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Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Explains The Surprising Goal Of His New Company, Jelly | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone his top-secret new startup Jelly, a mobile app that enables users to ask short questions of their social network through pictures. For instance, Stone snapped a photo of an art piece in San Francisco, asked his network what it was, and got a few dozen answers. Since this morning’s announcement, there’s been a swirl of and about Jelly, especially because it seemed odd to limit an information utility to short questions within one’s own relatively small social network. But, after speaking to Stone, it appears that Jelly has a much more unique and ambitious purpose than we’ve come to expect from web utilities. The primary goal of Jelly is to increase empathy, and is built more for the answerer than the asker. “Using Jelly to help people is as much more important than using Jelly to search for help. If we’re successful, then we’re going to introduce into the daily muscle memory of smartphone users, everyone, that there’s this idea that there’s other people that need their help right now. “Let’s make the world a more empathetic place by teaching that there’s other people around them that need help.” To be sure, Jelly is still a utility. I successfully used it this morning to answer a math question: The same could apply to asking about what to wear, where to travel, or how to decorate one’s room. In one anecdote, COO Kevin Thau’s niece solicited some art advice for an acrylic painting, which eventually got forwarded all the way to the art director of a friend and director of TV’s , Greg Yaitanes. “That art director answered it brilliantly,” he gushes. “In what world does a 14-year-old girl in Florida get a professional answer from an art director?” Success for Jelly is about creating a comprehensive question-and-answer network that users tap throughout the day, especially in their downtime, such as while waiting in line at the grocery store. “All these people are working on artificial intelligence. How about just intelligence? There’s 7 billion people; there’s a lot of intelligence out there.” But, the search engine seems almost instrumental. Biz’s stream-of-conscious explanation is worth quoting in full: Beyond being a very useful search engine, like I said before, it creates this circle of empathy, where people realize that ‘Oh, there’s other people who need my help and I can actually help them and they’ll feel good about it and they’ll get trained to thinking about helping other people. And, maybe that’ll even jump outside of the app and just into the real world and they’ll start looking around and helping people and wouldn’t that be great? With this, the format of Jelly makes more sense. Offering knowledge in an instant is the shortest path to helping. Jelly is explicitly discouraging discussions or any long-form back-and-forth. Just quick answers, a shot of personal dopamine, and off to the rest of the day. Jelly is the first major application that I’m aware of to be built for the person helping, not the one seeking help. It’s this counterintuitive proposition that makes Jelly so intriguing. More importantly, Stone is no stranger to wild success. Few would have ever thought Twitter would become a staple of modern-day media. Yes, Jelly is ambitious, but it’s being directed by someone who has the track record to actually make it happen. It’s new territory, and we’ll be following his grand experiment. “We just kind of increase that global empathy quotient just a bit in our lifetime, and wouldn’t that be great?” |
The FLIR ONE Case Gives Your iPhone Thermal Vision | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Most of FLIR’s products to date are aimed at hunters and professionals, but this iPhone case brings an affordable smartphone-based thermal camera to the masses for the first time, the company told me at CES. The FLIR is $350, which might seem steep for a case with a built-in camera, but it’s actually around $750 cheaper than their least expensive standalone model currently available, and it provides an easy-to-use interface that anyone could quickly learn. The app for the FLIR ONE offers numerous modes that interpret thermal data differently, with some showing many degrees of temperature, and others more clearly showing more or less binary differences between extreme heat, average temperature and extreme cold. Amazingly, it also picks up residual heat, like that left by a foot on a carpet for quite a while after a person was there. [gallery ids="938060,938059,938061,938058,938062,938063"] At first, I was a little skeptical about the potential use cases for a thermal iPhone case for the average consumer, but the company’s representative at CES explained that you could use it for something as simple as figuring out whether your dog is climbing up onto your bed when you leave or not. It could also be used for home security, detecting thermal leaks in your house, or finding water leaks in pipes behind the walls. Of course, it can still be used for industrial and commercial applications, too, including contracting, home inspection and building maintenance. Users can snap photos of infrared images for their phone’s library, and share pictures from within the app. There’s also a plan for an SDK later in 2014, to let others build apps for the case. The case also has a battery within that powers the camera itself for up to four hours of continuous use, which can also provide up to 50 percent more power for your iPhone, too, if used as a backup battery. The company says it’ll ship this spring, but pre-orders are open now. Thermal imaging might not be on the top of every smartphone user’s wishlist, but it could end up appealing to more people than you might suspect. |
Art Meets Tech In Former Mailbox Designer’s New Textile Project Bulan | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Sometimes when life seems too pre-ordained, you drop everything and flee in the opposite direction. That’s what designer did when her picture perfect career at Ideo stopped resonating in the way it once had. Then that’s what she did again shortly after She disappeared out of tech and dived into art. Luna, who has a Master of Fine Arts from Chicago’s Institute of Art, started painting ad nauseum. Canvas after canvas became a . Instagram shots of her work fueled sales. But it wasn’t clear where her former and present life would meet. In a a few months ago, she said: “Right now I’m making a giant mess. I’m in that liminal place between where I’ve been and where I’m going, and it’s a little uncomfortable and a little scary, but I’m sticking there until I know which direction I’m headed next.” Today, she’s releasing the first of several projects that intersect art with technology. The is an e-commerce platform for textiles. “The phrase I keep coming back to is livable art,” she said. “ She’s initially selling a hand-painted cloth that’s a little over 6 feet-by-3 feet with all of the year’s moon phases illustrated on it. For every day of the year, there is a representation of what the moon will look like on that date. “The moon’s phases illustrate the life-death-life cycle,” she said. “There are then reach their full potential, like having a full belly or idea realized. Then as the moon begins to recede and wane, you see it getting smaller. It’s maturing almost like the end of life. There’s something also really beautiful about a waning life. It’s almost distilling itself. It’s becoming more seasoned, more rich and more potent. That makes me think about the beautiful melancholy in the ends of things, when they reach their natural terminus.” She went on, “The moon is both constant and ever-changing. It’s both steadfast and ephemeral. It’s mysterious, yet erratic.” Luna put together the textile with help from artisans in Bali, who helped perfect a waxing and dyeing process that was chemical free. The idea is to offer a single cloth for every ‘edition’ of the Bulan Project. Luna was inspired by a New York-based store that changes its entire retail front every six weeks with different work that’s curated around a particular theme. She also took some inspiration from other art-meets-tech projects like Jen Bekman’s 20×200, which makes limited edition art prints that are affordable. The first Bulan cloth retails for $185. She brought in other artists from the tech community to collaborate. Michael O’Neal, the photographer who worked in Apple’s in-house graphic design group and helped launch a number of its iconic products, did the initial shoot for Luna. Designer and buyer went to Bali to put together Bulan’s production system, while , who heads design for Lift, and Disqus designer put together Bulan’s online store. Then she’s marketing the textiles through artist and photographer friends on Instagram. One friend, Laura E. Pritchett, left this up this morning.
“I’m really curious what happens when we get a different mix of makers, designers and artists in to realize each one of these ideas,” she said. “We’re throwing all this tech firepower at this art project. This project is mysterious to me and I’m not sure how it’s going to unfold. But I know I want it to come from a place of play and experimentation.” |
Indian Startup Little Eye Labs Confirms Its Acquisition By Facebook, Deal Worth $10-$15M | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Last month, we that was planning to buy , an Indian startup that makes a software tool for analyzing the performance of Android apps. Now the Bangalore-based company has by the social media giant. A direct source told us that the deal is in the range of $10 million to $15 million. Little Eye Labs’ investors have included and . “With this acquisition, Little Eye Labs will join forces with Facebook to take its mobile development to the next level! This is Facebook’s first acquisition of an Indian company, and we are happy to become part of such an incredible team,” the in a statement on its site. As expected, the entire Little Eye Labs team will move to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where it will build analysis tools to help develop apps. TechCrunch’s Pankaj Mishra wrote last month that the acquisition of Little Eye Labs fits into Facebook’s mobile strategy, which has lagged behind rivals like Twitter even though 874 million of its 1.19 billion users (as of September 2013) access the social network primarily via their mobile devices. Other acquisitions Facebook has made to strengthen its mobile products , a mobile-backend-as-a-service startup it bought in April 2013. As Pankaj also noted, the acquisition of an Indian startup that is less than 18 months old is a significant boost for , where high-profile acquisitions are rare. We learned that Little Eye Labs also pitched to Twitter, but was offered a better deal by Facebook. “The acquisition of Little Eye Labs by Facebook is transformative deal for not only Indian startup ecosystem but also for the whole of the emerging world. This validates GSF’s core tenet that Indian product startups are now ready for a global play,” Rajesh Sawhney of GSF’s accelerator program, which Little Eye Labs graduated from, told TechCrunch. The company also said that current customers of Little Eye for Android, which helps developers measure, analyze and optimize their app’s performance, will “receive further information on plans to offer a free version of Little Eye until June 30, 2014” and . |
What Legal Battles? Video Upstart Aereo Lands $34M In New Funding, Plans Big U.S. Expansion | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Streaming TV startup generated quite a few headlines last year. Backed by Barry Diller and IAC, the controversial young company has become entangled in a lengthy and expensive legal battle with the major network broadcasters who want to see it shut down — a battle that’s now headed to the Supreme Court. While the startup has been growing fast and as a result — in which it expected to be in 22 new markets by the end of 2013 — the legal battles have slowed Aereo’s nationwide expansion. However, today Aereo looks to be turning that around with a big round of new capital to fuel these efforts, as the New York City-based company announced that it has closed $34 million in Series C financing. The new round, in which the company’s lead investor, IAC, was joined by media investor honchos like Gordon Crawford and Himalaya Capital Management, will support Aereo’s “rapid nationwide expansion” and allow it to ramp up hiring, the company said. Previous investors Highland Capital Partners, FirstMark Capital also joined in the round. When , the Aereo founder and CEO was eager to have the case move ahead to the Supreme Court and remained confident that Aereo is operating within the law. While that may sound like entrepreneurial delusion or hubris, the founder has reason to be confident. Up to this point, while broadcasters have slapped it with injunctions and moved to hamstring the startup with legal shackles, the company already has two verdicts in its favor. For Kanojia, Supreme Court certification would finally eliminate any questions as to the legality and legitimacy of Aereo’s business — at least for the time being. A vote in its favor at the federal level could also make the obstacle presented by its clone, FilmOn, disappear as well. As to when a decision will be made by the Supreme Court? The rumor is that the Supreme Court could take up the issue as early as Friday, January 10th, the scheduled date for their next court conference. At that point, it may also become a bit more clear what the expected timeline will be for its decision. Regardless, a year from launch, Aereo has more than a little skin in the game already, having raised just under $100 million to date, some of which has likely been put towards its legal battles. In his conversation , the Aereo CEO admitted that the ongoing lawsuits have been not only expensive, but more than a little distracting. To that point, while Aereo pledged that its expansion would see it arrive in 22 new markets by the end of 2013, the legal battles have slowed that progress significantly. When January 1st rolled around, Aereo had managed only half of that pledge and is currently operating in 10 cities. Not to mention the fact that legal wrangles haven’t been Aereo’s only obstacle, as the startup has also encountered technical difficulties in moving its predominantly indoor technology out of doors — to rooftops in new markets. Not only that, but it’s had to wait for the “outdoor-friendly technology” to get regulatory approval as well, as Jordan wrote at the time. Nonetheless, the company remains optimistic, and with its new capital in tow, Aereo plans to be in five new markets by the end of the first quarter of 2014. Amidst the escalating wars in court, the startup has managed to scale quickly over the last year, launching its first Android app last year (the app is currently in beta) and doubling its headcount, Kanojia said today. As for it’s existing scope, Aereo is currently operating its cloud-based antenna and DVR technology in New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Salt Lake City, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Baltimore and offers memberships starting at $8/month for access to the antenna, with 20 hours of DVR storage. The company will be making a full presentation about the news at the Citi Global Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference tomorrow morning. Readers can find the live stream of the . |
Blaze Seeks To Save Cyclist Lives With A Laser Projection Bike Light | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | More and more urban commuters are embracing cycling as a way to get to and from work and around the city, and more and more cities are embracing cyclists by adding bike lanes and making commutes safer and more fun. But bicycle safety is still a huge issue in even the most bike-friendly cities. A new startup called hopes to improve rider safety by reimagining the classic bike light. Blaze’s bike light not only makes it easier for cyclists to see where they’re going when it gets dark, but more importantly, it’s designed to help motorists see them, even when they’re riding in a car’s blind spot. It does that with a laser light projection that projects the image of the bicycle five or six meters in front of where they’re biking. The Blaze bike light seeks to overcome one of the biggest issues that cyclists face — that is, the propensity of motorists to turn without seeing them. Nearly when a cyclist is biking straight ahead, and a motorist turns into them. (As a cyclist myself, I can say that the biggest wipeout I ever had was when a car tried to turn into me without signalling or seeing me.) Not only does the Blaze bike light make you more safe, but it’s also got a lot of other things going for it. It’s rechargeable, USB compatible, and 100 percent waterproof. It has magnetic charging pins, so it has a completely sealed case. The image it displays is green, which is the most easily seen shade, and also takes very little power to generate. The light has three different modes (high, low, and flashing) provides about 13 hours of usage per charge, and alerts users when the charge starts to run low. The Blaze bike light comes with a mounting bracket and USB charging cord, and is available for pre-order for $200. It might be a little pricy compared to other bike lights, but you can’t really put a price on safety. [gallery ids="939978,939979,939980,939981,939982,939983,939984,939985,939986"] |
The Silk Road’s Libertas Is Free, To The Annoyance Of U.S. Authorities, While DoJ Mulls BTC Sell-Off | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | The Silk Road moderator Gary Davis, aka Libertas, is officially free on bail and awaiting an extradition hearing on February 13. Irish and U.S. authorities arrested Davis on December 20 in an international operation that also nabbed Silk Road moderators Andrew Jones, aka Inigo, and Peter Phillip Nash, aka SameSameButDifferent. All of the accused were active in the Silk Road 2, a replacement to the popular illicit marketplace that the U.S. authorities shut down . “Ross Ulbrict has abandoned his ‘I will always defy Law Enforcement’ and has plea bargained,” said a source close to the proceedings. Originally believed to be , Davis was actually freed on bail. Charged under section 74 of the Criminal Justice Act, Irish police arrested Davis and then freed him on bail later that night “much to the annoyance of FBI agents.” The FBI flew to Ireland that night for the express purpose of taking Davis into custody and interrogating him in Ireland, with regard to his position and functions “being a moderator on a website allowing transactions to facilitate the sale of drugs online.” “Libertas is currently in compliance with the law of his country, as a free walking man, bailed. Thankfully, we all don’t all live in the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave,'” said the source. However, Davis was found in possession of illicit substances which could result in a minimum sentence. “The FBI’s next targets are senior vendors in the US and Europe,” said the source. “Again, some of these vendors are so big, that direct communications between Ross Ulbricht, moderators and senior vendors via PMs were frequent.” “There is a plan. It’s in the working,” the source said. Irish authorities did not respond to attempts for clarification. In related news, the millions of dollars in bitcoin seized by the FBI from Ross Ulbricht and the first Silk Road, , appears to be on the move. A source in the U.S. Justice Department said that “authorities” have access to the Ulbricht’s bitcoin cache and may be selling it off for less volatile currencies in the next few weeks. Ulbright has given the U.S. government the private keys to the bitcoins. “The reason for selling is that the Government has lost faith in the value of bitcoin and does not want to deal with the volatility of the currency,” the source said. The wallets are and . |
Sentry Scientific Wants To Remake Walker Tech To Keep Seniors Safe And On The Go | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Today at TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES displayed new walker technology designed to keep the elderly safe, and mobile. This isn’t the usual fare here at TechCrunch, but it’s important to keep in mind that not all tech progress is represented by social apps or new servers. The team at Sentry uncovered an odd truth: Seniors using walkers to remain ambulatory were being injured by unlocked brakes and steep inclines. In short, seniors often forget to lock the brakes on their walkers, and when they would then rest upon them, off went the walker, and down goes the senior. To combat this, Sentry has created a system that auto-locks brakes on a walker when it is sat upon, and doesn’t unlock them until the person manually releases the catch. Secondly, when heading down steep inclines with their walkers, seniors can lose control, and fall. Sentry took this in hand, and built technology to automatically apply brakes on walkers when they are headed down slope. It’s a gradual squeeze, but it provides enough resistance to keep you upright. I took a regular walker, and a Sentry-equipped walker for a test, ahem, walk today, and can affirm that company has built something that works. As a firm, Sentry Scientific incorporated in April of 2013, and has self-funded through winning more than $100,000 in prizes thus far. The company views its market as ripe: The senior population is supposed to double by 2030, meaning that more individuals will need walkers to get around on their own. Sentry doesn’t intend on building its own hardware, but instead plans on licensing its technology for extant walker companies to use in their own models. The company told TechCrunch that it is in conversation with a few companies, but declined to provide more details. A Sentry-enabled walker will cost more than a traditional walker, given that it includes additional components and technology, but its price point should be low enough in time that it could be covered by Medicaid, or similar programs. But it’s an interesting bit of technology being applied to a segment that certainly could seem to use it. |
Livemap Demonstrates A Motorcycle Helmet Concept With Built-In Navigation | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | , a Russian startup on-stage today at our , aims to make GPS navigation more accessible to motorcyclists in the form of a new kind of helmet. After all, CEO Andrew Artischev noted that if you’re riding a motorcycle, interacting with a GPS touchscreen interface isn’t exactly safe or convenient, and even looking at it means taking your eyes off the road. Livemap’s Motohelmet, on the other hand, is inspired by fighter pilots, who have “heads up” displays showing them important information directly in their helmets. Similarly, Livemap plans to build motorcycle helmets that display navigation information directly in your field of view. The helmets will use an Android operating system with Nuance-based voice control and NAVTEQ mapping data. As for the display itself, Artishchev said it employs “a beaming scheme.” “That means it doesn’t contain a display that could hurt the user’s eye or make obstacles for his view,” he said. “The image is beamed on the clear visor, is not visible from outside, is transparent, [and] all elements of the beaming system are hidden inside the helmet in a safe way.” The Livemap team argues that there are no direct competitors — in other words, no other companies building this technology into the helmet itself. What GPS companies like Garmin and TomTom are doing to address this market is building navigation devices that can be mounted on motorbikes, can be shock-resistant and waterproof, and can be connected to headsets via Bluetooth. But those features don’t fundamentally address the issues mentioned above, because you may still have to physically interact with the navigation device, and it might not be directly in your field of view. Livemap’s approach has also been , and Artishchev discussed Glass as a potential competitor, saying his company will offer better image quality and won’t force users to look at “the upper right corner of the human field of view.” The team previously demonstrated a full-face helmet using this technology, but now they say they’ve found a way to build the technology into a modular helmet that’s smaller and more convenient. (It also has the benefit of allowing Livemap to go into production with existing helmet shells, which is more affordable.) While they have yet to build a full helmet prototype (an expensive process) for the modular helmet, Livemap has focused on the key components of the technology, which the team brought to CES. They showed me the actual display that motorcyclists would see while riding, and it was transparent as they claimed — so I could imagine seeing the directions without having my view obscured. They also showed me the voice-controlled navigation application running on an Android phone, and it was able to give me accurate directions around San Francisco. Part of the Livemap team comes from , a Russian company that has been developing heads-up displays and optical systems for military helmets over the past 50 years. Through a combination of grants, debt, and Artishchev’s own money, Livemap has raised $1 million in funding, and it’s looking to raise another $10 million now. He said it’s been a challenge to get money from Russian venture capitalists who are more interested in backing hardware than software, particularly clones of services that have been successful elsewhere. (At the same time, apparently it’s thanks to financial support from Igor Agamirzian of the Russian Venture Company that the team was able to attend CES.) “If we speak about my motivation, I want solve to real problems, not invented ones, not social networks for dogs or cats,” he said. Ultimately, Artishchev argued that this could “save the lives of motorcyclists on the road.” The company has already made deals with the key manufacturing partners, he added, and it plans to start selling the helmet in the US and Canada in the last three months of 2014 for $2,000. The Motohelmet is at a $500 discount, and you can also get updates by following the company on and . |
CubeSensors Brings Health And Comfort Monitoring To The Whole Home | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | In the future, your home will know you just as well as your smartphone does. The era of the connected smart home is upon us, and that all starts with sensors. , a competitor in our CES 2014 Hardware Battlefield, is looking to help you track the health and comfort levels in your home the same way wearable fitness trackers like the Fitbit Force and Nike Fuelband measure your health. Simply place CubeSensors throughout your home, one in each room, and get a read on various factors that affect your health and well-being. Specifically, CubeSensors are equipped with seven different sensors measuring air quality, temperature, humidity, noise, light, weather pressure, and accelerometer. A CubeSensor can tell you when the temperature in your home is off, costing you money, or alert you that your office is too dark to be working without a light on as the sun starts to go down. Plus, it tells you about indoor pollution, ensuring that the air you breathe in your home is fresh and clean. The idea behind the project comes from consumers growing increasingly interested in data about their own lives, especially where health and fitness are concerned. Yet there’s no all-encompassing product that monitors the health level of your own environment. Knowing that people often care a great deal about the aesthetics of the home, CubeSensors was designed to be discreet and attractive, with the option to be wirelessly connected (and charged periodically) or plugged in. When you shake one, the CubeSensor emits a colorful glow that lets you know whether or not there is any adjustment that can be made to make that room more comfortable, relayed to the user via the app. CubeSensors come in small, medium and large packs, with two, four, or six sensors respectively and a base station. They with the option to add more cubes or base stations at a later date. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE_5ZjEDImA&w=640&h=480] |
Bang & Olufsen To Take On Sonos With The $1,000 Essence Streaming System | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Bang & Olufsen’s latest household gadget aims to make controlling music as easy as turning on the lights. In fact the company hopes homeowners install its $1,000 Essence system near a common light switch. Just don’t mistake it for a Nest Thermostat. The Essence consists of two parts. The round, aluminum controller is mounted on a wall or placed on a table. This unit controls the music and features the standard array of touchscreen controls and sports motion sensors. Walk into a room with the B&O Essence and Bon Iver will start playing. Walk out, the music will fade away. The other part consists of the actual streaming device that B&O envisions will be tucked away in a closet. All communication is done wirelessly and supports AirPlay streaming, DLNA streaming, Spotify Connect, QPlay and thousands of global Internet radio stations. B&O is entering a crowded market, but is taking the notion of wireless streaming dramatically up-market. From the quality of the material to the high cost associated with the installation, the Essence is clearly targeting a different demographic from Bose and Sonos. The entire system costs $995 with additional control units costing $200 each. B&O expects to ship the Essence this spring. [gallery ids="936568,936569,936570,936571,936572,936573,936574,936575"] |
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Yahoo Introduces New Ad Exchange And Manager, Says It Now Powers Tumblr Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Scott Burke, Yahoo’s senior vice president of advertising technology, took the stage during the company’s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show to talk about what he said is “a new unified advertising solution.” Burke ran through the news fairly quickly, but the thrust of it seems to be that consolidating existing ad products while also introducing some new tools. The company’s ad units now fall into four general categories — native, audience, premium, and search. The names mostly speak for themselves, I think, except perhaps for the new “audience” ads, which the company as “a better way to buy ads targeted to specific audiences.” On the native front, Burke noted that Yahoo is also making an addition of sorts by powering Tumblr’s Sponsored Posts. Earlier in the presentation, Tumblr founder David Karp had talked about those posts, which is its early stages — he noted that even though the actual ads, or the creative tools used to build them, won’t change with the new integration, the underlying infrastructure will, giving Tumblr advertisers access to “a bevy of new technologies.” Karp also claimed that those posts are being reblogged an impressive 10,000 times on average. Outside of the ad units, Burke said Yahoo is introducing a new Ad Manager, which is supposed to give advertisers direct access to the company’s ad products, regardless of the company’s size. And there’s a new Yahoo Ad Exchange, a marketplace for programmatic ad-buying. Overall, Burke said the changes represent “the next generation of tools” that will “simplify a highly complex and fragmented market.” I’m heading off to interview Burke now, so I will update this post with additional comments. In the meantime, you can read more details in . In a follow-up conversation with Burke and Dennis Buchheim, vice president of product management for display advertising, they gave me some more context and details about the changes. Burke suggested that the reason for the revamp is feedback from advertisers who say that the display advertising ecosystem has become “overgrown” and needs to be “consolidated and cleaned up.” One way that Yahoo is cleaning things up is by bringing everything together under the umbrella of Yahoo Advertising, For example, Burke said that the Yahoo Ad Exchange is an enhancement of what it offered through Right Media, and that the Right Media brand is being “sunsetted.” Similarly, the audience ad product builds on the work that Yahoo was doing through , which will also be retired. Burke and Buchheim said there are some themes unifying the changes. One is all the data that’s powering Yahoo’s ads. Another is an increase in self-service options, which you can see in the Ad Manager and the version for large advertisers, Ad Manager Plus. In the past, bigger brands have wanted more of a “managed services” approach (as opposed to self service), but now they’ve “reached a level of experience with digital advertising” where they’re asking to do more on their own. “This is really the first time we’re making self-serve access to buy premium ads available,” Burke said. Finally, he predicted that security will be a big theme this year. He noted that , and he said we’ll see a similar switch in advertising. That’s easier tougher in display ads than search, he said, because of “all the players” involved in serving a display ad. “You have to get the whole ecosystem to agree to flip, but I think this is the year all the big publishers will have to agree to move,” Burke said. |
Watch How SmartThings Can Help Jumpstart Your Day | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | It’s CES 2014, and once again, has taken over an entire house in Las Vegas to showcase all the cool things you can do with its home automation platform. Last year, when we , the company didn’t have any actual products on the market. Well, a lot has happened since then — it’s shipped the first generation of SmartThings products to its Kickstarter backers, it’s to make it easier to get your house up and running, and it’s signed up more than 5,000 developers making hardware and apps that work on its platform. This year, when we stopped by the new SmartThings house, we got to see exactly how far it’s come. That starts with the app that powers it all. SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson gave us a demo of how users can quickly get up and running on the platform. We also got a demo of some of the automation features that have been added to SmartThings. Thanks to its new SmartThings Labs initiative, it’s got apps to support apps and products from companies like Sonos and Philips Hue bulbs. With that integration, you can do things like let your house know that you’re awake, and have it turn on the lights, start up your coffeemaker and turn on your music player. SmartThings recently . Other investors include First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund*, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, David Tisch, A-Grade Investments, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Kal Vepuri, Ryan Sarver, Jared Hecht, Steve Martocci, Emil Michael, Aaron Levie, Zorik Gordon, and Nathan Hanks. — |
Yahoo Courts Mainstream Audiences With Vertical Sites, Launches Yahoo Food And Yahoo Tech | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Add another news portal to the increasingly crowded world of tech news sites, and another food portal if you’re still feeling hungry. Today Yahoo officially launched , a new site that will sit alongside Yahoo News and Yahoo Business, providing news about the tech world for a mainstream audience. And it also launched a new digital magazine, Yahoo Food. As part of Yahoo Tech, it is announcing some new hires, including Rafe Needleman as the site’s editorial director. Needleman, a veteran journalist, was poached from Evernote, where he had initially been the startup’s and then progressed to director of developer relations. But unlike other consumer publications, there will be a catch: no display ads. This is part of a new effort from Yahoo to move the needle and bring a new audience to its properties, and it looks like part of this will include ways of delivering content that present a more unique experience, potentially one more preferable to competitors whose sites are cluttered with banner and skyscraper and interstitial ads. Marissa Mayer, presenting a keynote at the CES conference in Las Vegas, brought star hire David Pogue, who left a role as a tech columnist at the New York Times to join Yahoo, on stage to talk all things Yahoo Tech. “In my opinion, the point is that the high end is really well taken care of… But who is taking care of the middle 85%? NOBODY!” (Yes, he screamed this last part.) I’m currently at the Yahoo keynote listening to them present about the new verticals, but when I was waiting for the conference to start, I ran into Needleman. This is what he told me about the new site: “People who buy most of the tech in the world are very smart but they are not enmeshed in this world, and they don’t care about staff changes and for the most part they are uninterested in Silicon Valley,” he said. “They want to know what is the best TV to buy.” As for Yahoo Food, it looks like this is the start of a number of vertical efforts from the company. “Digital magazines are a core part of our long-term vision,” said Mayer in her keynote. The site will incorporate elements from other Yahoo properties, like Flickr and from the looks of it will also incorporate social elements from other sites, too. As for how advertising will work in both of these? It’s not totally clear. I’ve had a browse through Yahoo Tech and cannot see anything in there that I’d call an ad — unless some of the app articles are actually sponsored content. The architecture of the site follows that of Flickr — that is to say, a mosaic in which, when you click on a particular picture stub, it expands. My guess is that this mosaic will become the basis of where ads will live, rather than alongside articles themselves. That would give Yahoo the option of putting in sponsored content, but also small, autoplaying videos that will be there when you’re browsing the full range of stories, but not when you’ve chosen to focus on a particular article — which comes across on a clean, white page. |
Yahoo Launches News Digest, Its First App Based On Summly | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Today at its CES keynote, Yahoo announced a new product, News Digest, to help people stay “quickly informed” on the day’s big topics by sending out twice daily updates, or digests. The content is a curated “blend” of information, using several sources to create news stories. Yahoo calls the individual stories “atoms.” The goal of News Digest is to bring users “comprehensive, effortless, and complete” information on their world. The product represents Yahoo’s first product built on top of Summly, a company that it purchased that had a focus on gisting information to small summaries. Yahoo’s own stated goal is to “give users a daily source of news that they are missing today.” The new service fits well inside Yahoo’s new rubric of building mobile applications that help users with their daily tasks. News Digest is designed to be used at least twice daily, so it could have high resonance among its user base. Yahoo’s keynote address also included various notes on its content strategy, which is expanding. It seems logical that its own reporting will be folded into News Digest. We’ll have hands on notes in short order. The app is live in . |
Twitter Will Issue First Quarterly Report As Public Company On Feb 5th, Take Questions Via Twitter | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Today, Twitter announced that it will report its fourth quarter fiscal year 2013 results on February 5th, 2014. This is the first report to be issued since the company went public last year. In an interesting move, questions will be able to be submitted via Twitter directly. “Questions submitted via Twitter, directed to @TwitterIR, using the hashtag #TWTRearnings will be considered during the Q&A portion of the conference call in addition to questions submitted by conference call participants,” said Twitter in a . There will be a live webcast of the conference call, as roughly per usual with internet companies today. Twitter also notes that its investor website, as well as accounts including @twitter, @twitterIR and CEO Dick Costolo’s account to distribute investor news. Points that we’ll be watching for in the report include any user growth metrics that might flesh out how Twitter is doing with its onboarding efforts. Its and recent and outside-network contextual products will also be evaluated based on the numbers it reports. Twitter recently , the ex-CEO of Pearson, as its first female board member. This ended a period of intense attention as to why Twitter’s board had no female presence whatsoever. Twitter offered its IPO late last year at a price of $26 and it quickly ballooned to $44 at open. The stock but has since recovered, — though it did trend downwards slightly in trading today. Image Credit: |
Yahoo Announces That It Has Acquired “Intelligent Homescreen” Startup Aviate | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just made her first announcement onstage during her Consumer Electronics Show keynote — that the company has acquired , a startup that taps the apps on your smartphone to bring up information at the moment that it’s relevant. Mayer suggested that Yahoo could use Aviate’s technology to deliver its content in ways that are “smarter and more personalized.” For example, she said that your homescreen could automatically show you stock quotes at the beginning of the day, instead of forcing you to open a finance app. The company offered more details : We envision homescreens becoming smarter, more personalized, aware of your context. Aviate helps us bring this vision to life. Aviate auto-categorizes apps on your Android phone and intelligently gathers them into “spaces.” By using signals to understand your context – WIFI, GPS, Accelerometer, Time, etc – Aviate automatically surfaces information at the moment it’s useful. So whether you’re just waking up, driving, at work, or maybe out for the night, Aviate learns your habits and helps anticipate the information and apps you need – making your phone smarter. Note that Aviate is an Android product, and the blog post says Yahoo plans to make it “a central part of our Android-based experiences in 2014 (and beyond)” — not, it seems, on iOS. When it was independent, , but I’m guessing its capabilities would be significantly limited. It’s also interesting to see Yahoo making an Android-focused acquisition, especially since we’ve written about . The Yahoo post doesn’t offer any details about the financials of the deal, but it does suggest, unsurprisingly, that the Aviate team is joining the company. The startup last year from Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. |
Meet ChoiceMap, A New App That Helps You Make Better Decisions | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Making complicated decisions is an emotionally fraught process and (if you are like me) the whole thing can leave you feeling paralyzed. is a new free iPhone app that helps you break down complex dilemmas into a list of priorities, rate them by how they will affect your life, and then uses an algorithm to score decisions. You can use it for everything from figuring out the future of your relationship to just deciding what to eat for dinner. It might seem a bit strange to use your iPhone to make the kind of decisions you’d usually talk over with a friend or hash out in your head (or a journal), but there are already several apps out there intended to help you make sense of your feelings. For example, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez , which she described as “the pro/con list for the smartphone, emoticon-favoring generation.” Both apps can help turn a mass of frazzled thoughts into cool, rational decisions, but I don’t think the two necessarily need to be seen as competitors. We all process things in different ways. For some people, seeing the emoticons Feels produces is helpful. For others, the bar graphs and percentages ChoiceMap uses to rank and rate your options are the way to go. Of course, the numbers only mean what you want them to mean, but looking at them gave me a much-needed moment of clarity on some issues that have been causing me a lot of anxiety.
Over the last week, I’ve used ChoiceMap to organize my thoughts and feelings on stuff ranging from what movie to watch next, as well as more personal issues I am too discreet to put on TechCrunch. Back in May 2013, I that was and helps you keep track of your emotions by rating them on a 10-point scale each day. Emotions tend to play tricks on our memories and Expereal is intended as a tool to help users keep their recollections of certain events or periods of time free from cognitive bias. ChoiceMap’s developer Jonathan Jackson was also influenced by Kahneman’s work. In this case, ChoiceMap draws on the psychologist’s writing about decision-making. In his book , Kahneman states that our thoughts are affected by two systems. System 1 “is basically intuition, a black box. It’s hard to know what priorities influence our gut feelings. System 2 is slow, methodical, and conscious,” explains Jackson. “With ChoiceMap, you weigh priorities, so decisions reflect what you care about the most.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAFwoQHAEzg&w=640&h=360] As seen in the video above, Jackson was inspired to make ChoiceMap while working through important and complex decisions about his career path, which city he should move to, and a potential relationship. In addition, Jackson also worked with , an organization that helps social entrepreneurs decide which social issues to tackle. “I realized that the algorithm I wrote solved a personal problem: where I should move after grad school, but the math had the potential to solve a major social problem: everyone makes mistakes,” he says. “That triggered the idea of a digital platform to help everyone make better decisions.” One of the things I like best about ChoiceMap is that you can create your own list of options or select from a wide assortment of templates for decisions ranging from “outfits” and “cars” to “breakup or stay together,” “baby names” and “career paths.” Jackson decided which templates to include by using ChoiceMap, of course. “We compiled a list of suggestions from friends, beta testers, and our own lives. We ChoiceMapped that list and turned the top results into templates,” Jackson explains. “We researched each template’s priorities, too, to make sure we included important factors for each decision.” I wish I had ChoiceMap when I was making the decision to move abroad several years ago. Instead of just sitting around dealing with a crazy-making mix of worry and excitement or engaging in anxiety-provoking discussions with friends (“There are a lot of mosquitos there. You’ll get bitten to death.”), ChoiceMap could have helped me sort out my hopes and fears in a much neater, more methodical way. Of course, you can do the same thing with pen and paper, but, to be honest, seeing the results of ChoiceMap’s algorithm is pretty fun and often enlightening. But ultimately, Jackson says the app does not set out to make final decisions–that’s still up to you. “The funny thing is–with ChoiceMap–people don’t need to decide what’s best. They need to acknowledge their own priorities,” says Jackson. “ChoiceMap helps people clarify these priorities one step at a time. As users walk through ChoiceMap, they feed our algorithm everything it needs to rank their options. So, at the end of the line, people discover that they’ve already made the big decision through a series of tiny steps.” ChoiceMap plans to start raising funds this month to create a larger platform for a wide range of decision making and already has a monetization plan in place. Jackson refrained from sharing too many details, but says “global-decision making is a big market.” Future plans “extends well beyond the iPhone app,” he tells me. “We plan to change the way the entire world makes decisions–from picking the size of a latte to passing foreign policy. The app is a tiny step toward a much larger decision-making platform.” |
WillCall’s New Bluetooth “BarTab” Feature Lets You Buy Drinks At Concerts By Saying Your Name | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | ‘s plot to reimagine nightlife goes way beyond its concert ticketing app. So it’s tackling the annoyance of buying drinks, from long bar lines to fumbling for cash to forgetting your credit card. Today it , a feature within its app that lets you buy drinks at participating venues by saying your name. But how does the bartender know who you are? Through WillCall’s secret weapon: Bluetooth Low Energy. Here’s how BarTab works. You install and go to a venue running BarTab. It doesn’t matter if you bought your tickets through WillCall or not. As you approach the bar, its BarTab-equipped iPad pings your WillCall app over Bluetooth Low Energy, and you confirm the prompt that you want to open a tab. In case Bluetooth LE fails or you don’t have it running on your phone, you can show the bartender your ID and they can find you in their BarTab app to start your tab. Bartenders select your name from the BarTab list to charge you for drinks Then you order drinks from the bartender as normal but when it’s time to pay, you just say your name. They pull you up from the list of nearby BarTab users, and charge your WillCall-connected credit card. You receive a push notification that you’ve been charged that also lets you tip, and you get back to partying. Your tab is automatically closed when the show ends and you get emailed an itemized receipt. I got to try out a demo of BarTab at a recent warehouse concert at San Francisco’s , and it was breezy. Since bartenders don’t have to run back and forth to the cash register, get you change, swipe your credit card, or find your card you already opened a tab with, WillCall’s BarTab could shorten bar lines. You don’t have to worry about having cash on hand or forgetting to close your credit card tab when you leave the bar. It may even be more secure because someone else can’t buy drinks on your tab without you being notified via push. WillCall founder Donnie Dinch tells me “the goal is to make live entertainment a bigger part of people’s lives and we’re doing that by any means necessary.” Unlike competing bar payment , , and , you pretty much order as you always did and don’t have to fiddle with an in-app drink menu where it can be tough to make special orders. Dinch notes that bartenders are resistant to too much change, and tells me “We can remove friction from the process but still maintain the user-bartender interaction.” Unlike some competitors, you can’t order your drink from the comfort of the crowd or your conversation and just stroll to the bar to pick it up. That sounds nice, but is a little clumsy in practice. Instead, BarTab feels pretty natural. It’s a sacrifice WillCall thinks will make BarTab easy for users and venues to adopt. Venues interested can . Eventually, WillCall may let users opt in to having venues receive their email address to hit them up about future events. If that sounds annoying, know that Ticketmaster and Ticketfly always give your contact info to venues where you buy tickets. WillCall is still experimenting with how to earn money from BarTab, but it’s leaning away from taking a percentage of sales and more towards a software-as-a-service model where it charges venues a flat fee per person that uses the WillCall app at the bar. That should keep WillCall’s investors like 500 Startups, SV Angel, r happy they’ve poured into the startup. Ok, so BarTab could help venues sell more drinks and delight customers so they keep coming back. But WillCall has a whole other value proposition — a unified nightlife data layer. WillCall founder Donnie Dinch Dinch explains, “We realized that venues know very little about the people that are in there. How do we get better engagement for ourselves? We use Google Analytics and Mixpanel. That really doesn’t exist for the live entertainment industry because there’s not enough data recorded. The big play is to start to build out the data layer for venues so they can implement better loyalty programs and market to specific people.” WillCall could let venues see that you’ve visited four times this month and bought several drinks each night. Eventually, WillCall could build a way for venues to give you a free drink for your patronage. Or venues could see you buy three extra tickets to each show that you go to and bring friends, so it might be smart to give you a free ticket to keep you coming. “[BarTab] is the first of many touchpoints we can mange to get better data for the venues,” Dinch tells me. “We’ll definitely at some point do merchandise.” And instead of sales data on tickets, the bar, and merchandise all being siloed, will lace it all together so venues can find out who are their most valuable customers. Right now, the biggest reason people don’t go to more concerts is they don’t know about ones they’d want to see. By bringing venues into the data age, WillCall could make sure promoters know who tell about shows, and help you have a nicer time rocking out once you’re there. |
Airlock, Facebook’s New A/B Testing Framework, Will Help Improve User Experience On Its Mobile Apps | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | has developed a new mobile A/B testing framework, it announced today. In , engineers Ari Grant and Kang Zhang explained that when Facebook two years ago, it gave them finer control over many aspects of mobile development, but also meant losing the ability to A/B test. With Airlock, Facebook can make new updates to their iOS and Android apps that “support 10 to 15 different variations of a single experiment and put it in the hands of millions of people,” which means that the company’s developers now have the ability to figure out which features work the best (or don’t) and improve mobile user experience much more quickly. Even though 73% of its 1.19 billion users (as of September 2013) access the social network primarily through their mobile devices, Facebook has struggled to make sure that its mobile strategy keeps up with rivals like Twitter. Airlock will make it easier for Facebook’s developers to figure out what mobile users want, which is especially important because . Both social networks also have to compete with the increasing popularity of messaging apps like , and . Airlock is the latest sign that Facebook is focused on fine tuning its mobile strategy. Back in April, it , which marked its entry into a new business category, or paid tools and services such as back-end data storage, for mobile app developers. And earlier this week, Indian startup , which makes a software tool for analyzing the performance of Android apps, . The Bangalore-based company’s team will move to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, where they will build analysis tools to help develop apps. |
After A Troubled 2013, The PC Market Looks For Stability | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Today Gartner released a preliminary set of results for the global PC market in the fourth quarter of 2013, indicating that PC sales . 2013 has certainly been a historically tough year for PCs and the industry that builds and sells them. Gartner, with its fourth quarter predictions now mostly in place, estimates that the PC market shrank 10% during the year. Total unit volume was 315.9 million units, a level that The Next Web is equivalent to shipments in 2009. I think that we can cap 2013’s PC market with a few statements. Let’s begin: That last point is not news. The prediction (IDC, not Gartner if you were curious) expects a 3.8% contraction in 2014, and then for the pace of sales to become “slightly positive in the longer term.” All told this means that the PC market should manage to stay above 300 million units per year for the forseeable future. Oh no, the world is ending. I’ve been as guilty as most in using hyperbolic language to describe the PC market. Plummeting, decimating, falling, crashing and the like have been the of reporting on the year’s results. But historic declines can be accidentally conflated with existential threat if we are not careful. I think that in retrospect, 2013 will remain a decidedly black eye on the PC market’s history. But provided that the folks counting boxes have it right, the swan dive (I did it again) is all but in the pool. Why was 2013 such a bad year for PCs? You could point to a weak economy, issues regarding Windows 8 and its market reception, unimaginative new PCs from OEMs, rising tablet demand, a general shift to mobile, and a host of other reasons. There is no single cause. But it’s worth noting that what likely merged to create the turbulent confluence that so retarded PC sales is in decline itself. The economy is better, PC design is better, Windows 8.1 is better, and so forth. A 3.8% decline this year for PCs would certainly not be a win. But anything less than a 5% decline I think supports the prediction that the decline in PC sales is slowing, and could end altogether. I don’t quite know how to phrase this, but once the PC market stops shrinking (again, we’re leaning on trends and predictions), the idea of a post-PC world itself ends. In fact, we need a new term. Call it the co-PC world, in which tablets and smartphones are equal in weight and importance to the PC. As I’ve written before, there is a muddle afoot in all of this. Operating systems are breaking down their own walls and spreading tentacles across device classes. This means that if we compare the traditional PC market to tablets, say, we are pitting one group of Windows devices against another. That won’t do, obviously, for comparison’s sake. And, as other operating systems — Android, in this case — move the device size chart (from phone, to tablet, to PC) we are going to have a more diverse PC market in general, further undercutting its performance as indicative of the health of WinTel, as we have for so long deemed it. So, fuck 2013 is what I’m saying, from the PC market’s perspective. It was awful. But shrinking 10% from massive scale still leaves massive scale. We need to keep close eyes on continuing declines in PC sales, but inside the next 8 quarters we could see a positive year-over-year period for PC sales. Something to think about. |
Sources: Yahoo Bought Aviate For $80M | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Earlier this week, , a startup providing contextually relevant information on Android homescreens, but it didn’t say anything about the acquisition price. Now a source with knowledge of the deal tells me that the acquisition was for $80 million. My source didn’t know any of the details beyond the amount — the mix of cash and stock or how much of the total is tied to an earn out, for example. Regardless, that’s an impressive price for a young startup that raised (from Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others) less than a year ago. (It was also incubated at StartX.) When I reached out for this story, spokespeople from both Yahoo and Aviate declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Yahoo has been on a pretty visible acquisition streak since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO. Last month, for example, it . During her keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, that Aviate’s technology will allow Yahoo to deliver content in “smarter and more personalized” ways on Android phones. Another writer heard from a source who said the number was actually $20 million, not $80 million — which seems more realistic given the amount that Aviate has raised. However, when I contacted my source (again, it’s someone who’s in a position to know the price), they confirmed that the number was $80 million. We’re trying to figure out where these different amounts are coming from. It’s possible that different parties are choosing to interpret the deal in different ways (again, depending on how stock options, earn out, etc. are counted), but honestly I’m not sure. I’ve confirmed with a second source that the acquisition price was $80 million. And we’ve heard a third source that the price was $80 million. They also confirmed that Aviate had been talking to Dropbox as well, which may go some way toward explaining the price. |
Ifbyphone Raises Another $9M For Voice Marketing Tools | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Marketing technology company is announcing that it has raised $9 million in Series D funding. The round was led by new investor River Cities Capital Funds (a growth equity firm focused on healthcare and IT) and brings Ifbyphone’s total funding to more than $30 million. Previous backers Apex Venture Partners, Origin Ventures, and I2A also invested in the Series D, as did SSM partners. The round was also disclosed in . Ifbyphone offers products for marketing, sales, and customer support teams to track and automate their calls. Services also include interactive voice response, virtual call centers, and more. Over email, CEO Irv Shapiro compared the company to Salesforce.com: “The magic with Salesforce is that it gives sales managers control over their own data. We give marketing and sales managers control over voice conversations and the data associated with those conversations.” The company says it has nearly 4,000 paying customers, and that it processed more than 200 million phone calls and 600 million minutes as of December of last year. It plans to make 25 new hires in the first half of the year, bringing the total headcount to more than 115. |
Google Play Services Gets Improved Mobile Ads And Multiplayer Support, Google+ Sharing And Preview Of Drive API | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Google today started the latest version of its for Android. Just like earlier updates, version 4.1 brings a number of incremental changes to the company’s service for integrating Google services into mobile apps. The rollout is currently in process and should land on all Android devices worldwide within the next few days. Today’s update brings support for turn-based multiplayer games to Play services, for example. With this, developers can easily build asynchronous games with up to eight participants. Every time a player takes a turn, the data is uploaded to Google’s servers and shared with the other players. Google has integrated this service with its tools for matching players with others, too. Also new in this update is improved support for Google+ sharing. This, the company says, will make it “even easier for users to share with the right people from your app.” As part of this update, users will be able to get auto-complete support and suggested recipients for all Gmail contacts, device contacts and people on Google+. Developers can now also use Play services to access Google Drive through a new API that’s now in preview. With this, they can read and write files in Drive. Users will be able to work on these files offline, and changes will be synced automatically. For developers who use Google’s ad products, this new version introduces full support for , DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Search Ads for Mobile Apps. What’s most interesting for advertisers, though, is that publishers can now also use a new location API to give Google access to a user’s location when requesting ads. Location-based ads are likely to perform better than generic ads, after all, though users have generally been a bit nervous about sharing this data with advertisers given the potential privacy ramifications. One other feature most users will likely appreciate is improved battery life. While Google isn’t sharing any details about this, the company said that anybody who has Google Location Reporting turned on should see longer battery life after this update, though whether that means less than 1 percent more (likely) or 10 percent more (very unlikely) remains to be seen. |
Oculus VR’s New “Crystal Cove” Prototype Is Kind Of Amazing | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | has been showing off a new version of its virtual reality technology at the Consumer Electronics Show. According to Vice President of Product Nate Mitchell, the “Crystal Cove” prototype features two big improvements — positional tracking and low persistence. I have to admit that when Mitchell first said this, I started to worry that these were going to be minor changes, only relevant to hardcore gamers and serious virtual reality geeks. Then I tried out the new prototype and, well, it was kind of amazing. You can see me trying out the prototype in the video above. Ignoring the fact that I look pretty goofy as I swerve around (or, fine, don’t ignore it) — I think it’s pretty clear that I’m having a great time. The more noticeable change is the positional tracking. Basically, it means that in addition to responding to where you look, the Oculus headset can also track the position of your head — if you lean left or right or forward or backward. So in the first demo, a tower defense game, I could lean in and see the details of the individual figures running around the screen, or I could lean back and see the full scope of the playing field. The other addition, , is supposed to eliminate motion blur — so when I shifted my head in the second demo, I could still read the text on the computer screens. The bottom line is that the experience felt much, much more immersive and real than it was . Granted, some of that is also because the demo involved more sophisticated and beautiful gameplay, but hey, some of that gameplay was enabled by the new features. As for when you’ll get to try all of this out, Mitchell said the company isn’t ready to make any specific announcements, but he suggested that Oculus will probably want to ship one more round of kits out for developer testing before releasing a version for consumers. He also said that everything I tried out at CES will be available in the consumer version. Oculus, by the way, recently led by Andreessen Horowitz. |
It’s Never Too Early To Say Goodbye | Eric Eldon | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | “You can’t just quietly slip out the door,” I’ve been told by too many people I trust. So okay, fine, here’s this post about my departure! Since you asked, TechCrunch is in a really good place right now. The various numbers we use to measure ourselves — from traffic to revenue to some leaderboard provided by a tech news aggregator site whose name I forget — are once again quite healthy or even record-setting. That’s despite widespread predictions of doom a couple years back, about the time I took the co-editor job. But measurements are a means to find the essence of something, they are *not the essence itself*. That’s particularly true for a qualitative craft like news. The essence, of course, is writing great stories that help people make better decisions in life and in work, that create accountability in the world, and that maybe even delight and entertain readers from time to time. My goal from the start has been to build a new system for greatness at TechCrunch. To put the writers in front and create something that could survive any number of staffing changes while getting better and better. This has happened, gradually at first, but faster over time. From gadgets to tech policy, long-time TechCrunch writers and a whole bunch of new people have come together and formed something new and strong. Today we’re publishing posts like of a startup that was screwing over its investors, or of Silicon Valley’s boom-and-bust cycles over the years — and a lot more that you’ll just have to find on the site, or wait for in the coming weeks and months (I am privy to what’s in the pipeline). Beneath the surface, we’ve added about as much editorial structure as the team would collectively tolerate. This has meant normal newsroom stuff like a fleshed-out weekend plan and mandatory vacations, and more aggressive journalism efforts like allowing writers to take lots of time away from the day-to-day grind to go after the big stories. For me, though, it’s time to try something pretty different. I’ve been in tech since everybody wrote it off as a dying industry town about to be fully outsourced, to a scarily mainstream phenomenon. Back in the old days when my media-tools startup got covered by TechCrunch, or over the years when I’ve competed against this publication, we all seemed a little innocent, hopeful and idealistic. The dreams came true. Almost too true. Now the industry has to ask itself the baroque sorts of questions normally reserved for politicians, celebrities, old-line industry executives and the rest of the traditional elite. As engineers say about a server melting from too much traffic, this is a good problem to have. How can the tech industry use its incredible power to do good? (I mean beyond the good it already does with the products it creates.) How can it benefit all people in the world, most of whom still live in poverty? That includes people who live and work in the Bay Area, who are ending up with more of tech’s costs than benefits. How will the industry preserve the dignity of citizens while working with governments to keep them safe? The list of these sorts of questions keeps growing. The global scrutiny is only going to increase from media, from governments, and from normal people who just want to know what’s going behind their favorite apps and devices. The industry has been too caught up in the boom — which is understandable when it’s all you can do to keep your servers from melting. But it’s not 2009. And unlike the last boom, the users are real and so are the revenues. And tech as a “thing” is here to stay. Now is the time for it to take a step back and listen, have conversations with its critics, and think of creative new solutions. TechCrunch’s role, first as the original tech blog back in 2005 and now as a tech media mainstay, is both to support the great things that tech builds *and* to wrestle with the big global issues of the day. The team, I’m happy to say, is already in the middle of this big new challenge. Knowing what I know about their ambitions and abilities, well, you’ll have to keep reading. …. Oh, and one more thing. You can follow me on my overused Twitter account at and my underused Tumblr at . |
And Now For Something Completely Different, Leadership Changes | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | As you may , our beloved co-editor is moving on to do other things. Clearly Eldon will leave a huge hole, and therefore we’re going to be making a couple of editorial changes to make sure TechCrunch meets 2014 staffed up for greatness. Our esteemed Senior Editor will become Managing Editor as part of these changes. The force behind Rao has become a fixture in the Silicon Valley community since she moved back from Chicago to San Francisco. She will be instrumental in making sure TechCrunch stays true to its roots as it grapples with an increasingly competitive news cycle. Our Senior Editor will be joining me as TechCrunch co-editor, because but because managing the most influential startup publication on the planet is really a two-person job. Panzarino is a photographer by trade, who got interested in technology when he began working in a local electronic store, in order to support his photo business. He got the blogging bug and decided to parlay his electronics knowledge into an aptly named iPhone site, The iPhone Guru, which had 150k unique visitors at its height. Thinking he could probably do this professionally, he then applied for a job at The Next Web where he became Managing Editor in no time flat. At The Next Web he consistently broke Apple and Twitter news, and wrote the kind of stories we wished were on TechCrunch, so here he is. For the past six months at TechCrunch, he’s assigned news in addition to penning insightful pieces like and There was a moment in time when every one in the tech news hustle wanted Panzarino ( ) on their team and . Big time. Goodbye, , and welcome, co-leader. |
And The Winner Of Our First Hardware Battlefield Is… CubeSensors! | Chris Velazco | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Three days go by awfully quickly, don’t they? The Consumer Electronics Show — and by extension our Hardware Battlefield — only started on Tuesday but we’ve seen no shortage of take our stage here in Las Vegas. This is the first time we’ve tried to put together a Battlefield solely for hardware startups and to be quite honest, we were blown away by both the number and the caliber of the companies that threw their hats into the ring. In the end we saw hundreds of applications beget 14 great contenders, and here we are — three days later — faced with the task of choosing a winner from a great batch of finalists that includes , , , and . That unenviable decision fell to our final panel of judges — Bre Pettis, Yves Béhar, Matt Turck, and Jen McCabe — who deliberated for half an hour until they came up with a winner. We’re awfully proud of all the companies that participated in our inaugural Hardware Battlefield, but in the end only one can take home the trophy and the giant $50,000 check, the metal man, and, surprisingly, a who agreed to give us one on stage. So without further ado, say hello to our 2014 Hardware Battlefield winner and runner-up: are home air monitors packed with seven different sensors that measure over air quality, temperature, humidity, noise, light, weather pressure, and motion. You can read our full coverage . [gallery ids="939084,939085,939086,939087,939088,939089,939090,939091,939092"] [gallery ids="939093,939094,939095"] The Owlet is a baby sock that tracks a young one’s heart rate, oxygen levels, skin temperature and even provides rollover alerts during sleep. You can read our full coverage |
Bioniq Health Compares Features And The Quality Of Health Trackers | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Health trackers, from pedometers to smart scales, are flooding the market and there’s no place to conveniently compare all the different competitors. is a new website to compare the features and quality of all varieties of health trackers. In the future, Bioniq hopes to give doctors the option to “prescribe” certain health devices and build a community to offer detailed reviews. Our readers can access an early version of the site with code “TechCrunch”. Bioniq is impressive at curating novel features. It’s my job to monitor these health trackers and I learned few new things from the comparison chart. For instance, I didn’t know the Fitbit force monitored elevation levels–a feature that’d be super useful for running hills in San Francisco. Bioniq covers the full range of the newest consumer health gadgets: smart scales, glucose monitors, neurofeedback devices, and diagnostics. CES attendees are getting early access to the site today and users will notice that it’s still sparsely populated. There’s still a lot more information and few new gadgets it could include (it does not, for instance, have features about the software aspects of the wrist bands and didn’t automatically compare the to its competition). I expect that in the full release, these issues will be fixed. The more interesting elements are yet to come. “Bioniq will help individuals to find tools and technologies most relevant to their specific needs (i.e. I want to run a marathon, I want to better understand and manage my sleep, or back pain, or high blood pressure),” writes Co-Founder Dr. Daniel Kraft to me in an email. And, “For clinicians, who will increasingly be ‘prescribing’ apps and devices we will serve as a platform to enable technology (for the clinic, home, and wearable) to facilitate better diagnosis as well as disease treatment and management,” he continues. “In the near future I may ‘prescribe’ you exercise with a ‘fitbit’ or others most relevant to the patient, or a BP Cuff to help manage your hypertension.” So, why couldn’t Amazon just do everything that Bioniq hopes to do? “Amazon is a great marketplace but the essence of these new technologies for health and wellness is not just buying them. It’s how they are used, what happens with the data, and who is involved,” Kraft argues. “The features soon to emerge on Bioniq will quickly clarify that Amazon is barely related to what we are building for our users. E-commerce is just one piece of what we are doing.” Health trackers are becoming a lot more popular, and if Bioniq can exploit their unique place in our lives, it’ll have provided a very useful utility. |
Pintrips Files A Motion To Dismiss Pinterest’s Trademark Suit, Says ‘Pin’ Is Too Generic | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Pins, pins everywhere! Back in October, we reported on a filed by against planning travel startup , accusing it of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition and trademark dilution. Now Pintrips is fighting back. It has filed a motion to dismiss on two grounds: first, that the term “pin” is too generic; and second, that Pinterest has made a claim on insufficient grounds as a result. These are the pin buttons in question, from a picture in Pinterest’s original suit: Pintrips’ motion for dismissal, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is embedded below. The development comes at a time when Pinterest is facing another setback on the trademark front. Last month, a court in Europe determined that — a London-based startup called Premium Interest does. A spokesperson for Pinterest tells us that it will be appealing the case. In the Pintrips case, the startup is fighting back with a vengeance, David versus Goliath style. Pintrips — significantly smaller than the heavily venture-backed Pinterest that is now valued at — accuses it of preying upon a “hard-working startup” that is not in the same social media space; and of taking legal actions because of its failure to secure trademarks on generic words. From the suit: “Frustrated by its failure to secure a U.S. trademark registration for the term ‘pin,’ and knowing that it cannot assert trademark rights for the term ‘pin,’ Plaintiff has resorted to suing Pintrips, Inc. (‘Pintrips’), a hard-working start up, on specious claims. Pintrips is not a social media platform. It is an online travel planning tool that allows users to review and monitor information for commercial flights…Part of Pintrips’ functionality [as we have ] is based on allowing users to virtually pin flights while planning travel arrangements. This Complaint is a textbook example of an industry giant using a spurious lawsuit to bully a small entity into giving up its right to use a generic, common term that merely describes a core function of its service.” Pinterest, however, appears to be directly refuting a core part of this claim about the registration of the word “pin.” It notes that it has already had its application approved (but not yet registered): “Our focus is on preventing consumer confusion and protecting our trademarks,” a spokesperson tells me. “Toward that goal, Pinterest already has registered trademarks for PIN in several countries, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office has approved Pinterest’s application for that mark, acknowledging the protectability of PIN in favor of Pinterest.” Pintrips raises a number of other points that it believes argues against the ability for Pinterest to claim any ownership of the word “pin.” For starters, there are already a number of other, much bigger online services that already use the word freely and without legal heat from Pinterest. They include Microsoft, Google and Facebook: Pintrips’ lawyers note that removing “a common generic term” like “pin” from “common and pervasive use so that a single company may profit” is against the law. But even so, there are a number of companies already with trademarks granted that include the word “pin,” again implying that these already coexist with Pinterest. Those companies include Pinny, Pinwheel, Pinning Party (my favorite) and Pinsync. And AOL (parent company of TC) even makes an appearance in the motion in another section, where Pintrips’ lawyers attempt to demonstrate from other examples that words that sound too generic have failed to get trademarked in the past. For AOL, its Achilles’ heel was “You have mail.” “Ordinary, everyday expressions are repeatedly denied trademark status because they are informational phrases rather than indicators of source, and thus such expressions remain free for all to use,” Pintrips’ lawyers write. Part of Pinterest’s appeal to users is its accessibility, which is helped by being built around non-technical and non-virtual concepts like pinboards and pins. Pinterest, now with $338 million in funding, has an enormous amount of resources now to try to protect its brand from those who will try to copycat its concepts and success. The question now is whether it’s choosing the right battles to fight and whether a Pintrips (or in the case of Europe, Premium Interest) may ever really impede the progress of its business. Image: [scribd id=197877254 key=key-qai3lfy6liuwj4bdgjc mode=scroll] |
Twitter Toys With Ways To Boost Engagement With ‘@AchievementBird’ Experiment | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Twitter has begun experimenting with an account, called , that will direct message you ‘achievements’ that you earn with your tweets. The account is protected but has granted follows in the past few days. Once you’re on the list, the account will occasionally send you messages about how one of your tweets has performed. Xero engineer Owen Williams on Twitter, as well as a couple of the messages that he had received so far: One of my tweets was ‘used in an article’ and AchievementBird notified me of the fact. When I clicked on the link, the relatively new ‘Related headlines’ feature showed me exactly where the tweet had been used. Another Twitter experimental account called is likely related to this effort, as it claims to let you ‘See where tweets are embedded around the web’ — though it could have some wider applications as a digest of newsworthy tweets. : This account appears to have been a part of a Twitter hack week project, as the bio has now been updated to reflect that. So probably not a part of Twitter’s main ‘experiments’ pipeline, but something team members were working on as a side project. referred us to the blog post It appears that AchievementBird is tapping into Twitter’s analytics package to surface the results of user tweets. Though it rolled out analytics to business users and verified users first, anyone can now get . This is what it looks like: If you’re a frequent tweeter, you’ll have some stats stacked up about RTs, favorites, followers and more. I’ve talked , which appears to measure the popularity of tweets by velocity. In that piece I mentioned that third-party Twitter engagement tracker Favstar is one of my go-to sites on a daily basis. One of the features that offers is accounts that hit you up when your tweets have passed fav milestones like ’50’ or ‘100’. It also offers a ‘tweet of the day’ award that you can bestow on friends or follows you think gave good tweet. Who knows what Twitter will end up doing with the AchievementBird account in the end, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it weave it into the main product as it . Having full access to Twitter’s dataset means that Twitter can offer features Favstar can’t, as it has to poll the API. I still like Favstar’s presentation better, and its integration with third-party apps, but it’s early days for AchievementBird and Twitter could always revamp its analytics to be more friendly. Either way, this appears to be rolling along the track towards integration as a push notification, not a landing page. Sending alerts to users notifying them that people are actually reading and even using their tweets in articles seems to be a good way to encourage those users to tweet more. And converting users from lurkers to active tweeters is important for retention and growth. |
With Revenue Now In The Millions, Piqora Prepares A “Content Management System” For The Visual Web | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | , a company that began its life as a Pinterest-centric company has over the past year expanded further into the visual web space with marketing tools for Tumblr and Instagram, as well. Today, the company is giving a peek inside its business, and announcing it’s now generating revenue in the single digit millions, with monthly recurring revenue up 600% in 2013. In addition, the company is also publicly disclosing a $2.1 million round of venture financing from last April, which comes on top of a previous seed round of $1.4 million. Freestyle Capital again led the newer round, which also included participation from WTI (venture debt), Baseline and Lazerow Ventures. Over the past year, Piqora has grown its customer base 400 percent, and now serves over 300+ clients, generally in the fashion, home decor and e-commerce space, including several well-known brands like Crate & Barrel, Wayfair, Etsy and Steve Madden, for example. These businesses pay anywhere from $12,000 to $24,000 on for an annual subscription to Piqora’s services, which include its analytics dashboard as well as a hands-on customer relations component which sees the firm advising brands on how to better succeed with their advertising, marketing and community-building efforts across the visual web. For instance, Piqora’s team can suggest what to do when Pinterest pins and re-pins are declining, or which popular and trending hashtags they should use when posting to Instagram. With the Instagram product in particular, the company is now tracking over 1,000 hashtags, CEO Sharad Verma tells TechCrunch. In addition, over 400 brands have connected their Google Analytics and Omniture accounts to measure the social ROI of their images, and Piqora has tracked over 450 (up 800% year-over-year) photo contests and sweepstakes on visual networks, which delivered over half a billion in product impressions. Now, the company is embarking on a plan to expand its product suite yet again in 2014, with something Verma likens to a “CMS for the visual web.” “The number of images that brands have to now monitor has exploded beyond imagination. What they’re looking for is a unified way to manage all the images – to collect branded images from a variety of networks – and the ability to see all the images in a consolidated library, sort of like a content management system for the visual web,” he says. This product, Verma explains, would allow marketers access to internal resources like their own Dropbox folder, for example, but also the organic conversations and imagery posted about their brand on public networks where user-generated content is present. An early step toward this larger vision of a CMS for the visual web will allow marketers to see all the images for the hashtags they’re tracking, which they could then publish on their own blog, website or Facebook. The product (pictured at top) will become available on the 27th of this month. But Verma’s idea for a “WordPress for the visual web,” is not yet built, and would eventually be priced as a separate offering. With the additional financing and the revenue Piqora is generating, Verma tells us he’s looking to double the business in 2014, especially in terms of growing the company’s headcount. The team, now 15 people, will add more sales and marketing personnel to its ranks, hopefully growing to 30 in the near future, he says. |
Pocket Drones Gets $50,000 In Pledges Overnight | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Hardware Battlefield entrant blew past their initial goal of $30,000 last night after launching on our stage at . The company, run by long-time friends and moderators of the , Tim Reuter, TJ Johnson, and Chance Roth, built their drones as an alternative to expensive, bulky toy drones. They are currently at $51,000 on Kickstarter and rising. “We’re a mission-driven company,” Reuter said. “Our goal is to put flying robots in the hands of as many people as possible. We think it’s empowering to democratize the sky.” The drones can carry objects as heavy as a GoPro camera and folds up to fit inside a (big) cargo pocket or backpack. You can control it with your own RF controller or, with the right module, your tablet. The drone costs $415 for a model without a controller and $455 with controller. You can . |
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Robin Labs Builds A Rear-View Mirror Personal Assistant For New Strategic Investor Pioneer | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | — maker of the eponynous personal assistant app — has been in the news of late because of a leaked video that shows a . While that app and their association remain the subject of “ongoing conversations,” Robin Labs has come to CES in Las Vegas with other news: it’s raised funding from electronics maker , and it’s working on a new version of its personal assistant that integrates into Pioneer’s in-car rear-view mirror system. The funding, Robin Labs’ CEO and founder Ilya Eckstein tells me, is an extension of its seed round, and comes from , a venture fund connected to Pioneer. It brings the total raised by Robin Labs up to about $1 million: previously it had raised about $700,000 from a group of angels that includes Esther Dyson. The company is now preparing to raise a Series A. The new app, meanwhile, marks a new chapter for Pioneer. At CES, the company is showing off its latest line of in-car connected touchscreen devices. These incorporate things like navigation, music, and more. But in a section separate from that, it’s presenting a picture of what is to come. While Pioneer has been known as a leader in speakers and other audio technology, here it is showing off rear-view mirrors that double as touchscreens. The idea is that while navigation screens can be useful, a mirror is far less obtrusive and is a place a driver already regularly glances (or should, in theory). It is here that Robin is making an appearance, powering Pioneer’s Drive Agent Mirror. This is an Android-based voice-driven personal assistant embedded in a car rear-view mirror, where the voice interface and the natural language understanding (NLU) platform come from Robin. In the demo that I saw, the rear-view mirror is a bit wider than a normal one. When it’s turned off, it’s fully reflective. When turned on, one-third of it turns into a touchscreen device. There, you can select from a menu that is a customized interface of the same features that appear on the that already exists. This includes maps, navigation, street parking, local listings, weather and so on. You can navigate the whole menu, as well as the items within it, using your voice. Adding a personal assistant into a connected mirror is a clever move for Pioneer and Robin because it’s a way to make a voice assistant — and corresponding visual information that it provides — as seamless an experience as possible. “To create the ultimate human machine interface for the driver, one needs a superior combination of truly natural voice & language understanding technology and flawlessly integrated hardware components,” Eckstein says, “which is why we are excited to join forces with Pioneer, the world’s top expert on in-vehicle infotainment systems. Together, we are well positioned to radically improve the driving experience for car owners around the globe.” Pioneer and Robin Labs are, of course, not the only two to be eyeing up this opportunity. Although Pioneer may be a leader in audio equipment, the battle for who will be out in front in connected cars is still wide open. Given that it may be some time before we are all using self-driving cars that let us completely stop paying attention to the road, I’d wager that those software and hardware makers who concentrate on making the connected experience as undistracting as possible are some of the players to watch here. (Another one is Meta, the YC startup that has developed a set of but is already formulating ways of incorporating the technology outside of the headset and into the wider space of the vehicle you are driving.) On the side of Robin Labs, while an implementation with Pioneer is definitely a cool progression for them, it also underscores another part of the startup’s ambition: to create a platform that can be used across different devices, and different verticals to provide a voice-responsive personal assistant to everyone and for everything. It’s this platform that is the basis of the Pioneer prototype, and also of the Yahoo assistant app in that leaked video. Eckstein tells me that while Robin Labs will continue to work on specific implementations like these in 2014, the plan will be to release an SDK so that any developer can use it anywhere they want. This will put Robin into direct competition with a heavy hitter in this space, Nuance, which this week also unveiled Nuance Cloud Services, which will let developers integrate Nuance’s voice-recognition and natural language processing engine into their apps. (One of the first demos of this, this week, was in the .) Eckstein acknowledges that there is competition there, but also contends that the two are targeting their products to different audiences. “Nuance is targeting the Fortune 500 companies, while we focus on the rest of the world,” he told me. “Nuance is purely B2B, we are (B2)B2C. So at the moment, our platforms are not competitive to each other, market-wise. And in case we do end up in a competitive position, so be it, it does not deter us. This industry is ripe with examples of David vs Goliath, and especially in the case of Nuance, I believe their near-monopoly in speech tech will not last much longer.” |
New Gmail Feature Allows Anyone On Google+ To Email You & Vice Versa, But Opt Out Is Provided | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Google is today a change to Gmail that will further bake in Google+ to its webmail product in a way that’s actually somewhat practical, though also potentially invasive. Going forward, you’ll now be able to directly email your Google+ contacts from Gmail, even if you don’t know their email address. And by default, anyone on Google+ will be able to email you as well, thanks to this new option, if you don’t adjust your settings. This feature appears as you begin typing your contact’s name in the “To” field of an email message. Matching contacts display first at the top of the list of suggestions provided by Gmail’s autocomplete, while your Google+ connections appear below. Because of the privacy implications of this feature — and the possibility of overwhelming the inboxes of more public figures — Google has at least put controls in place that allow you to specify who can send you emails. You can choose from “No one” to continue on as normally, or open things up a bit wider by choosing from “Circles,” “Extended Circles,” or even “Anyone on Google+.” And of course, because Google+ is now the default platform for YouTube commenting, and required for things like setting up a new Gmail account, the “Anyone on Google+” option is much larger today than in earlier years. Many people are technically “on Google+,” even if they aren’t active on the Google+ destination site itself. In addition, Google explains that not only are you able to specify who can send you emails, your email address isn’t visible to a Google+ connection until you send that person an email, nor is their email visible to you, unless they send you an email. The feature also takes advantage of , which breaks the Gmail inbox into sections like “Primary,” “Social,” Promotions,” and more. Going forward, emails from those in your Google+ Circles will appear in the “Primary” section, while those you don’t have in your Circles will be filtered over to the “Social” tab instead. Those users will only be able to start a conversation with you if you respond to them or add them to your Google+ Circles – something you can do right from the email header (which fortunately offers a visible “Report Spam or Abuse” link, as well). This new feature is an expansion on the Google+ integrations the company which originally brought Google+ to the Gmail inbox and Contacts section. The addition allowed users to automatically update their address book with a contact’s most recent information, making Google+ a more practical service than before. Also at the time, Google added a widget to the Gmail sidebar for viewing a contact’s most recent Google+ post, allowing you to add them to your Google+ Circles. Like before, the newer integrations are practical and useful when you need them as a sender, but could be disruptive to you as a recipient of emails — much like email itself, if you think about it. For those who still use the “Priority Inbox” interface instead of tabs, the additional emails could become cumbersome. But Google is making the setting available to users before the feature launches, so they’ll be able to at least adjust their settings before a deluge occurs. (Unless, of course, they get so much email that they miss the note from Google.) Google says the new feature is rolling out over the next couple of days to everyone who uses Gmail and Google+. Users will be alerted by way of a link to the setting when the feature is available to them. |
Uber Slashes UberX Fares In 16 Markets To Make It The Cheapest Car Service Available Anywhere | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Riding just got a lot cheaper — at least for most customers using its low-cost UberX option. That’s because Uber has for its on-demand car service in a majority of U.S. cities where it’s available, in some cases by more than 20 percent. The goal for Uber is not just to make its service more attractive than the competition, but to make UberX the cheapest option available period. That means undercutting fares for taxis and ride-sharing services like Lyft and SideCar, sometimes by a large amount. This isn’t the first time the company has lowered the price of UberX rides. Since June of last year, when it , Uber has in cities where UberX is available. This is the most aggressive price cut the company has ever made, however, with Uber cutting rates in 16 of the 23 U.S. markets where the low-cost option is available. That includes reductions in Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, Orange County, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, and Tucson. Some of those cuts are pretty dramatic. The price of UberX in Orange County, for instance, will drop by about 30 percent, according to CEO Travis Kalanick. San Francisco fares will be about 20 percent lower, and of the 16 markets seeing reductions, half will see cuts of 12 percent or more. For a business that operates on low margins already, that’s a pretty dramatic reduction. And it will put a whole lot of pressure on the competition. But that’s just part of the story. The fare cuts are also designed to make Uber more accessible to more people. To demonstrate how it’s doing that, Kalanick ran through a couple of real-world examples with me to show how much cheaper UberX would be than the competition. In L.A., a ride from LAX to Hollywood, for instance, would cost $51 in a cab, but traffic permitting, an UberX would cost just $29.50. In San Francisco, a cab ride from the Mission to SOMA costs about $11, but an UberX would be just $8. Combine that with a four-way fare split, Kalanick said, and the ride is the same price as taking the bus. All of which makes Uber not exactly a “ ” anymore. With each previous reduction, Uber has seen the number of trips per driver increase, which means that even with the lower fares drivers end up making more money. In the case of this fare reduction, Uber is cutting its own margins in some markets to help push prices lower. So how low can prices go? Uber wants to find out, but is aware that there’s only so much new demand it can drive with fare reductions. “There’s a ceiling to the number of trips per hour that a car can do,” Kalanick said. Uber has said that it wants to offer a low-cost option in all of its markets, so you can probably expect it to expand the number of available UberX markets in the same way that it’s adding new cities in which it operates. That number is up to nearly 70 now, as Uber has moved aggressively into a number of international markets over the last year. The company also has plenty of cash to play with. It raised over the summer, bringing total funding to more than $300 million. Additional investors include TPG Growth, Benchmark, and First Round Capital, among others. When queried about Uber’s latest move, Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer told TechCrunch: “Uber prices will still be higher. What does a price decrease mean when there is 8-10x surge pricing? It’s classic bait and switch and consumers see through that.” |
Overstock.com Partners With Coinbase And Starts Accepting Bitcoins As Payment | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Have a wallet with several bitcoins and shopping for a new patio set or maybe several lamps? Overstock.com is ready to take those volatile bitcoins off your hands. No word on Dogecoins, though. Overstock.com struck a deal with Coinbase, a sort of PayPal for Bitcoin, to handle the processing. Just today, Overstock.com and Coinbase flipped the switch, marking a milestone in Bitcoin history. Overstock.com just became the largest online retailer to accept the digital currency. The company CEO Patrick Byrne to accept the digital currency in late 2013. , Byrne felt he had tipped his hand and rushed to start accepting Bitcoin before any of his competitors. Up until now, Bitcoin has only been accepted as payment at smaller websites. A number of retailers started accepting the currency in 2013, but none of the size or scope of Overstock. Still, even with the retailer’s massive sales numbers, Bitcoin will likely account for a tiny part of Overstock.com’s overall sales. Currently, Bitcoin users are holding onto the currency for a type of investment. The value’s volatility gives plenty of opportunity to buy low and sell high. But, just in case someone wants to trade in a bitcoin or two for a new bedroom set, Overstock.com and Coinbase are ready and willing to make that transaction. |
The Alternative Commerce Recipe | Contributor | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Alternative Commerce is a piece of cake, right? After all, while big box retailers are suffering, fun things like “the Internet” and “mobile phones” make it easier to sell stuff to customers without the expense of stores and make a bunch of money. Just ask WebVan, Kozmo, eToys.com, or Pets.com. Okay maybe it isn’t easy. At the end of the day, even in the alternative commerce world, you still have to create, market, sell and deliver an actual product to consumers and make money in the process. Bottom line, it’s all about the team. Our firm has been early investors in RueLaLa (GSI/eBay), Kayak (Priceline), , and many other great companies. I am an early investor in (next-generation consumer products for babies/kids/families), (subscription healthy snack product delivered to your door), (the largest barter marketplace), (an online fashion brand that creates product based on social interaction/input) and (deals for moms). The reason we invested in these companies is simple: the teams. The basic tenet of a successful alternative commerce company (or any early-stage business) is to start with great people. Get your key chefs in place before you preheat your oven and get cooking. This is the part of the recipe where you can really get your creative juices flowing. Here are a few of the key ingredients. First introduced by Fred Reichheld in a 2003 Harvard Business Review piece, this can’t be more simple. The basic idea is to ask, How likely are you to recommend this product, company or service to your friends or colleagues? That’s it. This basic and fundamental idea is all that really matters. When this became clear to our firm a few years ago, it made clear why we believed in companies like Honest, Warby Parker, etc. – people loved what they were doing. When it comes to product, nothing else matters. Nothing. Are you solving a problem or making something easier, e.g. not having to go to a store? Google Express, eBay Now and Amazon are making logistics and visits to the store easier (and getting a lot of information in the process!). You can compete with them and get blown out of the water or actually solve a problem they can’t. Create healthier products, deliver a differentiated service, build something special, delight your customers. If you don’t, they win. Building a brand is hard. There are folks like Michael Kors and LuLulemon who have built amazing brands in the last few years (Kors has been a fashion icon for 20+ years) in the public markets. If you don’t want to build a brand, don’t try alternative commerce. Don’t. Walk away. People need to know you, need to love you, need to want you and have a personal connection to the brand. The only way to increase margins and grow a business is to own a brand. If you are selling someone else’s brand, you are dead. No matter how delicious the ingredients are, the cake will not come out right unless you have the right temperature, cooking time, etc. Some key metrics to consider: The reason I call this alternative commerce and not e-commerce is that if you sell things online that exist in the offline/online world, you are dead. The margins will continue to drop until you can’t be profitable. Sure, you can try to get a better deal with UPS or FedEx but it won’t matter. You can try to get more margin from the manufacturer but someone will do better. If you’re not Amazon, you will lose. We all learned this with Pets.com in the first version of the web but people don’t remember. If you keep selling widgets that are available at Target or on Amazon you will lose. When it comes to new alternative commerce ventures, if you sell product that has low margins, you will fail. Over time, other entrants will enter and your margins will drop even lower. Sell high-margin products (build a brand, have unique channels, offer high margin product). It’s that simple. If you need Google and Facebook to acquire customers you are in a heap of trouble. The “crack” seems really great for a while because of the economics but over time those economics will change. In fact, we have seen they usually flip. If you pay for your traffic, other people will fast follow and that’s a problem. When we started investing in alternative commerce 14 years ago, we thought it was a metrics-driven business. It is not – you need a team, killer product and brand. The numbers change the longer you stay in the business. That said, the cost to acquire a customer and the lifetime value of a customer are important. If your CAC to LTV is 2-4X (i.e. it costs $10 to acquire and it pays back 20-40 before folks churn) don’t keep going. One issue is you need to acquire. The other issue is that you are too close to the sun when acquisition increases. We tend to focus on 5X+ businesses. We may be wrong but I would rather be wrong here. These are the basic building blocks of my favorite recipe – no secret sauce here. In fact, all of the ingredients for success in alternative commerce are really the same fundamentals that have held true for years when building a business. The good news for new entrants is that the big box retailers are dead or dying. If you want to disrupt them, build an amazing product and brand that solves a real problem for your consumers and reaches them in a creative way. It’s a piece of cake, right? [Image via ] |
Sunrise Calendar Stops Sending iCloud Credentials Back To Their Servers | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | The increasingly popular Sunrise calendar app faced a bit of a brouhaha last week, after a couple of well-respected developers (namely, Neven Mrgan and Instapaper creator Marco Arment) pointed out that the application asked the user to punch in their iCloud credentials with little indication of what happened to them next. Given the amount of sensitive data that tends to be transmitted over iCloud (iMessages, backed up photos, email, etc.), such a request was iffy, at best. It’s certainly not the sort of thing you want to become the norm. Making things worse, the company was in turn taking those credentials and transmitting back them to their server (though they note that they were storing them.) They were sending the credentials in a secure way — but still: if it’s at all avoidable, sending important credentials back to the mothership isn’t good practice. This morning, Sunrise that makes things a little better. They’ll still need you to punch in your credentials, which is a bummer — but now, at least, they’re handling authentication within the app itself. Instead of sending your username and password back to their servers, they send a unique token that allows them to access your iCloud data without ever sending your actual username/password off of the device. And if you decide that you don’t want Sunrise to be able to access your data? Just change your password, which renders the token useless. It’s not a perfect solution, as it still require the users to trust a third-party with some pretty precious data. In this case, since Sunrise is now being quite transparent about how they handle the data, that’s fine. But it’s still not something that apps should be getting users comfortable with doing. Until/unless Apple builds in some sort of iCloud permissions dialog that allows for the user to grant a service like Sunrise access to data (sort of like the way Facebook handles Facebook logins within apps), however, this is the safest route they’ve got apart from.. you know, not existing. It’s been just 9 days since concerns about Sunrise’s methodology were raised; good on them for moving quick. |
Yahoo Could Do Search Because It Needs The Money | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Yahoo could be getting back into the search game. Its long-suffering deal with Microsoft has underperformed, making that the company is working on building new search products hardly surprising. As a , the Bing search deal is of growing importance to Yahoo. For the nine months ending last September 30, 30 percent of the company’s revenue came from the deal, or slightly less over the nine-quarter period than the last quarter reported. More dramatically, its 2012 third quarter — comparable to the 31 percent number — saw 27 percent of its revenue come from the Microsoft deal. And in the nine-month period ending with the third quarter of 2012, Yahoo earned a more modest 24 percent of its top line from Microsoft. So, 24 to 27 to 30 to 31 percent. That’s a steady progression. What is driving that momentum, given that Yahoo is ? I’d estimate that its revenues, which are declining, are doing so more quickly than income from the Microsoft deal. Recall that Microsoft last year with Yahoo in regards to its search agreement for the U.S. Financially, therefore, the Microsoft deal is something of a boon for Yahoo, providing revenue stability in a time of transition for the latter company. And Yahoo may be working to cut this income flow and forge a new path for itself. You could call that bold. But there is a fine line between boldness and overzealousness (leadership, you could argue, lies in between). Microsoft and Yahoo both declined to comment for this story. While that may be the case, it’s worth keeping in mind that Yahoo has old search chops, Mayer is brilliant, and the company is on a decent personnel footing. It could pull off a transition back to search. And, perhaps, Yahoo could deploy enough of that Alibaba cash to snag a few Googlers to pull the operation together. Yahoo was said to that revenue per search was actually worse with Microsoft under the agreement than it had been when the company used its own technology. That’s a point in favor of Yahoo trying again. The company may be able to opt out of the deal in mid 2015. And despite that work and treasure, Bing has yet to mature to the point in which Yahoo and Microsoft . That means that Bing was monetizing at below the set threshold, forcing Microsoft to fork over more cash to keep Sunnyvale on board. So, after billions and years, Microsoft’s search technology still isn’t so good at making money. For Yahoo, that’s the mission at the moment. It needs to grow its revenue. And, at this precise moment, it appears that the company is moving instead to replace a stable, and likely renewable revenue stream. |
Ask A VC: Manatt’s Peter Csathy On The New Golden Age Of Content | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Manatt Digital Media Ventures’ Peter Csathy joined us in the studio to talk about the return of content, his firm’s investment strategy and more. One of the topics Csathy and I talked about was the renaissance moment for content, whether that be video, long-form, or social content. Csathy himself previously was the CEO of Sorenson Media, which provides encoding tools and a platform for video distribution for media companies and online publishers and also was the CEO of digital video startup SightSpeed, which was acquired by Logitech. Why is content back? And what are the distinct properties that are driving viral content? Csathy answers those questions and more in the video above. |
Gametime Aims To Provide The Best Mobile Experience For Last-Minute Sports Ticketing | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | Online ticketing services are moving onto mobile, but Brad Griffith, CEO of a startup called , says the experience still isn’t good enough. For example, Griffith (whose previous startup Zappedy was ) recalled using the mobile app from “a current leader in the space” to purchase baseball tickets recently, but he didn’t realize until the last minute that he had to print those tickets out. As a result, he and a friend had to convince the owner of the bar they were at to print out the tickets, and they ended up missing out on the first inning — that might not seem like a huge deal, but Griffith argued that they lost a significant part of the value of their ticket. “It was just a huge disaster,” he said. With Gametime, on the other hand, everything is handled on the phone. You purchase a ticket on the app, then you just present your phone with the ticket at the gate and it gets scanned in. Not that Gametime is the only service to take advantage of this technology, but it’s deliberately limiting itself to tickets in these formats. So when you use the app, you know for sure that no printing will be required. Gametime is also focusing on tickets that are discounted right before the game, which, Griffith said, it’s pulling from “a bunch of different suppliers.” That means you get tickets at a cheaper price, and you don’t have to buy them days or weeks ahead of time. He compared the approach to HotelTonight — and indeed, the interface will be familiar to HotelTonight users as well, and HotelTonight’s founders are among the investors in GameTime’s initial funding of $800,000. Other backers include owners of the Warriors and Giants, as well as Sincerely and Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina. (For some reason, Griffith said he can’t provide the actual names of the investors, other than Brezina). Griffith added that the company is limited to just a couple of geographies for now — it started in San Francisco and recently added Los Angeles. The reason for the limited reach? For one thing, Gametime is limited to stadiums that support this kind of mobile ticketing. For another, Griffith makes a point of sending a photographer to take pictures of each supported stadium during an actual game. Nonetheless, Griffith predicted that the app will be adding several more cities throughout 2014. |
Airbnb Is Testing Out An Affordable Cleaning Service For Hosts In San Francisco | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Peer-to-peer lodgings marketplace has been focused on finding ways that it can help its hosts improve the quality of experience for guests that stay in their homes. As part of this effort, the company is trialing a low-cost cleaning service for some hosts on the platform. According to an email sent to a host in the San Francisco Bay Area that was forwarded to TechCrunch, Airbnb is piloting a program that will make cleaning services available to some people who make their homes available on the platform. The email claims those services will be “affordable, easy to schedule, and can be tailored to include amenities such as linen service and gift baskets.” In a statement from an Airbnb spokesperson, the company confirmed the trial, saying: “We’re always testing ways to make the experience on Airbnb better. This is a test we’re looking at in two markets.” Our Airbnb contact later reached out to correct this. One market, not two. Airbnb is working on a number of ways in which it can better support the people who list their homes on the platform. It recently , Chip Conley, and created a Hospitality Innovation Lab in Dublin aimed at determining best practices for hosts. It’s also introduced a that are aimed at making the listing process easier. At the same event in which those apps were unveiled, Airbnb announced that it would relaunch Airbnb Groups to enable hosts to communicate and share tips with each other, and even toyed with the idea of offering up smartphones to hosts as a way to improve response times to guests and boost overall bookings. But chief among the ways that Airbnb hosts can improve the quality of stay for their guests is through cleanliness of the spaces that they list. Those who frequently have Airbnb guests already know this, and many so-called “super hosts” already schedule regular cleaning sessions between stays. Doing so can be expensive, however, and can eat into the money that hosts make — especially those who rely on income from Airbnb to help them pay their rents. At $55 for a three-hour cleaning, the price is slightly below what you might get from a service like Homejoy, which generally charges $20 an hour (in San Francisco, at least). Individual cleaners can run even higher, depending on the size of the home or how much cleaning is needed. Offering hosts a somewhat discount price is a nice perk, especially for those who regularly rent out their homes to other members of Airbnb. It also improves the overall quality of their stays, could lead to better reviews, and overall increase the likelihood that hosts will have future guests. Full text of the email sent to our host contact below: Hi [XXXX], We’re excited to invite you to try a new cleaning service we’re piloting for a select group of Airbnb hosts! Airbnb Cleaning is affordable, easy to schedule, and can be tailored to include amenities such as linen service and gift baskets, too. Pricing starts at $55 for a 3 hour cleaning. We built this service to address what Airbnb guests care about most (things like odors, stray hairs, and refrigerators!). We also worked with hosts like you to understand how to cater to personal hosting styles and home setup preferences. We’ll save your preferences and set up your space exactly the way you want it every time. Click here to learn more! If you have any questions, simply reply to this e-mail and we’ll answer it promptly. Happy hosting,
Airbnb |
Apple Said To Be Focusing On Health With iOS 8 And iWatch, Following Exec Meeting With FDA | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Apple’s plans for iOS 8 focus on redefining health tracking via mobile devices, according to a new report from , which has a terrific track record when it comes to rumors it has sourced itself. The report details a new marquee application coming in iOS 8 called “Healthbook” that monitors all aspects of health, fitness and workout information, including vitals monitored via the new iWatch, which is said to pack a bevy of sensors and to be “well into development” according to 9to5Mac’s sources. The health monitoring app called “Healthbook” will come pre-installed on iOS 8, which, if true, would be a huge blow to third-party apps including those made by Fitbit, Nike, Runkeeper and Withings just to name a few. It would track and report steps, calories burned, distance walked and more, including weight fluctuations, and blood pressure, hydration levels, heart rate and more. Apple’s focus on health in iOS 8 is given credence by a number of new reports from this week, including the news from the New York Times earlier today that Apple execs met with the FDA late last year to discuss mobile medical applications. Apple also reportedly hired Michael O’Reilly, M.D. away from a position as Chief Medical Officer of Masimo Corporation in July 2013. O’Reilly is an expert in pulse oximetry among other things, which is used to non-invasively take key vitals from a user via optical sensors. 9to5Mac’s report details functionality of the proposed “Healthbook” app, which, as its name suggests, takes a lot of cues from Passbook. It’ll offer swipeable cards for each vital stat it tracks, letting users page through their medical and health information. The report cautions that this functionality could be taken out prior to the final release of iOS 8: With the FDA’s involvement, one concern might be getting the necessary approvals to market the software as a potential medical aid. As for the iWatch, the new report doesn’t add much in terms of firm details, but it does suggest we could see a release before year’s end, and offers that it could feature sensors that provide data to Healthbook. That app could also use existing third-party monitors and devices designed for iOS to source data, however. One more tidbit about the iWatch suggests that maps will be a central feature of the device, and navigation on the wrist is actually a prime potential advantage of smartwatch devices that has yet to be properly explored. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on these developments, and will update if we learn anything more. |
Euro Secondhand Marketplace Vinted Raises $27M To Take On The Salvation Army | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Fresh financing from and for the Vilnius-based startup comes after Accel invested $6.6 million into the company just over a year ago to port it from a web-based application to a service primarily for mobile devices… and bring its service to the U.S. Vinted launched in the U.S. in September 2013, after five years spent expanding in Europe, and will use its new cash hoard to develop its business here and add to its 110 employees both in San Francisco and in its Lithuanian headquarters. Vinted operates three different brands internationally: in Lithuania; in Germany; and in the Czech Republic, but going forward will consolidate everything under the Vinted label. In the U.S., Vinted is entering a . Companies like , which raised $18.5 million earlier this month from Andreessen Horowitz and a host of others; or , which raised $12 million in a round led by Menlo Ventures; and , backed by Highland Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Trinity Ventures, are also competing in the category. Unlike Twice, which operates as a virtual storefront for used clothes, housing them at its own facilities and shipping them to buyers, Vinted is more of a peer to peer marketplace and social network, according to its CEO. Globally, online consignment and secondhand stores have raised at least $109.2 million in financing, according to data from .
So far, the company has 3 million members around the world and has had 14 million listings managed from offices in San Francisco, Paris, Munich, Warsaw, Prague, and Vilnius, on an app available on both iOS and Android. The move to mobile proved to be a good one for the company, Janauskas said. “The customer retention is better; the user experience is way better than on the desktop. So naturally the company converted from desktop to mobile,” he said. For Accel, the company’s value was clear from the moment the partners first heard about the site, said Michiel Kotting, a partner working in Accel’s London office. “[It’s] half social network and chatting and half clothing exchange,” Kotting said. “They play into the same desire for second-hand clothing and a desire for the consumer to have a voice in fashion.” |
Coupons.com Files For $100M IPO On The NYSE, Trading As Coup | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | The march of the 2014 initial public offerings commences, with the latest one of the oldest brands on the internet. Coupons.com has for an IPO on the NYSE, trading under the name COUP, and raising $100 million. Goldman, Sachs & Co., Allen & Company LLC, BofA Merrill Lynch and RBC Capital Markets are listed as the underwriters on the filing. The news comes a day after . Coupons.com may elect to use a similar route to keep from disclosing certain aspects of its business, it notes. “We are an ’emerging growth company’ as defined under the federal securities laws and, as such, may elect to comply with certain reduced public company reporting requirements for future filings,” it notes. Coupons.com’s IPO filing was long anticipated, most recently with Paul Sloan from his position as editor-in-chief at CNET to take up head of communications to lead the effort. As one of the earlier movers in the online coupons space, Coupons.com is also one of the biggest. It notes in the IPO that in the first nine months of 2013, its sales were generated from some 940 million transactions on its site. Those included customers picking up digital coupons and also redeeming codes over its platform. That figure is up 49% over a year ago. Coupons.com says that today its platform includes more than 700 consumer packaged goods companies, representing over 2,000 brands, and retailers covering some 58,000 physical stores in North America. It had 17 million monthly unique visitors on average across Coupons.com and affiliated sites over 2013 and visited the sites of its CPGs, retailers and publishers. Its mobile apps have been downloaded some 7 million times. First established as a site for newspaper coupons, more recently the company has been trying to convert its brand recognition into a business fit for a more social and mobile age. In December Coupons.com to add loyalty networks to its service and position itself as a better bridge between offline and online commerce. In March 2013, it acquired , a Pinterest-like recipe service. Founded in 1998, Coupons.com has raised some $277 million in venture funding but it is a loss-making business. During the nine months ended September 30, 2013, the company says, it generated revenues of $115.3 million, growing 51% compared to the same period in 2012 but at a net loss of $12.8 million. That net loss was a decrease of 75% over the same period in 2012, the company says. The full-year figures for the year before show that Coupons.com is improving its structure. In 2012, sales were $112.1 million, 23% up versus 2011, but with a net loss of $59.2 million, up 158% (!) over 2011. Sill, coupons are big business, potentially. Coupons.com says that in 2012, 305 billion total coupons were distributed, “representing an aggregate discount value of $467 billion, with 2.9 billion redeemed representing an aggregate discount value of $3.7 billion,” citing stats from NCH Marketing Services. Photo: |
Keen On… Hacking Gender: How Women In Silicon Valley Can Become Jane Bond | Andrew Keen | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Despite incremental improvements, the gender bias issue in Silicon Valley remains an important one — and one that could benefit from special attention. Earlier this month, Y Combinator’s Jessica Livingston announced that the Silicon Valley startup incubator would be putting on a conference especially to female founders. And along similar lines, I produced a sold-out event last week at the San Francisco office of entitled . One my panelists was the very successful writer, social media guru and public speaker whose email signature line says: “Sent. By. Bond. Jane Bond, that is”. So I asked Merchant how all women in the Valley can, like her, become Jane Bond and overcome bias. “Have grit,” she advises. And “perseverance”. What women (and men) need to understand, she says, is that “bias exists.” It’s ingrained in Silicon Valley and results in women not being seen by men. And so they don’t get jobs or investments or leadership roles. But Merchant does see things improving. While she thinks that Graham needs to admit he’s biased, she is much more positive about Marc Andreessen’s recent confession on Twitter that only 11% of his followers are women. That’s how you hack gender, Merchant says, by acknowledging the problem, talking about it publicly and then trying to fix it. |
Gillmor Gang Live 01.31.14 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Have you found us on Facebook yet? facebook.com/GillmorGang |
BrightFunnel Raises Funding To Build Smarter Marketing Predictions | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Marketing startup is announcing that it has raised a small “advisory round” of slightly less than $1 million from some big-name investors. Co-founder and CEO served most recently as the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews (which was ). In that role, and in other jobs as a marketing executive, Hossain said that with his background in economics and econometrics he expected to be “swimming in CMO insights,” but that turned out not to be the case. Instead, Hossain said he found “production tools” with limited analytics, at least on the level of what a CMO would want to know. “I remember being at a board meeting in May of 2011, and they asked me questions where I didn’t know the answers,” he said. ” My self identity is as someone who can get at the numbers and get at the truth, and I had to make guesses. It just made me feel not authentic and wonder, why don’t I have the answers? These are knowable questions.” So at BrightFunnel, he’s trying to build tools that will given him the answers that he was looking for. The eventual goal, Hossain said, is to create “the Google self-driving car for marketers.” In other words, customers should be able to identify how much money they want to spend on a campaign and what their revenue targets are, and with BrightFunnel’s recommendations, the marketing plan should basically run itself. The company isn’t quite there yet. Instead, Hossain said, it’s more like navigation app Waze. Its current features include identifying the marketing “levers” that can lead to increased revenue, as well as analyzing performance trends by campaign and channel. BrightFunnel also integrates with marketing automation systems including Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, and Hubspot. And yes, it offers predictions about the revenue impact of marketing campaigns. Hossain estimated that those projections are within 10 to 20 percent accuracy — not just on the conversion rate but also how long it will take to close the sale, which is particularly important for the business-to-business marketers that BrightFunnel is targeting. One of Hossain goals is to improve that accuracy, which he said is “blows [marketers] away” but is not quite up to snuff for statisticians. Anyway, here are the investors: Paul Albright, former CRO, Marketo
David Gutelius, former Chief Social Scientist, Jive Software
Ryan Holmes, founder and CEO, HootSuite
Steve King, former CEO, DocuSign
Scott Kleper, founder and CTO, Context Optional (Adobe Marketing Cloud)
Tim Kopp, former CMO, ExactTarget (Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud)
Chris Maeda, former CTO, KANA Software
Mark Organ, CEO, Influitive and co-founder, Eloqua (Oracle Marketing Cloud)
Venkat Rangan, CTO, Clari and founder, Clearwell Systems (Symantec)
Russell Siegelman, former VP, Microsoft, and Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Facebook Paper, Lenovo-Moto, Carbon 3D Printing, And Coffee! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Looking for a way to get through Friday? Here you go. Facebook launched a news reader app called . (Teens will love it.) And Google , which made earnings week interesting. And, in the land of startups, we explore a new and a Keurig Coffee machine. So you can print yourself a cup-holder, which will store your fresh cup of coffee, as you drive to work on this blessed Friday. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the , featuring , , , , and . The Superbowl is in two days, and the work week is almost over. We’re almost there.
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
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Obama Says Intelligence Director Who Fibbed To Congress “Should Have Been More Careful” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | President Obama embattled Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who is accused of lying to Congress about the existence of the National Security Agency’s spying program. “I think that Jim Clapper himself would acknowledge, and has acknowledged, that he should have been more careful about how he responded,” the president told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “His concern was that he had a classified program that he couldn’t talk about and he was in an open hearing in which he was asked, he was prompted to disclose a program, and so he felt that he was caught between a rock and a hard place.” Clapper flat-out denied to Senator Ron Wyden, during congressional testimony, that the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper later apologized, but that hasn’t stopped critics like Senator Rand Paul for Clapper’s resignation and potential prosecution. “I find really that Clapper lying to Congress is probably more injurious to our intelligence capabilities than anything Snowden did, because Clapper has damaged the credibility of the entire intelligence apparatus, and I’m not sure what to believe anymore when they come to Congress,” Paul told CNN. Support for prosecuting Clapper is mixed, which means that in the current Congressional environment any sanctions would be difficult to pass. It certainly doesn’t send a good message to future intelligence officials, though, that they can essentially say whatever they want in public and don’t have to suffer anything harsher than a slap on the wrist. |
Aereo Sells Out Of Capacity In NYC | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | , a TV streaming service looking to change the way we consume media, has just sold out of capacity in New York City. Founder and CEO Chet Kanojia confirmed the news . The company launched in with NYC as a pilot market, and has since expanded to 11 markets total. The service, much to the chagrin of major network broadcasters, acts as a remote, mini antenna, letting subscribers pull OTA TV signals out of the air and stream them live across any internet-connected device. And if that wasn’t enough, users have the option to use Aereo as a remote DVR service for as low as $8 month. That said, Aereo has worked tirelessly to ensure that this type of business is actually legal. In much the same way that it’s legal for an individual to use rabbit ears to access broadcast television, it’s legal for an Aereo user to rent out an individual Aereo antenna and access, or record, TV content. However, a single antenna that sends a signal to multiple, separate users is illegal. In other words, Aereo needs one antenna available for every active user of the service, and at this point, there’s simply not any room left for new users in NYC. Some have misreported that this is a product of power issues, though recent conversations I’ve had with founder Chet Kanojia suggest that Aereo has been trying to build out more capacity to keep up with subscriber growth. For a startup, it’s not a bad problem to have. Though, if the company wants to foster growth in its first, and likely strongest, market, it will need to offer extended capacity as quickly as possible. Broadcasters must be equally displeased by this news, considering that they’ve been bullying Aereo in the courtroom since the service launched. It started with a lawsuit in NY, which migrated to Boston, and again to Utah, until most recently the . Based on the track record, I predict Aereo will win in court and will lead the revolution as a stepping stone from bundled TV packages and middle men to an on-demand, TV consumption structure. Here’s Aereo’s official statement on the matter: We’re fortunate that Aereo continues to experience strong growth across all our markets. Our team has been working overtime to add more capacity in our existing markets. As soon as additional capacity is added, new consumers will be notified that they can sign up and create an Aereo account. |
Vector Capital Makes Controlling Investment In CollabNet Developer Platform | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | is one of the leading agile development platforms in the enterprise and the company behind the version control software. It has millions of users on its platform, which launched back in 1999. Today, Vector Capital is making a controlling investment in the company as part of a concurrent equity round that includes another, undisclosed investor. The company did not disclose the size of the round, but Vector Capital currently manages over $2 billion in equity capital and typically invests from $100 million to $300 million in each of its . Vector Capital may not be a household name, but the company has previously invested in companies like Corel, LANDesk, RealNetworks, Register.com and WinZip. The firm says it usually invests in companies with at least $100 million in revenue. As Vector Capital partner told me, CollabNet is exactly the kind of company the firm likes to invest in. “CollabNet is a gem,” he told me. “It is rare, as a technology investor, to get an opportunity like this. It’s A+ technology and an incredible management team with a ton of experience. All it needs is a partner with deep pockets that can help it grow.” As part of this investment, Amen will take a seat on CollabNet’s board. Last year, CollabNet raised a $2.5 million , which today’s round will wipe out. The company raised most of its funding in its early years, with an $11 million round in 2002 and a $9.5 million Series B in 2005. Previous investors Benchmark, Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital. According to CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli, the 300-person company used this funding to grow through the recession but the industry wasn’t quite ready for its solutions yet. While CollabNet was among the first companies to enable software development in the cloud, enterprises weren’t quite ready for this concept. It’s only now, in his view, that enterprises are starting to catch up with CollabNet’s vision and are starting to adopt agile development. “What we are seeing now,” he told me, ” is that the world is moving to a distributed and fragmented development model, with data inside and outside the company. There is an ever-increasing need for developers to use their favorite tools, but enterprises also need transparency into this.” This fragmentation, he also stressed, is leading to integration issues for enterprises. CollabNet’s tools include its set of application lifecycle management tools that enable teams to collaborate in a distributed team while using a large variety of tools, whether that’s Subversion or git, Jenkins, Eclipse, Visual Studio, ScrumWorksPro or any other of over 50 tools integrated into TeamForge. For smaller teams, the company offers , a hosted version of Subversion, Git and TeamForge. The company tells me that there are currently approximately 9 million Subversion users, with 1 million on paid plans. TeamForge has about 425,000 users from several hundred customers. The company also tells me it has about 17,000 “ .” “We don’t play favorite,” Portelli said. Even though the company developed Subversion, which was essentially the first open-source version control software, it was also one of the early adopters of the rival version control system, for example. “We are the only company that pulls together so many open source technologies in such a scalable way,” he also noted. Over the last few years, the company made a number of pricing changes to better compete with the likes of Atlassian, GitHub and BitBucket, all of which offer similar development and collaboration tools. These changes included the for its platform. This has helped CollabNet prime its pipeline for selling paid accounts. And, as the team told me, its website traffic tripled over the course of the last year, too. To harness all of this interest in the platform, the team needed today’s investment because, as Portelli noted, the company’s main challenge recently was capital. With this new influx of funding, CollabNet plans to increase its investment in its agile and DevOps products. It also wants to scale up its marketing efforts to teach companies about agile development practices and how to adopt them at scale. The company also plans to use the funding to make a number of acquisitions in the future. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 9 | null |
Previous TechCrunch Battlefield Contestants Have Raised $2.4 Billion. Ready To Apply? | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | TechCrunch’s Battlefield is a proven springboard for startups destined for great things. Fact. We ran the data and we’ll take you through it below. But before we get to that, we’re announcing that it’s time for the next Battlefield at , May 5-7. The application deadline is February 20, 2014. TechCrunch writers and editors will read each and every one of those applications and select approximately 30 of the most innovative, under-the-radar applicants to appear onstage at Disrupt in New York City. The entrepreneurs will pitch world-class judges from the venture and entrepreneurial worlds. The winner will take home the and a check for $50,000. Along the way, the final 30 contestants receive world-class coaching on their pitches, exhibition space at Disrupt, feedback from some of the biggest names in tech, and invites to awesome parties. When they take the stage to make their pitches, they will do so before a rapt audience of 1,500 people in the auditorium and tens of thousands more watching the live stream. There is no platform like Battlefield to showcase a startup. But what happens to these companies after launching at the Battlefield? With a little help from our friends at , we’ve pulled the data from 2007-2013 across all of our TC-40, TC-50 and Disrupt competitions. (Note, our this month at CES is not included in this analysis.) Since 2007, 350 companies have participated in the Battlefield, or its precursors, TC-40 and TC-50. On average, these companies were just under a year old at the time they entered the competition and had taken on just over $2.4 million in funding. Recently, we’ve trended toward accepting earlier stage companies, with less funding in the bank. In 2007, the average raise for a company prior to participating in the Battlefield was $4.9 million, compared with just over $1 million raised in 2013.* In total, Battlefield companies have raised $2.70 billion. Of that, the companies raised $2.4 billion after participating in Battlefield. For those of you about to make the correlation vs. causation argument, consider this: Within the 12 months after competing in Battlefield competitions, the companies raised $520 million, or about $5.2 million per company,* on average. If nothing else, it looks like Battlefield conclusively helps companies navigate the Series A crunch. It’s true that there are a few highly successful Battlefield alums who, were we operating in the VC world, would account for over 90 percent of Battlefield’s returns. But even when you remove those rocks stars from the line-up (Mint, Yammer, Dropbox, Fitbit) the rest (194 companies) still managed to raise over $2 billion, after they participated in Battlefield. Setting aside funding, how did the companies turn out? The answer is that today 79 percent of Battlefield companies are operational, 15 percent have exited, and 17 percent have closed. Exits are spread out over the lifetime of TC-40 and Disrupt. Of the 51 acquisitions, the majority come from the years 2007 through 2010, but that should not be a surprise. On average exits companies took place 2.5 years after participating in the Battlefield. We’re eager to see how our 2011 and later batches perform. Not every Battlefield company continued exactly on the course it pitched on stage. Pivots happen. Take Sean Rad of , for example. Sean’s , a customer retention platform, participated in the Battlefield NY 2012 but afterwards decided to shift focus to a side project that became Tinder. We are really proud of Battlefield’s success in elevating great startups, and the startup world has definitely caught on. Back in 2010-2011, our acceptance rates hovered between 8-10 percent. In 2013, that number ranged from 2 to 5 percent for New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. As with any investment portfolio, there are successes and great lessons to be learned with each new batch of companies. We’re constantly evaluating our selection process and on-site experience to both find the best teams and support their early-stage growth. Interested? to join us onstage in at Disrupt NY. |
Ouya Updates Hardware With $129 16GB Console, 8GB Edition Remains At $99 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Ouya’s original hardware featured just 8GB of storage onboard, but a temporary Limited Edition all-white version launched during the holidays doubled that to 16GB. Now, the game console startup is making that a permanent feature of its newest hardware, an that also offers better Wi-Fi connectivity and a “refined” controller design. The new 16GB version adds $30 to the MSRP of the original, coming in at a total of $129 for the console and one controller. It goes on sale at Ouya.tv, as well as Amazon and Amazon.ca starting immediately, and the original 8GB model will continue to be sold as well at its original $99 price point (which is discounted to $69.99 currently on Amazon.ca) As for what’s been improved about the controller, Ouya says that the joysticks and buttons are “better” and that the controller has less lag time overall. We’ve asked for more specifics around the improved Wi-Fi, but have yet to hear back with any details. The new console also ships with the latest Ouya firmware, which is said to improve all-around performance for the Android-powered hardware. Ouya has faced some challenges lately, including the departure of one of its key founding team members, . The company has not released any sales data recently, so there’s no telling how it’s performing, but the introduction of a new SKU seems a little unusual given the relatively modest nature of the tweaks. Developers on the platform recently shared some numbers regarding their software sales on the console , which could be an indicator of hardware sales strength. Feedback was mixed, but overall the impression given was that sales by no means represent runaway success. Ouya has raised $23.6 million in funding to date, including its initial crowdfunding campaign and a led by Kleiner Perkins. |
Investor Reaction To Microsoft’s Rumored CEO Choice: We’re Fine With That | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Yesterday in after-hours trading, Microsoft picked up a minor gain. The trading period was interesting as news that Microsoft’s board as its next CEO had broken. This morning, the company’s stock has risen more than 2 percent in a generally down market day. Investors appear at least blasé with the CEO choice. If Microsoft had fallen sharply, or risen dramatically directly following the news, that would have been a different sort of signal. Is it negative that Microsoft’s stock didn’t spike following the Nadella news, perhaps indicating that the company could have done better in its choice? You could read it that way, but I think two things can force us — for now — to not be too negative. Primarily, Microsoft has not announced the news itself, so we’re still discussing probabilities and potentialities, . And secondly, I doubt that the street is too familiar with Nadella. Uncertainty is usually a sell, sure, but Nadella’s coverage has generally mentioned his strengths, perhaps providing some mental insurance to the trading classes. The caveat, naturally, is Nadella’s weaknesses — such as they are. I’ll be digging into this later today, but the simple summation is while he is tops at technical work and enterprise-facing efforts, he lacks commensurate experience with consumer products and hardware, and could therefore lack the leadership and vision he needs to drive Microsoft forward in those key areas. For now, however, the market is telling Microsoft it is fine with its supposed choice. |
BTC China Starts Accepting Deposits In Chinese Yuan Again | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | , the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, has started allowing users to purchase the digital currency with Chinese yuan again. This is significant because BTC China stopped accepting deposits in renminbi last month after the People’s Bank of China issued a memo warning national financial institutions not to trade in bitcoin. That decision . It also hurt , which has taken several shots in the past few months. BTC China CEO Bobby Lee that the exchange started accepting renminbi again on Thursday after studying the PBOC memo and determining that it was legal to accept deposits and transfer money into customer accounts, even though the banks that manage those accounts can’t conduct business in bitcoin. and picked up on BTC China’s decision, even though the exchange tried to keep it low profile. BTC China has not made an official announcement and timed the change to coincide with the Lunar New Year holiday, when trading volume is low. It’s still too early to tell what impact BTC China’s decision will have on . Lee told WSJ that BTC China, which from Lightspeed China Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, is treading carefully because the Chinese government can change its policies at any time. The Chinese government has taken a negative attitude toward digital currencies before. In 2009 , QQ, for the purchase of real-world items. Bitcoin is harder to control than QQ, however, because QQ was centrally managed by Internet company Tencent. “We are definitely in compliance with the Dec. 5 memo, but the government and the government agencies can change the rules anytime in the future. So we are going to take a wait-and-see approach,” Lee told the WSJ. We’ve emailed him for further comment. |
To Counter Investor Signaling, YC Partners Can No Longer Be The First Money Into The Incubator’s Startups | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | has long allowed its partners to invest their own personal money in the incubator’s startups — often times partners put money into these startups before institutional investors and angels have a look. Unfortunately, whether a partner (or partners) put money into a YC company started to become a signal to outside investors of the good bets in the incubator. It makes sense. These partners are often integrally involved in helping build these companies inside of Y Combinator. So they would know which startups have the legs to be successful, and potentially have insider knowledge into which startups have the potential for going the distance. To mitigate this signaling effect, Y Combinator is a new policy whereby YC partners can’t be the first money into a startup from the incubator. Specifically, YC partners can’t be in the first $500,000 a company raises unless it’s three weeks past Demo Day. As YC co-founder Paul Graham explains to us, the danger of letting the partners at an incubator invest in the startups is that it makes it harder for the ones the partners don’t invest in to raise money. In the early years of YC, this wasn’t as much of an issue because Graham was the only one investing, and he wasn’t systematic about it. But in the last few batches, investors started treating the companies that had investments by YC partners as an indication of what YC thought of the startups. Currently YC has about a involved, including Paul Buchheit, Garry Tan, and Geoff Ralston. What’s also of interest is that any funds that YC partners operate will also fall into this rule as well. So the started by Tan, now part-time partner Harj Taggar, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, will not be able to be the first money into a startup. This is clearly a founder-friendly move, and evens the playing field in some ways for startups to raise money from outside investors. It’s no secret that Y Combinator’s class sizes have steadily risen, and in the effort to save time and optimize their money, investors look for signals on which startups to invest in. Of course, YC partners investing in a startup is just one of many signals investors are looking at when evaluating a startup at the seed stage. YC also a new, easier convertible equity model for founders. Photo Credit/ |
Inq Mobile, One Of The First Facebook Phone Makers, Shuts Down | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Inq Mobile, one of , announced that it has shut down with a message on its site (h/t ). In a statement, the U.K.-based, -backed company said: We want to thank all the customers and employees that have engaged with Inq’s products and experiences over the years. Inq’s software services Material and SO.HO will be closed down at the end of January. For more information please go to www.inqmobile.com.” Inq, which was founded in 2008 and pivoted a year ago to focus on mobile software, said it will no longer update Material and SO.HO, its apps. Material, a news reader, released its final editions on Jan. 28, while social media aggregator SO.HO will not be updated after today, though it will continue to function. Support pages for the Cloud Touch smartphone and Inq’s featurephones remain on its site. The timing of Inq’s closure and Material’s shutdown is interesting because . These include ; Twitter and CNN’s ; and , which will launch next month. Inq Mobile began as a maker of low-priced Android smartphones. It was in 2011, around the same time HTC and the social network struck the partnership that yielded the and . Inq’s Cloud Touch, which was released exclusively in the UK three years ago, had a custom Facebook wrapper built on top of Android, and an early version of SwiftKey. Though cheaply priced (starting at $50 with a subsidized contract), the Cloud Touch couldn’t compete with Samsung’s rapid takeover of the Android market. The company pivoted and started developing mobile apps one year ago. Material, which , was a social magazine app that used Inq’s “interest extraction engine” to look at the Facebook and Twitter accounts of users and figure out what kind of articles they wanted to see. Content was delivered in two daily editions. At its launch, Material already had strong competition from popular social news readers like , , and . Inq CEO and co-founder Ken Johnstone told TechCrunch at the time that Material differentiated from other news readers by offering an easier set-up than its rivals because all users needed to do to power Material’s algorithms was connect their Facebook or Twitter accounts. “For somebody who has invested a lot of time in Twitter and Facebook anyway, this is about getting a return on that investment,” Johnstone told TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas. Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook’s news aggregation products all feature some human curation, but, like Material, they also rely heavily on algorithms to customize content for each user. Inq had planned to monetize Material by harvesting enough data to build an advertising business, but its failure to do may be a cautionary tale for other developers of news readers, even as they . Though algorithms are necessary if a news aggregator wants to scale up (and collect enough data to be profitable), they still can’t replace the discernment of a human editor. Like Feedly, Pulse, and Zite, Material’s customized content stream suffered from problems like miscategorized stories, irrelevant content, and “the overall feeling you get from flicking through an edition is not a cohesive, editorially unified whole, but an algorithmically generated bunch of mostly random stories with (at best) a few loose, overlapping themes,” as Natasha put it. |
Twine Canvas Is Like Tinder But Based On Personality, Not Sex Appeal | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 31 | Don’t judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s what’s on the inside that counts. These are the mantras of millions of young singles , or potentially procreate. But mobile app developer has released a new dating app, called Twine Canvas (??), that may be just the ticket. The , which just went live yesterday, asks users to browse and create “personality canvases,” which is just another term for a digital collage of your interests. If both sides of the connection “like” each others personalities (as displayed in pictorial form), then profile photos are revealed. Because nothing turns on potential suitors like scrapbooking talent. Or ugly people with awesome personalities. After downloading the app, you have free reign to browse through the personality canvases of others. If you sign in with Facebook, you can adjust the parameters of your such, including filters for age, location, and gender. Once you’ve created your own canvas, which isn’t nearly as seamless as it should be, you’re allowed to go through and like other canvases by swiping down. users, practiced in the art of swiping left to throw away and right to like, will have to be mindful of the new up/down structure. When mutual attraction is confirmed, users are able to see profile photos and open up a chat conversation. The idea behind the app isn’t half bad. Tinder asks you to like people based solely on their appearance. Physical attraction is certainly important, but does not a relationship make. On the other side of the same coin, compatible personalities are crucial to a lasting relationship, but can’t compensate for a lack of physical chemistry. By forcing users to focus on one side of the relationship (either emotional or physical connection), it shrinks the act of partner hunting into mobile, bite-sized form. My main complaint with this app is that it’s difficult to quickly create a Canvas. Users must add photos, that don’t show their faces, from the camera roll or Facebook albums. I’d much prefer to be able to add really awesome photos through search on Google images or something similar. Still, the app is worth checking out for those of us into the online dating thing. Here’s the . Happy hunting, everyone. [gallery columns="4" ids="950734,950735,950736,950737"] |
This Is Satya Nadella’s Twitter Account | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | After , we’re finally reaching a climax: It’s most likely going , though everyone except Larry Page wants it to be Google’s (kidding). While we don’t know for sure whether Nadella will be the future CEO of Microsoft, we do know that is his long abandoned Twitter account. With exclamation-heavy quips about tech like “Bing on Yahoo!,” “HTML5 – what fun!” and “playing with my new msn hp!,” Nadella’s account reminds us of a simpler 2010 Twitter, one where mindlessly broadcasting your whereabouts — Loopting to the — was perfectly acceptable. The activity dates from around the time Nadella was negotiating the first Twitter search deal with Microsoft ( ). It’s like some sort of Twitter time capsule, complete with egg avatar. If Nadella does get the job, he’ll have a whole new world of rapt followers for his first 2014 tweet. #HasSatyaNadellalandedyet? |
Salesfusion Acquires Marketing Analytics Platform LoopFuse | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Marketing automation platform has purchased , an analytics platform that helps clients find promising new leads, for an undisclosed price. The acquisition comes two weeks after , bringing its total funding . As , there has been a lot of M&A activity in the CRM space recently. For example, Salesforce.com recently stretched its cash resources, to pay for its acquisition of ExactTarget, while . Kepes notes that Microsoft doesn’t have a strong marketing automation tool of its own. By looking for acquisition targets, companies in the space may in turn make themselves attractive acquisition targets for Redmond. Even if Salesfusion isn’t trying to position itself for an M&A, LoopFuse will help it expand its customer roster. The acquisition of LoopFuse will allow Salesfusion to double revenue and triple new customer growth in 2014, CEO Christian Nahas tells me. The company says that in 2013 it enjoyed strong growth: doubling revenue, tripling earnings before interest, tax, and amortization (EBITA); and tripling net new monthly recurring revenue and net new customers. Nahas says that the company was attracted to LoopFuse’s talent and intellectual property, which includes “doing some exciting and powerful things with social intelligence and big data analytics to help marketers fill their funnel with quality leads.” Both companies are focused on medium-sized companies, but they also attracted smaller businesses and enterprise customers as well, Nahas says. The acquisition of LoopFuse means that customers will now have access to a combination of Salesfusion’s marketing automation platform for the mid-market and LoopFuse’s social intelligence and predictive analytics tools. This means that Salesfusion’s customers can now go beyond their customer-relationship management (CRM) tools and find new leads similar to existing ones that have already resulted in sales. [[Image source: ]] |
Founder Stories: Kakul Srivastava On How Tomfoolery Will Make Our Work More Social And Fun | Contributor | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | To hear break it down, it appears the answer is “yes.” Srivastava and her team at (which just this week was ) are on a mission to create fun and social software for people at work, based on the belief that our work and personal lives are intertwined. To that end, her company built software for workers to be more social and transparent. She has a deep reservoir of experience to draw from, with long-term stints at some of the big Valley companies. During that time, she realized she had to “unlearn” what she’d been exposed to in larger companies, as those large institutions had more processes, methods, and rules around working, which she believes impacts speed and creativity. Srivastava also shares a personal part of her journey, as the mom to two little kids, of how she’s able to balance being a caring mom and startup founder all wrapped up into one person. To hear Srivastava share her attitudes in her own words is inspiring, and I’d encourage folks who want to dip their toes into the water of startup founding (especially those ones with kids and families) to perhaps some draw some knowledge from what she has to share. |
Amazon Prime Could See $20 To $40 Price Hike | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Amazon Prime might be getting more expensive. The retailer revealed during its quarterly earnings conference call that it might jack up the price of the yearly subscription by up to 50%. Prime currently costs $79 a year. It’s the best service a person could buy. Free two-day shipping on most everything Amazon sells? I don’t have to go to the store for toilet paper. Yes sir. Amazon is in a tough spot. After being the street’s darling for so many years, the thanks to a . Analysts expected Amazon to report revenue of $26.06 billion, and earn $0.66 per share. Put another way, in a quarter of strong GDP growth, Amazon managed to miss expectations on both its top and bottom lines. As Amazon stated on its investor relations conference call, the cost of shipping is increasing and Amazon is unsure if it can continue to offer Prime at $79. It said it was considering raising the price by $20 to $40 a year. Since its launch, Prime has become more than just a free shipping service. Amazon also bundles its video streaming and Kindle libraries with the subscription. As a long time subscriber, a price hike would put a frown on my face, but I would still re-subscribe. I simply hate going to the store. |
Implisit Raises $3.3M For Self-Learning Service That Predicts Next Steps For Sales People | Alex Williams | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | has raised $3.3 million from for its self-learning platform that mines CRM data to help sales people close more deals and cut manual data entry. The service connects email, calendars and the contact information in the CRM platform, said Co-Founder Gilad Raichshtain. It offers follow-up steps for a prospective deal, the best approach and other intelligence. Over time, the service adapts to the business processes, updating the intelligence as the users go about their daily work. When a new customer joins Implisit, the service analyzes its historical sales data (both communications and their historical CRM data) to determine the customer’s specific sales patterns. From this, the engine creates tailor-made insights that fit the customer’s processes. Implisit uses several methods for analyzing the data, including text clustering, machine-learning techniques to better understand reasons for deals success, natural language processing to analyze a deals’ unstructured text, and algorithms to classify data. Implisit is the work of Raichshtain and fellow Co-Founder Elad Donsky who are known in Israel tech circles as some of the brightest technologists of their generation. Both started university at the age of 15. At the age of 16, Intel hired Raichstain, making him the youngest engineer ever to be hired by the chip maker. Raichstain and Donsky also spent several years working in the Israeli prime minister’s office. There’s a bounty of sales analytics platforms coming into the market. From one vector are the companies in the Hadoop ecosystem. The distributed computing technology is being used by companies like to manage customers, analyze email and social media, blog posts, click-through rates and other information. is a more direct competitor that uses predictive analytics to help serve inside sales professionals. Its algorithms are designed to tell the sales professional who to contact, when to contact and how to tailor the message for the sales target. In comparison, Implisit keeps CRM interaction data automatically updated, with no need for human intervention. Using that information, Implisit improves sales efficiency and forecasting, Raichshtain said. Implisit has some of the most brilliant people in tech building its service. It has packaged technologies that show it is on the cutting edge of development. The problem is there are more companies that also have the talent to do similar technology development. The challenge will be in differentiation. Analytics providers will offer their own version of how to best get the most out of sales leads. Some of the companies have very deep pockets, which is why the simplicity of this service is so important. If it really is as easy as they say, then that should be the way they influence others to use this advanced analytics service. But the question becomes more about how it can differentiate in a field that is increasingly crowded with analytics providers. |
Clinkle Gets Hacked Before It Even Launches | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | is the hottest app around to have done mostly nothing. The stealth payments service, which has raised , has yet to publicly launch. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be hacked. Today, a guest user posted a list of 33 usernames, user IDs, profile photos, and phone numbers . Based on the data provided, it seems as though these users are Clinkle employees who are testing the app. Founder Lucas Duplan is on the list (yep, that’s his Clinkle , shown above), as well as former Netflix CFO and . Former PayPal exec , now Clinkle CFO, is also listed. The data was seemingly accessed through a private API that Clinkle has in place. Referred to by the hacker as “typeahead”, the API appears to be the basis of an autocomplete tool, allowing uses to type a single letter (like ‘A’) and find all usernames starting with that letter (like ‘Adam’ and ‘Andrew’). [Note: Twitter has a similar tool with the same name — it’s unclear if they’re one and the same.] Clinkle seems to use this API in their own app (presumably so users can find friends when making a payment), which has allowed one hacker to search user names, leading to the associated user IDs and phone numbers. Here’s what the hacker had to say: Results from Clinkle typeahead API. It requires no authentication. The app stores writes results to disk automatically. This is much worse than Snapchat’s breach. Phone numbers masked as courtesy. In other words, whoever broke into the app didn’t need a userID to access Clinkle’s list of testers or their personal information, which seems to be saved on a Clinkle server. But to be fair, Clinkle’s breach isn’t quite the same as Snapchat’s, considering the information of , as opposed a small group of employee testers. Here’s Clinkle’s explanation for the breach: You’re describing visibility that was purposefully built into the system as part of our preliminary user testing and was always intended to be turned off. As you can see from the list, we’ve been testing internally and registrations have been limited to Clinkle employees. We were using an open API, which has now been closed. That said, only names, phone numbers, photos, and Clinkle unique IDs were accessible. Clinkle points to a Stanford student as the alleged hacker but that has yet to be confirmed. Clinkle, rumored to launch later this year, currently has both an in iTunes and an available in the Google Play store for those who wish to join the waiting list. Based on the size of the app (52MB) and the unzipped files uncovered after downloading it, it seems like the full Clinkle app is out there, rather than a placeholder app built for wait list registrants. Right now, the app has a waiting list wall, which “VIP” members can bypass once an administrator grants permission. This likely allows Clinkle to demo the app to investors and partners without having to go through some cumbersome download process. During the process of fundraising, I’m sure that little trick came in handy. Not so much today, though. The hack produced some interesting data about the team that works on Clinkle. Founder Lucas Duplan is listed as the first user (User ID: 1), with a picture that very much resembles him holding cash money. The CFO, , is also listed with a legitimate profile photo, as is the Head Of Comms, who confirmed the validity of the images and the data. The photos from Clinkle’s , where 22 unidentified Clinkle employees are pictured alongside goofy pseudonyms, also seem to resemble people in the leaked profile photos. Finally, we can put faces to names. So what are the implications? Well, Clinkle hasn’t actually launched yet, so it’s very possible that the team hasn’t been focusing on security. However, security and trust should be top priorities for a payments company. Especially for a company so young. Clinkle was founded by a group of more than a dozen Stanford students in 2011, and has stayed under the radar while key employees finish their degrees. The company was partially funded by Stanford professors before raising . Over 18 investors participated. The , followed by every other news outlet, proclaimed this the biggest Stanford startup exodus in history. Clinkle was all the rage. Seriously, . In fall, however, left many wondering if the Stanford-fueled payments startup was really the Messiah of trade. The company slashed around 30 employees, and then another 16. Around the same time, of the app in action were leaked, letting Clinkle’s cat out of the bag. circulated that the company was going through leadership issues. That those promised equity weren’t getting it. That folks were overworked and underpaid. That there was no transparency about the product timeline, or the product itself. That 22-year-old Lucas Duplan was taking home a six-figure salary and mistreating employees. Today, the same questions as before creep back into our consciousness. What have they been doing with all that money this whole time? Posting profile photos that confirm ? Whether the breach was a result of intentional openness or unintentional laziness on the part of Clinkle is unclear, but the photo doesn’t lie. |
Barry Sternlicht, Former CEO Of Hotel Giant Starwood, Invests In HotelTonight | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Last-minute hotel booking startup just announced that it has landed a personal investment from Barry Sternlicht, founder of Starwood Capital Group and former chairman and CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. Sternlicht, who has been described as the “ ,” is also joining HotelTonight as a strategic adviser. “He knows everybody in the hotel industry,” HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank told me, later adding, “When we launched, there was a lot of doubt that we were beneficial to the industry …. Getting the top guy in hotels to back us and to support us, that’s validation that we’re becoming grown up.” According to Shank, Sternlicht should be able to help HotelTonight improve its hotel experience and also reach broader deals with large chains, which is particularly important for coverage outside of major cities. On that front, HotelTonight is also announcing that it has reached agreements with several chains, including InterContinental Hotels Group, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, Best Western International, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, FRHI Hotels & Resorts, La Quinta Inn & Suites, Barcelo Hotels & Resorts, and Steigenberger Hotel Group. “Booking windows are shrinking and customers are going mobile, trends which position HotelTonight perfectly for the future,” Sternlicht said in the release. “But there’s something more that attracted me – it’s that HotelTonight is proving booking by booking that both hotels and distributors can win.” Shank declined to specify the size of Sternlicht’s investment, except that it was “a significant dollar amount.” HotelTonight says it has been downloaded more than 9 million times and now works with 10,000 hotels in 250 destinations. The company raised last summer. |
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Microsoft’s Next CEO Reportedly Will Be Its Cloud Boss Satya Nadella, Gates Could Be Replaced On Board | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | After a search that stretched for months, that Microsoft will select internal candidate Satya Nadella as its next CEO. Nadella is known for his work with cloud computing at Microsoft and deep technical knowledge. The company kicked off its hunt for a new head last year when long-time CEO Steve Ballmer announced that he would step down within a year. Nadella has long been a candidate for the role. If Microsoft does select him to replace Ballmer, it won’t be surprising. During the CEO dance, candidates from companies as far-flung as Ford were discussed. Internal candidates rose and fell, including the company’s soon to return former executive Stephen Elop. According to , the company’s founder and long-time chairman of its board could be replaced. The replacing of Gates would be more than symbolic. His stature on the board has caused some to fret that he could hold back a new CEO, exerting outsized influence as shareholder and former CEO. Microsoft declined to comment. |
Amazon Sheds 10% In After-Hours Trading, Erasing $19B In Market Cap | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | After reporting both a , Amazon fell 10.32 percent in after-hours trading. The company had ended the day at $403.01 and is now trading at $361.41. As a company, Amazon is valued by investors on the strength or weakness of its revenue growth. Amazon’s current share count is . At a per-share loss of $41.60 so far today, Amazon has lost around . Amazon not only failed to meet street expectations in terms of profit and revenue, the company also had first-quarter earnings guidance that was immediately called down as lackluster. As after the news dropped, Amazon’s stated revenue guidance for the current quarter of between $18.2 billion and $19.9 billion was below the market’s expected guidance of $19.67 billion. As a company, Amazon is not valued by investors on its current or near-term profitability. Investors have given the company wide berth to invest in its revenue growth. As such, the company’s owners are not expecting it to generate profit in a way that could be disbursed to themselves in the form of dividends — at least for now. The other side of that coin is that Amazon’s external growth expectations are steep, as investors are allowing it to invest their potential profits into its expansion. This means that lower than expected revenue growth is something of a cardinal sin for the firm. And when it misses, as it did today, down goes the share price. We’ll have to wait and see if the company can recover in after-hours trading. Apple, VMware, and Yahoo reported this cycle. Facebook and Microsoft, on the other tip, had strong quarters. |
Zynga Lays Off 314 Employees, Or 15% Of Its Workforce | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | , Zynga is also laying off about 15 percent of its workforce, or about 314 employees. This is part of a cost-reduction plan that is supposed to generate $33 million to $35 million in savings this year, excluding a $15 million to $17 million restructuring charge. In an interview today, CEO Don Mattrick said these jobs would mostly come out of “infrastructure” areas A Seattle studio is being affected with a closure. Zynga has roughly 2,000 employees at a time when better-performing competitors lack anywhere near the same kind of headcount. Supercell, which sold half of itself for $1.53 billion last fall to Japanese carrier Softbank, currently has about 130 employees and in revenue in the beginning of last year. Since Mattrick took over the company from founding CEO Mark Pincus, Zynga has engaged in a series of layoffs, cut out middle layers of management and shut down poorly performing games. Last summer, the company . |
Amazon’s Stock Price Stumbles After Hours On Revenue, Earnings Miss And Weak Guidance | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Today after the market close Amazon , including revenue of $25.59 billion, and earnings per share of $0.51. The company has operating income of $510 million in the period, up 26 percent year over year. The street Amazon to report revenue of $26.06 billion, and earn $0.66 per share. Put another way, in a quarter of strong GDP growth, Amazon managed to miss expectations on both its top and bottom lines. In regular trading, Amazon was up a very strong 5 percent. In after-hours trading, Amazon is down sharply, nearly 8 percent. Amazon’s expected earnings-per-share growth was more than 200 percent, for reference. Despite the disappointing earnings, the company was upbeat: “It’s a good time to be an Amazon customer,” said founder and CEO Jeff Bezos on the earnings call. In the , for context, Amazon reported net sales of $17.09 billion, and an earnings-per-share loss of $0.09. That was the company’s second sequential loss. The gap between the company’s third and fourth quarter revenue is due to the holiday shopping period, a cyclically strong period for Amazon. In its year-ago quarter, Amazon had earnings per share of $0.21. For its calendar 2013, Amazon had revenue of $74.45 billion, up 22 percent year over year. Its operating income rose 10 percent in the same period to $745 million. Amazon ended the year with cash and equivalents of $8.6 billion. That Amazon was up in regular trading to more than $400 a share was perhaps due to Facebook’s , which bolstered the social giant. Twitter was up a firm 8 percent today as well, riding the same winds. Now that we have the numbers, it appears those optimistic expectations were misplaced. For the coming quarter, Amazon expects to generate revenue between $18.2 billion and $19.9 billion, up 13 percent year over year.
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CrunchFund Is Raising $40M For Its Second Fund, According To Filing | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | , the early-stage investment firm that’s basically one giant conflict-of-interest statement for TechCrunch, is raising $40 million for a second fund, . I’ve emailed partners Michael Arrington and Patrick Gallagher for confirmation, and I’ll update this post if I hear back. (CrunchFund’s third partner, TechCrunch alum MG Siegler, .) Arrington, of course, is the founder of TechCrunch. He launched CrunchFund in the with a $20 million fund. AOL, which acquired TechCrunch a year before, was a big investor. (The announcement of the CrunchFund led to much journalistic handwringing and Arrington’s eventual ouster from this site, though he remains involved in TechCrunch’s conferences.) Since then, CrunchFund has backed (long enough that TechCrunch writers sometimes have trouble keeping track), with recent investments in , , and . Following MG’s departure and some ensuing speculation about the firm’s future, , concluding that it shouldn’t have any trouble raising a second fund, and that the mix of investors was likely to change. , which went up shortly before this story did, says the firm is actually targeting $30 million for the new fund. |
Google Q4 ’13 Beats With $16.86B Revenue, Misses With EPS Of $12.01 Because Of Motorola Weakness | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Google just its Q4 earnings report and the results are mostly in line with Wall Street expectations, though it missed on earnings per share due to larger than expected losses at Motorola, which doubled from the year-ago-quarter. Over the last three months, the company reported revenue of $16.86 billion and $3.37 billion in net income. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $12.01 and GAAP EPS was $9.90. “We ended 2013 with another great quarter of momentum and growth. Google’s standalone revenue was up 22 percent year on year, at $15.7 billion”, said Larry Page, CEO of Google in a statement today. “We made great progress across a wide range of product improvements and business goals. I’m also very excited about improving people’s lives even more with continued hard work on our user experiences.” Ahead of the earnings release, most analysts the company’s earnings per share to increase about 16 percent thanks to better ad revenues on mobile and YouTube. The analyst was that Google would report revenue of $16.75 billion (up 37.8 percent from the year-ago-quarter) and earnings per share of $12.26. Last quarter, Google revenue of $14.89 billion and net income of $2.97 billion for an EPS of $10.74.
For the last three quarters in a row, Google beat Wall Street’s expectations in large part thanks to improved results from its AdWords Enhanced Campaigns. Overall, though, cost-per-click, one of Google’s key metrics to measure its advertising performance, has been trending lower, with a 4 percent decrease in Q3 and an 8 percent drop year-over-year. Paid clicks, on the other hand, increased 8 percent in Q3 and 26 percent year over year. This quarter paid clicks increased by 31 percent and cost-per-click decreased by just 2 percent. Traffic acquisition costs increased to $3.31 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $3.08 million in the year-ago-quarter. This accounted for 24 percent of Google’s revenue, compared to 25 percent last year. The last few weeks have been particularly interesting for Google. The company announced its $3.2 billion and just yesterday (and surely timed to preempt today’s earnings release), it said that it would . Motorola has been posting losses ever since Google acquired it in 2012. Last quarter it posted an operating loss of $248 million and this quarter it had revenues of $1.24 billion but lost 384 million. |
Yahoo Detects Mass Hack Attempt On Yahoo Mail, Resets All Affected Passwords | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | The details are a bit sparse right now, but Yahoo has just disclosed by way that they’ve detected what they’re calling a “coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts”. Yahoo didn’t disclose how many accounts were affected, but we’ve asked for clarification and will update the post accordingly. It’s possible that they’ve yet to nail down an exact number. Given that it was enough to disclose the news in a public blog post, it’s presumably a non-trivial amount. The (sort of?) good news: it doesn’t appear that Yahoo’s servers were compromised — instead, it looks like someone is firing off a bunch of login attempts using emails/passwords secured from an unnamed “third-party database compromise”. In other words: the attackers got someone else’s database of usernames/passwords, and are mass-checking for accounts that use them same credentials on Yahoo Mail. In response to the attack, Yahoo has reset the passwords of all accounts that appear to have been affected. If you’re trying to log in and Yahoo is asking you to change your password and verify your identity via SMS, this is probably why. [Photo credit: on Flickr] |
Telenav Buys Skobbler For $24M To Power An OpenStreetMap Challenge To Google Maps | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Last summer we heard that German startup was , in the wake of Google’s purchase of Waze. Today Skobbler has achieved that exit — albeit not — selling to , maker of the , in a deal worth just shy of $24 million. The acquisition, which closed on January 29, saw Telenav shelling out $19.2 million in cash to buy Skobbler, along with $4.6 million of company common stock — making a price-tag of just under $24 million for the Berlin-based startup that was founded back in 2008. Skobbler has built a business out of transforming OpenStreetMap (OSM) data into a series of consumer apps — such as the hybrid online/offline maps app, — as well as licensing its mapping engine technology to third parties so they, in turn, can plug OSM data into their apps — as an alternative to paying to use Google Maps (or another proprietary mapping data provider). uying OSM specialist Skobbler gives its Scout app a route into international markets where the app has not previously been offered. “What we’re doing is taking Scout international basically with this acquisition. We’re rolling OSM into it and we’re taking that to be an international product offering,” Telenav’s director of traffic and navigation services, Ryan Peterson, told TechCrunch. The clear competitive target here is Google Maps consumer apps, according to Peterson. “Looking at Google, compared to OSM and navigation, we’ve positioned ourselves very well now to leverage OSM — it’s basically crowdsourced and open which is very different than the Google model. And that is accelerating very rapidly,” he said. Telenav said it sees huge potential for OSM’s open alternative to attack Google Maps in the consumer space — noting that OSM can offer very highly detailed mapping data, with features such as trees and pedestrian paths included, as well as basic roads. “OSM is actually a lot more detailed than what Google offers,” said Peterson. “And it’s just a matter of time before OSM is, globally, far better than Google Maps from that perspective.” “It’s amazing how many people are contributing into OSM. A great example is if you look at Sochi in Russia where the Olympics are being held… the detail around the mountain resort and the city and the village is far more drawn out in OSM than it is in Google Maps. And you know that Google is there mapping this stuff right, it’s the Olympics. “You just can’t compete with an open crowd.” Another differentiation route vs Google Maps is by app feature-set, with Skobbler having built offline maps capabilities in some of its apps, for instance, and Telenav focusing on adding commuter friendly traffic info to its apps, couple with consumer friendly UIs. Telenav has quietly been preparing the ground to use OSM as a differentiation engine for its consumer navigation apps vs the Mountain View flavoured competition. Back in September OSM founder, he company to work on OSM and lead its crowd-sourced mapping initiatives for its . Today’s acquisition of Skobbler makes plain the scope of Telenav’s hopes and ambitions for OSM-powered mobile navigation. “We’ve basically rolled up all industry expertise that’s out there for OSM navigation,” said Peterson. “Steve Coast… is intimately aware of all of the underpinnings of the OSM data structure, everything. We’ve got that all under one belt, so we can now move fast and quite frankly be extremely competitive with Google.” Writing in a blog announcing the news, Coast also fleshed out the scope of Telenav’s OSM strategy — saying he’s gunning to grow OSM’s contributor base to seven million in the next “year or two” (up from the current 1.5 million registered editors) to help it compete with Google’s closed approach. And the engine for OSM’s growth — beyond its own doubling ever year momentum — is Telenav’s strategy to get OSM data into the hands of more mobile users as a navigation aid vis apps that reach further afield. Coast writes: Today, OSM is a repository of quality map data, with more coming in than going out. I want to change that. Now it is time to leapfrog the simple design use cases – the economically efficient background usage of the map. It’s time to take OSM and harness it for everyday navigation. That’s where the users are and where we can really make difference. I’d like it to get OSM to seven billion contributors in the next year or two. The only real way to get there is to allow a significant amount of consumers to get their hands on the map. I want more mobile users to have the chance to navigate with it and provide feedback as they go. This feedback can be implicit in their GPS trails, or explicit in their feedback to us as they tell us where the map needs improvement. Since OSM’s mapping data is free for anyone to use, being as it’s generated by crowd-contributions, you may wonder what exactly Telenav is shelling out for here. But the key is the technology Skobbler has developed on top of OSM to allow for the of OSM’s static display map data into those consumer friendly and feature rich navigation apps Coast is discussing. So essentially, by buying Skobbler, Telenav is combining two complementary OSM efforts — its own, primarily in the U.S., and Skobbler’s primarily in Europe — to put more fire power behind OSM as a Google Maps challenger. Skobbler has an SDK to allow developers to license its OSM mapping engine, and that’s another route the acquisition can help Telenav build out its reach, said Peterson. “Google Maps is actually very expensive for developers and they’re looking for an OSM alternative. But OSM data is different from display of that data — you need a layer of software on top of the data to make it work, and so that’s really why people are looking at Skobbler as a technology provider for their applications. And we will, I think, see a lot of new deployments with OSM in very popular applications globally using OSM for that reason.” “Our interest in Skobbler is the people, a super talented team; it’s the technology that they’ve developed on top of OSM; their OSM expertise; and their engine and their application,” he added. “It really matches everything we’ve been doing internally for making OSM navigable… so it basically doubles our capacity. Combining those two together gives us this worldwide coverage.” Making OSM “navigable” boils down to taking the core OSM data from a “great display map” — made up of visual roadways and pathways created by volunteer contributors — and building it into apps that also pull out/draw on underlying meta-data — such as road speed limits and road characteristics — to make the core OSM mapping data more useful and accessible. “Those types of attributes underneath the road geometry are things that people in the OSM community generally don’t contribute into the database,” Peterson added. “So there’s a lot of technology behind the scenes to figure out that type of data using GPS probe data, using fancy algorithms, using sophisticated routing engines and those types of things where there’s a lot of innovation in technology that otherwise one wouldn’t know.” Peterson said Skobbler’s European offices, in Germany and Romania, will remain post-acquisition — with its Berlin office giving Telenav a base for its international expansion strategy. It’s not yet clear what will happen to Skobbler’s own suite of apps post-acquisition. Telenav’s Peterson said it’s too early to say, but it’s worth noting that Skobbler’s apps (which have had around five million downloads to date) are predominantly paid, whereas Telenav’s Scout is a free download (monetised by ads and premium upgrades). Back in 2012 , which it uses for its own app monetisation — helping to flesh out that side of its apps business model. |
Zynga Buys NaturalMotion For $527M, Signaling A New Tack For The Gaming Giant | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | Zynga has long been famous (or infamous?) for its data-driven approach to game design. The company never focused on building strong character IP, or intellectual property, in favor of releasing games that had been thoroughly funnel-tested. But now that founding CEO Mark Pincus has stepped aside and let Xbox executive Don Mattrick take the reins, perhaps the company is going in a totally new direction. Mattrick is sending a big signal on that front today with a $527 million deal to acquire NaturalMotion, the Oxford, U.K.-based gaming company behind franchises like CSR Racing and Clumsy Ninja. The deal involves $391 million in cash and about 39.8 million shares of Zynga stock at yesterday’s price, leaving Zynga with about $1.2 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand. (There is also sad news today, of the company’s workforce.) Torsten Reil, who runs NaturalMotion, doesn’t come from a cookie cutter gaming background. He had actually been working on his Ph.D. in Complex Systems in Oxford’s zoology department when he decided to go in a totally different direction. He used his biology background to design software that could realistically animate 3D movement. Those products went on to become a middleware business that helped animate games in the Grand Theft Auto franchise and films in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Then a few years ago, Reil and NaturalMotion pivoted to building their own games, using their proprietary animation software to make freemium titles like My Horse and most recently, Clumsy Ninja. Reil is a perfectionist, and he’ll delay games for months until the details are just right. That attention and care has attracted support from key partners like Apple, which let the company demo Clumsy Ninja and CSR Racing on-stage at the WWDC and iPhone 5 keynotes. (Let me just stress that being invited by Apple to go on-stage at their marquee events is like winning the “Best Picture” Oscar for an app developer.) When he launched Clumsy Ninja last fall (a whole year after the company teased it on-stage at the iPhone 5 launch), Reil told me, “We want to get the game right. We want to make people laugh and smile. We don’t want to design it to be a hard-core monetizing game. It has to be a delightful, wholesome experience.” It doesn’t sound like stereotypical Zynga, does it? Well, times have changed on the iOS platform. It used to be comparatively cheap to launch lots of casual, social games on the platform. But if you look at the top-grossing charts today, they’re almost the same as a year ago with companies like King, Supercell and MachineZone at the top. That’s because it’s so expensive now to market and acquire users on mobile platforms. So if you’re going to launch a game, it takes much more time and investment than it did a year ago. So that’s why a new and even more deliberate approach is necessary. It’s not enough to fast-follow on proven gaming categories, which was Zynga’s strategy on the Facebook platform. With this deal, Zynga gets a good portfolio of current and upcoming games, a character with real franchise potential in Clumsy Ninja, a middleware business and a 260-person gaming company that is culturally focused on quality. As for NaturalMotion and its investors, the company and had former EA executive Mitch Lasky on the board. Balderton Capital, which used to be Benchmark Europe, was NaturalMotion’s first venture investor. Lasky, who , shared some of his thoughts here. “NaturalMotion will provide Don with a fantastic slate of mobile products (both new, innovative ones, as well as sequels of their current hits),” . “Combined with Zynga’s reach, social networking expertise, and advanced audience measurement tools, NaturalMotion and Zynga should be a very potent combination.” |
Equidate Launches A Secondary Market For Early Startup Employees To Sell Shares | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | It was once a rare practice, but employees are now finding more ways to unload vested shares in their startups along the way. While employers have typically tried to control these sales, a new marketplace called is opening up that will let employees sell equity with or without the startup’s consent (although Equidate would prefer to collaborate with employers). Over the past decade, many companies like Facebook have elected to wait longer before going public. That meant that longtime employees wound up with their wealth mostly tied up in the stock of their companies with few options to diversify their holdings. At the same time, certain investors wanted access to a growing pool of pre-IPO tech companies. So companies like New York-based SecondMarket cropped up. They have helped facilitate employee share sales for privately-held companies like SurveyMonkey, which raised about $800 million in January of last year. Equidate’s critique of SecondMarket’s model is that if you are an employee that wants to sell shares, you have to do it through your company. Two of Equidate’s co-founders, Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam, saw that their friends in high-growth tech companies felt stuck financially. “It’s difficult if you want to sell shares as an individual,” said Prasad, who was previously a product manager at Zynga and an early employee at Chartboost. (But these restrictions also exist because as secondary sales have become more popular, companies have also wanted control. They want to manage the flow of private information of their financial performance and they want to know who their shareholders are.) So what Equidate has done is that they’ve created contracts tied to the value of an employee’s shares, which have to be vested and owned by them. (Employees can’t participate if they just have options or if they have restricted stock units.) “It’s similar to a collateralized loan. No shares are trading hands,” Prasad said. Prasad said that an Equidate contract allows an investor to buy rights to the economic upside of a share, while avoiding the legal hoops a company has to go through when it’s adding extra shareholders to its cap table. Gil Silberman, Equidate’s other co-founder, created the contracts after working as a lawyer with companies like LinkedIn, Craigslist and OpenTable. A fourth team member, Andrea Lamari, works alongside Gil Silberman in a business development role. They’re launching with four companies on the market including Dropbox, BitTorrent, Chartboost and Buzzfeed. They would like to bring more Series B stage companies or so onto the platform, which means they’d sit in between early-stage solutions like Funders Club and then big late-stage rounds. For now, Equidate will only allow accredited investors, who either have a net worth of more than $1 million or make at least $200,000 a year, to participate. The four-person company hasn’t shared any details on how much it has raised to date or who its investors are. |
Google Pleased With Hardware And Nexus Performance; Talks Nest, Glass And Other Wearables | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | call doesn’t feature CEO Larry Page this time around, which is a disappointment in terms of product discussion. But Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora discussed briefly hardware during the call, flagging the search giant’s growing satisfaction with the Nexus line and with the Nexus 5 in particular. Arora said that Google is seeing “strong interest in Nexus hardware,” and “great reception for Nexus 5,” especially during the holiday sales period. That’s due to the marketing team’s performance creating ads and also fostering a retail environment conductive to purchases. On the subject of Nest, Google reiterated the line it’s been touting so far, which is that they saw the goals of Nest and themselves in alignment. Google wants to help Nest scale, it said, and will continue to devote resources to this goal. That’s somewhat different from what TechCrunch heard recently, which suggested that the learning thermostat and smoke detector weren’t really the focus of the deal; instead, Google wants to put the . Asked whether the Motorola acquisition will affect their hardware plans, Arora said that he thinks their continued investments in other areas should show that they’re still committed to hardware. “As you know from the Nest acquisition, Glass and wearables, we’re continuing to innovate,” he said about their ongoing hardware projects. It’s an interesting characterization, because Google has yet to make anything public around wearables beyond Glass, yet Arora separated it out as a new category. Late last year, we heard that a , however, so this could be a tantalizing hint that this kind of device (or other wearable efforts) could indeed be on the horizon. Remember that , which made an Android-powered smartwatch. |
Announcing The Finalists For Hardware Battlefield: Atlas Wearables, Blaze, CubeSensors, And Owlet Baby Care | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | After two days of presentations, hours of judging, and 14 demos, we’re excited to announce the finalists for the inaugural Hardware Battlefield: , , , and . The winner will be decided tomorrow afternoon and awarded a $50,000 check and a robot-topped trophy. Fourteen companies participated in our first Hardware Battlefield representing eleven countries. From medical devices to quantitative self gear to drones to bike lights, these companies launched for the first time on our stage at CES 2014 and were judged by panels of all-star judges. Tomorrow, at 3:00pm PDT, the four finalists will present their product yet again to four more judges including Yves Behar, Bre Pettis, Jen McCabe, and Matt Turck. The winner will take home the first Hardware Battlefield cup. All of our companies were amazing. are already doing some amazing work in their fields and most are well on their way to successful crowdfunding. We were proud to have them on our stage. The finalists are:
[ ] – Atlas is a wearable device that tracks and identifies specific activity. Where existing products can only track a single metric, steps, Atlas is smart enough to identify pushups, squats, dead lifts and everything else.
Peter Li, CEO
Mike Kasparian, CTO
Alex Hsieh, Lead Software Developer
Mehdi Mirza, Data Scientist [ ] – Blaze are an intelligent biking brand. Launching with the Laserlight, a radical innovation tackling the greatest cause of cyclist fatality – being caught in the ‘blind spot’ and vehicles turning across an unseen bike.
Emily Brooke, CEO + Founder [ ] – CubeSensors are small, stylish and connected devices that help you understand how every room in your home or office is affecting your health, comfort and productivity. The Cubes monitor everything that can be measured about indoors, like temperature, humidity, air quality, noise, light and barometric pressure. They are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and can easily blend in any room you want to optimize for leisure, sleep or work.
Ales Spetic, CEO
Marko Mrdjenovic, CTO [ ] – Owlet provides parents with peace of mind by implementing new technologies to monitor, track, and alert on changes in their infant’s health. Owlet helps parents prevent SIDS and other early infant issues.
Jordan Monroe, CMO
Zack Bomsta, CTO
Kurt Workman, CEO
Tanor Hodges, CFO
Jake Colvin, COO |
CAN Capital Raises $33M From Meritech And Accel To Loan Small Businesses Working Capital | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | , a company that gives small businesses access to credit and working capital and helps solve this problem, has raised $33 million in funding co-led by Meritech Capital Partners and existing investor Accel Partners, with participation from Ribbit and QED Investors. Accel previously led a $30 million round in CAN Capital in 2012. CAN Capital constitutes the largest, non-bank alternative capital provider to small businesses in the U.S. The company uses its own real-time platform and risk-scoring models to provide capital to small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. and Latin America. To date, CAN Capital has provided access to $3.6 billion in capital to SMBs, representing roughly 123,000 distinct small-business finance transactions. CAN uses a variety of data points to deem a business worthy of credit or capital apart from the traditional criteria. CAN’s proprietary underwriting algorithms will churn through its data stacks of historical merchant demographic, firmographic, psychographic and social and behavioral profiles seeking and seasoning new behavioral and synthetic risk indicators and recombining those indicators into new risk scorecards. For example, CAN will look at frequency of sales (not just how much), inventory access, eBay seller rating, tax returns and other information. In terms of interest, the company uses a more unorthodox, merchant-friendly way of collecting money on top of a loan. If an online violin store needs $30,000 in working capital to purchase inventory, CAN will loan the money, but the borrower will need to pay back $35,000 to CAN over 12 months. Typically, CAN will give merchants and businesses anywhere from $2,500 to $250,000 in working capital. Customers range from medical practices to shoe stores to auto repair shops to clothing, accessory and home product online retailers. CAN has maintained in the past that its charges are less than any interest rate from a bank. And 75 percent of customers renew their funding. In some cases, repayment can be fairly simple, and can also cater to the merchant’s specific cash-flow needs. So an online merchant could choose to forward a small percentage of sales from its payment processor directly to CAN to repay the loan every month. If sales were lower than usual that month, CAN would potentially provide the option to lower the amount required to pay. Over the past four years, CAN Capital has doubled its revenue and is on pace to double again in the next two years. Accel Partner and board member Kevin Efrusy, who calls CAN Capital “the best-kept secret in the emerging financial innovation boom,” tells us the company is profitable and actually doesn’t need the money. This round was about VCs wanting to put more money into a fast-growing company that could potentially IPO. The disruption of various sectors of the financial-services industry is an ongoing trend that will likely accelerate in 2014. There are a few other players in this space who are trying to provide small businesses with access to capital, including Kabbage, OnDeck Capital, and well-funded competitor Lending Club, which recently moved into providing small businesses with loans, in addition to individuals. Prosper is also playing in this space. But Efrusy says that this is a market that has room for many large players, because the opportunity is so large, and because of the value provided to SMBs. “This is not a winner-take-all scenario,” he told me. We believe CAN Capital can do the same for lending to SMBs as what Capital One did for consumer credit cards.” |
Android’s Rise To Platform Dominance In One Graph | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | With Android landing on all-in-one computers and Windows extending its reach deeper into the mobile world, the platform world is tightening into three key teams: iOS and OS X, Windows, and Android. Chrome OS, BlackBerry, and the other minor players have derivative unit volume, and can therefore be discounted in our larger image of the market. To compare those three groups yields an irksome, yet interesting, picture. Gartner recently and prognostications along those operating system niches, stacking the groups against one another. The fine folks over at Redmond Magazine did us the favor of . Here, in a single chart, is the rise of Android, the slippage in the PC market, and Apple’s rising tide: Microsoft manages to stay atop Apple, but the chart makes it plain that if Microsoft doesn’t want to fall even further behind Android — recall that Android is now being deployed across device classes — it will have to grow its mobile base at a far more rapid pace than it has thus far. Put another way, for Microsoft to chase Google, it can’t lean on the PC market, even as that market category stabilizes. We can presume that Apple’s growth is mostly iOS-based, given that its OS X offerings are dealing with similar headwinds as Microsoft’s Windows platform. In July 2013, my colleague Josh Constine and I called . Recently, Paul Thurrott that 2013 was “the year that Android became the Windows of the mobile world.” In an increasingly multi-modal computing market, where the difference between device classes is blurring, operating systems are becoming more diversely deployed. So, we can’t keep Android unit volume in one bucket, and Windows PC numbers in a separate class. Microsoft, if it wants to regain the mantle of the leading platform company, has to do more than end the decline in the PC market: It has to . |
After Arriving On Android, Glooko Lands $7M From Samsung & More To Bring Predictive Diabetes Care Global | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | The proliferation of connected devices, coupled with rapid advances in data analytics and sensor technology, has fundamentally changed the way people interact with and manage their health. Thanks to smartphones and a new generation of smart, wearable gadgets, it’s now easier than ever before to monitor and and analyze a dizzying array of inputs and physiological signals and inputs — from your heart rate and calorie intake to your biorhythms and stress levels. The promise of today’s health apps is that, by leveraging mobility and realtime analytics, they can help Average Joes like you and me transform biometric data into something more substantial Information, knowledge and changes in behavior. While the market continues to brim with all manners of behavioral change and health management apps, only a tiny fraction of startups are addressing an area in which health management and tracking technology could (arguably) have the greatest impact: Chronic diseases and conditions. Glooko launched in late 2011 to bring mobility and data tracking to people living with Diabetes, a population underserved by advances in mobile technology. After all, diabetes, like any chronic condition, by nature requires constant monitoring from patients — across a number of devices — though diabetes itself is really at the apex of chronic conditions. Not only does it require constant monitoring, but any lapse in blood glucose can have potentially dire consequences (especially for those with Type 1 diabetes), requiring patients to keep a logbook to record glucose readings. But, given how many glucose meters there on the market, and the fact that a patient’s personal data is generally stored offline, in a number of locations, managing diabetes can be extremely time-consuming. Thus, the company set out on a mission to address the lack of interoperability and standardized methods for data transfer among devices (and glucose meters) to finally create a unified diabetes management solution. The effort has begun to pay off, as Glooko now supports data transfer between 26 glucose meters and 28 different mobile devices. For some perspective, compatibility with 26 meters means that it covers roughly 85 percent of existing meters in the U.S., says Glooko’s Vikram Singh. In November, on the heels of approval from the FDA, Glooko took another big step toward device agnosticism, expanding its support from iOS to Android devices — a move which the company says makes it the the “only FDA-cleared mobile diabetes management system to support the transfer of glucose data from dozens of meters to Android devices.” With its coverage increasing, the company is ready to take the next big step, says CEO Rick Altinger, thanks to the help of a few familiar names in the world of mobile technology. Today, the company announcement that it has raised $7 million in a Series A-1 financing round from investors that include Samsung Venture Investment Company and Lifeforce Ventures, with participation from existing investors, The Social + Capital Partnership, Sundeep Madra and Yogen Dalal, among others. With its new capital in tow, which brings its total to around $11.5 million, Glooko will focus on the next phase of data tracking technology applied to health: Predictive care. In order to have the biggest possible impact, Glooko will look to leverage its patient datasets to enable predictive diabetes care by delivering both patient data and decision-making algorithms to health providers and payer groups, Altinger says. With the help of a huge mobile player like Samsung, Glooko believes that it can begin to liberate blood glucose data from meters and make it more accessible to both patients and health providers. Going forward, the company will look to scale its diabetes management system across the globe, while adding a predictive layer of analytics and messaging that it hopes will allow healthcare providers to make therapeutic recommendations to its patients in realtime. As it stands today, Glooko’s system now includes its “MeterSync Cable” and applications for both iOS and Android, which combined, allow data to be transferred from meters directly to a user’s mobile device. The apps then integrated directly into the existing Glooko management web dashboards, along with EHRs and disease management systems, enabling healthcare providers and care management teams to remotely monitor at-risk patients. By doing so, Glooko is hoping to provide health systems and disease management organizations with access to better population management and analytics tools that can allow them to both increase focus on at-risk patients and, over the long-run, achieve higher levels of adherence to treatment plans. The hope is that this will, in turn, allow payers and insurance companies to reduce costs and offer cheaper rates to end users. By focusing on increasing involvement of healthcare providers and creating cost reductions, Glooko also sees a path towards monetization, as it could begin charging health insurance companies a subscription fee for access to tools that allow them to better execute managed care (and higher savings). Furthermore, with access to tools that allow patients to better manage their condition on a daily basis, patients are able to reduce their risk of emergency situations over the short-term and co-morbidities in the long term. Essentially, Glooko hopes that insurance companies will see paying for the service in the short-term as a way to generate significant savings over the long-term. For more, find Glooko |
Faraday’s Stylish New Bicycle Will Change How You Think About E-Bikes | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | Urban commuters are getting more and more comfortable with the idea of biking around, but in places like San Francisco, that can be a drag. Electronic bicycles have emerged to help people get where they’re going, even in incredibly hilly environments. But many e-bikes are ugly, due to huge motors and battery packs that end up being placed in odd places around the frame. hopes to change that, with a bike that was built to be stylish, functional, and a lot of fun to ride. We got a preview of the company’s first bike, which will be shipping soon to customers who pre-ordered it. With a motor on its front wheel and batteries actually stored inside the frame, the Faraday bicycle is built to look just like a regular city commuter bike. The first iteration of the Faraday bike was designed while founder Adam Vollmer was at IDEO to compete in a contest to create the ultimate city bike. But what started out as just a side project was spun out into its own company. Faraday has come a long way since then. About a year-and-a-half ago, the company ran a successful campaign on Kickstarter, and has sold several more pre-ordered bikes in the meantime. Behind the scenes, the company has been working to put the final touches on its prototypes and preparing to put them into production soon. What you see in the video is pretty close to what will end up being shipped to the community. It has a 350-watt motor, which works out to about three times your power. The company pre-sold about 200 of the bikes at a price of around $3,500. Starting in March, Faraday expects to be shipping out to those who pre-ordered, and then hopes to ship a second production run in the mid-to-late summer. Check out the video above for more details! |
Get Reminders To Brush Your Teeth And Water The Plants With The Digital “Mother” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | Need a helpful reminder to brush your teeth, take your morning pills, or water the plants? The newly announced device, called , imbues everyday objects with the gentle nagging power of our awesome moms. Conspicuous peanut-sized trackers (“Cookies”) attach to toothbrushes, medication bottles, backpacks, water glasses and other household items to track if they’re being used correctly. Our own dear mothers could be the next to be replaced by a computer–except, of course, telling us to give them grandchildren (oh, and that unconditional love thing). Inside the Cookie, a tiny accelerometer knows whether, for instance, a medicine bottle has been lifted up and turned upside down–indicating that you’ve dumped our your morning pills. Cookies are placed on all sorts of household objects and wirelessly synced with the base station, which broods from a distance in the shape of a loving Russian doll. Beginning with mostly household objects, the possible applications for Mother are endless. Imagine any object around the house, car, or office that you’re supposed to use on a regular basis and it, could, in theory, work with Mother’s digital ecosystem. Mother also tracks temperature (for, say, pets) and geolocation (for tracking a child on the way from school). Sen.se’s Mother device is supposed to launch in the spring with a base station and 4 Cookies for $222. Check out more on their . |
AirDroids Wants To Democratize The Skies With Its Pint-Sized Pocket Drone | Chris Velazco | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | The buzz around drones is undeniable these days — as it turns out, even Martha Stewart uses one to survey her farm — but there still hasn’t been a runaway drone hit that has captured that imaginations of the masses. That’s exactly what a hardware startup called is trying to accomplish with the Pocket Drone, a (relatively) inexpensive flying machine that’s meant to give people of all stripes a different perspective. They’re serious about that “perspective” bit, too. The original vision was simple enough: co-founders Tim Reuter, TJ Johnson, and Chance Roth really just wanted to create a cheap way to tote a camera through the sky. Those ambitions evolved slightly though, and now they’re looking at the Pocket Drone as the ideal air machine to kick off a widespread drone revolution. “We’re a mission-driven company,” Reuter said. “Our goal is to put flying robots in the hands of as many people as possible. We think it’s empowering to democratize the sky.” Plenty of rapid iteration formalized the Pocket Drone’s shape — by which I mean marathon 3D printing sessions in Johnson’s basement — and the process seems to have been fruitful. In its current form, the Pocket Drone can tote around a GoPro (or something of similar weight) for up to 20 minutes, and support for GPS navigation and tablet controls means that you don’t have to be an RC fanatic (like some of the co-founders) to maneuver of these things through the air. And, as the name suggests, the drone is just slight enough to fit into a pocket (albeit a pretty large one). It’s not going to fit in your jeans, but it does slide in and out of a windbreaker pocket without too much hassle. That’s mostly thanks to the drone’s folding design — the three rotors’ arms can fold back and telescope for easy storage. The inclusion of easily replaceable carbon fiber chassis components also simplifies the process of swapping out damaged bits — after all, no matter how skilled a pilot you are you’re probably still going to crash every once in a while. In the event that you’re itching to take to the skies with a Pocket Drone, the team just recently launched a where you can lay claim to your own unit for as low as $415 if you bring your own remote control equipment. Production is going to take a bit of time though — AirDroids is linking up with a Taiwanese manufacturing concern with operations in Mexico to bring the Pocket Drone to market and they hope to get units on peoples’ doorsteps and in the air by June of this year. [gallery ids="938559,938560,938561,938562"] |
Medypal Raises $400K In Seed Round To Help Patients Buy Affordable Healthcare In India | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | , an Indian startup that owns healthcare marketplace , has raised around $400,000 in seed funding from Unitus Seed Fund. With this funding, Medypal will help patients find trustworthy service providers who will bid against each other for their spend on medical procedures. Medypal will use a “reverse auction” method to ensure that the services are competitively priced and patients are able to pick the service provider they want. Healthcare is a and is expected to reach $100 billion by 2016. The challenge, though, is to provide affordable services to millions, many of whom are not even covered under any medical insurance. Moreover, a majority of healthcare consumers in India rely on friends and family to select a service provider. By offering information on-the-go, and getting online quotes from service providers in real time, Medypal wants to change that. Commerzpoint founders P Rammohan and Brahmesh Jain are no strangers to finding opportunities in India’s healthcare sector. They founded the country’s first and the largest health insurance exchange, , in 2006. With more than half of India’s 160 million users accessing Internet on their mobiles, there is an opportunity to be tapped in delivering healthcare services. Medypal will be offering a free mobile app to healthcare consumers. The Medypal service will go live February 1. “Using the app, patients can search for healthcare procedures, go through the list of hospitals offering those procedures, browse through the profiles of the doctors, and check the facilities offered by hospitals before finally shortlisting the hospitals,” said Rammohan. “The app will also allow patients to ask for proposals from the hospitals and book appointments while on the move.” The startup plans to make money on leads generated and passed on to healthcare service providers. “We are in the final process of signing up with 300 health care providers in Bangalore ranging from large hospitals, diagnostic centre chains to dental clinics and cosmetic surgical centres,” said Rammohan. “There is no easy way to get objective information on service provider availability, quality and pricing,” Commerzpoint said in a statement announcing the funding. “This is especially challenging for low-income families who have even less information, education, connections and financial reserves.” As we reported last month, to help people at the bottom of the economic pyramid access basic necessities in India. The new fund invests in for-profit startups in India. “We are investing in a team, which has demonstrated success in scaling healthcare services to the masses in India,” said Dave Richards, managing partner of Unitus Seed Fund. |
Tech Angels Cross The $1 Billion Mark In 2013 | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | Buoyed by a stronger economy, angel investors companies worldwide poured a record amount of cash into early-stage technology and life-sciences companies, according to data from . Angel investments have been climbing steadily since 2008, CrunchBase data shows, but 2013 represents a new high, with investors crossing the billion-dollar threshold, committing $1.1 billion to entrepreneurs launching new tech companies, up from $929 million in 2012.
In the first half of 2013, angel investors invested $461 million in a total of 379 deals, according to the , a survey of angel investments published by Silicon Valley Bank, Angel Resource Institute and CB Insights. Angels committed more capital in each quarter of 2013 than in the previous year, according to CrunchBase data. And U.S.-based startups raised the bulk of that cash, attracting $687.9 million in 2013, up from $646.9 million in 2012, the CrunchBase data shows. “I think it’s about the economy and the economy continued to improve,” said Marianne Hudson, Executive Director of the Angel Capital Association, a trade group for early-stage investors. “The economy felt better from all stages in 2013 than in 2012 and that also meant that angels had more money to spend and invest.“ Meanwhile, Michael Cain, a member-manager of the Wilmington Investor Network, an angel investment group based in Wilmington, N.C., said collaboration and the continuing professionalization of the industry were also factors in the growth, and growing clout, of angels. “You get more minds around the table, [and] you get better due diligence because you have more people who know the space.” Angels are also seeing their investments pay out, which encourages more activity, investors said. Acquirers snatched up 48 companies that had raised just one round of capital in 2013, including home improvement site, , which was bought by only two years after raising its seed funding. Among the biggest winners were the backers of , a Minneapolis-based life sciences company which raised $15,000 in angel funding in 2012 and was acquired by the medical technology company C.R. Bard for $200 million. “There were a lot of companies that may not be that recognizable across the country that did deliver between 3x and 15x returns,” Hudson said. |
The Fin Is A Bluetooth Ring That Turns Your Hand Into An Interface | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | Smart glasses! Smart watches! Smart… rings? While many in the tech world would agree that wearable devices are the natural next stage of computing, no one has really cracked the code. As much as we geeks love to chat about Google Glass and Pebble watches, no wearable has breached the mainstream and achieved any degree of ubiquity just yet. RHL Vision, a competitor in the TechCrunch CES Hardware Battlefield today, thinks they have the answer: Bluetooth rings that turn your fingers into buttons. Swiping your thumb down your index finger, for example, could turn your phone’s volume down. Want to turn it back up? Just swipe back up across the same finger. Want to skip the current track? Swipe your thumb across the palm of the opposite hand. In future iterations, they hope to use biometrics to distinguish each segment of each finger. This would allow them to assign each segment a different behavior, essentially turning each section of your hand into a different button. While the team has renders (shown below) showing the ring as they hope it will look once they reach the early stages of actual production, the current prototype shown on stage (and pictured above) is a bit more… extensive. Whereas they plan to use flexible circuitry (think Jawbone Up) to shrink the design and allow it to wrap around your thumb, the current prototype relies on more traditional PCBs and off-the-shelf sensors to get the job done. It’s not as small and not as pretty, but it do a good job of proving the concept. Here’s the teams campaign! |
With An Eight-Figure Runrate, Oscar Doubles Down on Health Insurance Through $30M In New Funding | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | , the New York-based startup in the decidedly unsexy world of health insurance, has just picked up an additional $30 million in funding. Why? Promising numbers in the product’s first 90 days since launch. The company unveiled new health insurance exchanges where consumers can pick and choose plans in compliance with the Affordable Care Act. Oscar has since enrolled “thousands” of customers and has “tens of millions” of dollars in annualized revenue. While the , state programs in places like New York and California rolled out more smoothly. That’s where Oscar has picked most of its new clientele. Apparently, the numbers were good enough that Founders Fund, which had been a minority investor in the company, decided to increase its stake at a $340 million valuation. Other firms including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Kushner’s firm, Thrive Capital, also participated. Founders Fund put in $25 million, while the other firms added the remaining $5 million. Oscar tries to marry many of the design and user experience lessons from the consumer web and mobile world with health care. They have a clean and clear sign-up flow and they offer amenities like telemedicine or the ability to talk to a doctor within one hour of making a request. Generic drugs and primary care visits are also free. The company has a notable team behind with it Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Vostu co-founder Mario Schlosser, Kevin Nazemi and Fredrik Nylander, who ran engineering and operations and Tumblr. That’s just on the tech side. They also picked up executives with about 1,000 years of health insurance career experience behind them. On the company’s board is Charlie Baker, who ran insurer Harvard Pilgrim out of Massachusetts, the only state with an insurance exchange before the Affordable Care Act was passed. Oscar’s timing was incredibly lucky. The team looked at the healthcare space before they really understood what the full impact of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) would be. But the act fortuitously offered them a window to pick up customers just as the U.S. government enacted an individual mandate, or a requirement that people buy insurance or face penalties. That has meant a host of previously uninsured customers have come online the last several months. In total, Oscar has raised $75 million, has gone toward a capital reserve that the state of New York requires for health insurance providers. The company only caters to customers in New York and has no immediate plans to expand outside of the state (although that is the goal long-term). |
Medium Considering Raising $20 Million | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | , clean and beautiful attempt at revamping the way people write and read online, is considering raising a venture round according to the rumor mill. We’re hearing that the company, which has been subsisting on angel money apparently, is thinking about finally taking money from VCs. One number we’ve heard tossed out is a $20 million raise, and one venerable firm name that’s also been tossed around is , though it’s unclear whether Williams, who became a billionaire in the Twitter IPO, needs to raise money to support his fledgling company. Nothing is set in stone quite yet. Newly anointed Greylock general partner Josh Elman was a Williams loyalist amid the executive tumult between Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and current CEO Dick Costolo. So it wouldn’t be that surprising to see Elman reel in a deal like this. I have reached out to Elman, Williams and others at Greylock for comment, and have not heard back from anyone. Like Blogger and Twitter, Medium has ambitious goals. And it might be Williams’ third home run in a row, aiming to be the place on the web where thought leadership and high quality content thrives. It’s getting there, despite quite a from a couple of tech founders. Raising a venture round would make sense for the company, which has grand plans and may need to make even bolder acquisitions to succeed. The company in April, and continues to iterate on its product, with before the holidays. It would also mean a continuation of the fat-content movement, where like Vox and Buzzfeed require hefty amounts of venture capital in order to support more in depth, curated content. Yahoo’s Tumblr buy has made Medium a tempting bet for VCs — if Medium will have them. |
Modbot Wants To Make Robotics Easier, More Modular And More Democratic | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | The DIY revolution means that people can now print their own 3D models, build their own websites and apps, and even build their own mobile devices and custom computers using things like Raspberry Pi. The team taking part in this year’s TechCrunch Battlefield at CES 2014 wants to do the same for robotics – not hobby robotics, but serious, full-fledged industrial and commercial robot building. [gallery ids="942300,942306,942305,942304,942303,942302,942301"] Modbot founders Adam Ellison and Daniel Pizzata identified a problem in prototyping and building robots for use in manufacturing, research and basically any other application: parts were unnecessarily complicated and expensive, when in reality they could be much more affordable and much simpler, too. Ellison and Pizzata have created a simple system consisting of a servo, a link and a joint component, along with a base upon which to build your projects. The Modbot vision is one where people can combine pre-assembled parts that cost significantly less than their professional industrial counterparts in order to build a wide range of robots for any number of purposes, including small scale production. Imagine, then a future where entrepreneurs could not only create a concept for a hardware device and send that away to a production partner, but also build the thing themselves in-house. [gallery ids="938462,938461,938460,938459"] Honda’s Asimo costs roughly $1 million just to make, according to Modbot’s founders, and most of that cost comes from actuators and hardware. By dramatically decreasing the price of this part of the process, Modbot is hoping to encourage innovation and make it possible for even the smallest companies to build anything from a giant robot death spider to a fully functional prosthetic arm. Modbot is asking people to get involved by , and plans to launch a campaign soon to produce its hardware and to develop its app, which is a rapid prototyping campaign that lets you design your robot in virtual space with just a few clicks, and then instantly click a button and order everything you need to build that design right from the prototyper and have it shipped to you directly. [gallery ids="942289,942290,942291,942292,942293"] Raspberry Pi has helped pave the way for a future where you could easily see kids coming to school with coding and electronics experience in hand. Modbot could offer the same sort of thing for robotics, albeit with pricing that while affordable, still reflects a target market of small business users and entrepreneurs rather than kids and hobbyists. But it could still be sort of equivalent to the 3D printing revolution, putting manufacturing capabilities once relegated to multi-billion dollar companies in the hands of five-person shops and startups. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 30 | null |
Yahoo News Digest Reviews Get A Boost From Yahoo Employees, Cheerleaders | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | Some folks out there really, really, really like any app that Yahoo puts out. At least, that’s the picture we get from looking at the of its Yahoo News Digest app, introduced yesterday. The app is currently flying high in the charts, and features a 4.5 star rating with 282 massively positive reviews. Taking a closer look at the review listings, many of the people leaving positive notes about the app appear to make a very strong habit of reviewing Yahoo apps, and only Yahoo apps. Some of them have only ever reviewed Yahoo News Digest, and others have only reviewed the catalog of internal products and recent acquisitions like Tumblr. Some of the Yahoo employees leaving reviews on the app appear to (from simple user name identification) include , a Mobility Architect at Yahoo and Yahoo India employee Rahul Aneja. There are most likely others. John Hermann and Charlie Warzel at Buzzfeed also note that new Yahoo Tech runner David Pogue and Summly acquisition Nick D’Alosio were . And that awareness raises questions about how easy it was for them to skip over mentioning the origins of many of those reviews in their ‘interview’ today. Is this a crime? No, not really. If I was part of a two-man company I’m sure that both my co-founder and I would be calling everyone we know to rate our app. But Yahoo is a big firm, with over 12,000 employees. And, as Hermann notes, a flood of positive ratings from a large company like this could certainly tip the scales in favor of one product over another. And, in fact, this is not the first time we’ve seen this kind of behavior from Yahoo employees on apps. In , which met with a fairly poor reception in the press. But the reviews were surprisingly positive. When a deeper look was taken, sure enough, Yahoo employees were weighing in enthusiastically. We’ve reached out to Yahoo for comment, but it has already issued a statement to Buzzfeed saying that its employees ‘were not instructed to write reviews’. Yahoo-er Raspaud’s review of the Yahoo News Digest app? “Perfect.” : A Yahoo spokesperson has also told TechCrunch that it does not ask its employees to write reviews, and chalked it up to ‘a case of enthusiasm’. Image Credit: |
Are You There, TechCrunch? It’s Me, Jon | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | If you’re reading this, then you either have very little to do right now, or you care about the inner workings and staffing decisions here at TechCrunch. (I’m sure there could be other reasons, but let’s stick with those two). I’m hoping it’s the latter – that you care about this site and the goings-on around it. In fact, I’m sure you do. The community of authors, commenters, contributors and readers that is the beating heart of TechCrunch is a passionate, committed, and engaged bunch… and I’m happy to join you. My name, if you didn’t read the byline, is Jon Shieber. I spent the last several years writing about venture capital, private equity, energy and technology from New York and Shanghai for Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal. And now I’ll be doing it for y’all. Here at TechCrunch, and over at , I’ve been tasked with helping everyone find the signals on where venture capital investment – and technology development – are heading through the noise of daily funding announcements, new product launches, new product updates, add-on acquisitions, new hires, etc. etc. etc. There’s a massive amount of u Anyway, it’s nice to be here. I hope I get to stick around for a while. Feel free to reach out and follow me on Twitter at @jshieber , or shoot me an email or . I’m looking forward to hearing… and learning… from all of you. |
Twitter CEO Says He Has No Idea How Many Users Opt Out Of Ads | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | Dick Costolo, the CEO of , says that it’s easy enough for consumers to opt out of tailored ads on Twitter, but he does not know how many actually go through the process of doing so. “You can opt out of tailored ads and content,” he told an audience today. But asked how many percentage-wise have done so, he would not say: “I do not know how many people have opted out of tailored ads.” The comments were made on the keynote stage at CES in Las Vegas, where Costolo spoke alongside Maurice Levy, CEO of ad giant and Twitter Publicis, on the subject of advertising in the age of social media. While the words may simply be a measure of an exec caught off guard, or just not wanting to reveal specifics, they are interesting in light of Twitter’s falling share price on the back of stock downgrades (the most recent one ), because analysts believe the company was too overvalued when it first started trading publicly in . Twitter’s main source of revenue these days, and therefore a key source of hope and valuation from investors, comes from advertising on its platform. And a good part of that has to do with inventory served to the most relevant users. On the day of the CES appearance, Twitter’s stock about 3.5% to $59.29 per share. In any case, Levy came to Costolo’s support with a stat from Europe, where even though users have had the ability to opt of ads, hardly any have done so. “What we are seeing in France and Europe is that the opt-out rate is below 5%,” Levy said. He says that’s because advertisers are more cautious of what they present to users in the first place because of the stronger data protection rules. “You have to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer,” he said. “They don’t want to miss the relationship with the brand or an offer, but they don’t want to be overloaded with a lot of information or the wrong messages.” (For readers’ information, you can opt out on Twitter in Settings->Security and Privacy->Privacy-> and then unticking the bottom two boxes. This won’t mean you don’t get ads or other content promoted to you, but they won’t be based on your activity on the site.) Levy, whose company in April inked a deal with Twitter, was strong on the role of privacy in advertising in the age of Edward Snowden, the computer specialist who went rogue and revealed the extent to which the government — specifically the U.S. National Security Agency — has been monitoring internet users. The process of data collection has now been laid bare for consumers to see just how much third parties are tracking what they do online, which had already been a sensitive issue where advertising is concerned even before Snowden. “Privacy is a serious issue and we should not take it lightly,” he said in a conversation with MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan and Costolo. “We should think about the consequence of using private data to universalize a product. We have to be extremely cautious and take it very seriously. “The problem is that today the issue is more complicated thanks to Mr Snowden. People have discoverd the NSA and the access they have. People understand the security aspect and are extremely mindful of information flowing.” He said that Europe, and his native France in particular, have taken a leadership position when it comes to how how data is used. France created its data protection agency CNIL back in 1978. One of the key enforcement positions, he says, has been providing ways for consumers to opt-out of data services. “This is to avoid tons of information floating around. All of this is working extremely well and there is no issues,” he said — partly because the regulator remains very proactive. In fact, just today it over a privacy violation. The French system has been adopted in Europe, and “we do hope that we find consensus between Europe and the U.S.,” Levy said. “Otherwise [consumers] will get frustrated with spam,” he said. Costolo agreed that clear policies that let people opt out, and systems to give users more relevant information, were the way forward. The two also provided a few (but really only a few) more details about the deal between them — which was never formally announced by either although confirmed by both and reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars and covering “multiple” years. So what did we find out? It sounds a bit like they are still trying to work out the full extent of what they will do together. “This may sound cliche but I couldn’t mean it more sincerely,” said Costolo. “It’s about really trying to develop a partnership rather than a transactional relationship. To do that you have to start thinking about how you work together. How customers understand everyday moments.” In more practical terms, it likely involves Publicis division Starcom Mediavest ushering its key clients onto the Twitter platform, and creating ways of being able to analyse and use Twitter’s firehose and corresponding metadata, via partners like DataSift, to provide more context to make sure ads are as effective as they can possibly be. Levy, meanwhile, got a bit existential. “Everything is blank,” he said of how Publicis views the best strategy for advertising in the future (it sounds much better in a French accent). “We cannot say we can build a platform for advertisers on only one platform. It’s a complex system that requires much more information and knowledge….that is where we and the ad agencies are in our way of thinking.” It’s “important not to work in silos,” he noted too. |
France Fines Google 150,000 Euro After It Refuses To Comply With Data Protection Act | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 8 | Google, a company that reported $14.89 billion in revenue , was (just over US$200,000) today by France’s digital privacy watchdog CNIL. Google was also ordered to publish a notice about the decision on google.fr within the next eight days. In early 2012, Google consolidated its multiple privacy policies into a single document, which prompted the working group of all EU data protection authorities to look into these changes. The EU decided that Google wasn’t in compliance with its legal framework and asked the company to make a number of changes to the policy, which . France asked Google for a to the document, define retention periods, limit the combination of user’s data and to “fairly collect and process passive users’ data.” CNIL, as well as other EU data watchdogs, then started its own enforcement proceedings and issued this rather small penalty on January 3. Given Google’s size, 150,000 euros aren’t exactly going to hurt the company. Indeed, the amount may be smaller than what Google would have to pay its lawyers to work on these documents. In the U.S. the FTC recently settled with Google for after it discovered that the company bypassed Safari’s privacy settings. Spain recently 900,000 euros (about $1.2 million) for mishandling users’ personal data. In France, however, the maximum fine the CNIL could levy is apparently 150,000 euros now and another 300,000 if Google still refuses to comply in the next three months. According to CNIL, it is also the highest fine the committee has ever issued. |
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