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This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Moto X, Locks, And Austin
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
TechCrunch is in Austin this week for some excellent pitch-offs and BBQ. We also learned of the new Moto X, a secret phone that could change Motorola’s fortunes, the , and the new iPod. It’s one of our only live shows done with three members of the team in the same room and features Jordan Crook, Matt Burns, and John Biggs as Sir Sweatsalot. 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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Connecting Offline Shopping With E-Commerce, Curebit Partners With Bonobos On New “Retail Referrals” Program
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
, an e-commerce startup that has built its business around optimizing and tracking word-of-mouth referrals for customers like Bonobos, Restaurant.com, Jawbone, True & Co., and others, is now stepping into the world of offline brick-and-mortar commerce with a new solution it’s calling “Retail Referrals.” This new in-store program, being trialed in a half-dozen , encourages shoppers to “tell a friend” about their purchase after checkout in order to earn additional store credit if the friend buys using the provided discount code. Despite a start, Curebit now has a couple thousand customers including about 18 enterprise customers worldwide using its solutions, which have historically been focused on driving and tracking referrals for e-commerce businesses. The company up to 25 percent of new customers for Bonobos during referral campaigns in 2012, and helped the retailer change its referral strategy from Facebook to email, which Curebit found was converting better. Now the plan is to help retailers marry their offline operations with online — two channels that are often at war with each other within these organizations. “This is very applicable to major, classic ‘old-school’ retailers right now, which are very concerned with the transition [from offline to online]. A lot their sales are still happening offline right now — 90 to 95 percent,” explains Curebit’s co-founder and CEO . “And in a lot of ways, they’re basically fighting between their offline and online channels.” The new Retail Referrals program could help retailers use their heavy offline traffic to support their online operations, and vice versa. Trials are now underway at all six Bonobos Guideshop locations. (Its are stores where people can try on the clothing in real life, then purchase items in-store via iPads using Bonobos’ e-commerce site). These include New York, Bethesda, Chicago, D.C., San Francisco and Boston locations. After checkout, the store clerk explains how the referral program works, and asks the customer if they would like to share an offer with friends via email. They can then do so directly on the iPad. Of course, most major retailers don’t have iPads at point-of-sale (well, yet?), but the system can be customized through Point-of-Sale integrations which could have a URL printed on receipts, for example, or could include codes emailed to customers after first collecting their information at checkout. The promotions offered are up the retailer, but Curebit is heavily involved in that process, having transitioned away from being a pure technology play to something of an agency model where it helps retailers with everything from copywriting to design for the promotions to assistance in understanding what types of promotions will work for that business and why. Its offline referrals system is flexible enough, allowing customers to give discounts to friends through SMS, email, social media, or even just providing them with special discount codes or short URLs they can share as needed. While in the Bonobos experiment, it’s likely going to work fairly well, given the heavy technology presence with in-store iPads, a salesforce whose main goal is to support an e-commerce website, and the company’s close working relationship with Curebit, in more traditional retail stores, having salespeople tell shoppers, “ ,” for example, hasn’t always been too successful – just ask those running post-purchase surveys that tend to have low single-digit response rates at best. Still, with surveys, there’s often no benefit to the customer, not to mention that surveys are tedious and time-consuming. Giving a friend a discount that could later pay off in the form of store credit is something that the team at Curebit thinks consumers will be more likely to do. “It doesn’t feel like a coupon code, it feels like free money,” says Grant of the promotions the stores will offer their customers. “Here, you feel like you’ve earned it – your friend bought, you got this as a reward. This is valuable,” he adds. The offline referrals program is a high-level, enterprise offering and will be priced depending on integration requirements and other factors beginning around $30,000 per month.
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Aiming To Make You More Productive, Focus@Will Launches A Music App For iOS
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
I’ve always been impressed by people who can listen to music while they write. I mean, I’ll do it every once in a while, especially when is being particularly distracting, but in general I’ve found that music just slows me down. Well, there’a startup called aiming to solve that problem, and today it’s following the launch of its website and Android app with the release of . Founder and CEO Will Henshall seems uniquely positioned to work on something like this. He founded music tech company Rocket Network and also created the audio media transfer system DigiDelivery, which he sold to Avid/Digidesign in 2003. But he’s also a professional musician and songwriter, having been one of the founding members of the band and one of the writers on their hit songs “I’ve Been Thinking About You” and “Come Back.” Henshall told me that most music is designed to delight and distract you — those are worthy goals, but they’re not exactly the best combination when it comes to productivity. Focus@will, on the other hand, has licensed tracks that were chosen specifically to distract you, and in fact to help you focus. That means no tracks with vocals, saxophones, or other things that focus@will has tested and found distracting. Henshall said that’s not quite the same thing as just playing elevator music, which people have learned how to ignore entirely. Here’s a little more info on how it works : The focus@will system makes it easier for you to get into the concentration flow, and then keeps you there. It works in the background by subtly soothing the part of your brain, the limbic system, that is always on the lookout for danger, food, sex or shiny things. … Each piece of music phase sequenced by focus@will has a specific role in influencing how your brain habituates, enhancing your focus and reading enjoyment. Characteristics such as musical key, intensity, arrangement, speed, emotional values, recording style, and much more determine what is played where and when. If you’re a little dubious about the science, there’s more detail and more citations on the site. For what it’s worth, I’ve been listening to focus@will while I work this morning, and while I haven’t noticed a dramatic increase in productivity or anything, I do feel like I think I went a solid hour without getting distracted, which is kind of a miracle. When you’re listening to the app, you can choose from different channels like Cinematic, Ambient, and Classical. You can also skip songs, which will give the app more information about what works and doesn’t work for you. There’s no advertising. Instead, there’s a three-week free trial period — after that, you can only listen for 100 minutes at a time or you have to pay a subscription fee of $3.99 per month for unlimited access. As for , Henshall said it’s pretty similar to the web and Android versions, except that it has been optimized for iOS hardware and supports both portrait and landscape mode, plus it uses so that the audio settings get automatically adjusted based on what’s playing. I also asked whether Henshall had any trepidation about putting his name on the company, and he replied, “I’ve gotta tell you, it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want to be that guy, you know?” However, he realized that “being able to focus at will, being able to control your own life” is the key to the company’s vision. Focus@will is backed by the Pritzker Foundation and Singularity University.
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Amazon Updates Route 53 DNS Service To Make Hosting High-Availability Sites On EC2 Easier
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
Thanks to an to its , Amazon now makes it a bit easier to host sites that need high availability in multiple AWS regions. Route 53 has been offering since February, but that wasn’t really an option if your application was also running behind Amazon’s (ELB) service. ELB allows you to traffic across EC2 instances. Route 53’s failover service needs to be able to check a specific IP address for availability, but that didn’t work with apps behind ELB because they don’t have a fixed IP address in Amazon’s architecture. Now, however, Amazon has a new feature to Route 53 that allows it to check up on the health of an application on EC2 that runs behind ELB. Route 53 can now, in Amazon’s words, evaluate “the health of the load balancer itself and the health of your application running on the EC2 instances behind it.” If any part of the architecture goes down, Route 53 will detect this issue and simply route traffic to the next available ELB endpoint. Thanks to this, Amazon says, you can run your primary application in multiple AWS regions around the world. The service will automatically remove any region where the application isn’t available. Here is Amazon’s description for . Another nifty feature DNS Failover allows for is to route traffic to a backup site hosted on Amazon’s S3 storage service, which makes it easy to . If all else fails, you can always route your traffic there, after all, and at least give users an update as to when they can expect the full site to come back up again.
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Two Years After TweetDeck Acquisition, Founder Iain Dodsworth Leaves Twitter
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth that he’s leaving Twitter. In his tweet, Dodsworth said that it’s been , and “now feels like a perfect time to start something new.” Dodsworth’s departure comes as Twitter’s vision for TweetDeck does seem to be shifting. A few months ago, the iPhone, Android, and AIR versions. There are still native Windows and Mac apps, but the company has suggested that the web version will be its focus going forward. Naturally, today’s news has prompted more speculation and handwringing about TweetDeck’s future. For example, Reuters social media editor/incoming Circa editor-in-chief Anthony De Rosa that the news made him “fear even more for @TweetDeck.” But Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager of news, that TweetDeck has a new product manager, Sharath Bulusu from the Guardian (whose hiring was ago). “We do realize how important it is,” Anderson said. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment further on the news. Also, .
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 9 | null |
The Transit App Nabs 35K Downloads In 72 Hours, Blows Past Google Maps In Canadian App Store After Going Free
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
The , the app that provides real-time transit information on iOS, enjoyed a boost back when Apple cut transit out of its own Maps app during the switch from Google to its own in-house navigation and mapping service. Earlier this week, the app went completely free and offered some great updates, including real-time estimates of wait times at stops for select markets, and now it’s seeing another big spike in demand. The Transit app has accrued over 35,000 downloads in the 72 hours since releasing their version two app for free, to general praise from reviewers and customers alike. That download spike has also helped the app’s ranking in Apple’s mobile software marketplace, propelling it to #4 in the U.S. Navigation category charts, and driving it up to #12 overall and #1 in Navigation on the Canadian store. Transit says it has over 20,000 active daily users, and that number is likely to increase as it has already loaded on a bunch of new users. Transit is part of Montreal-based accelerator FounderFuel’s current cohort, and FounderFuel’s GM Ian Jeffrey says that they’re happy to see the app really “catching fire” since introducing this update, which represents a considerable change in strategy for the app. Transit initially launched as a free title, but was supported by recurring subscriptions to gain access to its services. Now all features are available for all users without any charge. Transit co-founder and CEO Sam Vermette said in a statement around the version 2.0 launch that the decision to make it free was intended to help it continue to grow in international markets, and to help it secure a position as essentially the default choice for users looking for public transit directions on iOS. The Maps revamp earlier this year opened up a big hole there, and while the arrival of the standalone Google Maps app in the App Store threatened to close that gap, Transit clearly isn’t keen on giving up so easily.
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Lyft Hits The East Coast With A Launch In Boston, Its First Big Post-Funding Expansion City
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
Last week, peer-to-peer ride-sharing startup announced that it had raked in a huge amount of new funding, . Along with that funding, the company said it would be looking to aggressively expand its peer-to-peer ride service with launches across the country and even globally. The first new market to bear the fruits of that expansion is Boston. The launch in Boston will put Lyft on the East Coast for the first time since the startup launched its ride-sharing service about a year ago. The company is now in five markets altogether, including its home city of San Francisco, as well as expansion markets Los Angeles, Seattle and, most recently, Chicago. The company claims it is just at the beginning of a global expansion, and will be ramping up more launches over the coming weeks and months. That big funding round, as well as the — try saying that three times fast — should help accelerate all that. But the planned expansion is not without its challenges. Lyft, for those who don’t know, has a mobile app that connects passengers who need a ride with drivers who have a car (and some spare time). By doing so, the company is providing a service that is generally more reliable than calling a cab but slightly less expensive than booking an Uber. At the same time, Lyft is operating a service that falls outside the regulatory structure of most local jurisdictions. “Community” drivers from services like Lyft and competitor SideCar aren’t licensed in the same way that taxi or black car drivers are — which, to put it bluntly, usually pisses off local taxi and black car drivers, not to mention their lobbyists and regulators. That could be a point of contention in Boston, where local regulators have already had run-ins with Uber. Last summer, the on-demand car startup , apparently because the state had no guidelines in place for using GPS technology, which Uber relies on for picking up passengers and determining fares. The after a social media campaign by Uber and some intervention on the part of the governor’s office. For what it’s worth, ride-sharing opponent , apparently without incident. That’s good news on the regulatory front, but could signal even greater competition in that market. That’s because Uber, which has been , has committed to competing with Lyft and SideCar by in any market where local regulators have given “tacit approval” of those types of services. In other words, if regulators haven’t tried to crack down on ride sharing or community drivers after 30 days, Uber will enter the fray. With all that in mind, Lyft could have its hands full in Boston. Nevertheless, the company continues to push forward, with a “friends and family” launch in Boston today, and a full launch to all users beginning Saturday morning at 9:00.
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LightUp Helps Kids Learn Electronics With Augmented Reality
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 |
Understanding electronics is tricky. Electricity is invisible, the components are cryptic, and the concepts are hard to grasp. That’s where LightUp comes in. This is an AR-based system for teaching electronics by allowing kids to build little projects and “see” what the components are doing using augmented reality. The projects snap together with magnets and you can send juice through the circuit to light up LEDs and turn on buzzers. However, when you take a picture of the circuit with your phone, LightUp adds animated lines to show you what the electricity is doing. While it’s not particularly useful for simple circuits – there’s not much going on – it’s particularly cool in that it tells you when your diodes are aligned wrong or your transistors aren’t working. For $99 you can get a mini kit that includes an Arduino micro-controller as well as variable resistors, light sensors, and LEDs. A $39 kit offers considerably fewer parts but can be used to make a “morse code buzzer, night light, dimmer switch, [or] lunch box alarm.” I personally, could use the lunch box alarm to keep the kids out of my jellybean container. LightUp is . The project has a few competitors, including but the AR capabilities really sell this kit. Rather than focusing on blind experimentation, LightUp offers just a bit more in terms of STEM education.
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StartX, The Stanford-Affiliated Startup Accelerator, Kicks Off Spring 2013 Demo Day With 10 Company Debuts
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
the startup accelerator for companies founded by Stanford students, is just about to kick off in Palo Alto this evening. The non-profit StartX program, which was , aims to provide Stanford students with entrepreneurial ambitions the tools and connections they need to bridge the gap between dreaming of a concept and creating a real company. The organization has a solid track record: There have been four StartX companies acquired this year, so far, and seven total since the program’s 2010 launch. At this evening’s Demo Day, 10 companies are making their debuts, while five StartX alums will be returning to provide updates on their progress. There will be a slight change to the rhythm of tonight compared to other Demo Days. The 10 new companies are skipping the traditional five minute demo presentation and instead will be giving very, very brief pitches on stage, without any of the typical slide shows. This is to give more time for in-depth discussions with attendees at their respective stations in the room. StartX founder explained the change in an email to attendees RSVPed for this evening thusly: “Our goal is to make this a more personalized experience for both you and our founders. Since all our companies have the hockey-stick user growth and the $100 billion market slides to show you, this time we’ll get right to the good part. Founders from new StartX companies will briefly introduce themselves on stage at the start of the event and then they’ll be available at demo tables for the rest of the evening. This should give you more time to meet with the teams and learn about their technologies in a more personalized way.” It should be a refreshing shakeup for the typical scene that’s become de rigeur at Demo Days across Silicon Valley, and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s received — we’ll make sure to check back. For now, here is a rundown of the 10 companies set to debut for the first time this evening as part of StartX’s Spring 2013 class, with their own self-descriptions:
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With $200K In New Funding, Photo-Centric Rental App RadPad Comes To Austin
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
is one of those startups that comes from a founder’s real-world experience — specifically, Jonathan Eppers (a former product manager at eHarmony and Myspace) said that he was trying to find a new apartment in Los Angeles, and he was frustrated to discover that the process is still more complicated and painful that it needs to be. That was last summer. Fast forward a year and RadPad is getting ready to launch into Austin, Texas, its fourth market, and it has also raised $200,000 in funding. And while it launched as an iOS app, it just . But before we get to the new stuff, you may be wondering how RadPad actually fixed the issues that Eppers was complaining about. He said that his goal is to make the process as simple as possible on both sides. One of RadPad’s big differentiators is its emphasis on photos. (The site has been described as “ .”) Other sites certainly have photos, too, but RadPad really puts them front-and-center when it shows users listings, and it even requires that landlords include three photos to be listed. Users search the listings using a few simple drop-down menus, and it’s all location-based, so you can always open the app and see a map of available apartments nearby. It’s easy to upload those photos from mobile — Eppers said 35 percent of listings are posted directly from smartphones. The RadPad app has been downloaded 24,000 times, and around 2,500 L.A. renters open the app every day. College students are one of the big user groups, so it makes sense that RadPad is launching in Austin, too (its other markets are Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco). Here’s another reason for the Austin launch: One of RadPad’s investors is real estate company , which Eppers said owns thousands of units in Austin. When they first met to discuss the investment, Eppers said he was told, “Jon, you’ve got to look at Austin.” And indeed, he found a growing rental market with a hot tech scene and relatively little competition. The other investors include angel Tom McInerney, Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz, and Los Angeles accelerator Amplify. The company is looking to raise a larger round now, Eppers said. As for how RadPad plans to make money, Eppers said the service is currently free for both renters and landlords. Eventually, he wants to start charging for some premium landlord services. For example, they could start delivering push notifications to RadPad users who are near an available apartment. “We want to use technology to enhance the experience on both sides,” he said. You can .
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Apple’s New Product Strategy
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Apple appears to be on a kick of delivering product refreshes to punctuate its major release cycle, with changes to devices and tweaked versions that go beyond what it has done in terms of spec refreshes in the past. It looks like we could see a new era of light changes in direction to cater to market trends and optimize product viability under Tim Cook, which in many ways makes sense for a man known as a supply chain maestro. If you review all the mid-cycle changes Apple has made this year, you come up with a pretty long list. There’s the , which included new processors, is not really all that out of character; the company has been boosting internal specs on its Mac line for years. But the , the , and the which lacks a rear camera are all big changes to the way Apple generally operates those product cycles. All of these updates arrived with little fanfare, at least when compared to the lavish launch events Apple usually holds to trot out new hardware. At most they’ll get a press release, and in the case of some, like the iPod touch just launched today, they’ll simply update the online store. Press still flocks to these changes, regardless, and it’s true that they aren’t often ground-breaking enough to merit proper events, since they’d look paltry painted in that light. But the changes are a sign of a new commitment to continuous improvement, and one that seems like it could result in dramatic changes to how Apple views and operates its product release cycle. Tim Cook used to be Apple’s COO, and in that role he essentially helped Apple build one of the most effective and efficiently run supply chains in the history of supply chains. That meant that Apple seldom had any inventory costing it money by sitting around in warehouses, that incidences of error in the manufacturing process were drastically reduced, and that improvements and adaptations were made continually to help keep profit margins high. Likely Cook is still directly responsible for a lot of continued optimization in that area, but it makes sense that he would also bring those skills to bear on actual Apple products themselves, instead of just on their manufacturing process. The updates to the products mentioned above each constitute a specific optimization. In the case of the iPad, the storage bump helps it keep pace with other new-to-market devices including the Surface and better service education and enterprise users; with the iMac, it addresses the one big failing pointed out by reviewers of the iMac when comparing it to previous generations, and targets again business users; and with the iPod touch, it fills a gap in the company’s lineup, simplifies supply chain and makes it easier for developers to optimize their designs for screen sizes going forward. The new approach to Apple’s products appears to reflect a greater flexibility; thinks are more mutable than they were before Cook took the reins, if only just. There’s still the question of keeping fair of angering early purchasers of products, as someone who has bought an iPad four months prior doesn’t want to see a new model and regret their earlier decision, but for the most part, these upgrades look like very specific tweaks designed to expand a potential audience, not alienate an existing one. So long as that kind of precision refreshing continues, I think Apple stands to gain a lot from this modified approach to product development.
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SoftBank Capital Raises $50M To Invest Exclusively In New York Startups
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Good news, everyone! Well, everyone who’s trying to raise capital in New York, at least. , the investment arm of Japanese mega-carrier Softbank Corp., has just announced that they’ve raised $50 million that they plan to invest entirely into early-stage New York startups. This new New York fund will be headed by SoftBank Capital General Partner Jordy Levy, with the funds coming from the State Of New York itself in hopes that it’ll boost the startup ecosystem there. The one main rule of this new fund is that any company that gets investment from this fund has to call New York home — in fact, it sounds like they’ll mostly be focusing right on the core, New York City. This is actually the third super-focused chunk of funding that SoftBank has raised this year alone. Back in February, they focused on helping established tech startups break into Asia. In April, to do the same specifically for Japan. We spoke to Levy a bit about the investment, who tells us that this is “drop down” fund — which, in less fancy speak, mostly means that it’s a subsidiary of their bigger funding effort, and that they’re able to both back investments from the other SoftBank funds as well as invest on their own. For those keeping track, Softbank has actually already had a few big wins come out of New York. Of the New York companies in their portfolio, for around $800M, for $180M, for $315 million, and up by Groupon. To date, Softbank Capital tells us that they have 32 active investments in New York.
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Google Loses Key Maps Engineering Director Raj Shah To Microsoft’s Online Services Division
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Microsoft just made a key hire that could help it re-energize its . , who was previously heading up Google’s worldwide maps operations as the Engineering Director for Maps, will join Microsoft’s Online Services Division where he will likely work on Bing Maps and its related products. Microsoft confirmed to us that Shah is indeed joining Microsoft, but declined to provide any details beyond this. A source tells us that while at Google Maps, Shah was responsible for the part of the operation that brought in mapping data from around the world and then integrated it into Maps. According to his LinkedIn profile, Shah spent the last three and a half years at Google “spearheading [the] creation of its Maps by first establishing a global infrastructure that encompasses all countries mapped by Google.” In this role, his profile says, he built much of this capacity from the ground up and then enhanced it by “adding richer features to make the maps highly differentiated in a crowded marketplace.” In his bio, Shah also notes that he worked with the Google founders and senior executives to “establish a disciplined execution process for engineering teams and projects spread throughout the world.” Previous to working on the Maps team, Shah also built Google’s Engineering Center in India. He also has extensive engineering and operations experience outside of Google. He founded the web-based membership and event management solution in 1999 and was the vice president for engineering at online spend management solution . Not too long ago, Bing Maps was pretty competitive with Google Maps, but it feels like it has lost its edge a bit lately. Google Map’ , which the company announced at I/O earlier this month, puts it even further ahead of its competition.
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SuperCalendar Aims To Fix Your Scheduling Woes With A Mix Of Tech And ‘Superhuman’ Power
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
These are excuses that you may have given recently for missing meetings with people, either for work or for personal outings. Even though every major tech company in the world, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, has tried to tackle scheduling, the reality is that the options suck. Even , while beautifully designed, aren’t getting the job done. If we can’t afford a real personal assistant to bug us about every step we’re supposed to take on a given day, we’re not doing a great job of keeping our schedules straight. Even the most regimented planners aren’t thrilled with the options out there, with one close friend telling me that the “color coding” on Google Calendar is the only thing keeping her on time and employed. So what’s the fix if we can’t afford our own personal assistant and tech is letting us down? How about a hybrid of both? That’s what Aviary co-founder Michael Galpert has been working on in stealth mode under the company title of “ ” for the past year or so. Not much has been known about what Galpert was up to, other than what was found on his : It sounds a bit like , TaskRabbit and , but in hindsight, it sounds exactly like to me, which is Galpert’s first Superhuman product. So far, Galpert tells me that Superhuman has raised some seed capital to get things running, and the rollout will be gradual, with new invites going out every Monday. The service will cost you $89 a month, with unlimited scheduling. The best part about how Galpert has gone about doing research for SuperCalendar is that he used Superhuman to collect information and feedback about what the product would end up offering, when you signed up for an invite. Even though you had no idea what you were signing up for. Genius. I spoke with Galpert about the progress that he’s made on SuperCalendar, and asked him what he felt was missing with current offerings: What was it about calendaring that just wasn’t working for people? For busy people, managing their calendars was close to a full time job. The biggest annoyance that comes up when scheduling meetings is finding a time to meet, picking a location that is convenient for both parties etc. Not to mention you end up having to always be on high alert with your inbox and make sure to enter all the necessary info to keep your calendar up to date. We basically built a solution that makes it easier than doing it yourself. We have some customers who choose to schedule meetings on their own and just fwd the email to their SuperCalendar assistant to add to their calendar. When something comes up and they need to cancel all their meetings that day. Customers just send over a note that says something like “reschedule all my meetings today for some time next week” and we take care of the hassle of rescheduling so they dont have to. Were your own experiences with scheduling things the reason for starting Superhuman? The reason we started was to remove the bullshit in peoples lives that prevent them from being present and living their life. If you ask anyone that has a full time personal assistant they say they couldnt do what they do if it wasnt for their personal assistant. Richard Branson . The biggest distraction to your workflow is coordination and scheduling so we are starting with that. Some people have tried to re-mix calendaring but failed because it required too much work from users, how is SuperCalendar handling that? We dont think the solution is to give people a new interface to deal with. Ala which was a service I loved but anyone that I asked to coordinate using it loathed. Our approach is not to create a service that takes more time to learn than to complete the task at hand. We make it simple and easy to share your preferences with your Super Assistant (a team of scheduling assistants) via email. Are you worried about scaling the service, since it relies on real people in the background? Over the next couple of weeks we will be rolling out invitations to the service to make sure that our system can handle the demand. We are constantly building out automated processes that will allow us to scale without needing to rely on real people in the background. That’s how we can offer the service for way cheaper than hiring someone full time in the first place. ——— For those of you who don’t have more than a few things going on every week that you have to be on time for, you might not get value out of paying $89 a month. This is aimed at professionals that either don’t want to handle their own scheduling, or just plain stink at it. If you’d like to get priority access to , you can use this code: . Be sure to sign up now so that you can get your invite next Monday. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/64641405 w=640&h=361]
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GumGum’s New ‘Canvas’ Ad Unit Takes Over Publisher Images
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
In-image advertising company has launched a bigger, more attention-grabbing ad unit — one that it says is the industry’s first in-image takeover. The company is calling the new unit the Canvas, and it’s launching the first ads with digital agency Moxie as part of a campaign promoting The Rocket Mascara from L’Oreal’s Maybelline unit. When an image first loads up with the ad, the mascara actually flies across the picture, then there’s a quick ad that takes over the entire image space, and it finally settles into a more standard GumGum banner at the bottom. You can I’m guessing non-Rocket ads aren’t going to copy that specific animation, but you can imagine other ads following a similar format, taking over the image for a few seconds and then shrinking into a normal banner. And yes, GumGum founder and CEO Ophir Tanz said this “works really nicely on mobile,” too. Tanz added that GumGum can launch a unit that’s more aggressive than the company’s previous banners, because publishers are becoming more comfortable with in-image advertising and trust GumGum not to anger their readers. “At the end of the day, it’s an ad, so users aren’t really going to love it,” he acknowledged, but he argued that it strikes a nice balance, because users have the option to hit the X button and close the ad at any time. Plus, the ad should hopefully show up in a context where it’s relevant, and it’s frequency capped, so it shouldn’t get shown too often to any individual visitor. Tanz argued that in-image advertising is both more lucrative and more reader-friendly than the banner ads that clutter up most websites. In fact, his ultimate goal is to convince publishers to monetize entirely through these types of ads, and he said some GumGum publishers are already moving in that direction. The Canvas ad can help with that, because the CPMs (price paid by advertisers per thousand impressions) are a few dollars higher than GumGum’s standard rates.
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How Adzerk Made It Big (With Reddit’s Help)
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
When James Avery of met Alexis Ohanian in New York at an online advertising conference last year, he was ready. He had been angling to work with Reddit, the popular sharing site Ohanian had co-founded, for two years. After a brief exchange, Ohanian introduced Avery to the programming team in a few short months the deal was done. By mimicking Reddit’s up/down voting system in ads, was able to create non-intrusive text and image ads on the page, ensuring that the site’s persnickety readership would have some choice in what they saw one the site. Wrote Reddit senior manager Jena Donlin: After the implementation, Adzerk’s traffic doubled. In December of last year they saw 2.5 billion impressions while in March they crossed the 7.8 billion mark. The Durham-based company had seen slow growth before but now it was on fire. Luckily, they were ready. “I wrote the first version of Adzerk while running those networks and later spun it out as it’s own company in 2010. Last summer I hired Nate Kohari as our CTO and he has done an amazing job of building out our engineering team and leading the rewrite of our ad server in node.js,” said Avery. Before Reddit the company had raised around , a fairly in the world of ad networks. Avery himself moved to Durham, North Carolina, an up-and-coming tech hub that had a low cost of living and lots of great talent coming out of the local research parks and universities. “I moved to Raleigh from Cincinnati looking for a better technology scene and I was surprised to find it in small Durham instead of in Raleigh,” he said. “I think one of our biggest advantages is that we aren’t in NYC in the middle of adTech – we can take a step back and focus on the real problems.” They saw excellent pick-up from users who were moving from the hacked service and Reddit was helping them open doors nearly everywhere. By April they saw 11 billion impressions from 825 active accounts, a three-fold increase. Avery’s lesson, if there is one in this case, is that patience and planning pay off. He built his company as an API rather than a service and his “platform approach” allowed Reddit to open source the connector software between their ad platform and the sharing service. This sort of transparency is important, especially to an audience as vocal as Reddit’s. “Adzerk started as a project to build a better platform for running the two vertical ad networks I was operating at the time. I created it because the current ad servers weren’t built in an extensible way where a developer like I could build on and extend them in the ways I needed to,” said Avery. “We saw this because of the similarities between approach and Reddit’s approach – and how they both find the same things very useful,” he said. By building intelligently, living and working in a small, hot city, and by aiming for the big guy in his space, little Adzerk made it big. His formula, while not completely reproducible, is indicative of a new normal: that the little guy can reel in the big fish.
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Fan TV Is A Next-Generation Set-Top Box For Live TV, DVR, VOD, And Streaming Services Like Netflix
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Video discovery startup Fanhattan is getting ready to change the way that viewers watch TV, with a new streaming set-top box that combines all of the best parts of TV, DVR, and VOD, while also giving users access to all their favorite streaming services. It’s rebranding as Fan and showing off an innovative new take on live TV and streaming services. The key to the company’s new Fan TV box, being shown off at D11 today, isn’t the content that users have access to, but a beautiful, trackpad-like control that was designed by Yves Behar, as well as a search and discovery screen for navigating all that live, recorded, and streaming content. A few years ago, Fan unveiled its search and discovery application for iPad, enabling users to find all their favorite movies and TV shows available across a wide range of streaming apps and services. By providing a universal search and discovery mechanism, the app was able to highlight content wherever it could be viewed. With the Fan TV set-top box, the company is bringing that same discovery experience to the TV. But it’s also combining access to various streaming services with the ability to watch live, pre-recorded, and video-on-demand titles from your local cable or satellite TV providers. Yes, that’s right. Unlike Apple TV, Roku, WDTV, etc., this is a streaming box that will connect with your cable service. Actually, that’s a key part of Fan’s value proposition, as well as its plans to go to market. More than just a device for streaming Netflix or Hulu Plus, the search and discovery piece of Fan TV will be used to give users the ability to find their favorite programs on live TV, as well as discover new shows. The company plans to partner with big pay TV operators to make Fan TV available to their customers. While they won’t disclose pricing of the set-top box, the company expects to have a business model similar to the one that is employed by mobile phone manufacturers and wireless operators today, in which the cost of the device is subsidized for the end user by the service providers. Like existing set-top boxes, the Fan TV doesn’t rely on a coax connection to work. Even when it’s delivering live TV, it’s streaming that content, either over the local Wi-Fi network, or through an Ethernet port in the back of the device. In that way, it’s a lot like your typical Roku box or Apple TV. For cable and satellite companies, the Fan TV device could replace expensive, poorly designed set-top boxes from legacy providers like Cisco. Not only does it ultimately provide a better user experience, but it will likely do so at a fraction of the price of current set-tops. While the company has yet to announce any partners — those will come later this summer — CEO Gilles BianRosa told me that the company expects to be available to as many as 60 million pay TV households by the end of the year. The most impressive thing about the Fan TV isn’t just the way it seamlessly combines content from multiple services and makes it simple to browse and discover shows and movies. The most impressive thing about Fan TV is a new trackpad-like remote control that does away with all the ugly buttons and complexities of today’s current options. For the creation of the Fan TV device, the startup partnered with industrial designer Yves Behar — yes, this is his second product to launch at this conference — and the result is a game-changing new way of navigating options on your TV. The touch remote can be held in one hand, and allows you to change channels, navigate menus, and even control volume settings through a series of swipes, taps and gestures. I got a chance to try out the Fan TV for myself and I can honestly say that the control is like nothing I’ve ever used. It’s kind of like using your mobile phone’s touchscreen for navigation (and yes, there are apps to do that today), but simpler, and without the need for another device. The Fan TV has the opportunity to provide a better user experience for users who already subscribe to TV, making it easier to search for, watch and record their favorite TV shows. If it becomes widely available, the device could very seriously revolutionize the way that pay TV subscribers interact with their TV programming. But more importantly, it could bring cord cutters and so-called “cord nevers” back into the fold. By providing a set-top box that works like other streaming devices today, but with the benefit of also providing live TV, cable operators could introduce new, low-cost video services that match the convenience that young, tech-savvy consumers have gotten used to. That could be great news for cable operators, as well as Fan TV going forward.
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SuccessFactors Founder And SAP Exec Lars Dalgaard Joins Andreessen Horowitz As General Partner
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Andreessen Horowitz is boosting its investing team today with the addition of SuccessFactors Founder and SAP exec as general partner. Dalgaard founded human capital management software giant SuccessFactors, which was acquired for a whopping in 2011. As A16Z founder Ben Horowitz writes in blog post announcing Dalgaard’s addition, the acquisition “was by far the largest and most important acquisition in the history of the SaaS category.” While at SAP, Dalgaard was in charge of the enterprise incumbent’s cloud business unit, which he was able to grow to $1 billion in revenue. SuccessFactors was a success under Dalgaard’s leadership long before SAP shelled out billions for the company. Founded in 2001, SuccessFactors went public in 2007. The company has thousands of enterprise customers and brought in hundreds of millions in revenue. Prior to founding SuccessFactors, Dalgaard held management positions at consumer goods giant Unilever and pharmaceutical company Novartis. He from SAP last week. Dalgaard fit A16Z’s criteria of being a founder and operator, and it should be interesting to see who he is bullish on in the enterprise. He was an early investor in , the founded by Omniture founder Josh James. Dalgaard tells us in an interview that when considering becoming an investor, he thought seriously about private equity. But he realized he was done fixing other large company’s problems and was more interested in the core of starting things as a VC investor. He also evaluated whether to join a firm at the seed level, or early stage or even growth investing, but was attracted to the early-stage to growth opportunities. He was considering joining “the top three firms VC firms globally,” but when he spent time at A16Z, and with the firms partners; things clicked, he explains. “There is so much energy here, I want to get my ass handed to me every day, and this firm was going to challenge me.” He adds that he quickly realized the firm is also not just a marketing machine but clearly adds real value to its portfolio companies when it comes to sales, marketing, recruiting, design and more. Horowitz explains that Dalgaard won’t just be investing in enterprise, as he brings consumer knowledge to the firm from his past experience at Unilever. As for what Dalgaard is bullish on when it comes to investing, he says “consumer is repetitive right now but there are so many unseen areas in real estate and medical that have opportunities. In terns of enterprise, he things many of the current enterprise products are “ugly and disgusting and hard to user (he tried to fix that, he says, with SuccessFactors) and there’s an opportunity to create products that provide better experiences for businesses.
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Tumblr Brings More Ads To Users’ Dashboards, Rearranges Buttons & Teens Freak Out
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
A month after Tumblr into its native mobile applications, the company is today bringing those same brand advertisements to its web dashboard. Launch partners for these new “Sponsored Web Posts,” as they’re called, include Viacom, Ford Motor Company, Universal Pictures, Capital One, AT&T, Denny’s and Purina. Tumblr users will be able to reblog, like, follow and share these ads and the brands themselves directly from their web dashboard, which of course, is what we know all the Tumblr-lovin’ teens are just dying to do. Like Tumblr’s sidebar “Radar” ads, the new sponsored posts will be marked with an animated dollar sign icon to indicate that they are paid placements. Also like Tumblr’s mobile advertising, users will only see up to four sponsored posts per day. The company notes on the new ads that sponsored posts have already seen over 10 million likes and reblogs since their debut. Sponsored Web Posts in the dashboard will continue to roll during a beta period that ends in June 2013. During the first week, premiere spots belong to Viacom, Ford Motor Company and Universal Pictures, and then they’ll become available to Capital One, AT&T, Denny’s and Purina. “The engagement rates on the Tumblr Radar and Sponsored Mobile Posts have been spectacular and we have taken this same carefully architected approach to this new web in-dash opportunity,” said Lee Brown, Global Head of Sales at Tumblr, in a release. “The Tumblr post is a flexible, dynamic and expressive medium, and we are delighted to give marketers yet another opportunity to promote their content and connnect with this vibrant and engaged community.” As Tumblr founder has previously explained time and again, Tumblr wants to offer advertisers canvas and space for “creative brand advertising” – something he feels hasn’t really had anywhere to live on the web. “We want to give them the space to do anything, a four-second loop, an hour and a half video, a high-res panorama, whatever they need to help them build amazing, interactive ads,” in early May, ahead of . The expansion of brand advertising in Tumblr was expected, whether or not Yahoo bought the company. (Yahoo’s bigger plans , for instance, and it doesn’t expect to see significant revenue from ads until next year.) But Tumblr’s younger user base is sensitive to change, and likely they’ll see these ads a disturbance, then blame Yahoo. Already the user base , some , and today a minor change to the Tumblr dashboard involving the relocation of the Reblog and Notes buttons has them hand-wringing . Those changes rolled out yesterday, and today have reached 100 percent of Tumblr’s user base. The company says the buttons were moved for consistency between mobile and web. These buttons used to be at the top of posts on the web dashboard, and now they’re on the bottom – I know, right? The horror! And if you think that’s bad, just wait until the kids see these new ads. Tumblr’s teenaged audience has led to explosive growth for the company, (and dramatic), which makes every change that Yahoo/Tumblr enacts going forward risky. It still remains to be seen whether or not the audience will stick around as the site becomes less of an online hideout, and more ad-driven in the future.
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The Double Robotics iPad-Equipped Teleconferencing Robot Is Shipping
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
It’s impossible to be in two places at once. But , a , has finally made that possible. The company has begun shipping units of the Double to customers who pre-ordered and coughed up the $2,000 to get one. In fact, the first hundred are already safely in the homes and lives of their new owners. By September, the company will have shipped another 1,000 units, showing that even with a high price tag, hardware startups can still rake in the cash and run a sustainable business. But of course, this has to do with the fact that the Double has all kinds of valuable use-case scenarios that span across various industries. For example, we to usher in a new kind of remote reporting. And we . The $2,000 price tag, which was a special pre-order price, until June 6, for those who feel that they’d like to get in on the robotic goodness. After that, the price will go up to $2,499.
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Edukart Raises $500K To Bring Better Online Education To India And The Developing World
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Launched in late 2011 by Stanford grad and ex-Facebooker Ishan Gupta and Indian Institute of Management grad Mayank Gupta, Delhi-based is on a mission to bring online education to India and the developing world. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $500K in seed capital from a handful of institutional and angel investors. Participants include Kima Ventures, AKM Systems, Vibhor Mehra and Stanford alumni. The investment adds to the $500K the startup had previously raised from One97 Communications founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Providence Capital Director Manish Kheterpal. With broadband penetration and smartphone adoption exploding around the world, particularly in India, Gupta sees a big opportunity for education. Over the last few years, he tells us, “we’ve seen enormous growth in the number of people in India making transactions online, the number of debit cards and, overall, a huge uptick in broadband penetration.” The convergence of these three trends has led to increasing demand for web-based learning applications and, while this demand (and the online education market itself) are still nascent, Gupta believes India is at an inflection point. Unlike the hot MOOC platforms in the U.S., EduKart is pursuing a slightly different model as part of its approach to the Indian market. Every course on the platform comes with a price tag, which ranges from $20 to $2,400, depending on the level. EduKart is open enrollment, allowing students to pay for the course online and begin studying immediately, while providing them with phone and email-based support and an alumni group. The startup’s support staff is composed of paid subject experts, Gupta says, who are on hand to help students if they get stuck on particular problems by way of phone, email or text. The courses range from Telecom management to programming languages. The courses are created and taught both by EduKart’s content team and based on content it receives through partnerships with local universities. For now, the content is mostly slideshows, but includes a smattering of videos, documents and interactive materials. The platform requires students to complete assessments in between each exercise and complete a live, video-based final exam in front of a panel of EduKart’s teachers. Down the road, if EduKart’s educational model proves successful at home, Gupta says that he wants to begin looking beyond India to other developing markets in the region. Building a mobile platform and working more closely with publishers to create customized content are both part of the near-term roadmap for EduKart. At present, Gupta is also looking for more strategic partnerships in the U.S.: “It’s critical for us to partner with foreign universities, so that we can help bring quality, affordable educational programs to Indian students.” EduKart may not have quite the same growth curve as the skyrocketing , but it’s a mission that’s easy to get behind and one that could have a big effect on education in developing markets.
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Twitter’s Mobile Crash Reporting Tool Crashlytics Arrives On Android
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
As promised at the time of , mobile crash reporting tool has not stopped development. In February, to all for free, and today the company released the long-awaited solution for Android devices with the . Twitter’s Android engineers have been beta testing the new product, which offers a similar feature set to the iOS version, and includes things like fully automated deobfuscation, logged exceptions, condensed crash reporting, IDE integration with Eclipse, IntelliJ and Android Studio (beta) on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms – the details of which are all on the Crashlytics company blog announcing the SDK’s arrival. (For non-developers, what the above means is that the tool set is good at spotting bugs and making sense of them, and has been designed to easily integrate into a developer’s current workflow). Crashlytics founder Wayne Chang explains that crash detection and reporting is a tough problem to solve, also noting that it’s “particularly” complex on Android. “Given the complexities of crash reporting, Android’s explosive growth, and the myriad of devices, it was important for us to build the most powerful, lightweight crash reporting solution for the Android platform,” he states in the post. Meanwhile, Twitter’s Engineering blog that Crashlytics helped them solve over the past months, ahead of it actually acquiring the service. For instance, Twitter engineers were once perplexed by crashes that were affecting a small number of users, and the Crashlytics tool set eventually helped them figure out those users were on jailbroken iOS devices. Ben Sandofsky, Twitter’s tech lead for Twitter for Mac (previously iOS), also explained that while iTunes Connect helps with crash reports for production builds of the app, Crashlytics has been able to help the company with crash reporting for its internal “dogfood” builds – and this, in turn, helps the company reduce the feedback cycle and ship a better version for users, he says. At the time of the acquisition, Crashlytics had already been making a name for itself among mobile app developers, including not only inside Twitter (and Twitter-owned Vine), but also with big-name brands. The company now offers services to thousands of companies, including Yelp, Kayak, PayPal, Walmart, Groupon, Waze, 500px, Yammer, Blackboard, Path, OpenTable, Domino’s, Expedia, Square and more. The new Android SDK is .
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Grouper Talks Competition, Partnerships, And Why Group Dates Offer Built-In Credibility
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
has been around since 2011, breaking into the world of online dating by forcing a group situation. The service matches you with singles you may enjoy canoodling with, but asks that each party bring two of their friends for a group date-style situation. But the past year has brought a fierce new round of competitors to the online dating space, such as and Lulu. We caught up with founder Michael Waxman at Time Inc.’s 10 NYC Startups To Watch party to discuss competition, the value of partnerships, and how Grouper deals with transparency between users. In Waxman’s opinion, Grouper has a leg up on the competition because it actually facilitates real-life meeting, whereas traditional dating sites and social networks are more focused on letting you message and look at photos. Grouper has also been focused on partnerships and promotions with other startups such as and , though Waxman revealed that the company has actually been quite stingy with partnerships. It’s all about finding the companies who are dedicated to the same mission, which is getting people together offline. But perhaps most important to Grouper’s success is the model itself, pairing three boys with three girls. While other dating sites like are zeroing in on the friends-of-friends model to keep people honest on their profiles and in real life. However, Grouper already has that same credibility built right in, since you’re on a date with two friends who know when you’re fibbing or exaggerating. As the online dating space heats up, and dinosaurs like OkCupid and eHarmony are besieged by the new kids on the block, Grouper is one of the few services that offers a truly differentiated experience. No wonder Time Inc. has an eye on them.
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 31 | null |
Google Makes Its First Renewable Energy Investment In Africa, Puts $12M Toward South African Solar Plant
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Google today that it is investing $12 million in a 96 megawatt solar photovoltaic plant in South Africa. This marks Google’s first renewable energy investment in Africa and its overall renewable energy investment. Once it’s completed, Google says, the , which is situated in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, will generate enough power for 30,000 South African homes. In total, Google has now committed more than $1 billion to green energy projects. In South Africa, Google is joining SolarReserve, Intikon Energy and the Kensani Group as the main funders for this project, which is also backed by Rand Merchant Bank, the Public Investment Corporation, Development Bank of South Africa and the PEACE Humansrus Trust. The project will be one of the and cover about 450 acres with more than 325,000 solar modules. In today’s announcement, Google’s director for energy and sustainability, Rick Needham, also lays out some of the criteria the company uses to make these kinds of investments. He notes, for example, that Google will “only pursue investments that we believe make financial sense.” Because South Africa has policies that support these kind of projects, Google believes it is an attractive place for it to invest in this technology. The company, however, is also looking for “projects that have transformative potential – that is, projects that will bolster the growth of the renewable energy industry and move the world closer to a clean energy future.”
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Google’s Sundar Pichai Says Google Play Music All Access Is Coming To iOS In A Few Weeks
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Google has made a number of its apps and services available on multiple devices. Sundar Pichai, Google’s SVP of Android, Chrome, and Apps, announced at the D11 Conference that there’s another service that’ll soon be available on iOS: the service. Google’s answer to iTunes and Spotify was previously only available on the web and Android. According to Pichai, it will launch on Apple’s operating system in “a few weeks.” At its I/O conference this month, Google a pretty major revamp of Play Music, which now includes a Spotify-like subscription service. Pichai noted that it’s part of Google’s DNA to bring all of its services to as many platforms as possible. “In Google’s fundamental DNA, we want [our services] to be universally accessible… For us, users on iOS who want to use Google services, we want them to be Google users.” Indeed, he argues that Google’s approach to its service is different from that of its competitors. Talking about Samsung and Android, he noted that “it’s not just the operating system, but the services you deliver on top of it. The thing that makes Android successful, it’s the Google cloud services that are on top of that. We want to reach as many people as possible. For platforms which don’t have that many users at scale — for YouTube, as an example, we have HTML5.”
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Gillmor Gang Live 05.30.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
– Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
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Telly Releases Android Tablet App As It Approaches 70K Likes Per Week On Google’s Mobile OS
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 |
Video discovery service is launching its social video app on Android tablets today, a key step for the company as Google’s mobile OS becomes more important to its overall strategy and audience. Android engagement is growing quickly, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively, with Likes per week growing at a rapid pace, jumping from below 50,000 the week of May 17, to over 70,000 during the week of May 24. Telly also had 4.8 million views across all mobile platforms last week, which was up from 3 million the week prior. The decision to optimize for Android tablets was driven partly by user feedback, according to Telly CEO and co-founder Mo Al Adham. It was a frequent user request, he says, as users seem to be getting more and more interested in Android-powered tablet devices. Android slates have been relatively slow to catch on, compared to devices like the iOS-powered iPad, but Google was talking a lot about encouraging developers to optimize their apps for tablet experiences at I/O this year, and a recent IDC study showed that Android tablets (from all manufacturers) overtook iPad in terms of global shipments during the first quarter of 2013. “We’ve been working on this product for a little while now, even before the big announcements at I/O, and we’re excited about it,” Al Adham said. “Because video is really moving towards mobile, and whether that’s on a phone or a tablet we want to be there. And there’s a lot of growth when it comes to Android tablets lately, so it makes sense to be there for our users.” Telly’s overall strategy is to provide a discovery layer between mobile and Internet video, since the old paradigm of search for “funny videos” or “stuff to watch” on the desktop doesn’t work on mobile. It was always hard to come up with what to look for to being with, Al Adham said, and on a mobile device you have the inspiration problem combined with the challenge of actually entering search terms and finding time to go looking. By pulling in your social networks as video sources, Telly acts as an easy access discovery layer. Telly has also already made its first foray into monetization, with promoted videos that appear occasionally in a user’s feed, like Facebook’s promoted stories or Twitter’s promoted tweets. The idea is to make things as unobtrusive and natural as possible, while still giving big brands a chance to boost the visibility of their top content. This remains mostly an experiment, Al Adham says, but it is bringing in revenue, and once the small team feels they can turn their attention beyond product, more attention will be paid to growing that side of the business.
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Nokia’s Smarterphone Buy Yields First Fruit: $99 Touchscreen Asha 501 Polishes S40 With Fastlane View For Recent Apps, Contacts
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
Nokia has given its Series 40-based range of touchscreen Asha smartphones another push to try to keep up with the low end reach of Google’s Android platform today. The mobile maker has announced a new addition to the range — the Asha 501 (pictured left & below) — which also ushers in a new version of the Asha touch UI that’s designed to be quicker and slicker, and has a focus on swiping gestures to make it feel more fluid. The three-inch capacitive screen Asha 501, which has Wi-Fi but no 3G and costs $99 before taxes & subsidies, is expected to start shipping in June, via some 60 carriers in more than 90 countries worldwide. Nokia’s Asha range typically targets emerging markets in Africa, Asia and South America but Asha devices have also been ranged in Europe. Although Nokia has retired its other in-house platform Symbian, to concentrate its smartphone efforts on Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, it has continued to expand its portfolio of low end Android alternative S40-based devices — adding in a variety of new hardware and software features to devices in the range, including full Qwerty keyboards; dedicated keys for / ; refreshed industrial design; its Bluetooth sharing technology Slam; its Xpress browser to lighten the data consumption load; preloaded social networking apps; free games downloads; and a focus on long battery life. But keeping up with low end Androids also means improving Asha’s usability — and that’s what its latest platform refresh is all about. The Asha 501 is in fact the first fruit of , a Norwegian company that made mobile OSes for feature phones designed to give them smartphone looks and capabilities. Nokia said the new Asha platform is faster and more responsive. It also introduces a touchscreen UI refresh — with a dual homescreen view: the Home screen is a “traditional icon-based view for launching individual apps or accessing a specific feature”, while the new Fastlane view changes based on device usage, showing things like “recently accessed contacts, social networks and apps”. Fastlane “provides a record of how the phone is used, giving people a glimpse of their past, present and future activity, and helping them multi-task by providing easy access to their favorite features”, according to Nokia’s press release. The feature sounds a lot like certain portions of Motorola’s Android skinning software — such as the widgets deployed on 2012 devices like the Motorola Motosmart. The overall idea of the design refresh is to make it easier for Asha users to get to the apps and features they’re after, according to Nokia — with the two main screens accessible by a “simple swipe”. “Fastlane is integral to the whole Nokia Asha 501 experience, but so is the ‘swipe’ motion,” a spokeswoman told TechCrunch. “With swipe as you experience it on the device, we were able to make optimal use of screen space, so you see just what you need. You swipe to everything else, including pull-down menus and of course, Fastlane. The whole user experience is faster and more responsive.” So what about apps? The new Asha platform does require developers to rework apps for it — either by writing them afresh or porting them over. Which does mean Nokia is pushing the reset button yet again, but the company would probably argue that at this price point with these price-conscious consumers, users aren’t expecting hoards of apps — just select key apps. It’s also added in-app purchases to the new Asha platform, offering developers a new way to monetise Asha apps, along with its Nokia Advertising Exchange and carrier billing network. “A good percentage of existing apps can be ported to the new platform,” said Nokia’s spokeswoman. “We already have many developers working on this. Going forward and with the new Nokia Asha Software Development Kit, developers can write an app once, and it will be compatible with future devices also built on the new Asha platform, with no need to re-write code.” Apps that are already available for the new Nokia Asha platform include CNN, eBuddy, ESPN, Facebook, Foursquare, Line, LinkedIn, Nimbuzz, Pictelligent, The Weather Channel, Twitter, WeChat, World of Red Bull and games from Electronic Arts, Gameloft, Indiagames, Namco Bandai and Reliance Games. Nokia said its HERE location software will also be available as a download, starting in Q3 this year — and will “initially include basic mapping services”. Messaging giant WhatsApp is noticeably absent from the list but Nokia’s spokeswoman suggested that may change in future, noting: “WhatsApp and other key partners continue to explore new Asha.” In select markets, certain carriers are also offering data-free access to apps including the Facebook app and mobile website on the 501 for a limited time, offering another hook for the target cost-conscious consumers. The 501 comes preloaded with Nokia’s cloud-based data compressing Xpress browser. Nokia has also created a new web app, called Nokia Xpress Now, which “recommends content based on location, preferences and trending topics”. It said this will be available via the Browser homepage or as a download from the Nokia Store. “Nokia has surpassed expectations of what’s achievable in the sub-100 USD phone category with a new Asha handset that is unlike any other, with design cues from Lumia and a mix of features, services and affordability that is valued by price-conscious buyers,” said Neil Mawston, executive director, Global Wireless Practice, Strategy Analytics, in a supporting statement. Commenting on the launch via Twitter, Gartner analyst : “Asha 501 shows what you can achieve when you design bottom up rather than strip down features to hit the right price point. “Asha 501 Dual SIM with hot swap very important to users but what is most striking on this device is the user interface.” The full device specifications for the Asha 501 are as follows: Dimensions: 99.2 x 58 x 12.1 mm; 98 grams Camera: 3.2 MP Single SIM standby time: up to 48 days Dual SIM standby time: up to 26 days Talk time: up to 17 hours Additional memory of 4GB (card included in box), expandable up to 32GB Forty free EA Games worth €75 downloadable from Nokia Store Available colours: Bright Red, Bright Green, Cyan, Yellow, White and Black Suggested pricing is 99 USD before taxes and subsidies.
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Running With Friends, Zynga’s Entry In The Endless Runner Genre, Launches Globally
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
If you’re a fan of endless runner games like Temple Run, starting today you’ll get your chance to do more than — you can take on your friends, too, with Zynga’s new title Running With Friends. That’s the basic distinction that Travis Boatman, Zynga’s senior vice president of mobile, offered when describing the game to me. There’s already “a huge group of players that love these games,” he said, but they aren’t able to “play with friends and family the way that I can in Words With Friends.” At the same time, even though the social component is Zynga’s main addition, Boatman said the team was also focused on making sure the core gameplay was fun. That gameplay involves running through the streets of Pamplona, Spain, during the annual Running of the Bulls. As players try to keep ahead of the bulls, they also smash obstacles like haystacks and barrels to improve their scores. If they’re feeling particularly daring, they can jump on the back of a bull. As they race, they can compete with friends in a turn-based fashion, each player trying to best their friends’ time on the same level, and also trying to move up the game leaderboard. Although I have had my share of intense Words With Friends gameplay, this seems a little more fast-paced and action-oriented than the other titles in the With Friends franchise, which tend to have their roots in board games. However, Boatman said Running With Friends is linked to the rest of the franchise because of its asynchronous gameplay and its aim of being “very approachable” to casual gamers. (Plus, it uses the same login system as the other With Friends titles.) The game actually back in March, but today is its global launch on iOS, with an Android release promised shortly. This comes after some disappointing titles led to a relatively slow period for new releases from Zynga — during its most recent earnings call, executives said that , and that both Draw Something 2 (which launched in late April) and Running With Friends were showing some of the best internal scores that the company has seen. Zynga is also announcing Dunkin’ Donuts as a promotional partner, with Dunkin’-sponsored tips appearing in the game, and plans for Dunkin’-branded in-game rewards and boosts. Running With Friends was designed by team members who had previously worked on Scramble With Friends — they worked with Eat Sleep Play, the developer of Twisted Metal. Zynga said Eat Sleep Play built a custom 3D engine as well as helping out with art, animation, and other aspects of the game. For today’s launch, Zynga didn’t provide me with an advance copy of the game, just a video illustrating the gameplay. I did, however, get a chance to play once or twice during a company dinner with journalists earlier this year. As with other endless runners, I got caught up in the race pretty quickly — though it was only a few seconds before the bulls caught up and gored me. You can .
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Sogou Is Reportedly Being Courted By Baidu, Qihoo 360 And Tencent For An Acquisition
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
Chinese Internet companies , and are reportedly competing to purchase , ‘s search business. Sina Tech’s report (link via Google Translate) and Sogou CEO Wang Xiaoquan has already taken to his Sina Weibo account to but it’s worth noting that rumors of two recent acquisitions– and Alibaba’s –both turned out to be true. According to Sina Tech’s sources, Sogou, the third largest search engine in China, is currently stymied by a development bottleneck and can’t grab any more market share away from Baidu and Qihoo 360. Baidu has 67.21 percent market share and Qihoo 360 holds 14.94 percent, compared to Sogou’s 9.15 percent slice, according to data from CNZZ. The company has been considering a sale for the past six months, with Qihoo offering $140 million including stock and cash options, while Baidu is offering an undisclosed but higher amount of cash. Meanwhile, Tencent has entered the fray mainly because it doesn’t want Qihoo 360 to get its hands on Sogou. The sale has been held up in part because of dissension within Sogou’s top ranks. CEO Wang Xiaochuan is reportedly at the head of the faction that wants to sell to Qihoo 360, but Sohu chairman Charles Zhang prefers Baidu’s offer. Sina Tech sources say, however, that Qihoo 360’s offer looks poised to triumph. If Qihoo 360 does indeed buy Sogou, the deal will boost the combined company’s market share to about 25 percent. Qihoo 360 will also reap the benefits of Sogou’s , which currently has 195 million active users. “If the two merge it will really subvert the current structure of the search market. It’ll become a power struggle between two competitors,” said Sina Tech’s source. A Baidu spokesman declined comment. Qihoo 360 and Tencent have also been emailed for comment.
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AT&T’s Year-Old Nokia Lumia 900 Finally Gets A Taste Of Windows Phone 7.8
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
AT&T customers who took the plunge on Nokia’s Lumia 900 have had to sit idly by and watch Windows Phone 8 supercede the software loaded on their own devices, but they’ll soon be able to experience at least part of what WP8 brings to the table. Nokia announced earlier today that the Windows Phone 7.8 update is now available to owners of the one-time AT&T flagship. Better late then never, as they say. In case you haven’t been keeping track (after all, that’s what I’m here for), Nokia began the process of bringing Windows Phone 7.8 to the Lumia-owning masses back in February. All that’s really changing here is that the Lumia 900 will get a minor facelift — think (among other things) the inclusion of Windows Phone 8’s oft-updating Live Tiles, improved lock screen security, and the ability to share internet connections. Sadly, since the update is mostly cosmetic, Lumia 900 owners looking to fiddle with some of the new Windows Phone 8-optimized apps that Microsoft and its developer partners have been touting lately will have to wait until they splurge on some new hardware first. If we’re being honest, those Lumia 900 owners have had their share of issues to deal with — not only were they stuck with a device that could never be updated to Windows Phone 8, early production runs yielded Lumia 900s that just couldn’t consistently , prompting Nokia to push out a software fix and offer a . I suspect that a decent chunk of 900 owners will just be glad that the update is finally out there, but their eyes may soon be drawn to an even newer batch of Windows-powered handsets shortly — Nokia is reportedly preparing to show off some new Lumias at a London event in less than a week.
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Microsoft Mulling Nook Media LLC Purchase For $1 Billion
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC, the digital book and college book with Barnes & Noble and other investors, according to internal documents we’ve obtained. In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college book division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets. The documents also reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year as it transitions to a model where content is distributed through apps on “third-party partner” devices. Speculation about the surfaced in February. The documents we have are not clear on whether the third-party tablets would be Microsoft’s own Windows 8 devices, tablets made by others (including competing platforms) or both. Third-party tablets, according to the document, are due to get introduced in 2014. Nook e-readers, meanwhile, do not appear to fall into the discontinuation pile immediately. Rather, they’re projected to have their own gradual, natural decline — following the general trend of consumers moving to tablets as all-purpose devices. Microsoft and B&N representatives declined to comment for this story. A deal to buy the digital assets of Nook Media is the natural next step for Microsoft, which first announced a plan to work with Barnes & Noble on its Nook devices and content in , ponying up $300 million at the time to help. That plan included an additional $180 million advance to develop content for its Windows 8 devices — which Nook . To date, there have been 10 million Nook devices sold, including both tablets and e-readers, with more than 7 million active subscribers. Microsoft has seen limited interested in its Windows 8 devices (although it says it has for the OS to date). Currently the Nook app is available on every major platform, including Android, iOS and Windows. Nook Media last October with a $300 million investment by Microsoft for a 16.8 percent stake in the company. The partnership was aimed at getting B&N content on then-nascent Windows 8 tablets. At the time, said “It’s hardware, software, content: everything Nook is part of Nook Media. There will always be a long-term relationship between Barnes & Noble and the Nook business.” Nook’s decline seems to have helped alter company strategy. Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio buying back the whole of the company’s retail operation. The documents TC has seen values B&N at $1.66 billion. When Nook Media was first formed, the valuation of that division alone was $1.7 billion. When Pearson invested $85 million at a 5 percent stake in January, it was valued at $1.8 billion. If the deal goes through, Microsoft’s $1 billion purchase will be well below the price it had originally bought in at. The documents, which are based on company filings and management discussions, show the Nook unit brought in total revenue of $1.215 billion for fiscal year 2012 (which for Barnes & Noble ends every April 30th), for a loss of $262 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). It expects revenue to fall to $1.091 billion in fiscal year 2013, for a loss of $360 million as tablets are phased out — and estimates revenues to gradually recover, up to $1.976 billion by fiscal year 2017, for EBITDA profit of $362 million. In the meantime, the Nook division has taken a . The new models have sold at a discount for weeks at a time and their flagship 10-inch Nook HD+ fell from $269 to $179. Kindle is offering the Fire HD for the same price. The hardware, while in many ways superior to Amazon’s, seems to have fallen behind in the race to market share and revenue. If Microsoft steps in, the dedicated e-reader race between the stalwart B&N and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon could be over. : Publishers’ Lunch notes that there may be other factors in a calculation of the valuation, for example counting Microsoft’s equity stake in the College division, and what impact additional payments made by Microsoft would have. Read more details .
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Google Framed As Book Stealer Bent On Data Domination In New Documentary
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
is a new documentary about Google’s plan to scan all of the world’s books, which triggered an . The hair-raising film sees Google import millions of copyrighted works, get sued, lose, but almost get a literature monopoly in the process. It’s scary, informative, and worth watching if you recognize its biased portrayal of Google as evil. The film is getting wider release as Google continues to fight the Author’s Guild in court today. The organization is demanding $3 billion in damages from Google for scanning and reproducing copyrighted books. Google is asking the court to prevent the group from filing a class-action suit. “Google And The World Brain” premiered at Sundance this year, which is where I saw it, but more people finally got to see the documentary yesterday at the Vancouver DOXA festival. From the second it starts, director Ben Lewis’ opinion is clear: Google Books is as an insidious plot for data domination. See, Google didn’t just want to make a universally accessible library. It wanted to use all the knowledge to improve its search and artificial intelligence projects. The film opens with ominous bass and a high-pitched drones that lead into historic footage of futurist and sci-fi writer H.G. Wells describing the “world brain” as a “complete planetary memory for all mankind.” But for all its benefits, Wells also warns that the world brain could become powerful enough to displace governments and monitor everyone. Seemingly innocent, Google approaches university libraries, including Harvard, asking to digitize their books for free. They pitch it as a way to avert disasters like the burning of Alexandria or the flooding of Tulane University’s library during Hurricane Katrina. Gorgeous shots of some of the world’s most prestigious libraries position them as infinitely valuable. Head librarians appear in interviews, giddy with intellectual excitement, and they hastily agree to Google’s offer. Soon 10 million of their books were being fed into secret Google scanning machines. Google began showing parts of these scans online, and that’s when the backlash started. Six million of the books were under copyright and Google hadn’t attained permission to scan or reproduce them. In 2005, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed lawsuits claiming Google was essentially stealing the books. Libraries began to turn on the search giant. Internet scholar Jaron Lanier explains “A book is not just an extra long tweet,” and others begin to speculate that Google wants to hoard the books primarily for its own purposes, not to free and preserve their information. The reveal of the film’s thesis would have been more shocking and perhaps better received if it hadn’t been so blatantly foreshadowed. After three years, the plaintiffs settle with Google for $125 million, but within the 350-page court document are shady stipulations that Google now has the exclusive right to sell scans of any out-of-print book it’s digitized — even copyrighted ones. The film labels this as a “monopoly on access to knowledge.” It asks “do we want the universal library in the hands of one company that can charge whatever they want?” The documentary’s climax centers around New York District Court Judge Denny Chin’s choice of whether to approve the settlement or not. The director does a remarkable job of making it seem exciting by positioning the outcome as one man’s decision about the fate of all knowledge. [Spoiler alert if you didn’t read the newspapers in 2011]: Scored by a barrage of victorious brass music, Judge Chin announces that he rejects the settlement, preventing Google’s supposed “monopoly,” and all the interviewed pundits rejoice. ends on a harrowing note, though. Even if Google can’t reproduce or sell the copyrighted works it scanned, Google Search and its artificial intelligence initiatives have already sucked up all the knowledge. As a Google engineer told author , “We’re not scanning all those books to be read by people. We’re scanning them to be read by our AI.” The film is a bit sensationalist, and takes several detours to explore things like whether scanning books in English is an assault to classical European languages in which classic works were originally written. And for all of Google’s faults and audacious ambitions, it’s doing a lot to democratize access to knowledge and make the world a better place. Still, the documentary condenses a fascinating question about who owns information and the long battle for the answer into quite a stimulating 90 minutes. You might leave feeling a little more afraid of Google than before, especially if you don’t take the more heavy-handed fear-mongering with a grain of salt. But at the very least, you’ll stand up reaffirmed that Google is destined to change humanity in ways much larger than it does today.
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Google Translate For Android Can Now Interpret 16 Additional Languages By Camera, Adds Phrasebook Support
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
One of the coolest features of the app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. , this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish. That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in . Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work. In addition, Google is making its phrasebook feature available in that app. The phrasebook, Google said at the time, allows “you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them,” and revisiting them regularly should help you turn these translations “into lasting knowledge.” The phrasebook is now available in Translate’s app menu, where it replaces the app’s ‘favorite’ feature. The service will automatically sync with your Google Account (assuming you are signed in), so any changes you make on your phone will also be reflected on the Google Translate desktop site. “With your favorite phrases synced across devices,” Google writes, “we hope you’ll never be at a loss for words again.” It’s worth noting that the does not currently support translate by camera.
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Microsoft: Google Doesn’t Get Business Productivity Tools
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
When it comes to productivity apps, Office is still clearly the market leader, and Microsoft is now also quickly iterating on its online apps for Office. When it comes to its competition with Google’s online productivity apps, though, it’s hard to figure out if Microsoft is feeling superior or threatened (or a bit of both). Earlier today, I talked to , the director of product marketing for at Microsoft. In his view, Google doesn’t really get how businesses use productivity apps. Businesses, Atalla told me, are looking to find the right mix of tools from companies they trust. He believes Microsoft has the “broadest vision of productivity” that includes from the basic Office tools like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, to database servers, Skype and Lync for connectivity and real-time presence indicators, and support for multiple platforms. Microsoft’s Michael Atalla Productivity, he said, “is more than just working in the browser” (a clear nod in Google’s direction), because organizations also want security policies, the ability to work with data on-premise and off-premise, and a full set of business-focused capabilities (including business analytics, for example) — some of which can’t yet be replicated in a browser or just aren’t part of the standard online productivity suites yet. He also noted that while Google provides businesses and consumers with the same set of tools, “one size doesn’t fit all.” And while Microsoft “deeply understands that businesses need capabilities that go beyond consumer needs,” he clearly implied that Google doesn’t. Google’s focus, he somewhat jokingly added, seems to be on Glass and not on the productivity apps on Drive. developer conference will kick off next Wednesday, and chances are the company will announce at least a few updates to its productivity suite. Its acquisition of has given Google access to better technologies to provide Office users with the kind of high-document fidelity that only the Office Web Apps currently offer online. I can’t help but think that Microsoft is trying to preempt some of these announcements with the release of its Office Web Apps earlier this week and its overall publicity campaign around productivity (and it’s somewhat infamous campaign).
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Trump-Gasmic Crowdfunding Platform Plagiarizes From Indiegogo
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
While I wish not to throw any more fuel into the fiery fever dream that is Donald Trump, it is important to note the distinct similarities between his recent press release and the wording from an Indiegogo page describing his new platform, . The : While Indiegogo’s says: Perhaps the Trumpeter crowdsourced his talking points? Or perhaps he was misled as to which crowdfunding platform he was supporting. Either way, it just goes to show you: if you can’t beat ’em, copy most of their marketing collateral and the look and feel of their website. You can check out his new crowdfunding platform, FundAnything, .
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Amazon’s Quidsi Gets Its Own Version Of Prime, With New Membership Program “Familyhood Plus”
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
, the Amazon-owned parent company to a collection of single-word, e-commerce domains, including Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, Yoyo.com, and , is today launching a new membership program called . The program offers consumers free two-day shipping with no minimum purchases and other exclusive deals. Prior to today, Quidsi sites would only promise free two-day shipping for orders of $35 dollars or more, but these could include a cart filled with items from across all the Quidsi-owned sites. In addition, the company notes that many orders are now being delivered in a day or sooner, and in New York and San Francisco, Quidsi has been experimenting with same-day delivery for orders placed before 9 a.m. That makes the need for an exclusive shipping program negligible, perhaps. The new Familyhood Plus program is similar to Amazon’s own , which provides Amazon.com shoppers with free two-day shipping with no minimum order size. Amazon Prime is $79 per year, in part due to its other features, including unlimited access to Prime Instant Video and the Kindle Lending Library. Meanwhile, Quidsi’s Familyhood Plus program doesn’t have annual membership pricing set yet, the company notes. Instead, the program, which offers support across all 10 of the Quidsi-run sites selling items for home, kids, babies, and pets, will be available only as a pilot trial for now. Using the coupon code “GOCRAZY,” consumers can try the program for free during the first three months (*they must shop on a site they haven’t bought from before to get the trial going), with annual pricing likely offered when the trial completes. The free shipping will apply to more than 90 percent of the products on Quidsi sites, except for the “Add One” items which, like Amazon.com add-on items, are products offered at a discount when tacked onto larger orders. When ordered alone, these “Add One” items will not qualify for free shipping. However, AutoShip orders and those placed via mobile devices and native apps will receive the free shipping benefit. Familyhood Plus members are also agreeing to receive promotional emails which offer exclusive deals, but there’s an opt-out process for those not interested in that aspect of the new service. Amazon has been ramping up its Quidsi properties this year, , adding pet medications to Wag.com in March, and debuting children’s fashion site Look.com just last month. More details on the new membership program are .
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Disney Joins The Private Social Networking Craze With New Photo & Video Sharing App Called “Story”
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
The latest to join the cadre of startups offering tools for more private sharing outside of Facebook’s massive footprint is not, in fact, another startup, but rather another media giant: Disney. Citing its “rich heritage in storytelling,” , best known for games, sites, and virtual worlds like “Where’s My Water?,” “Temple Run: Brave,” “Club Penguin,” Disney.com, and more, today launched a personal, mobile memory maker simply called “ .” The , which debuts first , takes the photos and videos saved on your device, then automatically organizes them into sharable, but by default, private albums that can also be personalized with captions, text and various themes and layouts. The albums’ content is also saved in iCloud, so it can be backed up and synced to other Apple devices. Separating a collection of photos into albums isn’t exactly a new trick. Practically every photo-management application today, including Apple’s own Photos app, allows for some level of organization. What makes Disney’s app a bit more cutting edge is the way it automatically organizes the content for you based on the time and location of the photos and videos it finds. Though our saved digital memories have long since included time, date and location information, only more recently have we begun to see a steady stream of newer mobile applications that use that data for grouping photos or creating shared albums with friends. was the big example standing out in everyone’s mind of how to handle location-based photo albums, but others that followed, including , , , , , , and many more, have been experimenting to varying degrees in this space. But because of scrapbooking-esque annotation and customization features, it also shares a similarity to mobile photo-book makers like , and , for example. Unfortunately, Story stops short of actually allowing you to order a printed book at the finish of your creation. However, Scott Gerlach, Senior Director of Engineering at Disney Interactive, says that’s something that’s “definitely” being considered for the future. “In our extensive usability testing of Story, we heard clearly from our users that they’d like to purchase high-quality printed materials for themselves and others,” he tells us, adding that the company is “absolutely looking at different options to help users share their stories.” Those options may even include other photo-based gifts, too. These extra options would likely be added to Story as in-app purchases alongside other premium features the company has in the works, such as upgraded themes, for example. But for now, the app itself is entirely free, with no ads. Story itself is simple to use. To further edit any of Story’s automatically created albums, you can tap a button to add more content, including photos, videos or text, or change the theme. You can also tap on any individual item to caption it, remove it, or change the size. You can also drag and drop items around to swap their positions in a way that’s reminiscent to what years ago on the web, before it to Airtime in March 2012. Once you’ve created your “story,” you can then email it to your family or friends, or choose to share it a bit more broadly by posting to Facebook. Stories can also be embedded on your own website, if you choose. If there’s any complaint with the app, it’s that it has launched only half-done, despite having the resources of a larger corporation at its disposal. Story would make the most sense on iPad, but support for both that and Android isn’t yet available, nor is the option for printed books or other trendy features like photo filters or stickers. That being said, from the sounds of it, Story will slowly morph into a micro social network for families and/or other close friends over time, as Gerlach hints at plans for “more social and collaborative” features in time. That speaks to things like commenting, liking or shared albums, perhaps, and could put Story up against other family-first mobile apps like , , or , for instance. But for now, Story sits somewhere in middle of all these competitors, not quite finished on any front. If you’re leaning towards photo-book creation or private, family-focused social networking, there are other apps that still lead this space for now. Story is available in iTunes.
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Wacom’s Cintiq 13HD Is A Whole Lot Of Drawing Tablet Packed Into A Smart Little Package
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
If you’re a graphics professional, you know . The company consistently puts out the best in digital art tablets, and over the past year has announced and released a variety of improvements to its top-end Cintiq gear. The is the most portable of the line, which features displays built-in to a highly accurate pressure-sensitive tablet, and I’ve been using one to doodle, edit photos and paint digitally for the past few weeks. The Cintiq 13HD replaces the 12WX and improves on it in every way. Design-wise, there are big changes here that dramatically increase the tablet’s portability and overall usability. The 12WX was the closest Wacom came to making a Cintiq you could carry with you, but the 13HD weighs only 2.65 lbs, or 2.78 lbs with the stand. That’s 66 percent lighter, and it’s also smaller in terms of width, depth and height.
Even with all that space and weight savings, the display is larger at 13.3-inches diagonal vs. 12.1 on the 12WX. With the smaller bezel, you sacrifice some ExpressKeys, and the stand isn’t built-in on the 13HD like it was on the 12WX. But those are extremely minor trade-offs compared to all the portability you gain with the 13HD, which can be easily used in the lap like a large paper sketchpad, as well as packed in a laptop bag for travel. The Cintiq 13HD has 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, which is double that of the 12WX. It’s a difference you notice instantly in terms of how well the tablet responds to touch. The screen also has 1920 by 1080 full HD resolution, which is a lot better than the 1280 x 800 on the 12WX. It’s enough that interface elements sometimes feel small on the 13HD, but there’s no question that it succeeds in giving you a more workable drawing surface. It also seems to render colors better than the 12WX, and has better viewing angles all around. Maybe the biggest improvement, however, is in how the 13HD connects to your computer. This time Wacom has folded HDMI, USB 2.0, and the power adapter into an all-in-one cable that terminates in a single, dock connector-like input on the tablet end. It simplifies things immensely, especially now that most MacBooks sport a built-in HDMI port. Once again, this has tremendous advantages for travel, which is where the 13HD really excels overall. The pen that ships with the 13HD is slightly different from what you’d get with a 22HD or 24HD, but it has mostly the same ergonomics — that is, it’s comfortable to use and to hold. Again in keeping with the whole portability theme, you get a carrying case that holds your nibs in the box, and that’s a very useful accessory if, like me, you’re always forgetting where you stowed those things. I was a , and if you’re working at home consistently with a lot of desk space, that still provides the better drawing experience. But the 13HD doesn’t require many sacrifices in exchange for the big benefits in terms of space savings and portability it brings, and the laptop use scenario is much more feasible with this unit. The screen has a definite texturized feel reminiscent of paper, and the stand has three drawing positions and can also fold flat into the back of the tablet itself. the single cable means it’s easier to avoid unplugging something or knocking something over when you’re grabbing it from your desk to use on your lap or knees, and the pen is extremely responsive – lag is imperceptible. If there’s a flaw, it’s the lack of touch-sensitive control strips found on other Cintiq devices. These make it much easier to zoom, pan and scroll when working with large-scale graphics and drawings. And while there are workaround possible using the Cintiq 13HD’s ExpressKeys and rocker ring, they aren’t quite as elegant a solution. If you’re an existing Cintiq user, the 13HD is a no-brainer. It’s got everything you’ve come to know and love, and it either complements a larger device extremely well as a more-or-less mobile solution, or replaces older hardware with big improvements over the last generation. Likewise, if you’re new to Cintiq, this is a great starting place, since it’s the cheapest option (at $999), and yet more drawing tablet than most will ever need. The 12WX was a well-respected work horse for years, but it can rest easy passing the torch to the 13HD.
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Pomplamoose’s Jack Conte Creates A Subscription-Based Funding Site For Artists
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mZ02alEkbLw#!] Jack Conte is an who became an Internet sensation and now, thanks to , he’s an Internet entrepreneur. Patreon is a fundraising site that is a bit different than your run of the mill Kickstarters or . Instead of collecting one lump sum for, say, and album or song, fans can subscribe to the artists and receive “patrons-only” streams of their work. Conte made his latest song “Pedals” available as the first product on the site. It is available . He founded the company with , an ecommerce pro and founder of AdWhirl. The system is similar to the patronages of old where an artist was hired to work for a certain client for a period of time. In Contes’s case, he’s asking for $1 per YouTube video he puts up (we’re assuming, of course, he’s not going to take some shots of his gerbils and stick them up every five minutes) and you can unlock other rewards if you pay a bit more. “The other players in the crowd funding space aren’t providing regular, consistent income to content creators,” he said. “There are literally tens of thousands of people who create regular content on the web and have millions of followers. Kickstarter is not appropriate for a blogger who writes weekly articles – he doesn’t need a big chunk of money, and he has no big project to use it for. He needs monthly income, and Patreon brings crowd funding away from singular one-off projects and into the realm of regular content creation.” The pricing differs from project to project and patrons can cancel at any time. Conte has also brought in his amazing songwriting buddy, for the launch today. Conte thought about the hundreds of creators and realized they weren’t getting paid. “I told my college roommate, Sam Yam, about the idea, and he jumped on it immediately. Two monthly later, we’re launching, and I’m going to be the guinea pig user, releasing my EP for free on the site,” he said. “Patrons who sign up are given benefits in exchange for their generosity, like monthly Google Hangouts with the top patrons, presale concert tickets, access to the artist’s stream (like a Facebook feed where fans and artists can post and share media, comments, etc.), or anything an artist is willing to give back.” I love this idea – it’s not much money, it lets folks monetize their fan bas in a non-creepy way, and it’s produced by one of the nicest Internet musicians I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Conte is the opposite of Donald Trump. is open now for patrons and artists alike. I intend to use it to fund my gerbil video series there so get your dollars ready. You can see the wild video for his latest song above and a making-of video below. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHJkIUEONL8]
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Groupon’s Q1 Results: Beats With $601.4 Million In Revenue, Stock Up 11% In After-Hours Trading
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
just reported for its first financial quarter of 2013. The company, which is still looking for a new CEO after the in February, posted a $0.01 loss per share but says its non-GAAP EPS, excluding stock-based compensations, was $0.03. Its revenue was significantly higher than expected with $601.4 million in sales, compared to $0.02 earnings per share (EPS) on $559.3 million of revenue in the year-ago quarter. Wall Street clearly likes these numbers. The stock is already and currently trading around $6.23. The among financial analysts was that the company would report a year-over-year sales growth of 5.3 percent and an EPS of $0.03 on revenue of $588.92 million for this quarter (with a very optimistic high estimate of $618.5). Last quarter, Groupon $638.8 million revenue, buoyed by a strong holiday season, but the company still posted an operating loss of $19.9 million and a loss per share of $0.12. “We are encouraged by our results, as our local revenues accelerated and our margins improved over the prior quarter,” said Eric Lefkofsky, Chairman and co-CEO of Groupon. “We had record mobile performance as 45 percent of our North American transactions came from mobile in March, and more than 7 million people downloaded our apps in the quarter.” One of the main indicators for Groupon’s health has long been gross billings – a reflection of how much money the company has collected from its customers for Groupons it has sold. Last quarter, gross billings increased 24 percent to $1.52 billion. Gross billing for this quarter was $1.41 billion, and the company says it has $1.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents. In the last quarter, Groupon also reported that it had 41 million active customers, up 22 percent quarter-over-quarter and that it was handling about 37,000 active deals at any given time. In the last quarter, Groupon says the number of active customers grew to 41.7 million – a 13 percent year-over-year growth but just a minor increase from the last quarter. Groupon has obviously been through a somewhat tumultuous time recently. The company’s of CEO Andrew Mason after a number of disappointing quarters, however, seems to have brought some stability back to the company. Its share price remains low, though it’s up from its all-time low of $2.60. Currently, the stock is at around $5.60. After Mason’s exit, Lefkofsky and vice chairman Ted Loensis were appointed to the company’s newly created Office of the Chief Executive as interim CEOs. The company has yet to announce a permanent replacement for Mason. From the release:
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Beyond Verbal Gets A $2.8M Seed Round To Develop Voice Recognition That Decodes Emotions
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
With the introduction of Siri on the iPhone 4S in 2011, voice recognition, not exactly a new innovation, suddenly took center stage with consumers. But before that, and especially since then, there has been a rush of developments to meet the demand for ever better, more responsive technology across smartphones, tablets, computers, phone services and whatever else will come next. , a startup based out of Israel, claims that it has developed a way to take computer-based voice recognition one step further, by creating software that is able to detect not just the words, but the emotional nuances of a voice to decipher how a person speaking is feeling. Today, it’s announcing its first round of funding, $2.8 million led by the newly-launched , to roll out its patented technology commercially. As part of the investment, Kenges Rakishev, investor and co-founder of Genesis Angels, is joining the board. Beyond Verbal offers its technology as a API-style cloud-based licensed service that can be integrated into bigger projects: the sky’s the limit for what these services might be, but you can imagine emotion detection used in all kinds of scenarios, from customer services to games, dating services (maybe to help people figure out if someone is really interested in them) and, yes, personal assistants like Siri. Interestingly, while we tend to think of voice recognition as a customer-focused service, one potential application can actually be to help customer services representatives improve their own performance. “We can even tell if an agent is losing his temper. We can tell if you are losing your ‘sales perfect’ intonation,” said CEO Yuval Mor in an interview. Indeed, the premise of Beyond Verbal’s service is that a lot of the voice recognition services on the market today only give part of the story:
“It’s not just what people say but how they say it,” he says. Beyond Verbal also provides analytics and diagnostics that helps customers track different emotions picked up through their applications. Beyond Verbal has yet to announce any customers, although the first is likely to come in the next few weeks, according to CEO Yuval Mor. While the idea of voice recognition brings to mind companies like Nuance and True Knowledge (whose Evi we appears to have been acquired quietly by Amazon), which are able to parse natural language into actionable commands on a handset, Beyond Verbal is also touching on another trend in this area: the idea that these software-based services will become ever more human-like over time. This is something also being , a startup spun out of the MIT Media Lab that takes facial recognition one step further by being able to detect emotions. In the case of Beyond Verbal, Mor says that the system has been created with algorithms that can detect changes in vocal range that indicate things like anger, or anxiety, or happiness, or satisfaction, and cover nuances in mood, attitude, and decision-making characteristics. “To understand these three things is to understand emotions,” is how Mor puts it. Given that many voice recognition systems — from to IVR-based customer services — don’t actually work particularly well, I’m guessing that dissatisfaction may be one of the more highly calibrated of the emotions that Beyond Verbal can track. Beyond Verbal, of course, is not the first to claim that it is able to read emotions in a voice recognition service. But it claims that it’s providing something different from what is on the market today. Nice, for example, also says that it can track emotions, but it uses speech analytics and word choice and volume to gauge levels of emotion. But without including intonation, Tor says such a solution is “very limited.” Beyond Verbal is the first funding announcement to come out of the $100 million , which was launched specifically to focus on early-stage investments in artificial intelligence and robotics.
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 30 | null |
There Was A ‘Glass’ Before Google Came Along, And It Was Used In Antarctica In 2001
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
Whether you think is something you’d wind up using one day, you have to admit that the technology is impressive. Packed inside of the pair of specs is a computer running Android, camera and all of the wireless capabilities you’d need. The idea of wearable computers is nothing new, and a team that explored Antarctica actually had their own pair of “Glass” long before it was en vogue. In a blog post , Tina Sjogren remembers what it was like to pull together a wearable computer running Windows 98, paired with a “finger” mouse for controls and a glass screen as its display. It sounds a lot like an early version of Google Glass, but this was a technological marvel, considering that it was built and used at the South Pole in 2001. The specs of the device, which was called “South Pole Wearable,” are nothing short of amazing, including custom built software to share information and post photos. It was also solar powered, something that Google Glass could really use. It didn’t use 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi and instead relied on satellites:
Finger Mouse
Wrist Keyboard
HUD (VGA Heads Up Display, Eye-trek Glasses by Olympus)
Wearable Windows 98 computers
Daylight flat panel display
Customized Technology vests
Shoulder Mounted Web Camera
Bluetooth near person network
Iridium data over satellite
Power converters
Solar cells
Control and Command voice software
CONTACT blogging software
Image editing, word processing The entire kit weighed 15 pounds, which is almost double what the original Google Glass prototype weighed — about 8 pounds. It now weighs about as much as an average pair of sunglasses. set forth to build something that allowed them to transfer all types of information as they skied through the snowy South Pole. Sharing this type of information in real time was not something that many could wrap their brains around, therefore the pair didn’t get the type of attention for their device that Google is getting for Glass today. Tina says: We wore a computer on our hips, a mouse in our pocket, and the glass was our screen. We did it not to show off but because we had no other choice. She also sees a future for Google Glass and regular consumers: “New technology often needs time to catch on and I can see a future for Google Glass today. It will come down to how sleek and useful they are. A stylish design paired with all the wonders of augmented reality – what’s not to love?” Wearing Google Glass wasn’t the experience that Tina and Tom had back in 2001, as Tina refers to their display as “too bulky to wear all of the time.” The eye piece on their device had greenish text which, much like Google Glass, didn’t obstruct your view. It even had voice commands. The two even slept in their gear at nights, to keep it warm and protect it from the elements. In 2002, they became the first to broadcast live photos and sounds from the Antarctic ice cap. The trekkers counted on Ericcson as their sponsor during the mission, and here’s a drawing they made of a “future explorer” wearing their device: I spoke with Tina today, and she told me that the reason for building the device was based on their love of exploration: “Our specialty is to find and marry software and hardware for unique situations such as extreme expeditions, military, security and other.” The purpose of building the device was simple, yet profound: “We had a story to tell. There had never been live dispatches done from a skiing expedition on the continent before. We also helped General Dynamics with feedback on how this could work on aircraft carriers.” Twelve years after the Sjogren team set out on their adventure, Google is trying to make the world around us equally as interesting with Glass. It’s too soon to know whether it will catch on with consumers once they’re made available to people other than developers. If we’ve learned anything from Tina and Tom, it’s that good ideas have this way of coming back year after year, getting better and more polished each time. As Google Glass has gotten more publicity, Tina summarized her feelings about it succinctly, capturing the true mentality of someone who loves to see new things, explore new places and share experiences: “Cool, maybe the time has come for this tech.”
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Identified Looks To Solve Social Media’s Dirty Data Problem For Recruiters With Help From Former LinkedIn Data Gurus
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
Today, Identified has unveiled its patent-pending, artificial intelligence technology which aims to organize the masses of disparate, incoherent professional data that lives in our social media profiles in order to identify new insights into the job market. Essentially, Identified co-founders Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao tell us, SYMAN is an attempt to provide a solution to a problem many social media companies have struggled with for years: Unstructured, disorganized and inconsistent data. In November 2011, Identified on a mission to create a better professional job search engine. Built on top of Facebook data, Identified set out to nibble at LinkedIn’s lead in this space by giving both job seekers and companies a better way to connect — and find talent. To do that, the startup offered a product that it promised would become something akin to the “Google Page Rank for people,” assigning a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals and companies based on their education, career path, social footprint and more — a la Klout. By the following summer, Identified had attracted three million active users and had imported 10 million profiles from Facebook, series B financing round, led by VantagePoint Capital and Capricorn Investment Group, along with participation from Tim Draper, Innovation Endeavors, Chamath Palihapitiya and more. After this early buzz and validation subsided, however, Identified was met with the challenge of having to convince and incentivize the younger generations to claim and fill out their Facebook-derived profiles on its platform — not such an easy task when so many people already have a litany of online profiles to manage. But doing so is critical for Identified, because without users claiming their profiles and adding more data, an Identified profile isn’t worth much more than any other. Plus, it means the company has fewer data points with which to work when trying to assign an accurate score or effectively tracking a user’s career progress. As such, Identified has spent the last nine months in relative silence, hiring data scientists and designers and building out its team in an attempt to create technology that would set it apart from the field and enable it to begin monetizing. For the enterprise, startups (or really any company) to make use of social media data in a way that’s actually valuable and contains actionable insight, that unstructured, messy social data needs to be cleaned and structured in a way that makes sense. For example, “dirty data,” as the co-founders call it, makes it difficult to deliver high-quality search or analytics products — part of the reason why Facebook’s GraphSearch hasn’t yet seen substantive adoption from recruiters and partly explains why LinkedIn’s career map didn’t take off, respectively. By putting social media data in a clean, organized format, companies can more effectively ingest this data to power recruiting, human capital management, CRM, marketing and a host of other enterprise products. To help solve this problem, Identified partnered with a team of former LinkedIn data scientists to develop SYMAN. Inspired by some of the early work that LinkedIn did on its professional dataset, the startup is applying that methodology to a much larger trove of professional data: Facebook. While one might not think of Facebook as being the go-to site for professional information (especially as many are keen to keep their social and professional profiles separate), with over one billion people on the social network, there’s still an enormous amount of professional data to be gleaned from its profiles. Facebook’s dataset is, as one might expect, more than five-times the size of that of LinkedIn, far less structured and much less complete. That’s all well and good, but how does it work? Without revealing all the nuts and bolts behind the patent-pending technology, SYMAN’s data architecture enables a machine to draw inferences about the meaning of a particular data entry based on context in much the same way the human brain does. In other words, knowing that someone wrote “Analyst” as their job title on Facebook might not be of much help when making predictions about their ideal professional career. However, by considering complementary and related data, like their education, company and friend, SYMAN can infer that the person is in fact a “Systems Analyst” at Cloudera. Comparing biographical, professional and educational data against the career path of a “typical” systems analyst, Identified can now predict that Palantir, for example, might be the best (and most logical) next step in the career path for that particular analyst. The data schema and learning algorithms behind SYMAN, Wallace says, are inspired by pioneering neuroscience research proposed by Jeff Hawkins (the founder of Palm and Handspring) and Ray Kurzweil, who recently joined Google to develop a similar technology and apply it to pattern recognition. Identified has also developed SYMAN to create and inform a new product, which is currently in beta and being tested by 30 or so clients, called Identified Recruit. Just as LinkedIn used its enterprise recruiting tools to begin monetizing its dataset, the startup hopes to use its new product to enable recruiters to more easily and effectively search and identify candidates based on professional information culled from Facebook. In other words, Identified wants to turn Facebook into a candidate database just as LinkedIn has converted its own for similar uses. The product is currently being used by enterprise health clients, like Kaiser Permanente for example, to find healthcare candidates who traditionally have shied away from building LinkedIn profiles, like nurses and patient care professionals, in particular. To give an example of how its new product is being applied in this context, SYMAN was able to find 562 ways in which nurses self-identify on Facebook (how they say “I’m a nurse,” in other words). The technology then maps these 562 different terms to 15 unique categories or “15 different types of nurses that recruiters are actually looking for,” Wallace explains, enabling recruiters to find more in one search than they would be able to otherwise, using GraphSearch, for example. At present, Identified has only “cleaned” healthcare data via SYMAN, but going forward, the company intends to apply the technology to other industries, like finance, education and life sciences — to name a few on the near-term roadmap. Moving forward, the co-founders tell us that they’re also keen on integrating other datasets, applying SYMAN not only to Facebook, but to LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, Github and others. Though this will take some time, one can also see the company using its new tech to develop analytics products for professionals and companies, like, say, products that would them optimize their workforce and view leads, candidates and more in a centralized dashboard. Also on the roadmap, Wallace says, is the development of an API for a variety of social media sites, which would allow companies to use SYMAN to clean and organize their data, on-demand. Data-cleaning-as-a-service, in other words. The founders also hope that, through its future API, SYMAN could enable companies to monetize their data for enterprise applications in a way they’re currently unable to do, as well as allowing developers and third-parties to build B2B tools, apps and tools on top of SYMAN’s technology. Of course, in the big picture, the applications for SYMAN are just beginning to take root, so it’s still too early to say just how effective and attractive this kind of technology will be to other companies. But, based on where Identified was a year ago, it certainly feels like a step in the right direction, especially if it means to monetize in any significant way. Sure, it’s easy to talk about what could be, making Identified’s future plans for its technology seem like pie-in-the-sky-type conceptualizing at this point. However, the startup does seem to have assembled a team of experienced data scientists and engineers, and the recent addition of two new board members from well-known recruiting and human capital companies may be a sign that the startup is at least moving in the right direction. To that point: This quarter, Wallace says, the company officially added Jobvite CEO Dan Finnigan and Max Simkoff, the founder and CEO of Evolv, to its board of directors. As to what he sees as the potential for SYMAN, Simkoff says that he thinks the technology could solve a problem “that plagues big social data and which no other social or professional network has really been able to solve effectively,” and as such, could “uncover powerful insights and relationships buried deep within the Social Web, which have the potential to change how companies pursue talent, manage their workforce, and understand their competition.” For more, find , more on its and a brief video demo below: http://youtu.be/wteVbcLv7YI
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Slow Sales Of Facebook’s Phone? AT&T Drops Price On HTC First From $99 to $0.99
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 |
Facebook may be trying to sweeten the deal to get Home into more hands, or AT&T and HTC might just want their money. But for some reason, the Facebook Phone aka the on contract less than a month after its debut. Considering it comes with unbloated stock Android and a speedy LTE connection, that could be a bargain. Facebook tells me “We think this is a good move by AT&T and have highlighted the new price on our .” AT&T is also running a discount special on the popular HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, so this might not be as much a reflection of the First’s momentum as an overarching move on the carrier’s part. Plus, all phones get price drops eventually. Facebook has maintained that it’s committed to working with manufacturers on handsets, so don’t expect this to be the last Facebook Phone. But it seems Home wasn’t a strong enough selling point to convince tons people to buy a phone with a soggy camera — . The 5-megapixel lens did a crummy job in low light, and Home buries the controls for the camera making it harder to catch candid shots. Fewer than 1 million people have downloaded Home for their Android phones, and many fewer may have been willing to pay $99 for a phone with it. But Home will get better, and so will any phone carrying it. As I wrote yesterday, about the “apperating system” in its monthly updates. Specifically, I’d bet on a deeper onboarding flow to make Home less confusing, and a way for it to preserve your widgets and homescreen app folders rather than completely replacing them as it does now. If Home improves soon, or HTC releases another version of the First with a better camera, I think sales of the brand could pick up. Facebook might want to draft some new commercials in the meantime, though, as the last few made the First and Home seem like a .
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Readying For An IPO, Peer-To-Peer Lending Marketplace Lending Club Raises $125M From Google And Others At $1.6B Valuation
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Peer-to-peer lending platform is announcing a huge new investor today: Google. Google and existing investor Foundation Capital have put $125 million in Lending Club, which was valued at $1.55 billion in the round. As part of this investment Google will take an observer seat on the Lending Club Board alongside existing Board members including Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker, ex-chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley John Mack and former U.S. Treasury Secretary The investment by Google came as part of a secondary transaction whereby new and existing investors acquired shares from existing investors. Last year, Lending Club raised $17.5 million from Kleiner Perkins, bringing its total outside investment to just under $100 million. Because this is a secondary round, there is no new money being raised, as Google and Foundation are buying out existing early investors. Lending Club, which brings together lenders and borrowers who want to cut out banks in the process of investing among peers, has facilitated a total of $1.65 billion in loans. In the last quarter, Lending Club saw $350 million in loans made through the platform, and has generated 22 consecutive quarters of positive returns. Lending Club expects to issue $2 billion in loans this year alone. The company’s wholly-owned subsidiary LC Advisors, an SEC Registered Investment Advisor, has launched several funds in the last 2 years and now has more than $450 million in assets under management. To put Lending Club’s growth in context, when peer-to-peer lending began to establish itself about five years ago, there was a lot of excitement. By taking banks out of the equation altogether to connect investors directly with those in need of a loan, p2p lending almost immediately had tons of appeal (for both consumers and investors). However, thanks to heavy scrutiny from the SEC, companies like Lending Club and its main competitor Prosper faced a few challenges. However, the SEC finally greenlit the model, and Lending Club has been growing ever since. The company announced last year that it is cash-flow positive for the first time. Last year, the company added 50 employees, including the former Visa head of global development and Morgan Stanley CTO John McIlwaine and E-Trade general counsel Russel Elmer. Lending Club is also reportedly gearing up for a potential IPO in the next year or so. “Lending Club is using the Internet to reshape the financial system and profoundly transform the way people think of credit and investment” said Google’s VP of corporate development, David Lawee. “We are excited to be a part of it.” Having Google (not Google Ventures) as an investor is a huge deal. It’s not that often that Google makes a corporate and strategic investment in a company. In fact it’s pretty rare. The investment was made through Google’s arm, headed by Lawee. Most recently, Google in Survey Monkey’s recent funding. “The Google team is excited that Lending Club could transform the banking space,” says CEO Renaud Laplanche. “The company believes that our technology brings better value for consumers. “By promoting the transparency and democratization of data, Lending Club is opening up tremendous opportunities for disintermediation, which is disrupting the traditional banking model,” said Charles Moldow, general partner at Foundation Capital, which has invested $more than $50 million in the company. He adds that the investment was the one of the few largest in the firm;s 18-year history, which is “a testament to the magnitude of the opportunity” for the company. Laplanche explains to us that this year will be spent continuing to raise awareness for company and grow fast, specifically focusing on helping borrowers with good credit pay off credit card balances, and access lower interest rates from borrowers. As for the rumors of an IPO, Laplanche confirms that Lending Club is preparing for a potential IPO and hopes to be ready sometime in 2014 for a public offering.
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Survey Finds UK Startups Upbeat On Growth And Revenues, Downbeat On Fundraising
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Startups in the UK are upbeat about the future and usually more profitable (comparatively) than their US counterparts (which tend to focus on growth over revenues). But they find raising Series A money difficult, with 90% of entrepreneurs saying the UK fundraising environment is “challenging”. Those are the findings of a commissioned by Silicon Valley Bank (its first such) which has set up operations in the UK. Admittedly the 125 startup executives surveyed is not vast, but it’s likely to be highly targeted given SVB’s historically close relationships with the tech startup ecosystem. Top line findings of the survey revealed some 83% anticipated positive business conditions in 2013, 39% are looking to raise capital from VCs and Angel investors, but there remains a funding gap between Seed and Series A funding. This latter point chimes with our own anecdotal evidence from TechCrunch sources. It appears Seed funding sources are widespread – it’s now what happens afterwards that’s the issue. Some 90% of entrepreneurs in the study say the UK fundraising environment is challenging, with over a third blaming a “risk adverse” UK VC ecosystem. Most entrepreneurs surveyed are looking to Angel investors or VCs for their next source of funding (39% for each). Some 14% blamed ‘inexperienced investors’. Companies with fewer than 10 employees are more likely than those with 10 or more employees to look to: Angel investors (49% vs. 12%); the SEIS government tax relief scheme for investors (24% vs. 6%) and the EIS scheme (20% vs. 6%). Frankly, this feels like an opportunity for US investors to pick up some very competitive deals. One in five businesses is beating their revenue targets for 2012, and another strong year is predicted for 2013. Some 60% of the respondents say business conditions had improved in 2012 compared to 2011 and 73% met or exceeded revenue targets last year. Of the UK startups questioned nearly half expect their company to be profitable this year. The survey claims “just 26%” of their US counterparts report the same, though sources for that figure were not cited. More than half (56%) want greater access to government grants and funds designed specifically for startups, while 52% would like to see tax reforms. This latter figure sounds pretty favourable, given recent government changes on tax and funding, such as the SEIS initiative. Hiring is a key priority for UK based startups. Eighty-seven percent of survey respondents plan to hire in 2013 and 77% say that finding workers with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) skills is “absolutely critical”. Commenting, Bindi Karia, Vice President at Silicon Valley Bank says while the outlook appears pretty good, “the flipside is that many executives have concerns around how they should fuel the next level of growth, since access to funding and talent are cited as challenges for many startups.” Joshua March, Co-Founder and CEO of startup business Conversocial (based in Shoreditch at the centre of the so-called TechCity tech cluster) says: “The tech scene in London has evolved dramatically since we started working on Conversocial in 2009. One of the most exciting changes is how much easier it is to hire great developers than just a few years ago. Undertakings like Silicon Milkroundabout and the Tech City initiative, backed by so much government and press support, have turned ‘startups’ into a viable career path.” Market research firm Koski Research conducted the survey for Silicon Valley Bank in December 2012. For the purposes of the study, UK startups were defined as companies in the innovation sector with less than £25 million in annual revenue and fewer than 100 employees. Here’s a Summary of the statistics: A big year: • 83% anticipate positive business conditions in 2013.
• 18% of respondents say their company exceeded revenue targets in 2012.
• 55% or respondents say revenue met projected targets.
• 66% of respondents say conditions in 2012 were better than in 2011.
• 66% of companies are generating revenue.
• 30% of companies are profitable.
• Of UK start-ups earning revenue, nearly half expect their company to be profitable this year, while just 26% of their US counterparts report the same. Start-ups are Hiring • 87% of startups plan to hire new employees in 2013
• 38% of start-up executives say workers with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) skills are critical , and 23% say management, marketing, and other non-STEM skills are most critical.
• Engineering (69%) followed by Marketing-Sales (41%) are the hardest skills to find. Fundraising environment • 90% of entrepreneurs in this study say the UK fundraising environment is challenging.
• Over 1/3 of the comments received from respondents think that this is due to a UK VC ecosystem that is not as mature at the US one (risk adverse).
• Most entrepreneurs are looking to Angel investors or VCs for their next source of funding (39% for each).
• 28% cite a risk adverse culture as a barrier to funding; 22% claim that access to capital is in issue; 14% blame ‘inexperienced investors’.
• Companies with fewer than 10 employees are more likely than those with 10 or more employees to look to:
Angel investors (49% vs. 12%)
SEIS (24% vs. 6%)
EIS (20% vs. 6%) Attitudes to Government support • Over half of startup executives think that the Government has a role to play in helping the startup sector. • 56% mention that they would like greater access to government grants and funds, designed specifically for startups
• 52% want tax reforms.
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The FitBark Pet Activity Monitor Is A Reasonable Device For Pet Owners
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Jay Donovan
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
I don’t want to awaken the ire of any committed pet owners — because I think you can do whatever you want with your pets (and your money) — but I would be lying if I said I didn’t cringe a little bit when I hear about extreme pet products and services like doggie treadmills, pet psychiatrists or pet fitness centers and the like. In a quick conversation behind the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, an unofficial, unscientific, non-statistically sound poll indicated that “if you don’t have time to walk your dog and need to outsource that to a health club…maybe you just shouldn’t have a dog.” I concur with those results. Still, I came across on the floor of the Hardware Alley at and while it could, at first, seem “extreme” I found that after talking to these guys and hearing their explanation, their little device actually seems pretty reasonable. What is the ? From a technological standpoint, it is a wearable accelerometer that you put on your dog’s collar to monitor their activity. In most ways the product is very similar to products like the Nike Fuel + Band or the FitBit, however the strategy behind it — and this is the reasonable part — is quite different. FitBark is not designed to be a performance indicator or weight loss utility or competitive device for animals. Instead, it’s just an activity monitor so loving pet owners can make sure their dogs are getting enough activity. How it works is that, as the dog moves about, their activity is captured and stored on the device (up to three weeks of data can be stored). Whenever the FitBark comes into the proximity of the owners iPhone’s or optional homebase unit — via Bluetooth 4 or Wi-Fi — the data is transferred off of the FitBark, passed through the FitBark app on the iPhone and transferred up to the cloud where that data is stored. The historical data can then be visualized on any of the iOS devices that are allowed to view the data. In this way, dog owners can have real-time info about the pet’s activity. Another hint that the FitBark is reasonable is their one-time pricing model. There are no ongoing monthly service fees or memberships required. You buy the hardware device upfront ($99 from their ), and you get the data it produces for free. I”’m guessing they have worked their data hosting costs into the hardware price. In this way, it really seems like a tool for care and not a stingy racket for recurring fees. I’m not sure this is a product I myself would ever use, as I tend to think dogs are evolutionarily equipped to survive living in what James Brown would call “a man’s world.” However I can see how loving, caring and yes, pet owners might like to see this data about their dogs. Because of that, the FitBark seems like a useful piece of hardware.
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Philz Coffee Raises Eight-Figure Round From Summit, Angels, As Specialty Coffee Market Heats Up
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
I’ve found that when people visit San Francisco, it’s not unusual to hear them ask something like: “No seriously, is there a coffee shop on every block in this city?” Yes, San Francisco likes coffee. So do a lot of cities. Busy people thrive on coffee, especially in the tech industry. In fact, some would even say that a substantial amount of coffee . Phil Jaber would agree with that statement. After a long love affair with the brew and decades spent testing out his own blends, in 2003, he founded . What was started out of a corner grocery store has today grown into a budding coffee chain, with 13 stores now open and serving across the Bay Area — one of which you’ll find in Facebook’s headquarters. With all the coffee flowing through the Bay Area, Philz has stood out by combining varietals to make a bunch of fantastic tasting blends that are made without using a bunch of machinery. These blends were invented by Phil himself, and while they’re not patent-protected, they’re secret family recipes that you won’t find anywhere else, Phil’s son Jacob Jaber and current Philz CEO tells me. Philz is a proponent of the drip coffee method and, while that may sound like a “hipster” practice to those outside of the Bay, it’s pretty fantastic and has taken off in the Bay Area. Some connoisseurs swear to it as the only way to make and drink it. As a sign of just how hot the specialty coffee market is (at least in San Francisco), fellow Bay Area boutique coffee chain, Blue Bottle, from Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, True Ventures’ Tony Conrad and serial entrepreneur Bryan Meehan, among others. At the time, the coffee chain had expanded to ten stores of its own. When asked if Philz sees Blue Bottle as a competitor, Jaber said that he doesn’t — that the success of one is a positive for the other, and that the market for this kind of branded, personalized coffee experience is huge. In other words, he thinks there’s plenty of room for both to get enough people caffeinated to pay the electricity bills. Today, Philz Coffee is adding some growth capital of its own. Although the company isn’t ready to disclose the exact amount, Jaber says that the company has raised an eight-figure round that’s on the lower end of the spectrum. From what we can gather from sources, it appears to be in the $15 to $25 million range. The lead investor in the round is Summit Partners, and as a result of the firm’s investment, Summit Managing Director Greg Goldfarb will be taking a seat on the startup’s board of directors. Jaber says that the company will also be looking to add a much smaller angel round on top of the growth equity investment, which they hope to close in the near future. While the angel investor list remains unclear, we were able to learn that it comes from entrepreneurs and executives in the consumer tech and retail spaces. When asked why they decided to partner with Summit, the CEO tells us that the firm understood Philz’ ethos better than anyone else, both intellectually and viscerally, which was important to them, especially as it’s a family business and a passion of both Jabers. Of course, it also helps that the father and son duo will retain control of the company, with Summit taking a minority interest rather than a controlling share. Philz’ name has slowly begun to spread of late, thanks to partnerships the company has struck with Virgin America, for example. If you’ve flown on a Virgin America flight recently and had a cup of coffee, you were drinking one of Philz’ blends. With the new capital in its coffers, the company will look to strike a handful of partnerships like that one to increase distribution and awareness among coffee fans. To that end, Philz is also going to begin expanding outside of the Bay Area. Plans are still in motion, but Jaber says that you’ll likely see Philz begin to expand in California first, and into the surrounding states. They want to start close to home first. So you won’t be seeing Philz in Prague any time soon, unfortunately, but LA? And you cities on the West Coast? Look out. Philz crazy tasty blends may end up on your streets sometime in the near future. For more, find
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New York Startup Scene Shines At TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
The champagne bottles are empty. The startups are packing up. TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 is a wrap, and it was a hell of a show. Enigma won the Startup Battlefield, taking home $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup. Ryan Lawler’s Urban Transportation panel was somehow more rowdy than Josh Constine’s talk with Rap Genius. Ashton Kutcher showed up and proved yet again his value as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. There was even a special screening of Alex Winter’s upcoming film about the rise and fall of Napster, “Downloaded”. It just wasn’t the door-busting attendance that proved this was the best Disrupt yet. The show featured the best startups, the best speakers, all at the beautiful Manhattan Center in New York City. I know we say this after each Disrupt — this is, after all, the eighth Disrupt show — but this really was the best show yet. They say New York is the city that never sleeps — a point of trivia proven true by the thousands of Disrupt attendees, volunteers and staff over the last five days. The show unofficially started with the Hackathon on Saturday, April 27. We had record attendance. Over a thousand hackers filled the lower floors of the Manhattan center, occupying every usable inch of the facility to pound out their applications over the following 24 hours. Nerf guns, energy gum and a midnight dodge ball session kept the attendees going. 164 other projects to win the top prize. Disrupt NY 2013 started with a fireside chat with Chris Dixon and Eric Eldon where the Andreessen Horowitz partner and how 3D printing could . TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington took the stage next with Benchmark’s . Gurley also revealed that he . A rather shocking claim seeing how eBay was worth $5 billion just two years after Benchmark’s $6.7 million investment in 1997. The first day of Disrupt NY 2013 wasn’t entirely heavenly rays of sunshine. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of investment firm The Social+Capital Partnership, that the tech world should be “utterly ashamed,” because “we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started.” Yep, Palihapitiya calls it as he sees it. Jonah Peretti took the stage to deliver a keynote. He talked about , , and explained why . When Dennis Crowley took the stage, he explained to TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor that . Location apps will get smarter, he promised. Oh, and — at least that’s what Crowley said. Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media is stepping up its ad game with . With this, Bankoff stated that the company will be profitable in 2013. Betaworks’ John Borthwick took the stage with TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis and and, although briefly, Digg’s upcoming RSS reader — a product that was apparently in the works well before Google killed Reader. Big things are coming down the pike with Gilt Chairman Kevin Ryan and 10gen Founder Dwight Merriman who on stage that they were looking to launch one or two startups in the coming months. Flipboard is huge. , CEO Mike McCue explained to TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon that they aim to make the mobile app . The day kicked off with a talk between noted New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who recently became a VC himself. The two and traded VC stories with Wilson giving tips for pitching a venture capitalist. “ ,” Wilson pleaded. Arrington quickly nodded and agreed. Mike Abbott then took the stage with Mailbox CEO and co-founder Gentry Underwood. The two talked about the surprising pains in scaling Underwood’s hot iOS email application. It took engineers 24 hours a day for several weeks to keep up with the initial demand. And then Dropbox scooped up the company. Google’s Seth Sternberg, Director of Product Management for Google +, and Ardan Arac, Product Manager at Google, used the Disrupt stage to announce . Simply put, Google +’s visibility is now supersized in Google Search. eBay chief John Donahoe to Bloomberg’s chief content editor Norm Pearlstine about how the company screens its acquisitions and how he keeps founders from leaving after the acquisition — a trick that many companies fail to execute after buying a startup. Troy Carter is disrupting the music industry from within. And today he spoke with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine about his secrets regarding managing Lady Gaga’s online presence (she doesn’t use Facebook personally), , and why he thinks will be the home of the next big disruption. When should an entrepreneur raise money, who should they raise from… and, well, ? These were some of the questions discussed on a panel with TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis, which included participation from Mike Abbott of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Aaref Hilaly of Sequoia Capital, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, and BoxGroup’s David Tisch. Display Advertising Products at Google, Neal Mohan, Facebook Ad Products Director Gokul Rajaram and Twitter Senior Director of Product Revenue Kevin Weil took the stage to talk about the state of digital advertising — and take on the subject. In a chat with TechCrunch’s Leena Rao, representatives from PayPal, Stripe and Gumroad gave that has VCs emptying their bank accounts to invest afresh — Bitcoins, a very popular topic at Disrupt NY 2013. The afternoon kicked off between serial-investor Ron Conway, filmmaker/actor Alex Winter and CrunchFund’s MG Siegler to talk about the documentary “Downloaded” about the rise and fall of Napster. Conway said even in 2013, Internet sharing has yet to be solved and that is one of the most disappointing parts of the whole affair. TechCrunch COO Ned Desmond and CrunchBase’s Matt Kaufman used the TechCrunch Disrupt stage to launch a big expansion of CrunchBase, TechCrunch’s own robust free wiki-style directory of people, technology companies and investors. The new feature, , is to appeal to venture firms that want to improve CrunchBase’s data set. The last day of Disrupt started with a rather unruly talk with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine and the boisterous founders of Rap Genius, the the founders on stage will be bigger than Facebook. The site is also looking to get into breaking news with . But Rap Genius wasn’t the loud point of the morning. That happened when , , took the stage with the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) Deputy commissioner of Policy and Programs Ashwini Chhabra. TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler proceeded to manage the rowdy bunch as tempers flared. The talk peaked when it was that the City of New York had just came down on two SideCar drivers giving free rides in a sting operation. Ken and Ben Lerer spoke with Caroline McCarthy about the from venture investing, to starting a media companie, to StopTheNRA.com, which the two plan on launching in the coming weeks. Ashton Kutcher took the Disrupt stage for the third time in as many years. Since first speaking at Disrupt NY 2011, he’s made large strides in Silicon Valley, with his VC firm at a $100M valuation. Disrupt isn’t all about web startups proven equally but Hardware Alley’s marketplace of hardware company and TechCrunch’s talk with Limor Fried of Adafruit. The NYC-based startup is attempting to make learning about . Plush electronic components are just part of the company’s secret sauce. Fried also explained to John why the company — it’s not always cheaper in the long run to outsource to China, she explained. The afternoon season resumed with a talk between TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and noted Silicon Valley investors, Ron Conway, David Lee, and Brian Pokorny. The four VCs, when including Arrington, discussed in length Chamath Palipitiya’s comments on Monday that startup quality is at an “all time low.” They disagree. “ ,” David Lee concluded. Dave Gilboa, co-founder at Warby Parker, one of the e-commerce startups that has “made it” so to speak, shared some stories from the startup’s early days , where he was joined by Everlane’s Michael Preysman, Nasty Gal’s Deborah Benton, Wanelo’s Deena Varshavkaya. The panel was moderated by TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis. Oh and concerning the hot NYC startup and Google Glass? “No comment” was official comment. As one of the top NYC startups, Tumblr Founder David Karp had a lot to say about his city. He was joined with Sequoia partner Roelof Botha and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Simply put, walking down a New York City street than one in Silicon Valley. Thirty startups took the Disrupt Battlefield stage. Seven were eventually chosen as : Enigma, Floored, Glide, Handle, HealthyOut, SupplyShift And Zenefits. After an intense afternoon of judging, Enigma won $50,000, the Disrupt Cup and the title as of the winner of Disrupt NY 2013. Congratulations, Enigma. New York City turned out in droves for Disrupt NY this year. Over 1,800 people attended and 180 companies exhibited in Startup Alley and Hardware Alley. And 1,100 coders and designers hacked together 164 projects in just 24 hours. It was truly a fantastic Disrupt. We’re tired, New York City. But we’re not resting for long. TechCrunch is about to hit the road for a on May 30. More events will be held throughout the summer until and . See you soon.
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And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Is… Enigma!
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. This year’s crop of Disrupt NY Battlefield startups has been one of our strongest yet, but out of the 30 that entered the fray only seven would go on to the final round. HealthyOut, Enigma, Floored, Glide, HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits emerged from the pack as our seven finalists, and their respective teams were faced with another challenge. They had to take the stage one more time to present and face even more intense scrutiny from our judges, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, Allen & Co. managing director Nancy Peretsman, SV Angel managing partner David Lee, KPCB partner Chi-Hua Chien, CrunchFund partner (and TechCrunch founder) Michael Arrington, and TechCrunch co-editor Eric Eldon. Our judges sequestered themselves backstage at the Manhattan Center for quite some time, but they eventually settled on one ambitious startup. , founded by Marc DaCosta, Hicham Oudghiri, Jeremy Bronfmann, and Raphaël Guilleminot, is a web service that allows its users to dig into a vast amount of publicly available (but hard-to-obtain) data. The service pulls its data from more than 100,000 data sources, but the process of sifting through all this information is deceptively simple — a quick search for a person’s name and company brings up multiple previewable tables of information, and jumping in and playing with data is thoughtfully executed. Thinking of Enigma as a sort of Wolfram Alpha for public data gets you close, but Enigma is much smarter when it comes to finding connections between seemingly disparate data points. To date, Enigma has raised $1.45 million in seed stage funding, and has locked up partnerships with the Harvard Business School, research firm Gerson Lehrman Group, S&P Capital IQ, and newly-minted strategic investor the New York Times. You can read more about (or HAN:DLE), founded by Shawn Carolan and Jonathan McCoy, is a so-called “priority engine” available as a web app and iOS app that aims to make users become more productive. And how do the apps do that? By basically folding the functionality of an email client and a task manager into a single service. Users are able to “triage” their emails, as well as archive them for later perusal, but they’re also able to create tasks and schedule them for completion on a given day. The web app is full of power-user shortcuts (hitting the ‘A’ key archives an email, while ‘R’ opens a response) — that coupled with the overall focus on forming a clear picture of what needs to be accomplished on any given day makes for a potentially powerful tool for the chronically busy. So far, Handle raised $4 million from Menlo Ventures (where Carolan is managing director). You can read more about Handle .
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David Karp: Ten Out Of Ten Of The Biggest Hollywood Studios Now Advertise On Tumblr
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Tumblr founder and Sequoia partner (and Tumblr investor) took the stage to talk to TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington about how the blogging platform’s plans to take over the world. After a conversation about the merits of building a startup in New York City versus Silicon Valley, the talk turned to how Tumblr plans to monetize their platform. What’s going to differentiate Tumblr’s advertising over the big honchos of online advertising? Karp says that, unlike the bigs, Tumblr is going after the “top of the funnel,” in other words, advertising that actually inspires you to go out and buy. That’s all well and good, but is it actually working? “Ten out of ten Hollywood studios are buying advertising space on Tumblr,” Karp says. Tumblr is seeing high six-figures per campaign, and “budgets are starting to ramp up.” In fact, Tumblr really began its monetization push back in May of last year, when it first launched ads on its network. “We’ve had great early traction on our network,” Karp told Arrington, “because our story stands apart from the other big ad networks out there.” When Mike asked just what it was that made Tumblr stand out, Karp said that he thinks most of the big networks are really focused on bottom-of-the-funnel intent — that is to say, harvesting intent by hitting viewers with blasts of those little blue links that take them to the website of the “right asbestos attorney.” New media platforms building ad networks are using intent from demographic targeting, timeliness and other roughshod ways of serving the right ad to users, but really they just end up being a group of little blue links designed to convert. In other words, Karp isn’t exactly a fan of search advertising. Sorry, Google. Instead, Karp wants Tumblr to offer advertisers their own canvas and the space they need to create ads that will actually win awards, he says, the kind of content that one would find in traditional advertising. “We want to give them the space to do anything, a four-second loop, an hour and a half video, a high-res panorama, whatever they need to help them build amazing, interactive ads.” The problem is that creative brand advertising hasn’t had anywhere to live on the Web, the Tumblr founder says, and the startup wants to build tools to do that — and to build ad space that’s a comfortable fit for social advertising.
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Big Brands Want Ads On Instagram, But Facebook Is Focused On Growth For Now
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Facebook says that there are no plans for now to add advertising to Instagram, even though advertisers are approaching them, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today during the . Adding ads could end up stunting Instagram’s rapid growth. He said, more than once during the call, that Instagram is currently growing at a faster rate than FB did at the same age, and it now has 100 million users. “They’re really doing well and growing quickly and that is the right focus for them,” Zuckerberg said. “They have the opportunity to…build community. I am really optimistic about the business and the opportunities.” But he also noted that “big brands are approaching us” about doing more on the platform — perhaps commercializing more, is the implication here. Instagram is already a pretty substantial marketing platform. Facebook faced an last year when Instagram updated its terms of service, with many concerned about how Instagram would get commercialized, specifically around selling ads against users’ photos. The company ended up reverting back to its original terms. At the time, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom , “Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.
On one hand, the decision to hold off on adds on Instagram runs counter to how Facebook has been running the rest of its mobile business. The company has been focusing a lot on mobile advertising, which . For now, Facebook seems happy instead for Instagram to provide a complement to the increasing commercialisation on Facebook’s main platform, which includes . On the other, there’s still a lot of evidence here that points to Instagram still lacking the scale to be an effective ad platform for the company. While Instagram now has 100 million users, mobile active users for .
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Angel Investor, Spotify Fixer Shakil Khan Launches Coindesk, A Bitcoin Resource
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Shakil Khan, an angel investor and advisor to Spotify, just launched , a Bitcoin resource and news site, Khan says Coindesk was a project he conceived of about four weeks ago, around when Bitcoin was surging to an all-time high. It’s now trading at around $124.38, or about half as much as it was trading at a few weeks ago. “I was just sitting there and I literally had five e-mails that day from very seasoned entrepreneurs, asking me — what do you know about Bitcoin?” said Khan, who has invested in the space. He was part of , which is trying to make it dead simple for merchants to incorporate Bitcoin as a payments method. “There’s a lack of transparent information. Where do you go to read what’s right or wrong?” said Khan, who has been a head of special projects for Spotify for five years. He was also briefly a head of special projects for Path too. No, Khan’s not starting a Bitcoin media business. (That would be a head-scratcher.) “I have absolutely no desire to be publisher,” he said. “That is not my goal. I am just fascinated by the digital currency space.” Khan says that existing resources out there like Bitcoin Magazine and other message boards are too technical for a more mainstream audience. While helping put together over the last couple weeks, he got together a team of people and part-time writers to publish news about the Bitcoin ecosystem. But he adds that building a news site is not just a side project either. “CoinDesk, Bitcoins and digital currencies are more than a hobby for me,” he said. Khan has personally vetted about 15 deals in the Bitcoin space, and moved forward with just one. “The early guys who are having the ideas have not necessarily run businesses before. They’re looking at it more from an idealist perspective or vision,” he said, explaining why he didn’t go in on other deals.
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Yahoo Acquires 4M-User ‘To Do’ App Astrid, Is Now In A Holding Pattern For 90 Days
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
“Happier, healthier, more productive.” That was the goal of mobile app , and now Yahoo is taking up the mission as it’s just the social productivity platform. Co-founded by a former Palantir engineer, Tim Su, AngelPad-backed Astrid says that it has four million users, who as of logged 30 million plans on the platform. Astrid, we have heard, had raised well over $1 million from that included, in addition to AngelPad, Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Jack Herrick and TMT Ventures. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But we’ve heard the price is “well over the amount you would pay for an acqui-hire.” Yahoo has been putting a strong emphasis on mobile in its future plans, making several other acquisitions in the area, such as the recent deal to buy . Astrid not only gives Yahoo an existing base of mobile users, but also a productivity platform that Yahoo will now be able to scale out. On the hiring side, the whole of the team, which is around 8-12 people, is joining Yahoo. That includes Tim Su and his big data expertise as well as Jon Paris, the co-founder and CEO, who before Astrid had also founded another startup, , an event-planning site. (And before that, according to his , Paris had been a minister, with one previous role including Campus Director for the Stanford Chapter of InterVarsity, the Christian student group.) As for the future of the app, “Over the next 90 days, Astrid will continue to work as is, and we will no longer be accepting new premium subscriptions,” the company notes in a announcing the news. “To make future changes as easy as possible, we’ll be in touch with users shortly to share how to download data.” It doesn’t say what else Astrid will be doing after that. Yahoo has also provided us with a statement: “We’re excited to welcome Astrid to Yahoo!’s mobile team. Their background in personalized mobile experiences is impressive, and we know they will be a huge asset to as we continue to re-imagine our products,” said a spokesperson. “We’re really excited to join the mobile team and continue this work with Yahoo!’s goal of ‘making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining,'” Paris notes on behalf of the Astrid team in the blog post. Launched back in 2008, Astrid was a pioneer in the email management and to-do app space. Now it runs on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows and desktop and mobile web. The app lets you create lists and reminders, and share them with others. It also integrates with Siri on iOS to add voice-based reminders. If some of Astrid’s technology does end up getting used at Yahoo, the acquisition gives Yahoo a potential lever to compete with apps like Mailbox, Evernote and Wunderlist. On the email front, one of the features that Astrid touts is that it can help users .
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Take The H.E.L.M. 2.0 Is A Competition Designed To Encourage Startups To Move To NYC
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
is a competition from the that is designed to encourage tech startups and other fledgling companies to move their offices to lower Manhattan. They’re accepting applications today, and eventually the applicant pool will be narrowed down to 20 finalists that will compete for one of four grand prizes of $250,000 to assist them in moving their offices into the city. The first stage of the competition runs until July 15, 2013, after which time 20 finalists will be selected to compete in the second round. These finalists will be given opportunities to present a detailed pitch as to why a move to lower Manhattan would boost their growth as a company. Each of the 20 finalists is guaranteed $10,000 in prize money, while the four runner-ups are presented with a prize of $50,000 each. The four grand prize winners will be presented with $250,000 in prize money to seek out or expand their office space in a location south of Chambers Street. This competition is the second round of Take The H.E.L.M., which ran for the very first time last year, where the pool of finalists included a number of notable tech startups: , , , and . The contest isn’t exclusive to tech startups, but the large majority of the applicant pool are young tech startups looking to get a boost with NYC office space. So why is being based in New York City so important? “The power of branding in New York City is really about convening and talking about the right things,” says Kyle Kimball, executive director of NYCEDC in his interview with TechCrunch. “Our role is to try to solve some of the systemic problems in New York City to try and make it easier for tech companies to grow and be here.” You can apply for NYCEDC’s Take The H.E.L.M 2.0 competition . The deadline for applicants is July 15th.
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App Install Ads Earned Facebook “Real Revenue” And Helped 3800 Developers Drive 25M Downloads
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Facebook app install ads were the star of call today. Sheryl Sandberg said 3800 developers used the ads to drive over 25 million installs. 40% of the top 100 iOS and Android app developers bought these ads in the last week of Q1 alone. Mark Zuckerberg meanwhile said, “We’re starting to see real revenue from selling mobile app installs.” , the app stores are becoming increasingly overloaded as every type of business goes mobile. Developers need a way to get their apps discovered, creating a massive opportunity of for Facebook’s app install ads which launched in October. These lets developers promote their apps in the mobile news feed with a large image, description, and “install now” button that opens the app’s page in appropriate app store. By combining Facebook’s massive mobile user base with its app install ads, Facebook is becoming the paid gateway to app traction. Zuckerberg noted that with the rise of iOS and Android which it doesn’t own, it wasn’t clear how Facebook would add value to developers. But now Facebook has settled into helping developers build and growth their apps. In terms of building apps Facebook already offers free SDKs that make it easier for developers to build in Facebook login and sharing options. Then just last week, Facebook acquired mobile app backend platform Parse, which handles servers, data storage, and more for developers so they can focus on creating enjoyable mobile app user experiences. While a relatively small business now, Parse subscription fees could contribute a few million dollars per quarter to Facebook in the future. Where Facebook really stands to earn money is app discovery. Sandberg said “We’re uniquely positioned to offer developers massive reach”, alluding to its . Regarding app install ads, Zuckerberg explained that “Even if every recommendation isn’t one you take….we think [app discovery] is good for the community.” Facebook’s CEO went on to note that the ads work well because they’re mobile by design. “Most ads make you visit website”, said Zuckerberg, while app install ads just open the app stores which users are already used to visiting. And since people already have their payment info loaded into these stores, the commerce experience is quick and easy. App install ads also a good bang for developers’ buck, as Sandberg said “Our costs per install are highly competitive.” Meanwhile, CFO David Ebersman said this ad format is”early in its development but really doing quite well. We’re pleased with the experience we’re providing and the revenue we’ve seen.” They’re getting new businesses hooked on Facebook too, as Ebersman detailed, “ Zuckerberg sees the app ecosystem continuing to get larger and more competitive, which will make Facebook’s app install ads increasingly more crucial. They helped Facebook boost its , or 30% of its total ad revenue, up from 23% last quarter. Zuckerberg concluded that “this market is already big and I expect it to grow quickly.” The only issue is that others see this too. Twitter just launched app install cards, which show big visual app previews and links to the app stores when people tweet about the download pages of apps. Meanwhile, some including Hunter Walk suggest that Apple might start offering its own native app install ads within the App Store. Apps are proliferating, and developers need a way to rise above the crowd. Considering the amount they stand to make off of downloads, they could growing increasingly willing to put dollars directly into the pockets of Facebook and others if it gets them discovered.
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Taking A Different Tack, Nimbuzz Chat Startup Partners With Pakistan Operator Mobilink
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Recently we’ve seen a lot of news articles about the potential for chat apps to take over the role of SMS. Analysts Informa recently published research suggesting that 2012 was the tipping point, with nearly 19 billion messages sent globally over chat apps daily, versus 17.6 billion SMS messages. In 2014 some 21 billion SMS messages are predicted compared with 50 billion app-based messages. And while the user numbers of chat apps are significantly lower right now when set against chat apps (3.5 billion SMS users in 2012, against 586.3 million users of WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple’s iMessage and KakaoTalk), those ratios are changing. Given that SMS is 20 years old and chat apps have been going for only five years, the trend is on the minds of mobile operators. That is, if they don’t start thinking about the apps and maybe partnering. Clearly a few apps are trying to be simply disruptive to operators, especially WhatsApp and Viber. Others are taking a different tack. Today Pakistan telecom giant announced it is partnering with , a big messaging player in emerging markets run out of India. Mobilink will now give its 35 million subscribers access to the platform at a minimum flat cost irrespective of the data consumed. The deal mirrors one that India’s Aircel has done with Nimbuzz. The move means that it will be technically cheaper to use Nimbuzz than other apps. It remains to be seen whether this proves much of an advantage to Nimbuzz or not, but it does provide a significant, though difficult-to-monetize, distribution platform. The growing user base of these chat applications is affecting SMS revenue for telecom operators in markets like India, Singapore, Indonesia and Pakistan. They need new ideas. Nimbuzz, whose investors include Mangrove and Naspers, has 150 million users and plans to roll out this model of partnering with telecoms operators. Vikas Saxena, CEO of Nimbuzz thinks operator partnerships “help them to drive data usage among subscribers but also allow us access to users which we may not have had previously.” Where this convergence of operators and app startups leads its hard to say. The disruptors are holding a gun to the heads of the operators. Others are offering a way out. But in emerging markets where access to mobile data is still emerging and SMS remains a big staple, this dualistic approach might be the right one to take.
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Snapzoom Gives You A Smartphone Camera Mount That Turns Binoculars Into A Super Zoom Lens
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
A lot of people don’t carry cameras anymore, now that they have smartphones. But that means that you could miss opportunities to capture great moments, especially when you’re missing out on the great optical zoom available on some more expensive or specialized dedicated camera devices. That’s what hopes to fix with its binocular mount for smartphone cameras, and the best part is that it’s completely universal, meaning it fits a wide variety of both phones and binoculars. The project got started when Hawaii-based co-founders Daniel Fujikake and Mac Nguyen started using their own smartphones to film their surf escapades via a completely DIY, garage-made mounting device that they hacked together. They saw the utility, and other surfers asked them about it every time they went out, so they partnered up with a professional designer to form HI Resolution Enterprises and build a proper prototype using 3D-printed materials. [gallery ids="810885,810886,810887"] The duo took to to fund a production run for Snapzoom, and has already blown past its $55,000 goal in just over a week. The funding will help the two turn the 3D printed prototype into a glass-filled nylon injection molded retail product, which the company hopes to manufacture both in the U.S. and overseas. “It’s going to be extremely tough, since it’s something that’s meant to be used outdoors,” Fujikake told me. “You can put it in your bag, you don’t have to worry about babying it, you can get it wet, you can drop it, it’s very very tough.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yHTsFjlb7c?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] Already, before even closing its Kickstarter funding, Snapzoom has had a lot of interest from well-placed retail partners, including U.S. camera equipment and accessory retailer B&H Photo. Based on funding interest and prospective retail partner enthusiasm, the team seems to have tapped a strong, unaddressed consumer desire, even if it is a bit niche. And it’s not just voyeurs who are interested; this is great for nature photography and action sports, too. Snapzoom is looking to ship in September, and retail price for the mount is expected to be around $79.99, but currently pre-order backers on Kickstarter can get one for just $70. The team is working on stretch goals now, since it has already earned almost $10,000 more than its original goal.
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 8 | null |
Apple’s iOS 7 Will Ship On Time For A Preview Release In June And Full Launch In September, Report Says
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Apple’s iOS 7 will arrive “on time,” according to a couple of well-placed sources following a report from this morning that suggests it was risking delays in the face of major software changes. Apple blogger and noted gave one of his famous one-word confirms today on his blog, agreeing with a source which told that while Apple has had to shift engineering resources away from OS X to iOS to make sure things proceed on schedule, the update will arrive on time. Apple says on its WWDC landing page that we’ll see “what’s next in iOS and OS X,” but it hasn’t spelled out that we’ll see new versions of either its Mac desktop OS, or the mobile platform that powers iPhones and iPads. Still, the focus at WWDC is on software, and it’s more than reasonable to expect given the teaser on the information page as well as references to the future of iOS and OS X made in the official press release noting when tickets for WWDC would go on sale this year. iOS 7 delay rumors have been making the rounds since on the next version of its OS, and they cropped up again today thanks to Bloomberg’s report. But while Apple is apparently having to devote more engineering resources than normal to helping with the redesign process, which is rumored to be headed up by Jony Ive and involves a big visual refresh, which (favoring solid colors and doing away with optical effect that mimic the textures and reflections of physical materials) and bring big changes to the calendar and email tools built-in to iOS. The changes coming in iOS 7 are about modernizing the UI, likely to inject some fresh energy into a mobile operating system that has retained a fairly stable aesthetic style throughout the course of its six year existence. A significant change to the basic functionality of some apps and the look and feel of the entire OS would be quite difficult on its own, but Bloomberg says that the management shift that took place at the end of last year with Scott Forstall’s departure ended up causing a pause and refocus in the direction of overall development. WWDC is just over a month away, so we’ll see exactly how extensive the modification really is with a likely introduction of a public developer preview version at that time, if Apple continues doing the same thing it has in the past around the iOS development process.
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Facebook Earnings Graphs Shows Shift To Mobile May Be Depressing Domestic Ad Revenue Per User
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
It appears that as people switch from the desktop where Facebook shows multiple ads per page to mobile, Facebook is less per user in its most important markets. While helped total revenue increase, in the US and Canada Facebook earned $2.85 on ads per user (ads ARPU) in Q1, down from $3.30 in the holiday Q4 2012, but also down from $2.87 in Q3. Another important stat is that Facebook’s monthly active and daily active users in the US and Canada increased, despite erroneous recent claims from third-party data providers and critics that Facebook had lost users in US. That’s critical because the US and Canada are where Facebook earns the most money per user. One graph we wish Facebook would release is mobile user counts by geography. This could show whether developing markets coming online mobile-first are responsible for its huge surge to 751 million mobile monthly users from 680 million in Q4 2012. Check out the rest of these graphs for detailed stats on Facebook’s user growth, income, expenses, and more. ANd here are our own Bryce Durbin’s graphs that sum up Facebook’s earnings: <
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A Walk Through Hardware Alley At TC Disrupt
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Dogs, drones, and digital controllers, oh my! This year’s Disrupt conference in New York was full of amazing webs services and software, but Hardware Alley brought out the best in hardware startups and showed the world that hardware is finally serious business. Darrell Etherington and I wandered the halls of Hardware Alley today to meet some amazing companies. We met with , a way to see how happy your dog is and , a way to smoke without taking in harmful carcinogens. We saw zip and zoom around the room with their brand new mini drone and with their new system for bike sharing. We’ll call out individual hardware alley companies over the next few days but until then enjoy this quick look at the coolness that is Disrupt.
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Yelp Cuts Losses In Q1 To $4.8M, Sees Revenue Jump 68% To $46M And Record 102M Monthly Uniques On Web, 10M Mobile
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that first launched in the U.S. in 2004 and now lives in 21 countries and 12 languages, and has more than 100 million monthly unique visitors as of January this year, this morning. On the heels of bringing its review data to Kiwis and continuing its international expansion, Yelp announced In the fourth quarter, Yelp missed earnings expectations, with net revenue coming in at $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012, a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011, while it saw a net loss of $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share. Today, Yelp turned things around, as it announced net revenue jumped to $46.1 million in Q1, reflecting a 68 percent growth from Q1 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to more than 39 million, average unique visitors grew 43 percent y/y and local business accounts grew 63 percent. Wall Street’s see $44.5 million in revenue for the quarter, and $1.5 million EBITDA. Yelp hurdled over the bar, in fact, seeing a net loss in the first quarter of 2013 of $4.8 million, or $0.08 per share. This means that while net losses only fell slightly from Q4 2012, it saw a more significant reduction in losses year-over year, $9.8 million, or $0.31 per share, over the first quarter of 2012. In addition, compared to Wall Street estimates, Yelp said that adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2013 was $3.2 million, in comparison with an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $1 million for the first quarter of 2012. In the quarterly earnings release today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman trumped up Yelp’s milestones in the last quarter, namely its hitting a record 102 million unique users over the last quarter, while touching on its plans to improve on its mobile experience. Something that should be music to the ears of anyone with a smartphone. “We had a great start to the year and are excited about the large opportunity in front of us,” Stoppelman said. “This quarter we achieved many milestones including a record 102 million unique visitors on a monthly average basis, demonstrating the strength of our content and the trust we have earned from consumers. We provide valuable leads to local businesses because consumers turn to Yelp at the critical point when they are making purchase decisions. Looking to the rest of the year, we will continue to focus our product innovation around the mobile experience and new features to better serve the consumer and local business owners, and we will continue integrating Qype into the Yelp platform.” Other business highlights? Yelp mobile saw 36 percent of local ads shown on mobile devices in the first quarter, while the app was used on 10 million unique devices over the quarter, building on the company’s launch of display ads on mobile for the first time in Q1. In terms of guidance, Yelp expects revenue in the second quarter of 2013 to be in the range of $52.5 million to $53.5 million, which would represent a growth of around 62 percent compared to the second quarter 2012. Adjusted EBITDA is forecasted to fall in the range of $4.5 million to $5 million. For the full year 2013, net revenue is expected to be in between $216 million and $218 million, representing a 58 percent growth year-over-year.
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About 30% of Facebook’s Advertising Revenue, Or $375M, Came From Mobile Platforms
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 |
Almost one-third of Facebook’s advertising revenue is now coming from mobile platforms, according to the company’s latest earnings release. About $375 million of Facebook’s $1.25 billion in advertising revenue came from products like the company’s new mobile app install ads. That’s up from last quarter, when Facebook said it made 23 percent, or $305.9 million, from mobile ads. So this is a nice 22.5 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile advertising revenue. Because Facebook now sees about three quarters of a billion users per month on mobile devices, the company has to make a commensurate amount from these platforms. Analysts and investors are closely watching to see how well Facebook makes this leap from desktop-based ads to mobile ones. Unlike Apple and Google, Facebook doesn’t own its own smartphone OS or sell its own hardware. It doesn’t have a way to earn a cut of app sales or in-app purchases like it does with games and apps on the Facebook platform. Advertising is the key way that Facebook will monetize its mobile users. Up until the middle of last year, Facebook didn’t really have a program to earn revenues from mobile devices. But then it aggressively stepped up ads for apps in the mobile news feed. It’s well-positioned to do this as app discovery and user acquisition is still a hairy problem for mobile developers across the board. Yesterday, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York that mobile install ads were “performing well, and we’re seeing them deliver really high quality users that take actions.”
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thePlatform Simplifies Event Streaming By Adding Live Video To Its Content Distribution Platform
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Viewers are asking for more live streaming video, and surprisingly, broadcasters are willing to give it to them. Gone are the days where live events need to be watched on the TV, because I mean, who watches TV anymore? When I watch the game, I’m gonna do so on a seven-inch tablet in the privacy of my bathroom, because there’s nowhere else I can concentrate when the kids are watching Dora the Explorer on Netflix in the living room — or whatever it is the kids are watching these days. Anyway, keenly aware of this trend, — which already helps a number of broadcast and cable networks manage their on-demand libraries — is taking steps to make live event streaming easier for their customers. The company, which is a subsidiary of Comcast, is launching a new, SaaS-based platform which will allow networks to schedule and manage live events, with everything they need, like signal acquisition and encoding, dynamic ad insertion and metadata creation, and automatic archiving of programs when they’re done. The new live video offering will integrate seamlessly both with thePlatform’s existing on-demand video management system, as well as with the encoders that broadcasters use to take analog signals and make them digital. To start, that integration will include Elemental encoders, although thePlatform’s VP of marketing, Marty Roberts, promises that other encoders will be added soon. But anyway, once your encoder is hooked up to thePlatform, you’re good to go! After you’ve taken care of that, there’s all sorts of stuff you can do with it. Wanna hit each and every device your device-specific rights contract allows you to stream to? NO PROBLEM. Let’s say that you can stream to the desktop and laptop, but not mobile phones because you’ve got some exclusive legacy contract with a mobile phone provider where only their subscribers get the game. thePlatform has you covered. It even gets extra bonus points for streaming to the iPad, which no one could have imagined when that contract was put in place and isn’t considered a mobile device. (Yeh, I don’t understand it either.) How about making money? After all, you’re not gonna stream that football game for free now, are you? NO WORRIES! thePlatform has live ad insertion. You just tell those ads when to run and you’re golden. Cha-Ching! Wanna add funny graphics or live info while viewers are watching? NOT A BIGGIE. In the same way you just ran an ad, you can also dynamically queue up pretty much any type of media, just like it’s an ad! And once your live show is over, don’t you worry your little head about re-encoding it and putting it into some on-demand library for all the lamers who didn’t watch it live to come look at it later. thePlatform will auto-archive that shiz for you and feed it right into your on-demand library, with whatever rights management and ad rules and whatever else you want to apply to it. That way, it doesn’t have to be lost to the ether when all the action is over — the content will have all the same ad cues, chapter breaks, and metadata that was associated with it while it was streaming live. But now viewers will be able to search for it, and find just the moments they want to watch. So thePlatform has been working with a few different networks — like some of Fox’s regional sports nets and NBC Sports — and things have been all good on their live events. So now the live streaming offering will be generally available to other folks who want to try it. Got a network and wanna do it live! Call thePlatform!
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Microsoft Says It Has Sold More Than 100M Windows 8 Licenses, 250M App Downloads In Last 6 Months, Blue Coming “Later This Year”
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
By most accounts, isn’t all that popular, but , the company has now sold more than 100 million copies of the latest version of its desktop operating system. In January, the last time Microsoft provided updated numbers for Windows 8, the company said that it had . Windows 8 users are also getting used to using the Windows Store, it seems, as the total number of downloads for the first six months has now passed 250 million. The number of apps in the store, Microsoft’s CFO and CMO Tami Reller said in a canned interview with Microsoft communications manager Brandon LeBlanc today, has increased 6x since launch and 90% of the apps are downloaded at least once every month. Given that the Store didn’t have all that many apps in it when Windows 8 launched, a 6x increase doesn’t sound all that big, but Reller argues that this means Windows 8 has “already passed what iOS had in store, in its first year of app development.” Earlier today, Microsoft also that SkyDrive now has more than 250 million active customers. While Microsoft has long acknowledged that the next version of Windows has the codename “Windows Blue” and various leaks have already revealed many of its features, the company has never announced a roadmap for Blue. In today’s “interview,” Keller said that Blue will be available “later this year, building on the bold vision set forward with Windows 8 to deliver the next generation of tablets and PCs.” Blue she said, “will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem.” Blue, she also noted, is an opportunity for Microsoft to respond to feedback from its customers (who all seem to be clamoring for the return of the Start menu). With Microsoft Build , chances are we will hear quite a bit more about Blue at that time, so it’s probably a fair guess that “later this year” refers to the late summer.
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Nokia Appoints A New Lead In China As It Seeks To Reverse Its Declining Sales In That Country
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Nokia’s newly-appointed general manager of China, Erik Bertman, has plenty of experience in emerging markets, but it’s unclear if he’ll be able to reverse the Finnish company’s rapid loss of market share in the world’s largest smartphone market. Bertman will takeover the position on June 1. He succeeds Gustavo Eichelmann, who is leaving Nokia and returning to the U.K. for personal reasons, according to the company. In a statement, Nokia said Bertman was appointed to lead operations in China because “he has achieved good results in a number of important markets” and has experience leading cross-cultural teams. Originally from Sweden, Bertman previously served as the regional lead of Nokia Russia, where he oversaw sales and marketing. His experience with the company also includes a stint as financial officer in the sub-Saharan Africa region. Bertman arrived in China in 2009. Despite his experience in emerging markets, Bertman has a lot of work to do if he wants to turn around Nokia’s fortunes in China. The company’s market share in that country as it failed to weather competition from Samsung. The Finnish company slipped to number seven in overall sales in 2012, with 3.7 percent market share, compared to the 29.9 percent chunk it held in 2011, . It’s rapid descent was mirrored by Samsung’s quick rise to the top–the Korean tech giant nearly tripled its China sales in 2012, selling 30.06 million smartphones, up from 10.9 million handsets a year earlier. Samsung now holds a 17.7 percent market share in China. Furthermore, Nokia has had three people leading its China operations in as many years: Deng Yuan-yun, Liang Yu-mei and Eichelmann. The position’s rotating door may be a sign that the company is unsure of its strategy in that region. A turnaround in emerging markets is crucial for Nokia’s survival because North America has been the company’s weakest market for sometime. Last month, Nokia reported $334 million in sales in Greater China, down 56 percent from a year ago, a figure that puts it just above North America in terms of market size for the company. Nokia’s dramatic decline in China comes despite its efforts to hold on to its former dominance in the market with low-cost in March 2012. The device was the first CDMA Windows Phone in the country, but it failed to gain enough traction to compete against inexpensive Android handsets.
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In Praise Of Slow Hardware
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
In all the discussions I’ve had with hardware makers about their products, one thing is becoming clear: in the end, the cheap part is never cheap. Take a look at this for example. A maker, , had recently funded a that used a simple array of LEDs to display the time in QR code. He ordered the parts from an online supplier – 500 in total – and begin testing them. In all he saw 38 of the 500 fail in basic tests. In short, his “quick and easy” shipment of components from an inexpensive vendor resulted in a 7.6% failure rate. “I found out this week that sometimes goods and services purchased in China can be of low quality,” he wrote. In a similar vein, I once spoke to a hardware broker in Shenzhen who sold bargain-basement phones to the developing world. While his products were far from amazing, he did find similar failure rates in all of the phones he sold, resulting in the need to hire a separate QA tester who powered on and tried all the phones before he shipped them, thereby reducing his profit. I want to make it clear that this is no jingoistic rant, but this is, in short, the biggest problem with off-shoring hardware manufacturing. However, because the perception is that local – and by local I mean a general U.S. or European audience – is expensive, this quality problem is endlessly repeated. “When you off-shore hardware, every mistake, and there will be mistakes, causes a delay chain that multiplies by physically shipping prototypes, samples, tester units and more half-way around the world,” said Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries. “One of the best things you can do is keep your supply chain as close as possible.” It is telling, however, that the company just invested in a $175,000 pick and place machine for their SoHo office. “This is why we like to manufacture here in SoHo, have our injecting molding in North America, PCBs made in the USA and services like large volume laser cutting here in NYC,” she said. The proximity of a vendor to your assembly point allows you to, in a pinch, drive to complain. As it stands, Ciuffo’s vendor was kind enough to respond and resend extra pieces but after a 35 day wait on the original LEDs he had already added a month to his build time. While the price of the pieces was obviously low enough for him to consider the opportunity, the cost in time and potentially QA headaches becomes an intangible. But therein lies the problem: you can’t always source, say, an array of LEDs locally. Chances are the pieces are pulled from the same factory you’d be going to in Shenzhen and, barring a bit of QA on arrival, you might be running into the same problems. However, as companies like Adafruit begin catering to the hobbyist and local manufacturers begin catering to smaller batch hardware creators, I could definitely see it becoming easier to become a true hardware locovore. We, as consumers, should also require that the things we buy be locally sourced. While I am well aware that manufacturing is not all puppy dogs and rainbows, there is something to be said for a sourcing infrastructure that allows a Kickstarter project lead to make a few calls and flow a bit of money back into the community, state, or country. You either pay for cheap hardware up front or later on, in support costs. An active slow hardware movement would allow far more control over the process of making cool things and would, in the end, benefit us all by raising quality across the board.
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Tumblr’s Teenaged, Double-Edged Sword
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
“ “: A telling from a teenaged girl on the blogging platform turned social networking site Tumblr, in a chain of re-postings that had her pondering Tumblr’s impact on her life twenty years from now, when her passing, immature thoughts become fodder for a discussion among her boss and colleagues at some imagined future workplace. The fact that Tumblr speaks to this younger demographic, and in particular teenage girls slightly more so than boys, is known. Why that is the case is something which many are still scratching their heads over, even as Tumblr begins to focus on generating revenue from this very audience, whose online behavior makes it tricky for advertisers who want to connect. “ “, a confused parent once asked on another time-wasting site, the Q&A resource known as Quora. The top answer, posted by “Anonymous,” claims to be from a teenaged user of Tumblr, though it could just as easily be a sneaky marketing ploy from the startup itself. But it speaks some truths nonetheless. Tumblr, wrote the poster, “seems like a freedom, as weird as that may sound.” “Unlike Facebook, I have a clean slate,” this person explained. “I really have found myself starting to have my own opinions. These, in some cases, greatly differ from relatives or friends, people who used to greatly influence my opinions.” Whether or not “anon” was a real Tumblr user, or even a real teenager, it’s an apt enough explanation as to why the site has found footing among the young and hormonal. Though worries that a boss might peruse online indiscretions may one day come to pass, Tumblr users often use pseudonyms or only first names, making their blogs harder to find by the prying eyes of parents or HR, for that matter. Tumblr doesn’t owe its success among teens solely because of its pseudonymous qualities. That helps, but, more simply, it has become the digital upgrade to that demographic’s earlier tools for cut-and-pasted self-discovery: the repurposing of media and content to reflect their interests and fandoms, likes and hates, newly forming opinions, and more. Read through teenaged Tumblrdom as a grown-up, and you’ll soon feel very, very old. “i haven’t had my phone on ring for like 3 years,” “Aubrey,” who also once reblogged “what the frick is friendster.” Don’t worry, Aubrey, you don’t need to know. ~~~~ The real answer to the surging teenaged use of the site lies not in the lengthy Quora explanations, but in the examples of the odd, offbeat, and yes, sometimes inappropriate content kids are sharing. Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, , and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on . The teen blogs are also reminiscent of MySpace, featuring often same general gaudiness, and the spewing of content on top of content, like the layers of photos and other decorations teens used to tack up on cork bulletin boards and bedroom walls. Tumblr now serves that purpose, and more. ~~~~ At the risk of dating myself, I’ll reveal that I was teenaged in the pre-Web era. We didn’t have Tumblr then, but rather composition notebooks, glossy magazines, and scissors. We had mean girl-like cliques to rebel against, passions, complaints, and in-jokes. We liked boys. We worried about our looks and clothing and hairstyles. We dissed our teachers and our parents. We wrote short stories. And we expressed ourselves on paper with scrapbooks, torn magazine collages, and shared notes in passed around “slam books.” (To be fair, we weren’t writing things, really – that’s just what these books were called.) Now children have the Internet. And Tumblr has become their platform for those universal, familiar urges at self-expression falling somewhere in between the diary, the slam book and the cork board. Notes on Tumblr blogs range from (“ive been telling myself ill start my homework soon for the last 4 hours,”) to the (“a cute necklace for school tomorrow” which accompanies a picture of a noose – a note whose message would terrify parents and other adults, but appears to only be commentary on the horrors of high school life). ~~~~ According to Pew Internet’s from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64, and a (surprising) 1 percent of those 65 and older do. further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34. Then the numbers taper off. Site users don’t tend to have kids of their own, make somewhere between $0 and $50,000 (66 percent do), have either no college (41 percent) or college backgrounds (48 percent), and tend to reflect a more ethnically diverse makeup. Now Tumblr is seriously looking to monetize this audience, proffering a platform for brand advertising which is meant to be a place for advertisers to “build amazing, interactive ads.” “We have a story that really, truly stands apart from the other big networks right now,” he said. Other networks are harnessing user intent, then pointing users to little blue links. “Creative brand advertising has had nowhere to live on the web,” he said. Ten out of the ten top Hollywood studios advertise on Tumblr now, while speaking, too, of ads that inspire people to go out and purchase, designed by imaginative types who went into advertising because of their “Mad Men-like aspirations.” He may have played down the demographics’ role in Tumblr’s advertising equation during this discussion, but the site’s teen audience is too powerful to ignore: there are some 30 million U.S. teens with . They might not all be on Tumblr, of course, but if brands can reach a portion of this group, they have the potential to tap into a non-trivial source of disposable income from heavy-duty consumers. After all, . Tumblr’s future, for now, seems to be closely tied to its young adult demographic, their whims, and perhaps even their . This audience has grown up connected, is often when it comes to brand advertising, and tends to toe a fine line between wanting to express their individuality and wanting to fit in. It’s not an easy group to reach, which makes Tumblr’s revenue potential tricky to pin down. Too much or the wrong kind of advertising, and a fickle teen audience may find a new home elsewhere. Though Tumblr is now home to over 100 million blogs, if a good chunk belong to teens, it’s difficult to count that as serious traction – today’s teens are less committed to their digital creations than adults, having already , and are now turning to “ephemeral” messaging apps like Snapchat, which delete their communications upon viewing. They understand just how easy it is to deactivate an account, walk away and begin again. Content is disposable, and the web is an impermanent platform to build upon, they’ve found. These are decidedly radical views. For Tumblr, the shiftiness of the very group it has found a home among is one of the riskier aspects of what appears to otherwise be a strong, fast-growing and potentially service. Its revenue plan is to provide a blank slate to its users and advertisers alike (“…we want to give [advertisers] the space to do anything – a four-second loop, an hour and a half video, a high-res panorama,” Karp explained last week.). But Tumblr will need to be careful with the results of those advertisers’ . Overdone marketing messages could sour Tumblr’s most engaged users on their online hangout. Done well, however, Tumblr could endear itself to its reblog-happy user base even more, connecting aspirational imagery and content with those who are still young enough to dream they can spend their way into new feelings. Whether they’ll eventually end up “ those feelings or not.
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ATG Founders Aim To Turn Company-Building Into A Science With Their New ‘Venture Foundry’ Redstar
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Jeet Singh and Joe Chung have already had a nice exit, taking their enterprise software company Art Technology Group public (it was for $1 billion back in 2010). Now they’re hoping to turn the act of building successful startups into a “repeatable process,” through their new firm . Singh and Chung, along with their third co-founder Matt Beecher, said they became interested in angel investing a few years ago, but at the same time they were turned off by the randomness and risk of the traditional model. So they developed their own approach, a “venture foundry,” where the firm focuses on a few broad themes, develops companies internally, and then spins them out if they seem to be getting traction. Here’s how the model is : We identify significant trends and growing markets, and develop potential products and services for those markets. We match very successful mentors with young and experienced entrepreneurs and co-found companies with them. Together, we staff these teams, evaluate the market, build and test the product or service, establish partnerships, identify sources of investment, and launch the enterprise. We also fund these firms through their seed-stages. What are those ? The firm has three so far, namely underemployment, the “grey market,” and the present/future of media. Apparently Redstar has actually been around , but didn’t really publicize its existence — it’s only starting now because it has launched its first company, social shopping startup (I’m assuming that’s one for the grey market category). The goal is to launch about three companies per year, Beecher said. “We might spend seven, eight, nine months on the concept before we launch it,” he added.
“The core tenet of our business is knowing which [concepts to focus on] better and earlier through our network and research.” Redstar describes this as a “top-down” approach to building companies. That makes it sound like the firm is going against much of the received wisdom in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs are encouraged to launch their products as soon as possible and adapt based on customer feedback, and where team and execution are valued over ideas. Chung said he definitely expects companies to adapt and change, but he said that too many startups overvalue execution: “In the early days of ATG, there were so many company- killing decisions that we had to undo, but we were able to get away with it. … One of the great fallacies is that startups are really good at executing.” Not that Redstar is relying entirely on its thematic approach to guide its investments. It’s also a question of building the team — the partners said they might be excited about a given idea but decline to pursue it if they can’t find the right executive to lead the company. The firm aims to make investments of $500,000 to $1 million. Ultimately, Singh said the partners are hoping that half their companies will be successful. That would be pretty remarkable if it happened, but he noted that with a higher success rate, Redstar doesn’t need “billion dollar successes” to pay off. “We don’t have to swing for the fences,” Singh said. “We’re trying to build good, solid companies that eventually sell at a reasonable valuation.” REdstar itself is self-funded so far. The partners said they’re looking to raise money this year, but it might be structured less as a traditional venture fund and more as an equity investment in Redstar.
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Riding A New Transparency Wave In Science, Academia.Edu Lets Researchers Share Their Raw Data
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
It wasn’t until widely respected economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff shared the Excel files behind their influential paper on the relationship between government debt and economic growth, that a very basic and consequential spreadsheet error was discovered. Suddenly, a conclusion that policy makers around the world had seized on for years to justify steep spending cuts was thrown in doubt. That’s why Richard Price, the CEO of a social network for researchers called Academia.edu, says that sharing raw research data should be expected from the start. His platform is adding a feature today that lets researchers post the data behind their work through embeddable data-sets and code on their profile pages. “They literally drew the wrong rectangle and dropped off the last few rows of data. It wasn’t a hardcore programming error,” he said. Price asserts that along with another recent scandal involving who faked data for 10 years is damaging public trust in scientific research. Price said the Dutch scientist Diederik Stapel justified his fraudulent data by saying he felt pressure to make conclusions simpler for the journals. “He said, ‘They want elegant results and elegant data with beautiful conclusions. But the data behind an experiment can be so messy.'” Because of incidents like the Stapel fraud, Price believes that a pushback against traditional, less transparent and more expensive publishing models is gaining steam. Other competitors like ResearchGate and ScienceExchange are jumping on the bandwagon too. “The academic community is getting a bit radicalized about publishing,” he said. “It’s literally happened in the last 12 months with a series of things that are spreading a wave of awareness.” Historically, academics have only shared their finished work in the form of a paper that’s vetted by a journal (that’s then sold back to universities at sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year). Academics have been slower to jump on behaviors from consumer social media where people publish quick updates instead of longer-form content. He says that about three-quarters of the world’s scientific data isn’t shared because the right incentives and platforms haven’t existed. “Publishing scientific research is changing from being a very focused discipline to one where a fuller range of outputs and multimedia is being shared,” Price said. “Part of pushing this forward is about getting the incentives right. If you share your data, you should be able to build your reputation.” One benefit is that collaborating researchers might be able to take the basic data and tease out totally different ideas than the original academic. You can .
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Monday In Tech And Hip-Hop: Sheryl Sandberg Joins RapGenius, Everyone’s Obsessed With Snoop’s New App
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Mondays aren’t always smile-inducing, but today two news stories cropped up that were pretty fun — and showed the increasing crossover between the worlds of technology and hip-hop. First, Facebook COO signed up for a verified profile on “hip-hop Wikipedia” to help to her best-selling business book . Her annotations range from references to additional and to personal photos from and . The main takeaway is that it’s fun to see typically buttoned-up people like Sheryl Sandberg talking about real issues in a unique way — and, of course, it’s another feather in the cap for RapGenius’ founding team. Also stealing some of the Monday news spotlight has been , the app from legendary rapper (aka .) It seems to be the tech elite’s of the moment (pictured above is technology writer Nick Bilton taking Snoopify .) [tweet https://twitter.com/nickbilton/status/331482989794058241] Yes, it’s a silly celebrity app, but it’s also actually slick, addictive, fun, free to download on Android and iOS, with revenue-generation-tool-of-the-moment “ ” available for purchase. So basically, all the other mobile app CEOs out there should watch their backs. Individually each of these two things are small news items. But they’re just the latest examples of technology and hip-hop coming together — and that’s proving to be a marriage that seems to produce some of the most .
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PriceHub Wants To Tell You How Much Your Car Is Really Worth, With Data To Prove It
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
How much is your car worth? It’s an easy enough question to answer. Punch in the details at , hit submit, and bam — question answered, ego stoked (or not.) But how do know how much it’s worth? For the most part, even the tried-and-true sources like the ol’ Blue Book are kind of a black box. wants to make the process more transparent. They’ll tell you how much your car is worth, give you a mountain of data to back it up. Like many a car valuing service, PriceHub pulls its transaction data from all sorts of sources. Some of it comes from users; some of it comes from dealerships, or used car auctions. The vast majority of it, says the company, comes from DMV records. Unlike most other services, though, PriceHub makes a of this data available directly to the user for their own perusing. Want to see the transaction details for 10,000+ Honda Civics sold in the past 18 months? Want to limit it to just 2009-model Civics sold in California? PriceHub actually came into existence with little to no fanfare a few years back, built as something of a hobby project by Myron Lo, then the VP of Innovation at . It lived the first few years of its life in a rather humble form; black text spilled across the white background, with a modest data set of around 50,000 transactions. Over time, however, it became clear that this lil’ pet project could be something more. As the site naturally grew toward its 50,000th registered user, the team behind it decided to dive in headfirst. They applied to Adeo Ressi’s Founder’s Institute, got in, and have spent the last few months being “whipped into a start-up by Adeo” (their words!) In that time, the team has added all sorts of new tricks to PriceHub’s repertoire: Speaking of depreciation, the company mentioned a work-in-progress feature that I find particular interesting: depreciation alerts. If you’ve told PriceHub that you own a certain car and their data starts to suggest that its value is startin’ to turn, they’ll soon be able to fire off an alert to let you know that it might be good to sell sooner than later. Also on the roadmap: mobile apps (of course), and Zillow-esque sale price vs. time-on-the-market data. Anecdote time! Around half a year ago, I sold the first car I’d ever owned: a 2002 Honda Accord, which I’d more or less driven into the ground. I sold it to the first person with a stack of cash and a pretty smile, letting it go for a bit over $2.5 grand. According to PriceHub’s records for cars of that year with similar mileage, I probably could’ve gotten another two thousand bucks out of the car if I’d been patient. Whoops! PriceHub isn’t alone in this space, of course. Transparent or not, legacy offerings like Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds have held the throne for decades, with relatively new folk like TrueCar chipping away at their lead for a few years already. What do you think: is data and transparency enough to make PriceHub standout?
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Senate OKs Internet Sales Tax With Overwhelming Bipartisan Support [Update]
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
The United States Senate a tax on Internet sales today, voting 69-27 in favor of the Marketplace Fairness Act. The outcome was expected after a similar non-biding passed the Senate with roughly the same number of votes, despite extraordinary opposition from eBay and other major Internet organizations. As we’ve written about , supporters argue that tax-free Internet retailers have an unfair advantage over their physical counterparts and it robs states of billions in revenue. Opponents counter that the current bill would create an unwieldy tax code labyrinth, which would be forced on startups and Internet retailers before software technology could manage the new tax. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives for possible revision. TechCrunch’s sources on Capitol Hill say that broad support in the Senate makes it difficult for House members to oppose the legislation, but it may be modified to increase the threshold for businesses who have to collect online taxes, from $1M in revenue to $10M This is one of those laws that affects almost everyone directly. I’m kinda surprised there’s not more of an uproar. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte just released a statement (The Internet Sales Tax bill most likely will go through the Judiciary Subcommittee, so his views are very influential): “I do not believe the Marketplace Fairness Act is sufficiently simplified yet. While it attempts to make tax collection simpler, it still has a long way to go. There is still not uniformity on definitions and tax rates, so businesses would still be forced to wade through potentially hundreds of tax rates and a host of different tax codes and definitions. … I am open to considering legislation concerning this topic but these issues, along with others, would certainly have to be addressed. The Committee will also look at alternatives that could enable states to collect sales tax revenues without opening the door to aggressive state action against out-of-state companies.”
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Protesters Smash Google Shuttle Bus Piñata In Fight Against Rent Increases [Video]
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Sick of high-paid tech employees driving up rent prices, protestors in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood held a “Anti-Gentrification Block Party” and beat on a Google bus piñata before cops broke up the crowd. The area has long been home to artists and Mexican-American families, but they’re being forced out as techies move in, their employers set up shuttle stops, and housing prices skyrocket. Mission district blog was on the scene. He describes 30 to 40 people assembled at the neighborhood’s 16th street Bay Area Rapid Transit station. The spot is one of the dirtiest in the city — in stark contrast to fancy Valencia street just one block over where software engineers frequent posh restaurants and pricey bike shops. Google, Apple, and Facebook all have in the neighborhood making it easy for their employees to live in the hip district while commuting south to Silicon Valley in style. The buses have become a symbol of gentrification. Dozens of police officers surrounded the rally, fearing it might devolve into violence. Last May in neighborhood with many businesses vandalized with “Yuppies Out” graffiti. Montgomery says that around 2:30pm yesterday “the [protestors] did string up the piñata to a makeshift fishing pole and beat it mercilessly” as seen in the video below from YouTube user . Soon after, the police swarmed in and dispersed the group. As a three-year resident of the Mission, I’ve seen the influx of money from the rise of Apple and Google’s stock plus the Facebook IPO change its character. When the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, local techies came out to spectate and . Cheap grocery stores and eateries have been going out of business, while trendy bars and cafes move in. 29% from 2011 to 2012 alone. Unfortunately, I’ve haven’t seen the tech giants who’ve colonized the neighborhood do much to give back. Funding some local education or beautification initiatives could go a long way to reducing the gentrification backlash.
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Since Photos Are Boring Without Filters, Glassagram Will Spice Up Your Google Glass Pics
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Thanks to Instagram, we rarely see photos taken from camera phones without some type of filter on it. Even Twitter’s photo service uses Aviary to drop an earthy overlay or black-and-white treatment onto your digital masterpiece. Google Glass users aren’t going to be left out of this craze thanks to an app aptly named . Again, this is the type of app that we’re seeing early on, consisting of the very basics that consumers will look for when thinking about whether Glass is a device for them, once they become available to the general public. Adding filters to photos is pretty consumery. Once you sign up for , you simply share a photo with the service, then a card is sent back to your Glass timeline with all of your filtered options: The timeline card is going to be a main component in every Glass app that we see, as it will be the primary way for users to interact with what they’re seeing. For now, options like “share” are all we have, but I could see a day where more advanced controls like editing could be available. Something like Glassagram would be a perfect case for this. Once you get your options, simply scroll your way through them and reshare the one that tickles your fancy. It looks like you’ll get five different filtered options for your photo. The nice part about this is that it’s all done through the Glass UI, so you don’t need your phone or the web to do anything: Technological marvel? No. Handy app and an example of what’s to come from Glass developers? Yes. As I’ve been speaking with members of the Glass community, I’ve learned that quite a few companies are starting to look at the device to develop their own official apps, . There seems to be interest in the developers who are getting a head start in the Explorer program from the companies, as well. This means that those poking around the Mirror API to figure out everything they can do might be able to land themselves a sweet job focusing on the device specifically. Will a company like Facebook dedicate a small team to figuring out the right experience for its users on Glass? It’s a safe bet that they will. Until then, we get to enjoy these small, but evolutionary, apps coming from Glass explorers. It feels like .
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Adobe’s Hardware Experiments Are More Than Just Hobbies: Hands-On With Project Context
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
At its in Los Angeles today, Adobe showed quite a few products that will soon be available to its customers, but it also a number of hardware experiments, including Project Context, a totally re-imagined way for creating magazine layouts, as well as an advanced stylus and a ruler for touchscreens. After the keynote this morning, I had a chance to sit back with Adobe’s David Macy to talk about both the newly announced for touchscreens, as well as Project Context. All of these projects are definitely more than just hobbies for Adobe, something Macy acknowledged when I asked him about the company’s plans for these tools. While Macy obviously wouldn’t talk about when (or even if) Adobe plans to turn these prototypes into products, my feeling was that the company is clearly thinking about it. It’s also clear that the Adobe XD team, which is behind all of these projects, has the backing to explore these ideas. The idea for the Mighty Pen, for example, was born about a year and a half ago and the team has been iterating on the idea ever since. Out of the three projects, Project Context is clearly the one that is the most “out there” right now. It’s easy to imagine Adobe selling pens and rulers, but when it comes to giant touchscreens, that’s not exactly the company’s core focus. Right now Context is focused solely on magazine design, but because it runs on OS X (and actually uses two Macs for each screen), the system could be adapted for other uses as well (and Macy wouldn’t say if Wired or Conde Nast have any plans to use it in their actual production process). As Wired’s design director Claudia de Almeida noted when she demoed the project on stage today, layouts in newsrooms today are often still created physically with paper, scissors and boards where designers arrange their layouts. “The wonderful thing about Project Context,” she said, “is that it takes the best of what we do in the analog world and recreates it digitally.” That, of course, is also true of Adobe’s other two hardware projects. The Context system uses two 1080p high-def screens with a frame around it for picking up touch signals, as well as another screen set up as a in front of the other two screens. Because the screens are so large, you can actually see the individual pixels, but Macy hopes that once 4k screen become more affordable, that won’t be an issue. There is also something about having these huge touchscreens that gets people energized, he said. It’s a great tool for team collaboration, Adobe believes, and the prototype currently supports up to 30 touch points. I had a chance to play with Project Context behind the MAX stage and it’s indeed a very cool experience. The layout is, for the most part, the interface. Assets are available in a horizontally scrolling bar at the top of the page and to add them to the layout. Swiping left and right with multiple fingers allows you to scroll, touching an image with one finger allows you to move it around on the page (or between pages) and you can obviously resize images, pages and perform other actions. The prototype also includes a web browser, though it was deactivated for the demo today. In addition to the two-screen system, Adobe uses the Surface table-like setup that users can send individual images to. Users can put a keyboard on it and start writing notes onto the image or just start drawing on it with their finger. Once you’re done, you just swipe it back in the direction of the main screens and it’ll show up there again. Adobe’s first idea, by the way, was to build a room that could be outfitted with Kinect-like sensors, Wii-like remotes and similar technologies. Adobe actually ended up building this room, but in the end, however, Macy said, “making gestures in the air just felt silly.” Once you have a touchscreen, touching just becomes the natural way to work with the software. The next project for the team, then, was to build a touchscreen-based drawing table (the team’s leader is a former architect). Using virtual rulers and similar tools just didn’t make all that much sense in this context, though, so the idea of Might and Napoleon was born – and some of those influences can obviously also be seen in Project Context. As for the future of this project, as well as Mighty and Napoleon, it’s not clear where Adobe is going to go, but Macy believes that it does point toward a future and that Adobe needs to experiment with interface like Context to stay ahead of the game. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jexqp-MK0pI?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]
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An Anti-Abuse Ad With A Secret Message Only Children Can See
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
In order to discreetly reach abused children, one aid organization designed a clever billboard that for people shorter than 4’5″. The secret is a precisely serrated surface, a , that reflects light differently to those looking from above and below a specified height. Shorter people (children) see the following message on a street sign: “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you,” along with a confidential number to call the Spanish organization, Aid to Children and Adolescents. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zoCDyQSH0o&feature=player_embedded] Adults see, “Sometimes, child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.” The ad is especially designed for children who may be traveling with their abuser. Lenticular lens have been a popular gimmick for decades, from toy rulers to a (below) that changes images as a pedestrian walks passed it. In the future, we could imagine more advanced warning systems. IBM ads that remotely targets a user’s individual interests, based on radio frequency-enabled cards that they expect consumers will carry with them. Similarly, users’ cell phone signal as they travel from store to store for marketing data. It’s not hard to imagine a billboard beaming abuse-notification messages to a child’s cell phone, or, more discretely, to a technology like Google Glass. For an explanation of the ad, watch the video above.
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Freestyle Capital’s Dave Samuel And Redpoint’s Chris Moore
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
After a brief hiatus for TechCrunch Disrupt, Ask A VC is back this week with two all-star guests in the investing world. First up we have Freestyle Capital’s . Later in the week, Redpoint Partner will be joining us in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Samuel is a longtime entrepreneur who has founded a number of companies including Spinner (acquired by AOL for $320 million), Brondell, and Grouper (acquired by Sony for $65 million). While Samuel has been making angel investments for some time now, he and his business partner Josh Felser started a formal fund, Freestyle Capital, which makes investments in early-stage startups. Moore focuses on making investments for Redpoint in consumer internet, online marketing and SaaS companies. He currently serves on the board of directors of 9Flats, BlueKai, eBureau, Extole, Fanhattan, Hark, Inadco and Intent Media. Moore also led Redpoint’s investment in Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), Right Media (acquired by Yahoo), Auditude (acquired by Adobe), and IntoNow (acquired by Yahoo). Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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The Onion’s Suspected Twitter Hack Reveals The Syrian Electronic Army’s Morbid Humor
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
The Syrian Electronic Army has apparently hacked The Onion’s twitter account, exposing the groups seriously morbid sense of “humor”. “UN retracts report of Syrian chemical weapon use: “Lab tests confirm it is Jihadi body odor”, went one tweet. We’ve seen , and given that The Onion is a satirical news site, it was hard to know whether this “hack” was just another tasteless ploy for attention. As of about 45 minutes ago (11:15 PT), all of the suspected tweets have been erased. So, either it was a legit hack or The Onion editorial board had a change of heart. The Syrian Electronic Army has been on a cyberwarfare tear, including a false tweet about an explosion at the White House from the AP twitter account, in the stock market. Twitter is a more secure two-step verification to make it harder for cybercriminals to infiltrate accounts. Clearly, it can’t come fast enough. We’ve included a screenshot of the tweets below.
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Adobe’s Flash Professional Gets Improved Support For HTML5 Publishing, Real-Time Mobile Testing And A New Code Editor
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Flash may be dead, but Adobe’s has already gone beyond just being a Flash tool and it’s getting a major update today. The new version, Adobe says, has been “rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, modular, extensible, reliable, more focused and more efficient than before.” That’s quite a promise, but new version does indeed sport quite a few new features and improvements. The company has re-engineered Flash Professional as a 64-bit application, which should make it more stable and allow users to easily manage multiple large files. The app, which Adobe says is now far more responsive, now also allows Flash developers to export their content in high definition video and audio, “all without dropping frames.” The tool now also sports a streamlined user interface to make dialog boxes and panels more intuitive. Users can now also choose between a dark or light interface. With this new version, Adobe is introducing enhanced HTML5 support – something most of us probably don’t think about when we hear the word “flash.” The enhanced HTML publishing support now uses the updated Toolkit for CreateJS, meaning the service now features new functionality for buttons, hit areas and motion curves. Also new in this version is support for real-time mobile testing. Developers can now test and debug their content by connecting multiple iOS and Android devices to their computers via USB and quickly see how their designs work on a real device. Other new features include a more powerful code editor, which uses the Scintilla library. This new editor, the company says, will allow users to search across multiple files and features a new “find and replace” panel. Also new are code profiling in Adobe Scout, a real-time drawing tool, and an unlimited size for Flash Professional’s pasteboard.
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Samsung Has Acquired MOVL To Build Out Better Multiscreen Mobile And TV Apps
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Over the last few years, Samsung has been working hard on building technology to improve the communication between its connected TVs and mobile devices, whether they be iOS or Android phones or tablets. Well, the company has acquired , a startup that should provide even more help in that category. MOVL is the maker of the , which lets developers create apps to connect TVs via the cloud, as well as mobile phones on home networks. The , after a year-and-a-half that the MOVL team spent building the system. A representative from MOVL confirmed the acquisition with the following statement: “In April 2013, two years after inception, MOVL has officially joined forces with Samsung. We are now a part of Samsung Electronics, and we are excited to combine our multi-screen capabilities with Samsung’s scale and innovation in its device ecosystem.” MOVL has been working on the Samsung connected TV platform for a while now. The startup was one of the first winners of Samsung’s Connected TV developer contests, with its WeDraw app. WeDraw enabled users to draw images through an app on their mobile phones or tablets, and have those illustrations be displayed on a Samsung TV. But since then, MOVL has become even more ambitious, seeking to not only connect users of Samsung TVs and their mobile devices, but also to provide a singular platform upon which developers could build apps for multiple TV systems. Its Kontrol.tv interface works with both Samsung and Google TV devices, as well as iOS and Android phones and tablets. But it was working on integration with other smart TV platforms as well. The idea was to provide one connective tissue for all phones and connected TVs, and it had six other platforms in the pipeline for later this year. It’s not clear if Samsung will continue to allow MOVL to develop for multiple TV platforms, or if it’s just hoping to leverage the development platform for its own devices. The MOVL team has joined Samsung Electronics, and will be working out of the device maker’s San Jose offices. In addition to the startup’s 10 employees, Samsung also gets the technology platform it’s built out, as well as a couple of patents pending.
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About.com’s New CEO On How To Stay Relevant
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 6 |
Even with 84 million uniques each month, About.com tends to fly under the radar. But there is change afoot from the New York Times last year, most notably the appointment of Neil Vogel as CEO. We brought in Vogel, as well as Chief Strategy Officer Scott Kim (who also served as interim CEO for the past few months), to discuss how About might be changing in the foreseeable future. , but he has big plans. It’s a three-pronged approach really, involving social, mobile, and user experience. Where social is concerned, Vogel mentioned that About hasn’t ever given the vertical any “water or sunlight,” which means it’s a huge opportunity to leverage thousands of expert guides (content producers) and the massive flood of traffic coming to the site each month. He also revealed that 25 percent of About’s mobile traffic comes from mobile, and “it’s not cannibalistic traffic either, it’s a clear growth over the desktop traffic we’re seeing.” Confusing math aside, Kim explained that the mobile strategy doesn’t involve an app, since SEO is the primary driver of traffic to About. “The goal with mobile is the same as desktop, which means that we need to have the best possible user experience so people will travel throughout the site,” said Kim. I asked if SEO was enough for About, or if there are plans to bring users in more directly. “SEO is a thing now. As the internet evolves, SEO will become less and less of a thing as Google and Bing are getting better and better at what they do,” said Vogel. “They want to give you the best content possible when you want to solve a problem, and we have great content.” More important than how the consumer gets there, Vogel and Kim are concerned with keeping the user there. According to the dynamic duo, the plan isn’t a huge, monumental redesign. “It’ll be 1,000 small things we do,” said Vogel. “If you look at what we’re doing 12 months from now next to where we are today, it will look like we did something drastic, but we didn’t. We’re going to do it one new thing at a time.” After considering one of About’s greatest challenges, this plan actually seems much more logical. See, About is one of the top medical sites on the web, and it’s also one of the top food sites on the web. Vogel explained that it’s hard to get inspiration from competitors when you compete in so many verticals. “The good news is there are a lot of ideas,” he said. “And the bad news is there are a lot of ideas.”
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 1 | null |
50M Matches Strong, Hot Mobile Dating App Tinder Is Ready To Go Global, And Move Beyond Flirting
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
Digital dating is nothing to scoff at; it’s a big business, and it’s changed a lot of lives — mostly for the better. Yet, while dating has seen enormous progress during the Digital Era, there’s still a lot garbage out there, and the space is still mostly dominated by a handful of old names. A gaggle of dating sites and apps have appeared over the past five years, but few have had real staying power, and many have gone the way of the dinosaur. While it’s still too early to make any pronouncements, it’s looking more and more like could buck the trend. Created by Hatch Labs — an LA-based startup backed by , the same Barry Diller-led digital media giant that owns Match.com and OKCupid — Tinder has grown like a weed since it launched in October. A crazy, dating weed. In part, that’s due to timing, and in part because Tinder is based on a familiar, throwback model, drawing on the same addictive formula behind . Essentially, it’s Hot or Not made mobile, casual and connected to Facebook, but rather than promising to introduce people to their one true soul partner/life mate, Tinder just wants to make it easier to flirt — and get you off your ass to meet people. In the real world. By focusing on reducing the “creepiness” factor (always a relative term in dating, mind you), reducing spam and by targeting young people, Tinder has been able to find that elusive, exponential growth curve. (Unsurprisingly, , and the average age of its users is still 23.) It’s also fairly easy to use: It’s free, it doesn’t focus on building traditional profiles, instead pulling basic info from Facebook, is location-enabled, and matches users to other people nearby based on similar behavior, interests and so on. If you’re not interested, you can pass. If you are, it connects you with the other person, allowing you to chat and arrange a meeting offline. Thanks to the above, the app has been seeing the same kind of growth that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter saw in the early days, Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad tells us. But what does that mean, exactly? , it had served one million matches and users had made 35 million profile ratings. Today, Rad says, Tinder has served 50 million matches and users have made 4.5 billion ratings. So, while the team is keeping a tight lid on the number of downloads and users it’s attracted to date, from what we do know (and what we’ve been hearing from other sources), it’s safe to assume that both number well into the millions. And keep in mind: The app was released in late October. Tinder also seems to be avoiding a common trend among popular mobile apps: High number of downloads, but comparatively low engagement. In Tinder’s case, Rad tells us that around 50 percent of users open the app once a day, while approximately 75 percent open the app once a week and around 85 percent use the app every month. Based on this growth, rumors have been circulating for months now that claim Tinder is in the proces of raising a big round of outside funding, or is in the process of being acquired. At this point, the founder says, neither of those are true. While the company isn’t sharing how much it’s raised to date, we do know that IAC is it’s primary investor, and owns a minority stake in the business, having been the sole investor in its seed and series A rounds (which we hear total in the millions). And the startup was incubated within IAC. IAC would likely love to own Tinder outright, as would others, but at this point the startup is resolved to stay independent, and go public rather than sell. Of course, there’s a long road ahead, and these things have a habit of changing. Furthermore, while Tinder has opted not to raise outside capital, our sources tell us that this hasn’t stopped venture capitalists from courting Tinder in every way possible. With plenty of runway ahead and initial growth and scalability snags behind, Tinder has begun to focus more on product development as well as an area that will be key to its future: International markets. To date, 15 percent of Tinder users hail from outside the U.S., the CEO tells us, with the highest adoption coming from Canada, Australia, Brazil and Ireland. (In recent weeks, Rad says, Tinder was seeing 2,000 downloads/day in Brazil.) Going forward, the team of 13 will begin its international growth efforts in the UK, Australia, Latin America, Germany, France and China, in particular. To do that, the company is working on additional language support, targeted marketing and hiring local reps in each of these countries. Rad also sees big opportunity for growth in Asia, thanks to the explosion of mobile adoption, and is currently working on partnerships that will help it move into Asian markets and localize the Tinder experience to native languages, networks and so on. (Like how to leverage the biggest Chinese and Asian social networks for authentication, as opposed to relying on Facebook, for example.) Tinder has also been busy building tools that will help it follow through with its mission to solve social, discovery and networking problems outside the confines of dating. Today, for example, the startup is releasing a new feature called “Matchmaker,” which allows users to create matches between any two Facebook friends — for any purpose. Once users establish that connection, the two friends can chat within Tinder without sharing their contact information. The idea is to create a casual, simple way to make an introduction, whether you want to set two friends up on a date or make professional connections. Rad tells us that Matchmaker is anonymous and solves the awkward problem of introducing people and then being included on the resulting thread — an annoyance often experienced in email and Facebook intros. With Matchmaker, the introducer doesn’t have to be removed from the thread, they can send the message to the two people they want to connect, and that’s it. If the recipient isn’t on Tinder, they’ll see that they get a message on Facebook, and they can then quickly create a Tinder login if they want to see the post. Another cool feature of Matchmaker is that the person who makes the introduction can see if the match is active and they can get a sense of their success rate. Rad assures me that this feature is intended to be high level so that it’s not creepy, allowing users to get just enough of a sense of the activity level of the intros they curate so that they can check back in (or send a reminder) if the conversation goes silent. Again, the idea is that, while there are plenty of media through which people can make digital introductions, those connections tend to carry more weight if they’re friend-approved. If that intro comes from a close friend, you’re more likely to follow through on it than if not. Of course, there’s the question of whether or not people will want to make introductions in a professional context through a networking that’s primarily associated with dating. For this reason, the startup is launching the feature in beta to test it out and to see if it catches on. As part of this new release, Tinder is also making some improvements in the areas where its user experience has been less-than-impressive. In particular, many users have complained that the app’s sorting algorithm has matched them with teenage or underage users. (Not cool, Tinder, not cool.) So, in this release, Tinder now includes age filtering, so that users can select their preferred age range, along with making some general improvements to the accuracy of its matching algorithm and improving the speed of chat within the app. As of now, Tinder remains exclusively an iPhone app, but the CEO tells us that the team is working on an Android version, which will be ready “within the next few months.” The team also has plans to develop tablet apps, but don’t expect Tinder to show up on the Web anytime soon. Tinder is going to remain mobile-centric for the foreseeable future. In a crowded space, Tinder has, so far, managed to buck the trend and find that elusive, exponential growth curve. Of course, the next year will be critical. As growth inevitably levels out a bit, Tinder will have to keep evolving if it wants to avoid being another flash in the pan. International could hold the key to sustaining that growth, but it remains to be seen whether users will be willing to think of Tinder as more than a casual flirting and dating tool. That could be a tough sell, but if they get there, expect Tinder to stick around for awhile — and be on the receiving end of calls from every VC on the block. For more, .
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Google Now’s “Topics” Page Returns And Shows You How Much Google Knows About You, But It Only Works On Android
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
A few weeks ago, Google made a “Google Now” topics page available on the web and then took it down again. The page showed a list of topics Google believed you were interested in, based on your search history. Now this feature is back, but it’s a bit different from the leaked page. A few days ago, it seems, the company quietly (re-)launched this feature with the latest Google Now update. The leaked page was also visible on the desktop, but it like Google has plugged this hole the cards are now only available on Android – and only by going through ‘s research cards. On this page, you can still see many (but not all) of the topics that Google thinks you are interested in. The feature will now pop up at the bottom of , which often appear after Google realizes that you’ve been researching a certain topic in depth. One of the reasons for this card to pop up, for example, would be when Google detects you are planning a trip. To see this information, Google Now offers a link will appear underneath these cards (“Explore now,” then look for the “More of your topics” links in the top right) that allows you to delve a bit deeper into the topics you recently looked for and to get a different view of your search history. Indeed, besides powering the research cards, they mostly offer you a richer view of your search history. Unlike Google’s search history page, however, this feature shows you an aggregate view of what Google believes you are interested in, not just a list of all of your searches. In my case, for example, Google knew that I was looking for a hotel last weekend and had been looking at hotels in New York a few weeks ago, too. It also knows that I was looking for restaurants in Portland, did some research on web browsers, smartphones and Sim City. For now, this feature is only available on Android, as the Google Now research cards haven’t launched on iOS yet (where they would be available trough the Google Search app). Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a way to just surf to this page without having a research card available through Google Now. Google Now has always been about anticipating your needs and performing searches for you before you. The research cards clearly fit into this pattern and so does the ability to delve a little bit deeper into what Google thinks it knows about you. This, of course, shows you how much Google really knows about you – which is either really cool or creepy, depending on your overall thoughts about Google and privacy. When Google mistakenly leaked the topics page earlier this year, it looked like this would be another step in bringing . Sadly, it looks like that isn’t quite the case and that we’ll still have to wait a bit before Now makes it debut on Chrome for the desktop, but with the new notifications system and a flag to enable Now in Chrome, it’s just a matter of time before Google will launch this feature.
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Ask A VC: Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer On The Future Of Ecommerce And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
On this week’s Ask A VC episode, Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer joined us in the studio. Rimer has been in the venture industry for over 11 years so he had plenty to share on how VC has changed, and the differences in the venture world in Europe and the U.S. Rimer, who has led the firm’s investments in Etsy, Nastygal and many others, also talked to us about the future of e-commerce and how the industry is changing for startups. Check out the video above for more!
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Laptop Week Review: Samsung 700T Fly Or Die
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
In lieu of a formal review, Matt Burns and I sat down to take a look at the , a convertible tablet that has a small button on the keyboard that pops out the Windows 8 tablet that forms the brains of the machine. The device is a bit chintzy – more pressed metal and injected plastic than I like to see on a laptop – but at about $1,000 retail it’s an acceptable compromise for Win8 users who are looking for a nicer tablet. I gave this device a Fly simply because I like the idea – a laptop that turns into a tablet with much fuss – but Matt was unimpressed. A little treat for you: this thing was so hard to describe that I had to read the name off of my phone and I still mispronounced it. The laptop hit about 6 hours of battery life and a Geekbench score of about 4,000, on par with the i5 tablets we tested. The lower price – especially at this late in the game for this laptop, make it an interesting choice for a fleet laptop but I think the fit, finish, and power could detract from its overall appeal. It’s an interesting laptop, to be sure, but not the best of the bunch.
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Gillmor Gang Live 05.24.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
– Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
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Microsoft And Google Bury The Hatchet To Work On A Windows Phone YouTube App With Ads
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
Once a upon a time, Microsoft saw fit to put together a YouTube app for Windows Phone and it was actually pretty great — it let users download videos straight from the app and there was nary an ad to be found. To absolutely no one’s surprise, Google wasn’t too pleased: after all, the features that made the app so appealing didn’t exactly jibe with YouTube’s terms of service, and the search giant demanded the offending app be removed. Well, after a bit of back and forth (and a conciliatory update), it seems the two companies have finally come to an agreement. Microsoft and YouTube released a statement today affirming that the two companies will work together on crafting yet another YouTube app for Windows Phone that doesn’t fly in the face of Google’s and YouTube’s rules. Here’s the (admittedly brief) statement in full: So there you have it. Frankly, the news doesn’t come as much of a shock — Microsoft was seemingly caught off-guard when Google’s ire first became known and was willing to make things right by adding those ads should Google give the company access to “the necessary APIs.” Then again, a Google representative points out things like YouTube’s have been open to the masses for a while now, so it’s unclear why Microsoft didn’t just go that route in the first place. While it’s refreshing to see these two work out their differences here for once (mostly because Microsoft has been poking at Google with its Scroogled campaign for months now), the real loser here is the consumer. In just a few weeks a new, ad-laden version of the app will trickle into the Windows Marketplace and Windows Phone users who have downloaded the app will soon find themselves faced with the prospect of embracing a much different YouTube experience. Granted, it’s only one app that’s being bowdlerized, but Windows Phone has been making significant strides when it comes to app quality lately and it’s a bummer to see such a prominent app lose its charm. In the event you’re a Windows Phone user who hasn’t yet updated your YouTube app to the latest version, you may want to wait before taking the plunge. Microsoft recently pushed a tweaked version of the app into the Windows Marketplace that removed the ability to download videos on the fly, though you still won’t be subjected to in-stream ads.
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Google Needs To Bring Emerging Markets Online To Grow Its Business Opportunities In The Next 10 years
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
The that Google is participating in discussions with emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and Africa about setting up wireless network infrastructure in cities and towns. A source told the WSJ that: “The wireless networks would be available to dwellers outside of major cities where wired Internet connections aren’t available and could be used to improve Internet speeds in urban centers.” This aligns with Google’s goals of surrounding the world with technology that fits into our daily lives. That’s a “don’t be evil,” touchy-feely notion, but it comes from a need to set up Google’s future business opportunities globally. Remember, all of Google’s products require one thing: The Internet. According to , Africa’s “Internet penetration rate” was a paltry 15.6 percent as of June 2012. Compare that to 78.6 percent in the United States, and it’s clear that Google needs to move outside of the U.S. to go after its next group of “customers.” That’s a lot of business opportunity. Google Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt , projecting that by the end of the decade, everyone will be online: “For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected.” That’s lofty, but it’s essential for Google to grow. Mobile phones prevail in areas that don’t have proper Internet connectivity, but smartphones are still limited. People still use laptops and desktops at work, and would possibly use them at home, if they had proper connectivity. When looking at the chart above, Google sees all of the possible business opportunities that would come into play once those penetration numbers start jumping up. With more people online, there would be more eyeballs, more ad clicks, more shoppers, more…everything. If Google can push a few of these projects through in Africa and Southeast Asia, it will attract support of governments in other locales, as well. Google is working on rolling out connected Internet with its Fiber product in places like , Austin and Utah. A in the home, with 17 percent of them not using the Internet at all. These findings were unearthed during Google’s due diligence for setting up Fiber, of course. When I visited the area this month, Fiber hadn’t reached the homes that need it the most, the ones that would take advantage of the “free option.” That’s where things will get interesting for Google, as it will bring them engagement that they haven’t had and could lead them to building new products that they haven’t been thinking about yet. If you take those learnings and the Fiber rollout in Kansas City and apply it to emerging markets, then Google’s intentions become clear: More people online, more people using Google products. It’s simple. What’s not simple is getting these markets to realize that it would not only be good for Google to have more people online, it would be great for local businesses as well. While Google isn’t commenting, either for the WSJ story or this one, it’s clear that Schmidt is on a worldwide friend-making expedition, attempting to get as many global government officials on the “Internet For All” train that he can. Sure, setting up these emerging markets will help Google’s potential bottom line, but it could also help the entire technology ecosystem. More opportunities for Google will open up more opportunities for those building apps and services. If Google wants to do all of the research and foot the bill to get things rolling, then everyone wins. [Photo Credit: ]
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Gmail For Android Could Soon Get A Navigation Drawer
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
The folks over on must have spent some of their time rewatching I/O videos. While they were doing that, they spotted a potential leak during the “ ” session. In it, it seems, Google quietly leaked screenshots of what looks to be a revamped interface for the Gmail app. If this turns out to be a real product, and the presentation sure made it look like that, the app could soon get a new navigation drawer that should make using it quite a bit easier – especially for those of us who like to use lots of labels in Gmail. Currently, Google uses what it calls a “spinner,” the drop-down menu at the top of the screen you’ve probably seen in numerous Android apps. Instead, as Google’s Jens Nagel showed during his presentation, the new design would use a navigation drawer that users can pop out from the left side of the screen. Here is what this would look like: It’s worth noting that Google showed a lot of mock-ups during this presentation. The Gmail screenshot looks pretty real, however. Google does typically vet these presentations ahead of time, so we will just have to wait and see if this is really a leak or just an example of what the Android team could do with navigation drawers in Gmail. During the presentation, Google also showed a mock-up of what the Calendar app would look like with the new navigation drawer, but Jens Nagel explicitly noted that while they could use this as the main interface for Calendar, the sidebar does “look a bit underpopulated,” especially on a tablet. It would be odd for Google to use one interface paradigm for one of its main native Android apps and go with another one in the rest of its apps. Here is the full presentation. The discussion about the new Gmail interface starts about 23 minutes into the video.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: So Many Laptops, But Only One Xbox
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
Thank that it’s Friday, AMIRITE? You know what that means right? Friday is day, and boy do we have a show for you! In this episode, John Biggs, Matt Burns and Darrell Etherington discuss Microsoft’s , complete with voice commands, a brand new Kinect, a , and the best specs yet. Plus, is coming to a close, so the fellas discuss some of their faves, like the and the .
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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Laptop Week Review: Google Chromebook Pixel
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
Features: The Chromebook Pixel is the Chromebook I’d pick as my personal Chromebook – if money was no option, and if I felt I really needed a Chromebook. It’s an impressive beast, like a Bird of Paradise, but in the end a trained falcon would be a way better winged thing to own, since it could catch you some wild game, instead of just prancing around with its mesmerizing but fairly useless mating displays. While not comparable to a bird of prey, the Chromebook Pixel is a very impressive piece of hardware. The construction, which includes an anodized aluminum shell that has a dark slate finish, corners that are just slightly rounded for a more angular look than say a MacBook Pro, and clear attention to detail paid to the overall fit and finish that results in a final product you feel like putting on display in your home. The computer is solid, and it bears a pleasing weight to remind you, tipping the scales at 3.35 lbs (which is actually lighter than the 13.3-inch Retina MacBook Pro but feels more substantial somehow, perhaps owing to the smaller screen size. The Chromebook Pixel also has a touch-sensitive, high-resolution display that beats the Retina MacBooks in terms of pixel density (which may have something to do with Google’s naming choice here). The screen is admittedly gorgeous in ideal conditions, but ideal conditions are fewer and farther between for the Pixel’s screen than for the Apple one. The color spectrum was skewed slightly yellow on my unit, and viewed at lower brightness legibility suffers. Also, if you think glare is a problem on your MacBook Pro or iMac, you’re going to be amazed at how much worse it can get with the Pixel in bright lighting. The touch aspect works well, and surprisingly I haven’t had trouble with greasy mitts mucking up the screen so far. That’s probably because I seldom actually reach out and touch it though. The movement is awkward from a typing position, and of limited use value in my opinion. But for those few times you do get the impulse to tap something, it’s a very nice-to-have feature, if not a killer one. Speaking of touch, the Chromebook Pixel has one of the best trackpads currently available on a laptop, on par with Apple’s extremely solid input pads.
Hardware aside, the Chromebook Pixel’s main attribute is that it runs Google’s Chrome OS. If you’ve not used Chrome OS before, you’re probably not alone. But you also don’t need to worry about a learning curve; this is just like using the Chrome browser on your Mac or Windows computer. Web apps are treated a little more like proper desktop apps, perhaps, but the extensions, the experience and pretty much everything else about it is just like using Chrome. Which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because it’s simple, easy, and for a good chunk of people, it probably actually satisfies the majority of their needs. If you’re a light computer user, making the browser the focus of an OS experience makes sense. But unfortunately for Chrome OS, tablets make almost as much, if not more sense for those users. Once you start requiring more than a tablet demands, your needs likely ramp up quickly, and then you’ll feel the lack of dedicated apps like Skype and Adobe’s Creative Suite products on the Chromebook pretty quickly. In other words, the Chromebook Pixel occupies a very thin sliver in terms of potential buyer needs, and there’s likely massive demand on either side. Google didn’t make a mass market device with the Pixel, in the end. It made something that can stand as a shining example of what a Chromebook can be. That means that the Pixel is, in the end, something of a precious beauty, an exotic shape that won’t likely fit either a round, square or triangle-shaped hole. If you’re a designer and you’re using a Chromebook Pixel, you must be not very good at your job… or so good that I’m mystified at your abilities and you’ve evolved beyond the limitations of any physical tool. There are photo editing tools available for Chrome OS, and there’s even an SD card slot (but don’t try using ultra-high capacity ones like the 128GB I use as one of part of my go-to photography kit, it can’t read those), but if you’re a serious designer you’ll sorely feel the lack of better, more mature tools. It can output to other screens, too with a Mini DisplayPort, but that just gives you double the browser space, and still limits you in terms of design software. A lot of effort seems to be going into putting more design tools in the hands of web-based editors and creators, but we’re not there yet. Maybe that’s next after Adobe has moved to its Creative Cloud subscription-based model, but for right now, designers steer clear. The Chromebook Pixel might be perfect for a founder who’s building products based on the Google ecosystem and wants to kiss some extra ass, but really it isn’t a great tool for an entrepreneur on the move. The main reason being that some absolutely crucial conferencing tools like Skype are still not in place on Chrome OS. The other conceivable situation where this might work is if you’re a web startup that’s betting big on HTML5 and you want to really eat your own dogfood. But other laptops also offer Chrome, and a lot more besides, so why not have your dogfood and eat it, too? Not sure that metaphor actually works here but it reads well, so go with it. This is a situation where it probably depends on what exactly it is you’re programming. If you’re building IFTTT recipes, for instance, a Chromebook Pixel is pretty exceptional. And if you’re working on tweaking WordPress themes, then you can do everything you want to on the Pixel. But for anything beyond straightforward and simple text-based coding, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. I wouldn’t, for instance, recommend coding iOS apps on a Chromebook Pixel. I probably wouldn’t even recommend developing Chrome OS apps on a Chromebook, though you can to make it operate better as an everyday coding device. This is a very good Chromebook. But the fact remains that it still feels like devices running Google’s still-nascent Chrome OS need to be considered separately from other notebooks running OS X, Windows and even Ubuntu. The Pixel puts on an excellent show, has dazzling good looks and a stunning mating display, but it’s far from an apex predator.
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Erply Raises $2.15 Million Series B Led By Redpoint For iPad-Oriented Retail Software Tech
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
, the startup that makes iPad-oriented and cloud-based point of sale and inventory management software for retailers, has raised $2.15 million in new funding, co-founder CEO tells TechCrunch. The round, which is Erply’s , was led by with the participation of and Dave McClure’s . This brings the total venture capital investment into Erply to $4.2 million. The decision to take on just $2.15 million was a definite choice, Hiiemaa said, noting that Erply had offers from investors keen to pitch in on a $10 million Series B. But Hiiemaa decided to keep the round small because his company, which has a staff of 45, is profitable. “There’s no need [for a larger round] now,” he said. One way that Erply has achieved the strong financial position to be choosy with investors is by having its technology development in Hiiemaa’s native Estonia, where he has the know-how to employ top tier engineering talent. An Erply competitor with engineering operations in the United States “would need to raise $20 million to get the same team and speed,” Hiiemaa said. Still, Erply, which has been and currently has 45 million SKUs in 115,000 stores on board, has no shortage of ways that the new funding will come in handy — especially since its competitors include deep-pocketed tech giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, and RetailPro. The company just signed a lease on a new sales floor in New York City and plans to double its staff in the months ahead. Going forward, Hiiemaa said, Erply is focusing on big enterprise sales efforts, targeting more Fortune 500 companies with more than 200 store locations to use its platform. Also in the works at Erply is an iPad compatible RFID, NFC, and Bluetooth-enabled hardware device to manage inventory that should be making its debut later this year. As Hiiemaa told me earlier this spring, Erply’s larger vision is a big one — to help brick and mortar shops stay in business and keep our neighborhoods vibrant. “The most important thing for me is helping retailers to survive and be successful,” Hiiemaa said at the time. “They have stores, locations, inventory, but they lack web knowledge and algorithmic-powered tools to understand retention. Otherwise, online eats the stores.” Now Erply has a bit more firepower to fight that good fight, and let technology help traditional businesses rather than hurt them.
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Amazon Launches App Engagement Reports, Allowing Appstore Developers To Track App Usage & Revenue
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 24 |
Continuing to grow its suite of services aimed at mobile app developers, Amazon today announced App Engagement Reports, free app usage reports that are now a part of the company’s . The reports are designed for Amazon Appstore developers in need of information about app performance and revenue. Specifically, the reports include daily and monthly active devices, installs, sessions, average revenue per device, and retention metrics, and they can be filtered by marketplace, viewed in chart form, or downloaded as a CSV, the company explains in this afternoon’s official . Developers will also be able to change the data range on the reports in order to see historical trends. There are six Engagement Reports now being provided: At launch, the reports are only available for those apps that were submitted and published after October 25, 2012. For developers who haven’t updated their apps since then, they’ll need to either republish the app or submit an update in order to activate the reporting feature. However, there’s no need to make any other changes to the app’s code or integrate any additional software. The report will include data for apps running on Amazon devices like the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, as well as any other Android devices running the latest version of the Amazon Appstore mobile app. App analytics and sales figures are crucial to making Amazon’s Appstore a more complete service – these things have long been standard features of competing stores like Google Play or Apple’s iTunes, for example. Though many developers still integrate third-party SDKs to allow for increased capabilities and more detailed reporting beyond what comes out-of-the-box, it’s expected for the Appstore itself to at least provide some sort of basic insight into an app’s traction and sales. Amazon says that reports have been a “popular request from developers,” and that’s likely an understatement. The addition of the new Engagement Reports comes on the heels of several other changes Amazon has introduced in recent months to beef up its Appstore offerings for developers. Not only has it been expanding its footprint , the company has also added features like , subscriptions, and even its own virtual currency, , in order to give developers more revenue generation possibilities. Now that developers have had a little time to experiment with those new offerings, it only makes sense that they should be able to track how well those features are performing, and whether or not they have an effect on key metrics like ARPU (average revenue per user) and retention. Additional information about the various parts of the reports and how to access them are explained . Meanwhile, an offers the answers to even more specific questions about the new reports.
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