in future. It cited rivals using web cams to capture body shape as an example of a type of tech that it believes is not currently accurate enough for it to be “comfortable” using it, but which it could look to incorporate down the line if the tech improves. The unspoken implication here is that Fits.me could be looking to gobble up some of its rivals — when or if their technology becomes interesting enough. “At this time we’re looking at a number of different ways of increasing the solutions from our fit and sizing platform,” said Rankin, declining to comment further when asked whether it is looking to make any acquisitions. Looking beyond the problem of size and fit for online retailers, a possible future additional revenue stream for the business, once it has ramped up and gathered more sizing data, could come from monetising its database of body measurements in another way: by selling information about body size and fit preferences back to clothes-makers to help them make more saleable clothes. (What you could describer as ‘big, medium and small data’.) “Looking to a little bit longer term, as far as I know Fits.me is also the world’s largest database of human body measurements and fit preferences. Now when we are resolving the biggest problem for the clothing ecommerce, the data that we’re collecting helps the clothing manufacturers, clothing brands start producing clothing that fits more people not just in online channels, but also in brick and mortar sales. So Fits.me has quite an impact,” Haldre told TechCrunch. “Virtual fitting room itself is quite sizeable business — we’re talking a million forecasted bookings — however I do believe our next step is the data business which will be even significantly bigger.”
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Hands On With The Toshiba KIRAbook: Can Great Hardware Coupled With An Amazing Display Save Windows PCs?
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
With PC laptop shipments , Windows 8 machines desperately need multiple shots of adrenaline. The Toshiba KIRAbook may be just that. The KIRAbook is Toshiba’s first entrant in their newly fashioned “KIRA” line of luxury ultrabooks. At first glance, you can see that the KIRAbook is meticulously designed, and it radiates a Cupertino-esque level of fit and finish. We haven’t seen this kind of quality from Toshiba for a very long time (if ever). That doesn’t mean the KIRAbook offers anything new in terms of design. There are still shades of the Macbook Air to be found here and there, as is the case with all top of the line Windows ultrabooks. The KIRAbook has a smaller profile than the Macbook Air, but somehow manages to include a retina-quality 2560×1440 WQHD touchscreen display. Although I didn’t get an opportunity to compare it side by side with the retina Macbook Pro, or for that matter the Chromebook Pixel, but it’ll definitely be one of the best laptop displays out in the market once it’s released. The display is most certainly the KIRAbook’s marquee feature and Toshiba’s primary justification for its slightly onerous pricing, which I’ll get to in just a moment. Inside the KIRAbook, you’ll find an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The KIRAbook is also bundled with full versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, as well as a complimentary two year service and support package that Toshiba claims to be on par with Applecare. At least on a spec level, the KIRAbook lives up to its “luxury” label. But that also means it’s saddled with a luxuriously high price. The non-touch KIRAbook with Core i5 starts at $1,599. It gets a little crazy from there. The touchscreen KIRAbook with Core i5 goes for $1,789, while the top of the line touchscreen KIRAbook, with Core i7 and Windows Pro, goes for a whopping $1,999. That kind of pricing blows its PC and Apple counterparts out of the water. For comparison’s sake, the 13-inch Retina Macbook Pro , albeit with a smaller 128GB SSD. The Lenovo Thinkpad x1 Carbon , while the touchscreen equipped model . The Asus Zenbook Prime, with a touchscreen and a nearly retina quality display, is currently retailing . Toshiba representatives told me that they don’t expect the Kirabook to become the bestselling laptop PC on the market. They understand it’s a bit of a niche product. If anything, the Kirabook is a statement that Toshiba is capable of producing top of the line hardware in a very appealing package. No word on whether the KIRAbook is worth its price tag, but we’ll be sure to keep you in the loop with a full review soon. It’ll be available in stores May 5th. [gallery ids="801176,801177,801178,801179,801180,801181"]
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Facebook’s Ad Exchange Director, Former AdGrok CEO Antonio Garcia-Martinez, Hits The Road
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
“FBX was my baby that I staked everything on. We shipped it fast, scaled it up, and now the baby talks and can walk to school, but I don’t feel I need to babysit it,” says , product director of Facebook’s ad exchange who announced he’s leaving the company today. After selling his company AdGrok to Twitter, then defecting to Facebook two years ago, Antonio deserves a vacation. “‘To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?’ – George Eastman, suicide note” is how Garcia started his on Facebook today. But I wanted the deeper story, and he agreed to grant me an interview. For starters, Garcia tells me “I’m still totally long on Facebook as a company. Anyone who bets against Facebook probably deserves to lose their money.” So while many high-ranking Facebookers have departed in the year since the IPO, he doesn’t want his exit perceived as a sign that Facebook is losing steam. It was the company’s potential to change the world and its hacker culture that attracted him the in the first place. After attending UC Berkeley, Garcia did a stint on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs. His Facebook profile describes his position there as “Pricing quant on the corporate credit-default swap desk. Yes, I was part of that whole mess.” The financial sector implosion led him to Adchemy, where he’d develop the chops to start his own ad tech company, . The startup helped businesses automate Google AdWords selection and bidding, and was accepted to Y Combinator. Eventually, the young CEO accepted a , but it didn’t prove a good fit for Garcia. Facebook jumped at the chance to poach him and he became the social network’s first product manager of ad targeting. Garcia-Martinez tells me it’s these kinds of talent deals that keep Facebook feisty. “They acqhire or acquire lots of startup CEOs. They want that ‘crazy startup, do whatever-the-fuck it takes to get it done, no fear, maybe slightly abrasive and aggressive DNA. If you’re a small startup considering selling your company, there’s definitely far worse places to work than Facebook,” he tells me. While great people that joined Facebook the startup are leaving, they’re being replaced with great people who know they’re going to work for a big company. Antonio says “at the Facebook engineering level are some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.” Eventually he found the project that would define his time at Facebook: FBX. At the time, Facebook’s ads were firmly stuck in the demand generation part of the purchase funnel. The company knew who you were and what you liked, but not what you wanted to buy next. would change that. In his goodbye post, he writes of “building an ad exchange with three engineers in one frenetic month” — a serious feat. In June 2012, FBX began public testing. It let Facebook advertisers target users based on cookies dropped by websites they’d visited. If you almost booked a flight to Hawaii but didn’t pull the trigger, FBX could hit you with ads for discounted Hawaii flights and hotels the next time you visited Facebook. Facebook finally knew your purchase intent, and could sell it for high rates that companies would pay out of budgets reserved for retargeting. “It is working very well. No question it’s been a success for Facebook,” Garcia tells me. And ad platform data and interviews back him up. The FBX ads Antonio willed into being delivered big returns and had ad platforms betting their businesses on Facebook. Yet we’re not seeing Facebook doubling down on FBX as I would have expected, and perhaps that’s the real reason Garcia is heading out. Right now, FBX doesn’t work at all on mobile, which seems like a huge miss considering that’s now where the majority of Facebook’s engagement is. FBX retargeting data can’t be combined with standard Facebook biographical targeting, either. There are privacy concerns with that, but if Facebook was really committed to FBX, I think they would have been hammered out by now. As is, FBX is immature, and if Facebook isn’t going to apply the resources to help it grow up, I can understand Antonio’s desire not to play nanny. Regardless of the exact reasons for his departure, it was time for Antonio to go galavanting. If you’ve met him or follow him on social media, you know he’s an adventurer who loves fast cars and tall mountains. He writes, “What comes after? Probably a few months in either forest, ocean, or desert. And then another ride on that startup roller coaster that got me here in the first place.” As for what kind of problem he’ll tackle, he says it’s “not necessarily going to be in ad tech. It’s been four to 5 years [in that space] which is pretty long by my ADD standards.” He cites Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher’s popular quote: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads…That sucks.” Instead, he tells me, “My next thing could be something in hardware. It’s never been easier to turn bits into atoms.” I’ve covered Facebook ads closely for the last three years and it’s remarkable to see how far it’s come in no small part thanks to Antonio. What was once a fledgling channel has turned into a global powerhouse that’s redefining marketing with friends. And while he’s off to go exploring, he’ll probably miss working on something with the impact of what’s built at 1 Hacker Way. He assures me, “It will be the age of Facebook. It will be the next Google. It will define a generation of technology. “
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Join Us And Shawn Fanning For A Special Screening Of DOWNLOADED At Disrupt NY
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 |
Napster co-founder and documentarian Alex Winter will be at next week, joining to talk about their upcoming Napster documentary . <ad> </ad> Napster’s emergence was the first time the masses were faced with the power of peer-to-peer file sharing and the Internet. There wasn’t a college campus that didn’t Napster its way through party soundtracks in the early aughts. And the fact that a woman is in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit for downloading just 26 songs is testament to the fact that we still don’t understand how to harness that power. Not only will we host a special pre-release screening of the film at Manhattan Center after but we’ll be spending some time that afternoon chatting up Fanning and Winter. They will obviously talk about DOWNLOADED, why Napster failed and the state of the music industry in the digital era. And we suspect Fanning will keep you posted on the state of his latest startup, Airtime, which was in the last time we checked. Fun fact: The name Napster came from for Fanning’s curly (nappy) hair. The more you know. <ad> </ad> DOWNLOADED trailer below.
CEO & Co-Founder, Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1998 while attending Northeastern University. He is currently the GM of Rupture at Electronic Arts. Fanning has since founded SNOCAP, a B2B Music Distributor, in 2002, and Rupture, an MMORPG social network in 2006. Both companies were sold in 2008 – SNOCAP to imeem, and Rupture to Electronic Arts. Alex began his career as a child actor, with starring roles on Broadway and in feature films, including the immensely popular BILL AND TED franchise and Warner Bros. THE LOST BOYS. After attending NYU film School, Alex co-wrote, co-directed and starred in the hit MTV comedy series THE IDIOT BOX, following by his feature debut FREAKED, released by Twentieth Century Fox. Subsequent feature films include FEVER, a psychological thriller that Alex wrote and directed. Praised by AO Scott in the New York Times as ‘Pure Hitchcockian panic,’ FEVER was an Official Selection at Cannes and other festivals worldwide. For TV, Alex produced and directed two record-breaking, live-action BEN 10 movies for Cartoon Network, garnering an Emmy nomination for best Visual Effects. Currently, Alex is producing and directing DOWNLOADED, a feature documentary about the Digital revolution, for VH1 Rock Docs. Interview subjects include Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, as well as numerous musicians and industry executives. DOWNLOADED is due for theatrical and TV release in 2013. Alongside his feature projects, Alex maintains a busy career as a director, screenwriter and actor.
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Tint Gives Businesses An Easy Way To Bring Social Media Feeds To Their Websites, Apps And Facebook Pages
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
Last year, Tim Sae Koo, Nikhil Aitharaju, Eunice Noh and Ryo Chiba to give people a less hectic way to consume social media. The startup aggregated tweets, articles, links and more shared by influencers and celebrities on social media accounts and, by grouping those by topic, aimed to give people a snapshot of an industry through the eyes of the people who know it best. Although the USC grads were able to generate some interest and raise a small round of seed funding from Bill Gross and Idealab, the service never quite took off. Using the social media aggregation technology they’d developed for HypeMarks, they shifted their focus to take a B2B approach to social media aggregation. In December, they launched — a simple, DIY platform that helps brands aggregate, curate and display social media feeds from multiple networks on their websites, in their mobile apps, Facebook pages and event displays. In other words, Tint’s platform is designed to help brands create social hubs on top of their digital properties and, in turn, create a deeper level of engagement with their audiences. The idea is that, while there are a number of social media aggregators out there, the average consumer tends to gravitate towards one particular social network and, once there, tends to do their socializing and interacting on that network, rather than switching between them. Tint allows businesses and brands to connect their social network accounts with their websites, in part to help them promote their products and services through their social feeds, but also to provide their websites with more engaging content. Businesses can link their Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and RSS feeds to their Tint accounts, whereupon the service auto-populates the page from those feeds, serving the social content in a river that is Pinterest-like in design. Or, perhaps the better analogy is Flipboard, as each piece of content is given a headline, an excerpt and a photo, served in a create-your-own social magazine sort of layout. Users can then personalize their pages by changing fonts, background colors and so on or change the headline, URL and image of each piece of content. Tint also offers a handful of starter templates (on of which is free) in case you want to get started quickly. After that’s done, you can embed the product on your site, tweaking the code to customize it for your site or page, whether it be WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly or some other. Tint also allows you to choose the dimensions you want the embedded stream to be and the number of cascading columns you want to appear, automatically serving up the embed code. Take that to your blog, page, drop it in, and bingo, bango, bongo, you have a social feed on your website that is automatically updated every time you tweet or post cat pictures to Facebook. Admittedly, Tint probably sounds a little bit like Rebelmouse, but Sae Koo tells us that there are a few differences: Namely, Tint enables you to display social media feeds from specific hashtags, YouTube channels and Pinterest boards to help keep your users on your website, app or event (and engaged). Plus, he says, Tint wants to be a platform tool and an aggregator, not a publishing CMS — and one that’s easy to use and takes 10 minutes to set up. The alternatives, he says, are generally expensive, custom solutions that take time to implement and integrate. While it may not sound earth-shattering, in the four months since launch, Tint has started to build some traction. Over 10,000 brands are actively using Tint on their sites, averaging 2.5 million monthly pageviews and has been doubling revenue and user growth month-over-month. Today, Tint’s clients include Enrique Iglesias, Toni Braxton, a number of NFL and NBA teams, Honda and more, and its 10,000 clients have averaged a 10 to 15 percent increase in traffic, 20 to 30 percent increase in time spent on their site and 12 to 18 percent decrease in bounce rate, the founders tell us. Next up, Tint will be looking to expand its partnerships with digital agencies, build out its templates and customization options and finish raising its seed round. Find
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ICANN Says It Will Allow Chinese Top-Level Domain Names This Year, Followed By Other Languages
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
The president of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Fady Chehade that the organization will launch Chinese character options for top-level domains in the second half of this year. (A top-level domain is the part of the Web address after the dot, so the Chinese characters would replace the .com, .net, .org’s, etc. that you see in most Web addresses). The roll-out is part of ICANN’s plan to introduce address endings in characters other than the Roman alphabet. Other languages in the works include Arabic, Korean, Russian, and Japanese. The announcement marks a change in tune for ICANN, which was created in 1998 by the U.S. Department of Commerce to manage domain names. The organization has resisted previous efforts by China, Russia and other countries to control Internet addresses, and been criticized for not letting each country manage their own Internet addresses. In December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications, China was among a coalition of countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, that to gain more sovereignty over Web addresses, which faced opposition at that time from other nations including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. Critics said that allowing different countries to manage their own Web addresses could potentially lead to charges being placed on data transmitted over international boundaries. According to the WSJ, the language additions are “part of ICANN’s push to reduce global opposition to its regulatory power by leaving behind its U.S. roots and becoming a more international organization.” Another sign that the organization wants to work more closely with China includes the launch of an “engagement center” in Beijing to collaborate with the government on issues like URL trademarks. Chinese characters can already be used in the main part of a Web address, but after ICANN rolls out its new changes, companies and organization will be able to add Chinese character address endings. According to ICANN, both Tencent Holdings and Sina have already applied for the extension .weibo in Roman and Chinese characters. Other major Chinese Web companies that have bid for new extensions include Alibaba Group and Qihoo 360.
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VCs Invested $6.9B In 841 Deals In Q1 2013, Funding Up 17 Percent, Deal Activity Highest Since Dot-Com Days
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
Private company M&A and venture capital database has issued its Q1 2013 report on venture capital and deals. According to the report, VCs invested $6.9 billion across 841 deals (eclipsing a Q3 2012 high), which is the highest level since dot-com days, says CB Insight. You can find a full copy of the report . One of the most interesting data points noted by CB Insights was that Series C, D and E all saw an increase in shares of funding dollars while Series A and B both saw declines. Consistent with the reports we’ve seen over the past few months, seed funding continued relatively the same despite concerns about a Series A crunch. Deal volume was up 7 percent from last year, and funding, relative to Q1 2012, was up 17 percent. Seed VC activity was fairly flat on a sequential basis (194 seed VC deals in Q1 2013 vs. 190 in Q4 2012) but year-over-year VC seed deals are up 31 percent (148 in Q1 2012). Internet deal activity climbed to multi-year highs hitting 379 deals (best since Q1 200), but social as a category made up only 4 percent of deals. CB Insights attributes this jump to the boom in enterprise deals. Clean-tech deals and dollars also hit multi-year lows. Investment dollars within mobile hit $718 million in Q1, a high beat only by Q3 2012, which saw $968 million in investment. The actual amount of deals dipped to 106 from 122. As a sub-industry in mobile, security is seeing a boom, with over 30 percent of funding dollars for the quarter. Specifically for Internet companies, deal activity and funding to Internet companies increased 10 percent and 12 percent from Q4 2012, respectively, and climbed 16 percent and 35 percent on a year-over-year basis. In terms of states for the second time in the last two years, New York beat out Massachusetts on overall number of deals and funding in a quarter (behind California). In fact, CB Insights says Massachusetts hit a five-quarter low for deal share. As CB Insights reports, “The holy trinity of California, New York and Massachusetts was disbanded in Q1 with Mass. falling out of the top 3 for both deals and dollars.” Utah replaces Massachusetts for the third spot.
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Confirmed: Facebook Has Acquired Osmeta, A Stealth Mobile Software Startup
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
While is building out a bolder role in mobile in the form of , it looks like it is also continuing to make acquisitions that will help bolster that strategy overall. We have learned that in the lead-up to the launch last week, the social network appears to have quietly picked up , a Mountain View-based mobile software startup. Osmeta had yet to launch a commercial product, and it is not completely clear at this point if this is an acqui-hire or a technology deal as well. : A Facebook spokesperson has now confirmed the acquisition, with no further comment. Original story continues below. This is what we’ve been able to piece together: — Osmeta has been around since August 2011. It was co-founded by Google/IBM alum , and IBM alum , and it had 17 employees — all engineers. It’s describes a team of “world-renowned hackers and highly accomplished researchers capable of herculean software engineering.” In addition to Google and IBM Research, other past employers included Yahoo Research, VMware and Facebook. — A number of employees who on their LinkedIn profiles. One of them that he moved to Facebook after it acquired Osmeta in March 2013. — The company had yet to publicly launch a product, but what it was working on is/was in the mobile space, and appears to be something that works across multiple devices — evidenced by a of 25 pieces of hardware running on different platforms. It’s not clear if Osmeta’s technology has also gone over with Osmeta’s employees. — The stealth product is was/is likely in the area of software: “Between us, over the years, we have done pretty much ‘everything’ in terms of software creation, including several first-in-the-world type of magical things,” the site notes. “(Examples: Android, Chrome for Android, Chrome OS, Google Crawling, AdWords, ZooKeeper, BookKeeper, Pig (Hadoop), OSGi, Linux kernel control groups, network and other device drivers, cognitive computing, massive storage systems, unusual file systems, various types of virtualization, video game console emulation, and many, many others.)” — , CEO of enterprise storage company and himself a very successful entrepreneur (selling companies to Google, Apple and Broadcom), is one of Osmeta’s angel investors and a board member. Another VC mentioned on Osmeta’s site is Brian Long, a general partner at . It’s not clear if he also backs the company, but Atlantic Bridge happens to be a backer of Maginatics. — What does Osmeta mean? We have a , CEO of e-commerce app platform Lexity, who knows Amit Singh from studying together in Delhi, and appears to be the first person to have . He goes back to Singh’s expertise in virtualization. “‘Osmeta’ – a reference to ‘meta operating system’ — potentially a virtualization technology that allows you to run the same ‘core functionality’ on top of any (potentially mobile) hardware?” Kumar also puts forward the idea that Osmeta was more than an acqui-hire: “What if Facebook decided that, strategically, they need Facebook Home to transcend every mobile device – not just Android,” he writes. “Perhaps what Osmeta has built so far lets them spread Facebook Home across this fragmented device ecosystem, quickly, in a scalable fashion, and achieve a consistent, Facebook-centered experience, across all devices?” “All devices” might be an overstatement, particularly considering that Facebook Home on iOS is a for now. (However, worth noting here that Singh’s includes some deep knowledge of Apple’s operating systems, working on Google apps for that environment.) In the meantime, Android alone offers a range of devices that you could see Osmeta helping Facebook to span. While it may be debatable how and if Osmeta’s team will be working directly on making for Facebook, what is more clear is that Facebook is remaining aggressive in its push to acquire IP and talent (another example of that ) to try to ensure that what it does in mobile will position it as a leader, not a follower.
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Swipely Expands Its Credit Card-Based Loyalty System With Reputation Monitoring And Campaign Tracking
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
, a startup that allows local businesses to manage customer loyalty programs using credit card purchase data, is announcing new features, so those businesses can measure the impact that their online efforts have on in-store sales. First, there’s a new capability called Campaign Insights. Founder and CEO Angus Davis said it’s built on the analytics capabilities that , except it applies those customer-tracking and segmentation tools to determine whether a company’s online and offline marketing efforts are successful. Since Swipely uses credit card data, it can not only show whether a campaign brought in new or returning customers, but also how much those customers spent on average. It also tracks whether customers brought in by a marketing campaign continue shopping at the store, and whether the campaign seems to be driving Yelp and Google reviews. Speaking of reviews, the other major addition is the ability to monitor reviews on Google, Yelp, and OpenTable, and to respond to those reviews from within Swipely. Customers can see how their average reviews compare to the competition. And they can overlay that data with sales information — so for example, a business might see that after a string of negative Yelp reviews, sales went down. Davis acknowledged that Swipely can’t draw a direct connection between reviews and sales, but he said, “Merchants do like to see the data in one place.” The new features will be available to Swipely customers in May, Davis said. He also said that Swipely is now supported by more than 50 point-of-sale systems — which is important for getting into stores — and that the company is now managing $500 million in sales for its 1.5 million customers. Ultimately, he said his goal is to turn the Swipely platform into “an online operating system for local commerce.” By the way, you may remember that prior to building its current product, Swipely started out as a network for users to share their purchases with their friends. Earlier tonight, I actually wrote about , a previously competing company that also pivoted away from being a share-your-purchases social network.
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Help Kick Path’s Butt (And Support Teach For America)
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
Some of us in tech are self-taught geniuses who never needed school — but that’s mostly not the case, and you know it. Great teachers in math, science, reading and other core areas have helped this generation of tech leaders get the skills they needed to succeed, and those teachers are busy training the next generation right now. Now, help them. Here, we’ll make it easy for you: We’ve put together a meetup in San Francisco this coming Tuesday, April 16th at the on Howard Street. Come hang out with us — and support teachers — by . All the proceeds will go to on Causes. We’re at the moment, and quite honestly we think we can take them. Even if you can’t come out to the event, jump over to Causes and the TFA’s Bay Area efforts. The goal is to raise $250,000 through Causes, which would fund at least 50 teachers in the Bay Area. Teach For America has been working in the Bay Area since 1991, with 430 TFA corps members working in Richmond, Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose — reaching over 30,000 students at 127 schools. The contest will run until April 18th, and there will be two grand prizes. The individual, or team, that helps Teach For America fund the most teachers will win a table for 10 at Teach For America – the Bay Area’s 3rd Annual Benefit Dinner on April 23rd, featuring keynote speaker Sheryl Sandberg. If TechCrunch wins, we’ll give those tickets to the people or startup that contributed the most to the Team TechCrunch till. So help us beat Path, at least. Tickets are $15 and give you entry to the event. All proceeds will be donated to Teach For America. Get your tickets . Now.
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Blippy Team Launches Tophatter iPhone App With Surprisingly Fun Live Auctions
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
The team behind startup Blippy has started . After pivoting from Blippy to another e-commerce project, it has pivoted again and is now working on a live auction website called , and it . Like Blippy, Tophatter is a social shopping product. The vision, according to CEO Ashvin Kumar and COO Andrew Blachman, is to bring a fun, personal touch back to online auctions — the closest equivalents, Kumar said, aren’t sites like eBay, but instead the Home Shopping Network and QVC. “We didn’t start with auctions, we started with fun and entertainment,” Kumar said. “We were thinking about the real-world experiences — where do you get that feeling? So we decided, ‘Let’s put everyone in a room together.'” So Tophatter tries to recapture the live auction experience — the auctions can be held in a variety of virtual rooms, the attendees each have their own avatar, and they can talk amongst each other, as well as with the auctioneer. There’s even a little wooden paddle to signal the bids. To be honest, when I heard the description, my mind immediately went to those underwhelming virtual conference rooms that I see every once in a while, but it turns out that’s not what Kumar and Blachman had in mind. Instead, the Tophatter design is loose and cartoony, with lots of fun little touches — for example, you can scroll to the sides of the screen to see what’s happening around the auction itself. And the iPhone app is a natural extension of the experience. After all, in order to bid on an item you have to actually be in the room (virtually speaking) — live interaction is a key part of the experience. So an iPhone app allows you to keep up with the auctions when you’re away from your computer. You can even browse items that are going up later, set up reminders, then receive a push notification when the auction starts. Tophatter has been working quietly on the site for more than a year, and it has built up a highly engaged community. When the team showed me the website last week, there were several auctions going on at once, and each room seemed to be full of people. The same was true when I downloaded the app this afternoon. Part of that is because Kumar and Blachman said they’re trying to control the supply and demand, so that there aren’t any empty rooms. Kumar said that more than half a million bids were placed in March, and a sell-through rate of 80 percent — in other words, the vast majority of products that go up for auction actually sell. ( .) You can .
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SmartAsset Expands Its Home-Buying Tools With Mortgage Advice And Neighborhood Data
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that built tools to help you answer tough financial questions, is expanding its offerings today with features for choosing the right neighborhood and the right mortgage. Founder and CEO Michael Carrvin said that there are four broad stages to the home-buying process. The company’s focused on the first part — whether it makes sense to buy a home, how much you can afford to put down, things like that. With today’s launch, SmartAsset now covers three out of four. Carvin took me on a quick tour of the new features. As with SmartAsset’s previous products, the new features are structured around a question-and-answer format, with SmartAsset surfacing data that makes it easy for visitors to understand the implications of their decisions. On the neighborhood front, SmartAsset tells you things like the quality of nearby schools and the length of the commute. Some of this data is available on other sites, but now you get to see it in the context of the larger home-buying decision. Plus, Carvin said SmartAsset is the first site to incorporate data from Moody’s with investor predictions about the annualized change in home prices in a neighborhood over the next five years. As for choosing mortgages, SmartAsset doesn’t just include a mortgage calculator, but also helps visitors wrestle with issues like whether they should buy mortgage points. (Carvin suggested that in many cases buying points is a bad decision.) And similar to other topics that SmartAsset addresses, Carvin said that most of the existing online mortgage aids are limited to “content and financial calculators.” “Would you rather read about someone’s sister’s experience buying a house, or read real analysis about whether you should buy points and what mortgages you qualify for?” he said. Carvin has plans to continue expanding the home-buying product, specifically by adding features to help close deals. At the same time, he said SmartAsset has formed a separate team that’s focused on building completely new products, revolving initially around car buying and going back to school. Here’s the full list of new questions that SmartAsset answers as of today: Section 2 – Finding the right home 1. What Neighborhood Is The Best Fit For Me?
2. Am I Overpaying for This House?
3. Will This Home Appreciate?
4. What Will My Commute Be?
5. What Do I Need In A Home?
6. What Type of Home Should I Buy?
7. Do I Need an Agent? How Do I Find One?
8. How To Make An Offer Section 3 – Getting the right mortgage 1. SmartAsset Introduction to Mortgages
2. Mortgage Calculator
3. Should I get a Fixed or Adjustable Rate Mortgage?
4. Should I Buy Points?
5. Do I Need Mortgage Insurance?
6. How Will My Mortgage Amortize?
7. How Do I Get A Mortgage?
8. Do I Qualify For An FHA Mortgage?
9. FHA Loan Limits
10. VA Loans
11. VA Loan Limits
12. VA Loan Requirements
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YC-Backed Kippt, An “Evernote For The Web”, Lures Developers With New API, App Gallery
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
, which lets you collect and share content from across the web, is The two-person startup has relied on outside developers to have a mobile presence on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Kippt just returned to San Francisco from Helsinki, almost a year after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch. “An API is not only good for us, but it’s good for our users,” said , who co-founded Kippt and leads design. “There are some companies that fear this kind of openness will somehow harm the company, but we feel it brings value.” He pointed to more than a dozen third-party apps that bring Kippt to the iPhone or turn it into an elegant mobile reading list. . Saarinen said that some developers have already organized hack days around the API. It’s steady progress for the product, which started as a side project while Kippt’s other co-founder Jori Lallo was collaborating with Leah Culver on message board app Convore. Over time, however, Kippt started to take on a life of its own. Like a more evolved version of early social bookmarking site Delicious, Kippt is a tool that lets people save and organize links into lists and share them with friends and work colleagues. much more visual with image previews and a Pinterest-like layout for collections of links. Saarinen shies away from the word “bookmarking,” though. The idea with the recent redesign was to make saving links much more about the content rather than the URLs. “People know what bookmarking is, but that they also have this preconceived idea of what it should do,” he said. Kippt has a freemium revenue model: There’s a pro version for $25 a year that won’t have any advertising and will give people unlimited links. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8z3UVn3Xhc&w=560&h=315]
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Hiring Developers? Codassium Combines Collaborative Code Editing And Video Chat Into One Web App
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
As just about any startup in the world could tell you, hiring good developers is one helluva process. First you’ve gotta find the rare developer who isn’t already drowning in job offers. Then you’ve gotta sit down and chat ’em up to make sure they’ll be a good fit for your team. Then you’ve gotta make sure they can actually, you know, code. All in all, the process can take weeks, with a dozen false starts along the way. By combining a collaborative code editor with live video chat, Codassium makes the process a bit less painful. While I personally find the idea of coding on-the-fly while someone I hope will give me lots of money stares at my face terrifying, it’s a pretty standard part of the developer interview process. Sometimes the interviewer will ask you to code out a bit of functionality with whatever language they use internally to gauge just how well you grok the nuances. Sometimes they’ll ask you how you might make a certain operation more efficient. Other times, they’ll just throw in a bit of broken code and say “Quick! Find the bug!” while sounding an air raid alarm and blasting a fire extinguisher in your face*. Generally, this part of the process entails having the interviewee come into your office (which, in many cases, means flying them out to wherever you may be), or trying to juggle a video chat app like Skype alongside something like . Codassium takes those two pieces of the puzzle, crams them together, and sticks them in one browser window. Using Codassium is quite simple. You click to start a chat, give your browser permission to access your webcam, then share the unique URL with whoever else you want to join in on the conversation. I’m not sure if they’ve set a hard cap on how many people can be video chatting in one room at once, but I was able to cram in 6 talking heads before I ran out of room onscreen. Codassium is built with Google’s rather awesome (if a bit nascent) WebRTC framework. The upside: that means the video chat works without Flash or any other third-party plugin. The downside: it also means that it currently only works in Chrome (or a pretty recent nightly build of Firefox). While Codassium isn’t quite as fully featured as something like Sublime Text (it currently lacks support for tabs, for example), it has most of the basic bases covered. It handles tabs as you’d expect, and does syntax highlight for most of the major languages, from Python and Javascript to C++ and Objective-C. While I don’t see myself leading any developer interviews anytime soon (I’m a half-way decent coder, if I do say so myself, but we’ve got people more suited for that task here at TC), I like it for a totally different reason. I recently took to brush up on a few rusty skills, coding included. I’m fortunate enough to have a few friends who are better coders than I am, and they were often willing to lend a hand whenever I’d get stuck trying to wrap my head around a particularly tough topic. This usually meant hopping on the phone and pasting bits of code back and forth over Skype, which was… not awesome. I would’ve to have had something like Codassium in my toolbox at the time. Codassium is built by , a small firm out of LA that just builds a lot of neat stuff. If you’re a journo or some other archetype that often finds themselves transcribing audio recordings, be sure to check out their audio player/notepad mashup app, , as well.
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Glass Explorer Edition To Ship Within The Next Month, Google Confirms
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
Today during Google Venture’s , Google told us that it hopes to get the into the hands of developers “within the next month.” The exact date for when Google plans to ship the first publicly available versions of Glass remains unknown, but Google has now confirmed to us that it is now very close to shipping the $1,500 devices to developers. Shipping Glass within the next month, of course, makes sense, given that Google will host its annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco from May 15 to 17. Glass will surely take center stage at this event, and if Google wants to get developers excited about the project and talk about (and launch) Glass’ Mirror API during I/O, it needs to get the hardware into the hands of developers soon. Last year, Google allowed I/O attendees to pre-register for Glass, but the company never really reached out to these developers since — except for sending them glass blocks with their wait-list number engraved on it. Google also recently allowed others to for the right to be among the first to buy Glass by posting their reasons for wanting Glass on Twitter and Google+. That project, which was going to bring about 8,000 additional early testers into the Glass community, was heavily criticized because it seemed Google (and the company it partnered with for this) just picked people randomly. Google later . Users who won the right to buy Glass have to pick it up in person in L.A., San Francisco or New York. It’s not clear if developers will have to do the same, but it would make sense for Google to allow developers to pick their kits up at I/O.
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Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins And Andreessen Horowitz Team Up As “Glass Collective” To Invest In Google Glass Ecosystem
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
Today, Google Ventures announced a partnership with two of the biggest technology venture capital firms in the world, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, on what they’re calling the “ .” While this isn’t a fund, the three firms will be sharing seed investment dealflow for entrepreneurs and developers who are working on Google Glass software and hardware. If one firm sees an interesting opportunity, it will go to the others with it. The hope of this collective effort is to kickstart the developer ecosystem for Glass and bring it to mainstream users as soon as possible. Steve Lee, product lead on the Glass team, confirmed that Google will start shipping, , the Glass Explorer kits to developers who showed interest in Glass when it was . So the three firms want to get in front of the activity that is currently, and will be in the future, happening in the ecosystem. With the billions of dollars that the firms have, it’s safe to say that they’d like to corner the market on Glass investments immediately. This is similar to the approach that Kleiner Perkins took with its iFund, which has .
While the forming of the group doesn’t guarantee that the two firms will participate in a round of funding for any given project, the firms do tend to invest in other companies together already, so sharing what they’re seeing among one another makes sense. It was also made clear that there are no plans to bring in any other firms, so the “Glass Musketeers” will be going at this on their own. During the announcement, Google Ventures’ Bill Maris was joined by Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. The three discussed their excitement for the immediate potential of Google Glass as a platform, not just a wearable computing product. The Glass API, called . Before the meeting started, we were able to test out the latest iteration of Glass, which has come a long way in from what I could tell. That fact, tied with the obvious implications for real businesses to form around Glass, made these firms want to jump in early. Maris started off by discussing his introduction to Glass: I first saw and heard about glass from Sergey when it was just an idea of his. The early prototype didn’t function like the one you see today. As the team got built and the device has evolved, it’s more obvious that we could be sitting on the edge of a paradigm shift, similar to the ones we saw with browsers and mobile phones. It didn’t take much to get Andreessen and Doerr interested, as Maris says he barely got “Glass” out of his mouth before both said yes in separate phone calls. From those calls and discussion with the Glass team on how Google Ventures could get involved, the “ ” was born. Doerr went on to say that this group felt it “getting the band together again.” Kleiner Perkins was an early investor in Google, of course, and Doerr was also involved with Andreessen when he was working on the Mosaic web browser, which turned into Netscape, another Kleiner Perkins investment. Doerr’s excitement can be summed up in this statement: We all know the power of platforms. When you have a great product and robust APIs that will unlock the imagination of entrepreneurs, amazing things happen. We saw it with the web, we saw it with the app store. Andreesen was more succinct, saying: “You put on Glass and you say yep, that’s the future.” The recurring theme of this meeting, which Google co-founder Sergey Brin eventually rolled into on his bike, was that Google Glass is the next evolution of browsing the web and mobile devices, all wrapped up into one. The possibilities for Glass do seem infinite. As far as applications are concerned, there are still those who feel like the device will face , citing the ability for rogue applications to be developed for nefarious activities. Today, these firms say that they will treat Glass investments like any other investment in that they won’t be funding any application that isn’t good for consumers in the end. As far as what those applications could be, Maris, Andreesen, Doerr and Brin shared some of their ideas for Glass that could make an impact in the world and bring a bit more fun to it. Andreesen would like to see an interactive zombie game on the fun side, but feels like the implications for Glass’ usage in healthcare, for surgeons and patients, could be huge. Doerr agreed and added his hopes of seeing Glass used in the education sector to help remove some of the isolation in today’s learning environment. The person who has spent the most time with Glass, Sergey Brin, would like to use Glass as a viewfinder for his digital SLR camera and tracking his heart rate and performance while riding his bike. So far, the applications that have been conceived and built have been promising, the Glass team said today. The Glass Collective’s first investment could be coming soon, as Maris stated that there are a few developers working on interesting things that might need some money to get going, and Doerr added that Path and Twitter are already thinking about the applications that they can build on top of the Glass device and platform. With the experience and history of these three firms, it’s safe to say that other collectives like this will have a hard time getting set up and launched in time to make early deals. When you have the ability, as an entrepreneur, to get access to three world-class investment firms, one of which has direct access to the Google Glass team, it will be hard to justify taking your idea elsewhere. One thing is for sure, Google Glass isn’t going to be the easiest sell to consumers, as it takes some time getting your eyes used to seeing notifications pop up in front of your face. To be successful though, these firms don’t think that it needs millions of adopters to get entrepreneurs excited about building things on the platform.
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IRS Doesn’t Deny Snooping Emails Without A Warrant
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
The whether its Criminal Tax Division rummages through suspected tax dodgers’ emails without a warrant. In to the American Civil Liberties Union request for its privacy policy, the IRS dumped 247 records, revealing that the agency definitely believed it could access emails without a warrant before a court deemed the practice illegal. The agency is conspicuously silent on whether it still applies those old spying rules. “The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communication,” wrote IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel in 2009. Under a law widely acknowledged as an antiquated privacy law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), governments opened or older than 180 days without a search warrant. The giant loophole was responsible for the notorious resignation of General David Petraeus after the FBI gained access to his mistress’ incriminating emails. Recognizing that people now regularly store email in the cloud indefinitely, a federal court in needed probable cause to compel a company like Google to hand over access. Here’s the kicker: The IRS won’t say whether it now applies the privacy protections in to its investigations. Sometimes, what isn’t said can mean more than what is.
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Sendicate Takes Its Email Newsletter Service Out Of Beta, Launches An API
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
, a startup aiming to make it easy for businesses to create beautiful email newsletters, is moving out of beta testing today with the launch of version 1.0. In addition to removing the beta label, the company is launching an API, so that other products can integrate with the Sendicate service. When , it was pitched as an attempt to reinvent email newsletters for the present day without being weighed down by legacy technology. In advance of today’s launch, co-founder and CEO Chad Jackson also said that Sendicate is an attempt to meet the needs of publishers, marketers and e-commerce sites that want something more than a generic email service but can’t afford an expensive enterprise product. “There’s really nothing in the middle,” Jackson said. “If you have 100,000-plus customers, you’re stuck with the same tools as someone running a list with five people. … [With] the really enterprise level tools, you can’t even create an account with them. If you say, ‘Hey I want to send 50,000 emails,’ they won’t even talk to you.” You can see Sendicate in-action in the video below. One of the main points being emphasized is the ability to try out your newsletter with a wide range of customizable design templates, with the content being tweaked to match each template. It also has a slick, simple interface for managing your messages and subscribers. As for pricing, there’s a self-serve option that’s free for customers with fewer than 500 subscribers, with an increasing monthly fee that reaches $499 for more than 75,000 subscribers. And Jackson said Sendicate is also launching a concierge/managed version, which will include “dedicated account management, design and strategic services, template production, results optimization, custom integrations, etc.” [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/52963791 w=400&h=300] And now, thanks to the API, customers can use Sendicate with other services. So far, the API has been used to build integrations with mobile guestbook , web automation service , and e-commerce service (in the form of a Magento plug-in). I’ve been told to point potential partners to which is supposed to help with API integration. Even in the beta period, the company says that it sent more than 10 million emails from more than 2,000 customers, and that in March, email volume went up 40 percent while revenue went up 50 percent. (Those customers include Bobbi Brown / Estee Lauder, LiveIntent, Gyft, Focus Forward, and A Hotel Life.) Jackson also pointed out that Sendicate was an honoree in the Webby Awards – specifically . Sendicate is also announcing that it has brought on as CTO and co-founder.
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Google Wants To Operate .Search As A “Dotless” Domain, Plans To Open .Cloud, .Blog And .App To Others
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
If it gets it, Google wants to turn .search into a “dotless domain,” the company told ICANN a few days ago. Last year, Google applied to manage the .app, .blog, .cloud and .search generic top-level domain (gTLD) names as part of a major expansion of the domain-name system. ICANN, which is managing this expansion, hasn’t awarded any of the gTLDs yet, and the whole program remains controversial. But in May, Google telling the organization that it would soon provide some specific details about its plans for these top-level domain names. Now, Google has done so through its subsidiary (we have embedded the full letter below). At the time, it looked like Google was ready to open up these gTLDs to the public and wasn’t just planning on using them for its own services. In its , Google now confirms that it is working with “the relevant communities related to .blog and .cloud to develop technical standards relating to the operation of those top-level domains.” The most interesting plan here is to use .search to operate a redirect service on the “on the ‘dotless’ .search domain ( ) that, combined with a simple technical standard, will allow a consistent query interface across firms that provide search functionality, and will enable users to easily conduct searches with firms that provide the search functionality that they designate as their preference.” Dotless domains (think http://example and email addresses like mail@example) are something ICANN has for a while now and that security experts are . Google plans to run http://search/ as a redirect service that “allows for registration by any search website providing a simple query interface.” “The mission of the proposed gTLD, .search, is to provide a domain name space that makes it easier for Internet users to locate and make use of the search functionality of their choice,” Google writes in its amended application. What exactly this will look like in practice remains to be seen, however. It’s definitely a novel use of the domain system, and judging from the amended application, Google will open this functionality up to third-party developers and its direct competitors. Of course, it remains to be seen who will actually get to manage .search. Besides Google, Amazon, dot Now Limited, and Donuts.co have . The .blog TLD, Google says, “should be simple and easy for .blog registrants to associate their second-level domain with their blog on the blogging platform of their choice.” New .cloud domains, too, should have a direct association with “projects hosted in cloud platforms.” While it’s not clear how Google plans to do this, the letter notes that the company is working on a set of technical standards that will “allow users to automatically link their domain name to their blog at the time of registration.” As for .app, Google plans to restrict this TLD to use by “relevant developer communities” without restricting it to a specific platform.
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Well, That Was Fast: Twitter Already Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
This morning, on Twitter.com, allowing users to click a button directly within a tweet in order to make a purchase without having to leave the Twitter.com website. However, it appears that Twitter has already shut this feature down – almost immediately after its public debut. Ribbon Co-founder Hany Rashwan has confirmed that Twitter has indeed shut them down, and the company is now in the process of trying to contact Twitter to discuss. We’ve also reached out to Twitter with questions, and will update if and when we hear back. It’s possible that the way Ribbon implemented the in-stream payments using Twitter Cards (via the Player Card model) was a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service. What’s interesting is how quickly Twitter reacted to the situation, which makes one wonder who might have brought the violation, or issue, to Twitter’s attention. For background, Ribbon, which is something of a “bit.ly for payments,” previously allowed Twitter users to click and link and be redirected to a separate page offering a simple, one-page checkout experience. But today, it introduced a new, more integrated option for payments, which took advantage of Twitter Card functionality to allow for payment processing directly on Twitter.com. On an expanded tweet, users could just click a “Buy Now” button, enter their email and credit-card info, then click “Pay.” The entire checkout experience took place on Twitter.com itself – the idea being that by not redirecting you off-site like PayPal does, merchants can increase their conversion rates. However, now those same tweets no longer offer in-stream checkout, but instead point users to click a “view on web” link taking them to the Ribbon.co checkout page. You can see the new and current (degraded) experiences in the screenshots below. : : Update, 1:20 pm PT: Ribbon : At 11:00 AM PST, we launched the ability to do payments in-stream on Twitter without ever leaving a tweet. Top publications like TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, The Next Web and others all wrote about the news. More importantly, hundreds of tweets came in about this news, and people were genuinely excited about using this. At around 12:24 PM PST, with no heads up, our integration of Twitter Cards was taken down, and now Ribbon links go back to Ribbon.co without the in-stream buying experience. Before we released this, we made sure to validate our Twitter Card implementation (screenshot below), and all lights were green. We’ve had discussions with Twitter in the past, and are eager to find a way to work together. This is clearly something that’s good for not only Twitter, but also for Twitter users all over the world. We look forward to seeing what happens in the future regarding this. Update, 4/11/13, 5:20 PM ET: Though Twitter never provided comment on this, Ribbon has published another blog post on the matter. It appears that in-stream payments are not going to be permitted. Here’s : After a productive conversation with Twitter, we’ve been given access again to Product Cards, and are actively implementing support for Ribbon content. While this isn’t the same in-stream payments we released yesterday, that is still our big vision and one that we’ll actively work on finding a way to enable. It’s important to note that this in way affects what we’ve already released in our product. We’re still doing in-stream credit card payments on Facebook today, and that’s still very much active. In addition to that, we have support for putting our links on YouTube. Through our button, we also enable you to embed the whole process on your own website, blog, WordPress, or Tumblr. One very important new update that was unfortunately over-shadowed yesterday is our pricing change, something we’ve spent a lot of time working on implementing. At 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, we’re now competitive with the biggest players in payments and – unlike any of the competition – can help you sell across more platforms. On a personal note, the amount of support we’ve received from everybody has been overwhelming. What we have shown yesterday is that our vision and product are extremely well-received. That’s what motivates us every day. Stay tuned for more from us. This was just the beginning and, if you thought that was cool, wait until what we’re planning to do next!
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Internet Pioneer Dwight Merriman To Speak At Disrupt NY This Month
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
We’re very pleased to announce that Dwight Merriman, the co-founder and former CTO of DoubleClick and now the co-founder of hot New York startup , will be joining us onstage at Disrupt NY this month. He’s been at the forefront of Internet advertising and engineering for the past two decades and is an icon of New York startups. DoubleClick began life in 1995 by serving some of the first banner ads on the web. Merriman led its technology side for the first 10 years, through an IPO in 1998 and a merger as it grew to become a main way that websites made money. Google eventually bought it in 2007 for $3.1 billion, and the company now exists as part of its core display ads business. Merriman is now the chairman and co-founder of 10gen, which sponsors the widely used open source NoSQL database MongoDB. The company has been quietly surging, with total funding north of and an employee headcount expected to in the next couple of years. He joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, super angel Ron Conway, and more to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are with the early-bird discount ending tomorrow, April 11. .
Chairman & Co-Founder, Dwight is one of the original authors of MongoDB, the open-source document database. In 1995, he co-founded DoubleClick (acquired by Google for $3.1 billion) and served as Chief Technology Officer for 10 years. Dwight was the architect of the DoubleClick ad serving infrastructure, DART, which serves tens of billions of ads per day. Earlier he was Co-Founder, Chairman, and the original architect of Panther Express (merged with CDNetworks), a content distribution network (CDN) technology. Dwight is also a Co-Founder of, and investor in, Business Insider and Gilt Groupe. Dwight received a B.S. with honors in Systems Analysis from Miami University of Ohio. [image via tie.org]
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Bitcoin Suffers A Correction Amid Apparent DDOS Attacks On Some Exchanges
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and . We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that A denial of service attack happens when an attacker overwhelms a target with external requests, so that it can’t honor regular requests from legitimate users. This also happened last week when Mt. Gox when Bitcoin reached $142 and hackers attacked the exchange. At that point, “its worst trading lag ever.” to manipulate the price of the currency: “Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit.” It looks like this may be happening again. Aside from that, any kind of 400 percent increase over 30 days is probably unsustainable from a technical point of view. A correction at this point would be healthy and natural.
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 17 | null |
Movile Helps Users Get Connected With Apps To Find And Share Access To Free Mobile Hotspots
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 |
Mobile content company Movile has over the last several years distributed content and applications for a primarily Latin American audience. But what happens when a mobile user isn’t connected to a wireless data network? To help solve this problem, Movile has introduced a pair of applications that will help users connect to free Wi-Fi networks. The apps are named Free Zone and WifiPass, and both are designed to let users know when they’re near Wi-Fi hotspots that they’re able to connect to. But they differ in that Free Zone focuses on connections to open public hotspots, while WifiPass enables users to more easily get access to networks which are password-protected. Movile is increasingly making its products available in other markets, such as the U.S. and Europe. Take, for instance, the , a Facebook-based video app for viewing Spanish-language television content. Bringing Free Zone and WifiPass to a global market is just one more way that Movile is seeking to connect with users even if they’re not based in Latin America. Already, Free Zone has been wildly popular in Latin America, drawing more than 7 million users in its home market, without really marketing it elsewhere. The app scans for networks and alerts users when they’re near open Wi-Fi networks that they can freely connect to with a single tap. The number of smartphone users is rapidly growing in the region, but wireless data access is still spotty and can be expensive. Free Zone enables users with Wi-Fi-capable devices to gain access to the Internet without having to pay outrageous fees to do so. Eduardo Henrique, head of U.S. operations for Movile, says that more than 7.2 million free Wi-Fi access points are available on the app. And, well, the more users who are connected to the Internet, the more users there will be looking at Movile content. Anyway, that’s great for the Latin American market, but in other places around the world, people can be a little more protective of their Wi-Fi networks. With that in mind, Movile has released WifiPass, a more U.S.-centric app that connects with Facebook and allows its users to share password-protected Wi-Fi hotspots with their friends. The app works by allowing users to connect without having to jot down and manually enter SSID and passwords. It also allows users to save Wi-Fi network info and connect to them later. For now, Wifipass is , which is kind of a bummer for iPhone users like me. But Free Zone is available for both and .
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Simplee Combines Mint.com And PayPal To Bring Medical Bill Payment, Management To Your Smartphone
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
The mobile health market is growing like a weed these days. , there are 31,000 health and medical-related apps on the market today. In fact, over the last year, the number of health apps jumped 120 percent, and hundreds of apps now hit stores every month. Yet, in spite of this exponential growth, the mobile health space is still in its “Wild West” phase. In other words, it’s a work in progress. , there’s a lot of noise in the mobile health market, and a lot of misleading information. So, while the potential is high, there’s not enough data yet to prove that these products act as advertised and actually provide real value. , the startup that has been called the wants to buck the trend of over-promising and under-delivering in today’s mobile health market. Simplee first launched its medical wallet back in 2011 to help people better manage their healthcare financials — to track visits, monitor benefits and pay bills online, for example. Considering how expensive healthcare can be, and what a pain in the ass it is to manage, people are eager to find any way to streamline the process and reduce costs — to their sanity and their wallet. By making this appeal to consumers, Simplee has been able to find some traction: Today, it processes millions of dollars in payments each month across “thousands of medical providers” and has managed $2 billion in medical bills since launch. Earlier this year, the startup expanded its service, bringing a B2B-style payment and loyalty platform to hospitals to allow them to distribute digital bills, among other things. The idea being to offer hospitals a medical wallet that can, on the one hand, help them increase revenues, while making it easier to deliver new features and a better billing experience for patients on the other. Last week, the startup took the next step in the evolution, extending its medical wallet to the point of service through a new mobile app that allows people to manage and pay all their family’s medical bills from their phone, while on the go. In so doing, Simplee’s vision has been to transition from simply being the Mint.com of healthcare to a sort of Mint.com-meets-PayPal, for healthcare, expanding its medical wallet and uniting it with SimpleePAY. The new app allows users to view their medical history while in the doctor’s office or go back through billing history to see whether they’ve met their deductible, for example. They can also view a breakdown of insurance coverage and pay by credit, debit or FSA card. Again, that’s all well and good, but when you consider the above fact — that many mobile health apps make big claims about convenience and the ability to improve users’ health in a significant way — it doesn’t mean much without supporting evidence. So, we asked Simplee to share a little bit more about how consumers are paying medical bills online and whether or not they’ve actually been able to increase payment performance among users, for instance. While it’s still too early to say for mobile, as Simplee just launched its mobile app last week, the founders tell us that Simplee’s online medical wallet has been able to produce an increase in self-service payments of 17 percent, which has doubled in the last six months. Compared to 1 to 3 percent — what the company says is the industry norm. They also expect mobile to play a critical role in driving self-service even higher, especially at the point-of-service (i.e. at the doctor’s office). In addition, the company says 90 percent of its users making multiple payments after making their first, and 40 percent of its payments come from users who have upgraded to the full medical wallet experience, which means they get an expanded billing view with deductible status, more stored payment methods and so on. In other words, the founders believe this is a demonstration that users prefer horizontal payments and that the consumer side of its business is feeding the B2B-side of its payment platform. The first step was to build an online medical wallet, the next was to build a connected provider payment platform, and the third has been to connect the two and offer both experiences via mobile at the point-of-service. In a sense, it’s not much different on the more general consumer-side of the mobile bill payment space. Simplee is taking that and applying it to healthcare, while attempting to provide a value-add for hospitals and healthcare providers. It’s too early to tell whether Simplee can significantly expand its business through its new mobile experience, but, given that it’s already established some validation online, the founders have high hopes for mobile. It’s a smart play, and could have a big effect on the way people pay their medical bills, reducing the headache and complex, paper-based billing process that continues to prevail in healthcare.
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Y Combinator’s Paul Graham Takes His First Ever Board Seat With Healthcare Crowdfunding Non-Profit Watsi
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is a father figure to countless startups he’s helped accelerate, but had never taken a board of directors seat until now. Today he he’s accepted board seat with Watsi, a site that lets people donate money to pay the medical bills of needy people. Watsi came out of this season’s Winter 2013 Y Combinator class and is the first non-profit it’s ever backed. More specifically, of people in dire need of medical care, but who can’t afford it. Donors can browse the profiles and donate as little as $5 to help someone get well. 100% of donations go to the sick, and Watsi funds its operations and even pays credit card processing fees on donations out of its own pocket. We named Watsi one of the . Today, Graham tweeted: For the first time I agreed to be on a board of directors: 's. — Paul Graham (@paulg) [Update: Watsi tells me “We’re thrilled to have PG as our first board member. He’s been an incredible advisor and supporter to us from the beginning and we look forward to growing Watsi with his continued guidance.” So this is not only Graham’s first board seat, but Watsi’s too.] We’ve reached out to Graham for comment about why he accepted the position. But he had already been showing the startup some love. After discovering the startup on Hacker News and meeting the team he invited them to be the first ever YC-backed non-profit. When the company launched, Graham wrote a exclaiming “After about 30 seconds of looking at the site, I realized I was looking at one of the more revolutionary things I’d seen the Internet used for. Technology can now put a face on need. The people who need help around the world are individuals, not news photos, and when you see them as individuals it’s hard to ignore them.” He concluded, “I’ve never been so excited about anything we’ve funded.” Then after the Boston Marathon bombings he tweeted: When terrible things happen to people I can't help, I go to and help people I can. — Paul Graham (@paulg) Beyond a few advising investing roles with companies like 280 North, he’s known to devote himself fully to Y Combinator. He could help Watsi navigate the balancing act between being a startup designed for rapid growth, and being a non-profit with a mission for social good.
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Little Eye Labs Does Mobile App Crash Testing (Before The Day Of The Big Launch)
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
There are a plethora of options for mobile app crash testing, like Crashlytics, Crittercism and Bugsense. But what about before the day of the big launch? A startup out of called is looking to handle crash testing before developers go into post-production. They just launched an app and crash testing service within the last few weeks. “We want to catch the bugs before the app reaches the app store,” said co-founder . The company has built a way for developers to monitor an app’s performance on a single or a handful of devices for how it consumes memory, power and wireless data during a test-run. Basically you either plug the phone into your computer and watch how it performs, or you can disconnect it, and observe how the app performs for a 30-minute run on these metrics through their software. Other competing products like Crashlytics instead look at crash reporting for when a developer’s app is already released, out in the wild and being used on perhaps thousands or millions of devices simultaneously. Little Eye records what’s happening live on the screen as it monitors other less visible stats like data and memory usage. Once the test run is over, it shows charts and a side-by-side video recording that can tell developers what happened while an app was running. “When doing app testing, you need a lot of context around what a user was doing at certain points,” he said. “You can actually deploy this in your lab, run multiple apps on a series of devices. Our main value proposition is that context; it’s the whole video aspect of it.” Rangarajan said the closest comparable service out there is , which comes as a tool for developers using the platform. “It’s very rudimentary, but what we do is more visual, advanced and easy-to-use,” Rangarajan said. Rangarajan and his co-founders previously worked on developer tools at Rational Software, They have a SaaS model, naturally. A full annual subscription is about $500 per developer, and the monthly costs are roughly $50 per developer. There’s a 30-day free trial period so developers can see whether it’s useful or not.
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iPad Still Dominates Tablet Ads With iPad Mini Gaining, Velti Finds
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Mobile advertising firm has released its monthly report on advertising impressions across its network. The iPad is far and away the leader when it comes to the tablet market, and is gradually chipping away share from the iPhone in terms of overall dominance among mobile ads. The iPad mini remains a much smaller factor, but is growing steadily, and on the Android side it’s pretty much all about the Kindle Fire. Velti’s data found that the iPad accounted for 91.6 percent of all tablet ad impression during the month of March, and only lost share to the iPad mini, which gained a full percentage point to come in at 6.2 percent during the month, firmly in second place. The Kindle Fire was the next strongest device, with a comparatively small piece of the pie at 1.6 percent. The Kindle Fire still dominates the Android tablet segment, however, with only the Galaxy Tab line of devices anywhere close. Amazon’s and Samsung’s tablets made up 73.4 percent and 26.2 percent of all Android tablet share, respectively. Among phones, the iPhone still leads the pack, with the iPhone 4 still leading all handsets with 13.3 percent of the impression share. iPhones accounted for eight of the top 10 devices, with the Samsung Galaxy S II and S III coming in at 8th and 10th place, respectively. Samsung is running away with the Android market in terms of ads served according to Velti’s figures, with 68.2 percent of all Android impressions. That’s no surprise given the company’s clear continued dominance in terms of hardware sales. In March, most mobile app usage took place during weekends, with a much greater deviation between Friday/Saturday/Sunday and the rest of the week than Velti had seen previously, which perhaps indicates that more people were settling down to do serious work during the month. Finally, Velti also saw click-through-rates continue to grow on Android and shrink on iOS. This means that despite having a much smaller share of overall ad impressions, the ones that are viewed on Android are more likely to convert into some kind of customers action. That may be due to the more relaxed rules about what types of advertising and campaigns can appear within Android apps vs. those on iOS. Still, iOS was better in terms of eCPM, but the gap narrowed between it and Android, meaning iOS users resulted in just a little less revenue on average than did Android users for advertisers. The picture shows a fairly stable overall relationship between ads and the dominant mobile platforms, however; the needle hardly budged in terms of overall impressions. Will a flock of new devices coming to market affect this relationship in the coming months? Too soon to tell, though legacy handsets like the iPhone 4 and 4S, and the Galaxy S II still seem to be firmly entrenched.
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Facebook Forces You To Smile When You’re Unhappy (Update: Smile Turned Upside Down)
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
“Success Theater” means only sharing an idealized version of yourself where you’re always happy. Now a bug in Facebook’s is taking that concept way too literally. Select that you’re “Unhappy” and Facebook adds a smiley face to your post instead of a frown emoticon. [ : Facebook apparently saw this and has since fixed the bug.] Alas, these little fumbles (this one first spotted by ] are the price you pay for reduced bureaucracy and Facebook’s “Move Fast And Break Things” culture. Overall I still think the which is currently available to US users has the potential to make us . Some people just aren’t comfortable talking about their feelings, but maybe would be willing to select them from a drop-down menu. Meanwhile, structured data about our mood could let Facebook serve us ads for concerts when we’re happy and food delivery when we’re sad. Our inner most thoughts and emotions are a sensitive subject, though. If you didn’t notice the incorrect face you could share a pretty awkward update of a smile about some tragedy. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
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True Ventures Confirms Investment In Second Life Founder Philip Rosedale’s New Startup High Fidelity
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Earlier this month, we wrote that , the virtual world startup led by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, had , according to . However, we didn’t know who had actually made the investment — until today. Tony Conrad of True Ventures just that his firm led High Fidelity’s Series A, and that Google Ventures and various angel investors also participated. The High Fidelity website now Mitch Kapor and Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) as investors too. In his blog post, Conrad praises Rosedale’s achievement in building virtual world Second Life. Then he offers this description of what the new company does: Philip is truly a Founder of a movement—his passion for authenticity in our virtual interactions is unparalleled. So it stands to reason that his most recent company, High Fidelity, is building a next-generation virtual world enabling even richer avatar interactions, driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users. Together with Co-Founders Fred Heiberger and Ryan Karpf, the High Fidelity team is creating a version of the SETI system, but with computers powering a tiny piece of the virtual world rather than folding proteins or looking for aliens. If I understand Conrad’s description, as well as the details available on , the company wants to harness the collective computing power in user devices to build a new kind of virtual world. In case this clears things up: The site also emphasizes the importance of low latency in virtual world interactions, and it declares, “We work in labcoats. Starched and ironed.” Conrad’s blog post does not mention the size of the round. I’ve emailed True Ventures to ask and will update if I hear back.
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Ask A VC: Google Ventures’ Karim Faris On Why Enterprise Security Is Red Hot And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Google Ventures’ general partner joined us in the studio this week for Ask A VC, where we put VCs in the hot seat. Faris, who focuses on the enterprise and e-commerce investments for the firm, talked specifically about the opportunity in the enterprise security space and why we are seeing a growing number of startups succeed in the market. We’re looking at a year of a number of breakout security companies, explains Faris, and maybe even a few IPOs in enterprise security. We also tackled reader questions about where mobile is headed in the enterprise. Check out the video above for more.
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Announcing Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley And Hardware Alley Companies
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Startup Alley is the loud and boisterous marketplace of Disrupt. Young companies, huddled around cocktail tables demoing their wares, are vying for attention and a spot on the Disrupt stage. All of these startups are amazing and at Disrupt NY later this month. We have startups covering nearly every category, including separate pavilions for Brazilian, Israeli and Italian companies. The first two days will feature web startups covering media, mobile, lifestyle, enterprise, and many more. Then, on Wednesday May 1st, hardware companies will take over the Manhattan Center’s exhibit hall for Hardware Alley, our semi-annual celebration of gizmos and gadgets. The full list of Startup Alley and Hardware Alley companies is . These companies are also fighting to demo in front of Disrupt judges on Monday and Tuesday. If selected as the Audience Choice, they’re fast tracked to the Startup Battlefield where they compete for the Disrupt Cup and $50,000 grand prize. How can you attend? You can find out more at the but the gist is this: the event runs from April 29th – May 1st. We’re running a pre-event 24-hour for folks who want to get one free ticket but, as it stands, you still have the opportunity to pick up a ticket to the show. Or better yet, get a Startup Alley and Hardware Alley package and show off your startup. Packages are available . Sponsors: Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here
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This Week With The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Google Glass, Ubuntu, And Vibrating Undies
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
This week on the we talk about Google Glass, the Galaxy S4, and the magic of Ubuntu laptops. This time we’re joined by Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Greg Kumparak, and a pair of underwear that vibrates in Australia. Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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‘Airbnb For Bikes’ Startup Spinlister Returns From The Deadpool, Now With New Management
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
If you’re a big fan of bikes and Airbnb-type sharing economy startups like me, you might have been disappointed to learn that , the peer-to-peer bike rental startup, was shut down a few months ago. The service, which launched in New York City last spring, had just opened up to the general public a few months before being put on hiatus. Well, , resurrected by one of its seed investors while the founding team moves on to pursue other interests. After slowly making its peer-to-peer bike rental service available in a few various markets throughout the U.S., Spinlister made it into the in San Francisco last September, and soon after . But then things got weird. A few months later, the tiny little startup , suggesting that its marketplace for bike rentals might expand into a marketplace for other things. And then, both Spinlister and Liquid went dark, as the team shut down rental capabilities and contemplated what they were going to do next. I met with Spinlister/Liquid co-founder Will Dennis a few weeks ago, as he talked about some ideas that the team had become more passionate about. They liked the idea of video discovery and video messaging, and he showed me some early prototypes of the things they were working on. But it was clear that they weren’t really that interested in continuing to focus on bike rentals. The good news is that , Brazilian entrepreneur and seed investor in the startup, was interested in keeping the peer-to-peer marketplace alive. With that in mind, he took over the site and quietly brought the old Spinlister site — and the Spinlister brand — back to life earlier this month. Loureiro is the quintessential image of the self-made serial entrepreneur, previously building companies in the apparel, restaurant, and beverage industry. He founded Brazilian clothing startup , and had been part of Sagatiba Brasil, a liquor company that a few years ago. Prior to that, he had sold an Internet portal company to Portugal Telecom, and had also run a chain of restaurants in Brazil. When he invested in Spinlister, he liked the startup’s plans to make better use of underutilized assets, giving people access to things that they otherwise would have to own. And while the ‘Airbnb-for-x’ model still isn’t mainstream, Loureiro believes there’s still a huge opportunity for companies to take advantage of the peer-to-peer business model. “The peer-to-peer business is going to take a while to take off,” Loureiro told me by phone. “But I still think the idea is really good.” With that in mind, he’s brought back the old Spinlister site, allowing users across the U.S. to once again list and rent bikes through the platform. While not much has changed since the site went dark, Loureiro has big plans for Spinlister. More than 500 bikes were listed even while it wasn’t operational, but he’s hoping to update the site to make it more attractive and grow the community. That means more social features, as well as the launch of a mobile app to make renting more seamless. Loureiro hopes to have some major updates ready to release by Memorial Day, when he plans a bigger marketing push around the service. That could also mean opening up the service for rentals outside the U.S., essentially making Spinlister available all over the world. In a followup email to our original conversation, Loureiro showed some massive enthusiasm for Spinlister, especially after being in the liquor business for so long. It was, frankly, refreshing — especially for an entrepreneur who hadn’t originally founded the startup he’s now running. “As I told you yesterday I wasn’t expecting to be running Spinlister now,” he wrote. “But I am certainly enjoying the ride and [am] confident on the potential of the business. If I am going to succeed, I don’t know. But I am not afraid to fail.”
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Is Our Addiction To Tragedy On Social Media Inspiring Violence?
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
If terrorism requires an audience, then the recent mainstream adoption of social media may be giving violent actors a bigger stage than ever before. There are many reasons people lash out at the world, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that becoming the center of attention could be a factor pushing some to commit atrocities. Our retweets could be delivering their messages of fear. This is not to say social media infamy is the cause of any of the recent tragedies in Boston, or Sandy Hook, [Update: or ] or anywhere else. But watching the world feverishly tweet and Facebook post about the manhunt last night frightened me. I couldn’t help but wonder if other angry, disturbed, or mentally ill individuals might be watching, too, and craving that same notoriety. I shuddered to think of a future where a terrorist in hiding laughs as they see their actions trigger millions of mentions. Some believe that social media’s role is no different than that of traditional media years ago — that terrorists and killers in the 1920s would have just been just as attracted to becoming a newspaper headline as the subject of a sea of tweets. I disagree. Those old outlets were broadcast mediums; they weren’t participatory. Listening to reports of catastrophe on the radio and discussing them with people nearby doesn’t internalize the fear the same way as personally re-sharing and reacting to them in a real-time global forum. Social media instills emotions deeper. According to , PhD, a counter-terrorism research fellow at Johns Hopkins and author of “What Terrorists Really Want” from the International Security journal, “One thing counter-terrorism researchers want to know is what is the motive of the terrorist. They want to know that because they want to deprive terrorism of any utility. If we could remove the value of committing terrorism they wouldn’t do it.” He tells me, “One of the main goals of terrorists is to get attention. By it’s very definition, terrorism requires an audience, so it’s no surprise the advent of terrorism came alongside the growth of mass media in the 1880s. Social media today no doubt spreads the message of terrorists even quicker and to more people.” We’ve already seen perpetrators make use of social media to promote their point of view, like Christopher Dorner who was caught in an extended manhunt after killing several police officers in February. He may have wanted he posted to Facebook accusing police of corruption to be widely shared. And we shared it. His message hit closer to home because it was our friends distributing it, rather than a newspaper like the letters from the . If killing sprees are a cry for attention or help or an attempt to show the world someone’s pain, then our fixation on tragedy, our willingness to pause our lives and spread the news bit by bit could be playing into their hands. In fact, when video footage of Osama Bin Laden in his compound was recovered, Abrahms says one of the most striking things we found was that Osama was sitting on his sofa watching himself on television. It suggests terrorists do derive utility from knowing millions of people are paying attention to them. Our real-time updates can even have real negative consequences for the safety of those involved in pursuits of criminals. In February during the Dorner manhunt, the San Bernardino District Attorney that “The sheriff has asked all members of the press to stop tweeting immediately. It is hindering officer safety. And last night, the Boston Police Department discouraged people from posting what they heard on police scanners: : WARNING: Do Not Compromise Officer Safety by Broadcasting Tactical Positions of Homes Being Searched. — Boston Police Dept. (@bostonpolice) UPDATE: Boston Police are asking social media users not to post information they hear on police frequencies/scanner channels. — CBS News (@CBSNews) But does this kind of attention inspire violence? When I asked Abrahms who studied at Oxford and has spoken on Al Jazeera, he explained “In a sense, yes. Ideally we would completely ignore terrorism.” That’s not to say discussion is bad, and Abrahms notes social media’s potential to surface evidence in investigations. Still, propagating the fear and grief caused by acts of violence has the potential to satisfy those who commit them. This isn’t a call for guilt, or even abrupt change, but for mindfulness. When the Internet crowds around tragedy, do we think about the impact of feverishly sharing the latest gruesome details? There is a difference between distributing actionable news and trumpeting fear, and being aware of that difference is critical now that we each have our own audience. Abrahms concludes, and I agree, “if people are sharing news stories they find intellectually interesting, there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is if people internalize it and come to overestimate the chance of they themselves being victim of a terrorist attack. You don’t want society to overreact.”
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Yahoo Will Shut Down Upcoming, Deals, SMS Alerts, Kids, Some Of Mail To Focus On Apps You’ll Use Daily
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Yahoo has just a change in strategy designed to prep it for the mobile age and let it concentrate on core products like the Mail and Weather apps it launched yesterday. Soon, it will shut down Upcoming, Deal, SMS Alerts, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME) apps, and some older versions of Yahoo! Mail. People simply don’t have the bandwidth for dozens of apps, so best to do a few well. When I spoke to Yahoo earlier this year, representatives mentioned the company had over 80 mobile apps. Yet I know few people with any from Yahoo on their homescreen. That’s the real estate that truly matters, so cutting the fat and focusing on where it can really be best in class seems like a smart move. On April 30th, many of this round will go dark. As for the details, Upcoming and its API will shut down and you can download your info . Deals will close but you can first. SMS Alerts will stop but you can follow Yahoo’s various news sites with its mobile apps, or set up email alerts through Yahoo Messenger. Kids, formerly Yahooligans, but kids under 13 can still get a Yahoo ID through the Family Accounts program. Feature phone (J2ME) versions of Mail and Messenger will close, but you can still use the mobile web versions of and , or download the native apps. As for older versions of Yahoo Mail including Yahoo Mail Classic, they will close starting the week of June 3rd. Yahoo encourages people to switch to the new Mail product, and to use the HTML only / basic version if you’re on a slow connection, dial-up, or old browser. Yahoo also offers a . The question now is what about Yahoo’s bigger products that don’t perform as well, such as Search and Maps. I heard rumors soon after Marissa Mayer took charge that she was not interested in competing with Google’s far superior maps product anymore. That means this could be just the first wave of shut downs.
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Everyone Is Literally Crazy
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Everyone has their moments of insanity. The Internet has made that painfully obvious, as our moments of abstracted, often context-less, craziness are haphazardly posted and then, in some cases, amplified for all to see. Because of this dynamic, we’re also given endless opportunities to deconstruct the way in which someone else has come unhinged. To wit: The first thing we do in a national emergency and scandal? had a Twitter, Facebook or Myspace account — and then play . Or . “We think of ourselves as sane and other people as crazy but really we are all a little crazy,” says BuzzFeed CEO who will be giving the keynote speech at . The talk will be about this exact topic, titled: “Everyone Is Literally Crazy,” like the headline of this post. After the last two weeks, I can confirm that someone somewhere needs to shed some light on why everyone seems more wacko online. I’m looking at you, . “We think of ourselves as having consistent interests but really we are capricious and what we like depends on context more than our own convictions,” Jonah explains. “This all becomes clear on the web because we can measure human behavior so carefully.” The examples of the Internet exposing and archiving humanity’s darker psychological side keep pouring in: Just yesterday, Gawker posted this email from a at the University of Maryland. The article, which garnered over 1.6 million pageviews, featured a Delta Gamma board member lambasting her sorority sisters for “LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD.” Another great thing about the Internet is how often people My theory is that this email resonated with people not because it was super extreme, but because it reminded many of the more risky and out there stuff we’ve all done online when we think no one’s looking or even when, or because, people are. “Is it weird that I think this is a normal email?” TechCrunch writer Anthony Ha. Behind every joke is a little bit of truth. https://twitter.com/ryanlawler/status/325006984099282944 Because these social communication platforms are so new, people have no clue what’s appropriate. Even, and , the people we’ve hired specifically for that purpose. We’re just letting it all sloppily hang out in some sort of human communication avalanche. Tomorrow is 4/20. I hope they catch suspect 2 today so by tomorrow he can be stoned! #420 — Shawn Hikichi (@ShawnHikichi) “We have content to feed our obsessive compulsive selves, our narcissistic selves, and our ADD selves,” Jonah says. “We have content we like to search for on Google where nobody is looking but different content we like to share on Facebook where everyone we know is looking. We are strange creatures and our behavior on the web is a window into our contradictory souls.” Come watch Jonah speak about this at next week. Plenty of , as well. Not the sorority girl, though. I wish.
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Apkudo Wants To Handle Android Fragmentation So Carriers And Developers Don’t Have To
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Baltimore-based is debuting its “Apkudo Approved” program this week, extending its existing work with making sure that Android apps and devices perform well for consumers. The company has positioned itself in a growth market, to act as a layer both between developers and devices, and between devices and carriers, to help both parties deal with the fractured and often maze-like landscape of the Android hardware market. It’s normal for tier 1 carriers to run a gamut of tests on prospective devices before they bring them to market. Most recently, this was made quite public by BlackBerry, which has discussed the carrier testing process around its new BlackBerry 10 devices, but it happens for anything that hits a network. What Apkudo does is offer similar services for tier 2 and lower carriers, who might not necessarily have the engineering workforces or resources to devote to extensive testing. Tests run by Apkudo include monitoring all types of performance while running around 25,000 apps from developer partners, using techniques like taking photos of screens with high framerate cameras to detect dropped frames, Apkudo CEO Josh Matthews explained in an interview. So far, they’ve tested and can provide results for over 1,700 devices, and while they’re not allowed to reveal the names of any specific OEMs they work with, Matthews says that if you can think of a modern smartphone, they’ve probably had it in their labs. “There’s so much opportunity for the carriers given that an Android device can target budget and spec points on the full range of the spectrum, which is phenomenal,” Matthews explained. “The flip-side of that is that the variation in quality between devices in terms of performance under different app loads and in different circumstances is also phenomenal, and that can lead to very high return rates and customer dissatisfaction.” Apkudo’s work can help carriers take some of the mystery out of the process by providing them with data on hardware before it gets released on their network. That has led to a variety of smaller carriers now insisting that devices are first “Apkudo Approved” before they’ll even consider them for sale. Which, obviously, is hugely beneficial to Apkudo. But the company also works closely with OEMs, and can provide them with crucial testing data that helps them upgrade their own devices, too. Matthews says that his company is better-equipped to handle this task than most, simply because it’s their sole focus. And it does make sense that if the only thing you’re doing day in and day out is testing devices and software, you’d be in a better position than either a carrier or manufacturer to assess their strengths and weaknesses. Being a third party, with less personal stake in the products themselves, also helps. So far, Apkudo is making around $5 million a year in revenue, but it has just signed on a number of strong customers, including Cricket, Cincinnati Bell and the , which includes C Spire, Alltel and a number of other smaller regional carriers. Its is free, since it uses that to help build the library it uses to help with its lucrative carrier partnerships, so if you’re an Android dev trying to test across a range of devices, it might work better than trying to amass your own collection of Android hardware.
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Mobile Accelerator Tandem Doubles Partner Team With Rohit Bhagat And John Ellis, Announces New Startups
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Doug Renert told me yesterday that his firm , which backs early-stage mobile startups, is about to expand in a big way. The first step is bringing in more people, starting with two new partners that Tandem is announcing today — Rohit Bhagat, formerly chairman of Asia Pacific for investment firm BlackRock, and John Ellis, co-founder and executive vice president of product and technology at ad tech company Turn. Tandem is currently investing in three startups a quarter, but Renert said he’s hoping to do much more. At the same time, he doesn’t want to change the firm’s hands-on approach. He describes it as an accelerator with “muscle capital.” Like other startup incubators, it mentors batches of startups and offers them office space. However, it makes a bigger investment than most — $200,000 to start, and follow-on investments if the company is successful. Bhagat has experience scaling companies globally, Renert said, so he not only helps Tandem’s startups grow, but also does the same for the accelerator itself. Meanwhile, Ellis’ technical background means that he can help companies with product and infrastructure. Together, they effectively double the Tandem team, which until now consisted of Renert and Sunil Bhargava. I asked Bhagat over email why he’s jumping from a giant firm to a (relatively) tiny one, and he responded: I moved to Tandem because it is ideally positioned at the confluence of the rising tides of mobile, social media and cloud computing. Relative to large firms, I felt confident that Tandem’s model of “hands on” seed stage investing would spur more disruptive innovation, create stronger investment returns, and allow me to work more directly with smart people working on truly ground-breaking ideas. There will be more expansion news in the near future, Renert said. And yes, that will probably include more funding ( ), although he said it’s too early to talk about specifics. As for the companies that he wants to invest in, Renert said Tandem’s strategy is to target startups before they would normally raise money — when they’ve built a product but don’t yet have traction. He said many of the current opportunities lie in emerging markets — not just copying successful American products, but figuring out what makes them work and how to transfer that to other geographies. Renert actually wrote in February outlining the areas in mobile that he thinks have become too crowded (location-based social networking, photosharing, workplace collaboration), are still too nascent for successful companies (in-car apps and services, mobile wallets, integrated TV apps), and are just right for launching now (everyday apps, mobile developer platforms, rich messaging/SMS marketing). “At the same time, we want to make sure that we’re not just trying to build companies around our ideas,” Renert said. “We’re very open to entrepreneurs’ ideas. We want to back their ideas.” Tandem is also announcing the three latest startups that it’s backing: — Tandem’s first hardware company, which helps users find and track lost items — mobile fantasy sports tournaments — real estate browsing for tablets The deadline to for Tandem’s next class is May 1.
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 10 | null |
Scapegoating Internet Conspiracy Theorists Won’t Fix The Media’s Hype Machine
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
[tweet https://twitter.com/LukeRussert/status/325142594571083776] [tweet https://twitter.com/jonlovett/status/325143862853115904] Reporters have a nasty addiction to a particularly potent drug: the attention that comes from getting a scoop. Last night, during the live manhunt of the Boston marathon bombing suspects, we saw a lot of respected writers completely tweaking out on it. For lack of evidence, speculation began to swirl from the least reliable of sources: Internet conspiracy theorists. In the morning, when it became completely obvious that amateur sleuths on Reddit had falsely identified a missing Brown University student as the marathon terrorist, at Reddit as “vigilantes.” Crowdsourcing detective work isn’t to blame; it’s the reporters and media outlets that gave unreliable sources a voice. The poor high school track student whose face was splashed on the front page of the New York Post is reportedly now holed up in his home, . “It’s the worst feeling that I can possibly feel. . . . I’m only 17,” he told ABC. The name of another “suspect,” a missing Brown University student, was haphazardly tossed around by the likes of NBC news reporter Luke Russert . Even though Russert was explicitly skeptical, that doesn’t stop moderately informed citizens from misinterpreting the whole ordeal: [tweet https://twitter.com/VIPMag_HerbertH/status/325284056868737025] The unexpected infamy has caused the family of the missing student untold grief. “A tremendous and painful amount of attention has been cast on our Beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours,” wrote a family member on a Facebook page dedicated to searching for the missing boy. Indeed, one of the top posts on Reddit yesterday was “Media Outlets, please stop making the images of potential suspects go viral, then blaming this small subreddit for it. And read the rules we’ve imposed before calling us ‘vigilantes’.” : “Until the media got involved, none of the images were going anywhere but to the FBI.
Every single article on this subreddit so far reads like the writer took a glance at the front page then wrote an article about it, we explicitly have a list of rules to stop “witch hunts” … : News outlets have spread images on TV & in papers of two male ‘suspects’ that they say the FBI is looking for, these have now gone viral. That media, is what a witch hunt is.” The FBI and Boston authorities made a nationwide plea to send tips, pictures and smartphone video into their hot line. : a bystander had discovered a high-resolution shot of the suspect that was serendipitously taken after the explosion, giving the authorities a (literally) much clearer picture than grainy security camera footage. Online conservations can help bystanders become aware of latent content hidden in their phones. As the subreddit community hosting the conversation stated: “The harsh reality is that discussion requires looking at all possibilities. But to equate discussion with an unambiguous implication of guilt is presumptive and hyperbolic.” Adding, “We do not strive, nor pretend, to release journalist-quality content for the sake of informing the public.” In other words, for the love of everything that is holy, , or even for social media updates, as viewers do not rightly distinguish between a story published on an official website or one tweeted out by a reporter’s account. Overzealous redditors are conspiracy theorists — nothing more. One Reddit community to Tripathi’s family. But, there will always be this kind of drivel on the web; it’s the cost of a free Internet. However, we hold reporters to a higher standard, and they should start acting like they deserve it. [
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Bing Questions Study That Claimed It Delivers 5x More Malware Than Google, Says It Blocks 94% Of Clicks To Malicious Sites
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
Last week, a by German antivirus testing company claimed that Microsoft’s delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing its searches directly on Bing.com. However, this methodology, Microsoft claims, bypassed Bing’s malware warning system. Microsoft’s senior program manager for Bing David Felstead notes in his response that Bing “actually prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.” Microsoft does not explicitly remove potentially malicious sites from its index, he writes, “because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked.” Instead, it pops up a warning when users click on these links. The reason for this, Felstead says, is that when users search for a site – even if it’s a known malware vector – they do expect the site to appear in Bing’s index and would think Bing’s directory is incomplete if it didn’t show up on the search results page. Overall, Bing says it shows results with malware warnings for about 0.04 percent of searches. Felstead also claims that Bing’s warning system blocks “94% of clicks to malicious sites.” Despite the fact that the competition between Google and Bing has been lately, Felstead does note that detecting malware on websites is a very complex problem and that “no engine will be perfect 100% of the time.” But he also argues that Microsoft does show these malware warnings on its site instead of removing the links from its index in order to protect users who may otherwise go to Google and “then click on it (because Google may not have detected it as malware) their machine could be put at risk.” Here are the original results from AV-Test:
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Love Home Swap, The Members Club For Swapping Houses, Gets Into Rentals
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 |
, a U.K.-based startup that appeals to homeowners that want to trade their places, is getting into proper rentals. The company, which launched about a year and a half ago, was operating on a member subscription model. People would pay to get access to a network of homeowners that were open to swapping residences across 150 different countries, plus a travel team, personal concierge and travel guides. Now the company, which , is offering rentals along with swaps. Swaps are, of course, free to members. With rentals, Love Home Swap will take a 12 percent service fee. If you’re a gold member, it’s 11 percent and for Platinum members, it’s 10 percent. On the hosting side, the company will take a 3 percent service fee, which drops to 2 percent for Gold members and 1 percent from Platinum members. Love Home Swap also pairs each transaction with an insurance policy from Hiscox to protect members against damages or theft. Rentals are a natural move for the company, as nearly two-thirds of members said they would be interested in rentals. It adds a different revenue model to the subscription business. Normally, Love Home Swap charges anywhere from roughly $15 a month to $42 per month to belong to its club, depending on the tier of service you want. At the top level, they get a concierge service that helps with restaurant and flight bookings. That business has helped Love Home Swap grow revenues by 37 percent and triple traffic since funding was closed in December of last year. The company just acquired 1stHomeExchange, to add 23,000 listings. Love Home Swap doesn’t really consider itself a direct competitor to San Francisco’s Airbnb. It positions itself as a service that caters to higher-end customers that are a bit older, own property and have the ability to go on holiday more often. The company points to listings like a or a . The average age of their customer is 46 and they’re predominantly female. It’s split 50 percent between families while 21 percent are couples with no kids and 18 percent are empty nesters. The rest are independent travellers. About a third of the properties on the site are vacation homes, not primary residences. Another , which charges around $17,500 to join, plus $3,000 per year. They rent luxury properties that they let out for a few hundred dollars per day to a few thousands to members. . The 12-person startup has raised $2.4 million to date.
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StackMob Builds Parse App Importer For Refugee Developers Fleeing Facebook’s New Acquisition
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Some developers got very angry and threatened to leave mobile app backend platform when it was . Hoping to capitalize, competitor has since that makes it easy for devs to import their Parse apps. It’s a cutthroat game, this game of tech. When the Parse acquisition was announced, disgruntled developers flocked to Twitter, , and our . Facebook not to screw up the beloved development platform. While it won’t operate independently like Instagram, Facebook’s hands-off approach to the photo sharing app it bought a year ago should instill some confidence. Facebook’s director of product management Doug Purdy said in his statement about the acquisition that “We’ve worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don’t intend to change this.” On the phone with me he reiterated that Facebook doesn’t intend to mess with a good thing. Still, developers’ complaints I read centered on two fears: 1. That Facebook would degrade the Parse service, potentially by promoting its own social integrations and app install ads too hard, and 2. That Facebook would spy on data coming into Parse, including what types of content people chose not to post to the social network. Wasting little time, StackMob launched an for developers looking to move their apps elsewhere and published a blog post touting its advantages over Parse. StackMob CEO Ty Amell tells me the company had already been tinkering with a Parse importer, but when the acquisition was announced, it finished it up and made it accessible yesterday alongside a step-by-step guide. Then today the company began offering a Python script that turns the multi-step process into a single step. Amell explained to me, “Over the last few months we’ve seen an increase in people coming over from Parse. Once we heard they’d been acquired, we knew there was going to be a lot of backlash and uncertainty from mobile developers. Facebook has a history of monetizing other people’s users, and charging through ads and other ways to access users. Parse not being independent any more is a pretty large concern for developers.” He says developers had two main questions about the acquisition. 1. Do developers still own their data? 2. What rights to privacy do developers have, and how will Facebook use their data?
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Suitey Is A Software Powered Real Estate Brokerage For New York City Apartments And Homes
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
At first sight, looks like nothing more than a run-of-the-mill real estate website. But while sites like and merely provide a listing of available properties from a large assortment of brokerages and owners, all the properties on Suitey are being directly offered by Suitey itself. That’s because is a fully fledged real estate brokerage, and they believe they’re the first software-powered brokerage that offers a better, more transparent home buying experience. At their core, Trulia and Zillow are really nothing more than virtualized billboards. They provide a centralized location for brokers and owners to advertise their for-sale properties. Let’s say you’re looking for a new apartment, and you’ve narrowed down your list to five places. That means you’ll probably have to deal with five different real estate brokers, which from experience can be a total nightmare. With Suitey, everything is simplified. Once again, let’s say you’re looking for an apartment in Manhattan (for now, Suitey only offers listings in New York City). Once you narrow things down to five options on their website, you can contact a Suitey agent who will set a time to view all the properties with you. In the future, you’ll be able to video chat with the agent directly from the website. This face-to-face experience with Suitey’s agents is key to the company’s ethos. “We want to ensure that our agents are people you’d feel comfortable buying a home from,” says David Walker, CEO of Suitey. He tells me that Suitey’s agents are heavily vetted by the company before they are hired in a process that ensures their competence and general likability. Once you’ve agreed to buy the home, Suitey gives you a one percent discount to sweeten the deal. That may not seem like much, but if you’re buying property for several million dollars, that rebate ends up being a couple thousand dollars you can put towards your deposit. “I’ve never heard of anything quite like it, and it would interesting to see what happens,” says Laura Goldstein, Managing Editor of . “People have such a bad association with real estate agents, and the customer service approach feels very appealing.” Suitey was one of the featured at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator’s Demo Day today. You can check out a roundup of startups from our coverage of the event . (Disclosure: AOL is the parent company of TechCrunch)
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Ask A VC: NEA’s Pete Sonsini On The Next Disruptive Startup In The Enterprise
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
This week, NEA’s joined us in the studio for Ask A VC. Sonsini joined NEA in 2005 and is the co-head of the firm’s enterprise software practice group, focusing on early-stage investments in the space. His investments include Xensource (acquired by Citrix Systems) and Teracent (acquired by Google). He is currently on the board of Engine Yard, Eucalyptus Systems and a number of others. Considering the boom in enterprise startups and funding, we asked Sonsini what layer of the cloud stack is the best area for entrepreneurs to pursue now, SaaS, PaaS, or Iaas? Checkout the video above for Sonsini’s answers and more.
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Samsung May Launch A Rugged Galaxy S4 This Summer, Could Counter New Moto Phones
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Samsung is working on a dust-proof and water-proof Galaxy S4, which will essentially resemble the S4 but with environmental superpowers, says the . The paper also reported that Samsung is launching its next-generation Galaxy tablet in June, as well as a compact S4 at “just” 4.3-inches in size (this still seems large to me, but maybe I’m just old). Samsung has always been keen on capitalizing on flagship branding by diversifying its line with a variety of offshoot devices, so the news should come as no surprise. The ruggedized S4 will take the flagship phone in a brand new direction, however, and one that might actually cut off a key competitor at the knees – Google’s own Motorola. Google CEO and have referenced Motorola’s upcoming hardware work, referring to how phones should not break when dropped, or die when submerged in water, suggesting that one of the key features of any Android hardware coming out of Motorola once its existing pre-Google product timeline runs out will be somewhat rugged, too. Samsung and Google have a complex relationship, and much has been made about how the Korean smartphone OEM might make Google a little nervous, given how much control it has over the Android smartphone market. It’s a theory that Google itself has repeatedly and roundly denied, but Samsung recently went out of its way to and pretty much leave out any discussion of Android itself. The Wall Street Journal also notes that a rugged version of the Galaxy S4 will help Samsung attract lucrative military and government contracts, something the OEM is trying to accomplish in order to steal share from Apple and BlackBerry. That would definitely be an advantage, but there’s also just a general trend towards building more rugged devices, thanks to smartphones like the Sony Xperia Z. Startups like are also trying to make water-resistant consumer electronics common-place, both before- and after-market. At this point, it’s just a matter of who can do it first.
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More Google Glass Specs Revealed As Android Tinkerers Look For Ways To Root It
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Google felt it appropriate to highlight some of Glass’ specs earlier this week, but there’s much more to the company’s wearable display than just the . In case you were hankering for a taste of what else makes Google Glass tick, Android developer (and Glass Explorer) spent some time tinkering with his preview unit and managed to figure out what kind of hardware it has under the hood. Lee managed to confirm that Glass runs Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich (CEO Larry Page noted during Google’s most recent earnings call that Glass , and also determined that it has a Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 chipset. In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of developments in the mobile chipset market, the OMAP 4430 was used in devices like the original Motorola Droid RAZR and Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2.0 — solid devices during their prime, but the chipset that powered them is far from new. Sadly, some of the particulars are still shrouded in mystery — Lee wasn’t able to figure out the processor’s clock speed (the 4430 CPU can be clocked between 1 and 1.2 GHz), and the device only reports that it has 682MB of RAM, but Lee suspects the total is actually 1GB. Still, that’s not too shabby a spec sheet for a device that essentially lives on your face, and some recent reports reveal that the ambitious headset may be surprisingly too simple to root to. Liam McLoughin, an intern for Google’s Chrome team, recently tweeted to note that gaining root access to the search giant’s curious head-mounted display , a development that prompted Lee to go digging in the first place. Meanwhile, Cydia founder and administrator Jay Freeman that he too had made progress in gaining access to the device, and even posted a picture to show off how far he’d managed to go. At this point we’ve already seen some companies embrace the Glass platform (Path and the immediately spring to mind) and others like Evernote are known to be crafting experiences for Glass, but some moderately powerful hardware and seemingly easy rootability could make Glass an even bigger hit for Android tinkerers.
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Swifto Raises $2.5M From Benchmark To Be The Uber For Dog Walking
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
a startup that wants to be the Uber for dog walking, has raised $2.5 million from Benchmark Capital. We’re told that the funding round previously closed but the startup didn’t want to announce to the public for fear of attracting competitors. The marketplace connects dog owners with vetted and screened walkers. But beyond just serving as a way to find someone to walk your dog, the service also lets clients view walkers’ routes. The Swifto tracking app sends clients a text at the beginning and at the end of a walk, as well as a photo along the way, and it allows owners to track a walker’s progress on a live map of Manhattan through a mobile app as the walker progresses through the route. A 30-minute dog walk costs $20. Dog walkers use the app to track their responsibilities for each dog and to schedule walks. The startup says that each walker is fully vetted and undergoes a background check. After meeting the standard, they then go through three interviews and a training session, and they must pass an exam. A client gets a free meet and greet with a selected walker. Only after that meeting, and once a client deems a walker to be a perfect fit, do walks commence via Swifto. Payment is taken care of automatically online via Stripe. Swifto also offers insurance to cover walkers in case of any accidents. The startup says that after a year in business, Swifto is cash-flow positive with a 20 percent month-to-month growth rate in revenue. Sales are expected to reach $1 million this year. Swifto plans to expand to Boston by the end of the year, and both Chicago and San Francisco in 2014. While the Uber model doesn’t apply to every vertical (i.e. ) it seems to solve a problem for dog owners who want to easily find walkers, and track the walks when they are away from their pets. And so far, the are fairly positive.
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After Eight Years On Facebook’s Board, Jim Breyer Exits To Focus On His New Harvard Board Seat
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Venture capitalist is on Facebook’s board in June, which he’s held since April 2005. The split is amicable and stems from his desire to concentrate on his new seat on the Harvard University Corporation Board. Breyer joined the Facebook board after his venture firm Accel became one of Facebook’s earliest investors, leading its $12.7 million Series A. Breyer will stay on Facebook’s board until its yearly director’s meeting on June 11th. In a departure note, Breyer wrote, “It has been a genuine honor to serve as an investor and board member since April 2005 as Facebook has grown from an emerging social network for U.S. college students to a global service that connects over a billion people. After over eight years of board service, it’s time to step aside in light of my other responsibilities, including my recent election to the Harvard University Corporation Board. I will leave the board knowing that Facebook is a global Internet leader with exceptional leadership within the company and on the board.” Facebook tells me “Jim made many, many important contributions during his long tenure on the board and we were well-served by his presence. We will continue to have a strong relationship with Jim and going forward, we’re thankful we can continue to rely upon the tremendous depth and expertise of our recently expanded board.” Breyer also has plenty of other responsibilities to handle beyond Harvard. He’s currently on the boards of Wal-Mart, Dell, News Corp., and . His departure could leave another board seat open at Facebook. The are currently occupied by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine B. Bowles, Donald E. Graham, Reed Hastings, Peter A. Thiel, and the . Breyer’s financial expertise likely helped Facebook to navigate its early fundraising and keep Zuckerberg in firm control. That’s been crucial to allowing Facebook to concentrate on its user experience rather than make a quick buck for its investors.
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Monaeo Tracks Company Employees For Location Based Tax Information To Prevent Needless Auditing
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
According to Anupam Singhal, cofounder of , two out of three Fortune 500 companies get audited every year. And although there are surely several companies that get audited simply because they were unable to pay their taxes, most of the time it’s simply due an unfortunate case of miscalculation. What Monaeo offers is a software platform that helps companies track their employees solely for location based tax information. You see, when a company sends out their employees on business trips and the like, you have to understand that each state and country has their own separate set of tax codes. Depending upon where an employee has been, and how long that particular employee was working at that area, the amount of taxes the company will need to pay for the employee’s expenses can differ drastically. Today, most companies track where their employees have been through spreadsheets and the like. As you can imagine, it can be truly nightmarish for accountants to calculate where all of their employees have been over the space of a year come tax day. In fact, it’s a fairly common practice for companies to over pay their taxes for fear of being audited. What Monaeo does is provide a location based software platform that essentially keeps track of where each employee has been. Once Monaeo’s mobile app has been downloaded to each employee’s phone, Monaeo provides a overlay of where the employee has been, and how long they were at their particular location. Monaeo also automatically converts this location data into relevant tax information. Of course, privacy is natural concern that arises with anything like this. Monaeo says that their servers, which are powered by , are as secure as they possibly could be. They also raise the point that the location data that Monaeo gathers (which only provides city, state, and country information) would be less revealing than the calendars and expense reports required in an audit. Monaeo was featured at the Demo Day today, along with nine other startups that form . You can check out a roundup of startups from our coverage of the event .
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This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: The Q10 Vs. The One And The Fitbit Flex
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
This week on the we talk about the Blackberry Q10, The HTC One, and the Fitbit Flex. This time we’re joined by Matt Burns, Darrell Etherington, Chris Velazco, and a tiny thinger that won’t fit into the bracelet. Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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The Tesla Model S’ Battery Is Now Covered By A Nearly Unconditional Warranty
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Without proper care batteries can wither and die like a delicate tulip roasting in the bright sun from an unseasonably warm spring day — a fact made exponentially worse when the battery in your $60k vehicle no longer functions properly. With that in mind, Tesla an impressive new warranty for the Model S battery pack. With the notable exception of a vehicle accident or a curious owner opening the battery pack, under this new plan, Tesla will replace the battery pack for any reason including user error and improper maintenance. Best of all, users do not have to worry about servicing the vehicle on a regular basis. Annual checkups are now completely optional, meaning the warranty will still be valid if the owner never takes the vehicle in for service. Tesla states in a blog post today that the company took great pains in developing a proper battery and therefore if something goes wrong, it’s on them, not the owner. If needed, the battery will be replaced with a factory reconditioned unit with an energy capacity equal to or better than the original pack before the failure occurred. Sounds like a fair deal for the pricey Model S. Better yet, Tesla also announced a service loaner program in which if an owner’s Model S needs to go in for service, the company will deliver a fully decked out Model S as a loaner until the original is repaired. Take a shine to the fancy loaner? No worries, Tesla will let you keep the loaner and pay a price that is lower by 1% per month of age and $1 per mile. As Tesla notes in the announcement, this practice will ensure the loaner fleet is constantly refreshed with new vehicles rather than becoming the equivalent of a rental car fleet. If nothing else, Tesla and its billionaire founder are becoming very good at playing the media game. This announcement comes just weeks after the company rolled out a new payment plan (complete with a very shady marketing plan) to make the Model S more affordable. And let’s not forget Musk just of his own cash to speed up construction on LA’s 405 freeway. Why pay for press when you can get it for free?
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AOL Is Shutting Down AOL Music And Firing Staff Who Are Live-Tweeting The Bloodbath
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
While there’s still few details and no official announcement, AOL is shutting down its AOL Music news properties and is firing their employees, according to tweets from the official AOL Music site Spinner’s account and some staff. Poor performance due to competition from independent bloggers may be to blame. However, reports indicate Winamp, SHOUTcast, and flagship music blog Spinner may survive. AOL Music operates a variety of music news websites for different genres, the SHOUTcast Internet radio site, and the historic Winamp player it acquired in 2009 along with Spinner in a $400 million acquisition of Nullsoft. Later, Spinner Editor Dan Reilly tweeted: Well, we all just got laid off. AOL Music is finished. — Dan Reilly (@danreilly11) Then Reilly and several other Spinner employees began essentially live-tweeting the demise of the site they ran: Sitting in an HR meeting right now, trying to negotiate keeping our computers for a few more days. — Dan Reilly (@danreilly11) Well, at least I found a good reason to finish off the whiskey at my desk. — Dan Reilly (@danreilly11) Paul Cantor, the hip-hop editor of Spinner wrote: Just lost my job. Actually I'm in the room losing it right this second, while tweeting. So yeah, hit me with any opportunities. — Paul Cantor (@PaulCantor) The AOL Radio gave some official condolences but noted it will stay open: It's a sad day here at . We'd like to say goodbye to our colleagues at , , , and — What to Watch (@WhatToWatchAOL) For those who are inquiring, will still be around and we will continue to be bringing you the best music experience. — What to Watch (@WhatToWatchAOL) Meanwhile, other music sites such as The Onion’s AV Club are to the several dozen fired employees with job offers or freelance work, and the canned AOL staff seem receptive. Along with music.aol.com, AOL Music runs the site (country music), (metal), (hip-hop), and (concert tickets), which presumably are also getting the axe. While Twitter’s new music app happened to launch last week, it’s unlikely it had anything to do with the AOL Music shut down. Instead, it’s likely a reflection of poor performance by the site. When they started over ten years ago, AOL Music and Spinner were some of the only options out there for breaking music news. But as the music blogosphere blossomed, readership likely fractured to different sites with more specific personalities and genre focuses. Well from fellow AOL employees (they own TechCrunch too), we give our hearty condolences to the AOL Music and Spinner staffs. Hope that whiskey helps. Haha. AOL Music is trending on Twitter. Finally figured our social media strategy out! — Dan Reilly (@danreilly11) And thanks to everyone who offered their support today. I'm truly humbled. Now I guess it's time to tie one on. — Dan Reilly (@danreilly11) Update: Perhaps not all is lost, as it seems Reilly has finished his meeting with HR and just tweeted: Maybe you haven't heard the last of Spinner. I don't know. I'm glad I got to post this last interview today — Dan Reilly (@danreilly11) Meanwhile, music writer J Herskowitz has tweeted: I'm hearing that Winamp/SHOUTcast are still intact. — J Herskowitz (@jherskowitz)
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GateGuru Relaunches With New Ways To Streamline Your Travel Experience
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Founded by Dan Gellert and Jeff Arena, Time Warner Ventures and Yahoo! alums respectively, is second behind TripIt in terms of users and downloads. The app helps you build itineraries with simple input methods including selecting flights by number or even emailing itineraries into the program. Once you’ve set up your itinerary, the company makes money by pitching last minute car and hotel rentals on the fly – and unobtrusively – while you slog through the supreme indignity of modern travel. Gellert sees the app as “day of travel” assistant. “We have a lot of unique data in our product such as airport amenity information, TSA wait times, airport tips, maps, etc. For these reasons, as a day-of travel solution, the GateGuru experience blows away that of any of these guys,” he said. They have raised $1.3 million to date from Amol Sarva, Matt Daimler, Tom Glocer, and others. They are currently seeing 140,000 users per month with 1 million downloads. The inspiration for the service came when Gellert and Arena spent most of their time traveling yet remained confused about where to eat in airports and which security lines were shortest. “Somehow there was a complete black hole of information for the traveler. Simple things like: ‘Should I eat before or after security?,’ ‘How long is the security wait time?’, ‘Is my flight delayed or on time?’ often couldn’t be answered. I felt like there needed to be a seamless solution to give travelers knowledge about this entire experience; to put the power back in the hands of the traveler.” “From there, it has been off to the races in going from Yelp for the airport into our larger vision which is reinventing the entire day-of travel experience,” he said. The team is planning further improvements, including a true “virtual assistant” feature that should make traveling a bit more bearable. “We will get to the point in the next 12 – 18 months where we can say ‘John – we know you are driving out to SFO, and based on traffic, airport parking availability, security wait times, your walk to your gate and flight status, you should leave for the airport in 30 minutes’ – regardless of if that is 2 hours or 4 hours before your flight,” he said. “This is a big change from the anxiety filled experience of walking through the airport glass doors only to find the place mobbed, resulting in you potentially missing your flight.” The data comes from collections of information including TSA checkpoint wait times and airport maps. Whether GateGuru becomes a key part of your travel process or just another app that sits in that little folder on my phone labelled Travel and contains Kayak, TripIt, (inexplicably) Shazam, and remains to be seen. However, these lads do have promise.
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A User’s Guide To Disrupt NY 2013
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Joey Hinson
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Disrupt is two days away… and we’ve put together an array of awesomeness with our partners to make your event experience better. We’ve done a little pivot with our app for Disrupt NY. We’ve invited to be our partner this year. This web app brings a whole new universe of networking capabilities to the Disrupt community. For starters, it’s plugged right into Eventbrite. Once you’ve registered for the event, you’ll get a neat little invitation to join the Disrupt community. After you’re signed up, you’ll be able to see who is attending the conference, message other attendees, schedule meetings in our 1-1 meeting rooms, participate in conference discussions, view the agenda, receive updates instantaneously regarding the conference, and check out a list of sponsors. You can find the web app . And the great thing is, you can access the community after the conference. So, if you can’t find that business card that will change your life, you can just log in to the app and search for the attendee. has offered Disruptors $10 off of rides to and from the Manhattan Center. Now our friends at Uber are geniuses and have geo-fenced the discount, so don’t try to take an Uber from New York to Niagara Falls and expect a $10 discount! By entering Code into your app or online at m.uber.com, you’ll be good to go. Please note that the code must be entered before the first ride is taken in order to receive the savings. And, for all you first-time users of Uber you’ll get a whopping 25 bucks off your first ride with this code: “ . If you’re an armchair Disruptor, thanks to you’ll be able to view the conference action from the . You can follow and comment on the conference in the twittersphere using the #TCDisrupt hashtag. has long been a TechCrunch partner. If you purchased a ticket, you used Eventbrite. We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, please go do that Perkins Coie is our official Legal Counsel for Startup Alley. What does that mean? It means that Startup Alley and Battlefield companies at Disrupt are entitled to schedule 1-1 meetings with attorneys from Perkins Coie to get courtesy legal advice. Like, get your corporate charter done now. Or set yourself up for an epic IP battle that will dwarf the patent wars of Samsung and Apple by getting your ideas legally protected. You know who you are. Don’t forget to sign up. We’d like to extend a special thanks to for providing rehearsal space to our Battlefield companies. , we’d like to thank – they provide all of the graphics and printed signs for your viewing pleasure. Plus there’s a guy there, Alexander Tsoukias. You’ve been enjoying his Disruptive work since the infancy of TechCrunch Disrupt. We drive him crazy, but he still loves us. Alexander, you’re the best.
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Google’s Neal Mohan On The Keys To Bringing Brand Advertisers Online
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, said that his “top priority” for 2013 is to bring brand advertising online in a big way. I interviewed Mohan as part of the preparation for , where we’ll discuss the ad landscape with Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s product director for ads, and Kevin Weil, Twitter’s senior director of revenue products. During our Q&A we covered Google’s relationship with brand marketers, mobile and multi-screen advertising, and that Google’s Active View metric, which measures whether an ad was actually viewed (not just served), has been accredited by the Media Rating Council. So, how do you plan to get all those brand advertising dollars online? Yes, brand advertising is really a big area of focus for us. From my perspective, it’s certainly my top priority for the year. The reason for it is, as I said to you before, a lot of digital media across all of these different channels whether it’s display, search, etc., has been very much about performance advertising to date. And brand marketing, measured in terms of television, is really a $200 billion opportunity that the digital part of the universe hasn’t cracked. I would say that the challenge has been that we haven’t really had the technology to do that in the past. So in terms of really cracking that nut on behalf of our advertisers and agency partners, we’re focused on the handful of things: First, making sure that we give the right canvas to our advertisers for them to be able to tell a story. And what that means is doubling down on formats like video. The TrueView format, which is the skippable ad format, now represents something like 75 percent of the ads on YouTube. TrueView is a format that kind of aligns all of the parties’ interests — advertisers don’t have to pay if the users aren’t interested, users can skip the ad if it’s a boring ad. That’s the first big area of focus as it relates to brands. The other that I would call out in terms of formats — we’re not just stopping at video. How do we actually make other types of creatives rich and interactive. You may have run across something called which combines the best of customizable creativity with true scale. And it starts off in a standard 300-by-250 display space. If the user hovers over the ad for a few seconds, it expands into a canvas that gives the advertiser 100 percent share of voice in that space. The advertiser doesn’t pay until the user has engaged and expanded that ad — this notion of a cost-per-engage model is definitely something that we’re reinvested in very heavily. The third thing that I would hit on is, there’s obviously this buzzword that it’s the year of mobile. But given where the traffic is shifting, if you’re building for mobile, you’re really building for today. What you need to build for is multi-screen. As consumers, we don’t live on mobile or desktop; we truly live seamlessly across all of these screens. So we’ve made all types of formats and inventory available seamlessly on our exchange. And then the final thing that I’ll hit on — which I think is the most important thing — is measurement. That’s a big area of focus for us. You may have heard me say that I think a full third of all campaigns will be measured with something beyond the impression or click. Our announcement is that has been accredited by the MRC. The idea there is that instead of managing our campaigns in terms of impressions or clicks, we manage in terms of viewable impressions. Why is that certification significant? The most important thing is that it’s something that can now be applied as a standard for the industry. For all of our measurement efforts, our belief is that anything that we do is not something that Google can do on its own. We’re working hand-in-hand with the IAB in terms of defining what the standards of viewability are, we’re helping define those standards. Now that we have the MRC stamp of approval, it’s something they can start to transact media on. It’s not a technology that sits outside the tools and the platforms that they use today. It’s built in natively as a first-class citizen. If you’re an advertiser, now that it’s accredited by the MRC, you can negotiate a deal with the publisher. Similarly, if you’re a publisher, you can sell viewable impressions for perhaps a higher price than you see in the rest of ecosystem. How does this apply outside of Google? We’re building this into our entire DoubleClick suite, and there are many publishers who are using it outside of just buying on Google. To the extent that DoubleClick is the operating system for the industry above-and-beyond just Google, we’re building natively into that stack. Your comments suggest that when it comes to bringing brand dollars online, regular banner ads aren’t enough. I think the question around banners versus beyond banners is kind of beside the point. At the end of the day, the way that the creative shows up is the last step in the entire process. There’s all kinds of things that brands think about beforehand, which is, “How do I reach the right audience? How do I give that audience interactive that’s relevant for them? How do I incorporate user choice?” Whether you can do that in a banner is, in my mind, not the main question that brands are asking themselves. But if the question is, is a static banner going to be the thing that works for brands, my answer there is that of course they’re going to want opportunities to expand out of that real estate. What do you think about native advertising? I think that it’s something that’s interesting, something that should be part of this overall story. I don’t think it’s something that’s different or isolated from something I just talked about. Whether it’s something that starts from a banner, something that’s a sponsored story within a more native environment, brands want to connect with the audience and measure the efficacy of their campaigns. Native advertising, as it’s described today to me, feels like another flavor of what I just described. If you’re right and we’re finally going to start seeing that big brand advertising transition, how quickly do you think the shift will happen? The conversation so far has been extremely positive. Brands themselves have been the ones that tell us that you need to address these pieces. The adoption stats around things like TrueView, the adoption of engagement ads, those types of things, is pretty profound. From a brand standpoint, I think 98 percent of the top 100 brands are working with us in one of these different areas I think that if you were to ask me where we are, if this was a baseball game, I would say it’s like the first or second pitch of the first inning. I’ve been with the display business since the very early days. It’s going to happen a lot faster than people think. From a Google standpoint, we’re excited to work with our publishers and agency partners to crack it.
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Tumblr’s David Karp Gets Down To Business At TechCrunch Disrupt NY
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Ch – ch – ch- changes! The six-year-old media startup is going through quite a few right now, namely focusing on in its product efforts — enabling a promoted post feature in addition to launching mobile ads. The company is for a “Sheryl Sandberg-type” COO, amidst a series of and layoffs. Business Insider confirmed this with Tumblr board member and Sequoia , who will take the stage with founder David Karp at next week to talk about Tumblr’s future and perhaps even announce the COO new hire (we hope!). In any case, the talk will probably be illuminating after a week filled with tough but optimistic decision-making, “The team usually walks out of those meetings feeling a little beat up. But your best teachers were probably your hardest teachers. Your best coaches were your hardest coaches,” Botha BI. Karp and Botha join our of Disrupt NY that currently includes , , , , , and . . Worth it.
Founder, Tumblr founder David Karp was born and raised in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science before dropping out at age 15. An internship at Frederator Studios led to a gig leading product at UrbanBaby. When CNET acquired the company in 2005, Karp started his own development agency, Davidville. In 2007 his team launched Tumblr, now the home and platform for more than 100 million creators. As a top 15 US network, Tumblr serves an audience of more than 170 million people worldwide.
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These Guys Are Selling Their Private Photo-Sharing App Divvy From The Back Of A VW Bus
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Bootstrapping founders, Jeremy Greenfield and Kayvon Olomi, have taken a non-traditional route to marketing their new photo aggregation and sharing application, . They’ve hopped into a 1973 VW camper bus and are on a cross-country road trip to tour colleges around the U.S., in an attempt to get the word out about the privacy options their app allows. They left April 1st from Tulsa, and are now in the New York tri-state area, with plans to hit up Boston, MIT, Harvard, and more, before heading to Denver in three weeks. Olomi, who’s also the founder of app development marketplace , says he built Divvy to scratch a few of his own itches: the hassles of moving between Facebook and Instagram to follow his friends’ photos, the inability to zoom in on Instagram photos, and the inability to save those photos. But he also thinks that more private photo sharing is something today’s younger users want. A desire for more private socializing has of course fueled the rise of messaging apps and new twists on photo-sharing, as with the “disposable” photo and video sharing on Shapchat, for example. But penetrating the space as a newcomer is always tough. That’s why Divvy starts off by selling itself as a photo aggregator first and foremost. Today, the app pulls in the feeds from Facebook and Instagram, with plans to support Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Dropbox in the future. You can not only view your friends photos, but also like and comment on them using Divvy. This isn’t an entirely novel concept, since many apps and services have offered the combined albums experience, including Dropbox acquisition Snapjoy, Shutterfly acquisition ThisLife, Picturelife, Woven, Everpix, and even those not focused only on photos, like Flipboard, for example. What Divvy does differently is add its own photo-sharing features to the mix. Like a mini-social network of its own, friends can share photos to all their followers on Divvy, share selectively with individuals or groups, or share with nearby Divvy users – even if they don’t have their contact information. The nearby photo thing has been tried before too – with Color, most notably – but also with more options like Evertale’s Wink. It’s a use case that doesn’t quite seem capable of supporting a standalone application of its own, so it makes sense for Divvy to sideline this as an option, not as the key feature. Divvy’s app today is lacking polish, with a design that gives it a more utilitarian feel than a social app should have. It needs to work on the layout, where there are too many buttons and places to look. It should streamline things a bit. But there’s an idea here which makes sense – and not just for the college students they’re selling it to from the back of a bus – but for anyone who wants to share photos more selectively with others. .
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 19 | null |
Even After Hacks And Bombings, Privacy Advocates Have Big Week In Congress
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
In light of the AP’s and a vicious domestic bombing, Americans have not let fear derail privacy legislation. Just this week, the Senate advanced an anti-email snooping law and the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is reportedly on its way to the grave. It appears that the burden of proof has shifted to proponents of government surveillance, and they’ve been conspicuously silent about how spying will keep Americans safe. , which gives immunity to Internet companies for sharing sensitive data with law enforcement, will reportedly not be taken up for a vote in the Senate. “We’re not taking [CISPA] up,” a representative from the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation , “Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we’re going to strengthen cybersecurity. They’ll be drafting separate bills.” After wavering support from Facebook and other high-profile Internet companies, the White House threatened to veto the bill , most likely to ambiguous definitions of what constitutes a cyber “threat” and how agencies would be kept honest. – The 1970’s law that permits security agencies to access emails opened or older than 180 days, is on its way to a privacy upgrade. Designed before users kept their email indefinitely in the cloud (i.e. Gmail), a few high-level privacy breaches, the unearthing of General David Petraeus’s romantic affair, have created overwhelming demand to overhaul the antiquated law. Today, an to require a warrant before reading emails was voted on by voice, which means there wasn’t even enough opposition among the Judiciary committee members for a debate. Staff members inside the House of Representatives, where the bill will go if it passes the senate, tell me that there also isn’t much opposition to the reforms on their side of Congress, and that a by Rep. Zoe Lofgren ( : A) could very well be combined with the Senate’s version for a streamlined change (yes, occasionally things are efficient in Congress). Even after the AP’s Twitter account to spread a rumor about an explosion at the White House and two American men successfully detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon, there’s no reason to believe that either CISPA or ECPA would have kept Americans safer. Even President Obama’s freak-everyone-out op-ed last year urging cyber security legislation couldn’t muster more than hypotheticals. “Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials…Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies that operate most of our transportation, water and other critical infrastructure systems. Fortunately, last month’s scenario was just a simulation,” he in a largely unconvincing imaginary example to prove why we needed enhanced surveillance. As for the Boston bombers, American and Russian authorities had them. At any level, it appears to be an internal slip up, which neither data from their email nor Facebook pages would have helped prevent. On the other hand, privacy advocates have had some very tangible close calls. It appears the least liked government agency in the country, the Internal Revenue Service, on the emails of suspected tax dodgers. While I’m not convinced email and social media privacy necessarily outweigh very real terrorist threats, the burden is on the government to prove it needs a bigger spy glass. Ironically, if the government wants the American people to be more supportive of surveillance, they’ll need to be more transparent.
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Travel Startup AnyRoad Tries To Provide Anything But Your Typical Travel Tour
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Two years ago, I had a terrible experience at the Great Wall when I visited its most popular corridor in Badaling. Trapped between tens of thousands of local tourists for miles upon miles one scorchingly humid August day, I eventually managed to get off by riding a roller coaster down the Great Wall that ended up in a bear park. Really! I’m not alone. co-founders Daniel and Jonathan Yaffe almost ended up doing the same thing, but they were smarter. They asked around and found out about remote parts of the wall where you could walk for miles without seeing another soul. It took hours to get there, but they got lucky and met a courteous taxi driver who showed them exactly what they wanted — that endless, breathtaking view of the crumbling Wall stretching for hundreds of miles into the distance. With that as inspiration, they decided that would offer custom tours to people in cities like Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Jerusalem, San Francisco and more. The Yaffe brothers have a colorful background. The older one, Jonathan, founded and was a principal of a charter school named in Tokyo for several years, while the younger one, Daniel, ran and sold a drinking magazine called and is releasing a book on whiskey later this year. Their technical co-founder Michalis Polakis is a former Soundcloud engineer. They say they’re not quite like , or other marketplaces for experiences, because they’re partnering with established tour guides and small companies instead of regular, everyday locals that want to give people experiences in their spare time. has 200 tours available through 150 guides so far in five countries. The average ticket price being about $180. These include experiences like a , which teaches people about the history of the dance and music or . About 80 percent of the company’s booking are from outside the U.S. In their two month beta, they said that bookings are tripling each month and more than 1 percent of visitors to the site book a tour. AnyRoad takes a 14 percent commission off each one. They had to meet with more than 3,000 tour guides throughout different countries over 18 months to figure out different pain points in the booking process. The challenges are, of course, about scaling. The strong existing online travel startups have really strong SEO strategies, and are easy to find atop any search for hotels or tours in different cities. The company said it’s focusing on unique distribution channels and other partnerships, without offering too many specifics. On the supply side, AnyRoad is basically a very customized CMS for tour guides. It’s a self-serve model although AnyRoad curates the marketplace and doesn’t let every potential tour onto the platform. They also verify the guides’ credentials for safety and trust. The startup is bootstrapped so far.
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Designer Builds 3D-Printed Headphones That Use No Manufactured Parts
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/63043066#] If the whole of human knowledge were to be wiped out tomorrow, how would you recreate the consumer electronics industry so you can jam out to some rockin’ tunes? Why you’d build these unique 3D-printed headphones. Except for some twists of wire, these cans consist of thin pieces of printed plastic and the speakers are actually plastic with a coil of copper wire embedded, by hand, into a set of tiny traces. Even the audio plug which consists of wire wrapped around a small plastic spindle. You can and print it yourself or marvel at how the creator, designer was able to use wire and plastic to build a pair of cans that actually work. He obviously had to source the wire and magnets (although, arguably, he could have dug the ore himself, right?) but the rest of the project is completely hand-designed and printed on the fly, an increasingly common feat with today’s 3D printers. The audio quality looks surprisingly good, all things considered, and the design is ingeniously primitive. Writes Karich: Sadly no one has reported actually being able to build these things yet on but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Who knows? Maybe this is the future: artisanal headphones.
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Eric Schmidt Is Right, Using Google Glass Is Weird — Here’s My Experience
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 4 | 26 |
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt he finds having to talk to Google Glass out loud to control the interface “the weirdest thing” and that there are going to be “places where Google Glass are inappropriate.” My own experience of trying out the device, even briefly, confirmed to me that this product simply will not become a mass-market device any time soon. Indeed, if it has any future at all it will be either in disappearing inside normal glasses, or solely used by industry. I can’t see it becoming as ubiquitous as the smartphone in any way, and here’s why. At a conference in Europe this week I briefly tried on a pair lent to me by an individual — who will remain nameless since Google has threatened to take back the Glass if they are used by someone other than the owner. Suffice to say the experience was quite odd. For starters you are staring straight into clear space, despite feeling like you are wearing glasses. But then there is this small screen hovering slightly above your line of sight and slightly to the right. So you can’t flick your eye up directly, but up and slightly to the right. It’s not a natural movement, which implies Google Glass may need to be personally adjusted to the individual. A friend – who wears contact lenses – who tried out the Glass for a full 10 minutes complained of an hour-long headache afterwards from having to look up at the screen. Next up is using your voice to do various commands like “Take a picture.” If you have someone standing in front of you, this is extremely odd. Suddenly they are cut out of the conversation and you’re talking to the Glass. This is very unlike being able to check something on your smartphone while you are chatting casually to someone. The latter feels quite normal, but performing similar operations while wearing Google Glass would seem downright rude in front of someone. Ultimately this suggests to me that Google Glass will be incapable of being used socially. Okay, people in the tech world may use it socially and wander around with them on at conferences Googling each other. But it’s my belief that ‘normal’ people will not. In part this was suggested by Andrew Keen onstage at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. His point is that there is “no permission” given when the person in front of you is brandishing Google Glass. He’s right, and I can see most people asking the person to remove their Glass before conducting a civil conversation. You just don’t see that happening when two people with smartphones start talking. Where I can see Google Glass working is in activities where you require both hands to be free. Skiing down a mountain filming, using the Glass like you would a GoPro camera, for instance. And in industrial applications – building and manufacturing, yes, I can see this would work very well: “Show House Plans” for instance, would be a great command for a building app. And you can see the police suddenly thinking of a few useful applications. But not in everyday interactions just walking around. But the technology itself? Well, if it does disappear inside normal glasses perhaps it has a chance. But once again, interrupting a conversation with someone to interrogate it? We’ll have to rethink thousands of years of human interaction, and that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. So Google Glass for me will be this era’s Segway: hyped as a game changer but ultimately used by warehouse workers and mall cops.
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Google Now, Donna, Sherpa, And The Rise Of The Smart Personal Assistant App
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 21 |
Mobile personal assistant apps are all the rage these days. First there was Google Now for Android, but over the last several weeks we’ve seen a whole bunch of new apps pop up — apps like , , and — all of which seek to make our lives easier by simplifying how we organize our meetings, travel, and other personal information. With that in mind, I sat down with my colleague Drew Olanoff to discuss why this is such a hot space and whether these apps deliver on their promise. On that latter question, we still think these apps have a long way to go. As Drew says, all the technology is there — and yet, no one has really pulled it all together in a way that makes these apps truly smart. There’s also the issue of finding an app that fits everyone’s lifestyle. As he points out, his personal workflow is different from mine. Finding a way to make a personal assistant that suits everyone’s needs is a difficult process. As for me? I like what I’ve seen so far from apps like Donna or Osito, but I don’t want an app that I have to enter information into to make things work. I want something that will scour my email and calendars, figure out where and when things are happening, and then from that information plan my calendar for me. No one quite comes close right now. Check out the video above for our discussion on the topic, and let us know what you think in the comments.
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Smack Attack Makes Sweet Music By Connecting Your Car’s Steering Wheel And Your iPhone
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 21 |
My car’s steering wheel has taken a beating because of the all the lousy drum fills I’ve banged out on it over the years, and at least one entrepreneur thinks that experience could use a little bit of improvement. Gregor Hanuschak (who, in a previous life, worked for NASA) has put together a Kickstarter project for the , an in-car gadget that lets users make those steering wheel drum solos a bit more substantial. Here’s the project in a nutshell: the Smack Attack system consists of two separate parts, a steering wheel cover and an app for the iOS device of your choosing. Once that wheel cover is connected to your iDevice via Bluetooth, wannabe Ringo Starrs out there can trigger preloaded drum samples in the app thanks to eight pressure sensors that are nestled snugly inside the fabric of the cover. Naturally, you’ll also be able to customize the samples that get triggered so you can swap out that snare drum for a Wookiee bellow (because, you know, why not?). Oh, and in the event you’re not traveling alone, the app allows for other would-be drummers to jam at the same time… which could spell disaster for your trip depending on how talented your companions are. As downright silly as the project seems (just take a look at this , for heaven’s sake), Hanuschak is actually trying to tackle a real problem — that tendency for drivers to space out during long stretches at the wheel. By giving drivers something right in their hands to focus on, Hanuschak hopes that the Smack Attack will keep them from making some potentially deadly errors. Of course, one could argue that sticking a musical toy on a steering wheel presents some safety concerns of its own, so it goes without saying that the Smack Attack isn’t the right gadget for everyone. Hanuschak is looking to raise a whopping $200,000 to bring the steering wheel cover/app combo to market by the end of the year, and (assuming you’re a responsible driver) you’ll be able to claim your own in-car music maker for $149.
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Facebook Home Hits 500K Downloads In Five Days, Pales In Comparison To Instagram’s Android Shift
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 21 |
It would appear that Facebook Home has just surpassed 500k downloads on Google Play since launching on the platform on April 16. The app’s Google Play listing notes the milestone, and confirmed on Twitter. Facebook Home isn’t so much of an app as a user interface for the phone, putting Facebook smack dab in the center of Android users’ smartphone experience. Users with Facebook Home can post status updates and view the newsfeed straight from the lock screen, and conduct messaging without ever being interrupted, thanks to . In essence, it’s Facebook’s push past being an app like every other app and being a central force of the smartphone, a launch pad. Hopes are seriously high, as foreshadowed by Zuckerberg’s sweaty brow at the announcement, but word had originally circulated that users around launch day. Clearly, that’s not true as the app has garnered over 100,000 downloads a day since launch. Still, these aren’t blow-out numbers. Remember when and hit over 1 million downloads in a day? And then hit over 5 million downloads in six days? Yeah. Those were blow-out numbers. You also have to consider that Facebook has over a billion users, so 500K doesn’t really move the needle. But in Facebook’s defense, the Home application is only available on , including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, HTC One X, and the HTC One X+, along with the Facebook Phone, the HTC First. Oh, and Facebook is now quite happy for Instagram’s success on Android after that slight $1 billion acquisition.
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How Will We Define A “Good” Google Glass Experience?
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 21 |
Google Glass is getting closer and closer to becoming a shipping product. It’s already making its way out to early “Explorer” program pre-launch testers, and we’ll almost definitely see a lot more from Glass at Google I/O in mid-May. Drew already , and provided some useful insight about how it operates, and how it might be useful as someone goes about their average day, but Glass, and how we think about its level of success or failure as a consumer product, are still big question marks. It’s too early to do a review of what Google has already made available, and that’s fine; this isn’t for sale yet, so no one out there is mulling the value of dropping something like $1000 on a pair as of yet. But when it does come time to evaluate Glass, there’s going to be very little to compare it to, and plenty of challenges in terms of making a judgement call about how useful it is or isn’t to the average potential buyer. An analogous experience might be the iPad, and its first round of reviews and impressions. People had created tablets before, including some aimed at the general consumer, but for the most part there was a lot of confusion about what to make of the product. TUAW recently put together a of reactions to the original iPad that show most people were left scratching their heads. And Glass is a step beyond even what we saw with the iPad, and likely to generate even more skepticism and uncertainty. Apps and what third-party developers do with Google Glass will be a big part of how it’s received, because even based on recent statements made by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt at the conference this past week. Schmidt’s own comments about how he uses Google Glass didn’t exactly set the imagination alight, and mostly centered around basic functionality we’ve already seen. Being able to snap photos and check things like incoming messages definitely seems interesting, but it also doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary. That’s where a variety of third-party experiences will really help out. The problem with trying to provide an evaluation of Google Glass will be the same one with trying to provide a first impression or early review of the iPad: it involves a certain amount of trying to predict the future. With the iPad, at least we had the iPhone as a loose guide about where things might be headed in terms of third-party software experiences. With Glass, we’ll be charting almost entirely new waters with even less to navigate by. Not to say we shouldn’t try, just that five years down the road, the comparison of where Glass ends up compared to how we perceived it initially will probably be equally as amusing as the retrospective look at the iPad’s launch linked to above. Will Glass be judged as good based on its ability to entertain? Its power to keep our smartphones in our pockets? Its ability to deliver real-time information when we need it most? It could easily be all of the above. One thing’s for sure: trying to evaluate what is and isn’t a “good” Glass experience will be one of the more exciting undertakings the tech world has seen in a long while.
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For Developers, Google Glass Looks To Be A Fascinating But Slightly Limited Platform
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 21 |
Last week, Google finally the and other necessary documents that will allow developers to write apps for . In some respects, the so-called Mirror API may have been to developers who were expecting to run full-blown augmented-reality apps, but even in its current form, it will allow developers to create new experiences for their new and existing apps that just weren’t possible before. One thing many developers may not have realized before Google published these documents is that the API is essentially an old-school RESTful service. The only way to interact with Glass is through the cloud. The only apps you can build – at least for now – are web-based, and despite the fact that Glass runs Android, you can’t run any services directly on the hardware. Google may have made this choice for a number of reasons. It ensures that Glass’ battery life is reasonable (Google says it should last a full day, assuming you don’t record a lot of video), but this also means that if a service goes haywire and sends out a fresh cat picture to users every second, it can intervene and cut that service’s access off. Depending on how you look at this, that’s either a good or a bad thing, but Google is clearly interested in keeping over what’s happening on Glass for now. The way the API works, however, also means there are things you can’t quite do with Glass yet that are possible on any modern smartphone. You can’t write a real augmented-reality app, for example. It also doesn’t look as if you could easily stream audio or video from the device to your own services (though you can obviously use Hangouts on Glass). Because the platform is essentially web-based, you are also limited to HTML and CSS when it comes to styling your apps, and Google would prefer it if you didn’t write any custom CSS and just stuck . For the most part, though, developers will be able to approximate the experience Google shared in its first last year. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4?feature=player_detailpage] Assuming you have an Android phone, you will be able to create . Users can send images to your service (so you could build a service that manipulates or analyzes these images in the cloud and then sends the results back to the user) and upload videos, too (and in return, you can also send audio, video and photos to the user). What developers aren’t allowed to do (yet?), however, is to display advertising onto a user’s Glass screen or to sell their apps (unlawful gambling apps are also out of the question). Given the current size of the market for Glass apps, that’s not a huge issue. I expect that Google will allow developers to sell access to their apps in the future, but traditional ads just don’t make sense on this platform. Google stresses that Glass is still a very new platform and that developers should keep this in mind when they write applications for it. That’s also why only developers who own the actual hardware can currently get API access. For the time being then, developers will likely remain somewhat underwhelmed by the API. It’s worth remembering, however, that this is just a first release. Google could open the hardware up to more sophisticated apps in the future and/or enable access to more features through the current API. Without native apps, Glass won’t be able to do many things developers may have envisioned for it, but even with these limitations, I’m sure we’ll see a fair amount of innovative Glassware in the near future.
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Rhapsody Wasn’t Happy, So Open Source Music Service Napster.fm Changes Its Name To Peer.fm
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 21 |
Last week, to music services such as Rdio and Spotify, called Napster.fm. The name alone got our attention, and after using it, there were a few features that were reminiscent of its predecessor, which made it even cooler. Today, the service is changing its name to to steer clear of legal issues, since and , or whatever is left of it. Other than that, its been business as usual for its creator, Ryan Lester. Lester tell us that he’s had nearly 100k visitors to the site, with over 59,000 users actually trying out its features. Right now, nearly 1,500 users are registered and getting all of the benefits that come with that, including its social functionality that allows you to share tracks and playlists with friends. Most of the traffic is coming from outside of the United States, 64 percent, with areas of the world that don’t have access to Spotify bringing the heaviest users. We chatted with Lester about his project, which is noteworthy for its open-source nature. He told us that he’d love to make the service available to mobile users, but is focusing on translating the service for as many languages as possible: What has been the most used feature on the service thus far? Well, not surprisingly, just playing music. It’s looking like the more social-oriented features are starting to pick up some steam, but just the core music-playing functionality easily tops the rest in usage. There are a lot of music services out there. Why did people gravitate to yours? I think there are a few important reasons for this: 1. It’s definitely something cool and new that people into music will want to try at least once, and being open source earns a certain level of cachet and goodwill. 2. Despite still being in Beta, the quality of the software is definitely in the same league as that of its major competitors (e.g. Spotify, Google Music); on top of that, it adds a few unique features of its own like syncing music between users in real-time. 3. Napster had a cool social element which hadn’t really been precisely replicated by newer services until Peer.fm showed up. On a related note, I’m sure quite a few people use it out of nostalgia for the old Napster days. 4. In most of the world, there aren’t a ton of other options (just take a look at Spotify’s geographic availability sometime). 5. Being completely free definitely doesn’t hurt :). Are others asking to join and help you build out the open source project? Not a whole lot, but I have gotten a few code contributions for some minor display issues that would probably have taken me a couple of weeks to get to myself, and some offers to contribute to artwork and/or private testing in the future when necessary (which is really awesome to have willing volunteers for). Other than that, I’ve mainly had people email/text me about how psyched they are to have something like this released as open source. What features are you working on next? Top of my list in the short-term: language localization for non-English speakers; this is way too important to ignore with 64 percent of my traffic originating from outside the U.S. Outside of that, the major features at the top of my queue are multiple playlist support (as opposed to having only one massive library) and the ability to import music collections from other sources (especially iTunes). More long-term, I’ll be looking to extend Peer.fm support for mobile devices, but I really couldn’t give any kind of time estimate on that at the moment.
——— By being open source, Lester can keep building out the features that the community wants, as well as allow others to jump into the code themselves. In the same way that WordPress got traction from developers who had a pure love for publishing, Peer.fm could attract a similar following and involvement for music. Don’t be fooled though, the service isn’t paying for the music its streaming, and neither are the users, which will definitely make it a target for shutdown. The open source nature of it means that it can be re-opened in minutes, though. As we reported before, the way that the music is pulled in is due to “minor inefficiencies in YouTube’s piracy-detection system,” which haven’t seem to have been closed up yet. If that were to happen, then the project could be in jeopardy. However, I honestly believe that at some point, there will be an open source alternative to iTunes and Spotify, something that indie musicians can get behind and have a part in building. Once it attracts a few larger artists, then it could be a force to be reckoned with. Could be ? It’s the only reason that I heard the name “Rhapsody” in the past three years, so that counts for something, right?
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