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Meet The Next 10 Companies To Come Out Of StartX, Stanford’s Student Startup Accelerator
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Stanford’s student startup accelerator, , had its eighth demo day tonight in Palo Alto, showing off the latest class of 11 companies* to go through the program. The accelerator, which , has already had about 100 startups go through, raising $100 million along the way between them. This next batch is hoping to follow that lead. Here’s the next class of Stanford StartX companies, in the order they were presented: . This startup wants to use user-generated photos to help brands market themselves. The idea is not just to collect and curate photos that will resonate with consumers, but also to present them in a personalized fashion. The idea is that everyone will get a different experience, not just see all the same photos. The company had been chosen by the 49ers for a fan-engagement campaign around the Super Bowl, which had more than 50,000 photos submitted. It’s also being used by brands like Yamaha, Major League Soccer, and the NBA. . If you’re gay and new to an area, how do you find out where gay people hang out? And how do you find out whether or not someone hanging out in one of those places is also gay. That’s an overly simplistic description of a very complex problem that Distinc.tt hopes to solve. The mobile app shows nearby places based on the measured popularity among the gay community, and allows its users to check in and help identify other gay patrons in those locations. In just a few weeks, the app has garnered about 40,000 users, who log in twice a day on average. The company has also attracted Peter Thiel as an investor in its seed round. . This startup provides a “video business in a box,” allowing independent content creators, B2B companies, and other niche video producers to quickly get up and running with video distribution. VipeCloud not only provides a platform for sales, but also customer relationship management, enabling clients to build relationships with their audiences and determine what’s working and what’s not, what’s selling and why. . This startup seeks to give companies a better way to do HR, providing the connective tissue between various payment and benefits systems. It’s all brought together by a single, usable, user interface that employees, as well as in-house and outsourced HR, can all use while simplifying the usual crazy HR application stack. . Spot On provides time-based search which will give its users more actionable information. The idea is to match the right activity to the right person at the right time, therefore becoming a user’s personal concierge. The app works by pulling temporal data starting with the start and end time, matching items based on location, and then filtering by a user’s personalized preferences. The first market the team hopes to go after is families with kids to help provide activities that parents and kids will both love when they’re free. . This company plans to use big data to shorten the amount of time it takes to develop and test drugs, and, in the process, massively lower the costs associated with drug creation. By matching the molecular profiles of diseases and drug actions, NuMedii can reduce the amount of time for drug testing from 3-6 years down to 3-6 months, and its accuracy has been crazy good, with 6:6 probability of success in early tests. That’s successfully translating big data into effective drug creation at a fraction of the time and cost. . We all know email is a pain in the ass, and Meet Mikey wants to change that. The mobile email app, which works with Gmail, is aimed at providing quicker results to questions, with embedded yes and no buttons that can be sent and translated into instant answers. It also can show you who’s opened emails and attachments sent, making sure that everyone on your team is on the same page. It essentially aims to increase productivity and provide easier access to the information users need, in the palm of their hands. . readImagine seeks to empower artists and storytellers to create apps for children, with a platform for creation, curation, and distribution of high-quality kids apps. For creators, the platform makes building an app easier than before, and provides distribution through its own network of apps. For parents, it provides a curated group of high-quality apps their kids will love. . Crowdfunding will be a $6 billion business this year, and that’s set to accelerate, but creators need better tools for managing their campaigns. This company seeks to make building crowdsourced projects easier than ever, by taking the guilt associated with hitting up friends, family, and other members of one’s network to fund their passion projects. The tool works by involving participants early on and making them part of the project’s story well before it gets to the funding stage, making them more willing to give and also making them feel like a bigger part of the creative process. . Kidaptive hopes to provide better tools for kids to learn and for parents to help them during early development. Starting with its Leo’s Pad app, the company seeks to create a suite of 25 interactive stories that will play out over the course of a year-long curriculum kids can take part in. Better yet, the product helps empower parents to help their kids learn through a continued feedback loop that keeps them informed about how their child is doing, and what they could do to improve. * For various reasons, one of those companies didn’t want any publicity for its pitch, so we’re excluding it from our coverage.
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Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo Moved Into The Top 5 Global Smartphone Vendors In Q4, Says Canalys
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Canalys its final mobile phone shipment estimates, which show that although Samsung is still on top of the global smart phone market, three Chinese manufacturers-Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo-all climbed into the top five for the first time, thanks to domestic success as well as sales in overseas markets. Huawei took third place, which isn’t a surprise if you recollect , which revealed last month that it sprang up into the top-three smartphone vendors in the world, a first for the company. ZTE slid into fourth place for the first time in Q4 2012, thanks to success in their home markets as well as sales in the U.S., where ZTE was fourth and Huawei fifth thanks to their product lineups of low-cost LTE smartphones. Though their market share is climbing in the U.S., ZTE and Huawei combined still took up less than 5 percent of the market share in an arena still dominated by Samsung and Apple. Sony fared less well, slipping out of the top five in Q4 as Lenovo, one of the fastest-growing smartphone vendors, moved in. Lenovo grew 216% year-on-year, moving 9.5 million units to take fifth place-but the Chinese manufacturer is still struggling to break into overseas markets, which means it may have to seek other avenues for growth. Last month, Lenovo downplayed reports that it is looking at BlackBerry as a potential acquisition, but said it’s taking a close look at other M&A opportunities. “China made up 98% of Lenovo’s shipments with a handful of emerging markets making up the rest. Its struggle to gain a foothold in markets outside of China means that it may be forced down the acquisition route–as it was with its PC business-hence the speculation about BlackBerry,” said Jessica Kwee, a Canalys analyst. Canalys tracked mobile phone shipments estimates across more than 50 countries. The total mobile phone market, at 438.1 million units, was flat year-on-year, while the worldwide smart phone market grew 37%. Smartphones made up almost half of the all phones shipped in the fourth quarter. Of the latter number, Android smart phones powered 34% of total phone shipments, while 11% were iPhones. In the smart phone market alone, Android handsets made up 69% of the 216.5 million shipped. Its market share fell slightly from 74% as Apple’s share grew from 15% to 22%, thanks to the iPhone 5. In terms of Android manufacturers, Samsung grew by 78%, while Chinese vendors Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and Yulong all surged by triple-digit percentages. BlackBerry and Windows Phone shares remained unchanged at 4% and 2%. “BlackBerry, Microsoft and Nokia, as well as other Android vendors, have strategies and devices in place to attack, but the task is daunting to say the least,” said Pete Cunningham, Canalys principal analyst. “When we look at the whole of 2012, Nokia remained the number three smart phone vendor, shipping 35 million units, but Apple in second place shipped 101 million more handsets. First-placed Samsung shipped 74 million more than Apple-the gaps are colossal. But there is still a big opportunity as smart phone penetration increases around the world.” China, the largest phone market in the world, was unsurprisingly a key element in each of these manufacturers’ growth stories. Smart phones dominated shipments in that country, making up 73% of the market, an increase from 40% a year ago. (This makes China unique among other emerging economies like Brazil, Russia and India, where feature phones still dominate, according to recent by Nielsen). Volumes of smart phones there grew 113% to 64.7 million units. Samsung was the top seller, followed by Lenovo and Yulong. Huawei beat ZTE by over a million units for fourth place. Apple’s market share, however, failed to see significant growth. “China is a massive growth prospect, but Apple is not making the market share impact there that it is in other markets. The lack of a device on the China Mobile network is a big drawback, combined with high price points. Addressing these issues with the combination of a TD-SCDMA device and a cheaper model would open the flood-gates,” said Nicole Peng, China research director.
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CoverHound Lands $4.5M From RRE, Bullpen & Blumberg To Become The Kayak Of Online Insurance
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Car insurance is a necessary evil for all drivers. Of course, if you don’t happen to be accident prone, paying expensive monthly or annual bills is a headache and seems equivalent to setting your wallet on fire. Of course, insurance companies are great at reminding us that the world is a wild and dangerous place and that more coverage equals better protection from the vagaries of the road and those costly surprises. Plus, there’s the fact that auto insurance is required by law. So, as with airline tickets, hotels and many other necessary purchasing decisions, drivers want to be able to comparison shop for the best rates, deals and packages to limit costs and make an informed buy. In spite of the millions the big insurance companies spend on marketing, the industry remains inefficient, search and discovery is still messy and there really hasn’t been much innovation in recent memory. That’s why launched its comparative insurance platform last summer — to introduce transparency and simplicity to insurance shopping. Founded by veterans of insurance companies like InsWeb, Unitrin Direct and State Farm, the San Francisco-based startup is building a platform that provides consumers with instant, accurate and actionable rates from top carriers. Astrid, Kismet and Crittercism as a graduate of AngelPad’s startup accelerator, CoverHound allows everyday drivers to not only compare policies by buy and manage their plans directly through its platform. With the number of policies sold through the platform growing by over 60 percent month-over-month, CoverHoud is announcing today that it has raised a $4.5 million round of series A financing led by RRE Ventures. Bullpen Capital and existing investor Blumberg Capital also contributed to the round, which brings the startup’s total funding to $6.5 million. While plenty of the largest insurance companies offer comparative rates, CoverHound wants to become the Kayak of personal insurance, a destination that aggregates rates from all the major carriers and acts as an independent insurance agency. Carriers themselves have to hold and support the policies their customers purchase, while issuing and upholding the risk associated with each plan. By remaining independent, CoverHound isn’t tied to the same risks that issuers are subject to with their customers/shareholders, however, the startup wants to make sure that it doesn’t allow its model to turn into a use to be a hands-off-type middleman. Instead, the startup provides ongoing service to its policyholders, monitoring and adapting their policies as their needs change in attempt to ensure that they’re getting the best fit and pricing. It does this, in part, by providing its customers with access to professional advice both online and over the phone during the shopping process via its in-house team of insurance professionals. The platform collects users’ basic personal information and what kind of policy the’re looking for, at which point it presents a list of prices and plans for the user to review. The startup has partnered with carriers like Travelers, GMAC, Safeco, Progressive and others to provide consumers with accurate, personalized rates. The company is also attacking the B2B2C side of the industry with a portable “Storefront” that enables financial institutions to provide their customers with CoverHound’s rate comparisons and personalized policy vehicle. In other words, with a single snippet of code, banks and institutions can offer the startup’s insurance rates and policies, adding car insurance to the services they already provide online, like loans and credit cards, along with getting access to a supplemental revenue stream. Now in over 30 states in the U.S., the startup plans to use its new funding to expand its support nationwide, ramp up hiring and continue to pursue partnerships with brands looking to power their own insurance channels. While it’s been primarily focused on auto insurance, CoverHound has begun to move into homeowners and motorcycle insurance and plans to build out support for other personal insurance products. The startup declined to share specifics on its monetization (although, like any other insurance agent, CoverHound is paid a percentage of the premium for every policy they sell) or how much it’s been able to save its customers on insurance policies, which isn’t always a good sign; granted, it’s still in the early going. Consumers are increasingly going online to research and discover the best insurance services and solutions, and this macro change in consumer purchasing behavior can work in CoverHound’s favor. Of course, while the online insurance shopping market is growing steadily, there are still plenty of options for insurance shoppers. The big insurance providers have already established significant presences on the Web, and carriers like Progressive have been loudly touting their comparison shopping tools for years now in TV commercials that seem to air every five seconds. What’s more, the model feels more than a little familiar, to a degree derivative of web insurance pioneers like Esurance, which was the first platform to offer comparison quotes online. Progressive sold to Allstate in 2011 for $1 billion, and this consolidation could work in the startup’s favor. If CoverHound is able to prove that its algorithmic comparison shopping engine is more refined and its service more personalized and consumer-friendly than these incumbents, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t be a huge business. But there are a lot of options and a lot of noise in this space, and while insurance of every stripe is always in need of greater transparency, startups have to work extremely hard to stand out. What’s more, CoverHound is competing not just with giants like Progressive and Esurance but brokers as well, who essentially do their own comparison shopping to provide their clients with better deals. In the end, it’s all about who can offer the best rates, and certainly CoverHound could have a leg up by automating comparison shopping and removing the friction. “We’ve spent the past year building an insanely complex comparison engine that allows users to sift through tens of thousands of different carrier and coverage combinations to help them discover the policy with the best value. But we’re really just getting started,” said CoverHound founder and CEO Basil Enan. “Our dream is to become the brand that consumers trust for all of their insurance needs.” Find the .
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Amazon To Set Up Secondhand Ebook Marketplace
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Amazon wants to sell your used ebooks. It recently to allow people to hock off their read ebooks on its marketplace. Of course, ebooks don’t suffer from wear and tear, but think of the resale process as more of a way to transfer your book licences. This is already in action in a way—users can currently “lend” out Kindle books, which then disappear from your device as your friend holds the copy in their digital libraries. Another service called also exists, launched about a year-and-a-half ago. The company that Amazon’s patent, filed in 2009, employs a different technique of reselling, where a copy of an Amazon book is downloaded to a new device as the old one is deleted from the original owner’s bookshelf. ReDigi says that its method is different: a user’s copy is “moved” to ReDigi’s servers before it is downloaded to the new device. The company says this means that the book isn’t copied, and that only originals move around. Sounds like semantics to me, since Amazon’s method allows for only one copy at a time, anyway. Nonetheless, the startup must be dismayed. Amazon’s patent indicates that it wants dibs not just on your digital products but their afterlife as well, which doesn’t bode well for other online secondhand marketplaces.
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For A Brief, Terrible Moment, Facebook Connect Broke A Bunch Of Websites, But It Says We Can All Breathe Easy Now
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Well, that’s embarrassing. Earlier this afternoon, as covered by and , a Facebook Connect glitch caused serious problems on websites including the Huffington Post, Salon, MSNBC.com, CNN, Yelp, and others. Apparently, if you were logged into Facebook, when you visited one of those sites, you’d get redirected to Facebook.com, where you’d then get an error message. Users could resolve the issue by logging out. The problem was fixed pretty quickly, and a Facebook spokesperson sent me the following statement: “For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.” Even though the situation appears to be resolved, I’m guessing that a bunch of publishers are all feeling a little more uneasy about their Facebook Connect integration. And if we don’t see a more in-depth explanation/apology from Facebook in the next day or so, I’d be pretty surprised.
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A New $100K Genius Grant, The Cyrus Prize, Seeks Brilliant Iranians
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Countries around the world the innovative prowess of Northern California’s Silicon Valley. According to Berkeley Professor Anna Sexanian, a tradition of cultural support groups, mainly Chinese and Indian, is one of the Valley’s most unique and lucrative traits. The “brain circulation,” as she calls it, reins in top talent from around the world and helps greenhorn entrepreneurs solve global problems [ ]. To help extend the cultural advantage to the Middle-East, noted Menlo Ventures investor, Shervin Pishevar, has launched a $100,000 genius grant for Iranian innovators, dubbed, the “Cyrus Prize,” named after the Persian King and inventor, . “Human capital is the greatest untapped resource. Iranians talent is worth more than all the oil and gas reserves in Iran,” he tells TechCrunch in an email, “However, it is still untapped.” Consistent with Sexanian’s findings, Shervin’s own start came from his Persian connections, “My first angels were from the Iranian tech community.” But, unlike behemoths of India and China, the Iranian community is much smaller. Indeed, some of Shervin’s original angels, such as early Google investor Bobby Yazdani, went to the same Iranian private Catholic school, with other notable Valley businessmen, such as former Google executive advisor, Omid Kordestani. He explains, “Although Iranian Americans are a relatively small part of the U.S. population they have an outsize role relative to their population especially in Silicon Valley. I believe that the Cyrus Prize will help expand and scale that impact,” Referencing other influential persian figures, such as eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Unfortunately, given Iran’s beleaguered and repressive state, Shervin believes that success can only come from Persians to leave their home country. “For now the only real chance for top talent in Iran is to go abroad to achieve their dreams. Iran’s loss is the world’s gain.” The prize will be awarded by the end of 2013 and paid out over 3 years. Asked about how innovators can contact Shervin, he writes, “They don’t. We contact them.”
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The Valley Needs A Valleywag — Or Something
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Here’s an unpopular opinion, especially : The Valley needs a . On any given day, beneath the hype cycle of startups threatening to launch, then getting their VCs to blog/tweet about their launch threats, then pre-launching, then fueling PR/hype about their pre-launches, then putting up a special access code on select blogs, then their official launches,* some darker aspects surface. Sometimes it’s one startup stealing another’s idea, sometimes it’s a VC bullying a founder to get in on a deal, and sometimes it’s the blatant abuse of power by some of our industry’s most visible “heroes.” Or yesterday, a founder our writers. Other times an executive is fired, yet the tech press covers it as them “leaving the company” or “stepping down.” Or a startup fails and sells itself for scraps to its old CEO friend who takes pity, and Twitter is filled with congratulations. Yet, tech blogs — yeah even us — turn a blind eye. It’s dangerous how embedded we are in what we cover. These founders, these VCs, these employees , are some of our closest friends and sources. Our community is so tight-knit that you could be writing about a CEO getting fired at 2 p.m. and then sitting next to her at a demo day at 4 p.m. Or you have to ask her to speak at your event. Or she is literally your investor. These entanglements have made my ilk squeamish about any forms of coverage that might reference the darker side of business, or anything that skirts the “personal” line. Neither ATD nor TechCrunch referred to a when covering Keith Rabois for alleged harassment. While it would have totally made sense to do so from a background perspective, neither publication did it. We as an ecosystem need a watchdog with enough independence and daring to call it as it is. Right now the closest thing we’ve got to anyone who writes from a is Dan Lyons, and the biggest problem there is that he’s . This watchdog would need to be a savvy, ballsy type of person, and all of their posts would need to transcend mere gossip. The would also need to be organized such that there would be no quota for articles per day, as forced, low-signal posts killed the site last time around. Some days nerds just aren’t that juicy — but that doesn’t mean you should make stuff up, be spiteful or again. Tech news is largely driven by what’s working and what isn’t, what has traction and what doesn’t, what is making money, and what isn’t — So when a piece of information is surprising in any of those ways, it’s relevant news, even if it’s iffy or personal. Scamville of that: If so much Zynga revenue depended on scams, then Zynga’s success was at risk. The same with the Airbnb apartment-trashing story, which major tech blogs resisted covering for a month until Our libertarian-leaning community doesn’t necessarily care who is getting naughty with whom in the privacy of their homes. But they do care when personal greed and corruption undermine the fair play that our aspiring meritocracy, um, aspires to. TechCrunch, and other sites, shouldn’t be averse to exposing the seedy personalities behind the game or covering a few interesting Jack Dorsey outfit choices, but we often fail to because it is not our primary function: We flourish when we write pieces on and , but there seems to be some unspoken rule that we stay away from the personal stuff. “If I wanted to read US Weekly, I’d read US Weekly,” our comments sections cry out when we fly too close to the gossip sun. We often fall short of the messy truth because sometimes it is just too messy to be a pure “industry” story, and because we’re entrepreneur-friendly at our core. But the flaws, foibles, silliness and mistakes we humans make as we navigate the tech business are learning experiences, and shouldn’t be shoved under the blog rug.
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Stanford Student Startup Accelerator StartX Raises Another $400,000, Bringing Total Funding To About $1.5 Million
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
, which is a , has raised another round of funding, adding $400,000 to its coffers since last December. That money comes from new investors that include Cisco, Founders Fund, AT&T, Groupon, and Founder.org, and was primarily raised by Stanford students — StartX Sr. Managing Director Jeff Mounzer and Partnerships Director John Melas-Kyriazi — doing business development for the accelerator. That brings the total amount raised to $1.5 million, with previous investors including the Kauffman Foundation, Microsoft, Greylock Ventures, and AOL among others. The new funding was announced at StartX’s eighth demo day, taking place in Palo Alto, Calif. The accelerator, which hosts three classes per year, was launched in 2010 under the name SSE Labs. Since then it has seen more than 100 portfolio companies pass through the program. Those companies, in turn, have raised more than $100 million to date between them, with the average startup raising $1.5 million. That’s up from the , when the program reported that companies had raised a total of $80 million, or $1.3 million each. About 85 percent of startups which enter StartX end up getting funded, supporting about 250 Stanford alumni as founders. The program has also seen four acquisitions in its short history. There will be 11 companies presenting at this class’s demo day. Every year, approximately 6 percent of Stanford students apply to the program, which has an acceptance rate of about 8 percent. We’ll follow up with some of our favorites from the demo day later, but in the meantime, you can tune into a .
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Study Finds That Apple Took 72% Of All Handset Profits, Samsung Got The Rest
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
A study found that Apple took 72% of all handset profits worldwide while Samsung took 29%. While that is obviously a bit disconcerting, the thinking is that these are rounded-up numbers. What’s more troubling, however, is the fact that most other manufacturers – Nokia, BlackBerry, and HTC – are either losing money or making no profit at all. The by Mssr. Elmer-Dewitt but it points to the fact that we are living in a world where Apple takes the lion’s share of profit on 21.7% of sales while Samsung smothers the rest with another 21%. That’s why is doomed: at this point in the game, there’s no room for third place let alone a distant contender coming up behind. In this horse race, Apple and Samsung are way ahead and BlackBerry is still on the farm.
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NanoSatisfi Raises $1.2M To Disrupt The Aerospace Industry With Small, Affordable Satellites
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
For years, Peter Platzer was pretty close to a stereotypical — he was trained as a high-energy physicist, but he spent most of his professional career in finance. But he told me he’s always had an interest in space exploration, and now he’s working on an aerospace startup called , which just raised $1.2 million in seed funding. Platzer said he avoided the industry in the past because it was slow and government-dominated, with little innovation. It took an enormous amount of time and money to launch satellites, which meant that the technology on those satellites lagged behind what was available on the ground. “We don’t have in space,” Platzer said. That’s changing with the advent of nanosatellites, which are smaller and cheaper than satellites or microsatellites. For example, NanoSatisfi plans to launch two ArduSats this year, each one a cube with 10 centimeter sides and weighing about 1 kilogram, and they’re equipped with cameras, a Geiger counter, a spectrometer, a magnetometer, and more. ArduSats are designed to be active for about two years, at which point they’re replaced by new ones incorporating the latest technology. For example, even though the second ArduSat is launching only a few months after the first, its camera will actually be more powerful, thanks to rapidly dropping prices. Ultimately, the company wants to create “a constellation of nanosatellites that get updated on a regular basis,” Platzer said. The first satellites will be used for science experiments and education. Access to the satellite costs $250 a week, and supporters . Last summer’s campaign shot past its $35,000 goal and ended up raising $106,330. And the company plans to host this summer, where students learn more about the technology and can compete to run their experiments on the second satellite. NanoSatisfi isn’t just focused on science projects — once it gets more satellites in place, NanoSatisfi can start selling some “very attractive data services” to a number of different industries, Platzer said. After the Kickstarter campaign, Platzer funded the company with his own money. The new funds were raised from individual investors using . Since it’s, y’know, building satellites (or rather assembling them, often using components built by other companies) I asked if NanoSatisfi will need a much bigger round to really grow the company. Platzer said it shouldn’t require much more capital than other startups — his target for the eventual Series A is $10 million. “It is literally similar in capital efficiency of PCs versus mainframes,” he said. As for that first launch, it’s scheduled for July 15, and Platzer said the satellite is being taken up on one of the resupply missions for the International Space Station. Even though there’s always some uncertainty, he said those flights tend to be “the most secure and safe and well-guarded.” The startup is being incubated in San Francisco’s hardware-focused — it’s Lemnos’ first aerospace startup, but Lemnos co-founder Jeremy Conrad sounds pretty excited about the industry, so it probably won’t be the last.
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Curbing The Cost Of College: Coursera Wins Approval To Offer Online Courses For Credit For Under $200
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Last year, the buzz around the potential of online courses (particularly MOOC platforms) reached new heights, and this year is already shaping up to be the one in which online course platforms and the startups that love them, make their big push for legitimacy. To wit: The year kicked off with the news to pilot low-cost, lower-division and remedial classes — online and, importantly, for credit — within the California State University system. There is a growing list of institutions and startups that are on a mission to democratize education with affordable and scalable online course platforms, but the most familiar name in the world of MOOCs would have to be . Launched in 2011, Coursera has partnered with dozens of the country’s top universities to offer high-quality, Ivy League-caliber classes (on over 200 subjects) to anyone and everyone for free. For the sake of full disclosure, Coursera recently . In spite of a mission that nearly everyone can get behind, Coursera (and its ilk) haven’t been without their detractors. One of the biggest knocks against the startup in the early-going has been that it lacks an identifiable business model. Recently, Coursera has taken steps to fix that, moving towards revenue-generation with the launch of Career Services (an opt-in recruiting program that matches students with employers) and “Verified Certificates,” which allows students to verify the work they do on the platform — for a fee. It also marked the startup’s first foray into credentialing, which brings us to the second big knock against Coursera. Up until now, the startup has not offered degrees or credits for its online classes, which has meant that Coursera classes have existed mostly as a way to pursue supplementary or continuing education — not as part of degree programs. this morning that five of its courses have been approved for “credit equivalency” by the American Council on Education (ACE). This means that students who complete these five courses can receive college transfer credit at institutions that accept ACE recommendations. So, importantly, Coursera’s new credit equivalency doesn’t automatically mean that every university it has partnered with automatically guarantees credit for the approved courses; instead, institutions have the option to accept or decline credit. In other words, it’s up to them. The five courses include four undergrad courses and one vocational course, including Pre-Calculus from the University of California, Irvine; Introduction to Genetics and Evolution from Duke University; Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach from Duke University; and Calculus: Single Variable from the University of Pennsylvania and the vocational option, Intermediate Algebra from the University of California, Irvine. Why is this important? Well, I’m glad you asked. For starters, Coursera’s accreditation victory represents another step forward in the evolution of online education. Platforms like StraighterLine have long offered online distance learning courses for college credit (ACE approved, by the way), but Coursera is the first among the fast-growing congregation of MOOC platforms to receive accreditation. Though it’s worth noting that Udacity is currently in the process of seeking approval as part of its partnership with California’s state universities. This also opens the door for further evaluation of Coursera’s roster of courses, as the company plans to continue working with ACE to review and potentially approve more courses in the coming months. But, perhaps more importantly, offering courses for credit means that Coursera is moving closer to offering a real educational service. In other words, MOOCs have really been useful as supplemental learning tools, providing students or working professionals with the opportunity to brush up on subjects they’re familiar with or learn new skills to buffer their CVs. But, with credit, Coursera is positioning its platform as one that can help students earn a degree — and not only that, but because it offers content exclusively from the nation’s top schools, that means students could one day earn an online degree from an Ivy League university. Or, at the very least, supplement their degree from State University X with credits from Princeton, Yale and the like. Being able to take lower-level courses from elite institutions at a low cost has huge implications for students and, perhaps even on national graduation rates. As I said recently, “imagine being able to take a class at Princeton, get credit for it and not have to pay thousands to get it.” Let that soak in, and tell me that doesn’t have the potential to transform education, which is currently seeing record lows in acceptance rates at Ivy League schools and skyrocketing (trillion-dollar) student debt. Online education offers students the opportunity to learn at their own pace, using multimedia tools, video and study resources that classrooms just can’t offer. This has huge appeal to move the needle on learning outcomes for the many intelligent students out there who fall behind because they don’t get an opportunity to practice core concepts and instead just go with the flow — the pace of which tends to be dictated by the faster learners. What’s more, for those who have been skeptical that MOOC platforms like Coursera would be able to turn their free education model into viable, sustainable businesses, its new accreditation represents another big step in that direction. Coursera now has three revenue streams in Career Services, Verified Certificates and courses for credit. However, the former appears to be supplemental, while credited courses — tied into Certificates — will likely become the Golden Goose that brings Coursera to Monetization Island. In order for students to receive certificates or credits, the platform requires students to sign up for its “Signature Track,” which provides verification for the work students do in their courses. Signature Tracks will be offered for the majority of its courses and students have up to three weeks from the beginning of the course to sign up, at which point they’re asked to take two photos with their webcam, one of themselves and the other of a photo ID. This allows Coursera to create a “biometric profile of their unique typing patterns” by requiring them to type a short phrase. When they go to submit work for a course, they type the short phrase, which is then matched to their student ID. And while there is a fee for Signature Track, it pales in comparison to what these courses typically cost both in the classroom and online. Signature Tracks cost between $60 and $90 and proctored exams have a price tag of between $30 and $99. All in all, two or three college credits per course will cost between $90 and $190, Coursera says. And while we’ve mentioned the apparent value in being able to take Princeton courses for credit, ACE approval also means that Coursera’s classes could be eligible for credit at 2,000 colleges and universities across the U.S. — for under $200. While it’s hard to understate the potential significance of the startup’s ACE accreditation, it hasn’t been all sunshine, moonbeams and periwinkles for Coursera. The platform recently suffered its first big disaster — an ironic one, to boot — when one of its courses crashed just one week in and has subsequently been suspended. And what was that course, you ask? Why it was the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application,” of course. Oh, the bittersweet irony. In reaction, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng told Forbes, “when someone first invented the book, someone had to invent the table of contents, the page numbers, the section headings … and we’re in the process of inventing those right now, and there will be missteps along the way.” Looks like it’s about time for Coursera to make its first investment in some CRM software, after all, Ng is right. While online education has been around for years, MOOCs are still in their infancy. Yes, it still seems hard to justify poor service with a “hey, we’re innovating here” excuse, but these are first-mover growing pains. , students of the class reported that, as the professor scrambled to salvage the course, she did so “without an adequate technology infrastructure” to rely on. What’s more, the course “promised to teach students how to deal with these issues in their own online offerings,” as the description itself promised that students would learn how to design online courses, manage online classes and use web tools and Learning Management Systems. Again, the irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Because MOOCs are, by definition, online courses offered at scale (potentially to huge groups of students), as , the failure of Coursera’s course shows that when things go wrong on a MOOC platform, they affect a bigger audience than schools and educators are used to dealing with in their classrooms. These failures happen in front of the masses — online — where traditionally there has tended to be less empathy and tolerance of hang-ups than one finds in in-person contexts. As word spreads about the growing number of affordable, quality courses (for credit) online — and the increasing ease of access — it’s easy to believe that millions of students could begin flocking to platforms like Coursera. While activity overload is a problem Coursera would love to have, solving these infrastructure and support issues now is critical — especially as MOOCs increasingly find themselves in the spotlight. And you know what else is critical? Better authentication mechanisms and methods to ensure accuracy and prevent cheating. The potential for cheating in MOOCs is high, and are far from being a truly credible form of authentication. As students flock to online education platforms, this issue will become increasingly important.
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Microsoft-Owned Yammer Hit With Small Round Of Layoffs
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
We’re hearing from multiple sources that there was a small round of layoffs today at enterprise collaboration company Yammer. The number of people let go is around 20 staffers, according to our sources. Yammer has confirmed the layoffs. As you may know, Yammer was in July 2012 for $1.2 billion in cash. The Yammer team was folded into its Microsoft Office division and continue to report to the company’s CEO and co-founder David Sacks. At the time of the acquisition, Yammer had around 300 employees but this number was expected to almost double by 2013. Here is Yammer’s statement on the reductions: So it sounds like the layoffs weren’t due to financial performance but were more about eliminating redundancies and low performing individuals in the organization.
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Men’s Fashion Site JackThreads Is Blowing Up On Mobile, Which Accounts For Over 30 Percent Of Traffic And Revenue
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
, the Thrillist-owned men’s shopping community, is seeing some insane mobile growth and conversion rates. But it has also found something surprising: some of its customers have been discovering the company for the first time on mobile. They never shopped the site on the web. The company isn’t even sure yet who these people are, or why they’re connecting with the brand on mobile, but they can see the results of that change. And it’s good. “Trust me, I need to know,” says Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer, when asked who these new mobile users are. “That’s the question: who are these people that aren’t finding us on the web, but when we reach them on mobile they’re our absolutely [redacted] perfect customer?!,” he exclaims, using, , colorful language. These customers, he tells us, have helped the app go viral. They buy immediately and forward immediately. “They sink their teeth in and adore the brand right out the gate,” he says. The company shared some numbers to back up its claims. Since launching on iPhone and Android around a year ago, the iOS app has been downloaded half a million times on iPhone. It’s No. 3 in the lifestyle category, and #61 in the top free charts. . On Android, the app has another 100,000 or so downloads. On the web, mobile traffic, including from the iPad, has been climbing, too. Visits to the mobile website have tripled (up to 1.8 million visits, 12 million pageviews monthly), which now accounts for 30 percent of the site’s overall traffic. Even better, mobile shoppers are the better customers – 70 percent are repeat buyers, a higher percentage than on the desktop web. Mobile revenue has also climbed by 425 percent, going from 7.5 percent to 20 percent year-over-year. In January, mobile revenue was in the high twenties, percentage-wise. This month, it’s in the thirties. On some days, it has shot over 35 percent. To give you an idea, last year the company did somewhere between $40 million and $50 million in commerce revenue, Lerer says. (That’s ). So we’re talking about mobile revenue that’s in the double-digit millions. It’s not (i.e. around a quarter of Fab’s $150 million+ total revenue is mobile), but it’s not bad, considering that JackThreads only targets one gender: young, urban men. And the mobile explosion? , says app analytics firm *, which helped us fact-check JackThreads’ claims. The app reached the No. 3 spot in the Lifestyle section a few days ago, Distimo confirms, and has been fluctuating in Top Overall Free charts where it has been in the 60s and 70s, ranking-wise. It had been seeing around 1,000 downloads per day, spiking to 20,000 on January 30. This could be related to recent paid promotional efforts on JackThreads’ part to get more users on mobile, something Lerer says the company has been “experimenting with in small doses.” But Lerer adds he’s not interested in the app’s download figures. “I don’t care about getting someone to install, I care about getting someone to engage,” he says. “When we think about installs, we only think about people who convert and become members or who buy something through the app.” Within that portion of mobile installs who convert to paying customers, JackThreads is finding their kind of guy. The company, which offers hundreds of apparel brands including a couple of its own private labels, has found its mobile users to be some of the most engaged, Lerer says. They’re evangelizing to friends, sharing, and converting in days not months. What’s also interesting here is that these mobile users are not just the company’s web users making the mobile transition. Something else is going on – and even the CEO isn’t quite sure what it means. “Mobile is…mind-boggling. There are days now where, literally, over a thousand orders will be placed just on an iPhone. There’s real volume behind the iPhone now – it’s not just a toy,” he says. “The most important part is that it’s not cannibalizing web. We’re way ahead of our projections and our plans because of this mobile growth…it’s not just a shift, it’s and on top of what we had anticipated the business to do.” Although the company is still figuring out how it’s reaching this new class of user, it has been getting better at targeting them once they have the app in hand. JackThreads has invested significantly in its data and analytics team over the past year, and has been improving the way it targets its mobile users. Instead of spamming everyone with the same push notification, for example, it’s targeting audience segments based on preferred brands, time of day and other qualities, in order to increase engagement. And, says Lerer, “it’s working.” As for what’s next, JackThreads is looking to tap into the viral channels even more with plans to add Facebook Open Graph sharing in a few weeks to a month or two, and will be adding the ability for customers to “Want” products, making JackThreads almost like the men’s version of Pinterest…well, one with a checkout button. An iPad app is planned for Q2, meanwhile. In terms of fundraising, they’re not interested in that right now. “It’s a pain in the ass…and we really don’t need the money,” Lerer says. That’s a pretty good place to be.
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Y Combinator-Backed Goldbely Launches To Bring Gourmet Cuisine To Food Explorers All Over The Country
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
Foodies are always looking for something new and unique to try, but so much of what we eat is dictated by the local flavor of the areas we live in. Well one startup seeking to provide new experiences to those folks is , which aims to make interesting foods available to anyone who might want to try them. The startup, which is part of the current crop of Y Combinator companies, recently launched with a food delivery business that helps customers find unique foods from different areas of the country. Goldbely is trying to connect its customers — which it refers to as “Food Explorers” — with interesting food such as Chicago deep-dish pizza, Philadelphia cheesesteaks, Texas barbecue, New York bagels, and Maryland crab cakes, among other treats. The idea is to ship food so that it can be enjoyed almost as if you were eating it in its native region. So what do restaurants and vendors get out of it? They get increased distribution for their goods, and more visibility for foodies who might not have tried out their particular gourmet treats. They set their own prices for goods, which usually contain shipping, as certain types of foods require being flash-frozen and shipped on dry ice, for instance. Goldbely takes a cut of the sale, which varies based on the type of food and shipping costs. As for what it looks for in vendors, and the food they offer: The startup has been accepting tips for new and interesting restaurants. It likes to partner with those who already have been doing their own shipping orders, but maybe not really at scale, and it tests out all foods from those restaurants before making them a part of the site. Goldbely co-founder Joe Ariel told me that the company so far has only accepted about 3 percent of vendors that it’s tested, as it’s trying to keep the bar high for freshness and quality. Also important is the uniqueness of the food, and the fact that it probably can only be found in a certain region. So far the startup seems to be connecting with customers, who are trying out interesting, exotic, or maybe just hard-to-get gourmet foods at a rapid rate. In its first three months, Goldbely has seen order and revenue growth increase by more than 100 percent month-over-month. It’s also retaining customers at a pretty healthy clip — in the early going, 25 percent of customers who have placed an order have returned to place another. Super Bowl Sunday was a huge draw for the startup, which said its top sellers were buffalo wings from Buffalo, deep dish pizza from Chicago, and brisket from Austin, Texas. The company expects more orders based around upcoming events — like shipments of king cakes for Mardi Gras and various candies, cakes, and other sweets for Valentine’s Day. All in all, the team expects Goldbely customers to reserve orders for special occasions, when they’re throwing a house party or having guests over. If there’s anyone out there who can make this startup work, it’s probably Ariel. Before launching this startup, he was CEO of Delivery.com, and before that was CEO and Founder of Eats.com, which was acquired. The dude knows a bit about food, and food delivery, and has spent the last several years traveling around the country and making note of unique food experiences that should be shared with those in other regions. The team is rounded out by CTO Trevor Stow, formerly of Aol’s QLabs, and Vanessa Torrivilla and Joel Gillman, who both previously worked at Blip.
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 | null |
Prodded By Activist Hedge Fund, Apple Evaluates Plan To Return Cash To Shareholders Through Preferred Stock Issue
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
said this afternoon it is of issuing preferred stock as part of its ongoing effort to return $45 billion to its shareholders . The evaluation is apparently in response to , a hedge fund led by that currently holds some 1.3 million shares of Apple stock. Greenlight has been very to give more of its cash back to shareholders. In particular, Greenlight is opposing Apple’s to amend its corporate charter in a way that would eliminate the option of issuing preferred stock. In an interview with CNBC today, Einhorn said that preferred stock should indeed be issued by Apple, and he for hoarding its cash with a “depression-era mentality.” In a separate interview with , he compared Apple’s attitude toward cash to that of his grandmother, saying, “It is kind of like my grandma Roz. She wanted to hoard money. She would not leave me a message on my answering machine because she did not want to be charged for a phone call. It is really hard to convince somebody with that mindset to change what they’re doing.” Apple has been having a of late when it comes to the stock market. The company ended the trading day with a price of $468.25 per share, down 12 percent from the start of the year and down nearly 25 percent from its trading price six months ago. Here is the Apple release in full: CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–By early last year, Apple’s cash balance had built to a point beyond what we needed to run our business and maintain flexibility to take advantage of strategic opportunities, so we announced a plan to return $45 billion to shareholders over three years. As of next week we will have executed $10 billion of that plan. We find ourselves in the fortunate position of continuing to generate large amounts of cash, including $23 billion in cash flow from operations in the last quarter alone. Apple’s management team and Board of Directors have been in active discussions about returning additional cash to shareholders. As part of our review, we will thoroughly evaluate Greenlight Capital’s current proposal to issue some form of preferred stock. We welcome Greenlight’s views and the views of all of our shareholders. As a part of our efforts to further enhance corporate governance and serve our shareholders’ best interests, Proposal #2 in our proxy includes some recommended changes to our articles of incorporation. These changes were recommended independently of Greenlight’s proposal and would not preclude Apple from adopting their concept. Contrary to Greenlight’s statements, adoption of Proposal #2 would not prevent the issuance of preferred stock. Currently, Apple’s articles of incorporation provide for the issuance of “blank check” preferred stock by the Board of Directors without shareholder approval. If Proposal #2 is adopted, our shareholders would have the right to approve the issuance of preferred stock. As such, Proposal #2 has the support of many of our shareholders. We remain committed to having an ongoing dialogue with our shareholders to get perspectives around return of capital and driving shareholder value.
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Video Of 3D Printed Gun Magazine Shows Off Deadly High-Capacity ‘Wiki Weapon’
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
A new video showcasing the future of weapons was released on YouTube today: a enterprising 24-year-old gun enthusiast manufactured his own high-capacity 30-round gun magazine using a 3D printer. Hoping to spread the amateur design of more “Wiki Weapons”, the rebellious 24-year-old designer nicknamed the blueprints of the weapon, the “Cuomo,” named after New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who signed a recent ban on all gun magazines in excess of 7 rounds. “He [Cuomo] wants to be associated with these magazines,” designer Cody Wilson Talking Points Memo. “Lets make that association permanent.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY16r6EkUNY] Wilson’s Defense Distributed wants to catalyze a massive online catalog of weapons, similar to the user-generated encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The online blueprints, which are free and open to tinkering, have already been downloaded over 100,000 times, according to TPM. 3D printed weapons have faced harsh backlash from others in the growing industry of amateur 3D printing, the so-called “maker movement.” Popular 3D printer manufacturer and icon of the movement, Makerbot, has on weapons. 3D printer company, Stratasys, attempted to stop Wilson by seizing the very printer he was leasing from them, but Wilson has since purchased another Stratasys printer. Given the decentralized nature of such open-source movements, it’s hard to crack down on those who are willing to organize their own communities. “Our idea is to facilitate a community around what we’re doing,” said Wilson. “Defense Distributed is just about proving concepts and releasing snippets of basic information so others can learn. I think we’re a software organization, primarily.” Wikipedia probably never imagined it would be the inspiration for a global movement of gun makers. But, in this new world of easily accessible technology, group will be able to re-imagine their ideology for the 21st Century.
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LinkedIn Blows Past Expectations; Revenue Soars 81 Percent To $304M, Net Income Up 66 Percent To $11.5M
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
The business-focused networking site of record, , rode a wave of growth through 2012, turning itself into a Wall Street darling in the process. The race to win the professional networking market isn’t really “a race” anymore, as LinkedIn dominates online networking for the world’s working professionals, now . Oh, and it’s adding an average of two users per second. With growth continuing, LinkedIn has consistently outperformed expectations over the last three quarters, so this time around, expectations are high. The for revenues in the fourth quarter has been $280 million, up 68 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings has been forecast at 19 cents per share, compared to 12 cents for Q4 2011. As such, the consensus has been that it would be a tall order for LinkedIn to beat the Street again. But the company managed to blow away expectations yet again, reporting non-GAAP EPS for the fourth quarter of $0.35 and revenue of $303.6 million, an increase of 81 percent compared to $167.7 million in Q4 2011. Net income, too, increased for the quarter to $11.5 million from $6.9 million in Q4 2011. Non-GAAP net income for Q4 was $40.2 million compared to $13.3 million in 2011. Meanwhile, adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $78.6 million — 26 percent of revenue — compared to $34.4 million in Q4 2011, which was 21 percent of revenue. For the full year, revenue increased 86 percent to $972.3 million from $522.2 million, while non-GAAP diluted EPS increased to $0.89 from $0.35 and adjusted EBITDA jumped to $223 million from $98.7 million. In the preceding paragraphs, you’ll notice the frequent appearance of the word “increased” in relation to LinkedIn’s fourth quarter earnings. “Fell” or “dropped” were nowhere to be found. “2012 was a transformative year for LinkedIn,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in today in a statement. “We exited 2011 having successfully revamped our underlying development infrastructure. Based on that investment, we said that 2012 would be a year of accelerated product innovation, and it was. The products we delivered throughout the year drove member engagement and financial results to record levels in the fourth quarter.” So, what were those product innovations and Q4 highlights? As mentioned above, LinkedIn passed 200 million members this quarter, ending the year with just over 202 million, which adds up to cumulative membership growth of 39 percent year-over-year. Another stat worth noting: At present, over 64 percent of LinkedIn members hail from international markets. Additionally, LinkedIn rolled out a totally revamped profile last fall, which intended to make it easier for users to build their professional brands online — not just their online resumes — discover new connections and business opportunities and engage their networks. To that point, the company said that the average number of members who updated their profiles doubled from Q4 2011. The company also debuted LinkedIn Influencers in an attempt to develop its potential as a professional publishing platform, which the company said “helped drive an eight-fold increase” in traffic over the last year. This makes its blockbuster fourth quarter performance all the more impressive, especially considering the fact that LinkedIn has continued to invest heavily in its business, for advertisers to run large-scale social marketing campaigns and for developers to build customized tools for those campaigns. It followed the massive overhaul of its core product (Profiles) with big upgrades for its mobile apps, the addition of notification features, among others. The performance of LinkedIn’s growing suite of B2B products and services continued to accelerate in the fourth quarter, led by what has become its flagship product: Talent Solutions. The company said that revenue from Talent Solutions increased 90 percent over Q4 2011 to $161 million. In fact, the service represented 53 percent of the company’s total revenue in the fourth quarter. Following Talent Solutions was LinkedIn’s marketing service, which saw revenue increase 68 percent to $83.2 million in Q4, representing 27 percent of LinkedIn’s total revenue. In turn, premium subscription revenue increased 79 percent to $59.4 million, comprising 20 percent of the company’s total revenue in the fourth quarter. “Continued investment in our talent and technology infrastructure drove momentum in both product and monetization, resulting in record revenue, profitability, and cash flow,” LinkedIn CFO Steve Sordello said. “As we look forward to 2013, we remain excited about the value LinkedIn will create for members and customers in the coming year.” Of course, in spite of its executives beating the drums, it’s not smooth sailing for LinkedIn. Depending on whom you ask, Facebook Graph Search could potentially be a big threat to LinkedIn by stealing users from its “LinkedIn Answers,” for example. in that it can allow recruiters to uncover more details about potential leads and setting the stage for more referral opportunities. , sharing results of a Bullhorn survey that found LinkedIn still dominating mindshare for job searchers and recruiters. However, once Graph Search goes mainstream, Bullhorn CEO Art Papas says, Facebook could very easily start to eat into a market that LinkedIn has “essentially had to itself.” Just how much of an affect on LinkedIn’s core business Facebook can have remains to be seen, and, in the near term, the company expects growth to continue. The company posted a strong Q1 2013 guidance, expecting revenue to range between $305 and $310 million, with adjusted EBITDA ranging between $67 and $69 million. For the year, LinkedIn forecasts between $1.41 and $1.44 billion in revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the range for $315 to $330 million. Thanks to its impressive performance in Q4, LinkedIn’s stock jumped 10 percent in after-hours trading. But, going forward, questions remain about whether or not LinkedIn will be able to continue to bring users to its content, an important source of ad revenue for the company — and continue to grow the mobile side of its business. The CEO said that 27 percent of the company’s unique visitors come from mobile apps, up from 15 percent a year ago. LinkedIn wants to encourage readers to come to the site (and stay) to read news and engage with its content, but growing the publishing and content side of its business will be a much tougher uphill battle than adding value to its recruiting services. Mobile? If recent growth is any indication, expect mobile to continue pushing forward. Further mobile stats absent in LinkedIn’s Q4 earnings release, but we hope to learn more in this afternoon’s investor call. Stay tuned. For more, find LinkedIn’s .
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BlackBerry Confirms It Won’t Launch BB10 Devices In Japan
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 |
BlackBerry may have been much of the past few months criss-crossing the globe in an effort to drum up developer support for BlackBerry 10, but it turns out that there’s at least one market where the company has essentially given up. According to a recent report from the , the Waterloo-based company would not bring BlackBerry 10 and the devices that run it to Japan’s shores, and BlackBerry has just confirmed its stance. Here’s what the Canadian company told TechCrunch on the matter: We are in the process of launching BlackBerry 10 globally in key markets and we are seeing positive demand for the BlackBerry Z10 in countries where it has already launched. Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 devices there at this time. That’s not to say that RIM is pulling out of the country entirely — Nikkei’s report goes on to note that while BlackBerry doesn’t plan to push any new hardware like the Z10 or Q10 into Japan, it will continue to support what few existing models are still in use there. At least part of BlackBerry’s decision to keep BlackBerry 10 out of Japan was driven by sheer practicality — the process of translating all of the OS’s text into Japanese apparently presented BlackBerry with enough of a headache that it just decided to give up altogether. Of course, there’s another reason for BlackBerry’s choice here — BlackBerry hardware has never been quite as popular in Japan as it as been in other asian locales, and the prominence of other platforms has slowly eating away at BlackBerry’s market share. The devices accounted for as much as 5% of Japan’s smartphone market before plummeting to a mere 0.3% last year. In the mean time, Android has been steadily picking up steam ever since the HTC Magic first debuted on NTT DoCoMo’s airwaves back in 2009, and Apple’s iPhone has topped sales charts more than a few times despite thanks to carrier support from Softbank (who’s been busy trying to merge with Sprint) and KDDI au.
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What Games Are: Why The Xbox’s $5 Problem Is Great For OUYA
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
Game developers, publishers and platform holders regularly argue the toss on the appropriate pricing of games. They struggle with questions of whether being too expensive cuts off oxygen to new players, or whether being too cheap means they become devalued. In a free-to-play era especially, this question grows even more complicated. Those kinds of games require certain compromises in game design, and those compromises do not work for all kinds of game. The results of that argument play out differently over various platforms. Facebook games, for example, are almost entirely free-to-play, while console games are retailed at comparatively high prices. Steam makes most of its bones in holiday sales when games are often 75 percent off, while iOS advocates endlessly debate the virtue of $0.99 or $1.99, or the occasional outlier like Minecraft at $6.99. Each breeds its own tensions, but – for me at least – it seems that the optimum price for non-free-to-play digital games is around $5. I base this from a study that development studio 2DBoy . The studio sold copies of its hit game World of Goo using a flexible pricing model. You could buy the game at whatever price you liked. The developers then compiled and released all of the sales data. The results were interesting, showing that of all the price points that users chose, $5 seemed to work best in terms of numbers of downloads versus pay-off. Informally, I’ve seen the same magic number seem to work wonders across the board. Steam sales often from users of games in or around the $5 mark (ask any PC gamer just how many impulse purchases they have made at this level that they have not yet played). Similarly, second-hand retailing of games often serves as a kind of library for gamers, where they essentially maintain a deposit with a store by buying a game, and then trade-in-and-top-up with a few dollars each time to get the next game, and the next one. The reason is that $5 is cheap enough to consider a punt on a game without going through the rigmarole of trying a demo, or pirating the game, and it especially makes sense for kids. Kids operate on a pocket-money budget most of the time, which means that they swap, loan, copy and otherwise get access to many more games than they can reasonably afford. This kind of activity is how they play a lot, form their tastes and go on to become valuable adult customers down the road. That’s why the (Disclosure: I write a column for Edge magazine) about the next Xbox being always-online and locking games to accounts is so significant. The notion that a game that you buy soul-binds itself to your account is not new. Your iPad already does exactly this, for example, as does your Steam account. Once you buy a copy of XCOM Enemy Unknown or Temple Run 2, you can’t pass it on. This, largely, is the thinking behind locking games on console for disk- and digital-sold games. If you buy your Halo 5 in Gamestop and insert it into your next Xbox, the thinking goes, it will only ever work for you. So, no second sales or borrows or swaps. In principle this makes publishers very happy because they resent the grey markets of piracy and second-hand retail with a passion. Likewise, everyone assumes that the entire console business is going digital anyway, and with the death of media retailers like HMV it’s only a matter of time. The combination of the two seems to promise a future where all console games will be sold at high prices, all the time, and everybody will make money. Maybe, but at the expense of younger players. During my formative years I was an inveterate pirate. I got my start with a Sinclair Spectrum and games recorded on cassette tape. In the schoolyard I would swap, copy and even compile mix-tape compilations of games on larger cassettes, writing start numbers on the inlays. I would also buy games by the truckload. As a result, I played a lot of games. Whether you came up in the console era and swapped cartridges like a maniac at lunchtime, or copied floppy disks at home and prayed they would work, try lots of free-to-play games on Facebook, or buy lots of cheap apps, chances are that you’ve played many cheap or free games. It’s a part of growing up that you have way more time than money. You bore easily, but also become highly passionate toward the things that do not bore you, and you learn like crazy. You become invested, perhaps in a few games or in the whole culture of being a gamer, and this turns you into a lifelong fan of that platform. Unless, of course, you can’t afford to. Then you just go elsewhere. The problem as I see it for the next Xbox, or PS4, and this wish to lock games in, is that I just don’t see Microsoft lowering itself enough to charge $5 for Halo 5. Rather, I think they’re thinking to turn every previously-a-borrower potential customer into a $50 actual customer, and so is every other publisher that wants to see this kind of locking happen. And that’s simply ludicrous. A locked-in strategy only works in a $5-or-less world. Microsoft should have owned the digital gaming space years ago, not Apple. It had the solution in place, millions of customers, and the hardware to play really great games. But the problem was that Microsoft could not really allow itself to enable those games to find their natural price point. Even today if you browse through the Xbox 360 back catalogue there are many 2- and 3-year old games that are being offered at twice or three times what you would pay for them new at retail, never mind second-hand prices. Even while iOS races ahead as a gaming platform, console makers like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have not meaningfully responded. Part of the psychosis of these companies is that they still believe that they are a premium offering, and so they act like a fancy Nordstrom store selling perfume, luggage and handbags for vastly inflated prices. They get tied up in arguments over whether they should allow their product to be devalued (as though the rest of the world does not exist), and whether that is good for games in the long term. Long story short: They are not in the position where they can make $5 work, and their publishers are not willing to sell Call of Duty for such small amounts. And that opens the door to OUYA, Gamestick, Steamboxes and the oncoming storm of . Whereas Xbox and such are all bound up in these massive and complicated tangles, microconsoles like the OUYA are perfectly happy to work with smaller developers and publishers. They are keen to deliver that App-Store-like relationship to the TV space, and they are increasingly well-placed to make the price argument. If it comes down to Microsoft demanding premium money for a console and games with no comeback or resale, versus an OUYA for $99 that sells games for $5, that becomes an easy decision for any parent. So the OUYA becomes the platform that onboards young players. Perhaps there is a growing market for a console that is just for adults, for so-called “graymers” who are happy to pay for premium experiences. Perhaps there is an emerging market for an exclusive kind of console, a sort of super-premium category that does not need young players any more. If there is, I wonder how long that market could sustain an expensive platform like the next Xbox by itself though.
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X-Wing Squadron Seeks $11M On Kickstarter For Measured Response To Funding Of Intergalactic Weapon
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
The , with £224,596 pledged out of total £20,000,000 goal, but its construction won’t go unopposed. Rebel forces have rallied to crowdfund a means to oppose Imperial tyranny, in the form of an trained to use it to take down any moon-sized space stations that may end up floating around in the void. The project’s creators are seeking $11,000,000 in funds to finance the development of a single X-Wing, and to train a pilot to use the fighter to deliver its deadly payload. Let me take this opportunity to volunteer myself to wear the orange jumpsuit, since I’ve logged countless hours on the and simulators that LucasArts wisely issued back in the 90s in anticipation of this exact scenario. If somehow I’m not picked to be the first X-Wing pilot, then at least I hope to be considered for the entire X-Wing squadron that project creators Simon Kwan and Ed Dean hope to put together if they can manage to hit their stretch goal of $4,458,672,683. For backup, should the project achieve 13 million Galactic Standard Credits, the team will also fund and build the creation of a Corelleian YT-1300 freighter, which certainly came in handy when the Rebels took down the second death start in our distant past during that far-flung galactic struggle we all know so well from the re-enacted documentaries created by George Lucas. While it’s likely true that the galaxy needs an X-Wing or two, I’m a little skeptical about this project’s ability to achieve its goals, for one reason: the conversion rate for Galactic Standard Credits is all wrong. The GSC was estimated to be worth around , which means that that 13 million stretch goal would translate to around 8.6 million USD – . That’s just crazy, and it definitely doesn’t give me any confidence in the ability this project’s creators to get the job done. If you can’t handle basic galactic currency conversion, how do you expect to manage planetary defence? There’s a lot of math involved.
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Apple And Google Still Lead WebKit Development, But More Smaller Companies Contributing
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
Apple and Google still represent the bulk of reviewed commits contributing to the ongoing development of WebKit, the open source web browser engine that powers Safari and Chrome, among others. Google accounts for the bulk of commits, having overtaken Apple in that regard (though Apple still does much more with fewer authors actually writing code), but the more interesting story here is that the impact of other parties is steadily growing. Bitergia, a company that analyzes free, libre and open-source software projects, , showing that the share of reviewed commits coming from parties other than Apple and Google is at 25 percent and growing, higher than it has been in the past. Around five companies were actively contributing to WebKit back in 2007, but that number has risen to over 20 today, and the picture of which of those companies is contributing the most tells a story about changing fortunes and goals for companies building products for the web. Nokia, for instance, was once a significant contributor to WebKit, with its contribution peaking around late 2011 (which is also when the Windows 7-powered Lumia line first appeared, and when MeeGo was still a going concern). Lately, however, Nokia’s contribution has dropped off dramatically, with both its monthly commits and authors working on WebKit taking a steep dive. That may show where Nokia’s priorities lie as it becomes more of a dedicated hardware partner running more or less on software provided by Microsoft. BlackBerry, in stark contrast, has increased its contributions and authors working on WebKit by almost inverse proportion to Nokia. It’s impact has grown steeply since 2011, which is in keeping with the development of BB OS 10 and its WebKit-based browser, an element of the OS the company placed a lot of emphasis on at launch. Apple and Google are still the most invested in the development of WebKit, and for good reason, but the changing picture of reviewed commits helping the engine along means we’re seeing a more diverse set of interests represented in the project than ever before, and it’ll be interesting to see where that takes us.
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Microsoft’s 128GB Surface Pro Sells Out At MS Online Store Just Hours After Launch
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
Microsoft’s $999 128GB Surface Pro has sold out in the online Microsoft Store in the U.S. (via ), just a few hours after going on sale today, February 9. The 64GB version is still available as of this writing, and the Surface Pro is still likely in stock at physical retail locations like Best Buy, where it also went on sale today, although checking the stock levels via their online tool reports the Surface Pro as “Unavailable” across the board. The Surface Pro is Microsoft’s more powerful, Intel-powered Windows 8 tablet, which runs the full version of Windows 8 unlike the Surface RT and can handle full-fledged Windows desktop applications. In the was a much more compelling device than the RT, in part because of its ability to run software that enterprise IT departments depend upon from legacy windows installations. The Surface RT sold out of the but the Pro’s more expensive model has sold out even faster. That could indicate that users are placing a higher value on storage with the Pro, which is marketed as a device much more suited to getting serious work done than the Surface RT. The 64GB model remains in stock for now, and given that there’s only a $100 price difference to trade up to double the storage capacity with the 128GB version, that’s not surprising. Storage was recently the subject of a number of back-and-forth reports regarding the Surface, with some claiming Microsoft left little room on-device for personal files once you accounted for the Windows 8 OS install. Ed Bott reported earlier today on the actual storage numbers, which , but the free space on the 64GB version still represents a 200 percent increase from the actual usable space on the base Surface Pro model. The 128GB Surface Pro is still available to order from the as of this publication date, and you may still be able to grab one by visiting a physical retail location.
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Meet Kirsty Nathoo, Y Combinator’s Secret Financial And Operational Weapon
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
The back office is an unglamorous but crucial part of any venture firm. At Y Combinator, which has grown its seed-stage fund and incubator quickly in recent years, it also has to move at the pace of a young startup. The person who has made that happen is Kirsty Nathoo, a UK transplant with an accounting background. She joined a few years ago and has shepherded hundreds of companies from entry through incorporation, fundraising, and now even product development. “Y Combinator would cease to operate if Kirsty wasn’t around,” said Y Combinator partner “She’s the story behind Y Combinator,” said one YC founder, who us maintaining anonymity because his company is in stealth mode. “If you scratch the surface and see how YC works, Kirsty is critical to startups, and most YC companies are more likely to spend time with her than anyone else.” As CFO of the incubator, she holds the keys to the kingdom – literally. Not only does she control and manage Y Combinator’s internal finances, from paying bills to helping organize demo days to actually making sure Y Combinator’s money is wired to startups from the proper accounts; but she helps YC startups coordinate outside financings, tax issues, incorporation and other fiscal matters. She’s the financial brains behind the entire operation, which has funded and incubated 368 startups under Nathoo’s watch. In short, Nathoo’s job could probably be handled by a staff of five. As Nathoo tells the story of joining Y Combinator, timing was everything. She first heard of Y Combinator back in 2008 when her husband, Amir Nathoo, was accepted into the Winter ’08 program. Amir ended up graduating and launching mobile development platform Trigger. At the time her husband entered Y Combinator, Nathoo, who studied at Cambridge, was working as an audit manager at accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers in England. At PwC, she helped look after company bookkeeping. As soon as she visited San Francisco when Amir started Y Combinator, she fell in love with the city. Y Combinator also became a family of sorts, as her husband was immersed in the program. For the year following Amir’s program, Nathoo split time between the UK and the U.S. working for PwC until Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston approached Nathoo to help them with operations and accounting. In early 2010, Nathoo officially joined the incubator as its in-house accountant. The Winter 2010 class was Nathoo’s first batch of startups, with the total number of companies incubated at 26 startups. That number has almost quadrupled in two years, Nathoo notes, with the Summer 2012 class graduating a whopping 85 startups (all under Nathoo’s watch). She began looking after Y Combinator’s own bookkeeping efforts, organizing the money that Sequoia had invested in the organization, as well as keeping this separate from the original money that Graham, Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris put in the company back at its founding. It’s actually a complicated task. In March 2009, Sequoia invested , which was kept in one account. In 2010, Sequoia, along with other angel investors, put into Y Combinator. This also had to be kept separate, and Nathoo has to report into Sequoia on the amounts invested, as well as the returns (if any). “I was shocked at the amount of trust that was being placed on me at first,” Nathoo says. She also started helping organize demo days, which are the presentations the startups make to investors and the press at the end of the program. She also began working with startups and founders, the part of her job which she truly enjoys the most, she says. Taggar says that Y Combinator wants companies to do nothing during their program but write code and develop their ideas. “Kirsty is the person who let’s that happen. Founders don’t have to spend the mental energy on logistics and can focus on the things they want to focus on,” he adds. There’s not a lot that Nathoo doesn’t do when it comes to helping Y Combinator entrepreneurs enter the program and navigate finances, both for the company and personally. Nathoo will coordinate with admitted entrepreneurs to ensure that they get their money when they start the program, and help them understand the terms of the agreements. Y Combinator puts in $11,000 plus $3,000 per founder (up to a maximum of 3 founders) in exchange for around 7 percent of equity. Nathoo ensures this money is wired to the proper bank accounts, which is a complicated task when you are dealing with 30, 40 or even 80 startups (and more founders). Nathoo recalls a recent situation with an overseas founder who had flown to the country to attend Y Combinator with no U.S. bank account and no way to make payments. He didn’t even have access to money with which he could pay rent. So Nathoo met him at the San Francisco International Airport on his arrival with a wad of cash to take to a new landlord so the founder would have a place to sleep that night. Another role Nathoo takes on with founders and startups is an accounting advisor. She’ll ensure that every company incorporates in the state of Delaware, and if they haven’t done this, she’ll help with that process. Y Combinator and most investors will only invest in companies that have been in incorporated in Delaware, and many founders don’t know this. Nathoo says that of the current class of 47 startups at Y Combinator, only one company’s incorporation documents were problem-free when joining the program. She also helps them open bank accounts and keep track of receipts and finances to be mindful of tax consequences. Most of the founders have never raised funding so don’t understand what a convertible note is or how a cap table works. Jospeh Walla, CEO and founder of YC 2011 graduate and electronic signature startup HelloSign, recalls Nathoo’s help on 83(b) election forms. Whenever you issue stock, it’s important to report this via a 83(b) form to the IRS. Many startup founders don’t know this, however; and Nathoo helped Walla and a number of his classmates with this process. “It’s interesting that she keeps a low profile, because she’s a significant part of Y Combinator. She has a lot of pattern recognition when it comes to financing and accounting. I can’t think of anyone in the Valley that has that level of experience,” he says. “She makes sure we become a real company rather than a group of people with different ideas.” As Nathoo became more entrenched in the day-to-day operations of Y Combinator, it made more sense for her to take on responsibilities like handling and helping with financings. Last year, she was . Nathoo says that she has developed a systematic way to organize incorporation documents and financing term sheets from Y Combinator. Because she’s helped form hundreds of these funding documents from both Y Combinator and outside investors, Nathoo also has a pattern recognition into what terms specific investors will back down on, or negotiate. While she didn’t name names, she said that she’s started to see patterns of what certain investors want or don’t want and will advise startups accordingly. Additionally, Nathoo was also helping with the financial logistics of the Start Fund, which gave each Y Combinator company in investment from Yuri Milner, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. Y Combinator recently , which includes Milner, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Maverick Capital. Instead of $150,000, YC VC puts $80,000 into each startup. Needless to say, with all these different sources of money coming into Y Combinator startups, Nathoo is a master at Excel spreadsheets. Beyond managing financials, Nathoo has taken on the role of operations manager as well as mediator/den mother to Y Combinator startups. She invites VCs and angel investors to demo day, and ensures each investor is vetted. With the rate of successful startups coming out of Y Combinator, investors are clamoring to attend demo days, and Nathoo ensures that each investor attending is vetted, and are the right fit for startups. That means some potential investors could be left out. There have been situations, says Nathoo, where some investors try to bring their friends to demo day that have not been vetted, and she has had to ask people to leave. There have been a few investor tantrums, she adds. Some of Nathoo’s financial advice also gets personal. Many founders will come to her with personal tax and finance questions. And startups who have graduated Y Combinator continue to email Nathoo with tax inquiries and issues. Unfortunately, Nathoo also serves as mediator when things don’t go well between founders at Y Combinator, which does happen in each class. “I try not to take sides, but I am there to pick up the pieces,” she says. “I also advise them to establish rules and contracts at the beginning of their time at Y Combinator that establishes equity breakdowns and splits if one founder leaves.” Another characteristic that makes Kirsty so unique is her efficiency in what are normally very complicated matters. For example, she helped architect a way for funds to be automatically transferred into bank accounts of founders as soon as the original Y Combinator funding documents are filed. Previously, this was a manual process, and Nathoo would be making 60 or more wire transfers herself for each class. Now this task has been automated. Nathoo tells us that the last of the Sequoia money was used in the Summer 2012 class. Now Y Combinator is completely self funded through the money the incubator has made through its investments in startups (i.e. exits). Will Y Combinator continue to operate without any funding? Nathoo says she’s not sure how far it will go, but the organization is in a good place, financially. Y Combinator has also in Mountain View where the incubator will move into, as it has outgrown its current Mountain View headquarters. Nathoo will be managing the financials and operations around this as well. Looking forward, she’s also working with founders on product strategy, which she says is her next big challenge. She’s also been part of the interview process for startups applying to be in the program. “Y Combinator’s biggest challenge right now is scaling and figuring out how to do that,” she explains. We’re trying to figure out how to help more and more companies be successful, and there are many threads to that answer. Part of this is systematizing things that can be systemized, like finance.” For Nathoo, Y Combinator is more than just a job, it is a family. “This is my dream job. I tell so many people I have the best job in the world.”
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Mailbox’s Virtual Queue Succeeds In The Waiting Game Where Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity Stumbles
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
Mailbox, the email inbox management app for iPhone that was , currently has around 700,000 users queuing up for access, at the time of this writing. That’s according to the in-app counter that many of us have been staring at on and off for days now, which tells you how many people there are still ahead of you in line for the app, and how many people are joining up behind to wait their own turn. It’s ostensibly a mechanism to , though some believe it’s a marketing ploy designed to increase demand. Others think it could be an obnoxious experiment in human behavior. I’m inclined to believe that the Mailbox creators are truly looking for a more efficient and effective way to bring a server-intensive app online in a way that doesn’t result in huge outages, but intentionally or unintentionally, Mailbox is breaking new ground in virtual experiences that others have tried to explore with arguably less successful experimental games. The Mailbox queue is in itself an experience, apart from the app itself, which is highly regarded according to most reviewers. It’s probably the app I open most frequently on my iPhone at the moment (besides another project currently in development with some oddly similar mechanics). That despite the fact that there’s nothing to actually “do” for the time being: I open the app, a counter ticks down and another ticks up, I close the app. Still, even that simple act of repeatedly opening and closing the app represents more engagement than I can muster for around 90 percent of the other titles currently gracing my iPhone’s home screen. Compare that to Peter Molyneux’s recent exercise in patience for mobile devices, Curiosity. The app, built by Molyneux’s new 22cans studio, features a mystery wrapped inside a cube, which is chipped away gradually by all of the app’s users working in tandem to unlock the ultimate secret. Molyneux’s game has interactivity, an end goal that should be more exciting since it’s cloaked in secrecy, and manages to not simply replicate the experience of standing in line. Yet I’ve opened it exactly no times in the months following my initial exploration for a launch article. One part of stands out as extremely telling, and in retrospect, it foreshadows Mailbox’s current success. Molyneux said that in developing Curiosity, the 22cans team found that, by and large, players were content to just sit and watch while others did the work, and that they had to come up with tricks and incentives to convince those lurkers to participate. These “idle” players greatly outnumbered the active ones, so it stands to reason that Mailbox’s virtual queue, which is essentially exclusively about passive participation, would work so well. Other games have experimented with delayed gratification, including the excellent The Heist by the team behind the MacHeist bundle. What’s interesting is seeing that concept applied to a productivity apps, and to see that implementation received as well as it has been. Sure, there’s been some groaning about the absurdity of having to wait for an app, both on Twitter and in the App Store reviews for Mailbox, but I’d argue that as vocal as complainers have been, there’s still more demand for the app than anything else. So does that mean a participatory wait list becomes a staple of mobile app development? Don’t count on it; Mailbox benefitted from a unique blend of pre-launch hype, good design, and working in an area where people are immensely frustrated with existing solutions (i.e. email). But like Curiosity and The Heist before it, the example of Mailbox adds another data point to how software developers might use delayed gratification to engage users, and that could have interesting ramifications for the future of apps.
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Gillmor Gang: Snow Kidding
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — take advantage of the East Coast blizzard to toast some marshmallows on the fire. First up is the Series A drought and impact of the cloud on startup funding. Next, the big pivot to Spoilerland, aka Binge TV. House of Cards is having just that impact on the television industry, collapsing the mid tier pay networks into an environment much like planes stacked up over Newark. It’s Breaking Bad followed by Mad Men followed by Arrested Development and so forth. How the broadcast networks get past the new air traffic controllers is anybody’s guess, but Netflix continues to confound the experts and delight the customers. @stevegillmor, @dannysullivan, @borthwick, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Kickstarter: The Coastliner Automatic Watch Is Brimming With Understated Retro Appeal
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
Kickstarter occasionally has a watch project, but they’re relatively rare, and even when one does pop up, it usually isn’t impressive enough to turn my head. , a project going on right now, is definitely a noteworthy exception. From independent graphic designer-turned-watchmaker Tim Hadleigh working out of the U.K., the retro-cool Coastliner gets its design inspiration from American classic cars of the 1950s, and the result is a stunner. Hadleigh’s Coastliner marries a mirror-polish stainless steel case with a cream-colored dial, tapered needle minute hands and a sea-foam green second hand that acts like a cherry on top of the 50s-theme sundae. A brown calfskin strap, with green interior lining to match the second hand completes the look. The Coastliner’s appeal isn’t all on the surface, either; the watch is powered by an ETA 2824-2 automatic Swiss movement, visible through the exhibition window on the watch’s case back. The Coastliner’s face, with its small, sans-serif hour marker and the subtle relief design printed on the center may be my favorite part of the design, but every element comes together nicely. All of the elements of the fully functional prototype (save the sapphire glass and Swiss ETA movement) were designed and built by Hadleigh himself, who got his start in watchmaking as a hobbyist taking things apart, and eventually graduated to building his own designs, and even his own movements, by hand. The project is set up to fund a limited production run of 50 Coastliner watches. As of this writing, there was just one remaining at the discounted pre-order level of £375 ($592 US), with another 25 available at the full price of £750 ($1185 US). The prices are fair given how much work Hadleigh is putting into the production (a process he describes in detail for a previous watch he built on the Kickstarter page), and given the quality of the components. A lot of collectors hesitate on new or young brands, but if you’re a fan of supporting a new generation of makers trying to deliver high-quality products outside of the heavily entrenched legacy watch brands, the Coastliner is a good pick.
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10 Great Ideas Someone Should Invent
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James Altucher
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
This article might change your life or make you rich. It’s time to save the world. There’s a lot of bad news out there. Rising unemployment, soldiers being replaced in their jobs by drones that kill babies, a new housing crisis that will end all housing crises, who is the real father of Kim Kardashian’s child, and on and on. Meanwhile, many futurists are at work on “what’s new for 2013?” Will Lindsay Lohan play Princess Leia’s daughter in the new Star Wars movies? Will Tiger Woods make a comeback? Will the Middle East “have tension”? Forget about 2013 and Princess Leia. While the futurists do their thing let’s actually get down to exercising our idea muscles. And no more “little ideas.” I’m guilty of this. Some of my failures: “a dating site for Twitter users,” “crowdsourcing TV ads,” “Myspace for finance,” blah! Some little ideas I’ve heard recently: “search engine for shared economy sites,” “real estate search engine.” Blech! The idea muscle atrophies, just like any other muscle. It doesn’t matter if you come up with bad ideas or good ideas. There’s no such thing as a bad exercise session. Let’s come up with some real ideas that can save the world. The only criteria – they have to help a million people. Or, if they don’t work, can be turned into a science-fiction novel that 1 million people would enjoy. Don’t be afraid to come up with bad ideas. Here are mine. Feel free to have idea sex between your ideas and mine so we can come up with even better ideas. This is just practice. Practice makes perfect. I’m not afraid to admit when ideas are bad. More on this later. Think about it. It makes sense. If I give $5 to a donut shop that means a lot less than if Barack Obama gives $5 to a donut shop. Then that donut shop is “The Presidential Donut Shop.” B’s $5 was a lot more valuable than my $5. The $5 is just paper after all. It doesn’t matter who holds it. Klout + currrency = value in today’s world. So it makes complete sense that people with higher Klout should be able to buy more things. Because their currency is more valuable than mine. And when they buy things, that infers Klout on the seller, who can now buy more things. The world is heading in this direction anyway. Look at Oprah. Oprah has an infinite Klout score. When Oprah reads a book, that book’s author suddenly gets wealthier. If Oprah bought a pencil from me my Klout score would go up 80 percent, give or take. The middle class is disappearing. The temp staffers pay for goods with scrip and rich people buy Twitter followers. We’re moving towards a Klout-currency world anyway. Now make it happen. (In all respect to Josh Gosfeld, author of “ I just stole the idea you told me you were going to do a science-fiction novel about. Sorry.) . I don’t know why nobody has thought of this yet. Just look at the words “Global. Warming.” i.e. The surface of the planet is getting hotter. That means it’s giving off energy. Use photovoltaic strips to harness the energy coming off the planet to reduce our need for carbon-based energy. BAM! Problem solved. The beauty of this is that if there is no global warming then the technique won’t work. No problem! Go back to carbon then until the planet starts heating again. I am all ready to meet Al Gore now. “3D Printing” seems to be the latest tech fad. But whatever. I don’t even know what it is. But here’s what “3D Human Printing” is. Let’s say I can’t make a meeting tomorrow that’s in India, 8,000 miles away. But I really want to go. I get in my virtual reality suit at home and turn it on. In the conference room in Bangalore, another suit opens up. It opens its eyes. On the video screen in my suit I see what those eyes see. I move my arms and that suit moves its arms. I talk and that suit talks with my voice. My entire awareness feels like it’s in the room in Bangalore. Video conferencing can never replace face to face. And even though this is sort of like advanced video conferencing, the minds of the other people in the room are basically psychologically fooled into thinking I am right there with them. It’s just like if you take a robot and give it a human body, many people think it’s almost like an actual human even though it’s just a computer. This is one idea I can invent personally. And I have motivation. I don’t like to travel. I like to sit at home and do nothing. With this invention I can travel all over the world. I can even go to Easter Island. This is sort of like Teleportation 101. This sounds ugly at first. An ad on a wall in your house? Maybe in a frame like a picture. Or a mirror. But here’s the deal: I get the price of my house reduced if I agree to allow advertising all over the house. Like if I’m sitting in the bathroom and I see “daily deals” projected onto the shower curtain. The ad agencies agree to subsidize part of the price of my house. It gets better. As part of this, they have software that listens to all my phone calls. Forget “social media.” Let’s see what I’m interested in when I’m ACTUALLY being social, i.e. talking to people on the phone. If I say on the phone, “I’d really love to go skiing this year but I can’t afford it” I start getting offers on my shower curtain for skiing trips at a discount. It’s win-win-win. I make money while talking to my friends. My house is cheaper. And companies sell more, improving the economy, hiring more people, and life goes from “bad” to “good.” For 10 years I’ve been getting business proposals like “with our product you will get alerted when your friends are close by.” I actually think now is the time this will actually work because of the rise of phablets like the Galaxy Note II. But forget that. When I want to see my friends, I’m not an idiot. I just call my friends and say, “hey, let’s meet for coffee.” But let’s make this localization thing really life improving. “Studies show” that it’s better to be around positive people than negative people. Positive people uplift you, negative people bring you down. So let’s do this. Everyone wears an earplug that takes constant scans of your brain activity. The brain scans are matched against a database of 10,000 brain scans labeled “happy” or “sad” and then use standard speech recognition techniques to classify the user brain scan as either “happy” or “sad.” NOW, on my Google Maps on my phone I can see shades all over the map. The brightest colors denote areas where the happiest people seem to be. The darker colors denote areas where negative people are. So if I’m trying to decide today, “hmmm, uptown or downtown?” I can look at the Happiness Map to see where the happiest areas are and go there. Who cares if my friends are there or not? I’ll make new friends in the happy hotspots! . The reality is, most people should not be at work. Why? Because they are bad at it. It’s rare that someone is actually good at what they do. I know maybe 10 people that are good at their jobs. This is not a criticism. It’s just a fact. And basically, robots are better. That’s why Apple is moving production back to the U.S. Because too many Chinese people were killing themselves in their factories. Robots don’t kill themselves and they get the job done faster. So what society really needs is 40 or 50 percent unemployment. Here’s how you do it. My solution starts off Communist but ends up libertarian. Basically, companies get incentivized to replace all humans with robots. The excess profits you get from firing people get taxed at only half the rate. All of those “robot taxes” get put into a government fund that is used to subsidize the people who are fired (just like farmers are often paid subsidies not to farm). The subsidies, though, run out after three years. So you have three years from the day you are fired to start a new business. Hopefully the business uses robots instead of humans else you won’t be able to compete against your higher-margin competitors. If you can’t start a business then you end up being a temp staffer somewhere. Don’t say this is heartless. This is the way the world is going. That’s why the middle class is disappearing. . And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer. Don’t shoot the messenger here. It’s already happening. I’m just trying to figure out a way that we can actually accept the 40 percent unemployment or “underemployment” (which is already at 20 percent) which is coming. This is a slight take on “G” above. No dating service works. The divorce rate is going up. Many people are not happy and end up cheating. For the first time, five-star hotels like the Parker Meridien are charging by the hour because of cheating dating services like AshleyMadison.com. So let’s solve this and end a lot of misery. Take the brain scans of 1,000 couples who are happily married after 40 years. You know the couples that say, “well, we’ve had our problems but we’ve survived.” Get rid of them. NO PROBLEMS. They are out there. Just a 1,000 couples of the 2 billion couples on the planet. Now average the brain scans together. When you sign up for the brain dating service, you have to submit your brain scan. It averages your brain scan with the brain scans of all the women in the database. Then it matches the results against the database of 1,000 happily married people. Whichever combination for you results in the closest match to those 1,000 brain scans, you then get set up on date with the woman (or man) behind that brain scan. Price: $10,000. Guarantee: life-long marital bliss or your money back. I just read they are making contact lenses that can read SMS texts. That’s nice. I like to be in constant communication with everyone I know all the time. But let’s take it one step further. I meet you, I like you, BAM, I blink twice quickly and my contact lens registers the like. Now you go about your day and other people who meet you can immediately see, “Sharon has 158 Likes today.” And I can also see which of my friends like you. If you’re having a bad day maybe you have only “5 likes today.” No problem. People will avoid you on those days and give you your space. Life is stressful and maybe you need a break. Tomorrow you might be refreshed and get more likes again. I don’t want just “social media.” I want social LIFE. Before I get to “J,” I want to explain “A.” The original idea was “Wi-Fi with protein.” When nomad tribes got to a new area 15,000 years ago they would think, “Where’s the food?” Now, in my nomadic wanderings (i.e. NYC Starbucks locations) I think, “where is the Wi-Fi?” Wi-Fi has clearly replaced food in our minds. So Wi-Fi with protein would solve the problem, right? But here’s the issue. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how you would do it. With every idea above I can think of the next step. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about EXECUTION. I just looked up everything I could about molecular biology on Wikipedia and I simply cannot figure out how to make Wi-Fi with protein. So I deleted that idea. No good. By the way, if you are Ridley Scott please call me about licensing any of these ideas for a science-fiction movie. My brain is hurting. If you can come up with a good “J” to help me round this out into 10 ideas I’d be really grateful. And if I ever make a company out of it that makes a few billion dollars, I’ll give you a small piece of the company and part of my Klout score. so my Klout score goes up. I love you.
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Google Asks “Why Fly Private When You Can Fly Private – Out Of Your Own $82M Airport?”
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
Google’s executives could soon be enjoying their own private airport space ahead of winging their way to various far-flung locations around the world, according to a from the Mineta San Jose International Airport (via ). Signature Flight Support, in tandem with a company called Blue City Holdings which represents Google’s fleet of personal aircraft, will likely be awarded a 50-year lease on San Jose Airport’s West Side, in order to build a 29-acre, $82 million facility to house Google’s executive aircraft and those of other clients. In the news release, the airport expresses its intent to recommend that Signature be granted the lease, which will see it construct a “full-service, world-class fixed base operation” on the site. The physical facility itself should occupy over 270,000 square feet on the 29 acre plot, according to the proposal, and will include an executive terminal, hangars for storing aircraft, ramp space capable of accommodating large business jets and aircraft maintenance facilities. In exchange, Signature and its partners will pay $2.6 million in annual rent, a minimum of $400,00 in fuel fee revenues, minimum annual taxes of $70- to 300,000, around 200 jobs during the construction phase, 36 jobs directly on premises and around 370 total jobs created. Google’s fleet of aircraft included alone, according to news revealed back in December 2011, owned and operated by an independent company formed by the three executives apart from Google. Google almost definitely has more aircraft than that overall at this point, and establishing their own close-to-hand place from which to operate, maintain and store those means of transportation likely just makes more sense at this point that whatever other arrangements they previously had in place.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 7 | null |
Technical Debt Will Kill You Dead (If You Let It)
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
A project I’ve been working on launched recently. Well, re-launched. A called , which lets you send postcards with messages and pictures from your iPhone. Nifty, but sounds fairly straightforward, right? An app that shouldn’t have taken too much time to build. Unfortunately, didn’t build it; we built it. And the company that took the first crack at it (naming no names here) did a fairly good job on the server side…but epically botched the initial version of the app itself. Oh, it ultimately sort of kind of worked, other than the many bugs and frequent crashes. But quite aside from those, its codebase was such a festering abyss of global variables, spaghetti code, hacks, no-ops and race conditions that extending it or changing it at was next to impossible without major reconstructive surgery. This happens a lot more than anyone would like to admit. Behind the shiny UI of many applications there lurk Lovecraftian architectural nightmares that challenge the very sanity of anyone charged with maintaining them or adding features. Ask a developer, any developer; they’ll have some horrific tales to tell. And if yours is one of those–if your company is an app, and that app works, but doesn’t work cleanly, or elegantly, or extensibly, or scalably–then your company has already racked up a pile of , and whether you know it yet or not, you’re already in big trouble. I like to use a housing metaphor: just because your house looks good, and its rooms are comfortable and well-decorated, doesn’t mean it isn’t built on such a poor foundation that it may collapse if a heavyset guest so much as runs down the stairs. Add another story? Are you kidding? Forget about it. Indeed, your house may have been built on poor ground to begin with, in which case not even a new foundation will do: you have to scrap it entirely and start again somewhere else. This happens even at extremely technical companies. I give you RIM as an example. Remember when they released a tablet without an email app? Remember how they silently treaded water for an apparent eternity while iOS and Android left BlackBerry in their wake? These debacles were not design choices or deliberate executive decisions. They happened because RIM had run up an enormous amount of technical debt, and it took them years to pay it off. Like monetary debt, technical debt is perfectly OK as long as a) you don’t accrue too much of it and b) you know all about it. Of course there are often compromises to be made between, for instance, scalability and speed of development. Of course when a deadline is approaching, and/or the funding is running low, and the task seems immense, the quick-hack shortcut is sometimes the right choice. Of course all developers are understandably biased towards the tools they know–or, sometimes, the tools they want to learn–rather than the one that’s ideal for the job at hand. But all too often the accumulation of technical debt in favor of short-term success is ultimately a terrible mistake. Like all debt, technical debt compounds with time. Worse yet, many non-technical people — i.e. too many managers, executives, and founders — tend to underestimate its danger, or fail to even realize when they’re running it up by the vault load…until they find themselves spending many months fighting to pay off their technical debt while their competitors are happily zooming ahead. Just like RIM. So how can startups avoid such an awful fate? Hiring the right people is critically important, of course. helps, as does the I favor. And I’ve long thought that technical assessments would be a good idea: have a few experienced people take a week or so to audit your code and architecture, once early in the application’s lifecycle and once more midway through. for has done that once or twice, but alas, it’s not really common industry practice, or at least not yet. What can you do if you’ve already run up a load of technical debt? First, get your head out of the sand and accept that you have a major problem. Second, stop digging. Stop adding new features, and get things into a semi-stable state so that you can see what you do and don’t have. Then try to determine whether you can keep your metaphorical house, but need to rebuild the foundation — even though things that previously worked will start to break again while that repair is underway, which is always frustrating — or whether you have to throw it all out and start again. (Which can be both the best solution and the fastest one.) Most of all, though, listen to your developers. If you’ve hired the right people, then they want clean, extensible, scalable code as much as you do. It was almost painful looking through the initial source code of the Postography app. Now I feel a bit like we performed surgery that saved the life of a dreadful-car-accident victim who has gone on to become an Olympic athlete. It’s never too late to rescue your app; but the earlier you start, the easier it gets. “Images of Money”, / .
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TechCrunch Goes To India — Bangalore Meetup On Tuesday
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 2 | 9 |
I’m heading out to India (Bangalore and Delhi) to meet with tech companies. We haven’t had time to put together a formal event, but I do want to meet startups, VCs and entrepreneurs, so to that end I’ll be throwing together a Meetup – probably in a bar – in Bangalore on Tuesday. The details are: Tuesday 12 February
3-5pm
A venue in the MG Road are. We will announce the venue on Sunday. But also please check back on this post or leave a comment below and we will inform everyone.
Informal networking, casual event I’m travelling with fifteen of the UK’s digital, wireless and mobile software technology companies on an entrepreneur-led trade mission called to Bangalore and New Delhi with the aim of developing new relationships and opening up their business to the Indian market. You can follow our journey via their , , news stories and I didn’t realise we would sell out so fast! We have created a waiting list on the ticket page, so you can register your interest. Please try to understand that this is an informal meetup not a conference. For those of you in Delhi, watch for a separate post about a meetup there, likely to be on Wednesday night in the Connaught Place area at this stage.
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Snapchat Raises $13.5M Series A Led By Benchmark, Now Sees 60M Snaps Sent Per Day
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Billy Gallagher
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
, the impermanent messaging app that won at the 2012 Crunchies, has finalized a $13.5 million Series A round led by Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky. According to , Snapchat is now valued between $60 and $70 million. In December, GigaOm’s Om Malik that Snapchat was raising an $8 million round from Benchmark at roughly a $50 million valuation; and our own Eric Eldon that Snapchat was raising a Series A “north of $10 million” at a rough $70 million valuation, led by Lasky. Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel confirmed the funding to me, and noted that the company now sees 60 million snaps sent per day, and users have sent over 5 billion snaps in total. The company has hired five new employees, bringing the total staff to 10, and has moved to a new office in Venice Beach, CA. Spiegel tells me the company will use the funding for “hiring and servers, definitely. But most importantly, it allows us to remain independent and continue to grow the Snapchat community.” The Times also reported that Mark Zuckerberg met with the Snapchat team in December, shortly before Facebook launched competitor Poke. Snapchat $485,000 from Lightspeed Venture Partners. “I started hearing Snapchat in the same context as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook,” Lasky said to The Times, echoing Barry Eggers’ sentiments when he was involved in Lightspeed’s investment. “That got me curious.” Lasky has posted about Snapchat on his , explaining that he will be joining the company’s board of directors along with Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy. “At Benchmark we search for entrepreneurs who want to change the world, and Evan and Bobby certainly have that ambition. We believe that Snapchat can become one of the most important mobile companies in the world, and Snapchat’s initial momentum — 60 million shared “snaps” per day, over 5 billion sent through the service to date — supports that belief. Snapchat’s ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.” Lasky also noted that he spent most of his career in LA, where Snapchat’s offices are. A previous version of this story stated that Barry Eggers led Lightspeed’s investment; in fact, Jeremy Liew led the investment.
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SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung On Building A Startup With An International Footprint [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
SoundCloud was recognized at the last week as the “ ” of the year, so we pulled aside co-founder and CEO after he came offstage for a brief talk about how the company has grown. Watch the video embedded above to hear about how SoundCloud kept its international roots even after raising funds from Silicon Valley and New York City investors, what his advice is to other international founders looking to grow, what his favorite things on SoundCloud are right now, and more. We also talked to Ljung before the show started, when SoundCloud was just a Crunchie nominee and not yet a winner — and that was a pretty enlightening conversation too. Watch that in the video embedded below to hear about the perks of building a company in Berlin, what SoundCloud’s official language is, and what’s up next for the company.
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Ask A VC: Kleiner Perkins’ Chi-Hua Chien Talks About Mobile First, The Future Of Ecommerce And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
Kleiner Perkins’ partner was in the hot seat for this week’s Ask A VC series. Chien, who has helped led investments in Spotify, Klout, Path, Twitter, and Zaarly, among others; discussed his thoughts on and how startups should approach iOS and Android vs. mobile web. We also chatted about e-commerce and what’s next for online retail, as well as some of his favorite faith-based tech initiatives. Check out the video above for more.
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After 8 Years On The Web, Project Management Platform Basecamp Finally Launches An “Official” iOS App
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
, the project management platform developed by 37 Signals that launched in 2004, is still alive and kicking, which is something of a feat considering how many companies have come and gone in this space over the years. Plus, more recently, a slew of promising new players have entered the market, including Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein’s , Joel Spolsky’s , and (now part of Citrix) — to name a few. Basecamp has also managed to stand the test of time (and is now managing over 8 million projects) by bucking the trend and sticking to the mobile web rather than developing native apps for iOS and Android. But, after 8 years, Basecamp’s finally today. While the company will be quick to tell you that Basecamp has long been on the mobile web and available through , most of them are pricier ( ) and haven’t been of the highest quality. But Basecamp’s new app is free and, from the first look, it seems to be fast, usable and the quality of design puts its other apps to bed. The app uses much of the same design scheme and familiar look and feel of the major redesign its web platform . That means that user can access and monitor all of their Basecamp projects from their iPhone, have discussions with colleagues, view and check tasks off to-do lists, attach files and read and add comments. Basically, it’s the mobile app that many Basecamp fans have likely been waiting for over the past few years — the functionality of its web platform optimized (and native) for the iPhone and actually made by those who produced the original. (Weird, I know, though it’s similar to what happened to Twitter, except that it bought Tweetie and turned it into their official iOS app.) The app uses native web views and in that sense is a bit of a hybrid, 37Signals Founder Jason Fried said recently on Twitter, and Jason Zimdars how the team has approached the web/native debate in developing for mobile. The iPhone app also works with Basecamp Personal, that attempted to make the project manager more accessible for individual users, as its target audience up to this point has been small businesses. In addition, the new platform allowed users to pay a one-time fee of $25 to buy a Basecamp project, rather than having to pay for a monthly subscription fee. That being said, 37Signals has long been saying that it would stick with web-only development for mobile, so it remains to be seen how this will affect third-party Basecamp clients. Many were likely under the impression that they wouldn’t be dealing with any direct competition from 37Signals, which could put them in a bit of a tough spot. Then again, Zimdars did say on the Basecamp blog in September, “Does this mean there will never be native apps? Of course not, this isn’t our final word on mobile.” Not totally explicit, but also not hard to infer what the team has been up to. The apps also looks great. The visual design definitely puts it among some of the best productivity apps for iOS out there. It goes further than the typical pared-down, over-produced look and feel of many of today’s productivity players and gets high usability points. This is great for 37Signals and Basecamp but not so great for Basecamp clients. If you’re a regular user, there’s now significantly less incentive to use a third-party app. Great to have the choice for those who are doing the detail or integrations better, but you don’t really need it. One (potential) drawback of the app on the user experience end is that — — the app only works with new Basecamp projects. That means it only works with the stuff you’ve created since Basecamp launched its redesign in early 2012. For those using the original version of the platform — — no such luck. Why not include compatibility? From the company’s perspective it was probably less oops-we-forgot-to-make-them-compatible and more that the new design is just better and easier to use. It makes sense that they’d want to encourage people to create accounts on the new version of the platform, which has been optimized to make their lives easier anyway. Though not so good if you’re a staunch Classic user. Users need a Basecamp account and projects on the new framework, so Classic users will have to stick to the mobile site or third-party apps. Which may be a silver lining for apps like , which just launched yesterday. Although, that being said, it doesn’t look like Camp works with Classic either. Ouch. All in all, the new app looks great, and most Basecamp users are going to jump for joy that they actually get to use a functional, good-looking product on their iPhone to manage tasks and projects. Basecamp became one of the most popular productivity platforms for small businesses without it, but that position looks a little bit more defensible now that it does. Well, maybe once it gets to Android (which is coming “eventually,” according to Fried.) When this post was first published it attributed 37signals’ blog post to Michael Dick, when in fact 37signals UI designer was the author of the post. Correction included.
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Cooliris Expands Again With Yandex Partnership, Hits 3 Million Downloads On iOS
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
, the Kleiner Perkins-backed photo browsing and sharing startup, is again expanding its footprint in key emerging markets, this time in Russia thanks to a new partnership with Yandex. The move follows the company’s launch of a localized version in China in December, which also saw , “the Facebook of China.” “The great thing about Yandex is that it’s a very integrated company, similar to Google,” says Cooliris’s VP of Business Development, Sebastian Blum. “They own 65 percent of the search market over there. They have a photo product called Yandex.Fotki. They have a Dropbox or Google Drive competitor called Yandex.Disk,” he explains. Like Renren before it, Yandex also reached out to Cooliris about a possible integration in the platform. For these companies, the benefit is getting their service in front of users in more places, but these kinds of partnerships will also hopefully help Cooliris find traction in developing markets, boosted by the marketing and distribution power of their larger partners. As of today, has 3 million iOS users, around 60 percent of which are in the U.S., with the next largest market being Asia, at 30 percent of users. But those numbers may change soon, given the recent launch in China. Although China has yet to crack the top five among Cooliris’s 174 supported countries (U.S., Japan, Germany, U.K, and Russia), it’s now the second-fastest growing country in terms of new user signups. The company expects China will take over the number two position “soon.” In the first two weeks after the Renren integration, Cooliris jumped up by 30 times over its previous install base in the country, which was then in the “tens of thousands.” For most of last year, Cooliris had been largely limited to supporting Facebook, iOS’s Camera Roll, Instagram, and Google Images, but it has been busy ramping up its other integrations in recent months. Since its , the startup has added integrations with Google Drive, Picasa/Google+, Flickr, SmugMug, Twitter, and, of course, Renren and Yandex. Out of the billion photos linked into Cooliris’s application on iPhone and iPad, the company says 350 million have been engaged with in some way (e.g. viewed, tapped, expanded, etc.) over the last six months. 13 million sharing actions have taken place on Facebook, and Cooliris is seeing private, more selective sharing picking up steam, too. Females are now sharing about twice as much as men, and they tend to skew younger (18-24 is the largest demographic), compared with men (35-44 is tops). iPhone usage spikes around noon, while the iPad is more popular in the evenings as users do more browsing and batch sharing. Although Cooliris has an Android application, – the older “LiveShare” app. Now the team is working on a new Cooliris-branded app for Android users, which will be more like the current iOS app. This is expected to launch in April. Cooliris for iOS, meanwhile, is .
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Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Plans To Sell 3.2M Company Shares Over The Next Year, 42% Of His Stake In Google
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, the company , plans to sell about 3.2 million of the Class A common stock he currently owns through a stock trading plan, which would reduce his share in the company by about 42 percent. At Google’s , this transaction would be worth about $2.5 billion. According to the filing, Schmidt currently owns about 7.6 million shares of Class A and Class B common stock. That, Google reports, accounts for about 2.3 percent of Google’s outstanding capital stock and 8.2 percent of the voting power. Thanks to this plan, Google said in today’s filing, “Eric can diversify his investment portfolio and can spread stock trades out over a period of one year to reduce market impact.” In a in February of last year, Google announced that Schmidt planned to sell about 2.4 million shares of his Class A stock, which was worth about $1.5 billion at the time. In late 2011, Schmidt still owned about 9.1 million Google shares. Google founder Sergey Brin, according to , currently holds about 8.5 percent of the voting power and his co-founder and current CEO Larry Page .
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TechCrunch Giveaway: Brand New Lytro Camera And Free Ticket To Disrupt NY #TCDisrupt
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Elin Blesener
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
, one of our biggest events of the year, is well on its way! We have already which special guests and speakers will be joining us this April, but that’s only the beginning. We have so many exciting guests and speakers to announce, special after-party details to share, startups to meet with, and other surprises up our sleeves. In just a few months TechCrunch will again be taking over New York City, and we’re giving you a way to experience all the action. Tickets are already on sale, but this is your first chance to win a free ticket to Disrupt NY (valued at $1,795). The winner of this giveaway won’t just win a free ticket to Disrupt NY though. Listen carefully… they will also take home a brand new . We’ve written plenty of posts about this impressive little camera which you can all find . Long story short, the Lytro is the only camera that lets users constantly refocus photographs even after the photo has been taken. It’s a hot little number for sure, and it’s valued at around $400. Want a shot at winning a brand new Lytro and a free ticket to Disrupt NY? All you have to do is follow the steps below. 1) 2) – Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us why you should win The contest will start and next Friday, February 15th, at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner next week. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note the free ticket is for one ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel. Here are some sample photographs taken with the Lytro camera. Be sure to click on them to experience the change. [lytro username=’lytroweb’ photo=’437159′ width=’400′ height=’415′] [lytro username=’lytroweb’ photo=’437155′ width=’400′ height=’415′] [lytro username=’lytroweb’ photo=’431142′ width=’400′ height=’415′] [lytro username=’lytroweb’ photo=’431119′ width=’400′ height=’415′]
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GAIN Fitness’ New ‘Marketplace’ Brings The World’s Top Personal Trainers To Your iPhone
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
So we figured that it’s a good time to with , the startup that aims to bring workouts from personal trainers right to your iPhone or iPad. GAIN Fitness just issued some nice updates and launched a that will bring a new trainer to GAIN each month. GAIN has a really cool business model of being a platform, not just an app. GAIN shares its revenues with the personal trainers who create workouts — just like iTunes shares album proceeds with artists. It’s a win/win/win proposition in many ways: Trainers can distribute their work well beyond where they’re locally based, tailored workout experiences much more accessible to the general public, and, of course, GAIN makes money itself. We stopped by GAIN’s San Francisco headquarters recently to talk with CEO and get a hands-on look at the new trainer marketplace. You can watch it all in the video embedded above.
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Y Combinator Opens Applications For New Class, As Total Funding For Alums Reaches $1.5B, Or $3.18M Each
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
founder Paul Graham that the accelerator’s 464 startup graduates (prior to its current batch) have raised an average of $3.18 million in funding each, which means YC’s companies have landed a total of just under $1.5 billion. In context, , YC had launched 380 companies, which had raised just over $1 billion in total, with each company averaging about $2.7 million. So, over the course of the last six months (or one batch in YC terms), the accelerator’s startups have raised nearly $500 million and increased their average raise by nearly $500K. Granted, as Billy pointed out at the time, those statistics are skewed by the top alums, like Dropbox and Airbnb, which have raised $257 million and $120 million, respectively, accounting for nearly 30 percent of total funding (at the time). Now they account for about 25 percent. [tweet 300005637658664960 align=’center’] Y Combinator selects two classes of startups per year into their three-month program, during which the expanding team of mentors connects their teams with investors and invests in the companies. Initially, Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s Start Fund invested $150K in each startup. However, in November, the accelerator created a new fund called YC VC and decreased its investment to $80K per startup in an effort to “become more startup friendly.” Furthermore, up to this point, Graham had not as of yet shared the median amount raised by Y Combinator startups — the average, yes, but not the median. , Graham said that, for recent batches, the median “has ranged between $800K and $1M,” and the range is “0 to a number I presumably can’t disclose.” YC VC also aimed to provide more time and involvement from VCs in the development of startups, and Graham have been looking to lower the overall size of its startup classes. In addition, Graham also said in a HackerNews thread recently that the fund no longer has LPs, which wasn’t a result of the switch from Start Fund to YC VC, he says, instead the partners “finished investing the last fund midway through the Summer 2012 batch.” That means there could be less dilution and bigger returns for those investing in the new fund, plus, those who were squeezed out in Start Fund get a new shot. (More .) As to YC VC and the smaller batches in its new fund, Graham explained at the time: “The reason we accepted fewer applications was that in summer 2012 we grew too fast … We had 66 companies in winter 2012, and that was fine, but for some reason more things than usual broke when we jumped from 66 to 84.” This comes on the heels of YC for its Summer 2013 batch, applications for which are due by March 29th. So, startups can expect that, while the total number of applications for YC has continued to grow as the incubator grows, the next class size won’t continue the current trend. Instead, Graham said that there may be fewer than 50 companies in the mix this time around. Way down from the 84 companies in its largest class, Summer 2012. [tweet 299999672582426625 align=’center’]
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Shortwave Aims To Spur Video Conversations By Launching A Reddit-Style iPhone App
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
I’ve seen some unsuccessful attempts to build tools for video comments and discussions (including ), so I was a little skeptical when I first heard about a startup called . But then co-founder Aditya Avadhanula showed me the team’s new iPhone app, and I have to admit that I’m impressed. The idea, Avadhanula said, is to facilitate conversations, not the sharing of specific moments, which makes Shortwave different from a lot of the current wave of social video apps. Those conversations can be public or private. On the public side, Avadhanula said, “Imagine if Reddit had video responses only” — there’s a section in the app where you can start a conversation around any topic, users can respond, and other users then vote to either “float” or “sink” each video, with the most popular videos rising to the top. You can browse the app by looking at the newest or most popular content, or by following different users. And you can share any public video via Facebook, Twitter, or email — the content will be viewable either in the app or on the web. What I particularly liked was the work that Avadhanula and his co-founder Sean Chen have put into the thread-browsing experience. When you’re reading a website like Reddit, you can mentally skip over the stuff that bores you, and Shortwave tries to replicate that experience with video by letting you skip the rest of a video as soon as you get bored — you just swipe across to view the next video. You can also bring up a diagram of the thread that lets you jump to any point in the discussion that interests you. Here’s a video demo of the app. The sound is a little rough (and it doesn’t start until a few seconds in), but it should give a sense of what the actual interface is like. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMy047ZmhcM&w=560&h=315] I also liked the range of content that’s already in the app (Shortwave has been testing with a limited group of users, mostly students at Stanford and Cornell). There are users, like a beekeper, hosting “Ask Me Anything”-style threads. Avadhanula also showed me a thread where an amateur singer was taking song requests from all comers. Now you could theoretically have some kinds of interactions in other video sites and services, but again, Shortwave has an interface that feels natural for these types of threads and makes it easy to contribute yourself. Avadhanula also argued that it’s a great environment for talent (such as musicians) to get discovered, both because the best content should rise to the top through user voting, and also because of the social dynamics of following other users and discovering new users in each thread — when someone participates in a thread, “You’re bringing your fans and friends to my party and I’m bringing my fans and friends it to your party, and it’s the same party in the end.” And yes, there’s a channel where you can have private conversations with a specific group of users. Avadhanula compared it to a group texting app — except, obviously, for video. He also pointed out that it could be a particularly useful way for family members or close friends in different locations to stay in touch. You can .
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Gillmor Gang Live 02.08.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
– Danny Sullivan, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
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HTC’s Flagship M7 Smartphone May Just Be Called The HTC One
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
Let’s face it: HTC may have its hopes pinned on its not-so-secretive M7 smartphone, but sooner or later the company is going to have to drop the codename and let it fly under another banner. As it turns out, that new name may be more familiar than expected — prolific leaker noted on Twitter just a little while ago that it would debut simply as the HTC One later this month. I say “may,” of course, because ersatz leaks are just par for the course this close to an HTC unveiling. Then again, the Taiwanese company isn’t exactly great at keeping these sorts of things under wraps. If you’ll recall, the revelation of the original One series devices was spoiled , well ahead of HTC’s big Barcelona press conference at Mobile World Congress. HTC never puts much effort into debunking these sorts of claims (unlike, say, ) so you can expect the company to remain stoic on the matter, but EvLeaks’ generally strong track record lends this rumor a fair amount of credence. Granted, the move is a pretty clever one if true — HTC has spent the last year establishing the One series moniker as one worth paying attention to, and giving it up after making as much headway as it has would just be silly. Plus, simply calling its new flagship The One lends the device a certain cachet — it would be the culmination of the all the prowess expertise that went into crafting the already-impressive One series. Oh, and in case you needed a little more to chew on, points out that HTC CEO Peter Chou attempted to whip his employees into a frenzy at a recent year-end party by having them repeatedly chant “HTC,” “M7,” and yes, “HTC One.” Was it an awkwardly enthusiastic bonding exercise, or something more telling? Either way, the answer should be revealed very shortly.
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The Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Case For iPad Mini Successfully Balances Size And Performance
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
Logitech had a definite winner on its hands with the Ultrathin Keyboard Case for iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard that attaches via magnets built into the iPad, protecting the screen and adding only minimal thickness. Now, there’s a successor designed for the iPad mini that comes in an appropriately shrunken down package. Of course, making a keyboard smaller doesn’t always produce the best results, but in this case, Logitech strikes a good balance.
The Logitech Ultrathin is a good-looking device that matches up really well with the iPad mini’s design. My review unit is black, and the case’s matte finish pretty much perfectly mirrors that of the iPad’s rear case. Side-by-side and face down, the symmetry is such that you could easily pick up one thinking it was the other if you aren’t paying close enough attention. The two surfaces also feel the same, which speaks volumes about Logitech’s attention to quality with the Ultrathin’s construction. The magnet spine that attaches to the iPad itself snaps into place with a satisfying click, and lines up well when closed. The face of the keyboard features a shiny black plastic, which, while not as classy as the iPad’s glass surface, does a good job of mimicking its black bezel visually, to keep the whole design symmetry experience consistent. The Ultrathin’s keyboard is the part upon which everything hinges, and Logitech has pulled out all the stops to try to provide a typing experience that doesn’t feel compromised, despite the extremely limited real estate available given the iPad mini’s small footprint. To make it work, Logitech has combined a number of function buttons, reduced key size and cut down on the space between them.
The keys themselves feel great, and offer a nice response when typing despite how thin the cover is. But the experience isn’t without compromises. Typing on the keyboard will prove a frustrating experience at first for anyone used to using a full-sized keyboard. But the good news is that the number of errors you make starts to taper off pretty quickly, and in very little time, you can even feel mostly at home on the Ultrathin keyboard, though placement of some elements like the Shift keys never quite feels perfectly natural. While the typing experience isn’t perfect on the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard, it’s about as close as you can get without adding a lot more bulk to a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad mini. It still dramatically increases your ability to enter text, and beats using the software keyboard by a very wide margin. If you’re looking for an iPad mini keyboard that maintains the smaller tablet’s considerable size advantage over its big brother and still greatly improves the experience of typing anything longer than a tweet.
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Twitter Allows You To View Your Profile In LOLcats In Preparation For 2014 IPO
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
In an obvious move to position the company towards a planned 2014 IPO, Twitter has today translation capabilities for its user profiles. The translation of the sometimes obtuse service into the tired but still kind of funny LOLcats meme is meant to serve as a stepping stone in the startup’s efforts to eventually please the fickle financial markets. This is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Twitter in its plan to go public. Building up to LOLcats, the company has in a series of two tender offers and launched video with the help of It recently TV analytics startup Bluefin Labs to further solidify its foray into video. The Blackrock tender offer , with employees being offered $17 a share, but we’ve heard that the market value for Twitter shares is closer to $20 per share, as evidenced in from Dan Primack. It’s rumored that the company expects to bring in . We’ve been hearing from multiple sources that the company hopes to IPO around this time next year — and that the s-1 document should drop by the second half of this one. Taking a cue from Facebook, Twitter CEO recently told that “making Twitter more understandable to newcomers so the service can crack one billion users” was the company’s top priority. As it stares down the road to the NASDAQ, Twitter has become notoriously tight with liquidity, trying to avoid emulating a Facebook situation where many institutional investors already owned shares before it went public. Facebook allowed users to translate before its IPO, though it’s still unclear what effect that had on the stock.
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Stripe Releases Library To Help Developers Build Sleeker Credit Card Forms; Now Processing Millions In Payments Per Day
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
Simple online payments company , library of code for building credit card forms, validating input, and formatting numbers. It’s basically a library that helps developers build better payment forms, regardless of whether they are using Stripe or another payments platform. For background, Stripe is a developer-friendly online payments system that allows developers to avoid setting up merchant accounts and dealings with banks, while still ensuring transaction safety. The company competes with the likes of PayPal and Braintree, and is by General Catalyst, Sequoia, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk. The library is written in jQuery, the main open-source JavaScript framework, and wraps a bunch of common tasks such as validating card numbers, formatting them properly, showing the card type into a single library. This helps developers adding payments to a website to have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to building these features. For example, in a credit card form, purchasers can input their credit card number and the form will automatically detect whether the card is a Visa, MasterCard or American Express card. Also, there is an underlying algorithm that will detect right away if someone mistypes a credit card number. And developers can use the library even if they don’t accept payments via’s Stripe’s platform. The library itself powers Stripe’s , which were launched a few weeks ago. As more companies switch over to Stripe (i.e. new clients like Squarespace and Mixpanel), the startup is growing fast. We’re told that Stripe is now processing millions of dollars in payments a day. Of course, companies like Braintree and PayPal are also processing millions (and billions) of dollars in transactions but Stripe is new to the scene so it’s impressive to see the startup scale so quickly.
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Crash Debuts An Online And Mobile Guide To Local Tourist Attractions
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
Crashworks, a new Idealab-backed travel startup, is today coming out of its semi-stealth mode with a fun mobile application called and for unique, crowdsourced tourist attractions. The difference between what Crash offers compared with more robust travel guides, is that it’s not focused on recommending hotels, transportation, restaurants or bars – it’s only about the photo-worthy tourist spots in the city you’re visiting. That means, for example, Crash isn’t going to include a restaurant that has great food, but it let you know if a restaurant sells the largest donut in the world, explains Crashworks founder . It will have famous landmarks, film locations (similar to ), scenic viewpoints, amazing street art examples, and more. It’s a little bit like or , perhaps, but with more emphasis on tourism. Laubach, who has lived in L.A. since the late 90’s, says he got the idea for the application after becoming a little bit bored with things to do around town. “I constantly saw all these tour buses go by, where people were throwing down forty or fifty dollars a pop, and I thought there’s got to be a better way to find these tourist attractions,” he says. “I wasn’t able to find anything that I was really excited about downloading or being a part of, so I thought maybe I could build this thing.” So he quit his product management job at Santa Monica-based ThisNext, and proceeded to do exactly that. Starting with L.A., Laubach began taking some twenty to twenty-five photos per day of the best attractions the city had to offer, and around the time when he had 500 photos on hand, he was introduced to Idealab’s . Laubach pitched the concept for the app, and Idealab offered him a small amount of funding ($150K) as well as resources to get what’s now called Crash off the ground. Today, the app offers around 2,000 attractions and 6,000 photos in five regions, including L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, Hawaii, and Austin – the latter just in time for SXSW. Laubach says it takes around two to three weeks to get a city seeded with enough content to “launch” there, and he expects to be in 20 or 25 U.S. cities within the next 6 to 8 months. To get these cities going, he uses a remote workforce (sometimes TaskRabbit) to take the initial photos, and then user-generated content comes in to fill in the rest. But unlike Foursquare, not all user-submitted photos are used in the Crash app – the photos chosen to represent the attracted are editorially selected instead, and the users are credited. In addition to the mobile app, which lets you favorite spots, create lists, comment, and checkin and share to Facebook and Twitter, Crash has an accompanying website where you can also browse and interact with the content. There’s a social element too, allowing you to follow others in a Twitter-like fashion. For now, the app is free, and Laubach says he will consider in-app purchases as a possible monetization strategy in the future, or maybe other advertising and partnership strategies for the Crash website (think booking modules, sponsorships, lead gen, or traditional ads). But all of that is still up in the air. “If we can’t build a product that people are excited about using, none of that matters,” he says. The goal now that the app is launched is to start taking in user feedback to see where thing should go next, Laubach explains. Crash is a . Idealab is also going in on the forthcoming seed round for Crashworks, along with other angels and seed funds. The round is in the ballpark of $1 million, and has yet to close.
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It’s Time To Buy Grandma An LCD E-Reader Because She’ll Be Able To Read More
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
A at Johannes Gutenberg University found that readers older than 60 benefit markedly from the backlit screen of many ereader tablets despite their perceived dislike of the platform. While younger folks exhibited no difference in reading on multiple devices, seniors were able to concentrate more completely using a tablet computer. This is obviously a bit of a blip – you’re not going to change grandpa’s mind if he loves to lug around his copy of all day – but it’s interesting to note that the e-reader market is far larger than we assume it is as Baby Boomers start thinking harder about how they read.
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Fashion GPS Breaks Into The Notoriously Tech-Averse Fashion Industry Just In Time For Fashion Week
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 |
As you may well know from Twitter (or the inordinate amount of heels clacking through a snowy New York this morning), Fashion Week is underway. It’s like the Superbowl for designers, retailers, and everyone in between. But the fashion industry is ancient, and is thus quite averse to new technology of any kind. However, a company called FashionGPS has chipped its way into the world of fashion offering a one-stop destination for designers, editors, retailers, etc. to communicate during the most important week of the year. “We’ve been working on this for seven years,” said founder and CEO Eddie Mullon. “But only recently has the fashion industry become ready for this kind of tech.” FashionGPS is broken into several different iOS apps and web services that follow a product throughout its entire life cycle. First, GPS Events lets designers (who essentially coordinate the entire week) manage their runway shows directly from an app. Designers can send invitations to everyone important, track RSVPs in real time, and use an interactive seating chart to make sure everyone is in their proper place. If someone cancels or doesn’t show up, the designer can immediately give the seat away to someone else. In the past, this has been done with paper invitations, calls for RSVPs, and taken between four to eight weeks. When attendees arrive at the show, they can then check into the show with GPS Events (effectively skipping the line). From there, the process changes from coordinating an event to coordinating the various product samples going out to different blogs, magazines, and department store buying offices. Using GPS Radar, buyers and editors can have access to a lookbook immediately, and request which samples they’d like for advertising purposes. Again, what once took between six and eight weeks can now be done directly from the runway show. After samples are requested, the process gets even more complicated. Everyone from magazines to department stores need access to a single prototype before the collection goes on sale in stores. Tracking that sample across various locations and countries is almost impossible, and many samples are lost because of this. Fashion GPS offers an app called GPS Samples to solve this problem. GPS Samples lets editors and buyers scan the barcode of a prototype so that the designer can track it as it goes all over the world. But not all brands have fashion shows, samples or lookbooks. Mass market brands like H&M or Forever 21 turn around product so quickly that runway shows are almost out of the question. But GPS Styles lets those mass market brands upload their entire collections online (what could end up being thousands of products) so that various blogs and magazines can find and request certain pieces to be featured. Mullon tells me that over 95 percent of the shows at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York are using the Fashion GPS platform as we speak, but that’s no reason to rest on their laurels. “Our roadmap focuses on fixing communication issues between buyers and vendors, and eventually we’ll work our way into the B2C space as well.” GPS Radar is available exclusively in the Apple App Store . [vimeo 58985905]
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Just Go Change Your Twitter Password Now
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
, it was hacked and 250K accounts were affected, so they received emails from the company to change their password. This is not the first time this has happened, but this time it was a real hack, rather than a . Way to start off our weekends, Twitter. Who knows if you’ll even get the email from Twitter about it, I know that I filter all of those things out. You can . I find it really confusing when anything like this happens, because it feels like companies try to diminish the perception of the impact of the situation. Fact of the matter is, its users are seeing sad tweets from their friends about how they got hacked. I even had one person tell me that they felt like they weren’t because they get hacked. [tweet https://twitter.com/gotwalt/status/297528415572090880] Instead, or in addition to, just go change your password. We’re all cool enough to get hacked. The number, 250K affected, seems a bit too tidy to me, and I’m not saying that Twitter is lying, I’m just saying that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Twitter also suggests this course of action, which is way too much for most people’s brains to process on a Friday: We also echo the advisory from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and security experts to encourage users to disable Java on their computers in their browsers. Sure, OK. Happy Tweeting (Maybe)! While you’re at it, change all of your passwords for everything. It’s a good thing to do once in a while, especially if you use the same one for every single site you log into. [Photo credit: ]
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Twitter Sends Out Emails To 250K Users Who ‘May’ Have Been Compromised, Says Hack Was Not Related To Yesterday’s Outage
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
is sending out emails to 250,000 users it says may have had their accounts as the site experienced “unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data.” Twitter tells TechCrunch that this is “not related” to the the site saw yesterday. The text of the email is below. In its on the hacking, Twitter recommends that all users make sure they have a secure enough password on their account. In truth, there still seems to be some big unanswered questions. Twitter notes that “attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, and versions of passwords”, which can also be interpreted as “may not have had access”, or may not have had access to all of those different elements. The reader who sent in the letter below tells us that he had not seen any unusual activity on the account recently — so any password or other kinds of compromises had not yet translated into actions, for him at least. One coincidence that appears to be emerging is that many of the people who have been affected were among some of the earliest adopters of Twitter. Our reader signed up in 2007, and we have heard similar reports from others receiving the email. Twitter says that it believes that other websites may have been compromised. “This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” Bob Lord, director of information security at Twitter, notes in the blog post. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.” Twitter would not comment on whether it had any information on which other companies may have had related attacks — although by coincidence , although TechCrunch understands that Amazon has determined that outside groups were not involved. Twitter does, however, refer to the security breaches at both the and the , as well as the recent security issues with Java in browsers, as examples of how hacking is everywhere (and to possibly deflect a little attention from what has just happened on its site). Hi, XXX Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We’ve reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account. You’ll need to create a new password for your Twitter account. You can select a new password at this link: As always, you can also request a new password from our password-resend page: Please don’t reuse your old password and be sure to choose a strong password (such as one with a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols). In general, be sure to: For more information, visit our for hacked or compromised accounts.
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Ask A VC: Foundation Capital’s Anamitra Banerji Talks About Twitter Ads, Becoming A VC And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
For this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Foundation Capital’s newest partner , who was just promoted from entrepreneur in residence to investment partner at the firm. We chatted about Banerji’s decision to become a VC vs. founding a startup, and how being an entrepreneur in residence helped him come to that decision. And as the first product manager at Twitter and the company’s lead on advertising products, Banerji had some insights into how and why Twitter’s Check out the video above for more!
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The Crunchies 2012 Are Over, But You Can Relive The Magic Right Here
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
Last night’s Sixth Annual Crunchies Awards show was nothing short of a huge success. With big names like Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg, Ron Conway, and Mayor Ed Lee in attendance, and equally huge companies like Google, Square and Instagram in the house, one wouldn’t expect anything else. But Crunchies tickets can be hard to come by, which is why we wanted to . We’ve put together some of the greatest moments of the show, including Greg Barto’s accidental name-slaughtering of the Wu Tang Clan’s GZA and the acceptance speech for GitHub, , along with some interviews from Google execs, the man responsible for the Mars Curiosity Rover, and an interesting exchange between Tim Armstrong and Michael Arrington. All in all, it was a night I’ll never forget. But even if I do, we have this excellent highlight reel to relive the magic. Enjoy!
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Gillmor Gang Live 02.01.13. (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
– Keith Teare, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor.
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Google Says 2,000 Schools Now Use Chromebooks, 2x As Many As Just 3 Months Ago
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
Google continues its push to bring its web-centric into schools, and it looks as if the fact that Google is in this project for the long haul is starting to pay off. According to Google, . That, by itself, isn’t a massive number, but what’s important to note is that there are now twice as many schools that use Chromebooks compared to just three months ago. Google’s Global Education evangelist Jaime Casap made this announcement at the earlier today. In a blog post on the company’s Enterprise blog, Casap also noted a number of new deployments, including at the Transylvania County Schools in rural North Carolina deploying 900 devices; top Catholic prep school St.Thomas Aquinas High School in Florida, which now uses 2,200 Chrome OS-based devices and the Bay Area’s urban charter network Rocketship Education, which now uses 1,100 Chromebooks for its students. These are all relatively small deployments, but Google clearly believes in this project. The fact that there is a steady stream of new schools deploying Chromebooks for their students shows that sticking with this project is starting to pay off for the company and its partners, including Lenovo, which just its first Chromebook in January. Outside of the education space, it seems Chromebooks are picking up some steam, too, with Acer, for example, saying that its $199 C7 Chromebook now accounts for , for example.
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CrowdFlower Adds Skill Tests To Find The Right Crowdsourced Labor
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
, a startup that helps businesses manage crowdsourced labor , is looking to expand the types of jobs it can tackle with the launch of new Skill Tests — which, as you probably guessed, are online tests used to measure workers’ proficiency in various skills. Until now, anyone doing work on CrowdFlower had been able to access any job. As people do the work, the company performs automatic and human checks to ensure that the results are up to par — if someone’s work isn’t adequate, then all of their results are removed. However, CEO Lukas Biewald (a former college roommate of mine) and Tools and Platform Product Manager Joseph Childress told me that some potential customers are interested in a particular skill or knowledge set — they might, for example, want results from people who are knowledgeable about golf, or cars. The Skill Tests allow CrowdFlower to target jobs to workers with specific skills. In Biewald’s words, it’s a way to create “a fair system” where people can still access the jobs they want, while also finding “higher value crowds” within the company’s overall workforce. “This is like how LinkedIn allows people to endorse your skills, except that instead of using your network, we actually verify that people do know about these specific areas,” he said. The tests consist of 50-60 questions in five or six categories, the company said. The first tests focus on URL acquisition and image moderation. Childress said the goal is to add new types of work that are more lucrative, rather than adding new requirements to existing jobs. At the same time, he said the new tests could also help workers by giving them a clear idea of skills they should develop. With this addition, Childress said CrowdFlower is now taking a three-pronged approach to quality control, combining the automatic and human checks mentioned above with skill tests, as well as checks from the most reliable workers on a given job.
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YC-Backed Swish Makes Selling Simpler For Inventors And Creators
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
It’s never been easier for would-be inventors to take a harebrained concept and turn it into an actual, sellable product, but the process of getting those products to the masses could still use a little work. Sure, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have laid the groundwork for a revolution in how these passionate folks sell, but the team at YC-backed feel like there are even better ways to do it. “Kickstarter is way too much work for small creators, manufacturers and businesses who want to get their projects out into the world,” said Swish co-founder and CEO Iolanthe Chronis. “We’ve built something that’s truly retail just for the little guy.” Swish came about, curiously enough, because of a keychain. Six months ago, Swish CTO Brad Stronger came up with a design for a new kind of keychain, but was summarily shot down when he submitted the project to Kickstarter for reasons that were never really made clear. That unfulfilling exchange at first filled Chronis, Stronger, and fellow MIT alum Heather Brundage with the desire to build “a Kickstarter with better customer service,” but they soon realized that they could (and should) do so much more. Thus, Swish was born. At its core, Swish is a crowdfunded marketplace that focuses strictly on physical products, but what really makes it so special can’t really be discerned at first glance. There’s no behind-the-scenes curation process here. For one, anyone at all can list their product on Swish for 30 days for all the Internet to see. The Swish team is very keen on delivering a Reddit-esque experience, with users and buyers pushing the best products to the very top of the site while kitschy, useless projects fall away from the public eye. After those 30 days are up, Swish takes all the money that users have pitched in and places a single wholesale order to the manufacturer. From there, the folks making the product have 350 days to complete the full batch of goodies, and in the event that they can’t come through, all that money is refunded to the product’s backers. That said, the real magic happens when the products are completed — the full shipment is delivered not to individual buyers but to the team at Swish instead. Rather than put the onus of fulfilling every single order on the product’s creators (an often overwhelming process that puts plenty of strain on smaller operations), the Swish team does it all themselves. The end result is a process that’s incredibly friendly to inventors and creators. All they really need to do is focus on creating the best products they can, because the hassle of fulfillment is handled entirely by Swish. As you’d expect, this seemingly altruistic move can come at a cost. While services like Kickstarter take 5 percent of a project’s funding total, Swish’s approach is more akin to the one seen in traditional retail. The prices of the products sold on Swish all have some degree of markup built into them, and Swish keeps 35 percent of that markup for themselves. That seems like quite a jump, but considering the costs that go into fulfilling orders for a successful project, it’s a more equitable arrangement than it seems at first glance. At least, that’s the sentiment that the Swish team has heard when bringing word of their service to the masses. According to Chronis, many people trying to get their products out into the market get stymied by risk-averse retail buyers, and often wind up shelling out considerable chunks of money in exchange for oft-ignored booths at trade shows. To that end, the four-person Swish team has been criss-crossing the country hitting up these major events to put the service in front of ambitious product designers and inventors that probably wouldn’t have discovered Swish otherwise. Their recent travels include visits to CES and the International Gift Fair, and the team’s itinerary is already loaded up with future trips. For all the smack that the team had to talk about Kickstarter, there’s little question that they owe the popular crowdfunding platform a bit of gratitude for being so limited. “We are indebted to Kickstarter for inspiration,” Chronis said. “They’ve made it clear that there are some very interesting things to be done in this space.” “There’s a kind of land grab going on here,” Stronger added. “And we think we’re ahead of that curve.”
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As Mobile Devs Get More Sophisticated, Flurry Adds Crash, User Acquisition Analytics
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
San Francisco’s initially got its reach through offering a basic package of analytics that more than 95,000 different developers snapped up. But as the iOS and Android ecosystems have matured, app makers are getting more sophisticated. The biggest ones often juggle 30 to 40 ad networks and marketing channels, and need to understand which ones perform the best. So Flurry’s rolling out user acquisition and crash analytics today. The company’s crash analytics lets developers get automatic alerts on new errors and common crashes. They can then diagnose where these errors are originating from with full stack traces including symbolication. The company’s user acquisition analytics helps app marketers understand how much they’re spending for users on different cost-per-click and cost-per-install advertising campaigns and e-mail marketing campaigns. They can evaluate the users they get through these different channels based on how long they end up staying with an app, how often they engage with it or how much they spend on it. Both are free and are part of the same analytics SDK that developers regularly use. The user acquisition or marketing analytics are available now on both platforms, but crash analytics is in beta for Android and will come out for iOS later this month. In crash analytics, , which Twitter recently acquired. In user acquisition analytics, Apsalar’s ApScience looks at marketing campaigns to see how effective they are. Similarly, there are a host of game-centric service providers like Chartboost and Playhaven that may veer in this direction as well this year. Flurry build its crash analytics solution with Plausible Labs, which is the creator of the Open Source PLCrashReporter, already relied upon by thousands of developers. Flurry says it improved that reporting solution, by no longer requiring developers to keep track of dSYM files, implement custom configurations that include symbols and increase the size of their app to get actionable crash reports. As for the company itself, Flurry , the late-stage firm that backed Pandora ahead of its offering. The company, which has been around since 2007, used analytics to cultivate relationships with thousands of developers,
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Facebook Turns Photo Tag Suggestions Back On In The US — Will Users Like It This Time?
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
With a simple , Facebook yesterday announced it had re-enabled its photo Tag Suggestions feature in the US after the feature was temporarily suspended last year, supposedly to allow for some “technical improvements”. The feature means users can use the facial recognition capability of Tag Suggestions to help them “easily identify a friend in a photo and share that content with them”. The announcement is not exactly being trumpeted – so far it only has 178 Likes on the post, a very low number given that over a million users have Liked the Facebook privacy page. In addition, Tag Suggestions does not look like it has been switched on in Europe yet, since we’re not seeing it on European Facebook accounts right now. The Tag Suggestions feature was first available in the US in late 2010 and available worldwide by June 2011, but it experienced a backlash both in the US and in Europe for privacy reasons. The feature has returned with no changes, and is set to “on” by default. So it would appear that Facebook is testing the waters for our acceptance of the whole idea. Making photo tagging easier is crucial for increasing Facebook’s engagement metrics and return visits. The move could also signal that facial recognition is ready for mobile. Because tags are suggested to you automatically, this streamlines the process of tagging photos, and is a way of Facebook to more accurately measure your social graph based on the photos in which you are tagged. Of course, that then improves Facebook Graph Search. It’s possible to opt out of tag suggestions by clicking on Account Settings, Timeline and Tagging, then editing the option “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?”. The question is, will there be another public backlash, or will users simply grow to find the Tag Suggestions useful rather than just a little creepy? We’re about to find out.
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Cruel Irony: Egypt’s Morsi Announces Protester Crackdown Over Twitter
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
[tweet https://twitter.com/bencnn/status/297399035482996737 align=’center’] In an ironic twist of fate, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has threatened military force against thousands of student protesters through one of the very mediums used to liberate the country in 2011: Twitter. “Security forces will deal with the utmost decisiveness to law enforcement and the protection of state enterprises,” tweeted the , through a string of -ish updates. “Presidency confirms that these destructive practices that have nothing to do with the principles of the revolution and not to any illegal practices in the peaceful expression.” (Google Chrome translation from Arabic). Deadly clashes , as protesters demand greater adherence to democratic principles from their newly elected leaders. Instead of being a faithful steward of democracy as Egypt transitions from authoritarian rule, Morsi has made disturbing by declaring that courts cannot overturn his decisions, and cracking down on protesters with excessive force. A hallmark of the , Egypt’s coup was hailed as part of the “Twitter Revolution.” While there is about the impact of social media within the country itself after the government tried to block Internet access, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube became an extraordinary rally cry for citizens around the world to spread messages and show solidarity. Now, in its fragile state, Morsi appears to have co-opted the tools of democracy to announce swift force against protestors. We’ve screen-grabbed the full stream of his tweets below:
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Gigya Says Its Social Tools Reach 1.5B Users Each Month, Making ‘Tens Of Millions’ In Annual Sales
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
“Social infrastructure” provider released some data this morning that highlights its growth over the past year. The biggest number? The 1.5 billion unique users reached by Gigya’s tools each month, up from . To have that kind of reach, Gigya presumably needs big clients, and the company says new customers added last year include Wal-Mart, DirectTV, RedBox, Beats Electronics, Pacific Sunwear, American Heart Association, Jelly Belly, Barneys New York, Bad Boy Marketing Group, Adidas, Food Network, AlItalia, and Lush Cosmetics. The company says it now has 650 clients total, including 50 percent of the comScore’s top 100 US web properties. As for revenue, Gigya said it’s now bringing in tens of millions in annual sales. Sales growth tripled from 2011, with the fourth quarter coming in as the company’s biggest quarter ever. “Our growth has been so phenomenal that we truly feel we can control the entire social-consumer technology market in the next three years,” CEO Patrick Salyer told me via email. (I guess we’ll have to check back in three years …) The company last year and now has more than 150 employees. Its products fall into three broad categories — user management (including social login), social plugins, and gamification. I ran into senior marketing manager Victor White at the Crunchies awards ceremony last night, where I asked about the company’s plans for 2013. He said the big focus will be on social data, namely helping Gigya customers get more use out of all the customer information they’re collecting. At the same time, White said Gigya will continue developing and promoting privacy standards through .
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 8 | null |
Social TV Startup Dijit Buys Miso To Re-Define The Second Screen
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
When rumors come true! Two weeks ago we reported on a tip that social TV startup Dijit, maker of the NextGuide iPad app, was in the process of . The deal took a little bit longer than we expected to actually get done, but the companies are announcing this morning that the tie-up is complete. Through the deal, Dijit will get a bunch of technology and patents that Miso has built over the last three years as one of the first second-screen or social TV apps. But while the companies have definitively struck an agreement for Miso to be acquired, there’s still a lot that’s up in the air. For instance, it’s not clear how many of Miso’s nine employees will be joining Dijit. Or how Dijit plans to incorporate Miso’s technology and community into its own applications. One thing that is certain: Miso founder Somrat Niyogi will be stepping away from the day-to-day, although he will remain as an advisor to the combined company. Also, according to CEO Jeremy Toeman, Dijit will shut down Miso’s , which was designed to allow users to share specific moments from their favorite TV shows. Miso’s other products — its and its — could live on, but Toeman said he wants to have a unified identity system to integrate them. The company will be looking for ways to move Miso users into its own NextGuide system. While Miso had been working on ways for users to share what they’re watching, and for providing more information and content around shows, Dijit’s NextGuide is more focused on discovery. Toeman said that the tie-up could provide better ways for Dijit to connect users with new shows and connect shows to a new audience, as we all enter a “second era of social TV.” “We’re definitely somewhere different than where we were three years ago,” Toeman said. Terms weren’t disclosed and Toeman wouldn’t comment on the deal structure, but we had previously heard that it was more likely to be an equity swap than a cash deal. That makes sense, as Dijit hasn’t raised a ton of money. Toeman confirmed that the company had previously raised a small seed round last year, but wouldn’t comment on how much. Miso, meanwhile, had raised about $6 million over the last few years, with investors including Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, and Hearst Interactive Media.
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Apple Takes 3 Of Top 5 Spots In U.S. Mobile Phone Sales For Q4 2012, Says NPD
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
Apple has managed to nab three of the top 5 spots for the top-selling mobile phones in the U.S. during Q4 2012 according to the , with the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 ranking first, third and fourth, respectively. Apple also retained the crown for best-selling overall smartphone maker, accounting for 39 percent of smartphone sales in Q4 2012, compared to Samsung’s 30 percent. iPhone 4 sales rose 79 percent compared to Q3 2012, and iPhone 4S sales grew 43 percent sequentially, while the iPhone 5 accounted for 43 percent of all iPhone sales in Q4 2012, which is roughly in line with the as well. It also made up nearly two-thirds of all smartphone sales on post-paid plans with a value over $200, NPD says. Samsung made considerable gains on the year, going up to 30 percent of all U.S. smartphone sales in Q4 2012 from 21 percent in the year ago quarter, but the gains were mostly at the expense of other Android OEMs, including HTC, while Apple’s overall share remained constant. Net Applications also released its , which found that Apple’s iOS increased slightly in terms of traffic, accounting for 60.56 percent of all mobile operating systems, while Android actually took a bit of a dip to 24.51 percent, continuing a decline that has occurred over the past two months from a peak high in November of 28.02 percent. It looks like Apple’s release of the iPhone 5 might have essentially begun to erase earlier gains made by the longer availability of the Samsung Galaxy S III, but Apple still has some ground to make up if it wants to climb back to its 2012 high of nearly 66 percent web traffic share among mobile devices. Apple’s holiday quarter, which included 47.8 million iPhone sales and 22.9 million iPads, looks to have helped it in terms of remaining the leader in both smartphone and mobile device sales in the U.S., and in keeping the hold it has on mobile browsing. The strong quarter also accounts for Apple’s regaining the role of , an honor it reclaimed according to the latest data from Strategy Analytics released earlier today.
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The Next Frontier For Google Maps Is Personalization
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
just won Best Mobile App at the 2012 and , Google’s director of Google Maps for mobile talked to our own Colleen Taylor after accepting the award. In the interview, Graf noted that it was a unique opportunity for him and his team to start from scratch. Looking ahead, Graf stressed that the next frontier for maps will be about personalization. Talking to Taylor, Graf noted that the company has a lot in store for Google Maps for the next year. “There is a lot more you can do with a map. If you look at a map and if I look at a map, should it always be the same for you and me? I’m not sure about that, because I go to different places than you do.” Google obviously personalized virtually all of its search results already these days, so starting to personalize maps (beyond highlighting restaurants and other local businesses you reviewed on Google+ Local) seems like a logical next step. While Graf didn’t give away too much about Google’s plans for the coming year, he did tease that his team has a lot in store for the next few months. Interestingly, he also noted that he thinks Google now has all of the basic use cases down, so now is the time to do more “interesting” things with maps. You can see the full interview below:
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InfoArmy Retreats After Crowdsourced Research Business Goes Through The Floor. All Reports Now Free
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
— a startup built on the “Data 2.0” concept of crowdsourced competitive intelligence — has today sent out a letter, printed in full below, to its researchers informing them that it is pulling the plug on its current business model after failing to find enough sales for the research reports, and being unable to sustain the quality of the work that was being produced. As a result, it will be offering reports on its site free of charge and will no longer be paying researchers for their contributions, as it works on a pivot of the company. “The key thing is that crowdsourcing is still a part and parcel of what we’re doing, but the way we’re doing it with this model has not worked,” CEO and founder Jim Fowler told TechCrunch. “We got a bunch of researchers to work on this and it was a 50-50 share, but it ended up not working. The critical thing is that we’re looking at a much more crowdsourcing-like model. I remain a 100% believer in it.” Still, the news represents a setback both for enterprise-focused crowdsourcing, and also for Fowler, who sold his previous crowdsourced enterprise startup, Jigsaw, to Salesforce for . To date, InfoArmy had raised from Norwest Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and Fowler himself. It has been in operation for only about eight months. TechCrunch learned of the news from some of the researchers. One of them noted that he “really enjoyed” the experience at first. “Things were smooth, a lot of committed folks were involved,” he says. But he noticed early signs of problems with sales — not a surprise, perhaps, since there was only one salesperson hired at the company, but he noted that InfoArmy’s response was to cut the pay of researchers and claim report quality was the reason for the problem. “I take that as a fair criticism, but given they design the system within the researchers operated, they surely could have made some tweeks to improve quality,” he said. After this came more problems with the payment system, an outsourcing move to India for some of the report editing and publishing, and lots of researcher complaints on a forum — now, apparently, deleted. “They regularly teased a ‘big February 1st announcement’ that would address all of our concerns and hopefully right the ship. Then came today’s announcement,” he noted. The announcement goes into a lot of detail into what went wrong. “I’m a believer in being direct and honest,” explained Fowler. “Only then can you create a good company.” He also pointed out some of what InfoArmy plans to retain in its service when it pivots: “We like the mobile-first philosophy, and we’ve got gorgeous reports for tablets,” he said. “We’ve learned a lot about producing for mobile and done some great work on it.” The letter is below. “InfoArmy launched last June. Since that time we have worked together trying to create an innovative new business model that would allow many researchers to eventually earn income on the InfoArmy platform. Unfortunately, the current business model has several large and unfixable problems: ● Sales are not happening. So far InfoArmy has sold just 44 individual report subscriptions ($4,356). All of this revenue was distributed to researchers (InfoArmy did not take 50% as planned under the Revenue Share model).
● Almost two months ago we hired a full time sales person. He has been unsuccessful so far. Data quality is the main issue preventing sales. Common complaints include incorrect revenue estimates and competitors.
● Publication bonuses have created the wrong incentives. Some researchers have published the lowest quality reports they can get away with. “Quarterly updates are very unpopular – even with our best researchers. The report abandonment rate for quarterly updates is high. Updates are critical to the success of the current model. We have been unable to create a sense of report ownership across a large enough group of researchers. “So far InfoArmy has paid $146K to researchers (averaging $23/report), and some researchers have made over $5,000 individually. We are very happy that many hard working researchers have made money. However, without a clear path to revenue this model is unsustainable. “InfoArmy takes full responsibility for the above issues. This business model was our idea. Unfortunately it isn’t working as planned and we have to make some major changes. “We haven’t figured it all out yet, but we believe the new model will look something like this: ● No more 50/50 Revenue Share. Members will exchange information they have for information they need. ● No more report ownership. Many different people will contribute to reports and make estimates. Reports will be updated in real time instead of quarterly. ● All reports will be free (in their current form). The object will be to create added value that can eventually be put behind a pay wall. “For purposes of clarity, we will no longer be paying InfoArmy members for their information gathering. If you choose to continue to provide services to us under the new model, you will not be paid under the Revenue Share model or by any other means. The Terms Of Service that govern the services you provided will terminate with the final payment you receive. InfoArmy is creating an entirely new business model that will have new terms. As of today we have made all existing reports free. If you wish to remove the reports you created from the InfoArmy website please contact us at [email protected]. “We made one final General Fund Payment on January 31st, 2013. Along with the General Fund payment we included an Appreciation Bonus to thank you again for your support. Each initial report creation was awarded $5 and each update $2. These bonuses applied regardless of whether or not you still owned the report and were split 80-20 between the PR and SR. This final payment will make the total amount paid to researchers approximately $200K (or approximately $29 per report). “We anticipate that you may have questions and concerns. Please email us at [email protected] and we will respond as quickly as possible. We will also have two webinars to answer your questions. They will occur on Friday, Feb 1 at 3pm PST and Monday, Feb 4 at 7am PST. “To the majority of researchers who believed in the InfoArmy vision of creating a revenue share platform we offer our sincere apologies that the current model did not work. We recognize that many of you poured your hearts into creating reports, and we are very sorry to have let you down. We truly thank you for your support and have enjoyed getting to know you all. We are hopeful to see you again when we launch the new model. With best regards, Jim Fowler and the InfoArmy Team”
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Gravity Fully Launches Its Content Personalization Tools, Making Them Available To Any Publisher
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
A little more than three years after , personalization startup is doing a big launch today, opening up its suite of APIs so that they’re available to any publisher who wants to use them. Founded by a trio of former Myspace executives, Gravity has created an “interest graph” mapping different topics, which it then uses to recommend different content to users based on their activity on a given site. As the technology becomes better-acquainted with each visitor, the recommendations should improve. Kapur lays out a pretty ambitious vision about how personalization is “the future of content,” but publishers can implement Gravity in more limited ways — for example, by using the technology to create a “Recommended for You” widget that’s personalized for each reader. Until now, the company has been working with a specific group of partner publishers. Those partners include CNN Money, which Gravity’s technology to deliver recommendations in its iPad app, and TechCrunch, which has a Gravity-powered “What You Missed” widget (it’s down and right from this post). Gravity says it already delivers 25 million content recommendations to 200 million users per day. That’s more a reflection of the reach of its publishers than usage from actual readers, but the company also some partners have seen clickthrough levels increase two or three times, with a 300 percent increase in return visits and 40 percent growth in session time. Co-founder and CEO Amit Kapur (previously COO at Myspace) said it was always part of the plan to open up the platform to any publisher. So why has it taken several years to get to this point? “I think when you’re trying to do this big and disruptive, you have to be methodical,” Kapur said, later adding, “You want things to happen sooner and faster, but you have to kind of build at the pace that helps you build that amazing product.” Kapur also suggested that now is the time when “the market is ready to embrace personalization” — as one example, he pointed to about personalization as the future of search. The tools will be available to publishers for free. The company will include sponsored stories in the recommendations and split the revenue with publishers (an approach that’s similar to other content recommendation services like ). Kapur said one of his big goals in the coming months is to grow the sponsored stories program and hire more salespeople. He also sees mobile as a big opportunity — the small screen size means that publishers want to give their readers a more personal experience, and it also means that they can’t rely on standard ad units to make money. Gravity has raised a total of $20.6 million in funding, last fall. Recent hires include former MediaPass sales executive Robert Leon as its vice president of sales and Josef Pfeiffer, previously a senior product manager at the Wall Street Journal, as its director of product.
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With $2.3M From Vint Cerf & More, Tech Pioneer Judy Estrin Unveils EvntLive, The Web’s New Interactive Concert Hall
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
You may not be familiar with her name, but has quietly become one of Silicon Valley’s most successful serial entrepreneurs and executives. She began her career working with Vint Cerf’s research group at Stanford University — the same one that played a central role in the development of the Internet. Since the early ’80s, she has founded seven technology companies, has served as the CTO of Cisco Systems and held board positions at FedEx for 20 years, Sun Microsystems for eight years, and currently sits on the board of The Walt Disney Company (a position she’s held since 1998). Oh, and she’s also the author of and led the team that developed one of the first commercial local area networks (LAN). While it’s been years since Estrin last paid a visit to Startup World, this past year she stepped out of retirement with the help of her son, David Carrico. In late 2011, Carrico teamed up with co-founders Alex and Jonathan Beckman to found a startup called , a digital music venue for live and on-demand concerts that is set to launch later this quarter. Estrin tells us that, initially, she had only planned to act as an advisor, but as the business evolved over the last year, she decided to take on a larger role. While the family connection undoubtedly provides an extra incentive, the veteran Silicon Valley exec now finds herself as the Executive Chair of EvntLive (and one of its early investors) — roles that she wouldn’t have assumed if she didn’t believe in the mission, she says, or its potential to become a sustainable business. That mission, by the way, is an ambitious one: To create a scalable platform to stream live concerts ranging from sold-out arenas to intimate clubs, backed by a curated library of shows fans may have missed, integrated with social media, behind-the-scenes video and e-commerce. Based on this mission (and with help from Estrin), the startup has recruited music industry talent like Troy Carter, who has joined the team as an advisor and early investor. Carter is a well-known music manager as well as the founder and CEO of Atom Factory (a music management company), which represents Lady Gaga and John Legend, among others. He’s also an active angel investor, having invested in companies like PopChips, Uber and Backplane, to name a few. To fuel its early development, EvntLive raised $2.3 million in seed funding, as Estrin and Carter have been joined by an impressive roster of investors, including “Father of the Internet” and Google exec, Vint Cerf, Mayfield Fund partner and Glooko Chairman, Yogen Dalal, former Intel exec Dave House, Silicon Valley Connect Managing Director Ellen Levy, Tapjoy President and CEO Steve Wadsworth, Former Summit Partners director Walter Kortschak, Judy O’Brien, Jack Lasersohm, Roberta Katz and Amal Johnson, among others. Of course, while the startup’s leadership and its investor roster may be impressive, that talent means nothing if the business itself is a dud. Plus, it’s not as if the backdrop doesn’t have its own set of challenges. The music industry has changed dramatically in the last five years, fundamentally destroyed (or saved, depending on how you look at it) by digital technologies. The industry, and the record labels that once defined it, have a long road ahead as they attempt to adapt to new distribution, marketing, recording and manufacturing models — and rebuild. While the industry is still shaky, Estrin believes that the emergence of this new music industry and the changing nature of music consumption is finally creating the right conditions under which a dedicated, destination platform for live music and concerts can be successful. Of course, EvntLive is hardly alone in eying the potential of the live, online events space — or the first to dive in. YouTube, Livestream and Ustream, for example, each offer streaming concerts to some degree and are clearly interested in expanding their presence in the market; however, at this point, concerts are just one piece of their broad, streaming video services and far from being their only focus. Meanwhile, smaller companies like , and have also been finding traction in the space (particularly the latter). Qello, for example, offers access to a growing catalog of high-definition (mostly rock) concerts across platforms, but most notably through awesome . That said, Qello has focused more on building a platform around archival concerts, not so much on the live side of the business. The EvntLive executive chairman sees these startup platforms as being more “niche focused” and that by offering bigger artists, bigger venues and by combining social, interactivity and telling the story behind the show, the startup has the opportunity to build a more appealing experience for fans and artists. She also believes that EvntLive can also benefit from those macro changes taking hold of the music industry, particularly around distribution. With the scale of digital distribution channels, it’s easier than ever before for artists to get their music into the ears of listeners and tap into new (and potentially much larger) audiences. With music moving towards free, revenue growth (and profits) for both artists and businesses are increasingly coming from live performances and touring. Of course, there are limitations to this growth, as artists can only play so many venues and, in turn, venues only have so many seats. Expanding touring online can remove some of those limitations and allow the industry and its artists to add another revenue stream. In the big picture, Estrin says, the music industry has finally realized that it has to embrace digital models instead of fighting them tooth and nail, which is slowly beginning to work in startups’ favor. Of course, the evolution of the online live performance space is really just beginning, and it remains to be seen whether or not the timing is right for a platform like EvntLive. To help tilt things in its favor, the team made a conscious decision to resist rushing to market. Rather than launch early, pushing an MVP into customer’s hands right away and scramble to iterate, the team has been developing and testing the platform for over a year now. The company’s web services technology, in particular, is the product of its acquisition of Nubo9 — a software company founded by Bharat Welingkar and Matt Gloier, who previously helped lead cloud services engineering at Barnes & Noble (specifically at Nook). Nubo9 built a software platform to help develop and operate mobile APIs at scale, which EvntLive acquired last year and has since made the core of its backend technology. While Estrin and company aren’t ready to divulge all the details of what a fully launched EvntLive product will look like, the team was willing to give us an early sneak peek. Of course, Estrin herself happens to be particularly proud of the technologies working behind the scenes. At launch, for example, the platform will be a “true web-based service,” she says, using HTML5 and a “100 percent de-coupled front and back end.” The platform will distribute processing to maximize performance, she added, which means that it will be able to more easily run complex algorithms in the cloud — processes that traditionally consume precious resources on the client. On top of that, EvntLive has built a cell-driven cloud architecture that aims to optimize reliability and enable efficient scaling up or down based on demand, along with cost-effective implementation that leverages both open source and pay-per-use utility computing. For the non-technical, this means that EvntLive will be able to stream hours of live music content from dozens of artists — or at least that’s the idea — in turn allowing artists to add as much or as little content (and complementary services around that content) as they need. With EvntLive’s goal of allowing users to watch concerts anytime, anywhere, the platform will launch with support for tablets and smartphones through HTML5 on mobile browsers and will add native apps down the road. The platform will offer live and on-demand concerts, some of which will be free and some of which will come with typical pay-per-view prices, Estrin says. Really, the goal is to not only give the user a platform-agnostic music channel, but a customizable music experience in which they can tailor their own viewing experience with different camera angles and feeds, for example. Each artist will have their own profile page, which fans can follow to find more information on their albums, their upcoming tour dates, and eventually the startup wants to allow users to buy tickets directly from their pages. Each concert will have its own event page as well, which will include streaming video, different angles and views, while allowing fans to engage in conversation during the feed, to drill down into more information on the band and plan meetups for after the show, for example. To complement its streaming options and provide more value, EvntLive also wants to become an archive for concert footage. So, while you’ll be able to go watch The Rolling Stones live from MSG, you’ll also be able to check out footage from past tours. Naturally, one is only willing to invest so much in the live streaming concert experience — both in terms of cash, money, flow and attention. I’m not going to sit in front of my laptop to watch a two-hour concert — at least not with any regularity — no matter how good the quality of the stream is. Instead, the more it’s able to build out a library of high-quality, on-demand concerts from top artists (and not just the last two shows), combine that with live top artists, exclusive content, and so on, the more stickiness the platform will have. Plus, the more it can provide the synchronous, social experience of addictive music apps like Turntable.fm, allowing users to tweet, like and chat with their friends and others watching live shows or recorded footage, dig into artist data in an AllMusic-like data resource, follow and get updates and alerts on your favorite artists (when they’re coming to town for example), purchase tickets (for an actual live concert), the higher the value for the consumer. And, on the band side, artists are hungry for supplemental revenue channels and, with busy (or empty schedules) want better, easier ways to increase engagement and interest without having to manage this themselves. Not exactly their area of expertise — why they’re called “artists,” right? Partnering with third-party services that have already nailed the mechanics of marketing, etc., will be critical for EvntLive over the long-term. At the outset, the startup will be going after the big ticket names in music and the mid-sized bands or indie artists that can’t fill out big venues but have engaged, core fan bases already engaged to help it build awareness and brand recognition, but over time, Estrin sees it expanding to include the long-tail. The platform is currently in private beta, with a full-scale launch to come in the next few months. So stay tuned for more. Find EvntLive
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Online Radio Service TuneIn Launches Its Redesigned Web Presence
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
is a massively popular online radio service with more than 40 million monthly active listeners, according to its own data. The reason for its success is mostly due to its popular mobile apps and not necessarily because of its cool website. Until today, TuneIn’s web presence was functional but looked somewhat outdated. Now, however, the service has given itself a complete web makeover. The old, text-heavy design that emphasized station names has been replaced with large album cover-like images that indicate what’s currently playing on a given station. The experience, TuneIn tells us, is meant to “replicate the experience people used to have in a record store.” This new “content-first display,” as TuneIn calls it, marks the most significant update of the service’s homepage and station pages in a very long time. Last July, TuneIn that its mobile listener base had grown 267 percent year-over-year and that total listening hours had increased 348 percent. All the while, the service’s web presence didn’t quite keep pace with the development of its mobile apps and its expansion into connected cars. “Not everybody knows what they want to listen to when they come to TuneIn,” said Kristin George, TuneIn’s director of product in a statement earlier today. “When you visit the new site today, you get a better idea of our depth of content. This is a big step away from the older web experience, which presented the TuneIn content offering as more of a directory of stations. We’re hoping this new layout does a better job of showing people just how exciting it is to have the world’s audio at their fingertips.” With today’s update, TuneIn is also bringing its list of trending stations, which was previously only available through its mobile app, to the web. TuneIn currently offers its users free access to over 70,000 stations from around the globe and over 2 million on-demand programs. The service raised from heavyweights like General Catalyst Partners, Jafco Ventures, Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital last August. At the time, the company said it planned to use this money to increase its headcount and grow its product development initiatives. Chances are, today’s improved web presence is a direct result of this.
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Bebo Shareholders File Motion To Remove CEO, Have A Receiver Take Control of Embattled Company
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Here’s yet another sad turn in the story of one of social networking’s also-rans. Bebo, the early U.K.-based social network that and , may see its go. The company’s shareholders, who include the original co-founder Michael Birch, filed a motion today in California superior court to have a receiver appointed for the company. That court-appointed receiver would take over the company’s assets and day-to-day operations. It may take at least another two weeks for the court to come to a decision as it extended the hearing today, said Eric Benisek, the attorney representing the plaintiffs. He said that Levin and Criterion hadn’t opposed the appointment of a receiver. “Unless we did something funny with the papers, the expectation is that the court will grant the motion,” Benisek said. Levin did not immediately reply to a request for comment. This is the latest development in a nearly year-old lawsuit that pit minority shareholders like Birch, Richie Hecker, SV Angel against Criterion Capital Partners, In a suit they filed early last year asking for $5 million in damages, they claimed that as CEO, Levin let Bebo default on its lease, resulting in an eviction from its San Francisco offices. Levin then allegedly moved the company down to Los Angeles, without consulting the board. The suit also claimed that Levin paid himself $14,000 a month (or about $168,000 a year) as CEO even though he wasn’t working full-time at the company and was focused on other work for Criterion. It also said that the company didn’t hold any board meetings for at least 20 months and didn’t turn over financial information about the performance of the company over to the board. Since that suit was filed, the company also allegedly didn’t pay its review fees to operate as a registered company in Australia. The new motion and its letters of support from other plaintiffs also say that Levin let leads for the sale of the company to potential buyers like Tagged and AdKnowledge die. Hecker, who owns less than 10 percent of the company, said in a letter of support for today’s filing that Adknowledge had talked about a potential sale for $15 million plus a $15 million earnout, but Levin never provided financials to AdKnowledge, letting the talks die. The plaintiffs say that if a receiver isn’t put in charge of the company, it is in “severe danger of destruction.” It would be a sad end to one of social networking’s early forerunners. At the time of its sale to AOL back in 2008, by
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Sesame, The Newly-Launched Mobile Gifting App For iPhone, Becomes An Online Store
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 |
Question: when does your mobile app also need a web experience? Answer: when the app is essentially an e-commerce shop. , the recently launched mobile gifting app from , a company known for its mobile photo postcard and greeting card applications, is now web-friendly with the debut of the . Like its app-based counterpart, the web store will allow users to browse through the various gift boxes for sale, including the trio of new additions for Valentine’s Day, then purchase and send them without the need to install an app on their phone. This is a slight change in direction for Sincerely, which has been a mobile-first company in the past. Although the Sincerely website does offer users access to their past orders, account info and address book, the process of designing cards, greetings or ordering other gifts was done on mobile, previously. Sesame, for those unfamiliar, , allowing users to browse and send themed gift boxes from their iPhone. These boxes include unique, hand-picked items packaged nicely, and centered around a theme like “Cocktail Hour,” “Game Night,” “Puppy Picks,” and more. According to Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina, was added based on users’ feedback – they would read about what Sesame had to offer, but were frustrated that they had to download an app to even see the available gift sets, he says. Now they have access to a fully featured shopping experience right on web. Not only is running an online store like this a change for the company, Sesame itself represents a step up from the apps Sincerely launched in the past – postcards and greetings you send from your iPhone. But so far, that transition has gone well, says Brezina. Though he declined to provide user numbers because of the app’s newness, he did note that Sesame’s holiday sales quickly passed those of its Postagram app (mobile postcards) in terms of daily revenue, thanks to the average order size being so high, as well as increased interest from the corporate gifting market. “This has been our strategy all along,” says Brezina of the shift to Sesame’s more expensive gifting options. “We start users on the world’s simplest gift, a printed postcard, and then cross-sell other, more premium priced cards and gifts.” Once someone uses the Sesame app for a gift, their rate of repeat purchase is high, Brezina adds. Because Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, the company has introduced three new gift sets ranging from a spicy “5 Shades of Grey” set complete with massage oil and lotions, chocolates, silk ties and more. The other two sets are tamer, featuring the traditional V-Day selection of chocolates, a card, and a plush toy (a “love monkey,” ). Since its launch, the company has added just one other set to the dozen or so it already had, and still plans to add around two per month going forward, including holiday gifts. Although Facebook has also been making moves into social gifting in recent days – including with – Sesame’s gifts, in my personal experience, have been of higher quality than the early, . Gifts was a low mark on Facebook’s otherwise solid this week, as Gifts product and promoted user posts functionality accounted for less than $5 million of Facebook’s overall revenue.
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NTT DoCoMo Announces $109M Venture Fund, As Well As An Investment In 500 Startups
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s leading mobile operator, that it will invest in 500 Startups as it prepares to launch a 10 billion JPY ($109 million USD) venture fund in late February. The accelerator program will focus on the development of new businesses for smartphones and tablets. DoCoMo’s investment in 500 Startups is part of the Tokyo-based company’s plan for its new incubation program and will be carried out by DoCoMo Capital, its international VC arm which was stakes in startups including Evernote, Fab and Cooliris. NTT DoCoMo that it planned to create a fund to support early-stage tech and mobile startups by March of this year. This should be welcome news to entrepreneurs in Japan, where and early-stage funding is difficult to secure. The Next Web notes, however, that there have been some , including Yahoo Japan’s October acquisition of app-maker Community Factor for $12.8 million. In a statement, DoCoMo said it “aims to strengthen cooperation with venture companies through initiatives such as investments, primarily in Japan, to help upgrade services and technologies for smart devices in existing fields of business” on behalf of its parent company NTT Group. The new venture fund also seeks to: “accelerate development of business models, services and technologies in eight new strategic fields: media/content, finance/payments, commerce, medical/healthcare, machine-to-machine (M2M), aggregation/platforms, environment/ecology and security/safety. Such efforts are expected to rapidly expand DoCoMo’s involvement with integrated services centered on mobility.” DoCoMo is looking for companies “developing mobile-related services that have the potential to become global standards.” The application period for the incubation program is until March 11. Startups and venture companies selected for the program will receive mentoring, get the use of office space, and up to 2 million JPY ($23,000 USD) seed funding in convertible notes. DoCoMo and 500 Startups will also help participants learn how to enter markets in North America and other regions.
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Netflix Promises To Make Its Open Source Cloud Management Tools More Portable
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them . Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them. At a meetup for developers who use — or might be interested in using — the open source cloud management tools that Netflix has already released, the company showed off some new technology that it’s working on, and provided a roadmap for future open source releases. The big message for them is that Netflix is looking to make its open source cloud architecture more portable for those who wish to adopt it, and to make it easier to apply its tools to more use cases. “Many of you who are using [our open source tools] are probably just using one or two,” Netflix Director Cloud Platform Engineering Ruslan Meshenberg said to an audience of developers. “But these are more powerful when you use them together… If there is one takeaway, it’s that the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.” Several years ago, Netflix standardized its cloud architecture on AWS, which Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft says the company sees as providing “undifferentiated heavy lifting” for the services that it wishes to run on top of the cloud. In addition, Netflix has built a series of tools to do smart light lifting, and has over the years been adding new tools as new AWS features appear. But what works for Netflix doesn’t always work perfectly for other companies. The company is trying to change that, as it attempts to make its open source tools easier to use and more applicable to other services that might not be built around the personalized recommendations or the distribution of media online. How will it do that? For one thing, the company is introducing a series of “recipes” that will help others launch multiple versions of its open source applications seamlessly together. It’s also hoping to roll out a simplified launcher that will make deploying those tools a piece of cake. One specific tool that the company is looking to release soon to make its architecture more portable is called “Denominator,” and it is being built by , the . For Netflix, making these tools open source is one way to ensure that its own development won’t eventually go to waste in the future if some other tools are standardized. Cockcroft compared its cloud philosophy to those caravans traveling west during the 19th century. Netflix may have blazed the Oregon Trail for cloud services, but now it’s looking to lay down railroad tracks to make it easier for others to standardize on the cloud. “We started off a few years ahead of the industry,” Cockcroft said. But he believes it’s better to leverage that architecture as a shared pattern. The thinking goes that if Netflix makes it easier for others to adopt, those tools will become standards for the way cloud services are built. “We want to establish our solutions as best practices or standards,” he said. For the industry, that’s probably a good thing. Offering reliable, scalable code that can be reused among multiple companies can make adoption of cloud services a lot more efficient over the coming years.
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Nav App Waze Says 36M Users Shared 900M Reports, While 65K Users Made 500M Map Edits
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
At the beginning of this year, social GPS app was the . Had the linkup happened, it would have been a rare case of the Cupertino company acquiring a startup. But, as it turns out, there wasn’t a deal, even though Waze is a data partner for Apple’s mapping software. January might not have started out with as huge a bang for Waze as some people had hoped, but the company’s shows it still had a pretty good year. Waze grew rapidly in 2012, hitting a milestone of 20 million users in July after doubling that number in six months. In total, 36 million drivers in 110 countries shared 90 million user reports (including traffic and road condition alerts) last year. Users are an active bunch: a total of 65,000 Waze users made 500 million edits, updating Waze’s 1.7 million changes on the ground. Furthermore, about 70% of system-detected map problems were solved by Waze’s users over a 30-day period and almost all user-reported map problems were taken care of within a week. The company attributed the growth of its user base to its improved map editor, as well as new features like its gas station editor, which was made available to international users in July after first launching in the U.S. Users added more than 50,000 gas stations on the map in the first month and real-time gas prices are now active in 20 countries. It remains to be seen whether these number will help Waze land an M&A deal, if not with Apple, then maybe with a location-discovery service like Foursquare.
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Hunter Walk Leaves Google After 9 Years To Start VC Firm With Satya Patel Called Homebrew
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Earlier today, that well-known Googler/YouTuber Hunter Walk and former Googler Satya Patel would be starting a new VC firm called Homebrew. What wasn’t known was whether Walk would be leaving Google to pursue Homebrew full time, but he has confirmed that to be the case. The last time we spoke with Walk, he was passionately explaining all of the things he gets to work on with the YouTube For Good team. It consisted of people with all types of skill-sets, including forward-thinkers and leaders like Walk, who would help non-profits and organizations spread their messages and raise awareness for their programs using YouTube. In a , which is the email that Walk sent to his colleagues at Google, he thanked those who brought him into the company and gave a glimpse into the Google culture that you hear from those who have “re-entered the mainstream” after leaving the Mountain View company: After nine years, two months it’s time for me to figure out how to make lunch for myself. Yup, I’m leaving Google and it’s my year-old daughter’s fault. You see, when I look at her I think about the values my wife and I want to instill. Among the most important is the belief that you should pursue all your dreams, think big, lean into your fears and keep building. The best way for me to teach this is by example, so I need to step away from Google’s comfort. No next adventure to announce yet – this is about feeling there’s more for me to do, but also knowing I need some space to figure it out. Google has changed my life. The chance to work with so many smart and creative people – thank you for letting me learn from you. There’s no university in the world which could have supplied equal education. Because of my time at Google I truly look at the world in a different way, one of problems waiting to be solved rather than insurmountable obstacles or indelible truths. I’m especially appreciative of Joan Braddi, Susan Wojcicki, Chad Hurley and Salar Kamangar – leaders who took me into their teams and, when it was time, encouraged me to find new challenges. Selfless, intelligent and loyal to Google. While being inside of Google is special, passing through the membrane back into the outside world is also a unique time, one which affords me a few perspectives on being a Googler. Our best efforts come from desire to thrill our users, not from fear of competitors. Work hard and be uncompromising but treat one another with kindness. So many of our products have continued growth ahead and I’m especially excited to watch YouTube’s accelerating evolution towards the first global livingroom. Here’s to truly hoping I have the chance to work again with all of you. If I can ever be of help, don’t hesitate to reach out via [email protected] or mobile. It’s probably only fitting that I leave you with a favorite video: Warmly,
Hunter The video in his email is a lip-sync that was six years in the making, which is kind of a metaphor for the preparation that Walk has been through for his new venture: Patel has spent time at Twitter in addition to being senior product manager for AdSense, and he invested in companies for Battery Ventures as a VC. Walk to discuss a cookbook for Geeks, which benefits charity. It will be interesting to see what types of companies the two decide to invest in, and I imagine that the fabric those startups will be made of will be very unique. There’s something , and seeing them break out onto their own is exciting. All that we know now is that the two will be focused on enabling “the people-based economy.” Sounds fitting. [Photo credit: ]
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 1 | null |
Here Are 10 Standout Companies From The Fifth 500 Startups Demo Day
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Early-stage VC fund today held the first of for the graduating from its . It was a fun event, with 32 high-energy founders pitching their companies to a room full of investors and tech press. All of the companies were compelling in their own ways, covering a wide range of technologies, geographies, and sectors — you can check out the full list . It was tough, but we narrowed down a list of some of our favorites. In alphabetical order, here are the standouts we saw: Founded by former NYC real estate broker , CompStak has built a platform that compiles crowdsourced information about all things commercial real estate. In particular, the site tracks what’s known as “comps,” which is industry-speak for comparable price rates on real estate leases for similarly sized and featured spaces. This information is valuable, but it’s also historically been nearly impossible to find — people who have this kind of data tend to keep it close to the chest, even while seeking it out from others. CompStak has created a platform where people can trade info they have with info they need, giving incentives to all sides. We’ve written about CompStak before, which you can check out here. : Like a super lightweight and more fully featured Draw Something, Cubie is a mobile messaging app for both Android and iOS that lets people create and share drawings, photos, video, and voice messages inside a social chat client. It has become hugely popular, according to the founders, rising to the #1 social app spot in 16 countries, and amassing 5 million total downloads. The company has already attracted some hefty investor attention, with from a group of international investors. : This has a simple mission: To get more butts into movie seats. Up to 88 percent of movie theater seats end up empty, Dealflicks says, so it sells movie tickets and concessions for up to 60 percent off to make sure spots that would otherwise be vacant are filled with moviegoers. The company says it is now on track to have $5 million dollars in annual bookings flowing through its platform, and its app boosts online and mobile movie ticket sales by 40 percent. Filling last-minute vacancies by offering discounts is a strategy that has worked well for other apps such as Priceline and Hotel Tonight, so this could really be one to watch. – What if you were a brand marketer and you could take all user-generated photos and recognize when your logo or product showed up on Facebook, Intstagram or Twitter? That’s the kind of tool that Gaze Metrics provides, scanning photos posted to social networks and alerting brands when those photos start to go viral. The company is already working with more than 30 brands, and is sure to sign up plenty more as they learn about the technology. – When you want to find out what movie to watch, there’s Rotten Tomatoes to give you an idea of how good they are. For video games, there’s MetaCritic. But there’s no good universal guide for book ratings. Even Amazon’s ratings system is starting to lose its lustre, as they’re easily gamed by fake posts. Enter iDreamBooks, which seeks to be the Rotten Tomatoes of books. The startup was already chosen by the New York and San Francisco Public Library systems to provide aggregated professional ratings of books on their websites and is looking for more distribution. : Typically, an app that’s in the pre-launch stage must be uploaded directly to a mobile device for trial purposes — this makes the process of testing a mobile app cumbersome, time-consuming, and often expensive for the app developer. Kickfolio has built a platform for developers to upload builds of their iOS mobile apps straight to the web where they can be more easily accessed for testing. Kickfolio’s platform uses HTML5, so it makes apps accessible to anyone with a web browser. Kickfolio echoes in some ways Pieceable, the — just one sign that it’s in a very exciting space. TechCrunch covered Kickfolio’s launch back in December, and you can read that . : This startup aims to “take the mystery out of local marketing” by making local advertising more efficient for small and medium sized businesses. Local merchants simply tell it how much they’re willing to spend and what their specials are, and Privy seamlessly does social and search advertising for the businesses. Customers bring in coupons on their phones to complete the loop, and the system tracks conversion rate and efficiency of the campaign, providing detailed analytics to the business. The company makes $3,000 per year on average per business, but typically helps them recoup those costs within three months. : SupplyHog aims to reduce the amount of time that local contractors spend running around trying to source supplies for projects that they’re working on. Not only does the startup ensure that it can provide the supplies that are needed, without having to run around to various different home-improvement stores, but it can guarantee lower prices than those outlets. It does that by working with thousands of different local manufacturers and distributors around the country to find the lowest price while also ensuring that the materials needed are in stock. With a limited beta trial, the company has also had $130,000 in revenues, but more importantly — 100 percent of all the contractors who have used the site have come back to use it again so far. : With the rise of mobile payment systems like Apple’s Passbook, there’s a growing need to help businesses take advantage of these platforms. The problem is that it takes a team of designers and engineers to implement Passbook and other mobile wallet technologies. WalletKit takes the pain out of this process with a platform for quickly integrating with Passbook and other mobile wallet systems. We’ve written about WalletKit before, and you can check that out . : We’ve written — it provides instant translations for Asian-language text into English on mobile phones. How cool is that? So cool, it makes our top 10 list. That’s how cool. It makes money by charging just $14.99 for unlimited usage. Which, frankly, is a steal for overseas travelers.
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Google Launches ‘Enhanced Campaigns’ To Manage Cross-Device Campaigns In AdWords
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Google is rolling out a new AdWords system over the next few weeks called , which it’s pitching as a better way to advertise across multiple devices. As described in and a conversation that I had with a Google spokesperson, the goal here is both to simplify the campaign process and make campaigns more about reaching the desired users with the optimal ad, regardless of what device they’re using. In the post, Senior Vice President of Engineering Sridhar Ramaswamy writes, “Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.” The Google spokesperson told me that previously, if a business wanted to advertise on both desktop and mobile, they’d have to create separate campaigns. With Enhanced Campaigns, they create a single campaign that runs across devices, which can then be modified to accommodate different contexts — for example, an advertiser could bid less money to run their ads on mobile, or they could bid more to run their ads in a certain geography. Here’s an example from the blog post: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for “coffee” or “breakfast” on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign. Other features highlighted by Google include the ability to customize the ad unit based on the context (so that a mobile ad, for example, could include a click-to-call button) and new reports that incorporate metrics like calls and downloads. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV9rzYo4Jrk] Starcom MediaVest says it has already been testing out the system, and Paul DeJarnatt, vice president and group director at , told me via email that there are “some positives and some limitations.” He said he’s excited about the advanced reporting and the “promise of things to come.” However, he suggested that Google also “went too far” in its attempt to simplify the process, and is now offering too few options for mobile and tablet targeting. “Many of our clients have done extensive research and testing to uncover what is important to someone on a tablet versus a true mobile searcher, which may be altogether different from a desktop searcher,” DeJarnatt said. “While we may still have those insights, we now have no way to target our campaigns accordingly to serve the most relevant ad to the most interested audience. That seems to move away from Google’s mandate of delivering relevancy with every interaction with the search engine.” Similarly, Adobe’s Bill Mungoven pointing out that advertisers can no longer target their campaigns at tablets specifically. To a certain extent, that makes sense, he said, because “tablets really are used more like laptops or desktops than smartphones.” But he argued that it also benefits Google because Google makes more money when tablet ads are lumped in with desktops. DeJarnatt made a similar point, saying, “The largest beneficiary, at least at this stage, appears to be Google itself.” He suggested that Enhanced Campaigns could help small businesses, but added, “For sophisticated marketers and agencies, however, Enhanced Campaigns feels like a step back.”
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OUYA Reveals New Games For The Platform, Including Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure And The Cave
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Our own Romain Dillet noted the regrettable Android-based home gaming console just yesterday. Today, as if in answer, OUYA founder and CEO Julie Uhrman spoke at DICE to announce some new launch partners for the Kickstarter-funded project. The newly announced titles include (another Kickstarter success from gaming legend Tim Schafer’s studio) and Rob Gilbert’s The Cave, also from Double Fine studios. In addition to the Double Fine titles, Uhrman said onstage that Paul Bettner, best known for creating Words With Friends, would also be developing titles for OUYA. No word on the specifics, but it is a vote of confidence from a game creator who has had enormous success on mobile platforms. When Romain complained about a lack of substantial games for the OUYA, he was mainly talking about marquee titles that would attract core gamers to a standalone console. The argument he made is essentially that users won’t flock to dedicated hardware that they can essentially already play on their Android or iOS devices. Without noteworthy launch games to give it juice, he believes OUYA’s will become yet another device gathering dust on peoples’ shelves. What OUYA announced today isn’t its own Sonic or Mario — something to propel the console to something unique with an experience you can’t replicate elsewhere — but it is a pledge from a studio (Double Fine) that produce consistently interesting, engaging games that attract the attention, love and respect of gamers. Double Fine Adventure won’t arrive until Q2 2013 and therefore likely won’t make OUYA’s launch. The Cave hasn’t yet begun OUYA-specific development, so this doesn’t answer launch lineup concerns, but it does indicate there’s a pipeline for more quality titles to come.
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The First Ubuntu Smartphones Will Debut In October
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Ubuntu’s certainly has some panache, which has prompted more than a few nerds (myself included) to become enamored with it. Thankfully, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has just recently given us a clearer idea of when to expect it — he told the Wall Street Journal that the first Ubuntu-powered smartphone would see the light of day . That is, of course, if everything pans out the way that the Ubuntu team hopes. It’s not unheard of for mobile platform launches to miss their intended launch windows after all — BlackBerry 10 was famously slated for a 2012 launch before being delayed until last week. Sad to say, the rest of Shuttleworth’s chat with the Journal wasn’t nearly as revealing. Though we’ve seen the nascent mobile OS running on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus both in the initial announcement video as well as at CES, Shuttleworth declined to offer names of any confirmed or potential hardware manufacturers Canonical may be working with. Even so, Canonical’s fondness of the one-time flagship device doesn’t end there. Developers will be able to tinker with Ubuntu on the Galaxy Nexus starting sometime this month (though the fact that it was originally supposed to be released last month may not bode well for Canonical’s launch window). Shuttleworth also mentioned that the mobile OS would make its official debut in two major markets this fall, but you guessed it — there’s no hard word on which markets he’s actually talking about. But he did concede that North America is a “key market” for Ubuntu. That said, Canonical may do well by tackling some less-developed markets right out of the gate. Canonical’s Jane Silber noted that when Ubuntu for phones was first revealed that the appeal of Ubuntu phones extends far beyond the enterprise, adding that Ubuntu’s native apps and stylish UI could make it a popular choice for more basic smartphones. Some of the other upstart players are looking to expand the reach of their mobile operating systems by taking a similar tack. Carriers like Telefonica are planning to use Mozilla’s Firefox OS as a means of getting more low-cost, feature-rich devices into the hands of consumers in markets like Brazil. Attempting to make a splash where mobile OS allegiances have not quite had a chance to settle yet could give Canonical an edge, as those regions become more digitally developed.
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AngelList’s Naval Ravikant Says The Future Of VC Is In Smaller Funding Rounds
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
In an on-stage conversation today with at event, co-founder gave data-driven insights on the current state of venture capital. In short, he’s forecasting a world with more startups, more bootstrapping, ‘shrinking’ funding rounds, and a boost in cross-border investing. AngelList is seeing that the much-buzzed-about is indeed real, Ravikant said. But he maintains that this is part of a natural evolution that’s not necessarily a bad thing — and that the larger ecosystem needs to adjust its expectations, not wait for things to revert back to how they used to be. “We need to redefine what a seed round looks like, and what a Series A round looks like,” he said. “It’s going to start shrinking.” Whereas a seed round nowadays is typically expected to be around $750,000 and is often much larger, Ravikant says the “new seed round” will be just $250K to $500K. Series A rounds, which have historically been between $3 million to $5 million, should be scaled down to around $1 million, he said. These smaller rounds mean that the classic Sand Hill Road VCs will become less active at the early stages, Ravikant said. Smaller VC funds such as and will continue to step up and be responsible for the Series A stage, and more traditional firms will hold off involvement until the B and C rounds after startups have displayed growth metrics. While this talk of “shrinking” rounds might sound bearish, Ravikant does not think there should be fewer startups in the world. In fact, his belief is just the opposite. “The number of startups will continue to go up. I’m maniacal enough to think that eventually everyone will work for themselves, and we will all be startups of one,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean that we all should all be venture funded.” Instead, he says, more companies “should exist as bootstrapped businesses.” AngelList is seeing this first-hand, as 100 companies are added to the site every day. While many of those companies are aspirational or just “junk,” Ravikant said about 15 to 20 of them each week are “high quality and fundable.” The issue is that there is just not enough money around for all of them to get the funds they want. That said, AngelList is seeing more cross-border transactions: A Silicon Valley startup papering funding from a London VC, say, or an Austin company securing its Series A from a Brussels-Based investor. As for what sectors are attracting money, Ravikant says there’s been a very discernible shift that will likely continue. “In these times where people are feeling more skittish about investing, entire sectors have become unfundable,” he said. Gaming and social networking are two sectors that he said “VCs won’t fund” in general today. Instead, he said, investors are flocking back to three basics: Products with visible traction, and startups in two sectors that tend to bring in real revenue — enterprise software, and hardware.
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Layoffs And A Shut-Down For NM Incite, The Nielsen-McKinsey Venture That Works With Twitter On Social TV Ratings [Updated]
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Here’s a surprise follow-up to the news this week of of a social media analytics firm Bluefin Labs. — a social analytics JV between Nielsen and McKinsey that forms part of service — has started to lay off most of its employees, and we’ve even heard that NM Incite will be shut down altogether by the end of this month. We’re reaching out to NM Incite for comment, but from what we can tell, people started to get news about this yesterday, with posting on , and others on Facebook. A reader — a former NM Incite employee — has also contacted TechCrunch saying that he’s been writing recommendations for some of his ex-colleagues today who are now looking for work. [Update below, confirming the layoffs and shut-down of most of NM Incite’s business.] It’s not clear yet whether the move is directly related to Twitter acquiring analytics expertise of its own or whether it was a wider business decision with coincidental timing. It may be the case that in the wake of Twitter’s decision to have some expertise in-house, perhaps Nielsen and McKinsey have rethought how their own social analytics business would develop. In addition to the SocialGuide TV analytics platform, NM Incite also offers wider social media analytics services that it tailors to companies/brands in specific verticals like healthcare, financial services and consumer packaged goods. On the other hand, for all the eyeballs and attention that second-screen experiences are getting, in this still-young area of media, business models are still in flux — and, therefore, so are those involved in them. Away from analytics, there have been some consolidation moves in the social TV space: Viggle trying ( ) to acquire GetGlue and . : A person close to NM Incite has now confirmed the layoffs but didn’t specify how many. She also confirmed that NM Incite is closing down most — but not all — of its operations. BuzzMetrics and its social listening tools for enterprises, competing in a crowded space, are being retired, but the social TV analytics service, which is in a contract with Twitter to create ratings data, is set to live on, and be used as a possible basis for more expansion into advertising metrics. A separate source estimates that the part of the business that is getting shut down accounted for about 85% of NM Incite’s employees. A spokesperson said the decision to close most of NM Incite’s business was coincidental with Twitter’s acquisition, not directly connected. “NM Incite is winding down its social listening platform to focus on areas of social media analytics where it has a competitive advantage and can deliver truly unique, differentiated solutions – like social TV,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
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500 Startups Is Setting Up Shop In China, Adding Beijing-Based Venture Partner Rui Ma
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
is already focused heavily on investing overseas, with partners looking at startups in markets like Mexico, Brazil, India, and Southeast Asia. Now you can add China to the list, as the firm just hired a venture partner to focus on that region. will be joining 500 Startups as its first venture partner in Beijing, where she will be investing and sourcing deal flow in China. At today’s , founding partner and Sith Lord Dave McClure highlighted all the different locations in which the company operates. Launching with a headcount of just four or five three years ago, the firm has grown pretty substantially, and now with 21 employees. About half of those are focused on investments and deal flow, with the other half handling administrative, marketing, and events that the firm works on. Nowadays, it’s got its Silicon Valley headquarters, where it also runs the 500 Startups Accelerator Program. But with the addition of venture partners like , , and the , the investment firm is becoming increasingly international. Adding Ma to that mix will extend 500 Startups into the China market, specifically Beijing. Ma has worked in the area over the last several years providing investing and advisory services through merchant bank The Raine Group, which was an advisor during the Renren IPO, and advising cross-border M&A for CITIC Securities International Partners. Check out our interview with Ma above for more about what her role will be with 500!
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Tumblr Adds Real-Time Notifications To Its Dashboard And It Feels A Lot Like Facebook’s Ticker
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Today on its staff blog, Tumblr shared that it is rolling out real-time notifications to people’s dashboards, so that you can have even more cat- and fashion-related content thrown in your face. It’s a smart move and surprising that it took so long. The thing that has kept Tumblr from being seen as a blogging platform is the fact that it stands pretty still, so an infusion of real-time will be interesting. Check this out! We’re testing real-time notifications from people you follow. You should start to see them in the next few hours (and can toggle them on your Settings page). Enjoy! The demo only shows interactions with our posts from people that you follow, but once it’s live it’s definitely worth checking out to see if it’s for you: So yes, you’ll be able to load up your Tumblr dashboard and watch the interaction happen before your eyes. This might actually kick up some engagement for Tumblr, as it’s always interesting to see what your friends are liking on the service. This is very similar to on the right-hand side of the page, and there’s no telling how well that’s doing. It’s just always there and once in a while I’ll catch something and click it. Perhaps Tumblr is hoping for the same effect. Luckily, you can turn it off if it annoys you. Similarly, you can hide Facebook’s Ticker if real-time annoys you. Both companies hope that you’re a fan, because it means more clicks. [Photo Credit: ]
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With 300 Kiosks In 20 States, Device Recycler EcoATM Secures $40M In Debt Financing To Go Nationwide
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
You know those mobile devices that everyone keeps raving about? Turns out it’s a huge business. Shocker, I know. that about 1.6 billion mobile phones shipped in 2012. What’s more, , the tablet market grew by 75 percent in the fourth quarter to 46.2 million units, with total shipments hitting 114.6 million in 2012. With all these new devices hitting the market, people tend to overlook the fact that this creates an enormous amount of waste. debuted in 2011 with a green solution: Give consumers an easy way to recycle their used electronics. The San Diego-based startup has been on a mission to become the Coinstar for used, mobile devices, offering consumers ATM-like kiosks that automate the buy-back of their has-been electronics and give them a cash reward for doing so. With the tablet market growing like gangbusters, , which means that its kiosks will now accept your iPads in addition to your cell phones, smartphones and MP3 players. Over the last year, the startup has gone from 50 kiosks to about 300 across 20 states, and this year, it hopes to add another 600 or 700 kiosks, bringing cash for clunky devices to a mall near you. To support this growth, the 2012 Crunchies Winner announced today that it has secured $40 million in debt financing from Falcon Investment Advisors, which ecoATM CEO Tom Tullie says will help provide the fuel it needs to continue nationwide expansion. “There’s still a large percentage of the country that doesn’t have access to a convenient recycling solution for their mobile phones and other personal portable electronic devices,” Tullie says of the new debt round. “We raised this money to help us deploy ecoATMs nationwide and help people recycle their old phones, tablets, or MP3 players, regardless of where they live.” To date, ecoATM’s expansion plan has focused primarily on positioning its kiosks in shopping malls in large metropolitan areas — for good reason — “eventually, we’re going to run out of malls,” ecoATM marketing director Ryan Kuder told us recently. So, with its new capital, the startup wants to expand into smaller cities and other types of high-foot traffic areas, like supermarkets and smaller retail outlets. And, according to Kuder, the expansion reflects a growing demand (and growing use of) its kiosks among consumers. Yes, people are actually using the machines. Kuder says that people used ecoATM to recycle “hundreds of thousands of phones” last year and has paid out “millions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of customers.” By doing so, Tullie added, the company has been able to save landfills from “hundreds of thousands of potentially toxic devices,” as it has been able to “find a second life” for 60 percent of the devices it has collected, while recycling the rest. The new debt round funding it has raised to date from Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, TAO Ventures, PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital and Koh Boon Hwee, to name a few. In 2012, the company was also awarded a Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation for up to $1 million. The new financing brings ecoATM’s total funding to just over $70 million. For more, find the .
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Joe Green Steps Down As President Of NationBuilder, Joins Andreessen Horowitz As EIR
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Today, we’ve learned that Joe Green, co-founder of and NationBuilder, will be stepping down as president from the latter. Green, who is also an investor and advisor to Asana, will be joining Andreessen Horowitz as as an entrepreneur in residence. He also mentioned that he has some things in the works and will share them in the coming weeks, Last March, , announcing Green as president at the same time. He will continue as a board member of the company, which allows political candidates and organizations to build a website with all of the necessary social and fundraising tools it needs to get going right away. Its no longer lists Green as president. Here’s what Green shared on today: Friends, As most of you know I have spent the last couple years as Co-Founder and President of NationBuilder. Today I am announcing I am stepping down as President and away from day to day operations, though I will continue supporting the company as a member of the Board of Directors along with Jim Gilliam, Sean Parker, and Ben Horowitz. I want to thank Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen and the team at Andreesen Horowitz for offering me a position as EIR at Andreesen Horowitz, where I am excited to work with the best team in venture and help fellow entrepreneurs. I also am going to be diving back into political advocacy. I have spent the last 7 years building the tools to empower political change online, now it is time for me put them to use myself. I look forward to announcing some exciting initiatives in the coming weeks. Working with Jim, Jesse, Daniel Walmsley, Adriel Hampton, Lea, Katie Yording my brother Jacob Green and our whole team has been a dream come true for me. I am partularly proud my good friends Edward Rawlinson and Michael Moschella have recently joined. Since I first saw Friendster as an intern in the New Hampshire primary, I have been pursuing the dream of bringing community organizing online. The traditions of organizing, which go back thousands of years, when combined with the broad deployment of the social graph are empowering a whole new set of leaders at a scale never thought possible. This is what led me to found and run Causes for 4 years, and when I first met Jim Gilliam I knew immediately I had met someone whose life path had also led them to this vision. It has been a privilege to spend the last couple years working to make this vision a reality. I look forward to continuing to do everything I can as a member of the board. Having built a successful platform like Causes, it will be interesting to see what Green is up to next. He likes to create platforms and is passionate about political reform, so it will be fun to watch if he goes big or digs in deeper to effect real change. While Green sits in at Andreessen Horowitz, he’ll be able to see a lot of projects in very early stages that might get him excited.
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George Lucas Files To Sell Off His 2 Percent Stake In Disney For Nearly $2 Billion
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 6 |
Just four months after announcing the sale of production company to in a , , the screenwriter and director best known for the series, has made a move toward cashing out — big time. In a regulatory document filed today with the , Disney disclosed that George Lucas’ personal trust has registered for the ability to sell his two percent stake in the entertainment conglomerate, which could net him a total of $1.99 billion. The Lucasfilm sale made George Lucas the in the Walt Disney Co.; the first is the estate of the late . Per the , Lucas now has the go-ahead to sell a total of 37,076,679 shares of Walt Disney Company common stock at a proposed price of $53.77 per share. The registration covers all of the stock that Lucas received as part of the Lucasfilm acquisition — after the registered stock is sold off, the document says, he will no longer own any portion of Disney stock. It’s important to note that the prospectus indicates Lucas’ intent to sell this stock “from time to time.” That means that the sale will not necessarily happen all at once, or right away. The Lucasfilm sale . Back in October when the deal was first announced, George Lucas said in an interview that will give his films “a longer life.” Selling his total financial stake could be an even bigger indication of the trust he has in Disney with the legacy. Here is a video interview of George Lucas from October, when the Lucasfilm sale was first announced:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyqlTi7lkhY]
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Nokia Pulls Away Its Name From Its Mapping And Navigation Services, Rebrands As “HERE” To Push More Cross-Platform Business
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
is taking one more step to push its mapping and devices services as a standalone business. Today, the company announced during the handset maker’s press conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it would be rebranding all of its Nokia-branded mapping and navigation services as “HERE” going forward. The HERE suite comes pre-installed on the Lumia 520 and includes HERE Maps, HERE Drive and HERE Transit — a public transport guide “that you can use even in unfamiliar surroundings,” Nokia’s design chief Marko Ahtisaari said today. You can pin your home location on it as well — and use that as the base for all the data. “These personal experiences are meant to help you spend more time engaging in the world around you rather than navigating your smartphone,” he said. Elop noted that Nokia will begin integrating the HERE suite into non-Nokia phones later this year to help enhance the data. “The growing scale of the platform is beginning to be recognized by more and more partners,” said Elop at the press conference. Those include Amazon and (of course) its OS partner Microsoft. The company is also adding more functionality and integration into HERE, by integrating it with Sight — an augmented reality service that lets you take pictures of places to help you initiate maps and navigation functionalities. “We want to bring Sight and Location to more and more applications,” he noted. And it also introduced a wireless charging holster that can be used in cars — which again link up with the car navigation’s capabilities. Nokia has been moving closer to in-car navigation services, with its most recent deal with to embed the technology in its connected cars. The rebranding move is a sign of how Nokia continues to keep advancing its mapping business as a standalone effort, and as a revenue stream that may grow through partnerships with others, while it continues to exist as a suite of services for Nokia devices themselves. It could also be a sign that so far that effort has not had as much traction as Nokia would have hoped — perhaps because of the association with Nokia. Yesterday, Nokia was revealed as one of the launch app makers for the . Mozilla and its partners are taking a route (a gamble, some might argue) not focused on native apps but HTML5-based web apps to fill out content for the new smartphone platform. This also follows along with Nokia’s intention, when it , to make the service available via APIs both for other Windows Phone handset makers as well as developers on Android and other platforms. It’s part of how Nokia is also trying to open up more and more of its APIs to developers. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO of Nokia Stephen Elop noted the importance of Nokia’s navigation and mapping efforts and how it’s part of Nokia stepping back from being a strong brand in all cases — quite a seachange for the company. “Instead of hearing us talk about Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive, you’ll here us talking about HERE Maps and HERE Drive but we’ll also be talking about those capabilities, or some of those capabilities being taken across a broader collection of Windows Phone devices, beyond Nokia devices,” he said. Still, Nokia’s mapping and navigation unit has for a while been a small sibling compared to its bigger (if challenged) handset and hardware business. Although full-year results saw the division raising sales by 5 percent in the last year, it declined by 9 percent to , whereas handsets devices brought in 3.8 billion in the same quarter.
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Nokia Expands Its Windows Phones To More Price Points With $180 Entry Level Lumia 520 And $330 Mid-Range Lumia 720
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
Nokia has just announced two new Lumia smartphones at its Mobile World Congress press conference – broadening its Windows Phone 8 portfolio to five devices and filling in some of the pricing gaps in the mid and lower end of the range. The two 3G newcomers to the Lumia line are the Lumia 720, which slots into the portfolio just above the , and a new entry-level handset, the Lumia 520, which pushes the price of Nokia’s Window Phone 8 devices to a new low of €139 ($180) before taxes, down from its previous low of $249. CEO Stephen Elop described the new, more populous Lumia lineup as “ the most innovative portfolio of products ever” — reappropriating the tagline the company uses for its Lumia 920 flagship to underline how some of the features found on its flagships are trickling down to more affordable devices. This includes its “super sensitive” touchscreen technology, which allows users to interact with the screen using a fingernail or when wearing gloves, and its digital lenses image filters and its Cinemagraph animated GIF creator. “What we’re doing with this Mobile World Congress in many respects is taking some of the great innovation you’ve seen in flagship products like the Lumia 920 and we’re broadening that down through the portfolio,” said Elop. “We’re now at a point where you’re seeing an organisation which has undergone a great deal of restructuring and changes but now you’re seeing the full power and might of Nokia being applied to the broadest range of portfolio for the Lumia products.” Nokia’s previous entry-level Lumia, the 620, was announced last December but still hasn’t launched in the U.S. However Nokia confirmed today that its new entry-level Windows Phone will be coming to North America, with T-Mobile U.S. set to range the Lumia 520 (pictured below) in Q2. The Lumia 520 has a 4-inch LCD display with a resolution of 800 x 480. Under the hood the handset is powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip, along with 512MB of RAM. Internal storage is 8GB but there’s a Micro SD card slot to expand memory up to 64GB (not counting the 7GB of free cloud storage that comes with Microsoft’s SkyDrive service). The device also includes a 5-megapixel rear camera, plus the swappable shells featured on the Lumia 820 and 620 — in the same range of distinctive and bright Lumia colours. The new mid-range Lumia 720 (pictured below), priced at around €249 ($330), is initially targeting the Asia-Pacific market — with China Mobile confirmed to range it in Q2. It’s unclear whether it will come to the U.S. later — Nokia said it has nothing to announce at this point. China Mobile will also range the 520. The dual-core 1GHz Lumia 720 has a 4.3 inch Clear Black display for improved viewing outdoors, with the same screen resolution as the Lumia 520. Memory and storage are also the same. Nokia described the handset as the “trendiest Lumia in product family” — talking up its sleek, rounded looks, including curved edges to the screen and a 9mm waist, which makes it the thinnest Lumia in the range. This handset is being targeted specifically at “younger, trendier, hyper social users.” Aside from the device’s look and feel, the camera is the big focus with the 720 — thanks to its target audience’s love of social networking and photo sharing. Although the 720 is not PureView branded, it has a 6.7 megapixel rear lens, with Carl Zeiss optics (and branding) and an f1.9 aperture to allow in lots of light to boost low light photography performance. The front-facing lens has not been forgotten either — it’s a 1.3 megapixel HD wide angle lens, which allows for up to three people to squeeze into a shot so someone can take a self portrait with two friends. Nokia has also added a new Lumia digital lens — called ‘Glam Me Up’ — which lets 720 users snap an enhanced self portrait using the front-facing lens, which then auto processes their photos to make it look more polished, giving them whiter teeth and smoother skin. The company said this feature had played very well with its target market of appearance-conscious consumers. Despite , Nokia had no high end Lumias to unbox at its MWC press event today (nor was there any sign of hardware). Its focus this year is evidently on bulking out and expanding the competitiveness of its mid-range offerings — in both Windows Phone and Series 40 products — to firefight the spread of affordable Androids, and presumably also to try to head off the threat from other low-cost newcomers, such as the nascent . Driving Windows Phone to lower price points is a strategy Nokia CEO Stephen Elop discussed during Nokia’s Q4 results when he noted: “We are clearly innovating with Microsoft around Windows Phone, and are focused on taking that to lower and lower price points. You will see that over time compete with Android.”
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Foreigners To North Korea To Get Uncensored 3G
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
Foreign visitors going to will be able to receive uncensored 3G data starting March 1. Koryolink, a joint venture between Egyptian company Orascom Telecom Holding and North Korean state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation (KPTC), has set up a 3G service for visitors into the country. The service, which is not available to locals, won’t come cheap. A $100 Wi-Fi hotspot and $200 SIM card will be needed, after which 2 Gb of data will cost $300, and 10 Gb will run $525. Phone calls abroad will cost $0.50 a minute to European countries like Switzerland and France, and $7 a minute to the U.S. Calls to South Korea, however, are blocked. According to the , services typically banned like Twitter and Skype will be available on Koryolink’s network. North Koreans are blocked from the global Web, and only allowed some 3G services, such as MMS messaging and subscriptions to the state-run paper, Rodong Sinmun. Calls to foreign numbers are also blocked. This news comes just after the country started to allow foreigners to bring their own phones into the country to use with Koryolink SIM cards. It’s not clear if the new uncensored service will be extended to SIM cards that are available to visitors, so you can skip buying the hotspot. Koryolink is 75 percent owned by Orascom. Orascom has a 3G license in North Korea that was awarded in 2008. Its censored service to the locals had about as of February 2012. The country’s capital of Pyongyang has a population of about 2 million.
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The Nokia 301 Is An $85 Feature Phone With Smartphone-Style Camera Tricks To Nip At Android’s Low End
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
Nokia has unwrapped a new handset — not a fancy smartphone but a : The Nokia 301 (pictured left) is an $85 mobile that doesn’t have a touchscreen or a QWERTY keyboard but does pack HSPA (aka 3.5G) and includes some enhanced camera features. It also supports YouTube streaming video via Nokia’s cloud Xpress browser for the first time. Right now Nokia is holding its Mobile World Congress press conference where CEO Stephen Elop and his team are banging the drum for a newly expanded line of Lumia Windows Phone smartphones. But Nokia’s mobile strategy is , with Windows Phone at the higher end and its own Series 40 OS powering a broad swathe of basic and budget devices, such as the 301. The thing is, right now, Nokia simply can’t afford to ignore the low end. Here, far from the glamour of Lumia smartphones, is where Nokia’s volumes are. For all its marketing efforts to push Windows Phone, Microsoft-powered handsets still only account for a fraction of Nokia’s device sales. In its the company shipped just 4.4 million Lumias vs. 79.6 million mobile phones — mostly S40 based, as . At $85 the Nokia 301 sits at a price-point Windows Phone hasn’t dipped down to yet, although Elop has said Nokia is “innovating” with Microsoft to drag Windows Phone “to lower and lower price points” (case in point: it just unveiled a new entry-level Lumia, costing circa $185 — the Lumia 520). In the meantime, Nokia is doing itself what Microsoft’s OS can’t: powering phones that are priced to fight super budget Androids. In November it was the launch of a . Today it’s a brightly coloured feature phone with some smarter-than-average camera features. Nokia needs to keep budget buyers away from Android’s low end — which sets consumers on an upgrade path to higher end Android smartphones — if it is to stand a chance of convincing them to upgrade to Windows Phone-based Lumia phones later on. While the 301 doesn’t have the touchscreen smarts of a budget droid — or even Nokia’s Asha full-touch devices (the is priced at $99) — Nokia has beefed up the device’s camera capabilities with some quasi-smartphone features: a panorama mode, which lets users take up to four separate shots and stitch them together; a sequential shooting mode that allows for up to five photos to be taken continuously; a filter application to apply a choice of five camera effects to shots; and a neat voice-guided self portrait mode to help users align their image in the frame when snapping a photo of themselves. Hold the phone up in this mode and it will bark LEFT! UP! DOWN! RIGHT! and so on until your face is in the right position for your close-up. Photos can also be shared straight from the gallery to social networks like Facebook (or to other phones via Nokia’s tech). Nokia is also consciously styling its budget devices like its smartphones — dressing them in the Lumia range of distinctive colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white in the 301’s case) — as well as borrowing other Lumia design touches, such as the metal camera plate on the rear to draw attention to the 301’s 3.2 megapixel lens (as seen below). “For the first time now you’re seeing from Nokia one single portfolio. One single industrial design language that’s coming through from the Lumia 920 smartphone, all the way down to products like the 305,” said Neil Broadley, director of technology marketing, Nokia’s Mobile Phones division, who was showing off Nokia’s latest addition to the bottom wedge of its handset portfolio. As well as fancy casing colours and camera tricks, the 301 comes preloaded with apps, including Facebook, Twitter and eBuddy. Additional apps can be downloaded from the Nokia Store, although when you’re fighting the might of Google Play it pays not to focus too much on apps. Instead, Nokia is trying to stand out through hardware design and camera innovation: so it’s borrowing some of its Windows Phone strategy here, too. It remains to be seen whether bright colours, some camera tricks and a few key social networking apps are enough to convince the masses of cash-conscious buyers to choose Nokia’s feature phone over a budget Android. But Nokia also points to the thrifty nature of its cloud browser, which compresses webpages before delivering them to eke out more data, and long battery life (up to 39 days on standby in the 301’s case) as other areas where it’s looking out for the cash-conscious mobile consumer. The Nokia 301 will go on sale “during Q2 this year,” and will be available in single- and dual-SIM versions. Nokia said it will be offered in multiple markets globally (but not currently the U.S. market), rather than being targeted solely on emerging markets — launching in more than 120 countries, in “Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, India, Middle East and Latin America.” For the very cash-strapped phone buyer, Nokia has also today refreshed its rock-bottom entry-level device. The Nokia 105 (pictured below, right) is the successor to the Nokia 1280, and has a price tag of just $20. The biggest update, beyond the design refresh, is the screen — which is no longer monochrome but colour. The handset’s design has also been spiced up, with a single piece keymat and a couple of Lumia-esque casing colours: cyan or black. The device includes Nokia Life: its SMS-based subscription information service — but is clearly not going to get developers too excited. This phone really is a phone — in the traditional voice and text sense of the word. Small and feature-lite though it undoubtedly is, the 105’s predecessor, the (which launched back in November 2009) has now sold more than 100 million units globally, Nokia said today. So small and low-priced continue to do the volume heavy-lifting for Nokia, even as its top-end Lumias struggle to make an impression against Android and iOS. The Nokia 105 will start rolling out in Q1, with the initial target markets being “China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, Vietnam and other markets in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.”
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Kantar Worldpanel: Android And Verizon Back On Top In U.S. Smartphone Sales, Android At Nearly 50% Of Sales
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
, the WPP firm that analyses how well smartphones are selling with consumers (not shipping to sales channels) across key worldwide markets, has picked the week of a major mobile show in Europe, , to shift some of the focus back to the U.S. Today the firm released numbers on smartphone sales for the 12 weeks to the end of January, which show that Android was the top smartphone platform, beating out previous leader Apple’s iOS, and that Verizon has ousted AT&T as the top smartphone operator. This represents a change over a year ago, as evidenced by the tables below, but also last month’s rolling, 12-week sales chart, where The figures come at a timely moment, with news breaking earlier that , scheduled for March 14. The U.S. has long been a stronghold for Apple, although Android, led by Samsung, has been steadily chipping away at that lead. Android, Kantar says, took 49.4 percent of smartphone sales, a growth of 6.4 percentage points over the same period last year. Apple’s 45.9 percent of sales was 4.7 percentage points down one year ago. It sources these numbers by extrapolating from data collected from 240,000 consumers annually. And when you add those two numbers together you can see how ridiculously big the challenge is for others to get a look in. No. 3, Windows Phone, just barely breaks 3 percent of sales, although that’s an improvement on 2.1 percent last year. As has been the case for Android’s strength worldwide, the platform is being used by a number of handset makers, and those phones are being offered at a number of price points. Samsung, which plays in the full spectrum, from low-end smartphones up to its highest Galaxy S devices, is leading the market. Specifically, Android devices were priced especially agressively on No. 3 carrier Sprint. iOS-based iPhones cost $130 on average, Android $127 back in October 2012, but by this last three-month period iOS cost $95 and iPhones cost $146. The SIII from Samsung cost only $99 over the holiday season. When you look at how individual carriers have performed this shows where some of the shifts have occurred: specifically, AT&T, traditionally the leader in iPhone sales, accounted for 28.2 percent of sales, more than 8 percentage points lower than a year ago. Verizon rose by less, but it rose, and is now at 35.2 percent. Ironically, it sold more iPhones as well, but the balance between those and Android handsets is more even. (At AT&T it’s 70:24 in favor of iPhones; at Verizon it’s only 57:40.) Meanwhile, Sprint remained in third with a 14.2 percent share of smartphone sales in the period, Kantar points out, but its mix is 49:72 favoring Android, and that tipped the balance set out by the two leaders. “Part of Android’s increase in the latest period can be attributed to its large gain in share within Sprint’s smartphone sales,” writes Kantar Worldpanel ComTech analyst Mary-Ann Parlato. It’s worth noting that Samsung alone accounted for 60.3 percent of all smartphone sales on the No. 3 carrier.
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MasterCard’s PayPass Wallet Services Evolve Into MasterPass, Will Open To Canadian And Australian Users First
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
It was just this past May that MasterCard expanded its stake in the digital payments arena with its PayPass Wallet Services, and it’s already getting a bit of an overhaul. Today, MasterCard has announced that PayPass Wallet Services is graduating from its production trial with a new name — — and a slightly broader approach to how it aims to improve users’ shopping experiences. MasterPass will roll out to the masses in Canada and Australia before the end of March, with a U.S. launch slated for the spring and a U.K. launch to follow in the summer. To understand what MasterPass does, though, we need to rewind for a moment. MasterCard officially last spring by allowing users to create free accounts and pay for purchases on certain partner websites using the identity, credit card, and shipping information they’ve stored in their PayPass “wallets.” This will still be the case going forward, as will the ability to pay for products in-store with mobile devices. Don’t fret, PayPass users — nothing is going to happen to the extensive network of PayPass terminals, except perhaps that it’ll grow larger in the months to come. The MasterPass rollout will see MasterCard placing more emphasis on linking up with merchants and retailers, especially those who may be feeling the pinch thanks to cheaper, more efficient online retailers. MasterCard’s plan? To allow those businesses to integrate MasterPass into the sorts of mobile-friendly, device-agnostic shopping experiences that they want to create, be they reliant on NFC transactions, QR codes, or purely online payments. According to MasterCard senior vice president Ed Olebe, more than a few retailers are looking for ways to enhance the traditional shopping experience with the sort of flexibility that digital modes of payment afford consumers. “Take buying a shirt for example,” Olebe explained. “The typical experience is you swipe a card and check out. But why can’t you buy from the rack from your phone? If you like it and have to leave, why can’t you buy it from your phone and have the store ship it to your home?” It’s these sorts of “omnichannel” sales experiences that MasterCard created MasterPass to be a part of, and the company has already locked up support from players like Verifone, which today announced that MasterPass support would be baked into its mobile point of sale apps. Still, that’s only one part of MasterCard’s scheme. The company will also be letting those merchants, retailers, and banks offer their own branded digital wallets by way of . Consumers will ultimately be able to store any of their debit or credit cards in that branded wallet as they as would had they signed up through MasterCard directly. Perhaps the most notable addition to the mix is one that seems to have come about thanks to a savvy startup acquisition. MasterCard is also looking to add its own flair to the shopping experience in the form of value-added services like loyalty-driving rewards and real-time account alerts — a move no doubt aided by the company’s (formerly known as Billshrink) back in September 2012. Name change aside, this whole thing seems like a largely incremental step forward for MasterCard. That’s not to say it’s not a necessary one, though — analysts expect the mobile payments market to , and with MasterPass’ launch MasterCard is angling for a stronger position in the space while it’s still relatively young. Meanwhile, other players in the mobile payments space are jockeying to solidify their respective positions, too. Rival Visa announced earlier this month that it would launch in an attempt to get device manufacturers, developers, and service providers all on the same page when it comes to accepting Visa payments.
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Meet ownCloud 5, The Open Source Dropbox
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Scott Merrill
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
is a free software suite, written in PHP, that provides file storage, synchronization, and sharing. It provides the same basic features of Dropbox or Box.net. It also provides a whole lot more. ownCloud was started three years ago when Frank Karlitschek wanted a free software alternative to proprietary solutions. In the time since the project has attracted a dedicated group of core contributors, made several significant releases, and is available in 42 languages. It’s also spun off a commercial project to drive development of ownCloud for enterprise users. The core ownCloud offering is file storage and synchronization. You also get optional contacts and calendar synchronization, if you want to use it. As an open source application, you can install it on any computer you control. This means you know how and where your data is stored, something which existing hosted solutions abstract away from you. Individuals and enterprises can install ownCloud on their own hardware, and define access policies according to their own needs. I’ve been using ownCloud on my own for a couple of months now. My primary use is a backup for pictures taken from my phone. Just like Dropbox and Google+ and Facebook, the ownCloud mobile client can automatically upload pictures taken from your phone. I like this because not all of the photos I take with my phone are intended for public viewing, but I don’t want these photos to live only in my phone. Having backups automatically uploaded and stored at my house on media I can control gives me great peace of mind. Interestingly, ownCloud can be connected to third-party storage like Dropbox or Google Drive or even an FTP server. These are read-write connections, allowing you to use third-party storage in whatever ways make sense for you. Maybe you want a local backup of your Dropbox data? Maybe you want a single interface to all your hosted storage? ownCloud lets you do it. The is built atop the open source project, and includes features of interest to enterprise customers. Things like MS SQL and Oracle support, connections to enterprise groupware and directory services applications, and white-label mobile clients. The commercial version specifically targets organizations that require on-premise data storage and control. The first beta release of ownCloud 5 was just announced, with a release candidate due in the next week or so. I spoke with Karlitschek about the upcoming release of the latest open source offering from the project. According to him, there are three major elements of this release: integration, performance, and usability. The biggest visible change in ownCloud 5 is in the presentation. The interface has been completely redesigned to present a more streamlined, usable experience. More space is allocated to the display of your data, rather than the display of the ownCloud controls. Karlitschek highlighted a new photo gallery included in ownCloud 5, including better sharing options. This isn’t anything revolutionary, but does keep ownCloud on equal footing with its proprietary competitors. Also included are updates to the contacts application, and the calendar. ownCloud also provides a video player application, a PDF viewer, and a whole lot more. ownCloud administrators can connect an ownCloud installation to a variety of back-end account databases. These include UNIX user accounts, LDAP, and the built-in ownCloud account mechanism. The upcoming release of ownCloud 5 supports multiple simultaneous backend systems, allowing you to use both UNIX and LDAP systems at the same time for accounts, for example. This makes it easier to tie ownCloud into an existing infrastructure. Users can also select a “display name” other than their account name. So where an LDAP user might have an account name of “cn=scott,ou=people,dc=techcrunch,dc=com”, that user could select a display name of “Scott Merrill”. This is a small touch, but goes a long way toward usability. Under the hood, the file-caching mechanism employed by ownCloud has been revamped, and Karlitschek reports speed improvements of up to 500% in some circumstances. The caching changes reduce the number of round-trips to and from the server, so desktop sync clients and mobile clients should see noticeable improvements. Another big new addition is a full-text search mechanism, powered by Lucene. This is something that ownCloud offers that the proprietary solutions don’t. The full-text search will work in the mobile clients, as well as the web interface, allowing you to find files based on their contents, not just their file names. The current versions of ownCloud have file versioning, allowing you to track changes made to files. The upcoming ownCloud 5 will introduce a complete “trash bin” feature, allowing you to undelete files. Versioning plus undelete means that your data has multiple levels of safeguard against accidental removal. I asked Karlitschek about any particular challenges specific to the development of ownCloud 5. Since ownCloud is intended to run on any major platform, he said that they ran into a particularly surprising problem when running an ownCloud server on a Windows host. It turned out that PHP was “interesting” with UTF8 filenames on Windows systems, and a large number of bugs were reported which all boiled down to this issue. Several days of troubleshooting led them to the root cause. The solution was to write a filesystem abstraction layer specifically for Windows. That kind of effort goes a long way toward ensuring that this open source application works on as many platforms as possible. As with any open source project, it’s hard to know how many people are actually using it. Counting downloads doesn’t tell the full story. Karlitschek estimates that there are more than 800,000 active users of the ownCloud project. This number specifically does not count enterprise users who are purchasing the commercial version from ownCloud.com. Karlitschek shared some interesting use cases for ownCloud with me. Some people aren’t interested in file synchronization, and are instead only using ownCloud for the contacts and calendar functions. If you don’t want Google or Facebook to know your every move, but you still need consolidated access to your schedule from multiple devices, ownCloud offers a great solution. Karlitschek also told me about a group using ownCloud as the foundation for an e-book library sharing solution. As ownCloud continues to mature, it will continue to be used as a platform for more interesting solutions. ownCloud supports HTML5 applications, allowing you to add all sorts of additional functionality. The has dozens of apps. This extensibility makes ownCloud so much more than just a Dropbox clone. Indeed, according to Karlitschek, there is no other open source solution providing what ownCloud does. When I asked about the future of ownCloud, Karlitschek identified additional opportunities for integration: things like SharePoint, Atlassian products, and other hosted repositories of data. Karlitschek was adamant that ownCloud needs to integrate with all cloud services, since different users may be limited to using specific offerings. iOS users are tied pretty tightly to iCloud, and Android users are tied pretty tightly to Google Drive, etc. Existing proprietary solutions like Dropbox and Box.net offer limited freedom from platform lock-in, but they don’t go far enough. Moreover, those proprietary solutions are driven by what their customers are willing to pay for. ownCloud, as an open source solution, is free to pursue solutions that don’t provide specific economic benefit to their maintainers, but rather solve the real needs of its users. ownCloud 5 promises some major new features and some much needed improvements to an already impressive product. As an open source application, if it doesn’t scratch your itch you are invited to to help make it better for your own needs. Whether that’s submitting bug fixes, helping to run tests, or translating ownCloud to its 43rd supported language, all contributions are welcome.
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Samsung To Debut Its New Galaxy S In New York On March 14 As Rivalry With Apple Heats Up
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
It appears that Samsung has once again joined a growing list of companies that have decided not to release their flagship devices at Mobile World Congress. that the South Korean electronics giant said it will launch its new Galaxy S smartphone on March 14 in New York after requests from U.S. carriers. We’ve emailed Samsung for confirmation. One likely reason why Samsung chose New York for its launch is because, as Reuters notes, it is “Apple’s turf” and rivalry between the two is becoming increasingly intense. Launching in New York instead of at this week’s Mobile World Congress also has the added benefit of ensuring that the latest Galaxy S debut will not be lost amid a sea of noise from competitors. The for Samsung, so it’s no surprise that they would want to save it for special events instead of tagging it onto MWC. Last year, Samsung released the Galaxy S III in London. While the Galaxy S II made its debut at the 2011 MWC, the first Galaxy S launched at the CTIA mobile trade show in the U.S. in 2010. Samsung may have chosen New York for this year’s launch to give it a boost of good publicity in the U.S. after the last summer. Furthermore, Samsung has yet to dominate the U.S. market even though it was . In the U.S., in terms of sales. Though Samsung may plan to release its flagship smartphone elsewhere, it did , which it is planning to rollout globally in Q2 2013. Samsung did not say how much the tablet would cost, but representatives have said that the price would be “affordable.” Indeed, many mobile makers have made their low-end device launches at MWC, saving premium lines for their own separate events later on. For example, Nokia is expected to at the event, while Chinese company ZTE will debut the , one of the world’s first Firefox OS phones (Firefox OS is being heavily targeted at emerging markets). On the other hand, LG (and Samsung’s main domestic rival) will likely show off its at MWC this week.
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Network Infrastructure Company BTI Systems Raises $10M From Bain Capital And Others
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
Enterprise network infrastructure company has raised $10 million in new capital led by Bain Capital Ventures and existing investors BDC, Covington Capital and GrowthWorks. The company has raised more than $33 million since 2011. BTI Systems’ network infrastructure allows carriers and content providers to capitalize on the increasing demand for bandwidth (i.e. more consumers watching videos, app usage etc.). The company’s networking, application intelligence software and management products give carriers the capacity to manage bandwidth and deliver applications, services and content to subscribers and businesses. The company’s most recently launched product, BTI Intelligent Cloud Connect, allows content and service providers to overcome the performance bottlenecks created by inter-data center network traffic resulting from the demand for cloud services. So a carrier could use BTI to mitigate the traffic created by massive amounts of consumers checking Facebook or watching a YouTube video on their mobile phones. The new capital is being used to scale BTI’s operations and product development.
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LG Plans To Sell 40M Smartphones This Year As It Prepares Optimus G Pro Launch
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
LG Electronics, which lost market share to Huawei and ZTE last year, aims to sell 40 million smartphones this year as part of its strategy to move away from basic handsets, , the head of its mobile-communications division, before the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If the South Korean company hits its goal, this means LG’s shipments will rise 52 percent this year. LG sold 26.3 million smartphones last year and 20.2 million in 2011. LG will in the next few months as part of its effort to compete with the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy line. The Optimus line’s importance in LG’s efforts to reshape its image as a maker of premium devices is underscored by how quickly it has been introducing new models. That Optimus G Pro’s predecessor, the Optimus G, since . Kim Ki Young, an analyst at Seoul-based LIG Investment & Securities Co., that LG’s strategy is similar to that of HTC, which last week after its market share plummeted by more than half in 18 months, but looks more likely to succeed. “LG’s brand image in the premium league has improved. The company also seems to have higher growth potential than HTC and BlackBerry,” Kim said. LG’s total phone sales halved in two years after its basic handset models faltered in competition with devices from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei, the Chinese company that overtook LG as a Top 5 vendor in the overall mobile phone market in Q4 2012, .
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My Calendar Has Gotten Smarter In Really Dumb Ways
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
When I travel to the East Coast, I sometimes feel like I’m living in a time warp, as my iPhone and Google Calendar keep notifying me about meetings that had happened three hours earlier. I’ve already mentioned this problem on TechCrunch, , where I blamed the issue on “my apparently idiosyncratic way of dealing with timezones.” (In case you were wondering: I do my best to ignore timezones entirely, and if I’m traveling between zones, I put things on my calendar based on the local time of wherever I’ll be on a given day.) And I can’t deny that I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to using any productivity tool that’s more complicated than email. But I also think there’s something telling about the fact that my Google Calendar gets so damn insistent about changing time zones when I travel. It’s always trying to cajole me into pushing my meetings three hours forward, and as a result, I feel like an idiot and yearn for a simple pen-and-paper planner. Ultimately, all I really want is a calendar that replicates the physical experience, but is accessible on any device, and without the messiness of writing stuff down and crossing it out. As for this crazy time-zone thing, I can figure it out without technological help, thank you. , you may be saying, . To which I respond: Oh yeah, I kind of hate those, too. For the most part, calendar invites are perfectly okay, I guess, though I do feel it’s slightly presumptuous when someone sends one without asking first. What’s more exasperating is the 1 percent of the time that something goes wrong and events disappear or pop up at the wrong time, and both parties scramble to figure out exactly what went wrong. Sometimes people send an email to make sure that the calendar invite came through correctly, which helps, but it also seems to defeat the purpose. I mention both the time shifting and the calendar invites not just because I’m in a bad mood, but also because there’s something vaguely condescending about both of them. It’s almost as if, left to our own devices, we can’t be trusted to add items to our calendars correctly, so we need as much hand holding as possible. The hope, of course, is that these features offload some of the basic mental work, so that we can focus on more important things. Sometimes that’s what happens, but sometimes it feels like we’ve replaced one kind of mental strain with another: Instead of remembering that New York and San Francisco are three hours apart, I have to decipher about how to swap time zones and attach multiple time zones to a single event. And then I have to understand how my Google Calendar syncs up with my iPhone calendar, and how that calendar syncs up with other apps. Hooray for technology! And where do smart calendar products like and the aforementioned fit in? They don’t actually set off my grumpy old man alarms in the same way. Maybe that’s because I haven’t tried Cue, and I’m still getting used to Tempo, so my impressions are still in the “hey, that sounds like a cool idea” stage. They’re untainted by the disappointment of using a real and inevitably imperfect product. But the things that bug me about my calendar right now are the ones that, on a very low level, make me feel like I’m dealing with . In the face of these frustrations, I could give up on the idea of an assistant, but maybe what I really need is a better assistant. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway. Otherwise I might have to give this pen-and-paper thing a try.
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Developers Lead When It Comes To The Future Of iOS User Interface Design
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 24 |
Apple hasn’t done much to change the way iOS works at its core, in terms of navigating within and between apps and the home screen. In fact, iOS is maybe the mobile OS that has remained the most fundamentally the same since its introduction, at least among those that are still in active use. But while Apple hasn’t been making huge changes to the basic iOS user interface, third-party developers have been pushing the boundaries and creating great examples of how things could be better for a next-generation version of Apple’s mobile OS. The requirements for capturing attention in the App Store have changed dramatically over the last few years. When Apple’s mobile software store was new, just releasing an app at all could nab headlines and significant download numbers. But now it takes something special, especially when you’re building an app whose job is already adequately handled by countless competitors with existing apps. That special ingredient lately has come in the form of innovative new methods for user interaction. Designs that do away with buttons, standard user interface elements suggested by Apple and built into the iOS development SDK, mean taking risks since you’re asking customers to start in unfamiliar territory, but in the base cases, they also result in a kind of new life for your iOS device. [gallery ids="764306,764311,764310,764309,764305,764308"] Gestures are where it’s at for a lot of the newest apps out there. Gestures handle everything from data entry, to deleting and adding new items, to switching views and updating information. Apps like began to expand the concept of what developers could do with touch-based interfaces, and lately others have taken up the case and pushed the boundaries even further. Now there’s a whole cadre of apps that are doing similar things, including two featured this week by Apple: budget management app and weather app . Weather apps seem particularly ripe for this kind of change in design, with also offering a similar experience. But no category seems likely to be left untouched: uses a lot of gesture navigation not seen elsewhere for its inbox management commands, and is a new alarm for iOS that hides virtually every control interface, relying entirely on finger swipes and drags and eschewing anything resembling a button. Some of the interaction methods introduced in these apps are so intuitive you find yourself trying to use them throughout iOS and in other apps. For example, swiping left and right to access settings or preferences, or swiping down and up to switch views and access additional info. The good news is Apple need only pay close attention to what these third-party devs are doing to start charting a path to fresh new interface design for iOS. It’s beyond time the mobile OS got a significant, modern upgrade, and there are plenty of developers out there who are already helping that happen.
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