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Review: The Bowers & Wilkins Z2 Airplay Speaker Is Bowm-Chicka-Wow-Wow
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Jordan Crook
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The is a perfectly suitable option for those of us looking for a sightly, powerful, and compact speaker system. Anyone who’s already invested in Bowers & Wilkins systems before, like the Zeppelin Air or the should be especially considerate of the sexy little Z2, as it will fit in seamlessly with your current set-up in a relatively quieter room or space like a bedroom or bathroom. The B&W Z2 is as easy on the eyes as it is on the ears. The dock sinks below the upper ridge of the round, compact speaker making it somewhat invisible from most angles. The rounded shape turns both drivers out to fill up the room, and it surprisingly fits a lot of power into a very smal package. The whole thing is no more than about 7-inches tall, a foot wide, and four inches deep, and the only thing you might notice is a small LED light on the bottom right of the device to signify pairing, on and off, etc. The Lightning dock is built onto a hinge so it bends as you insert and remove your iPhone 5. Of course, this excludes anyone without an iPhone 5 or new generation iPods from docking, since the 30-pin isn’t compatible and iPads are too wide. Setup is a breeze. Just download the Bowers & Wilkins Airplay Setup app and follow the handful of easy steps. Just be ready to have your wifi network info at the ready. [gallery ids="803012,803013,803014,803015,803016,803017"] When you’re done, you’ll be able to throw music from your phone to the Z2 (or from Z2 bedroom to Z2 kitchen or Zeppelin Air Living room or A5 bathroom or whatever combination you can afford) and achieve a much richer, fuller experience that follows you around your house and not the other way around. Of course, not everything is perfect. If you’re putting extra strain on your Wifi network while streaming to the Z2, especially if that extra strain is coming from the same device that’s streaming, there are bound to be a few drops or off moments. However, I’ve found the Z2 to be more reliable than the , so there’s progress being made. On a brighter note, the Z2 offers a surprisingly excellent listening experience given its size. Whether it was to entertain at a loud party or have something pleasing on in the background, the Z2 always sounded great and had a deep but clear bass. It’s the cheapest offering to date from a company that’s been a pack leader in the wireless iOS audio world. And it lives up to its brand name. The remote isn’t changed at all from the A7 or original Zeppelin systems, which is annoying if only because it seems stagnant for a company that always seems to be cognizant of the maxim: “Iterate, iterate, iterate.” All in all, it’s a solid little speaker for a fair price, and worth some serious consideration from audiophile iPhone 5 owners and B&W loyalists. To learn more about the , check out the video below, or feel free to read up the all-wireless from B&W in our review right here.
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Hey Apple, What The Next iPhone Really,
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Natasha Lomas
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What the next iPhone really needs is not an , , or , or even . Or . That list is just garnish compared to the biggie: the iPhone needs a better keyboard. The iOS keyboard remains the most offensive piece of skeuomorphism across Apple’s faux realistic, lavishly textured user interface estate. (Yes, including the mock baize-plus-wood backdrop to Game Center — although that is truly awful.) The iPhone’s keyboard is a relic of the past in more ways than one. It has barely changed since the phone was first introduced, way back in 2007 — the proverbial ice age in technology terms. Sure it was an excellent keyboard then; reassuringly familiar, pleasingly responsive, forgiving of a few typos. It smoothed the way for physical keyboard users to make the trepidatious switch to glass. But those days are long, long gone. Touchscreens have been the norm in mobile for years now. And digital input technologies have advanced to disrupt the plain old virtual Qwerty. Yet the iPhone keyboard has stubbornly refused to move on. Unless you count a few . Keyboard nerds will be aware that Qwerty keyboards owe their letter layout to early mechanical typewriters, devised in the 1870s. Qwerty letter order made sense when the metal legs arranged around the typewriter’s amphitheatre needed to be positioned to avoid clashing with one another as they can-canned their letters up and over to stamp on the ink-soaked ribbon. Qwerty was just choreography. It was about giving the machine enough room to manoeuvre.
[Image by via ] Such mechanical thinking is clearly redundant in today’s digital word. Now it’s the user who needs room to manoeuvre. But instead of helping the pixelated letters fly faster, by breaking with the past and being more flexible about how users can input text and/or opening up its keyboard APIs to developers, Apple has let the iPhone keyboard become frustratingly staid. Watch an iPhone user composing an email and you’ll see a mime show parody of the past as alternate thumbs engage in a flat-footed tap dance. Here’s the rub: there are much, better ways to type on touchscreens. Next word prediction, for starters, has broken the traditional letter by letter rhythm carried down from the days of mechanical typing. It’s a big step up from auto correction (which, yes, the iPhone has). Autocorrect just smooths out errors (when it’s not introducing new ones). It’s virtual Wite-Out, at best. More often than not iOS autocorrect acts like . The very best virtual keyboards are a lot smarter. They learn your slang and syntax by parsing what you’ve written before, to whom, in what context and use that data to predict what you’re going to type before you’ve even started tapping. Not that next word prediction is perfect, of course. Humans are unpredictable and so it follows is language. But a lot of digital communication can be same-y and therefore predictable. When next word prediction is working well, firing off a short, generic email can mean just a handful of taps. ‘Running late to the meeting. See you shortly’ would all but write itself on a good virtual keyboard, with one tap per word to confirm each correct prediction. And all those small time and typo savings add up to faster and more accurate typing overall. A flow of words, not a trickle of letters. Even Blackberry, a company that built its empire atop the physical keyboard only to watch it crumble when touch blasted onto the scene, has taken steps to go beyond Qwerty. Its new OS, BB10, running on the full-touch BlackBerry Z10 injects predicted words above the letter you would have to type next in order to spell that word — so, if it’s the word you want, instead of tapping to type one letter you flick up to type the whole word. It’s not BlackBerry’s only new keyboard trick either. The Z10’s virtual keyboard adapts to its owner over time by shifting the underlying key-strike positions to better suit the user’s typing style. BB10’s keyboard software also analyses the messaging history of its owner to brain up on the sort of words they tend to use to improve its next word predictions. Now all that is great, but even BlackBerry hasn’t killed off the Qwerty layout or radically disrupted the basic tap-to-type input mechanism (though they have added a ‘flick’ gesture to the typist’s toolkit). In the touchscreen era, the most disruptive text input that has gained significant traction was devised by Swype ( ). Instead of tapping, the Swype keyboard lets the user drag a finger to chain letters together to form words. In the full year 2012, Swype was expecting its software to be pre-loaded on more than 100 million devices globally, mostly on Android but the keyboard can also be used on Symbian, MeeGo and Windows 7. But not iOS. Swype couples its novel input method with word prediction so you likely only need to swype the first part of a word to get the full word to materialise. Then you lift your finger off to start the next word. Typing by swyping looks more like writing — or rather a reporter scribbling shorthand symbols in a notebook. And like shorthand, once you get the hang of it, it’s very fast (Swype currently claims up to 40 words per minute). It also feels fun, rather than hesitant and laborious. Earlier this year Swype rival — which it calls Flow — to v.4 of its keyboard software. SwiftKey’s take supports whole sentences being chained together if the user glides over the space bar in between each word. Both Swype and SwiftKey’s keyboard software also offer users other text input mechanisms, including traditional tapping plus next word prediction, and speech-to-text translation options. Customised user dictionaries are also a given, while Swype includes a feature where it tracks new/trending terms that are cropping up in the public domain and incorporates them into its knowledge banks as a daily update. Nor are Swype and SwiftKey the only keyboard disruptors in town (though, at this point, they are probably the biggest). On the startup front, is a very fresh take on the virtual Qwerty. Devised by a Canadian startup, the Minuum keyboard doesn’t kill the Qwerty layout but does ditch a lot of redundant space so it can radically squash the keys into the bottom of the screen, as a “continuum of letters”, where they take up a fraction of the space — leaving more room to see other stuff on screen. The keyboard assumes sloppy typing, relying on its auto correct algorithms to pick up the slack. It’s also worth noting that Minuum is thinking beyond the touchscreen too — looking at how its continuum could work with a gesture or tilt-based input method to facilitate typing on a wearable device, whether that’s a watch or a pair of glasses or whatever. So instead of having to say ‘Ok Glass, start recording…’ perhaps a sequence of subtle head tilts could be used to turn on a video recorder function. Or silently compose a text in the middle of a theatre performance. Privacy and propriety fans will not be amused by either prospect but you can’t accuse this keyboard technology of being stuck in the past. There’s also which keeps the Qwerty layout but, in its main UI, minimises what’s on it — replacing some function and punctuation keys with gestures, such as using a swipe instead of an on screen space bar. Fleksy still requires tapping to form letters, so isn’t necessarily the fastest keyboard disruptor in town, but its creators claim their text prediction engine can cope with users typing total nonsense (i.e. not hitting of the right keys). Presumably Fleksy is pattern matching where users’ fingers are striking the screen — or would be striking a screen — to figure out what they were trying to type. Its method means that blind mobile owners, relying on their own muscle memory of the circa 140-year-old Qwerty layout, can apparently type on Fleksy’s virtual keyboard because they don’t need to make sure their fingers are landing on specific keys. Fleksy’s system can even work with zero visual cues — i.e. with a visually invisible keyboard. The startup has also rigged up a touchscreen-free version of its software, working with the Leap Motion Controller, to enable typing in mid air. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gMWa_GtGho] Fleksy’s take shows that the legacy Qwerty layout doesn’t have to be a mechanical burden holding back typing progress in the digital era, as is currently true in the iPhone’s case. Turns out it’s possible to leverage the old, to forge a-new. And while there are certainly , ditching Qwerty would mean everyone needing to learn how to touch-type again. And that’s a pretty big ask. Returning to Apple, it has added a speech to text translation feature on the iPhone 4S and 5. And of course there is also Siri. But Siri is a side show. Asking your disembodied robotic butler to fetch you a tidbit of information can be useful — and/or entertaining — but it’s in no way a pure-play replacement for the need to input (lots of) text. Not unless you’re the sort of person who’s happy to disrupt everyone around you when you’re composing an email/writing your journal entry/finishing off a work report. Not to mention being ok with your fellow commuters listening in as you navel-gaze in public. The only way Siri is going to kill the keyboard is if it learns to lip read. Apple’s focus on Siri may be part of the reason it’s allowed development of its keyboard software to stall. And that’s a problem. For iPhone users, whose Android owning friends can rattle out messages much quicker than they can. And for Apple, because it’s annoying its users by frustrating and slowing them down unnecessarily. In general terms, the pace of digital data-powered technology evolution can seem breathtakingly fast — which makes the stasis of the iPhone’s keyboard all the more strange. If Apple is worried about discomforting its existing (mainstream) users by making them adapt to a newfangled way of typing it wouldn’t have to do that. It could, for starters, license and add an additional Swype-style input method as an extra keyboard for those who go looking for it. Or let iOS developers create system global keyboards that users can download from the App Store, rather than stymying these efforts by making remain just that: siloed apps. A smarter native keyboard that runs right through iOS is what iPhone users really want. And really need. It’s possible that Apple is cooking up a ‘magical and revolutionary’ new type of keyboard or typing interface in iOS 7 that trashes its inner typewriter — and breaks with the past for good. iPhone owners can but hope. Because where the current iOS keyboard is concerned, one thing’s for sure: Apple needs to pull out the levers and get a shift on.
[Image by via ]
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MBAx.me Wants To Help Non-Technical Professionals Learn Key Technical Skills Online
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Leena Rao
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It’s not often that a guest post on TechCrunch turns into a startup. Earlier this year, Googler Aditya Mahesh which addressed what skills business students should take the time to learn before they start working in tech. As he writes, he wishes he had learned certain skills before entering the workforce at Google, such as Excel, basic HTML/CSS, web analytics, Photoshop, iMovie and other skills that he believes make you more valuable as a non-technical employee, even if you don’t have a CS degree. The genesis of this guest post ended up being an actual startup. Mahesh teamed up with fellow Googler Saleh Altayyar to launch to actually help professionals find online courses for some of the skills they may need. Mahesh and Altayyar talked to fellow Googlers as well as employees at Facebook, Twitter, Cisco and more to figure out what skills are needed to succeed in business development, PR, marketing, HR, and other non-technical areas. The team then found free online courses covering these skills and ranked them based on quality and breadth. Users can use the site to not only identify the skills they need to learn, but also actually learn the skills online. Check out our video above with Mahesh for more.
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Dawn Of The Digilante
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s hard to say with any conviction where we are in the process of, shall we say, crowd-sourcing justice. Like most things, it is a process, not something achieved, and while some question its utility, it’s no good to question its existence. Some will see the events this week in Boston as the moment digilantism (convenient portmanteau!) went from undercurrent to cresting wave. But I’m not quite in agreement: This week marked a significant point, not because of the act itself, but because of the consumption of that act (a necessary portion of justice, some would argue). As I watched the streaming video of (absurdly) a police scanner in some stranger’s living room with a quarter million other people, I was struck by how crude the process was and that demand had reached that magical point where something that was always there is suddenly “discovered” by the world at large. The result is usually astronomic growth. By that measure, we’re near the beginning of the digilante phenomenon — much as we were near the beginning of the digital music movement in the early 2000s. But we await both breakthrough and opposition. I don’t mean to downplay the versatility and importance of services like Ustream, Twitter, Reddit, and so on for the proliferation of information. But then again, I wouldn’t have downplayed the importance of things like FTP, BBSes, Download.com, and their like towards the end of the 90s. Think about how strange and inadequate everything about the Internet-at-large response to Boston was! A video of a police scanner was the best source of information to millions! The police were asking listeners not to post information like streets and names — asking, on a publicly accessible broadcast! Reddit and a dozen other major social sites bent under the torrent of information, necessitating meta services to sort and stream it. Even then the level of noise and redundancy was almost intolerable. Think about the scrutiny of imagery being done by masses of people immediately following the explosions. How admirable, and yet how rudimentary everything about it was! We have powerful and elegant tools for solving the most trivial of everyday problems — apps to organize our apps, for god’s sake — but when it comes to leveraging human ingenuity for the purposes of the highest urgency, it’s posts on 4chan and slapdash pop-up sites? And yet, despite this, the level of interest was incredible — almost embarrassingly so, considering how the manhunt eclipsed other major disasters and attacks. But this was a demonstration not of supply side of the equation. Important information tends, like liquid, to find its way down from the source to its destination, no matter how tortuous the route. In this case, there were millions (perhaps hundreds of millions, but at any rate more than ever before), who were unsatisfied with the stage at which they were permitted to partake. A few years ago they might have been happy to wait for the morning paper. Now, even people to whom Twitter is still just the noise that birds make are finding an insatiable appetite for real-time data. That is why we are at what amounts to the beginning of a transformative period, by the middle of which the way we experienced Boston will remind us of how we listened to music before the Walkman. But it’s not as simple as all that. While one pendulum swings toward the future, another passes it, returning in the other direction. Part of what made Boston exciting was the fact that we were tapping into something that was, in a way, forbidden. I’m not really sure if I broke any laws yesterday, but I suspect I did. I had no fear, however, because I was clearly beyond the reach of the law. Is the law as happy with the situation as I? How long do you think it will be until, just as a very basic example, police communicate only on encrypted channels, and relaying information or rebroadcasting it is a serious crime? How long before a law like SOPA or CISPA enables a quick legal takedown of, say, Ustream, which could be said to be complicit in violations of national security if someone were to use it to stream the movements of an FBI team down the street, or the surrender of the user’s real name and location? Ditto Pastebin for hosting bomb-making instructions? Or Thingiverse for proliferation of easily replicable firearms? The extent of the information to which we have access, and the means with which we communicate it, may be reaching the end of their progressive pendulum swing, and the next few years could bring them crashing backwards, as more restrictive security policies, harsher penalties, and newly granted powers make the process of finding and sharing that information more difficult and more risky. It’s ironic that the word “vigilante” has come to refer to people who take the law literally into their own hands, although the word itself has its root not in touching, but merely watching. These digilantes, in contrast, are empowered as never before to watch, but not to touch — despite the (admittedly made-up) word’s root lying closer to the latter. But like their street-level counterparts ( ), all it takes is one serious misstep and they raise their own obstruction. Let us suppose, hypothetically, that the broadcast on the Internet of the streets to which police were being deployed in Boston allowed the bomber to slip through the cordon and get away. It’s not so hard to imagine, given the level of access onlookers had. Can you imagine the outrage that would be erupting now against the tools that are being lionized in bars and on forums everywhere, as a democratization of surveillance ( ) that allowed millions not just to watch, but to aid? If it had not aided but disastrously impeded, we would be witnessing pundits, members of Congress, and perhaps even the president himself inveighing furiously against these “weapons of mass proliferation” with which irresponsible “cyber-hackers” had cheated justice. The opponents of crowd-sourcing the process of justice are not merely senseless or ignorant — they have legitimate objections (which I will not tire the reader with here, but can be readily imagined). But many of these objections stem from the crudity of the tools and the process, the inescapable fact that foolish rabble and bad actors are at least as common and active as the well-intentioned and insightful, for instance, or that there is no central authority over privileged information, as there has been for much of history. They have the advantage: Laws, policies, tools ready to deploy, hanging like the sword of Damocles and awaiting only that critical failure. A similar thing happened after September 11th, as we have had ample time to reflect on, and it will happen again. It is not a conspiracy theory that a state of war is conducive to laws that restrict freedom — and as both real life and rhetoric show, these days, the Internet is just another theater of operations. CISPA passed the House on the back of perception of an invisible cyber-war that we are, naturally, losing. And, as always, the pendulums are in continuous action and the conscientious columnist does not comment too explicitly, for want of complete information. But of this you may be sure: The demand for this kind of information is about to skyrocket, while the liberty of that same information is at severe risk of declining. This tension will brook conflict, as it ever has, though in all likelihood a fragile equilibrium will be struck, as it ever has, like the frontier between battling nations during a holiday. There will always be a way, of course — of that you can be sure. But when the stakes are raised, the way is not always easy, especially when it is the object of those in positions of power to make it difficult. We live in interesting times, but not charmed ones. Be ready for the backlash.
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Ingrid Lunden
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Fox Shuts Down Cory Doctorow’s Homeland Book In Overzealous DMCA takedown
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John Biggs
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that links to Cory Doctorow’s book, , are being shut down after a DMCA request by Fox. Why is Cory’s Creative Commons licensed book that is available for being attacked? It kind of sounds like it could be a copy of Homeland, the TV series, so they shut it down. Homeland is available on multiple sites, including Doctorow’s own, and is also available on some torrent sites. The names a number of Fox’s own properties, including Homeland, as well as ripped copies of , , and Apparently Cory himself replied to the DMCA takedown, saying to TorrentFreak: “I think you can safely say I’m incandescent with rage. BRING ME THE SEVERED HEAD OF RUPERT MURDOCH!” Sadly, even Cory’s own publisher, Tor, is sending for his book, . It’s also available for free but is popping up on torrent sites. Obviously both of these instances are cases of an overzealous robot hunting down potentially infringing content. However, given Doctorow’s tendency towards copyfighting, it’s a bit funny that his CC-licensed books are being so zealously attacked.
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Iterations: From Singapore To Silicon Valley, The Cross-Pacific Journey Of Developer-Focused Nitrous.IO
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Semil Shah
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During the summer of 2012, while working in venture capital, one of the early-stage companies I stumbled upon was founded by a trio of guys based in Singapore. We met a few times in the Valley and quickly became friends, and I informally helped them, from time to time, navigate the waters of moving to the Valley and getting situated here. I hadn’t talked to them in a while but we recently reconnected, and I thought their journey from starting a company in Asia to raising venture capital in California would be interesting to share with others, not only for those who reside outside the Valley and hope to move here to build their businesses, but also because this team is focused on building software exclusively for developers. This is an because I’ve found there are some investors who are betting long on developer-focused businesses, while others like them but worry about their ability to scale to venture “size.” Below is an edited transcript of an informal Q&A we all coordinated over email with of Nitrous.IO, Arun Thampi, Peter Kim, and A.J. Solimine: Pete, AJ and I were all in Singapore. The tech scene there is great, and there are lots of great engineers in Singapore. The problem is that it’s still young, and lots of people are still averse to taking risks and settle for jobs at bigger companies. We didn’t actively try to raise money in Singapore, but we spoke early on to Vinnie Lauria and Jeffrey Paine, who are good friends and run Golden Gate Ventures in Singapore. Vinnie runs SuperHappyDevHouse (a hackathon in Singapore), and we won two years in a row (including with Nitrous.IO), and so we knew each other well and he was very supportive of us from the beginning, and committed to invest in Nitrous.IO early on. Singapore is a great place, but in the last week, we’ve had detailed hour-long conversations with developers and software craftsmen we’ve looked up to (like Yehuda Katz and Guido van Rossum) and who’ve given us great feedback and encouragement, and also Joe Stump and Tobias Lütke agreed to be on our advisory board and are rooting for our success. This would probably not have happened had we been in Singapore. We decided from the beginning that we’d raise money from investors that had experience with cloud infrastructure and B2D space, and we have realized the investors in the Bay Area were the only ones that fit the bill. We did end up raising a small amount from Golden Gate Ventures in Singapore, because we are really good friends with the great team behind the firm, but we did not engage with any other investors in Singapore. If we did want to raise money entirely in Singapore however, there are various government programs in Singapore with generous matching grants and there are lots of investors willing to invest in startups with huge amount of cash, but we had consistent feedback from fellow entrepreneurs who received funding in Singapore saying that the amount of both technical and entrepreneurial help you get from the investors in Asia is minimal at best. Arun and I both graduated from National University of Singapore and we’ve been in Singapore for over 10 years. We’ve met and worked together in Viki, an Andreesen Horowitz-backed startup based in Singapore that does crowd-sourced translation of international videos and music, where I was working as a lead engineer and Arun was working as a contractor. I first met AJ at a meet-up in Singapore, and worked together in many hackathons. After I have spent some time at Viki, I felt that I’ve learned enough to think about doing my own startup. Arun and AJ were then working together in a startup called Anideo where they were building a mobile video-discovery app called Vidyou, but despite the app being highly polished and feature-rich, it proved to be tough to gain enough traction, due to the highly competitive nature of online video market. The online video space was also riddled with problems that were difficult for a startup to deal with such as copyright issues. Having known and having worked with them with pleasurable results in the past, I’ve approached Arun and AJ and asked if they were interested in working together for a “Shareable cloud-based development environments that can be access from anywhere with any device” idea. They loved the idea having wasted countless number of hours troubleshooting their own development environment woes. They also loved the how the product will enable you to develop even on thin clients like Chromebooks and iPads. The timing was also perfect because they were just about to look for new ideas to work on. We then decided to join forces and started Irrational Industries Inc. I was working in New York in the summer of 2009 when the financial crisis hit. I lived down in the Wall Street area and it was getting really depressing. The streets were pretty desolate but the bars were full of dejected, newly unemployed bankers & traders. A friend of mine from college grew up in Singapore, and I mentioned to him one night that I was considering living abroad and he suggested I consider moving there. I really only had a few suitcases and some ikea furniture to my name, so it was a pretty easy jump for me. Upon moving to Singapore, I realized that I knew all of two people in the entire country, so I started attending as many meetups as I possibly could and reached out to a bunch of people to have lunch and coffee. The community is small but pretty tight-knit in Singapore so it was actually easy and convenient to get settled. I met Arun at a Ruby meetup at hackerspace singapore and we kept in touch as we were both starting our own companies. We met up for a beer one night just to discuss our companies and we ended the night 5 hrs and about 20 beers later with a verbal agreement to join forces and start a company together – Anideo, where we developed a video-discovery app called Vidyou. I met Pete at a Pivotal Labs meetup at Viki’s offices, as Pete was working there as one of their initial lead engineers. It was a no-brainer decision. We are building a “B2D” product, so we just had to be in a place with the highest density of talented developers. Developer evangelism is a key user acquisition strategy for us and we knew there was no place better than the bay area for us to interact with developers. We plan to hold meetups, drinkups, and hackathons regularly in San Francisco. Hiring and getting advice is another reason why we had to be here. While there are some really intelligent engineers in Singapore, many of them lack experience in building a large-scale website, compared to those here. We also realized to form a real relationship with the thought leaders of the industry, we had to be geographically close to them. Eating, talking, and drinking IRL beats Skype calls, hands down. It’s a function of velocity for me. There’s no other place where knowledge transfer occurs as rapidly as it does here. Everybody knows you want to “skate to where the puck is going to be”, and the best place to do that historically has always been to put yourself right in the middle of a “hub”. In finance, it’s New York. In healthcare, it’s Boston. In entertainment, it’s LA and in Technology it’s San Francisco. I’m happy that I lived abroad for a few years though. There are a ton of amazing people in the valley, but it certainly feels deserving of the “echo chamber” description. I think it’s important to travel outside of the country if you’re able to so you can gain perspective on the problems that the other 6.7 billion people face outside of the U.S. Peter and Arun aren’t U.S. citizens, and getting U.S. visas wasn’t totally straightforward. By the time we decided to move to the U.S., the H1-B quota had already been hit, so we were really thinking we wouldn’t be in the U.S. until maybe October 2013. We did some research and realized that Pete and Arun were eligible for some other less common visas, so we put all the documents together and applied. I think both applications were well over 100 pages including supporting documents. It ended up working out well as they were both approved, but it definitely took up a huge amount of time and energy. Moving itself was pretty fun — we arrived on the eve of the Heroku Waza conference and crashed at a friend’s house in the city for a week (thanks Niles!). We ended up subletting an apartment together down in Mountain View because it was cheaper. The location is great, I love Castro street, but the apartment itself has its flaws. I definitely feel lots of other small tech startups in Asia want to move to the valley for the same reasons we have stated earlier. However, the visa situation really makes it difficult for most startups. Bootstrapping is virtually impossible since there is no chance that a ramen-profitable startup can qualify for any visa category that would let them stay beyond the typical three-month visa waiver period. Arun and I would not have been able to secure our work visas (we took L-1/O-1 route), had we not raised our significant seed financing. Having felt the pain ourselves (my visa application was 96 pages-long, and U.S. CIS requested for more evidence before finally approving it, followed by a rather unpleasant interview experience), we really feel that something needs to be done about this – afterall, we are trying to build a company and create jobs in the U.S. – and we strongly support recent immigration reform movements like FWD.us. For an entrepreneur/developer outside Silicon Valley, moving here is the equivalent of an actor trying to move to Hollywood. We’d decided very early on that moving to Silicon Valley would be crucial to the success of the company – not just for the investors, advisors who’ve been-there, done-that with PaaS/SaaS companies, but also since Silicon Valley probably has the highest density of developers/early-adopters who would put up with the warts of your software but would still champion its virtues. If you’re doing a hyper-local startup or a travel search startup focused on Asia, then it probably does not make as much sense to move here, since your customers and evangelists are probably not located here. Many investors have told us that they don’t like to invest in B2D startups because developers are cheap and they don’t like to pay for developer tools. I am not sure if I agree. Engineers are in such high demand right now, and because they are getting paid absurdly well these days (especially in the Bay Area), every minute of their time is really worth a lot of money. If some service can increase the productivity of an engineer that costs over $100 an hour by just 10%, that’s already worth over $1,500 dollars a month, and if a $50/month service can do that, then it’s really a no-brainer. Perhaps the term “B2D” is not really appropriate since it’s the companies that hire the developers that end up paying for the service, and not necessarily the developers themselves. Investors have sometimes been critical of the “B2D” market because they don’t think developers will pay for tools. We don’t really think of Nitrous.IO as a developer tool, but as a productivity platform for individuals and businesses. We save time for people who want to code and provide them with multiple ways to connect to a development machine. Marc Andreessen said recently that “software is eating the world.” Everybody knows this is true–even in financially turbulent times, the need for optimization is compounded and technology is the basis of almost all optimization. So software is the brain behind everything, but writing software is still not the most accessible or simplest of processes. You actually need to be pretty smart just to *start* coding. Our goal with Nitrous.IO is to reduce the friction of getting started with a new technology, whether it be a new programming language or a new combination of technologies when you’re working on an application (often referred to as a “stack”). The important thing that helped with investors was communicating that Nitrous.IO isn’t just a developer tool, but a full-fledged platform that helps businesses and individuals streamline their entire development workflow. We’ve had over 6,000 development environments created in our private beta, which took a total of approximately 17 hours to create on our system. If the developers were creating them individually, it would have taken well over 10,000 hours. Imagine how much more software can be written in those 9,983 hours =) We’d decided early on that we weren’t going to follow a “spray-and-pray-strategy” with investors in the Valley. AngelList was actually a great resource for finding investors who’ve invested in companies similar to ours. We knew that trying to explain a PaaS solution to an investor whose speciality is consumer/social would be a waste of both of our time and theirs (even if that investor was a “celebrity”). That is also when I’d noticed that you (Semil) had and were making great observations about the enterprise software segment, and got in touch with you (through all places – Highlight!). You confirmed our thesis that there is no point trying to meet random investors, and made some great introductions to people (who we are still in touch with, as informal advisors). This is just an observation based on anecdotal evidence, but it seems like a few Valley investors have social/mobile fatigue – and unless social/mobile is part of a bigger play (for e.g. Github is social around developers, and we have a mobile component as part of our strategy), investors are tired of hearing the same thing over and over again. That’s where I think we had an advantage, because the idea in itself was interesting and game-changing, and we’d executed well and had a beta product ready before we began pitching. New to the valley, we definitely lacked the social connections necessary to start talking to investors right away, and we were told by many that cold-emailing investors was a no-no, as it is highly unlikely for them to hear you out and once they say no, you have already ruined your chance. However one surprising thing we’ve discovered here is that other people in the startup scene in general are super friendly and willing to help. We’ve connected to lots of people whom we had absolutely no connection whatsoever previously over random channels, such as Highlight, AngelList, and Twitter, and more often than not, people were willing to meet up for coffee, hear our story and our pitch, and make intros if possible. That was also how we connected with you (Semil) and many others, and with lots of people following us in AngelList which got us in the “Trending Startup” list, we could slowly infiltrate and implant our names in the investors’ heads. We’re currently based in Mountain View, but that is because we are currently working out of a great office space provided by our lead investor, at no charge (see picture above of the team in the Bessemer offices in Menlo Park). Once we have an external hire, we plan on moving to San Francisco, because that’s where all the cool developer gatherings and conferences are held. In San Francisco, if you really wanted to, you could probably attend a developer event every evening. Long-term wewant to move to the city, there is an incredible amount of energy in the city, and with all the developer meetups and drinkups that happen, it makes sense for us to be there. Our immediate goal is to get to public beta and we have some awesome products and featured lined up which we are confident, will entice developers to pay for our service. We’re looking for a couple more engineers ( ) to help us get to that point and we have bigger plans for world domination once we hit general availability. One of the most important things we’ve done to begin to transition to a true business is to engage with our users. I think this is where a lot of startups go wrong — they don’t think about which users are willing to pay them and what exactly they’re willing to pay for. Often, startups think about those things, but they’re usually just guessing and aren’t going on real data. We’ve had 1-on-1 conversations with over a thousand of our users, and are always surprised at what we learn from those conversations. The next hard part is using all the qualitative data we’ve captured to create a valuable pricing model for our customers.
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My Favorite Entrepreneur Story In A Long Time
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Mark Suster
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This morning I was reading my social media and came across an article that had posted on Facebook. It was about the founder of Sriracha sauce, David Tran, displaced from Vietnam when the North’s communists took power. As the son of an immigrant myself, I am a sucker for an immigrant story. Moving to the U.S. with nothing but hard work and ambition. Having a strong sense of values. And wanting to build for the next generation. It is of course why immigrants power so many successful businesses in the US and why we need to embrace them. They have nothing to lose. They bring new ideas, new cultures, new business practices. But they mostly want to be – AMERICAN. That’s all my dad ever wanted for us. Even while he clung to his native traditions and culture himself. If you ever want to read the great American generational immigrant business story read by Philip Roth, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was voted by Time Magazine as one of the best 100 books of all time. It also chronicles the forces behind the decline of the American city (which has been revived in the past 10-15 years) and the rise of global manufacturing. My own fascination with hot sauces began a few years ago. I was never into spicy foods growing up but after living in the UK for nearly a decade and having so much great Indian food around me all of the time I developed more of a taste for it. I moved back to the US and after a stint in Palo Alto / San Francisco I moved to LA where I started to notice at some of the best Mexican restaurants I visited. I absolutely love the stuff. Addicted. So I started noticing hot sauces more and the more I looked the more I noticed this funny rooster bottle with a strange sounding name I couldn’t pronounce and that familiar green cap. Sriracha. Where was it from? What did it mean? What nationality was it? It seemed to be in every kind of ethnic restaurant. The company name sounded Chinese – Huy Fong Foods. Was this the latest Chinese product to take off in the US? Turns out it is a family-owned business started by a refugee from Vietnam (of Vietnamese and Chinese roots) and named after a small village in Thailand Si Racha. So grateful was David Tran for the people who provided safe passage from Vietnam for him that he named his company after the Taiwanese ship that carried him away. Tran moved to Los Angeles and started his business in Chinatown with a need he personally had. He noticed that Americans didn’t have good hot sauce. So he made hand-made batches in a bucket and drove it to customers in his van. But his goal wasn’t to make a billion dollars. He wasn’t driven by quick riches. He was driven by wanting to provide a great product. How much could the new generation of entrepreneurs learn from that? I know it’s what I look for when I want to back companies. And build a great business he did. While still owning the business he now does $60 million in annual sales built from nothing. Could he have grown faster with outside money? Or by selling to a big company and taking it international? Sure. But it wasn’t his ambition. You’ll absolutely love this quote: How many of you could say that? He didn’t want to compromise on product, as he knew he would be forced to if he had to expand too quickly. He wanted to keep his prices low (apparently he has never raised his wholesale price in 30 years). What I learned from the article? What touched me? What lessons could you learn from a Vietnam refugee who makes chili sauce? Quite a bit it turns out … When his packaging suppliers tried to get him to change his product to make it less hot or more sweet for American customers he refused: “Hot sauce must be hot. If you don’t like it hot, use less,” he said. “We don’t make mayonnaise here.” (he processes his chilies the same day they are harvested) – “We just do our own thing and try to keep the price low. If our product is still welcomed by the customer, then we will keep growing.” He said this in response to the fact that several other companies are now stealing the Sriracha brand name. He can’t trademark it since it’s the name of a city. By the way, he has never spent a dollar on advertising What will you be known for? Given the brand dilution going on with the name Sriracha how can he still grow his business? The distinctive design of his packaging. That crazy rooster. All those freaking languages on the bottle – the mystery of it all! And the green caps. But I have to say, despite it all, and it’s impossible to take away from the success of David Tran, I kept wondering if modern business practices couldn’t solidify this into a global product. Branding matters. Organic word-of-mouth worked until this point, but I wonder as this becomes an international product line. I wonder how agressive they are with digital distribution. I wonder if they could trademark a broader name than Sriracha so that they can get some defensibility. I hope the next-generation Trans have some thoughts on these topics and more. I would love to see this company continue to succeed. .
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Bitcoin’s Last Mile Problem
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John Biggs
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was (and still is) one of my favorite bloggers. Calling himself the Accordion Guy, Joey has been writing cool stuff for most of this decade, and he recently hopped on the train by posting a long how-to in the vein of . His is quite thorough in his process, but it sets an old HP all-in-one to the task, which resulting in very slow mining speeds and, as a result, a tangible waste of resources, including time, energy and computer wear. For all his hard work, Joey saw between 3.4 and 4.4 cents. He also notes that his post, on his acceptably trafficked site with about 6,000 pageviews a day, netted him about $40 in advertising money. He made more money writing the post – which arguably took more work – than bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is the perfect expression of Internet riches. It seems free (but isn’t), is easy to enter (but hard to maintain), and, in the end, as pointed out on Joey’s post, it is the perfect example of the old adage “you make a lot more telling people how to make money on the Internet, than you can actually make on the Internet.” So where does that leave the currency? The recent failure of and the recent rough and tumble ride that the market took these past few weeks make the world of Bitcoin a bit daunting. Continued DDOSes and attempts at phishing make it inaccessible and even dangerous, and the average computer user knows little if anything about Bitcoin at all, making it a reserve for the hacker with a bit of pocket money or a lot of powerful GPUs. The question then is whether the “real world” should care about getting their change in BTC? I would wager they should, but not for the reasons many proffer. Anonymity is not overly important for the average computer user, although they could use a bit more security. Traditional money transfer systems like PayPal are rife with problems, mostly stemming from overzealous customer protection representatives. The world needs Bitcoins to exist, even if the mass of humanity doesn’t use it. The goal of the currency is to disassociate the old methods of money transfer and to allow people true freedom in their ability to transmit value from one person to the next. A poor grandmother in the home village could receive money quickly and easily from the grandchildren without resorting to fees and trips to Western Union. Those on the move could hold their money in an account that is as liquid as quicksilver, allowing them to perform fee-free transactions anywhere. Refugees would no longer have to carry gold and instead could carry bitcoin. The utopian possibilities are, in a sense, endless. But then we have the last mile problem. Where can you shop with bitcoins besides a few places that are accepting the currency as a marketing gimmick? Where is my BTC ATM? Will they take Bitcoin at the exchange desk in the airport? All of these issues – and they are essentially issues related to the acceptance of a “value-less” currency in the world marketplace – hurt the general approachability of the currency. Bitcoin is only worth as much as the market says it’s worth, and without the ability without regulation the danger of holding money in Bitcoin is far too great. While the BTC market is one of the “purest” markets in the world, this also makes it one of the most tumultuous. to recreate traditional equities and currency markets, but instant, anonymous transfers don’t instill trust in non-risk takers. I can imagine a day when Bitcoin will be worthless. That day could come soon. Or and BTC could be accepted worldwide. In some ways I’d like the latter to be true, but the pessimist in me says it will be the former. However, it’s a blast to watch this New Millennium currency get its legs.
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Dipping Deeper Into Publishing, Kabam Launches $50M Fund To Bring Japanese Games West
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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With in just the Japanese market last month, it’s no surprise that Western game developers are looking to cherry pick more hits to bring back to West. Kabam, , is launching a $50 million fund to bring Japanese games into the West. Gaming giants like DeNA, GREE and Zynga along with mid-size developers like Pocket Gems are getting deeper into publishing third-party titles. It’s a way of de-risking the hits-driven nature of the gaming business by relying on outside creative content. At the same time, these companies promise indie developers greater reach and traction than they might have by going it alone. Marketing costs for games have gone dramatically over the last two years and the biggest mobile developers routinely spend several million dollars on marketing every month. DeNA, which is one of Japan’s biggest freemium mobile gaming companies, has had success in the past to Western markets. Chou didn’t reveal specifics about the specific revenue share that Kabam would take except to say that it would be less than 30 percent. It sounds like the benefits are pretty standard for any porting or publishing program; Kabam will help out with localization and marketing. The company will also provide tracking analytics that will help developers monitor user acquisition and retention. Kabam, which was one of the early social gaming companies to do midcore titles on Facebook, has done a hard shift to mobile platforms over the last year with titles like Kingdoms of Camelot. Earlier this year, in annualized revenues. Licensing partnerships have also led to Lord of the Rings-themed games like The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth and The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age. Those titles have done well enough that Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. did a strategic investment in the company.
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Real Estate Crowdfunding Platform Realty Mogul Is Gaining Steam, As It Wins Another Pitch Competition
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Rip Empson
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Last week, a young startup called took home top honors at a Silicon Valley pitch competition and networking event hosted by , in which eight early-stage startups showed off their wares in front of 400 investors and founders. Realty Mogul won the top prize from a pool of over 50 seed-stage companies, beating out email optimization startup , which came in as the runner-up. This isn’t the first time that Realty Mogul has caught the attention of investors or judges at a pitch competition — or of those at accelerators. The startup is a graduate of both the Founder Institute and Microsoft/TechStars’ accelerator in Seattle, and raised from a handful of angel investors, including Gust CEO David S. Rose, Gordon Stephenson and serial entrepreneur Sky Kruse. Not only that, but Realty Mogul also in early March, where it was selected as the top startup from over 100 applicants. Why the buzz? The Los Angeles-based startup has been attracting attention of late for its mission to make real estate investing simple and accessible to all. At least, that is the startup’s long-term goal. As Anthony wrote at the startup’s launch last month, as of now Realty Mogul is a platform where accredited investors “can pool their money to back real estate deals” and buy shares of pre-vetted investment properties, including apartment buildings, office buildings and retail centers. Accredited investors can invest as little as $5,000, without having to worry about the rest of the hassle that come with being an investor in those properties. The company is currently working with over 1,000 investors, who are using the platform to access a dashboard where they can manage their investments, browse a marketplace of potential investments, sign paperwork and submit payment for deals they want to be involved in and are charged only if the total funding goal is reached. Once reached, investors can track their investments using the site’s dashboard. And, yes, as Anthony wrote, Realty Mogul is focused exclusively on accredited investors at this point, and qualifying as an individual will require a net worth of more than $1 million. But co-founder and CEO Jilliene Helman thinks that the excitement over equity-based crowdfunding has big potential and that the startup’s model could work beyond this set of accredited investors. After all, it’s one of the ways that investors can still see returns on their investment, she said, as investments can begin providing returns in the short term (in a few months, via rent checks or loan payments), rather than over years or decades. As to its own cash flow, Realty Mogul makes money by way of administrative fees associated with these investments and by giving real estate firms access to a pool of pre-qualified (and vetted) investors. When we asked Helman to tell us a little bit about how Realty Mogul is looking to stand our from the competition — from related sites like FundRise and Prodigy Networks, she tells us that, in comparison to the former, Realty Mogul is working with operating partners who have local market knowledge within specific property types, whether that be multifamily, retail or office, for example. Fundrise thus far has raised money for all their own development projects, she says, and while “they are in the acquisition and development business, we are in the business of curating best-in-class operating partners.” Realty Mogul investors can diversify across locations, operating partners and property types, she continued. In turn, while Prodigy Networks has a sexy product and looks to invest in “trophy properties,” she says, “we are more interested in properties that kick off healthy cash-flow and provide steady returns for our investors … we are 100 percent cash-flow investors and look to provide distributions to our investors in the first quarter after they invest in a property with us.” The other big difference, the CEO says, is that Realty Mogul allows investors to invest in both loans secured by real estate and equity. In loans, the investor is “always in a first lien position,” which is the safest position position to be in on debt, and the startup’s loans pay fixed interest payments, while its equity transactions pay preferred percentages and allow investors to participate in appreciation and upside. Furthermore, in terms of traction, Realty Mogul has invested over a quarter of a million dollars since launch, and just closed a transaction in Washington that involved a loan “paying 8 percent to investors on annual basis,” she says. And, in terms of targeting that wider audience? Hellman says they’re still waiting on the final regulations to be determined by the SEC on equity crowdfunding, but “we’re interested in opening this model to a wider audience” as soon as they can. Founder Showcase runner-up, Embarke, which also impressed the panel of investors at the event, is an email optimization product that analyzes individual user behaviors and interests (as opposed to aggregate user data) in order to ensure delivery of the right message to the right person at the right time. Embarke has created over two million user profiles and is sending over 13 million emails a month, helping marketers to increase opens and clicks by 10 percent to 25 percent, the company says, and counts SendGrid as an integration partner. The startup is based in San Diego. Below you’ll find Realty Mogul’s pitch from Founder Showcase. Let us know what you think. [vimeo 62905494 w=640&h=380]
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Alibaba Group Launches Daily Deals Site Juhuasuan Overseas In Hong Kong & Taiwan
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Catherine Shu
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Alibaba Group that it has launched , a combination of C2C retail platform Taobao Marketplace and group shopping site Juhuasuan, in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Juhuasuan Overseas will offer merchandise and services from selected Taobao sellers in the same daily deals format as the original , which is accessible only to customers in mainland China because cross-border shipping is not supported. Juhuasuan Overseas currently offers between 12 and 20 new group shopping deals each day, and will begin selling localized lifestyle services and travel deals to Hong Kong customers in a few weeks. Daphne Lee, director of Taobao International Business, said in a statement that the new Web site will leverage Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com’s (one of Alibaba Group’s B2C e-commerce platforms) 2 million existing customers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. According to Alibaba Group, there were 1.4 million registered Taobao users in Hong Kong and 600,000 in Taiwan as of the end of 2012. Originally launched under Taobao Marketplace in March 2010, Juhuasuan was spun-off as an independent subsidiary of Alibaba Group in October 2011. Though it faced competition from other Chinese group-buying Web sites like Lashou, 55tuan, and Meituan, Juhuasuan has throughout the country. That tactic has helped Juhuasuan grow into China’s top group-buying site, with , double the share held by its next largest competitor, Meituan.
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Fliple Snags Windows Phone’s Style, Brings It To iOS As A Contacts Manager
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Greg Kumparak
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Oh, man. If Microsoft thinks is , they’re just going to this. Fliple is a new, free contacts manager app for iOS. It’s largely inspired (cough) by Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. It’s got the same white-on-black sans serif font. It’s got the little one-tap tiles that show a contact’s photo, only to slide away every once in a while to reveal their name. It’s got the same little circular icons. Every screen and icon even smoothly flips into place in a strikingly Windows Phone-esque way. But don’t worry! While it leans heavily on Windows Phone’s graphical styling and borrows a concept or five, it’s not a one-to-one rip off of Windows Phone’s People Hub (the WP equivalent of the standard contacts app). If it were… I probably wouldn’t be writing about it. I’ve always kind of the People Hub. And yet… Maybe it’s because Fliple ditches Windows Phone’s whole sideway-sliding-UI thing that makes me feel like I’m always missing something off screen. Maybe it’s because, unlike the People Hub, Fliple doesn’t try to take on a bunch of social networking duties that are best left to dedicated apps. [gallery columns="4" ids="793896,793897,793898,793895"] Whatever the case, I’m liking Fliple. Enough so, actually, that I’ve found myself using it instead of iOS’ built-in contacts/phone app. I can’t say how long it’ll stay there, but it’s earned itself a test run for at least the next few days. While it’s a contacts app and thus much of its functionality can be assumed (It has contacts! And… and profile pictures!), Fliple has a couple of features that I particularly like. Contacts can be organized into Groups, with each group getting its own icon that leads to a list of just those contacts. Each group’s screen has a compose button which, when tapped, allows you to blast a text or email out to the members of that group in one fell swoop. When you’re looking at your entire list of contacts, you can jump to a contact either through the standard alphabetical quick-scroll trick that iOS first made popular, or by narrowing down the options by punching in the letters on a slide-out T9 keypad. Check out the two minute demo video below. You’ll know within about 15 seconds whether or not Fliple is for you: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNwB9yNYGmc?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] You can find Fliple in the iOS App Store .
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Messaging App Line’s Kawaii Characters Get Their Own Cartoon Series In Japan
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Catherine Shu
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Line’s animated characters, which helped it become , now have their own cartoon series. The TV show, called “ ,” premiered on Tokyo TV Channel 6 last week (h/t ). “Line Town” features half-hour-long episodes and a prime 6:30PM to 7:30PM slot, and has already been picked up for syndication on BS Japan. According to Asiajin, the series also has the distinction of having a theme composed by Japanese pop idol and actress Shoko Nakagawa, the former presenter of Pokemon Sunday. found a on YouTube: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifMWXp1Y9zw] This is not the first time the characters from the NHN Japan messaging app have popped up on television. In January, a 5-minute long animated short featuring the characters called “ ” was broadcast on Tokyo TV. Line’s characters, which users can add in the form of “stickers” to their messages, are among a host of innovative features, including integrated video, images, and doodles, meant to increase user engagement. Found in top Asian messaging apps including Korea’s KakaoTalk, China’s WeChat, and Taiwan’s Cubie, these features are now making their way to American apps like MessageMe. Line is keen, however, to be known as more than just a messaging and free calls app. Last month, that the app wants to position itself as a social media alternative, and sees itself as an entertainment–not technology–company. Line has its own main characters (including Brown the bear, Cony the bunny and highly emotive Moon), who appear in the new cartoon series, but it also relies on cultural research to create new stickers for different markets like Spain and the U.S. Of course, Line is not the first app that has spun-off its characters into an animated series. Most notably, Rovio Entertainment that it is launching a cartoon based on its megahit “Angry Birds” characters. The Finnish company to $197.8 million in 2012 thanks in large part to Angry Birds titles like “Angry Birds Star Wars” and “Bad Piggies.” It will be interesting to see if Line’s characters enjoy the same success and eventually join Pokemon, Totoro, and Astro Boy on the roster of Japanese hit animations that have achieved international fame.
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FF Ventures’ John Frankel Talks Wearables, Brain Waves, And The Future Of Immigration
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Jordan Crook
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, founder and partner at , has a steady hand on the pulse of innovation. He’s invested in companies like 500px, Appy Couple, and Moveline, to name a few, and while he doesn’t see a Series A crunch on the horizon, he does see the pace of innovation rapidly heating up. After all, his firm as led seven investments in new companies since December 1, most notably in companies who are taking the smartphone and turning it into something truly functional and useful for people. As our focus begins to shift from pocketable computers to wearable ones, we found it only fitting to see how Mr. Frankel feels about computing headsets and wrist-watches. “The thing that will make us comfortable with wearables will be the accuracy of the information they provide,” said Frankel. “Letting Siri be not completely accurate is annoying, but since wearables are ever-present, that information needs to be 100 percent correct.” Quantified self devices and smart wearables are merging into a similar category, and Frankel sees this as part of a larger push “not to electronically measure different things about you, but to understand your DNA.” He brought up a company called Interaxon which has developed a brain wave-reading headset, called . Frankel sees huge opportunities with this, as the company has just opened up its API to let developers get a peek into our brains. “Maybe we can quantify our meditation,” said Frankel. “Or maybe someone will develop a program that tells someone they’re falling asleep at the wheel. I don’t know what people will come up with, and that intrigues me a lot.” We also took the opportunity to ask Frankel his opinion on Apple pulling 500px (one of his portfolio companies) from the App Store under accusations that it was easy to search for porn within the app. Frankel maintains that the photography on 500px website and app is not pornography, but rather tasteful nudity and that “most people know the difference.” However, he sees it as a larger move by Apple to tighten the reigns with regards to explicit imagery. But Frankel is perhaps most interested in companies looking to solve major issues, like what is doing with immigration. The company acts a lot like a TurboTax for immigration, allowing people from other companies to have easy, cheaper access to the documents they need in an understandable format. “These are the kinds of innovations that foster further innovation,” said Frankel. “I wonder how many people from other countries we’ve brought over here, educated, and then sent away.”
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The Other Silicon Valley That The Tech Industry Is Leaving Behind [Video]
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Colleen Taylor
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[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/63373007 w=600&h=450] On Friday, veteran journalist did a segment on Silicon Valley that gives a very different perspective than we get from most mainstream media coverage of the world-renowned , and it’s been fueling some this weekend. Called “ ,” it’s a very interesting look at the growing homeless problem in the South Bay of San Francisco that’s happening in stark contrast to the growing wealth in the same area. Instead of another at the cafeteria that offers free gourmet food for all employees, we meet a former worker in that same cafeteria who was laid off as the company tightened its hiring policies and is now living in a tent. Instead of gleaming footage of the high-tech machinery that produces silicon wafers, we meet a former employee who is now homeless at the age of 54 with “nothing” to her name. It’s a visual look at what the Associated Press in an article about Silicon Valley’s wealth disparity: “Food stamp participation just hit a 10-year high, homelessness rose 20 percent in two years, and the average income for Hispanics, who make up one in four Silicon Valley residents, fell to a new low of about $19,000 a year— capping a steady 14 percent drop over the past five years” The Moyers piece argues that the offshoring of tech manufacturing has played a big part in this current situation. While the issue of homelessness and wealth disparity is very complex, and the people profiled here may have more issues at play than the losing of their jobs, it’s hard to deny that the loss of middle-class type manufacturing jobs has an impact on the US. It’s interesting to see how Silicon Valley is no exception, despite how sunny here is. Again, it’s hard to get a comprehensive picture of all that’s happening in a six minute video — for instance, a small but significant light at the end of the tunnel could be the growing “ ” taking hold , and that’s one key thing that Moyers’ segment does not mention. But in all it’s a very well done look at an issue that often goes unseen. Either way, it’s something you should watch — it’s all in the video embedded above.
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Blink, Servo And Rust: A Good Week For Browsers
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Frederic Lardinois
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It’s sure been an interesting week for this of us who cover browsers. Last weekend, we that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and . Then, on Tuesday I got an email from Mozilla, asking if I had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s and the Rust language it is written in. Turns out, Mozilla Research wasn’t just going to work on this alone, but managed to get Samsung to help out with bringing this new engine that’s optimized for multicore and heterogeneous computing architectures to Android and ARM. Given that Mozilla had remained relatively quiet about Servo until now, it was a bit of a surprise that it was now ready to put it into the spotlight. Interestingly, I had heard from Google’s Chrome team earlier in the week and they, too, wanted to talk on Tuesday. Oddly, the PR team was unusually wary about giving me any details before the call (often they’ll give you some background to make sure you can prepare for the call). When Linus Upson, Google’s VP of Engineering, and Alex Komoroske, the product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me that Google was going to based on WebKit, I had to backtrack a few times to make sure I had really heard this right. Outside of a few WebKit insiders, few people expected Google to do this. WebKit is generally seen as a major success and given its dominance on the desktop (thanks to Chrome) and mobile (thanks to Safari), few would call it anything but a massive success. Google’s WebKit is fork is obviously the most controversial of last week’s announcements and leaks. Google says the reason for its fork is essentially technical, but given that WebKit was, at this point, one of the few projects where Apple and Google were working together relatively closely, it’s hard not to think that there were some political motivations behind this, too, especially given that Google was quite a bit more active in sharing its code back to the project than anybody else. We’ll still have to see what the ramifications of this move are, but I’m pretty optimistic. Sure, it means web developers will have to test their code against yet another rendering engine, but I do believe the folks on the Chrome team when they that this was “not an easy decision” for them. Google is obsessed with speed and with WebKit being part of so many other browsers, the development just didn’t move fast enough for Google. The Chrome team believes that “having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.” I agree. The sudden arrival of Chrome on the scene in 2008 sure pushed every other browser vendor to innovate faster. At the time, the competition was mostly about who could (all the WebKit-based browsers use different JavaScript engines). Now, with Blink and Servo out in the open, we may see a similar arms race for rendering engines, too, and at the end of the day, that can only benefit users and developers who can look forward to faster, more stable browsers.
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TC Makers: Inside Will Rockwell’s Steampunk Workshop
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John Biggs
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Hidden amidst the winding pathways of Llewelyn Park, New Jersey, America’s oldest gated community, steampunk designer Will Rockwell is building a future that never was. He began his career as a TV producer but he always loved to tinker with metals, leather, and wood – the three components of good steampunk. After building a set of Rocketeer-style USB keys, friends turned him on to . He opened a . These designs are a labor of love for Rockwell who scours the junkyards of New Jersey for cool odds and ends. He has two workshops, one in Pennsylvania and one in the basement of his 1912 home. Rockwell doen’t expect to get rich with his hobby but he’s doing well, nonetheless. His unique style, nautical-themed designs, and electronic additions to his devices meld the modern and the mysterious in a quirky way. My favorite project? His electric guitar outfitted with wild effects and knife switches, although his . Will is definitely following the maker spirit and is even making a little money. His world is one of the imagination, full of undersea starships and steaming hard drives run by pistons. It’s enough to make you think you’ve stumbled upon the world of Captain Nemo via the Jersey Turnpike.
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The Power And Weakness That Come With Being The Default
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Drew Olanoff
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Facebook had its on Wednesday, and its Home launcher will soon start shipping exclusively on an . This is the social network’s first crack at being the default experience on any device. Until now, using Facebook has been a completely optional and background experience, meaning you’d have to visit its website or download one of its apps. After nine years, that approach worked rather well, to the tune of over a billion users. To get to the next level, Facebook had to start dipping its toes into uncharted territory…being the default. Creating a situation where you are the default, out-of-the-box experience certainly has many advantages. For example, HTC is putting all of its marketing power behind the HTC First, and Facebook probably didn’t have to pay a dime for any of this. The phone manufacturer is hoping that even though this isn’t a true “Facebook Phone,” that the fantasy of it being that, along with a manageable $99 price tag, will be enough to sell a slew of them. AT&T is certainly helping the cause on their site with this massive advertisement, which is of course what you see by default when you surf there: On April 12, when people start opening their new devices, they will see a Facebook screen asking them to log in. Yes, Facebook has reached default status. If for some odd reason the person with the phone doesn’t have a Facebook account, they can simply sign up for one. Sounds crazy, but there are still many people without a Facebook account and might not have had a reason to have one before. They might have never had a smartphone before either, which means that the Facebook Home experience will be their guide. The importance, and potential negatives involved, cannot be overstated. Talk to Microsoft about defaults. It worked quite well for its Internet Explorer browser until it got them into hot water. We’ll get to the hot water later, but Internet Explorer was a beast, because it shipped as the only browsing experience for Windows machines. Was it the best web browser out there? For a while, yes it was. Installing another browser used to be seen as something only really geeky, or adventurous, people would do. I remember tweaking my old Windows machine every chance I could get, downloading other interface to the web that I could download. For most, though, the idea of using something not blessed by Microsoft was risky and not worth the time. During the early “browser war” days, the only other viable options to Internet Explorer were Opera and Netscape Navigator. There were plusses to both, but nothing overwhelming. Web surfers simply wanted to use the web, so they used the interface that was given to them, and it worked. For its operating system, Microsoft stole the enterprise market because they were the only option, and once one big company became a Windows shop, everyone else had to if they wanted to compete. Facebook is now in a similar situation with Facebook Home. They are the most popular experience for interacting with your friends online. The lure of Facebook is just that — all of your friends and family are on it. Why would you use something else to talk to them if that’s where they spend their time? Every app developer is trying to conjure up a “Facebook Hook” because it’s the easiest way to attract more people to your product. The power that comes along with that is just mind-boggling. Zuckerberg knows that after going public, Facebook is in a position where it can put its foot on the gas to get to 2 billion users. To get there, you have to pull out all of the stops. Will Facebook ever create its own phone? Maybe, once they see how the HTC test goes and how many people install Facebook Home onto their Android devices. It’s doubtful that Apple will ever open up enough for Facebook to take over iOS, so if all goes well with Home, there has to be a next phase of the plan. That plan would be its own phone and hardware. Another company, that starts with a G, has gone through similar testing phases with hardware products, only to start building ones in-house. That same company has its own software bundled with a mobile operating system, but they’ve gotten around any issues by making that operating system open source and modifiable. Or .” After Microsoft had cornered the browser market with its genius plan of shipping every copy of its Windows operating system with it pre-installed, other players cried foul. At the time, Microsoft saw its distribution methods as its No. 1 asset, because they were. But how could Microsoft not be open and let people which browser they used before being thrust into Microsoft’s idea of what browsing the web should be like. Choice. For users? Crazy. It was alleged that uninstalling Internet Explorer slowed down PCs using Windows, and that Microsoft didn’t provide users with the proper tools to completely rid themselves of the web browser and move onto another one. Accusations flew about monopolies, but Microsoft contested that Internet Explorer wasn’t a , but just a . It got ugly, and in case you’ve never seen Bill Gates’ deposition from 1998, here are some of the greatest hits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKcPx2jD5to If you ever have a lot of time to research this, are a hoot. All of this was awkward because Microsoft had helped pioneer home computing, so cases like this had never happened. The questions for Microsoft and the answers that the court received were firsts. It wasn’t a perfect , but Microsoft’s stronghold on the browser market soon came to an end. Users don’t have a problem downloading Chrome, Firefox or any other flavor of a web browser anymore. Personal choice is king on the Internet. The problem here for Facebook is that it will soon find a day where its lock on all of your friends and their data will be seen as a monopoly. Moves like becoming the default experience, even though it can be reversed, for a smartphone, could easily be seen as a move similar to Microsoft’s Windows distribution tactics. Does it mean they’re evil? No, it means they’re smart. Being smart catches up with you, though, because other smart people find all of the flaws with your product and build alternatives. Now that choice is commonplace for consumers, especially on the web, Facebook for the first time has opened itself up to someone building a competitive service and becoming the sexy alternative the ugly, old . Naturally, Facebook is full of really smart people, people that have worked with Microsoft’s finest for years, since they were an early investor. The social network can of course learn from the software company’s mistakes, but it will be once again heading into uncharted territory. There will come a day, maybe sometime soon, where Mark Zuckerberg is being deposed over what is seen as monopolistic behavior. There will be companies like Netscape and Opera who are crying foul, putting all of their efforts behind breaking down everything that Facebook had built over the years with its distribution methods. It’s all cyclical, there has to be a big guy. Facebook is the big guy in the social space, but when you have that target on your back, you know that others will come after you. Facebook will have a Pepsi to its Coke, and some predict that the true Facebook alternative will be a place for younger people. Only thing is, Zuckerberg already thought about it and that’s why it partnered with HTC for the Home launch and why it acquired Instagram. If it goes where the younger people are and captures that market, it will take longer for a competitor to unwind what Facebook has wound over the past nine years. Facebook is already an operating system, but you and I are the bits and bytes that make it up. For consumers, once they see the same thing every day, even though Facebook promises to update Home every month, they will start seeking out alternatives. Sure, Facebook allows you to take your data with you, but there isn’t anyone that properly handles all of that data just yet to disrupt Facebook’s position. There will be, though. It isn’t Twitter or Google+ alone, but it will probably be a combination of a few services, some of which haven’t been invented yet. In the same way as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, selling its own phone with nothing more than a login screen for the social network would be seen as anti-competitive, Home could be seen as slightly anti-competitive, to Facebook could be seen as anti-competitive. After all, being the first thing people see when they interact with their phone is more invasive than being the default browser, right? The only problem is, there is no competitor. Yet. There will be, though, and it won’t be pretty once this cycle happens all over again.
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The App Is Not Enough: Why We Might See More Companies Try Mobile Land Grabs After Facebook Home
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Darrell Etherington
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An app on a smartphone is a limited vessel, one that can provide content and information for your audience, but within bounds set out by the operating system. People still have to navigate to your app, and therefore there’s a time when they’re “in” your product or service, and a time when they’re “out” of said product or service. Facebook clearly demonstrated last week that it , and it’s sure to propel others to see if they can’t do the same. Facebook Home reverses the natural order of things on mobile devices compared to what has existed to date: A user actually starts off in Facebook, and then has access to a launcher which can take them “out” of the social network (though not truly out) and into Android proper, from which they can access other apps. The social networking company says that the whole idea of , but the business motivation behind it is actually to put Facebook first. The chart Facebook used to illustrate how Facebook Home operates and compares to other tools like true Android OS modifications and apps (it’s a layer sandwiched between the core OS and apps that run on top, Facebook says) is a perfect example of why it’s a desirable state of affairs for FB — as well as for others looking to derive more value from mobile users who tend to be more focused on doing one thing at a time and who can also pick and choose how they want to share with a service more readily thanks to the ease of integrating mobile SDKs and APIs into other people’s software. In general, companies trying to move their model from a primarily web-based one to a version that starts on mobile first are experiencing growing pains, specifically around finding ways to convert the advertising model to be as effective on smaller screens and in an app-centric context. Facebook Home isn’t starting out with ads, but Facebook , which means they’ll occupy prime real estate on the main interface of FB’s Android launcher. On Android, the opportunity is there for anyone with development resources, time and motivation to build their own launcher, which sits between the OS itself and apps, in many ways directing the experience of the user. Any company with a suite of services it wants to promote for sharing or communication would be well-served by occupying that space on a user’s device: it doesn’t take much imagination to conceptualize an Evernote phone, for instance, or even a GetGlue tablet, or yes, a Twitter phone, too. To imagine that a user might want to give over control of most of the experience of their devices to a single service or app-making company is more than a little egotistical, which is why Facebook with over 1 billion monthly active users seems perhaps justified in attempting it. Others with smaller networks might seem a little more ridiculous attempting the same, but if you can convince enough users to hand over the keys to their mobile experience, presumably, the initial risk will be well worth it in the long run.
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Students Tackle Road Trips, Online Distraction, And More At HackPrinceton
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Chris Velazco
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It feels like college Hackathon season is in full swing, and that’s why I’ve been making it a point to drive around the Northeast and check out what all these undergrad hackers are capable of cobbling together in just 24 hours. Last Saturday I pulled over at Princeton University just in time to see 30-some sleep-deprived teams demo their projects at — here’s a quick peek at some of the clever hacks that caught my eye: I’m something of a slow-starter when it comes to getting things done, so is right up my alley. Long story short, it’s a Chrome extension that aims to improve your productivity by slowly removing distractions from the time-sucking websites you frequent. And how does it do that? In case the name didn’t tip you off, a Tamagotchi lookalike follows your mouse cursor around and eats elements off the page to keep you from getting too side-tracked — you can fiddle with its hunger tolerance too so it doesn’t devour the contents of your Facebook news feed when you’re browsing during your downtime. As it happens, the team behind Tamagetitdone is no stranger to the Hackathon scene — Lehigh University’s , and also developed the that John was so fond of at the PennApps Hackathon. The trio had to settle for second back at PennApps, but this time around they picked up first prize in the software division — a cool $1,000. Meanwhile, a project called InstantKarma sought to remove all the guesswork from racking up worthless Internet points on Reddit. Created by (Princeton) and (Carnegie Mellon), InstantKarma is a program that monitors Reddit’s new submissions and analyzes them to determine which are most likely to become popular (and by extension, which ones you should comment on). Can’t come up with a witty riposte of your own? The program can also tell if a particular submission is a repost, and displays comments that did well the last time for easy recycling. A group of Yale undergrads on the other hand cobbled together their own spin on the email read receipt. , and churned out a service called , which alerts email senders when their missive has been read thanks to an image that gets embedded in the email’s signature. Once you’ve signed up for SeeMail, you punch in the names of your intended recipients on the SeeMail page, and it generates a snippet that you text into your email client of choice. After that you compose and send the email as usual — when the recipient opens said email, the SeeMail status page automatically updates to reflect the status change. According to Frank Wu the service is geared more toward curious individual users than for those who managed massive mailing lists, but SeeMail seems to work like a charm despite its humble origins. One of the most promising hacks at HackPrinceton was Rd Trpr (pronounced “road tripper”), created by vowel-averse Carnegie Mellon students . The service is comprised of two parts: an Android application that tracks your location when you head out on road trips, and a web app that displays your location to friends and family once you provide them with a link Rd Trpr automatically generates. To top it all off, Rd Trpr also collects and displays information about landmarks and local attractions near your current location, just to make sure that your trip is as eventful as possible. It’s still early days for the service, but it certainly seems to work — you can see the route the Rd Trpr took to get back to CMU . With enough polish I could definitely see it picking up some steam down the road (sorry, couldn’t resist). To my surprise (and delight), there were a handful of promising hardware hacks too thanks to HackPrinceton’s approach to reimbursing costs. Drawing Robot, developed by Princeton’s and , was far and away one of the crowd’s favorites that night. It’s not hard to see why — the four-person team whipped together an Arduino-powered rover about the size of a soccer ball that would slavishly follow a user-defined course. The kicker? The “navigator” would create that course by tracing one out in mid-air, which a Microsoft Kinect would interpret. The team took a photo of the demo area from above that acted as a canvas of sorts — from there, the user could position a wireframe avatar of himself on top of the image and sketch out a path that the orange robot (mostly) stuck to.
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Apple Pulls iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis From App Store
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Romain Dillet
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Apple pulled discovery service and daily deal app from the App Store. So far, AppGratis is not communicating on the issue and users can only speculate about what the issue is. Sometimes, Apple pulls an app because its latest update crashes or because the app uses a private API. Then, the developer has to submit a new release to return to the App Store. But there could be a bigger issue. Back in October, Apple a new rule in its iOS developer guidelines. It reads: “Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” As a reminder, AppGratis curates apps from the App Store, provides a short description and make paid apps free for a day. At the time, AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat that Apple was probably going after low-quality copycats, not AppGratis. AppGratis is all about discovery and helping independent developers thanks to its revenue-sharing deals. Yet, other popular discovery apps have been affected by Apple’s new guidelines. For example, as notes, AppShopper was from the App Store and has yet to make a comeback. AppShopper provided a way to search the App Store that competed directly with Apple’s own App Store. Moreover, users could be alerted when an app was on sale, effectively reducing developer revenue per user. That’s why many other scenarios are still possible. Maybe AppGratis uses a private API or breaks an insignificant guideline and Apple won’t put the app back in the store until an updated version is submitted. As always, developers are at the mercy of Apple’s review team. The team often contacts developers to require some changes to an app in order to stay in the store. Paris-based AppGratis has coincidentally raised in January. With 7 million users and the ability to lead to up to 500,000 downloads for a single app, the company is not a newcomer. If Apple wanted to stamp out AppGratis, it could have done it a few months ago. All there is left to do is to wait for Apple’s final say. For now, existing users can still use the AppGratis app. Maybe a few UX changes or infrastructure changes will be enough to make the app reappear in the App Store. We have reached out to AppGratis and will update this post as we learn more about the case.
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Iterations: The Tension Between Transparency And Privacy In The Startup Ecosystem
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch Everyone wants more transparency. It is part of a deep, fundamental trend. In government. In the workplace. Inside large systems like health care. And, more recently, around early-stage startup metrics and investment data. The crowd wants more transparency. They want to know more about metrics, revenues, and stats, and they want to know more about how investment dollars are allocated. Yet, the result of this shift raises concerns about privacy. In this world of imperfect, asymmetric information, combined with the desire among participants to build up, invest in, and report on the industry itself, frustrations can mount easily because, somewhere in the recess of our minds, the game feels slightly rigged in the other person’s favor, and the light of sunshine offers a promise of transparency to perhaps root out those bad apples and, just perhaps, inject an ounce of fairness, comfort, and peace of mind in an otherwise shady world. In this real tension, we find many nuances. For companies, unless they’re growing as fast as Pinterest or booking revenue as fast as Bloomreach, there’s little to be fully transparent and publicly disclose metrics. Doing so may impact future fundraising efforts, strain relationships with existing investors, hamper potential partnerships, and inform competitors of an opening. Remaining relatively quiet is one of the key benefits of being a small, closely-held private company. For investors, transparency may be an even dicier proposition. First, companies they invest in may want to remain stealth or not have their investors made public. In these situations, it is the founders who drive privacy — not the investors. Second, some investors may prefer to keep their moves private so as to not give their own competitors actionable information, especially in a climate where competition among funds within a contracting industry is growing fiercer. By law, investment funds are required to make filings with regulatory agencies, but those laws do not include, for example, listing out limited partners and other details many would like to know. Many people are also simultaneously investors in many funds at multiple stages, compounding the sensitivity. So, here we are. Many want — in fact, at times, demand — that all of this data be made public to identify, tag, and call out the early-stage companies and investors who are not active, who are not what quite what they say they are. Investors may be growing tired of companies who craft and broadcast vanity metrics, and founders may be growing tired of converting their investor spreadsheets into a never-ending cascading waterfall of pointless investment pitches that waste time. Investors are in pursuit of perfect information when considering pulling out the checkbook, and every minute a founder spends pitching an investor who likely won’t pull the trigger because they’re generally disinterested, are phishing for information, or may not have any gunpowder left. We have forgotten one dimension. We must investigate what fundamentally drives all of this to begin with: It is our collective curiosity to know more during a time in society where demand transparency is rising and at loggerheads with keeping some information private. Nearly everyone in the ecosystem participates in the making of, analyzing of, or reporting on the news. Nearly everyone has a desire to know more about “who” funded “what” and at “what price.” Founders are lured to coordinating PR around their funding announcements, helped by an industry devoted to this and a network graph of relationships which can make dreams sing above the noise to target the right set of potential partners, the next key hires, and even the next investor. By the same token, investors love to be mentioned in these announcements, their brands gently stitched into the threads of the story. Both, ironically, work in concert, revealing what is material but oftentimes — as is currently their right — cloaking the specifics. The result is speculation masked as information. Add the real-time nature of Twitter to the mix, and perception distorts any signal frequency into reality. People are keeping score, if even in the back of their mind, of who is following who, who is investing in who, who has real growth, who has real money, who is walking dead, who won’t be able to raise their next round, who won’t be able to raise their next fund, and all the other aspects and currencies of what makes the Valley’s parlor game so dynamic and opaque. I believe in more transparency on a fundamental level and am not an apologist for shadowiness, but I do recognize that part of the draw of private enterprise is, well, privacy. The big fault line here is between transparency versus privacy. The web continues to make imperfect markets more efficient, and it is only rational that in these imperfect markets, rational actors will want as much information as possible before transacting. The startup world, in this context, is just another market, one that has traditionally been kept largely private and is slowly opening up thanks to new platforms, blogging, and (ironically) private dashboards created by actors to try to use data to make sense of the madness. The cost of this transparency is privacy, but not just for private companies and firms — but also perhaps for people, because a person’s reputation in our industry is tied so closely to one’s place of work, the drive for transparency might mean that individuals, in addition to firms and startups, may have to give up more privacy than they bargain for. /
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Chat Multi-Tasking, Facebook Home’s Game Changer, Could Rattle Apple And Google
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Josh Constine
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Single-tasking has been a hallmark of mobile. But lets you chat in an overlaid drop-down window as you use Google, Yelp, Maps or any other app, bringing the productivity of the desktop to the small screen. Home’s cover feed and responsive design are nice, but you could call them . Chat multi-tasking, though, merges the communication and computing sides of the smartphone. Innovation doesn’t need to hit you over the head. It just has to solve a problem in a new way. Until now, a real hinderance to text messaging on mobile was context switching. You were either communicating with someone, or you were in another app. ‘Or’. Not ‘And’. What Android and iOS call “multi-tasking” is really just more rapid switching. Even with pop-over notifications, you still had to leave one app and open another to respond. That moment you see your current activity fade to black and a messaging app ascend to replace it causes a mental break. This context switching is unnatural and unhelpful. Often we are communicating what we’re computing — giving someone the answer to a question, making a joint decision, guiding someone to a destination, or discussing a piece of content found online. I’ve definitely had to go back and forth multiple times in frustration between SMS or Facebook Messenger and other apps when I couldn’t remember a set of directions or other complicated string of information I was trying to pass to a friend. The best option was to carry on a voice call over speakerphone as you navigate around the phone, and some connection types don’t even support this. Our desire to converse as we cruise around the digital world stems from pre-mobile behavior patterns. Humans have always been able to talk while doing something else at the same time. Since the days of IRC and (TechCrunch parent company) AOL’s Instant Messenger, you could browse the web or use other apps with a chat window floating on top. We were led to believe there simply wasn’t enough space on our little mobile screens to do this. Maybe on big phablets like the or full-size tablets like the iPad, but not a traditional-sized smartphone screen. Facebook’s designers weren’t satisfied with that. They are obsessed with modeling mobile after how we conduct our lives in person. That’s why they built “read receipts” into Messenger a year ago. They mimic the body language cues that tell us someone heard what we said At the time, I asked who oversees messaging about the philosophy behind alerting people when their messages are read by their recipients. He told me: “Technology has always been here to assist us, not to get in our way, not to make us think too much. We’re building technologies that are modeled after real life conversations. We start with people and how we’ve been wired for thousands of years to behave. ‘How do you get things closer to face-to-face?’ Everything we do is built on this social principle. What we’re doing today is just the start.” Chat multi-tasking in Home is the next step he was alluding to. When someone messages you, a little bubble with their face pops up over the top of whatever app you’re using. A preview of the first dozen characters of the message splays out sideways from their head. What’s special is that if you tap their face, rather than closing your current app and opening Facebook Messenger, the bubble scoots to the top of the screen and an overlaid message window drops down from it with part of your currently used app still visible. Tap their face again and the message window retracts, revealing what you were doing with no context lost. When I used it in the launch event’s demo area, I was very impressed by how seamlessly it worked into typical mobile activity. Rather than being interruptive, chatting felt complementary to whatever I was doing. This system brings us one step closer to bonafide simultaneous messaging and mobile activity. In my opinion, the only serious shortcoming is that you can’t park the overlaid chat window on part of the screen and scroll around the exposed background app behind it. There isn’t a ton of room for this on the HTC First screen and some standard Androids, but I still think it’d be useful. Luckily the trend is growing screen sizes, so we’ll likely have more space soon. Everyone I showed the to or described the homescreen replacement app to has fixated on chat multi-tasking, which Facebook has given the silly name of “Chat Heads”. When I showed the Home video to a group of three decidedly non-techie 27-year-old women in Washington, DC, it was Chat Heads that surprised and elated them. It was met with calls of “I want that” and even one “I want to buy that” in regards to the HTC First running Home. The feature is a true game-changer because I believe we’ll see similar functionality emulated and improved upon in other apps and operating systems. I would be extremely surprised and disappointed if the next version of Apple’s iMessage didn’t have some kind of chat multi-tasking. The same goes for the Google’s rumored that’s supposed to launch at some point in the near future. Hopefully they’ll offer true, simultaneous messaging and other app usage. Until then, Chat Heads could be the feature that convinces people to download Facebook Home or buy an HTC First. The messaging space has gotten extraordinarily hot these last few years as companies realize just how long we spend texting, and how much valuable data about who we care about comes with it. Instant, asynchronous mobile messaging brought us the ability to communicate as we go about our offline days. That’s why SMS got so popular. But as we increasingly live digitally within the infinite potential of our smartphones, we need messaging broken out of its silo.
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WikiLeaks Goes Google, Develops Searchable Database For Millions Of ‘Kissinger Cables’
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Gregory Ferenstein
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[tweet https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/321100916273070081] Buzzword enthusiasts would call this a “pivot”: infamous classified document release outlet, WikiLeaks, for over 1.7 million historical diplomatic cables. The “Kissinger Cables” span from 1973-1976, partly covering the leadership of controversial Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, containing “significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels,” WikiLeaks in a Sunday night press release. “The government can’t be trusted with its own archives,” explains WikiLeaks spokesperson, Kristinn Hrafnsson, justifying the shift from contemporary leaked cables to declassified (but obscure) documents. “One form of secrecy is complexity. That’s the reason why we decided to merge these files with our existing cables and put a lot of effort into making a user-friendly and accessible database.” WikiLeaks claims that the government has repeatedly attempted to reclassify some of the documents, which were obtained from the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA). WikiLeaks has named the database, the Public Library of United States Diplomacy or “Plus D”, for the sake of a convenient Twitter hashtag. WikiLeaks hasn’t had any juicy anonymous submissions since 2010 and is clearly trying to remain relevant in the face of financial turmoil and the legal troubles of its leader, Julian Assange, who’s holed up in . Perhaps the search engine will prove fruitful. If not, be a mensch and support anarchy with this fashionable line of .
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Bitcoin And The End Of Money
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John Biggs
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A commentator on Bloomberg, Princeton student , writes that Bitcoin is an “existential threat to the modern liberal state,” a line that can be read in two ways. One reading of his op-ed suggests we are all in danger and that the inability to tax and track will result in a thriving black market and reduced fiscal control that will be disastrous for all of us. Taken another way – and given Soltas’ biases, I suspect he’s focusing a bit more on the “liberal” part of the title versus the “modern” part – it suggests that the modern nation cannot afford to fritter money away on the welfare of its people because it will no longer be able to tax the rich unfairly, leading to a fiscal nirvana for men and women of a certain breed. Either way, it’s a goofy way to look at what will remain, for the time being, a blip on the economic radar. There have long been ways to transfer money anonymously. Ad hoc networks, most notably , have allowed relatively seamless transfers of wealth for centuries. Further methods have consisted of the condensation of wealth into precious metals, jewels or jewelry – a sort of money ZIP file that has allowed all manner of misdeeds to thrive between borders. Each of these methods have been seen as a way to launder money, support wars and help war victims, and, as Soltas notes, build an “existential threat to the modern liberal state.” The FBI, for example, says that “the way it creates, operates and distributes bitcoins makes it distinctively susceptible to illicit money transfers.” The same can be said of a $20,000 watch that someone wears over the border and resells when he lands. Bitcoins still require a way to convert the virtual currency into something you can spend in the real world. While you can buy a , I doubt the service will become sufficiently popular that every merchant will have a wallet at the ready for your next Slurpee purchase. Instead, Bitcoin represents a new part of the economic engine. As it stands, trusting, say, a wallet service or your own computer to hold millions in bitcoins is a risky proposition. The transfer may be seamless but the extraction will be hard. While I find it laughable that various federal agencies will be able to track the inflow and conversion of funds from a bitcoin transaction programmatically, an intrepid auditor should be able to raise a red flag when you have $100 one day and $20,000 the next – unless you keep your cash in turbulent bitcoins or less turbulent cash. This talk of the destruction of the modern banking system is akin to the talk about 3D-printed guns: it’s an interesting aside but it’s still far easier and cheaper to just do things the old-fashioned way. If Bitcoin becomes truly seamless and relatively solid, I could see some cause for worry. As it stands, it’s a cool way of doing something that has been done for centuries before and it’s definitely something to watch.
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Homegrown Developers, Localization Breathe Life Into South Asian Gaming
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Hassan Baig
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It’s an open secret that the social gaming industry is no longer the cornucopia of opportunities it used to be. Rising CPAs, falling k-factors, plateuing ARPUs and channel saturation all have made life difficult for the typical gaming studio devoid of a big network of users or a deep warchest of advertising money. But there’s a new gaming opportunity on the horizon, and the savvy tech investor will do well to take notice of it now that it’s still nascent. This opportunity is the impending mobile gaming boom in South Asia, scheduled to arrive by 2015 for all practical purposes. Read on for a thorough look at the gaming history of the region, emerging fundamentals and future expectations. Spurred by 200,000 gaming cafes popping up across the country, China witnessed an online gaming revolution in the early aughts. Facing no serious competition from traditional entertainment media heavily tethered by government censorship, gaming companies like Shanda and Giant Interactive firmly entrenched themselves in the typical gamer’s consciousness, making gaming a in China. By 2006, sensing the time had come for neighboring South Asia to take the plunge as well, India’s Reliance Entertainment released a gaming portal called . But unlike China, the response that Reliance received was lukewarm at best, and it turned out to be a stalled revolution. Zapak is still , as are Shanda and Giant Interactive, but whereas the latter have grown to become industry leaders, Zapak never validated the business case upon which it was built. Ultimately gaming failed to take root in India because of stiff competition from the prevalent form of entertainment in the region: Bollywood and TV. Zapak’s offerings were too underdeveloped, and subsequent interest in them was too thin to displace these highly mature regional media. Thus, other than a curious fringe, Zapak never made a dent in the South Asian universe like online gaming did across the border in China. Today when mobile gaming is en route to become a $48 billion industry , South Asia is excluded from the discussion almost entirely given its tepid history. But here’s the thing: Analysts are mistaken to equate South Asia’s lackluster past performance with its potential as a mobile gaming hub. Web and mobile games are two very different animals, and where the former failed to make inroads in South Asia, the latter will create some strong ripples. At their core, mobile games are excellent fillers for idle time when, say, waiting in a queue or for a bus. They harmoniously coexist with going to the movies or watching TV, while also retaining opportunities of exclusive engagement for hardcore users. So whereas web gaming in the region has had to compete with television and Bollywood, mobile gaming will with these favorite pastimes in South Asia. Moreover, given the region is one of the most densely populated in the world, it is reasonable to expect the average South Asian to have available more idle minutes due to greater wait times than their counterparts in the west (meaning potentially more minutes available for absorption by mobile games). And as game developers will tell you, every extra minute of engagement correlates to an uptick in ARPU. South Asia has been globally viewed as a slow adopter of the 3G standard. However, most people have missed the tipping point, which was reached in January: 3G penetration is now growing at a startling rate of 11 percent month over month in India, to K. Srinivas, president of Airtel, India’s largest and the world’s mobile network operator. Such a growth rate ensures that the current 3G penetration in India will more than triple within 12 months. That’s an estimated 210 million 3G subscribers in India by mid 2014. And you know that something has surely entered the Indian public’s imagination when Bollywood ends up making a about it. Though lagging behind India, the rest of South Asia is also exhibiting healthy interest in 3G and smartphones. Taken as a whole, South Asia boasts an estimated middle class of (same as the population of the US). Owing to of smartphones coupled with availability of , it can be safely assumed that this 310 million strong middle class will each own a smartphone phone with affordable mobile broadband by 2015. In effect, South Asia is poised to become one of the largest smartphone markets in the world, and the implications of that on the mobile gaming industry are immense. Because of a lack of widespread credit card usage, ARPU from digital content monetization remains quite low in South Asia. Hence conventional wisdom views the aforementioned explosive growth in smartphones as not necessarily translating to big bucks for mobile game developers. But here’s what conventional wisdom is overlooking: much like (and recently), ARPU from mobile content consumption in South Asia will be driven by carrier billing, not credit cards. Optimistic about the role carrier billing can play in unlocking South Asia’s digital economy, local mobile network operators (MNOs) have sprung into action. For instance of carrier billing rollout by MNOs in the region spotted all of 2012, and have continued well into 2013, as well. As long as MNOs deliver on these announcements and ensure judicious revenue shares for developers, expect the South Asian gaming market to become a big story around the world. Total mobile phone penetration in the region currently stands at , so there exists ample headroom for smartphone adoption. Expect the mobile gaming industry to be volume driven as carrier billing is rolled out and improves payer conversion rates. Assuming the region’s 310 million-strong middle class is each armed with a smartphone by 2015 and carrier billing can help generate yearly ARPU between $1 and $3, we’re looking at an industry size between $300 million to $900 million annually, and with ample room for further growth. Be it any sphere of life, a localized interaction is much more engaging than a generic one. It’s the reason President Obama uttered the Arabic greeting ‘Assalam-u-Alaikum’ when in Cairo; it’s the reason popular puzzle game Bewjeweled wasn’t as successful as its exploding-animals clone in South Korea. Likewise, the gaming industry in South Asia – a region of rich, unifying culture – will benefit tremendously from localized content. Themes of Bollywood and cricket are pervasive across the region and national boundaries, and present a great localization opportunity for game developers. Similarly, local festivals (e.g. Diwali or Eid) are culturally entrenched enough that no content creator focused on the region would want to ignore them. Ultimately, great localization will play a key role in driving up gaming engagement and ARPU across South Asia. Thus western game developers aiming to break into the region will be best served by partnering with their South Asian counterparts who understand the local cultural mores. In an on TechCrunch, I pointed out the exceptionally low share of social games made in South Asia among the top Facebook games in the world. The story is largely similar across mobile gaming platforms, as well. But change is in the air since the local devscape has come a long way in the last few years. Much of this progress has been driven by outsourcing shops looking to squeeze a marginal dollar from western game developers, but the ecosystem also ensconces a fair sprinkling of IP-driven local developers vying to usher South Asia into a new era. than ever are emerging from the region, startups have begun emulating of their western counterparts to engender a culture of creative freedom, and has been picking up. In fact, the region has even seen some of its . Expect all of these trends to snowball in the coming year as industry growth gains momentum. Overall, the fundamentals to support the coming mobile gaming boom in South Asia are firmly in place and the savvy investor should keep an eye out for opportunities in the region. Ultimately, first-mover advantage will play a key role in separating the big winners from the also-rans. As the industry grows and local developers multiply, there will be ample chance for those interested to get a slice of the pie on offer.
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Backed Or Whacked: The Battle Of The Bands
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Ross Rubin
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. Crowdfunding sites have become a breeding ground for smart watches and even a fair number of . But assuming one opts in for such a portable time-telling conveyance, that usually leaves a second wrist available for product targeting. For those willing to band together, a range of both inventive and connected wristbands have cropped up to ensure that ever more of your bodily real estate remains adorned with functionality. This week’s column will look at wristbands that don’t connect to smartphones whereas next week’s column will look at their higher-tech cousins. The rabbit holes of sites that feature products vying for your pledges is so deep that you can obtain just about anything through them except, perhaps, Vitamin D. Yes, as thermometers rise across much of the country, there’s a stronger case for feeling the warmth of our closest star upon our skin. Those who believe in the theory of epidermal warming, though, say we must temper exposure to dangerous rays that can burn us. Sunscreen can certainly help, but who wants to think about the best time to reapply when enjoying warm weather fun? An offer of help came from the sunny paradise of Oxfordshire, UK, where Inovia has created UVeBand, a water-resistant wristband that detects exposure to ultraviolet rays and gives off a gentle vibration when it’s time to reapply sunscreen. Backers would receive a band in such Yankee-Candletastic colors as deep-sea blue, poppy red, lemon zest and harmonious linen. Not enough backers felt the burning passion to contribute, though, and the campaign wound up with less than a tenth of the £80,000 sought. The PocketBand isn’t the first crowdfunded wrist wear to enable one to store a trivial cache on the go. Chicago served as the birthplace of , a wristband designed primarily for runners wanting to keep a key at hand securely. The PocketBand’s design is a bit less daring but a bit more functional. In addition to carrying a key or two, it can accommodate a folded bit of currency (take that, !), a stick of gum, a small pill or two, SD card or other similarly sized objects. With about 13 days left in the campaign, PocketBands has attracted about double its $10,000 goal and should be serving as a thin layer between wrists and tiny necessities in May in a range of colors and sizes for about $10. The anonymous inventor of the Buntastic Band hails from Provo, Utah, where she is a full-time student with a part-time job. That kind of time pressure can lead to only one thing: concern about the looks of your locks. With time on her hand not occupied by a watch on her wrist, she created an unassuming leather wristband that can lead a double life. By pulling hair through a slit in the band, rolling it and re-fastening its snaps, the Buntastic transforms from wristband to hairbun-enabler, allowing any woman to unleash the inner schoolmarm at a moment’s notice. As any scrunchie user will tell you, the Buntastic Band is hardly the first hair product to find at least a temporary home on the wrist, but the $10 product’s campaign has tripled its funding goal before winding down. Delivery is expected in May; Bumpits, you’ve been put on notice.
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Google Adds Non-Profit Information To Knowledge Graph, Gives Them A Boost With Google+ Follow Buttons
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Drew Olanoff
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Some people believe that Google’s practices when it comes to search are mystical and unfair — or sometimes — but what the company wants to do is surface the most important information for you when you perform a task on its most important product. With the last year, Google started showing information on the right-hand side of search results to help you figure out if you’re searching for the right thing, be it a person, place or thing. Today, that it’s now filling up its Knowledge Graph with information about nonprofits, which will help people find the organization they’d like to check out and potentially donate to. In its announcement, Google said that this is still in its early rollout phase, with more information being added all the time: We’ve just started to add information about nonprofits to the Knowledge Graph. When you search for a nonprofit organization on Google.com, you will start to see information to the right side of the search results that highlights the nonprofit’s financials, cause, and recent Google+ posts. Start following the organization on Google+ directly from the panel by clicking the Follow button. To learn more about related nonprofits, click on one of the organizations under “People also search for” and a carousel of similar organizations will appear at the top of the search results. Over time, we’ll continue to work on bringing more nonprofit information into your search experience. In addition to key information about nonprofits, including their categories and tax deductibility codes, Google is promoting their Google+ pages, as well. This means that Google+ could immediately become a hot spot for nonprofits to find new volunteers, avenues for fundraising and, more importantly, awareness for their campaigns and causes. While all known nonprofits aren’t available in Knowledge Graph yet, it looks like most of the big ones are. You’ll notice that Google is also publishing the last Google+ post from the organization, allowing people to jump right into a conversation: This is yet another example of how Google has strategically, and with precision, started to stitch together all of its products to create a world where people can spend just a little bit of time and get better results and information quicker. It’s also an example of how Google+ has become the connective tissue to make all of these connections happen.
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Foursquare’s Upcoming iOS Release Is A Pivotal Moment For The Company, As In It’s “Now Or Never”
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Drew Olanoff
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We all know the Foursquare story quite well: The app , and a fair amount of people have been using it to check-in ever since. The company is releasing a new version of its , which will put those 3.5 billion check-ins in the forefront with search and explore functionality. It’s a move that we saw coming ever since they did on their website back in October. Having on the app, Foursquare now wants you to dive head first into locations around you, hopefully using the app to help you decide where to go next. The moves come off as a bit manic, even though it’s clear that the company has a ton of information and just desperately wants users to start interacting with it. The new app, which will be available sometime Wednesday morning, is now split up into four parts. The search box is at the top of the screen, and a map of your nearby friends is below. These main areas are followed by personalized recommendations for this particular moment in time, and then, of course, there’s the check-in button at the bottom. Basically, Foursquare wants you to go somewhere, and go there fast. We’ve heard that the company and might be in acquisition discussions. Some feel like Yahoo! would be a perfect home for the service, which I happen to agree with. All of these things would be contingent upon this particular version of the app striking a new chord with consumers. Having said that, there aren’t any other overhaul-esque iterations that Foursquare can go through at this point, and this particular update is labeled as version 6.0. It’s a matured product, and this latest version must grip with a new set of users who have relied on services like Yelp and Google for information about venues and suggestions on where to go and hang out. The conversation that people must have now is that Foursquare is an app to help keep you busy with things to do in the real world. The app, in a way, must be your personal assistant, using all of the information that you give it, and the information that your friends have given it, to help steer you to your next destination. But this is the last version of the app that Foursquare can release to grab a set of consumers that it doesn’t already have. If it can’t do it this time, the future is not looking good. Badges were fun for a while; checking in was addictive; collecting points and being at the top of a leader board made up of your friends was a riot; and becoming mayor of a venue was a hoot. But that was then, and this is now. The data is there from those of us who have provided it over the years. The ability to discovery is up front, and the recommendation technology is in place. The 30 million+ members of the community have done their job. Will new people flock to it? Will Foursquare make our lives better? We’ll see once it launches. It’s stayed around this long, and that alone is impressive. The question that remains is how many more rounds can it fight without an earth-shattering, jaw-breaking knockout? [Photo credit: ]
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The Facebook Phone Consensus From 7 Reviews: An Impressive First Try For $99
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Josh Constine
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Why trust one reviewer to tell you what phone to buy? Better to get a consensus, and across reviews by seven leading publications the verdict is that the HTC First features a stylish yet casual design, efficient messaging, reliable battery, and an addictive feed-reading experience. But its “apperating system” is confusing, the camera fails in low light, it sacrifices widgets, and has privacy issues. (Hint: the answer to my initial question is “So you don’t have to read two hours of reviews like I just did.”) But after and poring over New York Times prose, Ars Technica stats, The Verge’s details, and our own , I can tell you Facebook faired surprisingly well despite its inexperience in the handset world. The HTC First is not going to change Facebook-haters’ minds, but it will magnify the love of fanboys and draw casual users deeper into the social network. The phone piggybacks on Android, turning bland parts visual while leaving an unadulterated OS for those who want to leave Home. If Facebook’s hope was to boost engagement and get an education in mobile operating systems, Home and the HTC First lay a strong foundation. But don’t take my word on whether to . Here are the highlights from some of the best gadget reviewers and tech pundits in the business. Be sure to click through to their articles to get their full opinions. The First is a very stylish, well-built phone, once again proving that HTC has a penchant for design. The Chat Heads feature can best be described as the roommate who quietly knocks on the door and then cracks it open to see if you’re busy. Chat Heads try hard not to distract you so that you can continue to multitask, but they to subtly alert you that someone has sent you a message. I can see the placement of the micro-USB port becoming a bit of an issue in situations where the phone is charging and it needs to be laid horizontally or placed in a car holster for navigation. It’s also awkward trying to type with both hands when the phone is plugged in. The screen size wasn’t much of an issue except when reading e-books and text-heavy webpages. Fortunately, there is an option in the Settings menu to make the font bigger, which actually helped significantly. In performance tests, the First had results similar to the Samsung Galaxy S III. It appears that Home doesn’t use up that much battery life either, despite its ingrained status within the Android operating system. Overall, the handset was fast and speedy. It didn’t feel like a mid-range handset. — Because of its small size, the First is a pleasure to hold. It nestles comfortably in one hand in a way that few popular Android phones do these days. Text is perfectly readable at nearly 90 degrees. The screen is very difficult to see in bright sunlight. The First’s camera feels like a throwback to an earlier age when smartphones were nigh-useless in the dark. Video on the First is equally forgettable, amplifying hand-shake and displaying the jelly movement effect so common on low-end cameras. The HTC First is running stock Android 4.1.2, almost completely unpolluted with apps from AT&T or HTC. If you’re a Facebook devotee, or just want a cheap phone that runs well, by all means check out the First (but test the camera before you leave the store). If you absolutely want a smaller-sized Android phone with LTE, the First is probably the best option out there right now. Overall score of 7.9 out of 10 — I found Facebook Home to be easy to use, elegantly designed and addictive. Although I’m a regular Facebook user, I found that, with Home, I paid more attention than ever to my news feed, The idea is that during spare moments—say, while waiting in a line—you’ll get immediately hooked by Facebook. Facebook Home blocks the one-step camera icon some Android phone makers place on their lock screen to allow you to take pictures without first unlocking the phone. With Home, Facebook is essentially staging a land grab of Android. Because it’s so dominant, it makes it less likely that a user with limited time will launch Google products that compete with Facebook, such as Google’s own social network, Google+, or rival services from other companies, such as Twitter. — Since the First was built to impress the Facebook-savvy, we shouldn’t be surprised that this is one of the most playful-looking handsets HTC has ever made. We also need to point out the lack of an LED notification light, which seems like a huge oversight given Facebook Home’s heavy emphasis on alerts and other notifications. Unfortunately, there’s no option to add widgets or folders. By far, our greatest concern with Home is the impact that it could potentially have on data usage, since it dynamically updates Facebook’s news feed in the background. Fortunately, Facebook includes a three-tier data usage and image quality setting (high, medium and low). The toggle becomes handy for smaller data plans or if you’re getting close to your limit, but oddly a WiFi-only option isn’t available. In our testing, we consumed 93MB in four days on the medium setting; at that pace, Home would snatch up 698MB in a month. Think about it this way: if you have a 2GB plan, Facebook Home would take up more than one-quarter of your data allotment, on the Now imagine how much the high-usage scenario destroys the average consumer’s data plans. Use Home responsibly, folks. Widget lovers will quickly become frustrated by their inability to access their favorite ones without jumping into the stock launcher each time Fortunately, the 2,000 mAh Lithium-polymer cell was enough to keep us going for 14 hours of solid use, with Home running on medium usage the entire time. All of our cellular connections have been consistently good and the volume was more than sufficient. It’s aesthetically pleasing, and surprisingly polished for a 1.0 product. In its current state, Home isn’t the best fit for productivity-minded people, although it does offer a bit of mindless entertainment for anyone just looking to burn a minute or two throughout the day To put it bluntly, Home won’t convert non-Facebookers into believers, and it won’t encourage people to sign up for the service; it will be a failure in that sense. It may, however, turn casual users into more habitual Likers, commenters and posters, and we have a feeling this is exactly the kind of success Facebook is hoping to reap. — Facebook has made Android faster by removing a lot of crud that typically ships with Android on carrier-branded phones. For a service that is supposed to bring us updates in real time, this isn’t close enough. You can actually feel the slow speed (and infrequency of updates) of the feed when you compare it with the desktop feed which moves at a faster pace. The phone has a soft-touch rubber design which is easy to grip and it is something I appreciate because my phone keeps dropping from my hand. Bottom line: I am unlikely to use this device. But if you are a Facebook addict, are on a budget and have solid AT&T coverage in your area, this might be a good one for you. — On the app launcher: If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. In removing the app-launching function from the Home screen, Facebook has wound up having to reinvent the way you open programs on your phone, and the result feels like a hack. Chat Heads are fun and effective, but Facebook’s engineers appear to have overlooked one small detail: Chat Heads are useful only when you receive a message. How are you supposed to initiate a conversation? For that, you have to duck into your app-launcher screen and fire up the Facebook or Facebook Messaging app. What does Home add, really? Yes, the ability to see incoming posts on your Home screen; you save one tap. But is it worth losing widgets, wallpaper, app folders and the Android status bar in the process? — It’s really good. I like the HTC First with Facebook Home (the official name, I think) more than the Nexus 4, but less than the iPhone 5. [On Cover Feed] It’s surprisingly addictive…because you can swipe to scroll through these images/statuses all without unlocking the phone. I think Facebook has really nailed the interaction element on the home screen. I actually wish I could use Instagram and other visual feeds this way as well On top of that are the beautiful, elegant notifications that Facebook has created. Simply put: I like them more than both Android and iOS notifications. They feature big, clear app icons (or a person’s face if it’s a Facebook notification) and a snippet of the message you’re receiving. I’ll be curious to see Facebook Home running on other hardware like the Galaxy SIV, but I think the fact that you won’t be able to get third-party notifications would be a deal-breaker for me. [On password entry]: This is where things start to get a little weird…sometimes you’ll be asked to enter your password from the app list, sometimes before it. Even weirder is that you can actually do a few types of Facebook actions — both liking and commenting — without entering any password. In fact, there’s no way to password protect these actions, as far as I can tell. Someone could definitely take your phone and leave comments galore on your friends pictures, no questions asked. Chat Heads. Awful name not withstanding, this is absolutely how messaging should be done on a smartphone. Rather than making you open a separate app to get and respond to messages, Chat Heads put a user’s face…on top of whatever you’re doing on your phone. [On design flourishes] These touches, while seemingly trivial, give me the same type of feeling I get when using iOS. You can tell that a lot of time and care has been put into the user experience here and it shows, in spades. Still, it’s hard to believe this is only Facebook’s first take at Home. This is a very polished and impressive first entry into the space.
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer
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Leena Rao
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Ask a VC is back this week with Index Ventures’ partner . You can submit questions for Rimer either in the comments or , and we’ll ask them during the show. Rimer, who is focused on investing in infrastructure software and services, joined Index Ventures in 2002 and helped established the firm’s London office. He’s led investments in Boku, Etsy, Factual, Flipboard, FON, Nastygal, Oanda, PeoplePerHour, Sky, Rightscale, Trialpay and viagogo. He’s an observer on the board of Dropbox and was previously was a director of KVS (McAfee), Last.fm (CBS), Lovefilm (Amazon), MySQL (Oracle), Neoteris (Juniper) and Skype (Microsoft). Prior to joining Index, Danny was a general partner of The Barksdale Group, where he invested in a dozen companies, including TellMe (Microsoft). Prior to joining The Barksdale Group, Danny was managing director in Hambrecht & Quist’s (JP Morgan) Equity Research Group and was responsible for the firm’s Internet practice. It’s clear that Rimer has invested in a broad spectrum of hot startups, so we’re interested to see what he’s particularly excited about at the moment. I’m also curious to see what Rimer’s secret is to picking the best bets in the tech world. Please send us your or put them in comments below!
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Medium Adds Collaboration Tools To Its Publishing Platform, Allowing People To Add Notes To Your Posts
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Drew Olanoff
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Today, Ev Williams’ , added some tools to bring people together while they’re writing. The collaboration tools are similar to what you’d find in Google Docs, but the key is to work on something to share publicly, together. The service isn’t open to the public yet, but it’s a beautiful set of tools to help you write about the things that interest you and then file them away in collaborative groups and categories called “Collections.” You can add your own posts to someone else’s collection, creating a fun, and social environment for writers. In a post called “ ,” Williams discusses the new features and the philosophy behind what Medium is building as a whole: Since starting Medium, we’ve maintained a focus on collaboration. We’ve touched on it with collections, which allow many people to contribute to the same idea. But today we’re taking it a big step forward with pre-publish collaboration. Within your post, you’re now able to click an “invite collaborator” button on the top-right of the page once you’ve saved a draft, which gives you a link to send to friends: Once you’ve done that, the person can then come in and add notes to certain sections on your post: After the post is published, the people who worked on it with you get their due credit automatically: Even posts that are public can be annotated, with the author having the choice of whether to make your additions public or not: In a way, this is a re-imagination of commenting systems, where instead of a slew of comments showing up below a post, points can be made about particular passages, opening up a new avenue of discussion. It’s interesting to watch Medium evolve, as we know that Williams has come from creating Blogger to shoving Twitter into the mainstream. It looks like all of the little things that Blogger never had as a publishing platform are now being put into the Medium product. The interesting use case for something like this is when your friends take a look at your posts and catch some typos, or perhaps a link that doesn’t work. Instead of firing off an email to you or an instant message, you can see notes in-line and then take action on them before or after you’ve published. You really get a sense for how useful this is once you see notes dropped into your own posts: Imagine being able to write an article together and then publish it, which is something that you can’t do on any other competing service. I wouldn’t mind trying it out. Nor would I mind being able to launch a note into a new post, giving that person the credit for sparking a new idea for me. Williams says that Medium’s mantra is that “People create better things together.” That’s certainly a different approach than the solo nature of tweeting and blogging as we know it.
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Adobe Launches Primetime To Facilitate TV Everywhere Services, Signs Up Comcast & NBC Sports As Customers
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Ryan Lawler
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Adobe has changed the way it sells technology used to enable high-quality streaming services from TV networks and other video providers. With the launch of Adobe Primetime — previously know as Project Primetime — the technology company is providing a suite of tools for video delivery. And it has signed up a couple of big new clients for the suite of products. Over the last year, Adobe has been re-thinking and re-architecting its media-delivery business to move from offering up several different components needed for streaming video to providing a single unified architecture to its clients. It’s come up with a new, modular way of doing business that will allow customers to just pay for the services they’d like to use on a subscription or usage basis. Primetime leverages Adobe’s video publishing, player, DRM, advertising, and analytics offerings in an integrated set of products. The idea is to provide a sort of one-stop shop that will enable big TV networks and distributors to quickly turn up TV Everywhere-type streaming video services. By doing so, they should be better able to introduce multiplatform experiences while also tracking and monetizing the content that is being made available on those platforms. Previously, a company looking to offer authenticated streams on multiple devices would have to select lots of different pieces of delivery infrastructure — including encoding equipment, digital-rights management software, ad-insertion technology and the like. Then it would either work with a system integrator to get its services working, or stitch them together itself. In addition to offering its own products to handle some of these issues, Adobe has also partnered with a bunch of product and service providers in the streaming video market. That includes everyone from encoding vendors like Elemental Technologies or Cisco to CDNs like Akamai to DRM technologies such as Widevine or Microsoft PlayReady. Partnering will facilitate the process of introducing new streaming services by enabling content providers to mix and match the technologies they’d like to use without doing a whole lot of messy integration. Since every customer will have different needs and vendor preferences, Primetime gives Adobe the flexibility to provide them with the feature set and technology they want, without forcing them into choosing a certain vendor over another. With the introduction of Primetime, Adobe is also announcing a few big launch customers for the platform: Comcast Cable and NBC Sports. Comcast is using the Primetime platform for its TV Everywhere services, enabling delivery of its Xfinity streaming video service on the web. Comcast is using a whole bunch of Adobe Primetime bits and pieces for Xfinity, including the player, DRM, ad insertion, ad serving and analytics. That’s mostly for its on-demand content, allowing subscribers to catch up with their favorite shows as long as they’re logged in. For NBC Sports, Adobe Primetime is helping to enable more live streaming of sports content on more devices. That includes Major League Soccer and National Hockey League matchups. It also streams Golf Channel content for those who want to bore themselves to sleep. It’s worth noting that, even though NBC Sports is a subsidiary of Comcast, both groups made the decision separately. In addition, Adobe has added a bit of a surprising feature to its product suite. Since it’s looking to provide a single publishing workflow, it’s added support for Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) format, which is becoming more widely adopted not just for iOS devices, but plenty of other devices as well. Since a growing number of connected TVs, smartphones, and tablets have HLS is quickly becoming a de facto standard for providing adaptive bit-rate streaming across platforms and operating systems.
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Mobile Video Views Up 300% In 2012, With Tablets Driving The Charge With A 360% Increase
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Darrell Etherington
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Adobe has released its Digital Video Benchmark for the U.S. for 2012, wherein the team shows what it learned monitoring video performance throughout the year across digital platforms. The study compiles data from Adobe Marketing Cloud customers, scoring viewing habits and also monitoring ad performance. 2012 saw a massive increase in mobile viewership, according to Adobe’s numbers, though desktop still dominates when it comes to online video. Overall, digital video saw growth across all platforms, with an increase of 30 percent year over year in Q4 2012 versus the same time in 2012. TV and sports content was responsible for a large chunk of that new viewership, and streaming video available has grown 50 percent between Q1 2011 and Q4 2012. Smartphones and tablets were both among the biggest growth categories in terms of devices, and now account for more than 10 percent of all video starts combined, the first time they’ve reached that high of a share. Though both smartphone and tablet views have increased over the past couple of years, tablet viewing is accelerating at a faster rate and has already begun to pull away from phones. Tablet viewers are also much more likely to complete a video than viewers on a smartphone, or a PC, which is good news for content producers hoping for an attentive mobile audience. One of the challenges, however, comes in getting mobile viewers to engage with online ads, which will admittedly take some re-strategizing vs. approaches that have worked on the desktop. “There are two types of challenges with an increase in mobile viewing,” Adobe Senior Manager of Digital Index Tamara Gaffney explained in an interview. “One of them is a technology challenge, with enabling broadcasters and the media world to handle all the different platforms and formats and the ability to drive buying cycles around their inventory has been less developed up until now. That’s an area Adobe is working to fix.” The other challenge comes in what kind of ad to present. Pre-roll ads are less likely to be successful on mobile platforms, especially for shorter video. Mid-roll and post-roll (which offers a click-through opportunity that can be very useful on mobile) look to present new opportunities, but there’s still probably some adapting to do in terms of finding a format that works best on tablets and smartphone devices, particularly for video clips that are under two minutes long. A big opportunity for digital video in general comes from social channels, Adobe found. Social engagement jumped from 42 percent to 70 percent in terms of how likely referrals on networks like Facebook were to prompt a video viewing completion. Gaffney says that all media properties that employ video should be looking at ways to make better use of their social media channels, to offer video content to their followers and fans as much as possible to drive better video viewing engagement. Another area that Adobe monitors is authenticated streams, which it provides publishers through its TV Everywhere service. This allows publishers to gate access to their content to paying subscribers only. Adobe found that 71 percent of this access came from mobile devices, in a reversal of the situation with traditional digital video streams. The Xbox and iOS devices represent the highest engagement for this kind of content, with around 14 plays per unique visitor on both, with Android coming up third with just 8.2 plays per user. Mobile is a fast-growing opportunity in digital video, and the good news for content providers is that viewers seem quite open to subscription-based models of video distribution on smartphones and tablets. Mobile is likely to become more, not less important to digital video, so it’ll be interesting to see how ad strategies change to reflect the growing impact of portable platforms.
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As It Focuses On Profitability, Tumblr Lays Off Team Behind Editorial Initiative Storyboard
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Catherine Shu
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Tumblr has let go of the three person behind , an experimental initiative to highlight users and organizations on the blogging platform, less than one year after the project went live. In a , Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp said “what we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on. I want to personally thank them for their great work. And please join us in wishing them well.” Storyboard was launched last May, with Chris Mohney as its first editor-in-chief and Jessica Bennett as executive editor. Both came with plenty of publishing experience–Mohney was previously the editor of Gawker and Gridskipper and oversaw Blackbook magazine, while Bennett had formerly worked at The Daily Beast. The team also included editorial producer Sky Dylan-Robbins. Storyboard’s initial features included one on the companion Tumblr set up by New York Times’ photo archive, an interview with pianist and Tumblr user Dotan Negrin, and an infographic charting the many “Fuck Yeah” blogs set up on the platform. In an with Fast Company just after Storyboard’s launch last year, Mohney said “this is the first thing Tumblr has done that has a significant outward-facing goal.” Mohney added monetization wasn’t an initial goal of the project and there were few immediate benefits for sponsors on Storyboard: “Tumblr’s revenue plan is to find partners who are interested in doing creative stuff on Tumblr as opposed to just bringing in banner ads. If (advertisers) are doing something great as part of their sponsorship program, they’ll get a lot more recognition out of that than from our editorial recognition.” It seems like Storyboard’s lofty but less-than-lucrative directive may have fallen by the wayside as six-year-old Tumblr focuses on after allowing advertisers to pay for more prominent posts on its Web version and mobile app. Inside of using banner ads and keywords–or placement on Storyboard–Tumblr’s advertising system gives sponsors the chance to get more views and reblogs. Tumblr’s vice president of product Derek Gottfrid recently that Tumblr’s mobile users have quadrupled over the past six months, bringing the total closer to the number of Web users and making the advertising initiative more important. Tumblr has been emailed for comment.
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An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Facebook Phone
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MG Siegler
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“This is not a Facebook Phone.” Yeah, whatever. The HTC First is the first phone that has Facebook partnering up with an OEM to bake an Android pie with Facebook Home filling, so I’m calling it the Facebook Phone. There will be more. This is just the first. And guess what? It’s really good. Sitting through the Facebook Home announcement last week, before I got a chance to play with a device, I thought it was a smart maneuver by Facebook to use Android’s openness to their advantage — to put their own social layer on top of the OS. It’s not forking Android, . But given that this was their first stab at the product, and given some of the woes many of the OEMs have had doing Android skins, I honestly wasn’t expecting too much. Maybe down the road, after a few iterations. But not now. But again, it’s really good. Regular readers will know my predilection for the iPhone. I think it’s not only the best smartphone ever made, but the best ever made, period (though the iPad is close). The iPhone started out fantastic and has just gotten better over time with each iteration. Android, on the other hand, started out as sort of a nightmare. The G1 was like a weird Sidekick/iPhone hybrid with a half-baked OS. In the subsequent years, Google has come a lot farther than Apple has, only because they started so low. The most recent “pure” Android device, the Nexus 4, . The hardware is solid, the OS is better. It’s still not quite iPhone-good yet, in my mind. But it brings the two sides closer than they’ve ever been. So where does the Facebook Phone fit in? It’s a complicated question to answer because it really depends on what type of user you are and what you’re looking for out of a smartphone. So again, I’ll just give my take as an addicted iPhone user. I like the HTC First with Facebook Home (the official name, I think) more than the Nexus 4, but less than the iPhone 5. From a pure hardware perspective, there’s no question that both the Nexus 4 and the iPhone 5 run laps around the HTC First. (I assume you can sub the Galaxy SIII, SIV, and HTC One in here as well, though I don’t have much experience with those devices.) As you can tell from , the First isn’t as fast as any of those devices. Nor is the camera as good. Nor is the storage as plentiful. Etc. Using the First, you’ll notice some lag within apps and the core OS itself that you don’t experience on the iPhone 5 or the Nexus 4. But I’ve been very impressed with how well Facebook has gotten their own Home animations to work on this hardware (more on that below). In terms of build quality, I actually quite like the HTC First. In my hand, it reminds me of the Nexus One, which was for a long time my favorite piece of Android hardware (only recently passed by the Nexus 4). Compared to the other, larger-screen Android devices that are popular these days, it feels small, but not too small. The screen is actually slightly larger (4.3-inches versus 4-inches) than the screen on the iPhone 5. And the pixel density is a bit higher (341 PPI versus 326 PPI). It’s a great screen. And because it’s only slightly wider than the iPhone 5 screen, I’m enjoying using it in one hand more than I do with the wider Nexus 4. I’ve found the battery of the HTC First to be excellent. Yes, even with the screen constantly displaying and rotating big images and with AT&T LTE constantly on. But let’s be honest, no one is buying this device because of the hardware. That it’s perfectly nice and adequate is just a cherry on top. The key to the HTC First, of course, is . While Facebook is purposefully downplaying it — “It’s not an OS.” — to regular users, this will absolutely like a new OS from the moment you turn it on. When you turn the device on, you log in with both your Facebook and Google credentials. Once that’s done, every time you turn on the First, you’ll see a collection of big, beautiful images constantly rotating on the screen. These are all pulled from your Facebook friends. If they’ve posted pictures to Facebook, those will show up here. Or if they’ve simply left a status message, that will show up with their profile cover photo behind it. This all looks really, really good. And it’s surprisingly addictive. Because you can swipe to scroll through these images/statuses all without unlocking the phone, I’ve found myself doing this each day that I’ve been testing the phone more than I care to admit. The fact that you can double-tap to “like” any of these (an action taken right out of the Instagram playbook) is even more addicting. Let me be clear, I’m not what I would consider a heavy Facebook user — or even a moderately heavy one. I browse the service from time-to-time and post things there every once in a while. I think Facebook Home has me using it more than I ever have in my life. Maybe it’s the novelty of it over these first few days. But I think Facebook has really nailed the interaction element on the home screen. I actually wish I could use Instagram and other visual feeds this way as well (of course, Instagram pictures shared to Facebook are a part of this main screen experience). You can also comment on any photo/status right from this home screen (technically called “Cover Feed”). The other element you’ll notice here is a big circular picture of your face (or whatever your Facebook profile picture is) at the bottom of this Cover Feed. When you tap it, it brings up three options: move your face up to get to your apps, move it left to get to Facebook Messenger, move it right to return to whatever you were doing last before you re-entered Cover Feed. If you move your face up, to apps, this is where you’ll finally see something that looks like Android. But it’s not entirely like Android. It’s a page filled with Android apps, but along the top are the standard “Status”, “Photo”, and “Check In” buttons that will be familiar to any Facebook user. This is normally where the Google Search bar goes on Android devices. Instead, that’s somewhat buried in a screen to the left. On this main screen is where Facebook Home instructs you to put your favorite Android apps. Included are what you’d expect: Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, alongside the Google standards like Chrome, Maps, and the Google app itself (better known to some as the home of Google Now). Also here you’ll find the Camera, Gallery, Settings, Play Store, Phone, and a couple other stock Android OS apps. You can create more of the app collection pages to the right of the main page. And to the left (where the Google Search bar is), you’ll find a scrolling list of all your apps. So yes, some of this feels like Android. But again, it also feels different. And I really like that. To me, one problem I’ve always had with Android is that at its fundamental level, it draws directly from the look of iOS. It’s rows of app icons. Yes, widgets and a few other things have since been added, but I’m always still looking at the screen and thinking of Android as a slightly less responsive and polished iOS. Facebook Home is different thanks to the Cover Feed, which lays on top of the app screen. And on top of that are the beautiful, elegant notifications that Facebook has created. Simply put: I like them more than both Android and iOS notifications. They feature big, clear app icons (or a person’s face if it’s a Facebook notification) and a snippet of the message you’re receiving. These notifications stack in reverse chronological order, as you’d expect. You can swipe them away. Or you can hold one down to collapse them all on top of one another to swipe them all away. If you tap on one, it flips over and asks if you want to open that app. One more tap does that. This is where things start to get a little weird. If you have a password enabled to protect your phone, you’ll be prompted to enter it before you can enter the app. But what’s odd is that if you simply swipe up to get to your list of apps, you don’t have to enter your password until you click on one in particular. In other words, sometimes you’ll be asked to enter your password from the app list, sometimes before it. I get it: Facebook doesn’t want you to be able to use an app before you enter this password, but it’s weird to prompt for it at different levels. Even weirder is that you can actually do a few types of Facebook actions — both liking and commenting — without entering any password. In fact, there’s no way to password protect these actions, as far as I can tell. Facebook says that you’ll need to enter your password before leaving a status message or posting a photo yourself, but someone could definitely take your phone and leave comments galore on your friends pictures, no questions asked. This is a direct result of Facebook Home laying on top of Android. The security here is still on the Android layer beneath the Home surface. I suspect Facebook will add the option to put some security on their Home layer as well. ( : As on Twitter, there is a way to make the lock screen go in front of Facebook Home. It’s actually in the Home Settings — which is a different app from the regular Android Settings — there you unselect “See Home When Screen Turns On”. Unfortunately, this is basically useless because it disables notifications until you unlock your phone. So, yeah, you probably don’t want to do that unless you’re very paranoid of someone snatching your phone and commenting up a storm.) Another awkward thing about this Home-to-Android handoff is that if the phone is unlocked, you can hold down the middle home “button” (it’s not actually a button, it’s a haptic area below the screen, standard on most Android devices) to bring up the Google App (which includes both a big Search bar and Google Now, if you have it enabled). But if the phone is locked, holding this down does nothing. It doesn’t even prompt you to enter your password. The same is true with double-tapping this button. If the phone is unlocked, this brings up a list of your most recently used apps. If the phone is locked, this does nothing. A few times I found myself in no-man’s land because of this handoff as well. I would try to run something from a notification and for whatever reason, the unlock screen just wouldn’t come up. So I had to go back to the Cover Feed area. Not a huge deal, but again, awkward. I also found it awkward that the HTC First haptic buttons don’t function in the same way that they do on other Android devices that I’ve used. For example, the far right button usually brings up a list of running apps. Here, again, you do that by double-tapping the center button. The far right button is instead a settings button on this device. Back to the good stuff: Chat Heads. Awful name not withstanding, this is absolutely how messaging should be done on a smartphone. Rather than making you open a separate app to get and respond to messages, Chat Heads put a user’s face (in the shape of a small, circular icon, just like your face on Cover Feed) on top of whatever you’re doing on your phone. Browsing the web on Chrome? Up pops a face with a snippet of the message. Click on the face to open an overlaid chat session. Click on the face again to minimize it to the circular icon (which can remain “alive” clinging to any corner of the screen). Brilliant. This even works with multiple conversations at once. And, of course, group conversations. I suspect we’ll see a lot of other players in the mobile space copy all or some of this implementation. Again, this is how chat on a smartphone should be done. What really pushes Facebook Home into the good product category for me though is the little touches. Elements like Cover Feed not only look gorgeous, they’re highly responsive and even a bit playful. For example, when you move your face icon around the screen, the action items (“Apps”, “Messenger”, “Back”) will be drawn towards your face depending on which direction you’re moving. It’s a bit like a black hole getting close enough to a star to swallow it. In other words, it gives you the illusion of gravity. Likewise, double-tapping to “like” something within Cover Feed brings up a nice big “thumbs up” overlay. And this is accompanied by a water droplet sound. Simple, but again, playful. The same is true of all the system “clicks”. These touches, while seemingly trivial, give me the same type of feeling I get when using iOS. You can tell that a lot of time and care has been put into the user experience here and it shows, in spades. And again, you cannot overstate how smooth everything feels. In my experience, even with the Nexus 4, this has not always been the case with Android. What’s odd is that this isn’t even technically the latest version of Android. This is 4.1, not 4.2. (I’m told that Facebook will move fast to ensure that Home is compatible with the latest Android releases after they come out.) The Android apps themselves can still feel a bit sluggish or jittery at times — again, this isn’t the fastest hardware out there. But all of the Facebook layer performs wonderfully. (And, to be clear, I had no problem getting every Android app I downloaded to run.) So, will I replace the iPhone with the Facebook Phone? No. But again, I’m just not a heavy Facebook user. I’m impressed that this phone got me more into the service, but not impressed enough to give up the iOS universe. I’m also not the target market of this phone. And if you’re reading this, I doubt you are either. Still, it’s hard to believe this is only Facebook’s first take at Home. This is a very polished and impressive first entry into the space. I’ll be curious to see Facebook Home running on other hardware like the Galaxy SIV, but I think the fact that you would be a deal-breaker for me. I think the success of this first Facebook Phone will ultimately come down to how much marketing muscle Facebook, AT&T, and HTC put behind it. The first commercial is already out there in heavy rotation. And I suspect those AT&T stores will be erecting some big Facebook Phone tents any day now. This is a good product, so marketing will help drive sales. They just need to get it in customers hands, trying it out. Facebook has said they plan to update Home at an aggressive pace. That’s great news. It’s nice to have another innovator in the space, even if they aren’t their own phones or OSes. That’s a technicality. To most people, this will sure like a Facebook Phone. And for now, Facebook Phone. And given the quality of the work here, I see this all as nothing but a good thing.
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Facebook Phone Review: “HTC First” Decorates Home With Extra Alerts But A Shabby Camera
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Josh Constine
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After years of rumors, the Facebook Phone aka the finally launches April 12th for $99 on AT&T. It’s light and supple, plus comes with a suped-up version of pre-installed that pipes in non-Facebook notifications, but the 5MP Camera is a let down. If you’re highly social, want a mid-range handset, crave email alerts, and aren’t a photo buff, the First could be a great fit. Considering this is Facebook’s first time really getting its hands dirty with a handset, I was very impressed with the First. Its comfy feel and soft edges make it a joy to hold. The 720p, 341 PPI screen is sharp, though not blazingly bright. Facebook’s launcher replacement runs great on the First’s modified version of Android Jelly Bean 4.1, which is responsive and fun to play with. Home’s Facebook Chat/SMS multi-tasking is a game-changing efficiency booster, and the detailed screen makes laying back and watching Cover Feed photos stream by very relaxing. Unlike the downloadable version of Home that becomes available for five other handsets on Friday, the optimizations made to Android let the First display notifications from any app on your Home/lock screen, rather than just those from Facebook. But in getting the price down to $99 on contract, Facebook and HTC sacrificed camera quality. Its 5MP can’t compete with the 8MP of the cameras on the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S III which crowd its price range. Home also buries access to camera beneath an extra tap, which might make you miss some spontaneous candids. You can disable Home completely, but that kind of defeats the purpose. That’s my short take. Now let’s look a bit closer. When I first got my hands on the HTC First during the demo session blitz after the launch event last week, I was so fixated on the Home software that the handset’s hardware kind of faded into the background. It wasn’t until I got my review unit that I realized that was the point. The First is designed to get out the way so you can focus on the people instead. It accomplishes that by feeling downright friendly in your palm. The glass screen seems to curve down at the thin bezeled edges into the surrounding plastic case and its matte finish. There’s not a sharp edge to be found, nor any cold glass or aluminum. Rather than a triumph of industrial chic, the First feels cozy — dare I say sensual. It’s thin, and the plastic helps keeps the weight down despite the 4.3 inch screen. Between the rounded edges and sleek figure, it’s a breeze to slide into your pocket. The First’s specs place it firmly in the mid-range handset market. That’s why HTC didn’t trumpet them too loudly at the launch event. But other than its camera, it holds its own in its class alongside the 4S and S III. The LTE connection is very speedy, the screen is colorful and clear, and NFC is a nice bonus. The battery life is decent, but goes quick if you’ve got the brightness turned up to take advantage of Cover Feed. The last 15% of the battery seemed to drain infuriatingly quickly, which can be rough when you’ve been rationing and expect that much juice to get you to the end of the day. Thankfully the micro USB charger fills up relatively fast, though the phone won’t automatically turn back on once it’s banked sufficient electrons. Here’s the First stacked up against the 4S and S III: Facebook went out of its way to declare that Home doesn’t require a forked version of Android, and that it didn’t build some “Facebook OS” — except it did. Mark Zuckerberg noted that the First’s operating system was optimized for Home. Later, HTC confirmed to me it worked with Facebook to alter some of the Jelly Bean frameworks. This gives the HTC First’s version of Home a big improvement over the standard downloadable homescreen replacement app that also launches April 12th. The First’s homescreen and lock screen can display big notification tiles for anything that appears in the Android notifications tray. This includes Facebook alerts about tags and likes, but also incoming emails, calendar appointments, Twitter replies, and more. The downloadable version of Home only shows Facebook notifications. Surfacing a wider set of alerts could attract more business-minded consumers, in contrast to the general opinion that the HTC First and Home are for teenagers. As for the standard Home features, they work great, but are merely a reason to own some phone that can download it, which doesn’t have to be the First. Cover Feed fills your home and lock screens with a full-screen, one-story-at-a-time stream of the best updates from your news feed. It only works in portrait mode, which is a bit odd considering so many photos these days are shot in landscape. A Ken Burns-style slow pan effect makes sure you see most of an image in the 5 seconds before a new one slides in. If a friend shares a pure text update or link, you’ll see their cover photo behind words. The big images and large fonts on the sharp screen make Cover Feed a great laid-back experience, perfect for laying in bed. It makes the standard Facebook app’s news feed look sterile and stagnant by comparison. My favorite feature of Home on the First was Chat Heads, the chat multi-tasking system. Incoming Facebook Messages and SMS appear as little bubbles of friends’ faces that persistently float over the top of whatever app you’re using as you navigate around the phone. Tap one and your message thread drops down in an overlay on top of your current screen, allowing you to look at something like a Map or Yelp, and then quickly open a conversation and relay information you just learned, bouncing back and forth without having to open and close the apps like with standard “multi-tasking” on iOS and Android. To leave Home, you tap and hold your profile picture at the bottom of cover feed and drag it in one of three directions. Left for Facebook Messenger, right for the last app you used, and up to open your app favorites screen. You can customize this with whatever apps you want quicker access to, or swipe right to reveal your full list of apps. You can turn off Home with a few taps of of the Home settings menu to get a more standard Android experience. If you don’t though, there are a few things you give up. Rather than being able to access Google Now and search from the home or lock screen, you have to open the app drawer and slide right to get access to the search box. You can luckily hold down the Home button on the First to instantly conjure these though. What’s more problematic is that the standard Camera app is totally buried in the app drawer so you can’t access it for spontaneous candid shots. When you do get it open, the 5MP camera takes soft, almost blurry images, and is even worse in low light. This is the worst part of the HTC First. Facebook’s goal is to wrestle more control of the mobile ecosystem away from Apple and Google, and the HTC First could be a smart initial move. The device isn’t perfect, and considering Facebook’s recent focus on photos, the lackluster camera seems incongruent. But Facebook’s probably wasn’t expecting to hit a home run on its first swing. It has a lot to learn, and by working closely with HTC it likely gained a ton of insight on what to do next. It could be a long time, if ever, before Facebook has the skills to make a premier smartphone to challenge the latest Apple and Samsung models. But the mid-tier market is large and that’s Facebook’s game — scale. It wants to connect everyone, not just those with hundreds and hundreds of dollars to throw down on a handset. The HTC First is aptly named. It’s just the first “Facebook Phone”. Facebook has devised the Home Program where it will offer other handset manufacturers guidance on how to fiddle with the versions of Android they run to optimize Home. It might take six months, but I expect some OEMs will bite. If you’re deadset on getting a Facebook Phone, this probably won’t be your only option. In the end, if you want the latest mobile technology, the First lags behind. Still, it’s a great device beyond the camera. So if the HTC First’s strengths align with your priorities, go ahead and .
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Google’s Bufferbox Move To The Bay Area Didn’t Surprise Swapbox, Which Remains Focused On Scaling
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Drew Olanoff
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Who knew that package delivery would become a hot space, especially when it involves installation of physical lockers? Last week, we uncovered that Google’s recent acquisition, the San Francisco Bay Area with its shipping service. Of course, after being acquired, nobody knew what would become of Bufferbox, so another Y Combinator company, to fill the potential void. I spoke with Swapbox’s founders today and learned that their plans and strategy are “unchanged,” and that the team knew that Bufferbox would eventually come to the Bay Area, expanding from its current locations in Canada. Swapbox recently installed its service in San Francisco’s Nob Hill section, mostly because of the concentration of people in the area. The company’s co-founder, Neel Murthy, says that activity with Swapbox is impressive in such a short period of time, with two-thirds of its customers being repeats. Of course, with Swapbox and Bufferbox, you don’t get assigned your own static P.O. Box, you can have your items shipped to any location that’s available. “We’re still just steadily rolling out Swapboxes, building out the independent infrastructure that everyone can use, and growing our footprint,” Murthy says. He added that the company is set up to install the Swapbox quickly, thanks in part to its modular design, which allows them to easily fit the cabinet into the space that’s available. Basically, no custom cabinets are needed. Of the feedback that Swapbox has received, the most interesting is that its customers are asking them to build out notification services that remind them to pick up their shipments before they leave work. Murthy says that Swapbox is seeing an average of four hours between notification that the item has been received and the actual pickup. The key to services like this, which are being mimicked by huge retailers and , is that consumers shouldn’t have to worry about being at home to wait for a package. If one of these services is available in an area where you work, it’s likely that you’d rather go there to pick up your package than to wait for FedEx to come back after a missed drop-off. Something like Swapbox isn’t limited to just Amazon and Walmart purchases, which is an advantage in getting repeat customers. After Nob Hill, Swapbox will be infiltrating the Mission, another highly populated area in San Francisco. The current cost to use Swapbox is $1.99 per shipment, so it must stay competitive with Bufferbox in that sense to succeed. Game on, Google.
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Badgeville Names Former Cast Iron Exec Ken Comée As Its New CEO
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Anthony Ha
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Gamification startup just announced that it has appointed Ken Comée as its new CEO. Co-founder and outgoing CEO Kris Duggan will become the company’s chief strategy officer, and he will also remain on the Badgeville board. Comée was formerly the CEO of Cast Iron Systems, a cloud company that was acquired by IBM, and of PowerReviews, which was . He might not seem like the obvious choice to run a gamification company, but Badgeville says it’s actually selling its tools (which allow companies to add social features and game mechanics to their products) to some big enterprise customers, like Deloitte, EMC, and Oracle. “Gamification is not a fad,” Comée told me via email. He later added, “I see user engagement as the vital factor in the success of all cloud and web-based technologies. While we’ve … had tremendous success in driving user engagement across key consumer environments, we’ve also tapped into a great market opportunity to extend more into employee engagement.” As a startup grows, it’s not unusual to see a more seasoned executive replace the founder as CEO. However, I asked why the move made sense now, and Duggan pointed to two things. First, he said the company needs “a proven leader to scale to the demand of our enterprise customer and partner base.” Second, this will give Duggan time to become “a full-time visionary and evangelist” who can “cement the market.” I also asked how they’d avoid some of the conflicts that can arise when someone steps down from the CEO role but doesn’t leave the company. Both of them said they’ve already been working together, because Comée has been serving as an advisor to the company for the past four months. “We make a great team,” he said. Badgeville launched in September 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, where it . (Duggan is the one on the left accepting the award in the photo above.) It says that it now has hundreds of customers, and that its revenue doubled in 2011, doubled again in 2012, and will, yes, double this year.
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eBay Hires A VP Of Data To Focus On Personalization Across The Marketplace And Other Properties
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Leena Rao
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We know that eBay has been to its marketplace and other products and properties but today the company is brining in new leadership to direct this efforts. Zoher Karu, who was formerly Vice President of Marketing Analytics and Insight at retailer Sears, will be joining the company as its first Vice President of Customer Optimization and Data. In his new role, Karu will leverage the company’s customer data to drive a more personal and relevant experience across eBay properties, says the company. A Sears, Karu made similar efforts in organizing customer data, extracting analytical insights and then integrating those insights into customer channels. He also holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. “Karu’s passion for customers, coupled with his outstanding business experience and professional track record, will significantly advance the company’s efforts to drive data-driven innovation, delivering a personalized and intuitive omnichannel shopping experience to customers around the world,” said Marketplaces President Devin Wenig in a release. The hire isn’t surprising, as eBay has been talking about data for some time now. At eBay’s analyst day a few weeks ago, CEO John Donahoe said “data will enable us to drive better experiences for our customers. It also will allow us to help merchants of all sizes drive deeper consumer engagement and loyalty in a connected commerce world. We have massive amounts of data. And we are just beginning to leverage our data to drive innovative, personalized customer experiences. Our advantage is not just the amount of data we have…But we have a massive amount of closed loop data. What other companies struggle to create, we already know – each step of a consumer’s commerce journey.” eBay has been using customer data in its new but it sounds like we’re going to see similar products coming from the e-commerce giant soon.
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TechCrunch Is Coming To Austin, Seattle, San Diego, And Boston
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John Biggs
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TechCrunch is rolling into Texas, Washington, California and Massachusetts this year for our patented Meetup+Pitch Off events, parties dedicated to exposing the coolest startups in your home town. We want you to attend. Here’s what’s up: Austin is happening on . at a location that will be announced shortly. The is also TBD but the event will be held on . Up next we will have Boston in November. What do you need to do? First, mark your calendars. We will be selling $5 tickets to these events to help cover the cost of beers. 21 and older only, please. Second, apply to the pitch-off. Registration for Austin is with others coming soon. We will pick 20 companies in each city and these winners will get 1-on-1 time with the TechCrunch folks in attendance. Please also give us the name of the most important, coolest, or funniest person in your startup ecosystem. It could be your boss, a VC, or hardware hacker you know. We’re going to need judges and we want to pick some great people from each city. We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Second Place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third Place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. These events are usually a blast and we love meeting all of you in real life. Startups are the TechCrunch’s lifeblood and these events are great ways to meet the folks working on the ground floor to make a cool new future. See you soon! We also need sponsors so if you’re looking to get your name up in lights, email us at or purchase packages for , , , or .
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FuzeBox Adds 50K New Enterprise Subscribers In Q1 2013, Debuts Improved iPad Client
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Darrell Etherington
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San Francisco-based virtual meeting player has had some impressive success to kick-off 2013, posting a 200 percent rise in demand for its product in the initial quarter of the year, with 50,000 new subscribers added in just a few short months. The company also now counts 30 percent of the Fortune 500 among its clients, and is debuting new features for its to help continue its adoption as more meeting attendees shift to mobile. The new features include the ability to initiate meetings from iPad, with up to 12 streams in full HD for participants, and sharing of content either via a built-in web browser or from cloud-based content. iPad meeting goers can also shoot video via their device’s camera and upload it immediately for sharing in full HD, as well as begin meetings for a third-party presenter. Refinements and changes to the UI should also provide for a smoother experience. Overall, the idea is to make the iPad client feel like much more of a first-class citizen in the overall FuzeBox ecosystem. “Mobile is accelerating at a greater pace than a lot of the other platforms, but the desktop platforms are still dominant in terms of current usage,” CEO Jeff Cavins explained in an interview, describing the growing importance of mobile. “But what we see is a trend towards just huge deployments of iPads as these workplaces have gone mobile. Think of it in terms of cost savings: it’s a lot more cost-effective to deploy iPads than laptops in a lot of cases, and a lot more direct and easy to use in a lot of cases, too.” The FuzeBox advantage is in making sure that features work across platforms seamlessly, and that services available on one are available on all. The company is investing heavily in infrastructure, with data centers around the world to make sure it can handle server demand and deliver high-quality streaming results, since it gets a lot of use these days in helping creative teams demo and collaborate on rich media content like HD video advertisements. Eventually, we’ll see the features introduced in the latest iPad version make their way to Android tablets, and also potentially even to smartphones down the road. There are a lot of challengers in this market, but FuzeBox, which was founded in 2009, thinks it’s iterating fast enough and smart enough to keep the rest of the pack at bay. So far it seems to be working well enough to attract new customers, including strong attention from those with the deepest pockets.
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Microsoft’s Latest “Scroogled” Ads Attack Sharing Of Information That Google Developers Need To Process Transactions
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Drew Olanoff
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Today, Microsoft has by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play. have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy. In the two videos below, Microsoft uses animations and words to walk you through “what might happen” if your data were to end up in the wrong people’s hands. It’s a fear campaign, and it really doesn’t have any basis whatsoever. Take a look at the videos and we’ll get into what actually happens when you buy an app from Google Play.
In the second video, a “real life” situation is played out on the front steps of an apartment building:
A Google spokesperson provided us with the following statement: Google Wallet shares the information needed to process transactions and maintain accounts, and this is clearly stated in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice. Why the mention of Google Wallet? The main difference between Google Play and the Apple App Store is that Google uses its “Wallet” service to process transactions. While it’s not a third-party service in the sense that it’s a different company, it is a function of the process that is not embedded into the Google Play experience. It’s something that users are made aware of in the and when they sign up. More importantly, when merchants and developers sign up to sell things in Google Play, they must buy into not sharing any of the information that they get, which is name, email address and general location — the things that all companies selling things online need in order to process your transaction and provide support. Better start your attack against Amazon, Etsy and everyone else on the Internet, Microsoft. The timing is interesting on this, because this is the way that Google Play has always worked. Its privacy policies haven’t changed since last July, in fact. At the end of the video, if you got that far, you’ll notice that Microsoft ends things with a big “Windows Phone doesn’t do it this way.” Instead of doing an advertisement on how great Windows phones and apps are, Microsoft has decided to go after how “horrible” Google is. The even has a big old link to explore Windows Phones. Isn’t that convenient? If Microsoft was purely trying to protect consumers from having their data “stolen” by nefarious app developers, don’t you think that it would focus on that, rather than trying to drum up business for itself? You can’t put something on the Internet if it isn’t true, right? Wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx4twCK3_I Wait, wasn’t that bearded “french” guy the same one that shows up at the end of the second Scroogled video? At least we know who is doing Microsoft’s ads now. Put those marketing dollars into making great products that people love, Microsoft.
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Vudu Headquarters Robbed, Hard Drives With Private Customer Data Stolen
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Greg Kumparak
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There’s been a break-in! And this time, it’s a physical, real-world break-in — not the digital variety we’ve grown so accustomed to hearing about lately. Vudu, the video streaming service acquired by Walmart in 2010, has just sent an email to customers letting them know of a break-in that occurred in their Santa Clara, CA office on March 24th. While it appears that credit card info is mostly safe (Vudu says they never stored anything but the last four digits), the thieves walked off with multiple hard drives containing data like customer names, encrypted passwords, addresses, and phone numbers. While the passwords contained on the hard drive are said to have been encrypted, Vudu is immediately voiding all current account passwords and recommending that users “be proactive” with their security (read: if you’ve got a Vudu account and are using the same password elsewhere on the Interwebs, you should consider changing it.) Vudu has confirmed the break-in , and their official statement on the matter follows: Wait, wait — March 24th? Good on Vudu for reporting the break in and all, but why did it take them nearly 3 weeks to do so?
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Developer Community Coderwall Launches Pitchbox, A New Recruiting Service
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Anthony Ha
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Y Combinator-backed started out as , but it has been moving into recruiting — first by and now with the launch of a new service called . It’s a separate site from Coderwall, where developers describe the salary and work they’d want from their dream jobs. Then Pitchbox uses a combination of human curation and automation to recommend positions that they might be interested in, delivered as a personalized pitch. If the developer is interested, Pitchbox arranges for a 10-minute conversation with a developer at the recruiting company. Founder Matt Deiters said this has a number of advantages over the normal recruiting process. For one thing, it avoids the random spam that developers often receive (and ignore) from recruiters. For another, it puts people who aren’t actively looking for new jobs in a position where they can still hear about opportunities that they’d be genuinely excited about. “They are very complementary,” Deiters said when I asked why Pitchbox isn’t just a feature on Coderwall. “We had initially … thought about Pitchbox as being a product in Coderwall. As we evolved and added things around the community aspects of Coderwall, it kind of became its own network and its own community.” Ultimately, Deiters said he decided that he didn’t want to have yet “another thing that we had to communicate” within Coderwall. At the same time, he said that the company has created “touch points” between the two services, for example by promoting Pitchbox to certain Coderwall members. Deiters added that, thanks to the company profile feature (the profiles are free, but companies pay to promote them and add job listings), Coderwall’s revenue has been growing 40 percent “nearly every month” for the past six months, and in March, with the early tests of Pitchbox, it went up 10x. Coderwall is now profitable, he said. He also said that Pitchbox customers include YC startups, Dropbox and “a few Fortune 500 companies.” As for how Pitchbox might expand, Deiters said there’s been interest from startups that want to recruit other types of positions. He wants to stay focused on developers for at least the next few months, but Pitchbox might expand after that.
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Social Commerce / Photo Sharing Network Lockerz Launching Ador, A New Fashion Site
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Ingrid Lunden
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Looks like , the social commerce and photo sharing service, may be moving on to yet another chapter in its life. After , , and earlier this year, the company is now launching a new fashion site, . A tipster tells us that Lockerz is shutting down altogether and relaunching, but as of right now, the Lockerz site looks like it is still operational. Ador, meanwhile, is in an invite-only phase. We have reached out to the company to confirm what is going on. The launch of Ador, in any case, is one more sign of how Lockerz continues to search for new ways of bringing in more users and scale to its service. Lockerz was founded in 2009 and built an early reputation as a place to post photos to share on sites like Twitter — a service that may have proven popular, but perhaps difficult to monetize. That operation picked up extra challenges after other photo sharing services like Instagram emerged, and Twitter took photo sharing into its own hands. Indeed, Lockerz that it was Twitter’s changing terms of service that led it to close down its Plixi API. A second source tells us that the Plixi API had driven “90% of the traffic to Lockerz.com and its mobile site.” (Again, we have not confirmed this with the company.) Lockerz has to date raised in funding. Investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Liberty Media, DAG Ventures and Live Nation, with the most recent round, a , coming in October 2012. While we can’t confirm whether or not Lockerz is pivoting or rebranding, what we can see is that Lockerz has a trademark for “Ador,” along with “A Ador” and (bizarrely) “A”. “A ADOR is a product and service created by Lockerz, Inc.,” the reads. Ador is also currently hiring an iOS developer in Seattle. An on Ador.com, meanwhile, describes a fashion-focused site where people can collect images that they like and share them with others, as well as use the site to purchase the items, and track when tagged items go on sale. In other words, Ador’s services sound similar to some of those being offered on Lockerz, which has been transforming itself from a photo sharing service into a photo sharing service with a fashion/celebrity/e-commerce angle to it. “Discover the latest in fashion, beauty and entertainment,” the Lockerz site reads today. “Get rewarded for sharing what you love with our community of stylish shoppers.” In , Lockerz updated its look with a Pinterest-style grid layout and infinte scrolling. When we covered the layoffs in January, we noted that key employees, such as head of mobile Daniel Marshalian, were still working at the company. According to Marshalian’s , he has now left. Mark Stabingas — who took over as CEO of Lockerz after founder Kathy Savitt the role left to become CMO of Yahoo — . It’s not clear if Savitt remains chairperson, a role she took when Stabingas took over.
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Alibaba Group’s New Stake In Sina Weibo May Help Its Nascent Smartphone OS Gain Traction Against Android & iOS
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Catherine Shu
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gives Alibaba Group several perks, including an inroad into social media and access to the microblogging platform’s data. Not only that, but its new 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo may also give Alibaba Group a leg-up as it seeks to promote its own smartphone operating system Alibaba Mobile OS (AMOS) as a rival to Android. As the Wall Street Journal , Alibaba Group’s investment in Sina Weibo means that it now has access to data generated by the platform’s 46.2 million daily users. This is on top of the 500 million registered users on Taobao, one of Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites. “If you are a big Internet company and you are ambitious enough in the mobile space, you have to do more than apps. Otherwise, you are just a small species in an ecosystem controlled by others,” Alibaba chief strategy officer Zeng Ming told WSJ. Zeng said that Alibaba Group’s target for AMOS is to power 10 percent of all smartphones shipped in China, an ambitious goal considering that AMOS currently only has 1 percent market share. According to , Android currently holds an 80 percent chunk of the market, while iOS accounts for 10 percent. Though seven Chinese smartphone makers — KONKA, ZOPO, Amoi, G’Five, Little Pepper, Haier, and Beijing Tianyu–have to launch AMOS phones, none of them are major players. Obstacles standing in Alibaba Group’s way include Google, which because Acer is part of the Google-led Open Handset Alliance. Google said that Acer could not work with a “noncompatible” version of Android and, even though Alibaba insisted that its OS is not an Android variant, the Acer phone was shelved. But Alibaba Group seems optimistic that it will ll be able to get around the Open Handset Alliance. Zeng told WSJ “if quite a few handset companies decide to choose Alibaba’s OS, Google will have to be careful in how far they want to push it.” Alibaba Group recently in which it outlined its plans to leverage its e-commerce properties to get support from device makers, telecom carriers, and software developers as it creates an ecosystem for AMOS. Steps Alibaba Group is taking to promote AMOS include subsidies for smartphone makers and a 1 billion RMB ($162 million) funding program for app developers. The company is also striking deals with telecom operators that would allow customers to purchase AMOS smartphones without deposits or down payments by determining their creditworthiness based on transactions on Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites. Furthermore, AMOS may stand to benefit from the Chinese government’s push to promote operating systems developed within that country, which has included attacks on foreign developers. For example, in March China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology , while Apple after a series of attacks by state-run media. Other OSes currently being developed by Chinese companies include Smartisan and Ubuntu Kylin.
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Walk The Floor With Us At TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013’s Startup Alley
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Darrell Etherington
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Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, there was a brand new batch of startups on display in Startup Alley, and we hit the floor this morning to check them out. There was a healthy mix, including the Italian pavilion as well as a number of mobile and media startups and companies concerning themselves with privacy. We saw a way to create an animated storybook with Toon Hero, a crowdsourced bounty-setting platform for lost items with , a way to motivate group action around an issue with Crowdshout and a museum and culture recommendation and reservation tool with Musement. Overall, it was a varied and extremely interesting mix of companies from around the world.
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As Aereo Fights A Clone, Fox Threatens To Go To Cable If Courts Continue To Rule In Aereo’s Favor
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Jordan Crook
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This is a story about multiple lawsuits, a clone, and yet another tale of David vs. Goliath, except this time David and Goliath are kind of the same person. After winning in the courts against a cohort of major broadcast networks just last week, two major problems have befallen the streaming TV startup Aereo. The first is a clone called AereoKiller LLC, which claims to operate under similar technology on the West Coast. The second problem is that News Corp has threatened to turn Fox into a cable channel, putting it out of the reach of Aereo’s technology, in the wake of the recent Second Circuit court decision. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s go through this one piece at a time. To say that AereoKiller LLC is competitive would be a huge understatement — the company originally distributed its live TV content from the URL BarryDriller.com, a clear knock at Aereo investor and media mogul Barry Diller. AereoKiller LLC is under fire in California just like Aereo is under fire in New York, only . A federal judge in the Ninth Circuit of California, which covers most of the west coast including Washington, California, Nevada and Arizona, ruled against AereoKiller LLC granting the broadcast networks request for a preliminary injunction. See, in Aereo’s case, the company operates within the law based on precedents set in a Cablevision case a few years ago over its cloud DVR service. The Cablevision case claimed that since the remote DVR service only transmitted an individual’s unique copy of the content, which was controlled only by that user, Cablevision was not infringing on the broadcasters’ copyrighted content. In fact, everything was exactly the same as the original DVR service except that the content was stored in the cloud instead of on a DVR box hard drive in the user’s living room. Aereo works in a similar way. Users rent out a tiny micro-antenna (that is stored remotely by Aereo) which picks up free over-the-air signals and records them to a cloud DVR when users begin watching. Each user is watching their own, unique, recorded copy of a show, whether they’re using the “watch live” function or the DVR service Aereo provides. For this reason, the Second Circuit in NY deemed that Aereo’s service is legal. But Ninth Circuit judge George H. Wu isn’t bound by Second Circuit precedents. In his order for the preliminary injunction against AereoKiller LLC, he said: Plaintiffs argue that Defendants’ internet retransmission service infringes their exclusive right to make public transmissions of their copyrighted works. 9 Defendants do not deny Plaintiffs’ ownership of the copyrights or Defendants’ transmission of the copyrighted works but argue that, due to the architecture of their systems, their transmissions are private, not public. Assuming that Defendants accurately describe their technology- which Plaintiffs dispute – Second Circuit law would support Defendants’ position, because cases there have held that where a transmission of a work over the internet is made from a copy of a work made at the direction of and solely for use by single user, there is no public transmission. But, that Second Circuit law has not been adopted in the Ninth Circuit, and this Court would find that the Ninth Circuit’s precedents do not support adopting the Second Circuit’s position on the issue. Instead, the Court would find that Defendants’ transmissions are public performances, and therefore infringe Plaintiffs’ exclusive right of public performance. Because opinions differ from coast to coast, Judge Wu’s decision is . For now, this isn’t a huge problem. Aereo currently doesn’t have plans to expand to the West Coast, and with good reason. It is, after all, Hollywood. But if Aereo ever did want to branch out into California and neighboring states, it may face being shut down if this ruling holds up. AereoKiller LLC is also appealing the decision. In the meantime, Aereo has almost issued a ceasefire with its clone. Barry Diller sued the company for using BarryDriller.com as a URL slug, and he won. AereoKiller then distributed content through a host of other URLs, including CBSyousuck.com, until landing on FilmOn.com. Aereo has filed a suit against AereoKiller LLC over the naming arrangement, but for now the startup seems more concerned that its clone doesn’t run around setting unfavorable precedents. Aereo does not comment on litigation. The second problem facing Aereo is News Corp and Fox. After losing out against Aereo in the Second Circuit last week, News Corp’s COO Chase Carey to pull Fox off of broadcast television and make it a cable channel. “If we can’t have our rights properly protected through those legal and political avenues, we will pursue business solutions,” said Carey. “One such business solution would be to take the network and turn it into a subscription service.” To make matters worse, News Corp also sent out a press release, solidifying the threat: News Corporation has a long-standing commitment to the broadcast television business, and to delivering the highest-quality entertainment, sports and news programming to our viewers on a localized basis. We are committed to broadcasting under a business model where programmers receive fair compensation from parties that want to redistribute our product while continuing to make our product available for free to individual consumers that want to access our signal. We believe that Aereo is pirating our broadcast signal. We will continue to aggressively pursue our rights in the courts, as well as pursue all relevant political avenues, and we believe we will prevail. That said, we won’t just sit idle and allow our content to be actively stolen. It is clear that the broadcast business needs a dual revenue stream from both ad and subscription to be viable. We simply cannot provide the type of quality sports, news, and entertainment content that we do from an ad supported only business model. We have no choice but to develop business solutions that ensure we continue to remain in the driver’s seat of our own destiny. One option could be converting the FOX broadcast network to a pay channel, which we would do in collaboration with both our content partners and affiliates. In an interview with TechCrunch, Aereo founder and CEO Chet Kanojia neglected to comment on what News Corp would do specifically, but spoke very openly about where he sees media evolving with regards to this situation. For one thing, he explained that on Aereo, as with any other media channel, shows are popular, not channels. “Content creators seek audiences, not artificial business models,” said Kanojia. “Wherever audience accumulates, that’s where people who sell shows will go.” Traditionally the best content airs on broadcast television, because it has the largest audience reach, he explained. Without broadcast, you’re just “another channel on a dial,” with no relationship to the local community brought about by local affiliate stations under the umbrella of a broadcast network. “Broadcast is the largest footprint from an audience perspective. It’s such attractive real estate,” he said. “If Fox doesn’t want it, someone else will step into that real estate. The audience is impossible to replicate. If you look at any cable channel, it doesn’t hold a candle to the reach and the local connection broadcast offers.” But the story isn’t complete without Barry Diller. Fox Broadcasting Company popped up in the early 1980’s as the first real competition to the Big Three Networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, which went out to the majority of Americans as broadcast television. Fox was the first channel to join them as a broadcast network, rising to a current number 2 position behind CBS as the most viewed network. At the time that Fox was deciding to public broadcast its content, Barry Diller was the CEO. Now, almost thirty years later, he’s pioneering efforts to re-distribute those free over-the-air signals with a new company called Aereo. It’s almost as if his latest venture is an innovation piggy-back from earlier moves he’d made in the media industry. “One of the greatest strengths I’ve learned from [Diller] is to look forward,” said Kanojia of Barry Diller. “That’s how I’ve experienced him. He’s of the mentality that you just can’t change the past, you have to go forward, and the more you take advantage of the opportunities technology offers the more value you can create and the better off you are.” Moving Fox from broadcast to cable is no simple feat. It would take months if not years, it would exclude a good 10 percent of the population that doesn’t use cable, and who knows what would happen to the investment made in all those local affiliate networks? And all this for a startup that is only operating in New York. In this day and age, companies need to predict the future, not just be ready for it. But News Corp is perhaps giving Aereo even more validation than the courts did by threatening to pull its content off of the air. Clearly, the Barry Diller-backed startup is making more than a few people panic. It’s ironic, isn’t it? The same guy that helped put that content on broadcast airwaves is now the one disrupting that very model. The significance of this situation stretches far beyond today, as major media corporations slowly learn how to aquire, or perhaps lose, an increasingly digital audience.
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Webydo Makes It Easier For Designers To Build Websites By Creating The Code For Them
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Natasha Lomas
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is a cloud-based SaaS for designers who want to be able to sell their website design services without having to get their own hands dirty doing any coding or hire a developer to do it for them. The system offers a custom CMS where designers can build the website. Once they’re happy with the design, Webydo’s software converts it into web code for them. The company also hosts the published website. “We can bring any design into life without writing one line of code,” says founder and CEO Shmulik Grizim. “We have a sophisticated code generator that actually replaces the developer in the equation. You don’t need to manually write the code. You can create any kind of website for your customer’s business.” Designs, photos, media and other assets can be imported into Webydo’s “online canvas” where the various elements are assembled via a drag and drop interface to create the finished website. “You just drag and drop your elements to create your own unique design, exactly as you planned it, pixel by pixel. You can insert sophisticated features such as blogs, and forms, and Google maps,” says Grizim. “Whatever you want to create any kind of website. Hundreds of pages, dozens of pages, it doesn’t really matter. We are the only platform on the web that enables the designer full freedom for creating.” When the designer hits publish, the code is assembled by Webydo’s code generator — which Grizim says is patent-pending. This is also where the payment kicks in: the tools are free at the point of use, but published websites cost $10 per month. The startup says it is hosting more than 50,000 websites created with its tools so far during its closed beta. It opened this up yesterday to the U.S. market — prior to that it was mostly operating in Israel and Europe. The main competitor he cites when asked about rivals in the space is Adobe Muse. But whereas that’s a desktop application, Webydo is a cloud SaaS offering — and that’s it’s “main advantage”, says Grizim. As well as offering the design studio free at the point of use to designers, Webydo’s CMS is also free for the designer’s customer to use to edit their website. “In Adobe Muse you only have the editor tool for the designer. But once the business owner wants to edit the content on his website he needs a developer to connect it to a content management system. With Webydo we have a fully integrated content management system on the fly — you don’t need to do anything, everything is included.” “We are offering our designer partners to build their own business — they get a full business ready to use, and they can create the websites for their customers,” says Grizim. Websites can be created in a few hours “from scratch”, he adds. The company has raised $1.8 million in seed and Series A funding, from investors in the U.S. and Israel, and has raised $2.6m so far of a $5m target for its Series B.
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Save The Mom Puts A Family-Only Social Network On Your iPhone
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Darrell Etherington
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Italian company and TechCrunch Startup Alley participant at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 has created an iPhone app that’s designed to bring families closer together, with social networking tools designed specifically for private use. It’s not only about being social, however, as it includes shared productivity and task management tools to make managing a family easier, too. The Save The Mom app is a little sexist in its naming, but the tools it offers are pretty useful. It provides tools like grocery and to-do list collaboration within the family, private photo sharing, post appointments and commitments that you have in your own calendar and more. You can even poll family members, maybe to make a meal choice, and record audio notes, which co-founder Davide Dattoli says is especially useful for children that are too young to be able to communicate with written language.
Save The Mom is a free app for iPhone owners, and will be coming to Android within the next few weeks. There’s also an iPad version in the works for late on, too. The free app is supported by in-app advertisement, which has already enabled Save The Mom to make some key partnerships. “The business model is based on advertising,” Dattoli explained. “We’re partnered with Condé Nast in Italy, and we’re integrated with Style.it and we’re developing other partnerships around awards. We know what people buy, and we know what they do and where they do it. Advertisers are very interested in that.” Asked about privacy concerns, Dattoli said that the company is very careful with client privacy, and doesn’t pass on any kind of identifying information about its users to its advertising partners. That doesn’t mean that customers won’t still be made nervous by the idea of an app designed around private sharing transmitting any kind of information to third parties, but it’s possible the benefits of targeted, relevant deals will outweigh those concerns.
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Judge Throws Out Craigslist’s Copyright Lawsuit, But It Can Still Sue 3Taps Over Data Use
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Catherine Shu
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A California federal judge that Craigslist can’t sue real estate listings platforms 3Taps, PadMapper, and Discover Home Network for copyright infringement. But the judgement isn’t a complete victory for the developers of 3Taps because Craigslist is still allowed to sue the startup for gaining unauthorized access to data on its Web site. Critics of Craiglist’s legal actions have said that they stifle innovation and competition. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer denied 3Taps’ request to dismiss claims by Craigslist that it violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), but he threw out copyright claims against 3Taps for using information from user listings. Breyer wrote that aside from a two-week period last year, Craigslist’s TOU did not grant it an exclusive rights and copyright to user-generated postings. Craigslist provides no authority for the proposition that an ambiguous grant of rights is presumptively exclusive, and the court declines to read that term into the terms that Craigslist itself drafted. The court therefore concludes that the TOU, standing alone, did not grant Craigslist an exclusive license. Without an exclusive license, Craigslist cannot sue for infringement; the TOU provision that purportedly granted Craigslist the right to sue is ‘impermissible,'” Breyer wrote in his decision. Though the company may still face a lawsuit from Craigslist, 3Taps is viewing Breyer’s decision as a victory. On its Web site, 3Taps saying: “Craigslist has threatened scores of startups and established firms with copyright claims over user content posted to its site. But, on April 30, 2013, Justice Charles R. Breyer, speaking for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, put an end to further sham litigation by dismissing Craigslist assertions that it held exclusive licenses and copyright over user generated postings submitted to its site. Furthermore, the fact that 3taps syndicates user generated content to 3rd parties such as Padmapper was also dismissed as a baseless accusation of criminal conspiracy. Startups creating new search options for users for data from multiple sites can more confidently continue to focus on innovation rather than litigation.” Craigslist began after a dispute over the use of Craigslist data in third-party services. In addition to 3Taps, which after the initial cease & desist letter from Craigslist), to Missouri-based Web site developer Jeff Kastner and the makers of Ziink’s Craigslist helper. Then in August, Craigslist made the move of , though it . 3Taps filed a , citing unfair and uncompetitive business practices in violation of federal and state antitrust laws. At the time, 3Taps said that Craigslist used its “market power illegally to stifle innovation and hurt consumers,” depriving users of “better ways to find and execute real-time exchange transactions.” In today’s statement, 3Taps addressed the potential lawsuit from Craigslist and again reiterated its belief that Craigslist’s tactics stymie innovation: “Still remaining as an issue in the case is how 3taps accesses the data in question. At the start of the litigation between the parties, 3taps sourced the publicly available data through third party sources such as Google. Once Craigslist began blocking Google, 3taps accessed Craigslist directly, which resulted in a subsequent cause of action by Craigslist under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (the CFAA). The statute is the same anti-hacking cause of action leveled against the late Aaron Swartz over his high volume downloading of JSTOR academic articles from the MIT campus. The difference here is that Craigslist has leveled these charges of unauthorized access for data that is already publicly available, not copyrighted by Craigslist, and already in the hands of third parties such as Google. At issue is whether Craigslist restraints exist to “protect” its community or are actually thinly disguised tactics to deter competition and innovation at the expense of, rather than defense of, users.” We’ve reached out to Craigslist and 3Taps for further comment.
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Poutsch Is An Opinion-Gathering Platform For Tracking What The World Thinks
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Natasha Lomas
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Here’s a startup hoping to fill the gap left by the : French-Belgian startup , now based in New York and exhibiting here at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley, has built a platform for tracking opinion data by crowdsourcing market research, which is incentivised through a free-to-use-and-browse social opinion network. The startup describes itself as a “question & opinion” platform — rather than a Q&A play like Quora. “The difference is we’re not looking for one answer,” says co-founder Felix Winckler. Poutsch’s platform takes the temperature of whatever its users are curious enough to ask about — so everything from ‘what’s your favourite fruit pastille?’ to ‘are you still using Mailbox?’. Poutsch’s platform lets users ask, answer and view questions, read opinions and look at charts displaying how the data breaks down by variables, such as location, gender and age. They can also follow other users and share their questions to their own network to keep the opinions flowing in. As you’d expect for a site that needs user-generated content to function, Poutsch is free to use, as well as for third-party sites to use its widget to embed polls. The ultimate aim is to monetise the platform by selling opinion data to advertisers, marketers, product manufacturers and so on, says Winckler. Poutsch launched a public beta back in January. An iOS app is due soon. It says it’s acquired “thousands” of users — both individuals and organisations — to date but won’t be more specific. It’s currently live across 160+ countries. The big challenge for Poutsch will clearly be acquiring enough users to generate the volumes of data it will need to monetise its platform. The most answered questions on the site mostly have only a few hundred responses apiece, while many trending questions have just tens of responses, so there’s clearly some work to do there. But it’s still in beta — with a “hard launch” due in about a month.
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The 7 Disrupt NY Finalists: Enigma, Floored, Glide, Handle, HealthyOut, SupplyShift And Zenefits
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Alexia Tsotsis
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More than 2,000 people have filled up the historic Manhattan Center with our biggest hackathon and Startup Alley yet, and a set of incisive discussions with tech leaders. Now it’s time for the battlefield finals, and we have our seven finalists picked out. But first, Ashton Kutcher, Joe Lonsdale, a big panel on transportation, an interview with hardware startup leader Limor Fried, the Rap Genius guys, and more. Finals judges include Nancy Peretsman (Allen & Company), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), David Lee (SV Angel), Michael Arrington (CrunchFund), and Chi-Hua Chien (Kleiner Perkins). from more than 100,000 data sources, and is already being used by journalists to break stories and financial firms and companies to make smarter business decisions. , apartments and houses using 3D camera technology and proprietary software to build customizable 3D models for real estate purposes. on your own schedule, and has made it into the finals round from our Startup Alley. via a rich web app as well as a companion native iOS app that integrates with Gmail (and soon Microsoft Exchange and Yahoo). of food from local restaurants, set up as a subscription delivery service to help them lose weight or just eat better overall. that lets companies and organizations track everything that’s going on with suppliers around world, collecting sustainability data to help them reduce risk exposure. manage payroll, health care and other human-resources services for employees.
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Viddy Co-Founder Chris Ovitz Lands At Mobile Gaming Startup Scopely
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz has landed at another buzzed-about Los Angeles startup, the mobile gaming platform Scopely. He used to head up business development at the mobile video startup Viddy, which shot up like a star on the Facebook platform and iOS charts only to later come back down just as dramatically. At Scopely, he’ll be a vice president of business development, where he’ll work on external opportunities (presumably deals with third-party game makers) to grow the network and the business. Scopely is pursuing a playbook that many other mobile game developers are following. They’re trying to grow the biggest network of gamers possible using apps built both in-house and by outside studios. With an eight-figure number of monthly actives, Scopely is still smaller than other larger competitors that have publishing programs like Zynga and Sequoia-backed Pocket Gems and the Japanese giants like DeNA and GREE. But they say they’ve been able to get all of their games into the top five free apps on the iOS charts. , he and Driver started talking about what was next. “I’ve had the privilege of watching his entrepreneurial career,” said Scopely CEO Walter Driver. “Honestly, I never thought we’d have a chance to join forces, but we recently started having casual conversations about his future and thought there might be a potential fit.” Ovitz declined to go into a lot of detail about what happened at Viddy, except to say that the company has to be inward-focused right now. “I obviously got to see the entire spectrum of a startup’s life. It was an incredible learning experience,” he said. “They really need to focus internally on product and technology, so there’s not a lot of business development for me to do there.” Viddy skyrocketed up the charts as a short video-sharing app last year in the wake of Instagram’s massive $1 billion buy from Facebook. On that momentum and Instagram’s buzz, the startup . But it and its direct competitor Socialcam started hemorrhaging users after Facebook cut off the viral fuel that was helping both apps up the charts. Socialcam, in contrast to Viddy, took a more conservative route with venture capital, instead leaning on friends and family from Y Combinator for a giant party round. They parlayed that and their momentum into a $60 million sale to Autodesk. Meanwhile, Viddy’s . and . “I’ve been a gamer my whole life,” Ovitz said. “I grew up interning at Activision and tried to start my own gaming company in business school. I’ve always admired Walter as an entrepreneur and I wanted to hop on this rocket ship.” Scopely like NEA, Anthem Venture Partners, The Chernin Group, Greycroft Partners, Lerer Ventures, The Collaborative Fund, Yahoo’s former CEO Terry Semel, Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, ShoeDazzle co-founder Brian Lee, Auren Hoffman, Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow, TechStars’ David Cohen and David Tisch.
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App Install Ads Could Be The Growing Cash Calf Of Facebook’s Earnings
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How do you get hundreds of millions of people to consider downloading your app? One of the only answers is Facebook’s app install ads. With the app stores overrun and every company going mobile, app install ads are Facebook’s big chance to monetize mobile. Companies like 1-800-Flowers and Poshmark say the ads are already a hit, and I think they could be the star of Facebook’s earnings tomorrow. If you’re unfamiliar, Facebook in October 2012 to let developers pay to promote their apps in the mobile news feed of Facebook’s apps. The ads show the app’s name, a short description, the category of app (i.e. adventure game, ecommerce app), a big image of the app, and an obvious “Install Now” button that opens the app’s page in the Apple App Store or Google Play so it can be quickly downloaded. On iOS, the App Store can even be so users don’t feel like they’ve ditched their friends on Facebook. Why are these so important? Because app discovery is a mess right now, yet mobile is becoming critical to nearly every business — web giants, mobile-first startups, game developers, name-brand retailers, and with time, even smaller businesses. Beyond word of mouth, the only reliable way to get an app discovered for free is to climb onto the frequently browsed app store charts…which requires tens of thousands of downloads in the first place. That leads developers to try to buy installs however they can, but often they end up with users that never really use their app. It doesn’t matter how cheap they are to acquire if they don’t generate any return on investment. What app makers need are legitimate downloads. Downloads from users that will engage, share with their friends, and pay. Lots and lots of downloads. Few channels are big enough to deliver app discovery at a massive scale. There’s the existing favorite, Google AdWords, which are popular and making Google a ton of money. But increasingly, developers are turning to Facebook’s app install ads. In its last earnings call, Facebook said that since the launch of app install ads, 20% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps are using them. Today after his talk at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, I asked Facebook’s product director of advertising Gokul Rajaram how mobile install ads are doing. He candidly told me “They’re performing well, and we’re seeing them deliver really high quality users that take actions.” Facebook’s clients agree. 1-800-Flowers.com’s VP of Mobile and Social Amit Shah tells me “Our ability to reach hundreds of millions of US users who are accessing Facebook every day on their mobile devices is phenomenal. Other than Google search ads, there’s not another discovery medium at scale if you want to drive a large number of downloads.” Mobile-only fashion marketplace app Poshmark’s CEO Manish Chandra concurs, “We’ve been using mobile install ads since their beta and they’ve been incredibly cost effective. We’ve found no difference in the acquired users, whether from Facebook’s organic shares or mobile install ads, in terms of their engagement and overall behavior, so we’ve been using them as one of the largest sources of user acquisition for Poshmark.” Meanwhile, Canadian ecommerce discounts app Checkout 51 was able to pull in using app install ads. The cost per install came in at just $0.60. That low cost, and the quality of users Facebook’s app install ads deliver is crucial because buying installs only makes sense if you earn more on each user you acquire them it cost to rope them in. Facebook’s wealth of targeting data means it can show the ads to people who’ll actually want them and have the , so people actually become users with high lifetime value. That’s a big improvement over incentivized install ad networks that give people virtual goods or currency in their favorite games in exchange for downloading new apps. Downloaders often immediately delete these apps despite the developer getting charged for the ads. 1-800-Flowers President Chris McCann tells me “Facebook is putting us into the right context. [The ads] show friends who have Liked or used our app. We think it’s a great discovery/distribution mechanism.” The company is planning a big Facebook mobile app install ad buy this week before Mother’s Day to get people installing the 1-800-Flowers app that lets them easily buy gifts. Instead of using ads to drive people to a one-time purchase, McCann says “If we can get them to download an app, we’re a long term player to them”, and the company might get additional ROI beyond the initial purchase when future holidays roll around. [Update: And then there’s Instagram, which currently doesn’t even show ads. Promoting other apps people could download might eventually be a core way Instagram monetizes.] Becoming the paid gateway to app install ads is a lucrative business. App stores already have users’ credit card information, and the gratification of a download is instant. That makes conversions easy, and attributing those installs to ads simple. That’s why Twitter recently launched its own app install cards, which makes it quick to download apps people talk about. By using Promoted Tweets to amplify tweets that include links to the app stores, advertisers can essentially run Twitter app install ads. Competition from other channels recognizing the opportunity, and Facebook’s rates increasing as more developers run install ads are risks. [Update: As are the app stores creating their own native promoted apps advertising units, as suggests Apple might.] Still, the business is already humming for Facebook, and it’s poised for serious growth (enough to support multiple players) as the app ecosystem keeps getting larger and more competitive. That’s great news for Facebook, which needs more ways to monetize its 680 million daily mobile users. In Q4 2012, 23% of the social network’s advertising revenue came from mobile, but at that point mobile app install ads had only just launched. When Facebook announces its Q1 2013 earnings tomorrow, I expect mobile will have grown to around 32% of ad revenue with app install ads playing a central role to that increase. All it takes is a quick scroll through the mobile news feed to notice how prominent they are compared to other ad units like promoted Page posts. While brand advertising was the rock of Facebook’s desktop ads business, app install ads could form the base of the mobile ad business its future depends on.
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ValueClick Founder Brian Coryat Raises $1.5M For Business Listings Startup ‘Local Market Launch’
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that helps companies manage the online presence of local stores, is announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding. The company was founded by Brian Coryat, who previously founded ValueClick, an online ad company that went public in 2000. Coryat told me that he spent much of the past decade working with small businesses, and that Local Market Launch was created to address one of the big issues that he saw during that time — the need to manage the presence of these businesses on the web, both through their own websites and their listings on other properties. There are companies tackling parts of the problem, he said, but it’s a fragmented landscape with tools that aren’t easy to use. “Our charge is to make businesses findable on all locations, apps and devices,” Coryat said. There are three main pieces to the startup’s offerings for multi-lcoation businesses. First, it creates a landing page for each location, and each page is optimized for local search, he said. Second, it promotes those pages by pushing out the information to a number of search portals and channel partners. Third, it offers monitoring tools so businesses can track social media buzz and reviews. The company launched in 2012, and Coryat said it doesn’t usually work with these businesses directly — instead, its customers are print directories who can sell Local Market Launch as part of their services, as well as certified marketing representatives (basically, agencies who work with these types of businesses). As for the funding, it comes from . Combined with seed funding provided by Coryat himself, Local Market Launch has raised a total of $2.7 million. Rincon general partner John Greathouse told me that his firm likes to work with “serial entrepreneurs in an adjacent space” — in this case, Coryat actually tackled a similar problem with his first company, AAA Internet Promotions. Greathouse also emphasized that Local Market Launch is trying to drive real-world sales: “If you boil it all down, the goal of Local Market Launch is to generate door swings and phone rings.” I asked Coryat about the competitive landscape, , a company that helps local businesses update their listings across a range of websites. He replied that Yext has “kind of a neat platform,” but he said that for most small businesses, the real-time updating that Yext emphasizes just isn’t as important, and that Yext doesn’t have Local Market Launch’s focus on optimizing for Google.
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David Tisch Is Bored With His Smartphone’s Apps
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has made quite the name for himself as an investor based in NYC. Most notably, Tisch spent years at TechStars as the Managing Director, and has since left to co-found another investment fund called BoxGroup. We sat the man down backstage at Disrupt today to chat out his thoughts on the NY tech scene, trends he’s excited about and his transition to BoxGroup. “If you ask anyone whether they’re bored with what’s on their phone, it will always be a unanimous yes,” said Tisch. For him, he sees streams like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are the best forms of entertainment for the average Joe taking a glance at his phone. But there’s room for more, according to Tisch. In terms of BoxGroup, Tisch seems to enjoy finally being accelerator-agnostic and doesn’t mind companies that never go through an accelerator at all. But how do you get Tisch’s attention? “Be yourself,” he said. “If you’re trying too hard, but it comes off genuine, that’s okay. If you’re passive and antisocial and awkward, that’s fine. Just be yourself.” In his perspective, there’s no model to follow because entrepreneurship is about creating your own story. If you try to copy someone else’s story, it won’t ever work out. If you’re interested in David’s feelings towards the NY tech scene, the engineering talent pool, and the future of entertainment on mobile, be sure to watch the full interview above.
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Anyone Can Become A Content Curator On Woisio
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Michael Seo
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is a Turkish company being featured at Startup Alley this year, and it’s a little like what watching television would be like if your friends took over the programming. At first glance, Woisio most closely resembles an everyday television programming lineup. There are a number of predefined channels that are organized by category, each of which streams a series of 15 minute “shows” that air one after the other on a 24/7 basis. And yet, you won’t find any programming from any of the four major TV networks on Woisio. Nor will you be able locate any shows from any of the major cable networks. Each 15 minute show is in actuality a running playlist of YouTube videos, photo galleries, songs, or blog posts that have been curated and packaged by Woisio’s users. Woisio has a number of channels called “stages”, that are defined by specific arenas of interest and location. For example, you’ll find a “Music” stage for general music related content, and a “New York Music” stage for content specific to the New York music scene. You can also subscribe to the stages that most interest you, and thus create a specific channel that is tailored to the content you’d like to consume. But what if you want to do more than just consume? If you’re looking to get your own curated content on Wiosio, it’s a fairly simple process. When you first sign up with Woisio, you’re given 5,000 Woisio points that you can use to bid for auctioned spaces of airtime. Airtime on each stage is auctioned off in 15 minute chunks, and the auction runs until the very second that slot of content is scheduled to begin streaming on the stage. The more people upvote your shows when they air, the more Woisio points you obtain, increasing your influence as a content curator in the Woisio network. “You can say that the media manufactures its own stars, news, and facts,” says Mujdat Ayoguz, founder of Woisio, “and imposes them on people.” Ayoguz believes that Woisio is a platform that truly democratizes content curation and distribution. Woisio launched in the United States in December, and released their last Friday in an effort to expand their user base here. According to Woisio, they’ve already established a presence in Turkey in the “tens of thousands” of users range, and are planning to launch in Latin America very shortly.
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Disrupt NY 2013 Barrels Along For A Second Day
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And with the conclusion of the last Battlefield Startup presentation, the second day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 has come to a close. The day kicked off with a talk between noted New York City venture capitalist Fred Wilson and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who recently became a VC himself. The two and traded VC stories with Wilson giving tips for pitching a venture capitalist. “ ,” Wilson pleaded. Arrington quickly nodded and agreed. Mike Abbott then took the stage with Mailbox CEO and co-founder Gentry Underwood. The two talked about the surprising pains in scaling Underwood’s hot iOS email application. It took engineers 24 hours a day for several weeks to keep up with the initial demand. And then Dropbox scooped up the company. Google’s Seth Sternberg, Director of Product Management for Google+, and Ardan Arac, Product Manager at Google, used the Disrupt stage to announce . Simply put, Google +’s visibility is now supersized in Google Search. eBay chief John Donahoe to Bloomberg’s chief content editor Norm Pearlstine about how the company screens its acquisitions and how he keeps founders from leaving after the acquisition — a trick that many companies fail to execute after buying a startup. Troy Carter is disrupting the music industry from within. And today he spoke with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine about his secrets regarding managing Lady Gaga’s online presence (she doesn’t use Facebook personally), , and why he thinks will be the home of the next big disruption. When should an entrepreneur raise money, who should they raise from… and, well, ? These were some of the questions discussed on a panel with TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis at Disrupt NY 2013, which included participation from Mike Abbott of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Aaref Hilaly of Sequoia Capital, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, and BoxGroup’s David Tisch. At TechCrunch Disrupt NY today, VP of Display Advertising Products at Google, Neal Mohan, Facebook Ad Products Director Gokul Rajaram and Twitter Senior Director of Product Revenue Kevin Weil took the stage to talk about the state of digital advertising — and take on the subject. In a chat with TechCrunch’s Leena Rao, representatives from PayPal, Stripe and Gumroad gave that has VCs emptying their bank accounts to invest afresh — Bitcoins, a very popular topic at Disrupt NY 2013. The afternoon kicked off between serial-investor Ron Conway, filmmaker/actor Alex Winter and CrunchFund’s MG Siegler to talk about the documentary “Downloaded” about the rise and fall of Napster. Conway said even in 2013, Internet sharing has yet to be solved and that is one of the most disappointing parts of the whole affair. TechCrunch COO Ned Desmond and CrunchBase’s Matt Kaufman used the TechCrunch Disrupt stage to launch a big expansion of CrunchBase, TechCrunch’s own robust free wiki-style directory of people, technology companies and investors. The new feature, , is to appeal to venture firms that want to improve CrunchBase’s data set. The day wrapped with 15 startups launching on the TechCrunch stage. In the Startup Battlefield, 30 companies are competing for the TechCrunch Disrupt Cup and $50,000 in cash — along with a boatload of press attention. Disrupt NY 2013 concludes tomorrow with an all-star speaker lineup, including the boisterous Rap Genius kicking the day off with a loud start. Then, after a morning of fireside chats and conversations, a Startup Battlefield winner will take home a gigantic check. Here are the video highlights of the day.
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UQ Life Is A Gaming Platform For Personalized Self Discovery, Learning, And Development
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Ryan Lawler
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was founded to create a smart platform for self-discovery and personal development, and it’s designed to help kids learn through collaborative games. Today, as part of TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Battlefield, the company launched with a couple of apps for child learning and development by personalizing games to match individual skill sets. According to founder and CEO , these games are created to improve and reinforce skill development, especially in areas such as math and science. But the platform can also be used for games that help kids develop social skills. Founder Dunne is a data scientist and educational program director, working with children to improve their learning and development. She’s spent the last several years studying developmental science and cognitive science, and hopes to apply some of that expertise to the collaborative gaming space. There are a few advantages to using the UQ Life platform. For one thing, the platform provides users with built-in, closed social features that can be used so that students can collaborate with family members, teachers and tutors. It allows them to co-participate in games for coaching and mentoring children. Parents act as administrators and decide who gets invited and is approved to join in gameplay. In addition to providing opportunities for mentoring, Dunne says that the social aspect also can help bring families closer together. Like for instance, by enabling grandparents to participate in the games. Games are also multi-platform, which means that kids can play them on any number of devices — whether they be PCs, tablets, or mobile phones. The adults that participate with them can as well. So a kid can be playing on a tablet, while their grandparents are on a desktop at their homes. In addition to the collaboration and mentoring aspects, UQ Life’s platform is also designed to enable more personalized skill development. While we usually think of recommendation engines that provide content that we would prefer based on past videos we’ve viewed or content we’ve listened to. But UQ uses personalization technology to better understand students’ specific skill sets, as well as their needs. By doing so, it helps them develop new skills in a more targeted fashion. It’s that technology that is at the center of what UQ has built and how its platform differentiates itself from others. At its base level, the games built on the UQ platform will provide basic educational tools to first-time users. As with any technology of its kind, the more a user interacts with it, and the more users there are on the application, the bigger the data set and the better it will be at personalization. The team has already built a few applications for the platform, including an interactive story with six mini-games, as well as a couple of other games and toolsets for collaborative activities. But the ultimate goal is to make its platform available to third-party developers to build their own personalized skill development apps. In fact, while the UQ Life platform is currently focused on childhood education, it can also be used in other vertical markets beyond childhood educational games. For instance, Dunne said that the same kind of personalized skill-development technology could be applied to job training or therapy. UQ Life has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from a syndicate of institutional investors, as well as a couple of angels. The company has six full-time employees and is based in San Francisco. A: It works on all devices. A big part of it is bringing together a community to support child development. A: Every aspect of the design is based on translational research and the way we structure the data is to really help a particular skill set. A: We’re releasing our own games, but this was a platform built from the ground up to add features that aren’t available now. A: We’ll work with developers to make sure that they take advantage of the features we built into the platform.
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ShipHawk Aims To Be The Only Retail Shipping Solution You Ever Need
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Darrell Etherington
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TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley audience choice for day two is , a Santa Barbara-based shipping startup that launched this week at the conference. ShipHawk, co-founded by Jeremy Bodenhamer and Aaron Freeman, is a fully-featured online shipping platform that takes care of everything from providing shipping estimates to handling package pickup, delivery, packing, insurance and more for both residential and commercial addresses, for small and medium-sized businesses. While the key difference that ShipHawk has from other shipping services is that it provides estimates without having to see items packed beforehand, it also adds to the experience by allowing customers located anywhere to organize pick up and delivery from other locations, so that a client based in SF can ship an item from New York, without doing so much as cutting a piece of packing tape. And the process is made much more transparent, including packing (boxes, materials) and transport. The company works like any other retail shipping operation, and charges the same as you’d find at any of those. It makes a referral-type commission from the businesses that actually handle fulfillment, including UPS and FedEx, as well as insurance companies and agencies that handle the packing. Right now, Bodenhamer says that they make their revenue strictly by collecting the finder’s fee for referring customers to the services of other companies, but they’re already talking to VP-level execs at FedEx about fostering a deeper partnership. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6LWZfr5res?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] Both Bodenhamer and Freeman have previous experience in the shipping and logistics worlds. Freeman has 10 years experience in shipping, and Bodenhamer’s business recently acquired Freeman’s retail shipping store in Santa Barbara. “We got together after I bought the business and we said ‘What’s broken around retail shipping?’ and we came with an idea to solve the problem,” Bodenhamer said. That involved looking at pain points for customers, which included the process mentioned above around assessing the price of a shipping job up front, and around getting the package to a shipper quickly and easily without having to resort to using yet another service provider.
ShipHawk has around $500,000 in seed funding so far, mostly secured from friends and families, as well as some independent angels and investment firms. Thus far, the focus has been on getting help to make sure the platform addresses the needs of actual users, Bodenhamer says. “We have a network locally of people who are advising us and helping us to formulate the whole plan,” he said. “We believe strongly that this has the potential to grow into a household name-type business, just like Expedia or Kayak. So just like when you need a plane ticket, you don’t go to American Airlines, you go to Expedia.com, when you want to ship something you won’t go to FedEx.com, you’ll go to ShipHawk.” At first, ShipHawk will be serving the Southern California area, with plans to expand across the U.S. after that. It’s a good idea to start local with a business like this that involves quite a lot of logistics, and coordinating with local companies and resources. It’ll also offer a “ship free” promotion that rewards people for recommending their friends, the same way that Dropbox has done to ramp up user acquisition as it expands. The mobile app for ShipHawk, which is now on the web as an MVP product, is currently on the roadmap and will arrive sometime down the road once they have the product up and running smoothly in their initial launch markets.
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Talkz, Because Messaging With Your Thumbs Is So 2000 And Late
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Jordan Crook
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If email is first in line for disruption, messaging has to be second. A new company launching out of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 has a fresh take on our most favoritest form of communication. Talkz asks you to stop typing and start talking. Or type. Or doodle. Or share music. Really, anything you want. “We’re combining the benefits of SMS and Voice Messaging/Push-to-Talk in one”, says founder Heath Ahrens. It’s a messaging app that offers every type of sharing under the sun, but the really exciting part is voice messaging. Ahrens says, “by combining voice and text in every message, we are providing a faster, more convenient messaging experience”. In every message sent on Talkz, both text and voice is displayed. Of course, you can choose to use your own voice recording, or you can choose to use a celebrity voice clone to get your message across. You can send this to one friend, multiple friends, or share your Talkz on your social networks. At launch, the only available celebrity voice clones are Obama, George W. Bush, and Romney, but the team is working to build that out. Obviously, it’s easy to put both voice and text into a message when you speak your message — all it takes is some solid voice-to-text transcription. But how does Talkz replicate your voice when you type out a message instead of voice recording it? Talkz actually starts to learn your voice over time. After a while, you’ll be able to type out a message and Talkz will not only send the text but send a clone of your own voice speaking that message to the recipient. It’s wild. [gallery columns="4" ids="809393,809395,809396,809398,809399,809400,809401,809402"] But voice and text aren’t the only things we share in messages. We send links, pictures, song suggestions, videos, and everything else under the sun. Talkz is ready for that, offering options to send music previews through iTunes (which link direct to the iTunes store), doodles, and even share your location. You can also send pictures, with options to search the web, send the last photo taken, take the picture on the spot, or choose one from your library. Oh, and if that weren’t enough, users have the option to group chat as well. Overall, it seems to be one of the most complete messaging apps available, but it also marks an important shift in the way we communicate. With the explosion of text messaging, many believe voice communication is on the way out. But when you think about efficiency in communication, voice is the fastest way to transfer information. But voice isn’t always convenient. With Talkz, you always have the option of a reliable voice-powered conversation, with the fall-back alternative of text available at any time. So how will Talkz make money? “We believe Voice Cloning will do for celebrities what ringtones did for music labels,” said Ahrens. “We are already in conversations with numerous celebrities and brands to create Voice Clones, in addition to Personal and Presidential Voice Clones already available in the app. We are selling these Voice Clones as in-app purchases within Talkz or as branded advertising.” The app is available now in the App Store, with an Android version in the works. Q: The thing that separates apps in this space isn’t features. It’s about being viral. What do you have to differentiate and pick up user?
A: We had one of the best applications on BlackBerry years ago. Our core technology background is in speech and text-to-sppech, so messaging is much easier for us than speech. Q: What’s to stop Voxer from doing this?
A: If it was easy to do Voxer would already have speech. We team with a company called iSpeech, and Voxer would have to partner with a Nuance or someone to do it. And our voice clone technology is done by no one but iSpeech, with whom we have an exclusive partnership. Q: I can’t predict the success of the messaging space. You just have to launch it and see what happens. For every one that’s successful there are fifty at the bottom of the App Store.
A: We’re working on celebrity voices model to kickstart usage. These celebrities get 30 percent of any in-app purchase so they have an incentive as well. Q: Do you have interest with celebrities yet.
A: We’re in talks with them and they’re very interested. Q: How much traction do you have so far.
A: It’s day one. We saw 2,000 downloads after seeding 50 people with the app. Q: Marketing?
A: We have relationships with RIM and Microsoft and other app stores will be featuring this application. Q: Do you have a strategy of pulling away users of other messaging apps?
A: One of the best things about Talkz is that you don’t need the app to receive messages. So it’s instantly viral, even if you’re a user of another messaging app.
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Stop Forgetting The Important Stuff From Your Meetings, Thanks To Retrace
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Anthony Ha
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It’s possible that you are an incredibly organized person who remembers everything important from your meetings, and you’re part of an incredibly organized team where every post-meeting task is communicated clearly. But … maybe not. Maybe stuff slips through the cracks. That’s where , an app that just launched at Disrupt NY’s Startup Battlefield, comes in. Co-founder and CEO Austin Marusco told me that Retrace is “the best way to remember and organize everything about the meetings you have.” It’s an iPhone app that integrates with your Google Calendar or Calendars, creating a shared workspace around each meeting where participants can share notes, photos and tasks. It also displays contact information and profiles (you can pull in data from LinkedIn and Facebook) for everyone in the meeting. A number of smart calendar apps also aggregate information about meetings, but they’re mostly aimed at helping you get prepared for or get to the meeting on time. Retrace, on the other hand, is more about what comes after the meeting (though preparation is part of the app too). “These [smart calendar] apps make you more punctual,” Marusco said. “We help you do your job better.” For example, during my interview with Marusco and his co-founder/CTO Kenan Pulak, they created a task for later — sharing their screenshots of Retrace with me. During their on-stage presentation, Marusco and Pulak walked through the entire meeting process and showed how Retrace can help. Beforehand, users can set up meetings, invite others, view profiles, and save the location to find directions later on. During the meeting, or right afterwards, someone could create a meeting summary and post follow-up tasks in the App. People to review those notes whenever they want, including their preparation for the follow-up meeting. To a large extent, Retrace is aimed at replacing the notes that people take during meetings and the follow-up emails that they send afterwards. That’s a system I’ve become quite used to, and one that more or less works. Marusco pointed out, however, that the notes you take are often only useful to yourself, and that email inboxes are a pretty cluttered place for the assignments, reminders, and additional material that is sent afterwards. Oh, and if you’re meeting with people who aren’t already Retrace users, the app should still be useful because you can store information for yourself, or share the content in the app with other people via email. The company has raised $100,000 from , , and . (CrunchFund was founded by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, while Archimedes Labs’ Chief Product Officer Keith Teare was Arrington’s co-founder at TC.) I was a little surprised to see Marusco and Pulak, who only recently graduated from Virginia Tech, working on this type of problem. It seems like this idea would come more naturally from an experienced sales type. And while they do expect salespeople (along with anyone else who has a lot of meetings) to be early adopters, they also argued that, as relative newcomers to the business world, they’re in a better position to recognize how clunky the current processes are. This is the pair’s second trip to Disrupt, having participated in the Startup Alley last year with their previous company, Roundpop. Marusco said that he and Pulak didn’t go to bars for a year beforehand in order to save the money to attend. As for Retrace, they’ve been working on it since June. Pulak said it was initially more of a contact-sharing product, but they decided that meetings were a bigger opportunity. And naturally, they’re heavy users of the app themselves — Marusco said that a few minutes after each meeting, the app reminds him to upload notes, and that he’s also making heavy use of the ability to create tasks. Retrace is launching today in a limited beta that you can sign-up for on . For now, it’s limited to an iPhone app, a decision that Marusco justified by arguing that fewer and fewer people are bringing their laptops to meetings. That said, the company does plan to launch eventually on other platforms, including the desktop web. It also plans to integrate with Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive for document-sharing. The business plan is to keep the basic app free, but to charge for premium features like profile customization and integration with other services like Salesforce. It sounds like you’re making this for someone who’s super-disorganized. How are you going to convince them to change their behavior? A lot of enterprise tools are terrible, whereas Retrace “spent a ton of time making sure that every interaction we do is as seamless as possible” — for example the automatic syncing with Google Calendar. Have you guys done enough customer development to figure out who the target user for whom you’re filling a real need? Yes, you need to dive into a vertical case. “I don’t think the concept of meetings actually exists.” Meetings are too nebulous: “I can’t think of single app or device that exists around the word ‘meeting.'” Agreed, but there is already specific interest from VCs and salespeople. We should be able to record the meeting and Retrace transcribes the notes. Yes, this should be more passive. “The only work you should make me do is invite people.” What about search? We have it.
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Mobile Enterprise Startup Workspot Lets Employees Securely Work From Whatever Device They Want
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Mobile enterprise startups are like unicorns. Nearly every VC I talk to wants to have a bet in this space, yet there really aren’t that many new candidates each year. Everyone knows that workers are bringing their own devices to work and want to use their personal tablets or phones instead of clunky, employer-mandated devices. Yet employers want to make sure that corporate data remains secure and trackable. Enter , a startup backed by Kleiner Perkins, Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint, that’s debuting today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. “We’re simplifying bring-your-own-devices for the enterprise,” said co-founder Ty Wang. “The biggest problem that most companies have is that people love these devices. They’re bringing them into work, but they can’t get their work done because the apps the they need like Microsoft’s Sharepoint, are still behind corporate firewalls.” Wang said older competitors that do mobile device management have solutions that lock the entire device down, that make them unusable in other situations. Instead, Workspot’s solution is a consumer app that an employee can download through the regular iOS app store. It gives them streamlined access to all of their work apps, requiring just a basic log-in with password. (That’s after a one-time authentication with their work’s network security appliance.) The company supports four of the leading VPN providers like Cisco and Juniper, which cover about 80 percent of the market and let workers log-in remotely into corporate networks. Employers can easily add in new apps for their employees to use from a control dashboard. Wang said the process takes a few minutes. “With most of the solutions today, you’d need to set up this system, go through a whole new testing cycle and all kinds of process to add apps,” he said. The product is actually free for end-users, and Workspot monetizes through offering employers two paid services. One is something called Insights, which gives them analytics into how their workers are using their software and the other is called Events, which gives the employer total visibility into all end-user activity for compliance and auditing. For those two services, the company charges anywhere from $150 a month for 0 to 25 users to $4 per user per month for companies with more than 250 employees. The company has raised $1.9 million from Kleiner, Norwest and others and has 11 employees. Their team has a wealth of experience in enterprise. The CEO Amitabh Sinha previously oversaw the integration of acquisitions at Citrix after being a general manager of Enterprise Desktops and Applications. The CTO and co-founder Puneet Chawla spent seven years at VMWare before working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures. Wang, who is also another co-founder, was a vice president of business development for Twilio after being a senior director for platform product marketing at Oracle.
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Somo, Developer Of The Summly iOS App, Secures New Investment From MMC Ventures
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Mike Butcher
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, the UK’s largest independent mobile marketing agency, has secured a second investment round led by and participated in by existing investors. While we normally don’t bother with investments where terms are undisclosed, it’s worth noting that Somo, while it’s a large independent mobile agency, is also rapidly developing a reputation as a ‘product Lab’ than simply pure agency. Somo has developed Apptimiser, a mobile advertising network tracking technology and App Planner, a media planning tool that associates app store ranking with download numbers. Most famously (at least of late) Somo developed the front end iOS interface for , the startup app recently for $30 million. Launched in 2009, Somo now has more than 125 employees and now has offices in London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Singapore and plans new offices in Europe and the USA. Clients include Audi, News Corp, AirAsia Expedia, Red Bull and Groupon. Nick Hynes, co-founder and CEO says “Our new tech and engineering hub is a demonstration of how we are building a centre of mobile expertise and experience… This investment will allow us to grow even faster.” In 2000, Hynes, alongside co-founder Carl Uminski, created Overture Europe. Overture was sold to Yahoo! in 2003 for $1.6bn. In 2004, Hynes founded The Search Works, which became Europe’s largest paid search agency as well as Google’s biggest European customer. He sold the group to TradeDoubler AB in 2007 for £56m. In 2009, Hynes partnered once again with Carl Uminski to found Somo. The announcement was made at London’s City hall at the , of which Somo is one of the first beneficiaries.
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Lenovo May Produce A Think-Brand Smartphone, Says ThinkPad Business Unit’s VP [UPDATE]
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Catherine Shu
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In an interview today with (link via Google Translate), Dilip Bhatia, vice president and general manager of Lenovo’s ThinkPad Business Unit, said that the Chinese tech company may build a Think-brand smartphone. If Lenovo does come out with a Think-brand smartphone (a ThinkPhone?), it would be inline with the company’s growth strategy. Lenovo is currently the world’s second largest marker of PCs behind HP, but is eager to diversify its core businesses by aggressively growing its mobile unit. Bhatia told Sina Tech that the company wants the Think brand, which includes ThinkPad laptops, to gain higher name recognition and desirability among younger consumers. Lenovo has already fared well with its current suite of smartphones: in Q42012, its smartphone business grew 216 percent year-over-year, shipping 9.5 million units and moving into the top five smartphone vendors in the world for the first time, according to . Much of that growth has been fueled, however, by the sale of low-end devices in China, and Lenovo is still searching for ways to gain a larger share of the global market. A high-end smartphone released under its flagship Think brand may serve as Lenovo’s answer to the iPhone and allow it to compete more directly with Apple (CEO Yang Yuanqing has said that he wants Lenovo to ). Other steps Lenovo has taken to build out its mobile business in China that will produce smartphones and tablets. The company has also been busy looking at acquisitions, a tactic it took in 2005 when it acquired the ThinkPad brand by purchasing IBM’s PC division. Reports emerged last week that Japan’s NEC is in talks to , and earlier this year BlackBerry was rumored to be another potential acquisition target. Lenovo denied the reports, but purchasing BlackBerry would have allowed it to gain access to a new OS and the Canadian company’s subscriber base. Lenovo has been emailed for comment. [ A Lenovo representative said, “The report was inaccurate, and I understand it is being updated. We have not announced any plans for a ThinkPad smartphone. Our executive stated that we continuously evaluate opportunities for growth, including things like new technologies, designs, markets and form factors.”]
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Resume-Killing Jobs Marketplace HireArt Wants To Help You Find A Job At An Education Startup
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Rip Empson
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If you’re not familiar with hiring platform, , they’re the startup that , courtesy of my colleague Sarah Perez. Yes, the Y Combinator-incubated startup launched in March last year to provide a new solution to an age-old problem experienced by every employer during the hiring process: Resumes are bullshit. Job candidates have a tendency to oversell themselves and fluff up their qualifications in their resumes, leaving employers to sort out the wheat from the hyperbolic chaffe. So HireArt devised a solution in which employers can ask applicants to complete a series of tasks in their purported areas of expertise to help them get a better sense of their skills. Using the startup’s platform, candidates can search for jobs and positions that are relevant to them, complete challenges and fill out applications, sending the finished product to employers with one click. Today, HireArt is bringing its model to one of the hottest arenas in Startup Land: Education technology. The startup announced today that it is launching an Education Technology Challenge, which is designed to help people who want to work in EdTech with startups that are hiring, and, in turn, help education companies identify the best candidates. HireArt co-founder Elli Sharef tells us that more than 50 companies have already signed on to participate in the challenge, including Scholastic, General Assembly, LearnSprout and Edmodo — to name a few. But why education and why now? Sharef says, that for one, the EdTech space has been seeing enormous growth over the last few years, with investments in EdTech startups tripling over the last decade, increasing to $429 million in 2011 from $146 million in 2002, according the National Venture Capital Association. This, in part has led to a growing interest in the EdTech space among entrepreneurs, startups and the media — both at local and state levels. the amount of EdTech stories it published in 2011. Of course, there’s also the fact that the price of a college diploma, coupled with soaring student debt, poor test scores and dwindling graduation rates make education as a whole ripe for technological solutions. We’ve seen a big uptick in the amount of education-focused startups over the last two years, and although there is the Series A crunch to contend with, the smart money says that this trend is going to continue. Furthermore, looking for job in EdTech offers the potential to have a meaningful impact on the world, rather than simply helping to create a better photo-sharing app. One HireArt candidate explains: “I did Teach For America for two years, and now I want to work in tech because I think it’s the best way to make best practices in education truly scalable. It’s really going to change the game.” For job candidates, the co-founder sees the potential appeal of the EdTech Challenge in that it offers an efficient and easy way to be considered by a wide range of educational employers at once. That, and that it’s a different (and maybe even fun) way to get into EdTech if you haven’t worked in the space before but want to dive in while the market is hot. Sharef also says that HireArt has found that employers tend to care much less about the resume when they have candidates’ video and text responses to consider as alternatives. Just in case you think that not having a sterling resume might hurt your chances. For those interested in applying to HireArt’s challenge, you can apply . After filling out an initial form, candidates will be invited back to complete the challenge, which consists of five questions centered around EdTech (like “What trends are you excited about in education?” for example). Using HireArt’s platform, candidates can record their responses in video, text and/or attachments. The best candidates will be shared with the participating employers, who will then reach out to candidates for phone screens and in-person interviews. HireArt’s Education Technology Challenge is free for both employers and candidates. Applications are rolling, with a final deadline of April 18th.
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Practice Fusion Launches Doctors Appointment And Reviews Site Patient Fusion
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Josh Constine
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“It’s absurd that people won’t go to a restaurant unless they’ve read reviews but they don’t do that for their healthcare.” That’s why top electronic medical records startup ‘s CEO Ryan Howard said his company built , a site where you can compare reviews of nearby physicians and book appointments as soon as within an hour. You could call it Yelp meets Uber for doctors, but with a big data angle that could ensure you’re seen regularly so you don’t get sick in the first place. found huge success over the past few years with its free electronic medical records (EMR) platform for doctors. Since Howard founded the company in 2005, it’s , grown to 255 employees, recruited 150,000 medical professionals onto its software, and now hosts records for 60 million patients in the US. That makes it the largest web-based EMR platform, and arguably the biggest overall behind the 27-year-old industry veteran AllScripts that’s slowing down. Rather than charge doctors or patients, Practice Fusion lets labs, pharmacies, and other healthcare businesses competing for doctors’ referrals to advertise to physicians through the platform. It’s a strong business, as Howard tells me Practice Fusion will be “well into the eight-digits of revenue this year” and it’s “close” to profitable. He confesses that internally there’s been “a lot of dialogues about going public”, and that the company probably will take just one more round of venture funding later this year before that happens. The core mission of Practice Fusion is to make people healthier. 200,000 people die each year due to allergic reactions to medicine and other complications that could have been prevented if their doctor knew their full medical history. Practice Fusion’s EMR platform lets doctors easily log and track health data of their patients, who can bring the record with them to any medical appointment. Making those appointments, though, is a big hassle requiring several calls to a doctor’s office. And patients don’t have an easy way of finding high quality, verified doctors. That’s where comes in. When Practice Fusion signs up a doctor, it verifies their identity and that they’re a certified physician. Then Practice Fusion emails their patients after appointments and asks them to review their doctor’s overall performance, bedside manner, waiting time, and if the treatment worked. And unlike Yelp where anyone can rate any doctor with having even having seen them, Patient Fusion has 1.5 million reviews based on visits it knows actually happened. This verified review system works similar to ZocDoc, and let Practice Fusion create the local doctor search and review side of Patient Fusion. Once a user has found a great doctor nearby, they can check the office’s schedule and book an appointment with no phone call required. That’s because Practice Fusion already serves as the calendar system for doctors on its EMR platform. All it had to do was let patients request to fill their doctors’ free slots. You can even search for a certain time slot across all nearby doctors so you can find the next available appointment if you want almost-immediate attention. The Patient Fusion system could seriously boost efficiency and transparency in healthcare, get people to see their doctors more often, and make everyone live stronger. It’s a boon to doctors’ profitability since a third of all staff time is spent scheduling appointments which can now happen almost automatically, and it assists docs with recruiting new patients. Most doctors have a shoddy web presence and aren’t great at marketing so that’s a big help. In turn, Howard says Pateint Fusion generates “more prescriptions, more lab tests, and more data we can mine insights from — all channels we monetize today.” Revenue will keep growing as more of Practice Fusion’s EMR customers opt into being listed in Patient Fusion. Howard says most docs love it, except for the tiny percentage who are exposed as quacks by bad reviews. “If the worst doctors ended up not practicing anymore [because of Patient Fusion], that’s a legacy I can live with” Howard jokes. The CEO agreed to give me a preview of the roadmap for Patient Fusion, which includes iOS and Android apps for search, appointments, and toting around your medical record. One important thing that’s missing in the launch version is the ability to sort doctors by those covered by your health insurance, but Howard tells me that should be added within a month. And down the road he hinted that you might even be able to pay for your appointments. As for Practice Fusion, it’s working on an API so quantified self devices can contribute data. That way you could correlate how your running routine or sleeping habits interact with medicines you’re taking. The company is also trying to bring in some rockstar executives and directors to lead its team that’s a bit on the young side. What’s most exciting is the intel that can emerge as its vault of health data grows richer and richer. The is building out an iPad app that analyzes fluctuations in how frequently different drugs are prescribed, which could blossom into a stock ticker for medicines. And with doctors appointments and medical records in the same system, Practice Fusion could truly advance preventative care. Soon, it could send you an email that says “You’re 40 and have high blood pressure but haven’t seen a doctor for a year. Why don’t you come in for a quick check up?”
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Now In Search Of Its Second Cohort, AcceleratorHK Wants To Boost Hong Kong’s Nascent Startup Scene
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Catherine Shu
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Hong Kong’s startup scene is still in its infancy, but the founders of , the city’s first accelerator program, have high hopes that it will become one of Asia’s leading tech hubs. AcceleratorHK, which is sponsored by , is now seeking the second batch of startups from within and outside of Hong Kong for its fourteen week incubator AcceleratorHK. The program, which and focuses on hybrid mobile development with HTML5, was founded by Telerik’s chief strategy officer Stephen Forte with TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon winner Paul Orlando.
The first class of AcceleratorHK included , , , , and . While the process of incorporating a business in Hong Kong is fairly straightforward and transparent, Forte says it’s often a challenge for startups to get the most basic operational necessities. “Unfortunately the Hong Kong business culture is skewed toward banking, real estate, import/export, and big business, so it is still challenging for a pre-revenue, pre-investment startup to do such things as open a bank account, obtain a lawyer, obtain an accountant, and get office space without cash on hand,” says Forte. For founders, the lack of an entrepreneurial culture can be an obstacle. “You also get social pressure to work a standard job,” says Orlando. “I even had one young guy in an earlier program I ran tell me that he never tells potential dates that he works at a startup, because what would be heard is ‘he has no job and no money…”’ Despite these drawbacks, AcceleratorHK’s founders say Hong Kong’s startup scene has made lots of progress within the past few months. “For example, co-working spaces are on the rise,” Forte notes. “A year ago today we only had 1,000 square feet of co-working space, today we have over 100,000 square feet and more on the way!” New mentors available to guide AcceleratorHK’s second cohort will include a local lawyer and accountant, and Forte is hopeful that “eventually the banks will come around, they follow the money.” “When we were putting together the first cohort a year ago, no lawyer or accountant would return my call when I told them the teams had no money,” says Forte. “Now they are coming to me.” Another perk for AcceleratorHK’s startups is the potential for government support. InvestHK, the Hong Kong Government’s agency responsible for business development in the territory, is supportive of the program and has helped non-Hong Kong teams apply for work visas, grants, and interest-free loans. AcceleratorHK’s specific focus on hybrid mobile app development with HTML5 gives members of each cohort a chance to share feedback as well as take advantage of user feedback in what Forte describes as “quite possibly the most mature mobile market in the world,” with five major 4G/LTE providers and cheap unlimited data plans that . “Most likely, startups have to change what they do as they learn more about what works for their particular customer segments. Hybrid development helps keep people more open-minded while they’re doing discovery work. If after you’ve proven you have customer demand and a business model and then you want to build native apps, I have no problem with that. But start with hybrid,” says Orlando. “The other difference is that at AcceleratorHK, we work with early-stage startups who are still really going out there to test their ideas. Hybrid is a good match for that.” Taxiwise founder Jean-Marc Ly, part of AcceleratorHK’s inaugural co-hort, first moved to Hong Kong to take advantage of the city’s high smartphone user rate and test out his previous startup CityWise. Taxiwise is an app that allows customers to book drivers in advance for full day or half-day packages, which is attractive because hailing a cab on Hong Kong’s congested streets is frustrating for both drivers and customers. Ly says Taxiwise has the opportunity to scale up in the region by collaborating with hotels, conference centers, serviced apartments, as well as accommodate tours and driving services for business travelers to Hong Kong. “Because it has one of the highest mobile penetration rates in the world, the city is the right size and density for us to test and validate our idea. Also, it’s right next to China, which is a huge potential market,” says Ly. Hong Kong’s proximity to “large markets both mature like Japan, Korea, Australia, as well as developing and growing such as China, India and South East Asia, make Hong Kong startups think global right from the start,” says Forte. “Validate your app in Hong Kong and then take it global right away is what we say.” Applications for AcceleratorHK’s second cohort will be accepted through April 15 at the .
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Mosaic Prepares To Launch Another $100M Of Projects On Its Solar Crowdfunding Platform
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup allowing people to invest in solar projects, today that it has received regulatory approval for its next wave of crowdfunding efforts in California, worth a total of $100 million in investment. back in January with three projects that were fully backed in fewer than 24 hours. In total, the company says that it has raised $1.1 million from more than 1,000 investors to fund 12 rooftop solar power plants. Co-founder and President Billy Parish added that after Mosaic made the announcement this morning, it launched a project that needed $157,000 in funding, and it raised the amount in six hours. Mosaic investors choose the projects that they want to back, and they can invest as little as $25. Once those projects start earning revenue, the investors are paid back with interest. The company estimates that investors will see a 4.5 percent return on average. Each project on Mosaic has to be approved by regulators, Parish said, but getting that approval is “less time/cost-intensive now.” As for that $100 million in just-approved projects, Parish said we can expect more to be listed on the Mosaic site soon. And here’s a new promotional video that Mosaic released today. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJaI79r9L5M&w=560&h=315]
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Just Six Months After Being Acquired, Twitter’s Vine Hits #1 Free Spot On Apple’s App Store
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Drew Olanoff
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Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app Vine last October before it ever launched, sending everyone into a frenzy about the company . In late January, Twitter finally . Since then, it’s gone from being from the featured section due to an issue over adult content to being used in and celebrities. Today, it all paid off, as it hit the top of the charts for free apps in the U.S., : Hey guys, remember that time we made the No. 1 most popular app in the world? — Rus (@rus) Vine: bigger than Batman. — bobby (@bobby) It’s a pretty impressive feat for any app that’s not a game to hit this spot, and it’s also impressive for Twitter to have another presence on the list, in addition to their own core app. Clearly the push from Twitter helped the cause. The top app on the free store gets quite a bit of downloads after it hits the spot, eventually coming back down to earth after a quick explosion. The charts are based on new downloads and the trajectory of its current download popularity. Therefore Twitter’s own app sits at No. 35, which just means that a lot of people have already downloaded it. When an app is at the top of the charts for a long time, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of new users being onboarded daily. Vine’s closest competition in the social sphere? Snapchat. And even then, a few games stand between the two. The good news for Vine and Twitter is that the service is iOS-only at the moment, which means there is quite a bit more growth for the app to experience, much like Instagram did when it went over to the Android platform. are Android users. The multi-app approach is working for social companies, as all you have to do is look at Facebook’s success with Messenger, Instagram and the quick-hit Poke to get the idea. Once a big platform starts splintering off smaller experiences with focus like video, , its main audience will of course at least give them a try. to the Vine team.
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Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley For $69M-$100M To Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts
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Ingrid Lunden
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Educational publisher is diving deeper into the world of open and social educational data: it has bought , the London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics and organizations to share research and collaborate with others via a social network. The terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed but we understand it is for a sum between $69 million and $100 million. We first broke the news of this deal when it was still being negotiated, in . The acquisition will heat up competition between Elsevier and other large publishers moving into ed-tech, among them , which owns , a competitor to Mendeley. Mendeley is both a technology/platform acquisition as well as an acqui-hire for Elsevier. CEO Victor Henning, one of the three PhD co-founders of Mendeley, tells us in an interview that all of Mendeley’s 50 staff are coming over to Elsevier, and Henning will become VP of strategy for the company — a sign that Elsevier may be gearing up for more activity and possibly acquisitions in this space. (Picture of that Mendeley team taken earlier is below, complete with kitschy hologram.) Olivier Dumon, MD of academic and government research markets at Elsevier, says that the company does not plan to merge Mendeley with existing Elsevier products that once used to compete against it, such as , “but we will integrate it better.” Elsevier notes that in some regards it’s been working with Mendeley since 2009. “Elsevier has referred users to Mendeley, invited Mendeley to build apps on ScienceDirect using its open APIs, and sponsored Mendeley’s Science Online London conferences on Open Science,” the company said in a statement on the acquisition. Mendeley — which was founded in 2008 and has raised from investors including , , and — will keep running both its main platform as well as its Institutional Edition, aimed at helping universities and other large organizations track research and what’s being read in real time. Mendeley currently has 2.3 million users on its platform (up from 2.1 million in January), as well as 24 “high profile” institutions across North America, Europe and Asia. The plan is to expand the amount of free services offered across those, such as doubling the amount of storage for individuals to 2 gigabytes. It will also keep its API free and open to use: that API today is used by some 300 apps, up from 260 in January. Henning says Mendeley will continue to source data from different places — not just focus on what’s published or owned by Elsevier. “If people want to source the latest research on neurobiology, it wouldn’t make sense to limit this,” said Henning. “Elsevier will help us by enriching our content, but when it comes to other publishers it will also increase the transit routes into them.” The acquisition also will mean that Mendeley can shift gears a bit. In the past, it charged users for extras like more storage space, usage packages for larger teams and so on, services that helped the company triple its revenues in the past year. Henning says that if it had remained independent there would have been more of a pressure to push revenue generation even more. “But I think with Elsevier we can take a longer term perspective,” he says. “What do our users want, rather than having to monetize too early. The focus will be to growing our user base rather than trying to monetize right away.” As part of that, Mendeley also now wants to focus resources on some projects that it has been wanting to tackle for some time. The company already has a strong use on iOS devices; now it will be looking to launch an Android app later this year. When we first broke the news that the two companies were in acquisition talks, I noticed a lot of negative chatter in the comments of the story and elsewhere — in fact you might argue that some of the sweetened deals such as increased storage are there to help hold on to skeptical users — with many concerned that the product would become too proprietary or commercial as a result. Henning is insistent that this won’t happen here. “If you look at any acquisition, whether its Mailbox getting bought by Dropbox or us, people are always anxious about what will happen to a service,” he says. “In our case it will accelerate our vision.” : Since posting last night, Mendeley’s published a Q&A on the deal , and I’ve had a couple of others getting in touch passing on other information on price, with one, claiming to be close to the deal, suggesting a lower sale price of €50 million ($65 million).
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Twitter Pushes Android App Update To Fix The “Me” Tab Bug
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Drew Olanoff
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Over the weekend, we told you about an from last Wednesday. The issue centered around the “Me” tab not loading properly, just giving you a spinning wheel on a white screen. Users took to Twitter to complain about the bug, saying that they couldn’t access important features on the screen, like reading DMs and switching accounts. You could search for yourself and tap on your avatar to find your way to your profile, but that was a hack more than anything else. Most users just thought they had a bad connection and waited for the screen to load…forever. Today, the company to the app that fixes the bug: v4.0.1
– Fixes “Me” tab loading issues
– Improved UI on Honeycomb devices I’ve confirmed with multiple people who were having the problem that this update does indeed fix the issue, and the “Me” tab is now loading quickly. It didn’t seem to affect every Android device, but the folks it did affect have been pretty loud about it since last Wednesday. Here’s a tweet from just a few hours ago: Silly new update for twitter android has a bug and now I can't see photos or my own profile :'( — Sums🦋 (@sumayasmiles) Consider the bug squashed. Twitter has been working on unifying the experience for the service on all platforms, including native apps. The main reason for pushing out updates to the mobile versions were to incorporate the that were announced last week. This was just a bump in the road for an that now lets you cycle through your four tabs with a gesture. Now all four tabs work. [Photo credit: ]
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Tumblr Overhauls Its Android App With Path-Like Interface, Brings “Take A Photo” Back To The Desktop
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Drew Olanoff
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Today, Tumblr launched a new version of its . Its interface is the design you’re seeing in many apps lately, mostly Yes, Tumblr has gone with its UI. That aside, the app feels way more responsive, letting you scroll through all of the cat photos and emo shots of your pals. Its pull-down-to-refresh even got a snazzier animation. The brief note from the came along with an animation of the new navigation…animations: Tumblr for Android just got a total facelift! We’ve completely redesigned the interface, added fancy post animations, made images pop, and a whole lot more. Download the update today. Tumblr has also made it so that photos pop out in your stream more, so as to increase interaction within the app. This is something that Facebook recently announced it’s doing with its own News Feed: It’s interesting that Tumblr attacked the Android app first, as its still has this boring old interface: Stay tuned for the iOS version, though, since its latest major overhaul was . There’s only one problem with the new interface, though. You can’t post from any page you’re on. I’d like to see the animated “post” button follow me no matter where I am on the site. Right now, you have to go back to your stream to post something. Since it’s not all about mobile, for those who like to take “selfies,” (who doesn’t?) the company has to the desktop site. If you just want to show all of your followers exactly how you feel right now, you can just shoot a shot and post it to your stream like this: Sadly, that feature only works on Chrome and the latest versions of Firefox. Sorry, Safari and IE users, no selfies for you. Happy Tumblr-ing. [Photo credit: ]
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How To Mine Bitcoins
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John Biggs
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Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – is the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahua. But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is currently wild. At $188 per coin, the direction of the bitcoin is anyone’s guess right now and, unlike equities, these things don’t split. In short, you should probably mine. But what is bitcoin mining? Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file. You can but just understand that for every block mined you get 25 coins or, at current rates, $4,722.25. Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $188, an alarming result that is probably caused by money movements related to Cyprus and a general bubble-like excitement over the platform in general. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price. As it stands, mining solo is very nearly deprecated. The process of finding blocks is now so popular and the difficulty of finding a block so high that it could take over three years to generate any coins. While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual bitcoins are worth. Pooled mining, however, is far more lucrative. Using a service like “Slush’s pool” (more on that later) you can split the work among a ground of people. Using this equation: While this is simplified, it is basically how the system works. You work for shares in a block and when complete you get a percentage of the block based on the number of workers alongside you, less fees. Using this method, I have been able to raise about $1.50 over the weekend by running a dormant PC. The astute among you will note that I probably used twice that amount of electricity. Being a neophile, I’m surprised it took me so long to start mining. explained how to set up a pooled mining account so I thought it would be interesting to share the instructions. 1. You can either store your wallet locally or store it online. is an online wallet that is surprisingly simple to set up. Wallets require you to use or download a fairly large blockchain file – about 6GB – so downloading and updating a local wallet may be a non-starter. Like all wealth storage mediums, keeping your bitcoins “local” is probably a better idea than trusting a web service, but that’s a matter of private preference. There is no preferred wallet type and there are obvious trade-offs to both. Privacy advocates would probably say a local wallet is best. You can download a local wallet but make sure you keep a copy of your data backed up. Once you’ve created a wallet, you get an address like this: 1BEkUGADFbrEShQb9Xr4pKPtM8jAyiNQsJ. This, without the period, is a direct way to send bitcoins to your wallet. Make a note of your address. In Coinbase, the wallet address found under linked accounts. 2. To mine in a pool you have to work with a group of other miners on available blocks. The most popular is Slush’s Pool found . You can also try guilds like as well as a number of other options. Each of the pools is characterized mostly by the fees they charge per block – 2% for Slush’s pool, for example – and the number of users. Pools with fewer users could also have a slower discovery time but pools with many users usually result in smaller payments. How can you be sure the pool owner doesn’t steal all your bitcoins? You can’t. However, as one pool owner, Slush, notes: For simplicity’s sake, I’m using Slush’s Pool and have created three workers. First, create a pool login. Then add workers. The workers are sub-accounts with their own passwords and are usually identified by [yourlogin].[workername]. I have three workers running, currently – one on my iMac and two on my old PC.
You must create workers to mine. The instructions are very straightforward for most services so don’t become overwhelmed. Like any online club, you can dig deeply into the subculture surround bitcoin as you gain experience. I like to think of it as a financial MMORPG. Also be sure to enter your wallet address into the pool information. This will ensure you get your bitcoins. 3. There are a number of mining options for multiple platforms although OSX users may find themselves in a bit of a pickle. Miners use spare GPU cycles to power the mining operation, much like services like SETI@Home uses spare cycles for finding intelligent life. Miners, on the other hand, use these cycles to help handle peer-to-peer processes associated with bitcoins. Thus by doing “work” you are maintaining the network as well. is the simplest solution for Windows users as it allows you to create miners using almost all standard graphics cards. You can download it . is also a popular solution. Both require you to enter your worker info and pool and they’ll start mining. Linux users can run miners like . An excellent guide to installing a miner on Ubuntu is . OS X users can use , a two-year old command-line program that will mine using OpenCL. Sadly, it uses deprecated calls to Bitcoin and is quite a bit slower. As a result, you need to run your own proxy, , that allows Diablo to connect with services like Slush’s pool. Both of these programs usually run without issue on OS X although you may need to install . To mine I’ve created a script that I run in Terminal that simply runs the proxy in the background and then connects Diablo. Note the last two arguments are necessary for Mountain Lion. is far easier to run – you simply click an icon and enter some data – and both have very rudimentary, text-based interfaces. Running Diablo on my iMac has not had much effect on application performance under OS X although it does slow down my Windows 8 machine considerably. 4. Bitcoins are baffling in that they are wildly simple to use and mine. Speculators, then, would probably be able to throw hundreds of machines at the problem and gather bitcoins like raindrops, right? Wrong. As more bitcoins are found, they become more difficult to find. will help you understand what you’re up against but understand that this isn’t a sure thing. I’ve run my systems for a weekend and seen a mere $1.50 – enough for a coke – but other users may have improved hardware and methods to succeed. In short, if it costs more to run your hardware than you gain in bitcoins, you’re probably doing something wrong. Good luck in your journey and enjoy your first foray into this wild and wooly world.
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Nearly 60K Low-Quality Apps Booted From Google Play Store In February, Points To Increased Spam-Fighting
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Sarah Perez
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Google has stepped up its efforts to remove spammy or otherwise non-compliant applications from its mobile application marketplace, Google Play, in recent weeks. App deletions hit a record high in February, with 60,000 apps removed during the course of the month – the largest round of app deletions to date. The news of this massive app removal comes just ahead of the launch of a revamped version of Google Play (version 4.0), which is expected to arrive in the near future. We learned of this large, new round of app deletions from a company in the mobile app industry which has insight into changes like this. To be clear, not all of these apps were deleted by Google. Some, such as a handful of Sprint bundles and apps, as well as the product from startup cautionary tale Color and several others, were likely pulled by the publishers themselves. But with a number as high as 60,000, it’s clear that many of these were pulled by Google directly. Below is a summary of those findings, indicating which categories were most affected. As you can see, a good number of the deleted apps were those in the MP3/ringtone category, which often includes less-than-reputable publishers, to put it kindly. Though Google doesn’t vet apps prior to publication the way that Apple does for the App Store, it has historically deleted applications that violate its Terms of Service, such as those spreading malware, infringing on others’ copyrights, or those with graphic, sexual material. However, Google often addressed these situations in the past more as a “ “- jumping in to immediately pull malware, for example. Google won’t comment on the record about mobile app deletions, but it’s understood that, as with Google Search itself, the company has been steadily improving the capabilities of its automated systems. Instead of reviewing applications ahead of publication one-by-one with an army of reviewers as Apple does, Google takes the opposite approach and scans its app store the apps have gone live. As Google Play’s store grows, the data pool also gets stronger, allowing the company to improve upon its algorithms and automated efforts at handling spam. Spam apps violate a number of Google policies, necessitating their removal. In fact, the company has a dedicated section in its Terms of Service detailing how spam apps are identified:
With so many ringtone/MP3 apps in the recent deletions, it seems that Google is starting to moderate its own app store for quality – it’s just going about it in a different way than Apple. It’s also worth noting that as today’s mobile application marketplaces continue to grow in size, the sheer number of applications available becomes a number of lesser importance. In February, the Apple App store had more than 800,000 applications for iOS devices, while Android’s “official” was 700,000 apps as of this past October. Meanwhile, some have placed that number as high as currently, or , depending on your data source. For what it’s worth, Google today confirms again that its official count is still 700,000. For end users, the difference between 600,000 and 800,000 apps is not as meaningful as the number implies. While as an early adopter, it means that a number of the startups TechCrunch covers aren’t available on Android on day one, but for mainstream users, these missing apps represent the long tail. Today’s Android users may be more concerned about the quality of the apps that are live and available for download, not the numbers. And quality is a metric that Google’s automated systems can now attack at scale.
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YC-Backed TapIn.TV Evolves Into Framebase, Aims To Make Building Video Products Less Painful
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Greg Kumparak
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Sometimes, the business you be building is hidden beneath the one you already are. Back in early 2012, four friends set out to build . As one of many competitors in the crowded live mobile video broadcasting space, TapIn.TV focused almost entirely on video. After months of development, they noticed something rather troubling: building video stuff — the uploading, the recording, the playback — is too damned hard. So they’re setting out to fix it. Over the past few months, the company (part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 class) has quietly been changing directions. What was once TapIn.TV is now , an infrastructure service meant to make adding video functionality to a project a matter of dropping in a few lines of code. Development on TapIn.TV, meanwhile, has been halted. I generally try to avoid the “Company X is like Company Y, but for Z” trope, but it’s just too accurate here. What Twilio is doing for telephony, and what Stripe is doing for credit card payments, Framebase wants to do for video. You see, the challenge of developing a video-centric site (or even just integrating a single video-centric feature into an existing site) isn’t just the initial building process. That’s maybe half the battle. Most developers worth their weight in hoodies and Red Bull could hack together an upload form, patch in something like Zencoder, and find a decent open-source HTML5 player to embed. It might not be pretty, but it’ll get the job done. The bulk of the challenge comes in video for the long term. Once you’ve amassed a small mountain of video, where do you store it? When new playback formats emerge for new devices, how do you support them? If video isn’t a core feature of your project, it’s enough work that you’ll probably have to bring in another full timer. Thats where Framebase comes in. Their API handles the recording (if you want users to be able to record on-the-fly from their webcam) and the uploading (for videos stored on the user’s hard drive), transcodes the videos to all sorts of different formats, stores them, and hands you back an unbranded player that should work across almost all devices and browsers. Most importantly, they’ll make sure it all keeps working for the long haul. While they (smartly) avoided naming names before the contracts were dotted and crossed, Framebase’s founders says they’re already working with a bunch of “companies that you’ve actually heard of.” Meanwhile, they’ve received enough interest from investors that, while the company isn’t actively fundraising right now, our conversation suggested that they’ll have their pick of the lot when they do. Framebase is currently web-only, though they tell me that native mobile frameworks (for, say, adding video uploads to your iOS app) are in the works. It’s worth noting that this space isn’t without competitors, nor is it without its sacrifices to the deadpool. A similar service, , recently shut the doors and killed the lights without much fanfare. Their most lively competition is probably , though CameraTag focuses on capturing and uploading webcam videos as opposed to those that have already been recorded. Pricing for the product varies widely, from a free package (allowing 5,000 minutes of playback and 150 minutes of uploads per month) meant for developers to test with to a $199 “Traction” package (100,000 minutes of playback and 3000 minutes of uploads). Of course, they also offer the classic “Call us and we’ll work something out” enterprise package for the big guys. With their current pricing structure, it seems Framebase is focusing on targeting projects where video is something of a secondary feature, rather than the core of the business. If you’re aiming to be the next YouTube, for example, you’d be hitting the aforementioned big plan’s 3,000-minute monthly upload limit every 90 seconds. But this approach makes sense: if video is the No. 1 focus of your site, you’ve probably (hopefully) already got all the video infrastructure you need being built in-house. Whatever the case, the possibilities here are beyond exciting. Without Twilio, there would be no GroupMe. Without Stripe, companies like would have to spend weeks focusing on how to take payments. What becomes possible once video is easy for everyone? You can check out , or .
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Report: 46% Of Social Login Users Still Choose Facebook, But Google Is Quickly Gaining Ground
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Frederic Lardinois
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Since Google its earlier this year, social logins have suddenly become a hot topic again. According to the latest data from social login provider , Facebook continues to be the most popular identity provider for social logins, but the social network is starting to lose some ground to Google. Services like Janrain, and their competitors make it much easier for users to register and sign in at a website (and for websites to get more information about their users). Most sites that use social logins offer a variety of options, with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Twitter being some of the most popular, but depending on a site’s niche, even offering social logins through networks like SoundCloud or Tumblr can also drive up registrations. supports over 25 networks. Facebook currently accounts for about 46% of social logins on Janrain and Google’s share is 34%. For Facebook, that’s a 3% drop from Q4 2012, however, while Google’s share increased by exactly those same 3%. This is the second consecutive quarter during which Facebook lost ground to Google. Janrain argues that this is a sign of the “trust and affinity felt toward Google’s service.” It’ll be interesting to see if Google’s push to make its Google+ logins the standard for sites that use Google logins will allow it to increase usage in the coming quarters. to its feature set, so it’ll likely make an appearance in its next report. As Janrain’s report also notes, there are large geographic differences between which service users prefer for their social logins. In the Netherlands, for example, the social networking site accounts for a large share of logins through Janrain, while Google’s remains popular in Brazil and India.
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Darrell Etherington
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Adknowledge Acquires SocialWeekend Labs To Add App Promotion Tools
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Anthony Ha
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Online ad company just that it has acquired , a startup that built tools for developers to promote their apps, and also built its own Facebook and mobile apps (such as Birthdays+ and Photos+). It sounds like Adknowledge is most interested in the startup’s developer tools, as well as its team — the company says it plans to integrate those tools into its own offerings, while continuing to serve existing SocialWeekend customers. “SocialWeekend has a first-class team of engineers with proven user acquisition expertise,” said Ryan Stephens, general manager of Adknowledge’s Apps business, in the acquisition press release. “They can help us take our already-robust marketing suite for app developers to an entirely new level.” doesn’t go into too much detail about the startup’s technology, but it says that more than 150 million users have “installed a SocialWeekend product.” It also emphasizes the startup’s strength in analytics, social, scaling and mobile. SocialWeekend was founded by Shane Walker, Andrew Tso, and Fariz Chowdhury, and it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Brad Harrison Ventures, and various angels. The financial terms of the acquisition aren’t being disclosed, either. The entire SocialWeekend team will supposedly join Adknowledge’s San Francisco office.
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Instantgram.Me Turns Your Instagram Photos Into Magnets, Calls The Whole Fridge Into Question
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Jordan Crook
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These days, you can get your Instagram photos printed onto just about anything. There are companies that print out Post-it-sized Instagrams, Instagrams on Canvas, Instagrams on wood and fiberglass, and everything in between. Today, is joining those ranks with its new Instagram magnet-making business. The service offers 9 magnets, all 5cm x 5cm, for $17.00 with free worldwide shipping. The prices aren’t necessarily a steal, but magnets are actually smart uses for Instagram pictures. Let’s face it: our Instagrams aren’t always worthy of a spot on our walls, or even printing in the first place. But magnets are cute and funny, and they’re usually holding up pictures of our loved ones anyways. Instantgram has just lopped one in with the other. The company also sells non-magnet prints of your Instagram photos in a product called Squares. You can either get a 24-set of 5″ x 5″ prints, or a 48-count set of 2.5″ x 2.5″ prints again for $17. The beauty of it is, with both magnets and squares, you can choose duplicates of certain pictures thanks to an easy-to-understand interface. This turns your Instagram photos into those cute little elementary-school pocket pictures you used to pass out to your friends. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that an entire ecosystem has sprouted up around Instagram, an app that generated no revenue for the majority of its lifetime, before getting acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. There are countless services that are based on Instagram, from printing services to Instagram clones and back again. We have yet to see any of these services or apps break away from the crowd into household-name territory, but that isn’t to say it’s not going to happen. Instantgram, like and and and and , has a good a shot as any. But perhaps not so great a name. [gallery columns="4" ids="794473,794474,794475,794476"]
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Gentry Underwood, CEO And Co-Founder Of Mailbox, To Speak At Disrupt NY
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Alexia Tsotsis
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Mailbox launched to much fanfare earlier this year. Heralded as “ “, iOS users virtually lined up to try the app. It was a hit. So much so that led by CEO and co-founder Gentry Underwood. And now, at the end of April, Underwood will be onstage with us at Disrupt New York. , Gentry led his team through the pivot from Orchestra to Mailbox, and finally to Dropbox . Pivoting takes guts, but Gentry proved it can be done successfully while taking on Apple and Google. We’re excited to have him. Gentry joins that currently includes eBay CEO John Donahoe, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and more coming to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are currently available with the early bird discount ending Thursday, April 11.
CEO and co-founder, Gentry is a designer and entrepreneur who has a passion for creating simple products that help people work together. He co-founded , now a part of Dropbox, where he continues to build the mobile inbox that puts email in its place. Before Mailbox, Gentry led IDEO’s Knowledge Sharing domain and the creation of IDEO’s TUBE, an award-winning social intranet. Gentry has a BS in human-computer interaction from Stanford University, a MA in psychology from Santa Clara University, and an MS in anthropology and community development from Vanderbilt University.
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Report: More Than 250M Domain Names Have Now Been Registered, Almost Half Are .Com And .Net
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Frederic Lardinois
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The total number of registered domain names passed 250 million in the last quarter of 2012, according to latest . More than 6 million domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2012, bringing the total to 252 million worldwide. The basic .com domains, of course, make up the majority of registered domain names. By the end of December users had registered 106.2 million .com domains, as well as 14.9 million .net addresses. The .com and .net top-level domains (TLDs) also accounted for the majority of newly registered domain names. In total, 8 million .com and .net TLDs were registered during the fourth quarter of 2012, up slightly from the 7.9 million that were registered in the year-ago quarter. About 21 percent of .com and .net websites, by the way, are just one-page sites and 15 percent are registered but don’t point to a working site at all. Outside of those two TLDs, country code top-level domains grew another 5 percent quarter over quarter and 21.6 percent year-over-year to a total of 110.2 million domain names, with China driving quite a bit of this growth. Indeed, China is now the seventh-largest TLD, according to Verisign’s data. Here is the full running order of the largest TLDs: The largest TLDs in order by zone size were .com, .de (Germany), .net, .tk (Tokelau), .uk (United Kingdom), .org, .cn (China), .info, .nl (Netherlands) and .ru (Russian Federation). The one domain that probably stands out here is .tk, the top-level domain of . These .tk domain names, which are available for free through , have a bit of a , but chances are that the lure of a free domain name is driving most of these registrations.
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Facebook In Talks To Buy Bang With Friends
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Alexia Tsotsis
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Facebook is in the process of acquiring startup , according to multiple sources, in order to make a foray into the online dating space. According to these same sources, the acquisition will be a $30 million deal in both cash and stock, as that seems to be the for gimmicky startups these days. Concerned about what the success of college-friendly dating apps like and means for the future of social, we’re hearing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to scoop up the service to ramp up Facebook’s competitiveness. We’re also hearing that Facebook attempted to clone the product, which allows friends to choose which of their friends they’re interested in sleeping with (and connects them if the feeling’s mutual), internally before approaching the founders. Robust staff penetration and rumors that Google is building a competitive hook-up platform called Google F*ck Now also hastened the deal. According to one source, Facebook considers the dating market to be “bigger than e-commerce,” and it hopes to evolve beyond being a platform for stalking people you are silently crushing on into a platform for actually banging those people. Nine years after its launch, the social network will finally realize its full potential: From stalking to action, making the world “more open and connected” where it counts the most. Like Instagram, Bang With Friends will remain mostly independent from Facebook. However, integration with Facebook’s core offerings isn’t off the table: potential of a Bang Graph as a supplement to the Social Graph has given some clued-in insiders a proverbial chubby, adding another dimension to Facebook Graph Search. The company plans on launching a mobile app called “Wood” to compete head to head with Tinder by the end of this year. Bang With Friends has seen in recent months, as stories about the and salacious product have titillated the imaginations of bored bloggers and readers with their minds in the gutter. We’re also hearing that Yahoo’s had made the startup a competitive offer, but the founders eschewed the portal because of Marissa Mayer’s controversial “bang from home” ban. I in Facebook. Also, this was an joke (in case are working on ).
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Midokura Scores $17.3M Series A To Ramp Up Its Network Virtualization Offering On A Global Scale
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Darrell Etherington
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Japan’s , a startup with offices in San Francisco, Tokyo, Lausanne and Barcelona, today announced a $17.3 million Series A funding round, led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, along with NTT Group’s DOCOMO Innovations, Inc., and Innovative Ventures Fund Investment, the investment arm of NEC Group. The funding will be used to hire and grow the team in preparation for future deployment and expansion of Midokura’s network virtualization services. Midokura sells its offering to companies that want to deploy their own cloud solutions, like mobile network operators and enterprise customers. It’s a virtualization offering that works with popular cloud platforms, simplifying the costs and requirements associated with managing cloud computing deployments. MidoNet is an infrastructure-as-a-service play, and has already managed to attract considerable interest from its beta product launch back in October of 2012. “MidoNet, our software-defined networking product, is a solution for companies that are wanting to build a cloud, whether they’re a cloud service provider, or a hosting provider, or a large enterprise, or even a small company that wants to build a cloud, as you start the process you realize that it has some problems to do with scalability, with automation, with isolation,” Midokura Chief Strategy Officer Ben Cherian explained in an interview. “Our product MidoNet solves these problems having to do with cloud networking.” This is a considerably large funding round, but Cherian said it’s what the company needs to grow at the pace needed to keep up with the interest so far. Co-founder Tatsuya Kato, who as part of this announcement is moving from the CEO position to a role as chairman of the board, originally set out to build essentially an Amazon Web Services for Japan with co-founder, former CTO and new CEO Dan Mihai Dumitriu, but found it to be a huge problem that needed addressing first, hence the creation of Midokura. Now, the team plans to grow the company quickly to accomplish its goals. “A large percentage of this is to be put back into the company to build more product, to hire more engineers,” Cherian said. “The goal is really to go deeper in terms of the technology. We’re going to be doing more work in terms of adding features to it, in terms the management aspects to it, and in terms of integrations with other technologies and other companies out there. All of that takes people, so mostly the funds are going to be used to bring on more engineers and more technical folks.” Midokura sees the market evolving quickly in this space, with more enterprise customers coming on board as demand increases and product awareness around software-defined networking grows. To make sure it can best meet the demand in that area when it arises, it’s laying the engineering groundwork now with this sizeable Series A.
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TechCrunch Is Breaking Into Real-Money Gaming
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Even though that pave the way for online gambling in the U.S., Zynga is not going to be the first to get in on it. Given how terrible the economics of running a blog are, TechCrunch has been exploring new revenue streams. They may include, but are not limited to, , Path 3.0-like stickers for Livefyre comments and a . What has been most promising, however, are virtual currencies and real-money gaming. If the hope of real-money gaming has boosted , imagine what it can do for AOL’s stock. In that vein, we’re launching a new series of slots and social betting games that let you put real money on the startups you think will get ahead. Think of it as an even easier way to bypass SEC regulations around being an accredited investor. Why bother with the $1,000 minimums of Funders Club or deal with AngelList or SecondMarket, when you can just straight-up gamble your seed capital? There are real prizes in this, including a ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco (which is worth $1,795). The Tesla Roadster, I’m afraid, is virtual though. But if you do get three Alexias in a row, she could write you a poem and if you get three Anthony Has in a row, he could sing you his infamous rendition of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” over Skype. For every three-in-a-row match that readers get, we’ll collect their contact information for a drawing. And one person randomly selected from each pool will win the prize. Special thanks to and for putting this working game together in literally a week.
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Space Monkey Founders Show Off Their P2P Storage System, Prepare For Kickstarter Campaign
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Anthony Ha
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We’ve Google Ventures-backed before, but last week we actually got to film the peer-to-peer storage service in-action. Co-founder Clint Gordon-Carroll described the technology as “our way of disrupting the cloud” — you store your data on your own Space Monkey device, but it’s then encrypted and backed up on other devices across the company’s user network. The goal is to give you the advantages of cloud storage (backup, sharing, and accessibility from any device) at faster speeds and lower costs (a basic subscription costs $10 a month and includes a terabyte of storage). You can see Gordon-Carroll walk through the Space Monkey interface towards the end of the video above. He browses the folders he’s stored on Space Monkey, then starts playing music without any noticeable delay. He also shows off the pinning feature, where certain files are also stored locally on your computer for offline access. I asked Gordon-Carroll and his co-founder Alen Peacock about their target user. They said they’re looking for people with lots of data. “It’s a generic market, but we see a trend, and that trend is the amount of data people are generating or creating over time,” Gordon-Carroll said. As for what’s next, they said that they’ve got most of the technology and manufacturing in place. In the next few weeks, they plan to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund their efforts to actually bring Space Monkey to market.
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Why Facebook Home Is Potentially Brilliant
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Greg Kumparak
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Let’s say we build a phone, theoretically. We’re not! But if we did, we could get maybe 10 million people to use it. 20 million. That doesn’t move the needle for us. – With , it’s looking like Zuck was being almost completely honest. isn’t building a Facebook Phone. They’re letting HTC do it for them. But that’s seemingly not the end goal, here. Don’t worry too much about Facebook Phone, as in whatever hardware might get announced at the event on Thursday. It is, at best, a test bed. Facebook doesn’t want Android phone. They want of the Android phones, including the ones already out there. And they can get a whole bunch of ’em, too. You see, today’s leak signals something rather crucial to Facebook’s Android strategy. Contrary to a thousand reports leading up to Thursday’s announcement, Facebook doesn’t seem to be Android. If they are, it’s in subtle ways — little tweaks that polish up the experience (with things like Facebook Chat bubbles being allowed to float above other apps), made because in this case, with this phone, they can. Instead, most of the magic comes . A launcher that can, like the dozens of launchers already on the Google Play store, be installed on any Android phone once Facebook flips the switch. Facebook isn’t reinventing the wheel. It’s more like they’re getting ready to sneak up in the middle of the night and strap shiny blue rims onto everyone else’s wheels. For the unfamiliar, a launcher lays of an Android build, rather than replacing it. It boots when your phone boots. It can completely overhaul the device’s built-in homescreen, add functionality, and determine both the general look and the way you launch apps. To 90% of users, what else does an OS even ? If Facebook wants to add fancy, built-in-house Messenger functionality to the home screen? Sure, a launcher can do that. If Facebook wants to do away with the standard bucket-o’-icons-and-widgets design of the home screen entirely, and turn the whole thing into what is essentially an always-on Facebook app that just happens to have a drawer for other apps? Sure. Any phone that Facebook can stick this launcher on “the” Facebook phone. All those Google Apps? They’d still work. And you know what Google could do about it, even if they cared to? Not a whole lot. Facebook just needs to get people to install it. If only Facebook had some way of reaching a few hundred million Android users. If only they could shout to the Android masses, “Hey! You! You like Facebook? Make phone a Facebook phone! Click here!” Oh, Of the 750 million-or-so Android devices out there, Facebook is regularly used on around 200 million of them. Not just installed. Let’s say Facebook decides to push this launcher out to everyone, and sends out a note like the one above the next time a user opens their app. If two out of ten people already using Facebook on Android go along with it — bam, that’s 40M “Facebook Phones”, not a one of them built by Facebook. And two in ten is probably . Sure, might not install it. You’ve probably got a rooted HTC Butterfly imported from Japan running a nightly build of Cyanogen. But how many people will install it just to give it a try? How many people — the little brothers and sisters of the world — see their Android phones as Facebook-in-a-box? Lots. Lots and lots and lots. So why might Facebook even bother working with HTC, as today’s leak suggests they are? Because they can. It gets the ball rolling, and works out for everyone. HTC gets to launch “the” Facebook Phone (and maybe, just a bit of exclusivity with ), and Facebook gets a free test bed and an example handset to convince other OEMs to ship with their launcher out of the box. “The strategy we have is different from every other tech company that’s building their own hardware system, like Apple. We’re going in the opposite direction.”
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Menlo Ventures Adds Playspan Founder Karl Mehta As Its Newest Partner
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Colleen Taylor
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said today that , the tech entrepreneur perhaps best known for founding virtual goods monetization startup and leading it as CEO through its , has joined the Silicon Valley venture capital firm as a partner. According to Mehta’s , he stayed on at Visa as the CEO of PlaySpan for two years post-deal, leaving the company just last month. In his new role, Mehta will focus on investments centered in financial services, mobile payments, e-commerce, and gaming — no surprise, given his background. He has a solid history with the firm: Menlo was an investor in PlaySpan, and the Visa deal earned the company a spot in the Menlo portfolio’s “ ,” the firm’s managing director said in a today. Though much of his work has been as an entrepreneur, this will not be Mehta’s first time on the investor side of the table. He’s showed some activity on , and was previously a founder and partner in a firm called Source Ventures. Mehta has also been active when it comes to policy and government: He was selected by the Obama Administration to serve as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2012, and he was appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown to sit on the California Workforce Investment board. Here’s a quick quote from Menlo Ventures’ announcement: “Karl is a tenacious entrepreneur with a great eye for what’s coming next, a strong ability to execute, and an unprecedented understanding of the payments landscape. We look forward to collaborating with Karl as this exciting market evolves to produce the next set of market leaders.”
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With Its ‘Foodie Top 100 Restaurants’ Guide, Glam Media Is Releasing Its First Print Book
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Anthony Ha
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has built a company around digital advertising and publishing, but today it announced that it’s getting into the print business, with the release of of its Foodie Top 100 Restaurants Worldwide guide. Other online companies have released their own books and booklets, but they’re usually just a marketing gimmick rather than a serious publishing effort. In this case, however, CEO Samir Arora said the book represents “a pretty big investment,” and it’s coming from a real publisher, . The book will include all of the top 100 restaurant lists that Glam on today — the worldwide list, plus lists for France, Japan, USA, and a final list that covers Europe, the United Kingdom, and the Asia-Pacific region. Arora described it as a high-quality book with beautiful photography. So why publish a physical book, especially since the content is already online (and also available via mobile apps)? Arora said that he wanted the list to be accessible to consumers in any form that they want. “Print can be a real value-add for a consumer when done carefully for the right reasons,” he said, adding that for Glam “what cross-platform means is our ability to go back into print.” As for whether Glam plans other print efforts, Arora said he’s open to it, but he didn’t describe any specific plans. The Top 100 restaurants guide is notable in other ways, he said. For one thing, it means Foodie.com (which ) is expanding beyond recipe guides. “Our goal is to be the next generation Michelin,” he said. Obviously, Foodie is a less venerable brand than the Michelin Guide, but Arora also said it’s taking a different approach. For one thing, rather than depending on secret reviewers, Foodie enlisted some of the top food critics in the world, including Masuhiro Yamamoto (who was a judge on Top Chef and was featured in the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi) and Pulitzer Prize-winner Jonathan Gold. And those reviewers were instructed to put food first, in contrast to the Michelin approach, which emerged from France and also puts a heavy emphasis on wine. Arora said the list also shows off some of Foodie’s new social features, because users can build and share their own collections of restaurants that they’ve been to, and that they want to visit — something he argued is much more powerful than just hitting a Like button. Since , Arora said the company is now rolling out its own consumer social applications, and the social features on the Foodie list are an example. And yes, the lists will be updated — Arora plans to turn them into an annual affair.
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Google’s Director Of Privacy Alma Whitten Steps Down
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Frederic Lardinois
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As Forbes this afternoon, , Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, has decided to step down from her current position. Google has now confirmed this. Whitten joined Google 10 years ago and oversaw the company’s privacy policies during a tumultuous time when its Street View cars were accused of spying on people’s Wi-Fi networks and Google decided to consolidate its over 70 privacy policies under a . Whitten has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, where her thesis looked into “ .” She spent seven years as an engineer at the company before she was to director of privacy right after the Wi-Fi Street View story broke and Google had been severely criticized for the privacy controls of Buzz, its pre-Google+ attempt at launching a social network. At the time, Google described her as “an internationally recognized expert in the computer science field of privacy and security. She has been our engineering lead on privacy for the last two years, and we will significantly increase the number of engineers and product managers working with her in this new role.” Whitten, Forbes , will be replaced by , a Google engineer who previously at Pixo, Apple and Taligent. Forbes reports Whitten will remain at the company to oversee the transition. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooOt3nInMLk?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]
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eBay’s Comparison Shopping Site Shopping.com Rebrands As Ad Platform eBay Commerce Network
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Leena Rao
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Comparison shopping network , which was purchased by eBay back in 2005 in cash, is officially as the eBay says that the site has evolved from being a comparison shopping site to an actual commerce ad network, and this shift in title reflects that. The network aims to connect retailers with buyers across sites like eBay, CNET and Bing. The company says that 4,000 merchants already work with the eBay Commerce Network to acquire new customers via advertising. The comparison shopping market is a competitive space, and Shopping.com hasn’t been the go to destination for buyers to comparison shop online. eBay says that the current state of ecommerce necessitates merchants to advertise across multiple channels to reach consumers when they are shopping and researching online. No word yet on what eBay is doing with Shopping.com. It appears the site will remain as is for the time being.
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Matt Burns
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Queueing Theory Lets Any App Offer A Mailbox-Like Reservation System (Even If It’s Just For Building Buzz)
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Sarah Perez
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Ever since Google announced that access to its then-new email application Gmail would be invite-only at first, startup founders have been angling to reproduce that same kind of fervor for their own services. But it wasn’t until the new iOS app Mailbox launched its innovative “reservation system” that we’ve seen anything come close to replicating the same level of demand that Gmail saw back in the day. And now, a new San Francisco-based company known as wants to bring a Mailbox-like reservation system to any startup – especially those targeting mobile users. Mailbox, which was recently acquired by Dropbox, by first collecting sign-ups at a dedicated URL. Users were given a reservation number via SMS, which marked their place in line, as well as a Private Code to unlock the app once it became available in the App Store. Though helped it with the strain on its servers, the system had another side effect as well – it made the buzzy new app feel like an exclusive club which only the coolest early adopters could access. Now other applications, like newly launched “smart calendar” , are utilizing similar systems – in Tempo’s case, ,” necessitating a reservation system of its own. But why limit this feature only to email or calendaring apps? As any startup founder can tell you, getting hit by a heavy load of users can tank your servers quickly, leading to a poor user experience. That’s where Queueing Theory comes in. It will introduce a Mailbox-like reservation system designed with the needs of mobile app developers in mind. Though the system has a web interface, it’s being targeted specifically at those who want to launch in the Apple App Store (and soon, on Android, too) Instead, users can sign up for their spot directly from the app or from the startup’s homepage. After providing their email address, users are given a spot in line, which is sent via SMS and appears upon subsequent app launches. Where the company’s system varies from what Mailbox introduced, however, is that it’s building out a whole social network just for signing up for new App Store apps which are live, but only for “special” users. Startups can create a set of custom badges or stickers which then appear on Queueing Theory users’ profiles. With a glance, you can check out which apps your friends are signing up for, then click the stickers to sign up for the apps they’re waiting on, too. There will also be a premium set of stickers that users can purchase for a nominal fee in order to move up in line. Users at the top of a line will also have a “golden ticket” sticker. Those who collect the most golden tickets for apps on the Queueing Theory system, will then receive discounts on additional “super queue” stickers in the future. For developers, the system offers not only a way to quickly integrate a waitlist into their mobile app, but also a way to generate buzz and move up the App Store charts, ahead of anyone actually being able to use their application. (It’s unclear how Apple will respond to this, though.) Developers will also have an online dashboard where they can selectively filter sign-ups, create custom invite batches, design their “sticker set,” and more. Hilariously, Queueing Theory hasn’t used its own invite system to collect interested users’ emails ahead of its official launch – instead, . The company says that development on its own system isn’t yet complete, but it will transition from Launchrock to a Queueing Theory page in the next few weeks. In the meantime, for access to that forthcoming page, which will then put them on the list to be alerted as to when the Queueing Theory sign-up page becomes available.
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Former
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Colleen Taylor
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, the former executive editor at who at the trailblazing tech publication late last year (weeks after longtime chief editor ), will announce today that he has taken on two new roles — keeping one foot in journalism, and one foot out the door. Goetz will assume an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) role at the health-focused philanthropic organization . He’ll also be joining the as a blog correspondent focused on “big ideas in technology and healthcare.” His first post for the went up . As far as the EIR role, in a personal to be published today announcing the news, Goetz says that he will spend much of his time working with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s . He explained: “Here in Silicon Valley, Entrepreneurs-in-Residence are typically affiliated with venture capital firms, working to evaluate portfolio investments and hatch new companies. At best, they’re interim positions that end up producing something exceptional. My role with the RWJF is modeled on those posts, with a few differences befitting a non-profit foundation rather than a VC firm.” He elaborated a bit in a comment to TechCrunch, saying:
“Over the past couple months, I’ve been talking to many EiRs in the Valley about what they do, and it seemed like an great role to bring to RWJF. I’m confident some amazing projects, hopefully TechCrunch worthy, will come of it!” Goetz moving more firmly into the world of next-generation healthcare after more than 15 years in journalism should actually not come as too much of a surprise to those familiar with his work. He went back to school in 2005 to pursue a Master’s degree in Public Health from UC Berkeley, and much of his recent reporting has focused on health and related technology — personal genomics, cancer screenings, and the like. More recently, he wrote a book about the future of healthcare called “ ” in 2010, and his has garnered some 300,000 views. There’s no doubt that health and healthcare are in the tech industry, and more innovation is on the way. It will certainly be exciting to see what Goetz cooks up in the future, now that his job is to both write about newsworthy products and initiatives, and create them himself.
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Game Of Thrones Season 3 Premieres To Record Ratings, Piracy
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Ryan Lawler
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Everyone, it seems, is a Game Of Thrones fan. The fantasy series, which was spawned out of a series of novels by George R. R. Martin and adapted for HBO, just aired its third season premiere last night and a whole bunch of people were watching. The show touted its largest-ever live audience during the broadcast, which is good news. The bad news is that it also had more people pirating the show than ever before. The Season 3 premiere had an average of 4.4 million viewers at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, which was greater than Game of Thrones’ previous record showing of 4.2 million viewers. That was for the Season 2 finale, which set the stage for the new season. It was also substantially higher than the Season 2 premiere, which had 3.9 million viewers last year. Over three airings, the premiere had 6.7 million viewers, which was above the 6.3 million that tuned in for the previous season’s debut. Last night’s stats were impressive, but HBO can expect a lot more views when it counts on-demand, DVR, and online streams of the show. Last season, HBO reported that Game of Thrones had an average gross audience of 11.6 million people watching when non-live viewers were also taken into account. No doubt the larger live viewership will likely translate into a larger aggregate audience on HBO’s on-demand and streaming distribution channels. That said, while the Game of Thrones audience is tuning in en masse to watch the show live on HBO, the number of people downloading the show for free is growing even more quickly, . That shouldn’t be too surprising, as Game Of Thrones has been the most-pirated show over the past year. But TorrentFreak reported that, after a quick look at the number of downloads from the premiere, Game Of Thrones appears to have become even more popular this season. A few hours after airing, hundreds of thousands of users were part of the swarm to download or seed the series to others: A few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded the OpenBitTorrent tracker reported that 163,088 people where sharing one single torrent. 110,303 were sharing a complete copy of that particular torrent while 52,786 were still downloading. How big is that? TorrentFreak notes that the previous record for the largest BitTorrent swarm “belonged to the season premiere of the TV show ‘Heroes’ with 144,663 peers.” But that was just a single file. Considering that there are usually multiple versions of an episode being seeded at any given time, TorrentFreak estimates that more than a million viewers have downloaded the show since being aired last night. In addition to the number of downloads TorrentFreak had more info, including a breakdown of where those downloaders are coming from. HBO has said in the past that many pirates of its shows are international viewers frustrated by the typical lag between the U.S. air date and when the show appears in other markets. HBO is working to collapse those windows. But a quick look at the early Game of Thrones torrent stats shows that the No. 1 market for pirates is actually the U.S., which is where nearly 13 percent of downloads were coming from. English-speaking markets like the U.K., Australia, and Canada were also big on pirating the show. Surprisingly enough, Australia, which has a population of a little more than 20 million, made up about 10 percent of the total. (That, by the way, matches comments that Martin made about a lot of the show’s piracy .) What’s clear from the data is that not all the pirated downloads are coming from markets that didn’t have access to the show in the hours immediately after airing, and in fact, there’s a large number of viewers in the U.S. who just aren’t paying to watch the show. That’s no longer surprising, of course, and it seems to be a fact of life that HBO is just willing to live with, knowing that not everyone is going to pay for cable plus a premium video channel like HBO just to watch one show. Then again, there are some who believe HBO could cash in on folks who love its programming, but don’t want to pay $100 a month to get it. But if you think HBO is going to make that switch anytime soon, .
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Facebook Phone Leak Points To Budget HTC Device, Homescreen App For All Androids
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Josh Constine
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Facebook’s new “Home” on Android will debut on a mediocre HTC handset codenamed “Myst” but will be available on standard Android phones, according to an autopsy of a leaked developer build of the Facebook “phone” software scored by . This and predictions from last week about what Facebook will launch at its big press event on Thursday. Building a slightly operating system for an HTC handset would give Facebook the freedom to customize its user experience in ways iOS and stock Android won’t allow. This includes a that pipes in Facebook news feed content and notifications, but also has deep Facebook functionality built in elsewhere. However, there may be a limited market for a phone that’s totally focused on Facebook. So, as I wrote last Thursday, Facebook is likely to release a more basic version of its HTC homescreen experience as a homescreen launcher replacement standalone app that’s compatible with the unmodified Android OS — the most popular mobile smartphone operating system in the world. This would give Facebook’s hard work a much wider audience than if its homescreen was shackled to HTC. of this Facebook phone application package file (APK) confirms all of this with new details. There’s always the potential this device could have just been a tester and something better could be debuted Thursday. But the handset build.prop file from the APK says Facebook’s new software is meant to run on: These specs mesh with what Unwired View reported the Facebook-HTC device would have, and they point to a handset very similar to the HTC Sense 4.5. There’s also the potential this could run on other carriers beyond AT&T. As for the software, it includes a logo titling it “Facebook Home” just as . Special features that the software has Android permissions for include the ability to: In the layout XML and image files are indications that Facebook Home will let you view Facebook news feed stories, a more standard clock screen, shortcuts for launching apps, and search via Google. One of the most fascinating features is referred to as “Chat Heads” in the APK, and comes with the ability to “pop out chat head.” It appears to let Facebook Chat conversations float above the currently viewed screen and remain visible even while you use other apps. Think how certain websites let you activate a music player that stays persistently visible and doesn’t pause a song as you browse between different webpages. This could be similar but for mobile chat. The Chat Heads feature could be one that only runs on Facebook’s modified Android OS. Possibly the most important thing Android Police discovered is that the Facebook Home software comes ready to read the settings of the launcher for the stock Android operating system, and the HTC launcher, but also the TouchWiz Launcher — the front-end mobile interface designed by Samsung. That means Home is designed to run on the more traditional Android OS installed on handsets made by OEMs other than HTC. Essentially, Facebook could ship a version of Home that could be downloaded from Google Play onto a wide variety of devices. It makes perfect sense and what I wrote last week. The premier version of Home could be shown off on an HTC running a build of Android altered by Facebook. This would include the custom homescreen, but also deeper hooks, such as the ability to Facebook Chat while in other apps. On April 4th or a little down the road, Facebook could also offer a slightly less powerful version of Home for standard Android. If both are a success, it could pressure other OEMs beyond HTC to partner with Facebook to modify the Android builds they run to be compatible with the premier version of Home. This strategy would let Facebook: 1. Build its dream experience on HTC, 2. Offer a deeper homescreen experience to anyone with Android, and 3. Persuade more OEMs to work with it. That sounds good in theory, but the success of Facebook Home will come down to whether it really adds value on top of the existing Facebook flagship Android app. If not, few will buy the HTC Facebook phone; only the most hardcore social networkers will install the homescreen replacement, and OEMs won’t invest in deeper Facebook functionality. Years of work on Facebook’s part could fizzle out. But if it does succeed, Facebook Home Users could give us what I call a by instantly being able to see on our homescreens what’s going on with our friends. It could perhaps even push Apple to open new homescreen modification abilities to developers. And most critically, without manufacturing its own devices, Facebook could gain more control of the mobile experience and drive even more engagement on the small screens that everyone’s switching to. —
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