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Disrupt SF 2013 Startup Battlefield Applications Are Open And Conference Tickets Are On Sale Now
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Matt Burns
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TechCrunch Disrupt SF is back! We’re very excited to announce tickets are on sale and stealth companies can now apply for Startup Battlefield. This September 7-11, we’re bringing Disrupt back to San Francisco to welcome an all new slate of outstanding startups, influential speakers, guests and more to the stage. It marks the seventh time we’ve set up shop here in SF and once again all the action — starting with our 24 hour Hackathon — happens at The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center. Last month, at Disrupt NY 2013, a very impressive batch of startups including , , and . The very best startups showed up in New York this year, and we’re stoked to keep the magic alive in San Francisco once September rolls around. So are you ready to launch your company on the biggest startup launch stage? Tell us about it. As in years past we’re looking for the very best startups to compete in the Startup Battlefield and walk away with the Disrupt Cup, $50,000 cash, and gobs of attention. For the first two days, 30 companies will present their product to a panel of judges. But first you have to apply. Applications are due June 17. for the application and full list of rules. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis — and the last two Disrupts had record numbers of applicants — so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you are ready. Due to strong demand, we are unable to review applications more than once, so please do not submit a draft application before you are ready for final consideration. PowerPoint slides and video demos are optional but highly encouraged. We reserve the right not to review applications without video demos based on application volume. We look forward to reviewing your application. All submissions are confidential unless otherwise permitted by applicants on the application form. More Disrupt SF 2013 details will be announced in the coming weeks. at a significant discount. We have a stellar line up of speakers and panels on the docket. But we need your help. Apply for Startup Battlefield and help us make Disrupt SF 2013 the best yet.
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Tumblr Proves That Even Billion Dollar Companies Can Screw Up Mass Emails
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Greg Kumparak
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Tumblr just can’t catch a break. Yeah, yeah, they’re getting a from Yahoo — but it’s been a torrent of criticism ever since. Porn! Know what probably won’t help? Botching the key detail of an email sent to many of your most tech-savvy users. Tumblr just sent out a big ol’ mass email to all of the users who host a Tumblr blog through their own, independently owned domain. In other words, to the folks who know enough about these bleepy-bloopy electronic space typewriters we use to be able to get a bit fancy with their Tumblr blogs. It warned users of an impending change they’d need to make to their settings — a new IP address they needed to point their domain at — unless they wanted their blog to suddenly “ “. The catch: they, uh, kinda forgot the most important part. They’d put in a placeholder for the IP, and… it never got replaced. “Please point your custom domain to [IP Address],” it directed. Wherps. For many of these users, this was among the first emails they’d received since the Yahoo acqusition. Within about 30 seconds, the started going up. Moral of the story: If you work at a lil’ company and manage to botch a mass email, don’t worry too much. You’re in good company. Billion dollar company.
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Mr. China Goes To San Francisco
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John Biggs
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A block from the Mariposa on-ramp and in the eye-line of 90,000 cars whizzing by on 280 sits an old warehouse that was home to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alt weekly, and Digg. Most of the building is gutted, and inside they are working on the “greatest enabler of hardware on the planet,” according to head Liam Casey. It will be the new home of Lime Lab, a hush-hush design consultancy that Casey bought in and, most important, the U.S. gateway to Asian PCH’s manufacturing might that allows hardware startups to access stem-to-stern services in design, coding, manufacturing, packaging and shipping. Casey, dubbed “Mr. China” in a article that outlined the rising importance of Shenzhen as a manufacturing giant, is one of the biggest machers in Asia. A teetotaling Irishman, the inexhaustible Casey ostensibly lives in a hotel in downtown Shenzhen but is nearly always in the air. He and his cross-cultural team make nearly all the accessories you can imagine for multiple vendors. You couldn’t point a finger in a Best Buy without hitting a product PCH builds. He envisions his new building as a gateway to China and a way to help clients – and the public – understand the vagaries of mass manufacturing. The space will contain a public foyer and cafe where visitors can learn about materials, design and manufacturing. C-Level training will go on in a large anteroom on the first floor with a huge video screen suspended on epoxy-sealed walls. In short, it’s the Apple Store if the focus was all the trouble that went into products before they ever reached the consumer. “We want it to be the most photographed building in San Francisco,” said , co-founder of Lime Lab. The company, which started in the doldrums of the recession, consisted of Yousefi and his partner until Casey bought them and expanded the team to 25. They expect to hire 15 more engineers by October and hope to fill 80 seats in their new HQ by 2014. Not bad for a tiny, two-man shop in a run-down district of San Francisco. Yousefi is the buttoned-down member of the group, clean-shaven and more dedicated to design than manufacturing. Dammermann is the scruffy mechanic who has seen factory floors and is at home with drill presses and band saws. The Lime Lab vision is born of the needs of hardware startups and companies that need a full-service consultancy to help their products move from idea to packaged product in a few short months. “What we don’t do is the high-volume accessories work,” said Yousefi. “We’re doing more up-front product development, end-to-end.” Using PCH’s retail distribution platform, TNS Distribution in Dublin, Ireland, coupled with the company’s extensive contacts in China’s manufacturing centers, Lime Lab can take a sketch of a product and bring it to fruition at a speed unimaginable for most strategic design houses. Yousefi and Dammermann were former IDEO designers and CAD jockeys who wanted to build their own consultancy. “You come to us with either a napkin sketch or just an idea and we do the detail design and development to flesh it out,” said Dammermann. “One we have the idea fleshed out with the design team, we work with the team in Shenzhen to take it to the finish line.” The team was reticent to mention their clients or current employees although they have hired ex-Apple, Intel, and IDEO engineers and designers who were looking for something more rewarding. They are working on everything from audio products to mini-computers and their current offices, though small, hold CNC machines, 3D printers, and a small testing facility. The new lab on Mississippi Street will contain far more gear, as well as a situation room for describing the retail shipping patterns laid out by PCH and the design decisions made for each product – all in a building that is bathed in natural light thanks to a long bank of leadlights windows. “A lot of engineers in the Bay Area have become more strategic. We’re trying to close that loop and create engineers that are really good at manufacturing,” said Dammermann. “The physical-making aspect of engineering is slipping away,” said Yousefi. Lime Lab hopes to change that. Like proud parents, the pair was excited to show off their new baby. The building is not nearly finished but already they talk about the epoxy-sealed floors as if they’ve been walking on them for weeks and the banquette style wooden stairs as if they’re getting ready to present to a group of schoolkids the next day. The space is huge and outside there is a definite whiff of marijuana in the air, as if the neighbors were enjoying the relative quietude of the neighborhood to run a grow house. One of the previous tenants left a Diego Rivera-style mural of mightily straining migrant workers on the stairs up to the second floor, an addition that the partners haven’t yet decided what to do with. The walls have been stripped down to studs and you can see the thick joists peeking out from between whiffs of insulation. In short, it’s a great place to start again.
, formerly of Khosla Ventures, will run PCH’s Incubator program from the third floor of the building where two rows of desks will house ten small- to mid-level startups. These companies will have a direct line to Asia. Most Lime Labs employees will also spend three months in Shenzhen to become accustomed to working with a bi-continental team. “People are always talking about how manufacturing expertise has moved to China. The best thing is that we’re bringing it back,” said Dammermann. The “after” renders the team shared with me show a building that is half factory and half Prada store. The exposed brick is mostly hidden and the space is all light and air. Gone are the remnants of industrial San Francisco, replaced with a shape as form-fitting and beautiful as an iPad box. “It took us a little while to look for buildings. When we first started, Liam was like ‘Nope.’ He wouldn’t even get out of the car,” said Dammermann. They settled on the biggest building they could find, signing a 10-year lease on the space. There is enough room to invite groups to hold meet-ups at the space and there are plans to offer engineering seminars to incubated companies as well as executives who may be interested in starting up using Lime Labs expertise. While they are looking for larger clients in the Valley – the company is also looking to help Kickstarter projects join the ranks of successful business. “Hardware makes software sticky,” said Dammermann. It’s this ethos that drives the pair to make their lab accessible to all comers. The last floor of the new space is a roof deck dedicated to the incubator participants and engineers. From here you can see the iron belt of the highway girding the edge of the Bay. It’s windy up there, a problem the pair will have to solve down the line. Until that time comes, probably sometime in mid-2014, the team can simply focus on hiring and building. “The junior guys are awesome. Their network is immense. They’re like pigs in shit. We send them out to China and they come back with smiles on their face. One trip alone gives you two years of experience,” said Yousefi. “We never gave up on hardware. I’ve never started a web company,” said Dammermann with obvious pride as the sun set over downtown SF.
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Dozens Of Top E-Commerce Retailers Find It Pays To Put Customers’ Instagram Photos On Their Sites
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Sarah Perez
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The ROI of social media is something of a black box for many e-commerce companies, but New York-based startup is beginning to change that. The company, which allows brands to collect user-generated photos from services like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to display on their websites, is now offering an analytics suite to help retailers and brands understand what content works and how it’s affecting conversions. was founded by Pau Sabria, Luis Sanz and Jose de Cabo; they met while attending Columbia University, and this past summer the company closed on $1 million in seed funding from Bonobos backer , plus , , and other angels. It’s now cash-flow positive. At the time of the initial funding, the team said the plan was to expand the software-as-a-service platform beyond the publishers and brands it had previously worked with (which included Condé Nast, Pepsi, NY Daily News, The Baltimore Sun, and various sports teams) to reach those in the e-commerce sector. Today, Olapic has worked with about 100 companies, a good many of which represent the young, trendier e-commerce companies where something like an on-site Instagram gallery has a better chance to work. To date, Olapic has worked with more than 40 top e-commerce brands, including Lululemon, Baublebar, Nasty Gal, Coach, New Balance, Teva, Guess, Reef, Steve Madden, Threadless and many more. Retailers are using the service to engage their community via contests and other campaigns, asking fans to hashtag themselves modeling the clothes, shoes or other accessories, for example, or just sharing photos of their favorite products. For one campaign Luluemon ran this past fall (#TheSweatLife), 26,000 consumers responded by posting photos on Instagram with the appropriate hashtag. Olapic offers the e-commerce companies backend technology to manage the submissions, in order to vet the images before they appear on the site or quickly sort through a selection in order to determine a contest winner, for example. Now, it’s helping the retailers make better sense of the data surrounding those images, too. With the new analytics suite, retailers can track which photos are getting clicked, what those click-through rates are, what products are trending, what consumers are interested in, conversions, and more. During its beta, clients saw an increase between 5 and 7 percent in their conversion rates when they displayed user-generated photos on their site, and click-throughs on the most engaging photos was between 15 and 20 percent. The majority (82 percent) of the latter came from Instagram. Also, the company has found that, on average, the shoppers who interact with a real person’s photo on the site convert at 2 to 3 times higher than the average shopper. This increase can be attributed to the fact that people can finally see what the clothes look like on normal people, instead of the models typically used to showcase the fashions on shopping sites, explains de Cabo, but it’s also related to the fact that those who are browsing the images are probably doing more product research, which indicates an increased intention to purchase. But there’s something more to it, too. Olapic has also arrived at a time when there’s a shift underway in e-commerce and shopping trends. Brands and retailers want to more directly engage with their audience, and in turn, the audience expects the company to be engaged and responsive. In addition, younger users – which especially speaks to the 18-30 demographic that favors shopping at many of Olapic’s clients’ sites – have grown up with smartphones and social media, and are now transitioning to communicating through photos, instead of static posts containing just text. You can see this trend playing out on the larger stage, as well. It’s why Facebook acquired rapidly growing photo-sharing app Instagram, and became fearful enough of private photo-messaging startup Snapchat to ship a clone called Poke. It’s why Pinterest caught many by surprise with its quick ascension, and why Twitter has been moving toward complementing its 140-character text-based posts with richer media like photos and video, even acquiring the video-sharing service Vine along the way. Most recently, it’s why image-heavy (well, GIF-heavy) site Tumblr was snatched up by Yahoo, a company seeking its return to “cool.” For the youngest demographic in particular, they don’t want the brand marketing to them, they want it to provide a platform that enables participation. Case in point: although Olapic offers a button that allows users to request their photo be taken down, the company says that of the more than 100,000+ photos that have been publicly shared by brands, only one user ever requested a photo be pulled. Fans are generally excited when a photo is posted, explains de Cabo. “Our partners are telling us they’re receiving a lot of comments and emails that [consumers are] super pysched to be a part of the brand,” he says. More details about Olapic’s platform are available .
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Unface.me Is A Gossip Girl-Style Social Service For Anonymously Trolling Your Friends
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Natasha Lomas
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A Russian startup called has created a new social network inspired by the Gossip Girl TV series which lets users create an alter ego to — let’s face it — troll their friends, or even post even worst types of gossip entirely anonymously. The site connects with Facebook and Russian social network so it can pull in users’ genuine friend networks, then furnishes them with a series of tools to poke fun, dish salacious gossip or vote on who of their friends is coolest and therefore who is not. Y’know, teen stuff. Teens powered the rise of social networking giant Facebook. But today’s teens are their siblings spent all their time on, what with so many other, more flexible ways to ping and poke each other. Facebook’s insistence on real names, and its standard comms toolset of public posts, private messages and IM isn’t helping here. Looked at through the hyper layered and stratified teenage lens, it’s pretty limting. Which is giving startups the opportunity to crowd in. Zuck and co were also not as quick to respond to the growth in mobile messaging as they should have been. The long and short of it is that today’s teens are spoiled for choice; they don’t need Facebook to stay in touch — they have a whole arsenal of creative digital tools to get around being grounded. Facebook’s difficulty, of course, is that it can’t keep up with the kids without risking alienating its . With such a whoppingly huge user base that spans multiple age-groups comes a big responsibility not to put segments of users off. Keeping things fairly simple is the compromise path, but that too risks boring the kids — so they go looking to get their kicks elsewhere, whether it’s Snapchat or Unface.me. Now it must be said that Unface.me is pretty rough round the edges — and focused pretty squarely on the Russia market for now. It isn’t necessarily anything more than a curiosity. It’s just come out of a closed beta, so its user base is small, with a test group of around 20,000 that it’s now looking to grow — having just opened up to the public. It says it’s also starting to advertise to get the word out. But as an experiment in extending social networking by adding an element of privacy it’s interesting to watch — also bringing to mind . Unface.me’s founders are three computer science graduates from Moscow State University, with respective specialisms in marketing, business development and web development. The startup is currently bootstrapped with funds from founders, friends and family. “The inital idea came from the Gossip Girl series, but we decided to go further and develop a place where people can share their feelings freely and get honest opinions from their friends, but sharing secrets and gossips can be done too. We strongly believe that anonymity loosens up and helps discovering new facts about friends and yourself,” Unface.me’s Dmitrii Ponomarev tells TechCrunch. The site has been in development for around a year and a half, with the closed beta kicking off six months ago. The “mission” is to “let every person discuss freely anything or anyone”. And, judging by some of the public posts, there’s certainly plenty of that going on already. Indeed, it’s pushing into some pretty unpleasant territory, which is generally what happens when you mix teens and gossip, regardless of the medium they’re using. The key twist here is the mixture of unknown and known, says Ponomarev. Since the users are interacting with their real friends, pulled in from third party social networks, not random online strangers. From there they can choose to chat and post anonymously or under a fixed alterego. Or indeed using the real name they use on the linked social network. “A user can anonymously write a story about his friends on yesterday’s party, share it anonymously via sms and watch the discussion,” explains Ponomarev. “Or he or she can post a photo of his new look and get really honest responses from friends because the are anonymous. Or he can start an anonymous chat with his friends and discuss something that matters with his friends but no one will know each others’ names… We’ve gone much further than just posting anonymous text messages.” Teens are famously creative in their communications. Even within the Facebook straitjacket they find subtle and not so subtle ways to hack the limits — by ‘being in a relationship’ with all their BFFs, say, or asking each other to like a post for feedback on what they look like and so on. Unface.me looks like it’s picking up on that preference for teens to gamify their communications — and giving them even more layers to interact with each other. Facebook can still be part of the mix, of course — as one of the foundation networks that Unface.me is using as its jumping off point. However, if more teenage chatter ends up going on anonymously outside Facebook’s walls that’s not an outcome that will end up pouring coin into Zuckerberg’s coffers as it restricts the flow of data. Addressing the innovation challenge posed by upstart startups that are offering cooler, more teen-friendly ways to do stuff is the sort of war that is looking impossible for a single, central dominant service like Facebook to win. When it comes to the social networking/social messaging space, it’s definitely time to get the popcorn in.
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Facebook’s Head Of Brand Design Paul Adams Joins Customer Outreach Startup Intercom
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Anthony Ha
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, who was previously Facebook’s global head of brand design, has joined a startup called , where he will be serving as head of product design. Adams told me earlier that he wasn’t looking to leave Facebook, but he had also been advising Intercom and became excited about the opportunity. The startup, which is , offers tools for online businesses to track every interaction with a customer and to use that data to deliver personalized messages and offers. When I suggested that this sounds like a shift from Adams’ previous work in advertising, he didn’t entirely disagree, but he also said Intercom’s work ties into the themes he’s been exploring at Facebook, which have also been and . (In addition, Adams is , particularly .) Adams argues that in the future, businesses’ interactions with potential customers are going to be much more personal and relationship-based, rather than following the one-to-many broadcast model of traditional advertising. Intercom facilitates those company-to-customer interactions, and he added that it’s not just a way to deliver slightly-more-targeted marketing emails. “In the past … companies tried to minimize customer interaction,” Adams said. “They didn’t want customers to talk back to them — that was overhead. Minimizing customer interaction is a very outdated model from a pre-social web world. Intercom is very much about intimacy, very much about being personable.” Adams will be working out of Intercom’s Dublin office — he said he had already made the move from Silicon Valley to Dublin for personal reasons.
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WordPress.com Maker Automattic Sells $50 Million In Secondary Offering To Tiger Global
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Ryan Lawler
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Automattic, the company behind publishing platform WordPress.com, has led by investment management firm Tiger Global. The sale will allow some early investors and employees to get cash in exchange for their shares, while adding another stakeholder in the company. The share offering wasn’t necessary to raise funds for the company, according to Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. In a , he wrote that the company is “healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can, so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly.” He also noted that the minority of stockholders who participated in the secondary sale continue to hold on to the vast majority of their shares. Lee Fixel at Tiger Global led the investment, which follows other high-profile, late-stage deals that the firm has made recently. Those include investments in and . Tiger Global is also an investor in companies like Palantir, Square and Warby Parker, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. With the purchase, Tiger will join existing investors in Automattic, such as Polaris Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and The New York Times Company. WordPress.com, of course, is the publishing platform (one might call it a CMS) that powers a number of high-profile sites, including . WordPress (the open source project upon which WordPress.com is based*) is just about to celebrate its 10th anniversary on May 27 and will have to celebrate. ==
* Confused yet? This happens every time we write about WordPress, WordPress.com, or Automattic
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Josh Constine
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Cubic Telecom Secures $5.2M To Create Devices That Roam Mobile Networks Cheaply
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Mike Butcher
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We’re all familiar with the bill shock associated with roaming abroad with our cellphones. There are plenty of players that allow you to swap out your SIM card and use cheaper traffic, including . However, that process is tedious. So Cubic has secured new funding to enable a range of tablets and notebooks to have their technology built into partner devices. To do this they’ve raised a further $5.2 million in funding from Enterprise Ireland, Qualcomm Incorporated, ACT Venture Capital and TPS Investments. The money will be used to expand globally, and invest in the technology which essentially allows Cubic to operate like its own global mobile phone carrier, not an MVNO. As a licensed mobile network operator (MNO), Cubic Telecom partners with Tier 1 mobile operators to provide coverage in 230 countries. Its Software Defined Network (SDN) works across multiple technologies (3G, 4G-LTE, CDMA and WiFi). The Dublin based company has also secured contracts with a number of leading Fortune 100 tablet and notebook manufacturers to be in-built into their devices, though these partners have yet to be announced. The embedded nature of the service means any changes to the internal SIM can be Over The Air (OTA). Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom, says they will “enable the latest devices and applications to be always connected anytime anywhere.” In plain English, that means Cubic Telecom devices can integrate with content and apps. Thus, imagine a world where an app provider asked Cubic to allow its use to be free on Cubic dvices. All it would require would be a simple OTA update from Cubic to its customers. That could be a very powerful place to be. The company also announced that it will create a total of more than 70 new jobs over the next 3 years, as part of an investment supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.
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AngelPad’s Sixth Batch Of Startups Includes Companies Working On Drones, Storage, And More
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Anthony Ha
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, the San Francisco-based accelerator founded by former Googler Thomas Korte, held its sixth demo day yesterday. I wasn’t there (I know, it’s super-embarrassing), but I did get to meet with Korte and partner Carine Magescas today to talk about the newest batch of companies. Magescas said that in the three years since AngelPad was founded, “the premise of what we had in the beginning has been validated.” That premise breaks down to three main ideas, she said. First, she and Korte “push [the startups] really hard.” That’s particularly important in the company’s early stages, Korte said, because it can be hard for the founders to get honest feedback from their family and friends, and because making a relatively small change can have a big effect on a startup’s ultimate trajectory. Another reason the partners might be particularly tough on the startups is because they’re investing their own money. There’s no separate fund — at least not yet. (When I asked, Korte said, “There hasn’t been a fund to date,” followed by what may or may not have been a significant pause.) Second, Magescas said, “We are a really small family.” Twelve startups were chosen from thousands of applicants. The first AngelPad group had eight companies, and there was one with 15, but they’ve settled on a dozen for the last few classes. That allows the AngelPad team to spend a lot of time working one-on-one with each company. “I feel like it’s better to spend more time with less companies,” Korte said, adding that he’s realized that having a long list of well-known mentors isn’t as useful. There are outside experts who come in and give talks on a specific subject, but it really falls to Korte and Magescas to work closely with the founders. When you have too many different people offering “cookie cutter advice,” Korte said, “It hurts more than it helps.” Third, they said AngelPad has always had a strong focus on business-to-business companies. In fact, there’s not a single consumer-focused company in the current class, according to Korte — some of them might offer consumer products as part of their business, but none of them are focused on building large-scale, free services that make money from advertising. At the same time, Magescas said they’re open to consumer startups, they just have to be “really good.” So that’e the vision. Here are the companies, in alphabetical order: uses data from existing music services to help bands and marketers reach their desired audience. For example, if a band was making a tour stop in San Francisco, Audience.fm could identify the band’s biggest fans, and they could offer free or discounted tickets. is a storage startup that delivers boxes to its customers. You fill the boxes with whatever you want to store, then Boxee picks up them up. at this year’s Launch conference. is a content marketing network, where influencers and brands share content that they want to see promoted. Rather than getting paid for sharing sponsored content, it’s more of a quid pro quo system, where influencers are rewarded for successful sharing with points that they can redeem to share content of their own. has built software for commercial drone operators (just to reemphasize — commercial drone operators, not military ones). The founders are former Googlers with machine
learning PhDs from Cambridge and Edinburgh. . is a mobile task management system designed for workers who are out in the field. For example, it could be used by a team of construction workers while they’re on a construction site. aims to build an API for accessing all the data that’s being gathered on various health devices, sensors, and services. So instead of figuring out how to work with dozens of different devices, a medical provider could just pull data from HumanAPI. is an email marketing startup founded former Google and Twitter engineers. Customers can test different emails and also personalize the messages to each user without any coding. integrates with existing ticketing solutions and apps, allowing them to offer seat upgrades. Partners already include Ticketmaster, the Golden State Warriors, and other NBA teams. aims to build a layer of voice commands and natural language processing on top of existing CRM systems, so a salesperson who’s out taking meetings could update their CRM from their phone without slowing down to type. has built a marketing platform for mobile app developers, allowing those developers to track and improve their rankings on different search keywords. is a collaboration platform where fashion brands can interact with fashion bloggers. There are already 1,500 bloggers on the platform. has built an enterprise phone system that’s cheaper than traditional systems and runs entirely on smartphones. Interested investors can .
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Online Video-Ad Network Tremor Video Files For Its IPO
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Catherine Shu
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Video ad network Tremor Video has for its long-awaited public offering. The company’s shares will trade on the NYSE at TRMR and it wants to raise at least $86 million. Tremor Video, which runs ads on more than 500 Web sites and mobile apps, disclosed in its S-1 filing that from 2011 to 2012 its revenue increased from $90.3 million to $105.2 million. During that period, its gross margin improved from 35.2% to 41.7%, due in part to the adoption of its performance-based pricing models, while its net loss decreased from $21 million to $16.6 million. Since its founding in 2005, Tremor Video has received a total of $116 million in funding from Canaan Partners, Masthead Venture Partners, W Capital Partners, Meritech Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, as well as investors Jason Glickman, Mark Pinney and James Rossman. Its IPO will be underwritten by Credit Suisse and Jefferies. Tremor Video is among several video startups that are anticipated to launch IPOs this year. Bloomberg that YuMe and Adap.tv have also began planning public offerings as they look forward to strong growth in the video-ad market this year thanks to a boom in online commercials.
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A Vibrator Called Limon
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Jordan Crook
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No longer just an , the Limon is also a new sexy-time vibrator from a startup called . The company is looking for backers for its “couples’ vibrator”, which just so happens to look like a pink lime-lemon hybrid. However, the Limon is no lemon or lime. It’s an ultra-powerful bullet vibrator that is controlled by how hard you squeeze it. That is, the harder you squeeze the lime part of the Limon, the harder the lemon-style tip will vibrate. Minna claims that it’s the strongest vibrator of its type in the world, thanks to the fact that they squeezed a motor made for larger toys into a lime-sized bullet vibrator. Of course, I’m sure the or the beg to differ. The Limon also has a customizable memory, meaning that you can record and playback the vibration levels exactly how you did before. Interesting, right? Consider the scenario: Two lovers are chilling with their Limon and one has to go away for a week on some business trip. They can use the Limon the night before, and the lonesome lady will then have a recording of her partner giving her the good stuff. Sexy. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/65657974 w=500&h=281] from on . The Limon battery will last anywhere between 90 minutes and three hours, depending on how aggressive you are. It’s waterproof, charges by USB cable and comes in both teal and pink. Of course, we’ll have to conduct a complete review, lest we shamefully leave these claims unverified. But for now, the Limon is looking for backers so that it can be made into a reality. It’s expected to go for $120, but donations start at $25. [gallery columns="4" ids="822318,822317,822316,822312"]
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Adly Raises $2M More As It Expands Tools For Social Media Celebrity Endorsements
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that connects advertisers with celebrities willing to post promoted messages on social networks, recently raised $2 million in additional funding. The new funding came from previous backer and new investor . Adly has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The company also launched a new product this week. It’s the first thing you’ll see if you go to the — a button that says “Match Me Up!” which allows Adly to analyze a business’ existing content and followers, then find publishers who are a good match to “amplify” their content. For example, when I signed in with , Adly said it found six celebrity publishers who, collectively, could increase my reach 61x and my engagement 31x. They include a blogger/entrepreneur with 103,000 followers, an analyst with 180,000 followers, and a podcaster with 199,000 followers. (I also tried to analyze TechCrunch’s account, but we have too many followers.) Who are these people? Well, you don’t actually get to find out until you actually start a campaign with Adly. Walter Delph, who a little more than a year ago, said this is part of his larger strategy. One of Adly’s big selling points is the fact that advertisers aren’t just getting access to a lot of eyeballs. By enlisting celebrity endorsers, they’re hopefully prompting lots of conversation and engagement, i.e. reach that’s “earned” rather than paid for. The company’s next step is building more tools to ensure that the conversation and engagement is happening. To that end, Adly has been adding analytics to track the results of each campaign — the full reach of the message, the replies, the shares and the clicks. That dashboard, however, is really about looking back at a campaign (though customers get the data in real time, so they could adjust their spending accordingly). On the other hand, Delph said the celebrity matching tool is all about looking forward — it’s a way to get people started with Adly campaigns. He added that we can expect more features to come that take advantage of the company’s “reams and reams of data.” By the way, even though Adly is known as a celebrity endorsement network, it’s actually broader than that. The company has relationships with 75,000 influencers, and Delph estimated that only about 2,000 of them are celebrities in the traditional sense — “By celebrity, what I mean is, if you walked down the street you would recognize them.” The other 73,000 aren’t at that level, but they have influence that’s valuable to advertisers (at least when it comes to certain topics).
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With $1.12 Million From Battery And Others, Vaunte Aims To Define The Next Era Of Luxury E-Commerce
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Colleen Taylor
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As great as the web is, I still haven’t been able to kick my habit for buying fashion and lifestyle magazines off the newsstand. One of the things I love the most about monthly glossies are features like and , in which notable people reveal the exact products that they actually buy and use (celebrity chef David Chang uses , FYI.) It’s just compelling to find out more about people through their stuff. The folks at New York-based startup think so too, and in fact, they think this kind of voyeuristic editorial approach could be the next generation of luxury e-commerce. Vaunte has created a web platform where notable people (think starlets, fashionable executives, designers, and socialites) show off the stuff in their closets — and put things up for sale. Vaunte started off as purely a consignment market that takes 30 percent commission for photographing and shipping seller’s items, but it has since expanded to also sell new versions of the items people show off. Though Vaunte has made a splash in the fashion news space since its , it has flown under the radar in the tech and business press. But now for the first time, the company is revealing a bit more on the corporate side. TechCrunch sat down this week with Gilt Groupe veteran and engineer/entrepreneur , two of Vaunte’s three co-founders — the third, ex Gilt Grouper , was in Los Angeles working on a Vaunte photoshoot — to talk a bit more about what Vaunte is and what’s in its future (video embedded below.) A Vaunte closet profile The big news going forward is that with the launch of its upcoming mobile app scheduled for this summer, Vaunte is set to open up its platform to let anyone display and sell their clothing and accessories on the site. These users will be charged less of a commission than the higher-profile sellers, since they will be responsible for taking their own photos. There is a significant amount of additional technology that Vaunte’s team had to build to make this app scalable to taking items from the general public — quality control on the photos that are taken and having to verify that luxury items are genuine, for example. It’s an expansion that will put Vaunte in an interesting intersection in the existing e-commerce market — its competitors will now range from to to to and more. Personally, I’m excited to see what Vaunte has in store for its future. The first time I opened the site this week, I had one thought: “Uh oh. I am going to spend so much money here.” I’d imagine that I’m not alone. Park and Shin stopped by the TechCrunch TV studio to discuss Vaunte’s vision and give us an early look at the new mobile experience. Check it all out below:
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Sarah Perez
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Report: Google Could Soon Face New FTC Antitrust Probe Into Its Display Ads Business
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Frederic Lardinois
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Bloomberg today that Google could face a new U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust probe into its . As Bloomberg’s Brian Womack and Sara Forden , the FCC is looking into whether Google used its strong position in this market to “illegally curb competition.” The investigators, the report also notes, want to see if Google used its display ads business to “push companies to use more of its other services.” We reached out to Google for a statement about this new investigation but Google did not have a comment on the report. As Bloomberg notes, the FCC investigation – assuming it will go forward – will likely focus on whether Google used its dominance in the display ad business to “squeeze out competitors in the display advertising market.” Google’s ad revenue from display ads was about $2.26 billion in 2012 and, according to a , could hit $3.11 billion this year. According to the same report, Google currently owns about 17.6 percent of the display ad market, followed by Facebook and Yahoo. Google and the FTC are, of course, old acquaintances. The two have sparred pretty regularly over the last few years, and just this January, the FTC with Google after a 20-month investigation. Google, at the time, agreed to make some voluntary changes, including how it handles its AdWords campaigns. Google also still faces a similar investigation in Europe, where it recently proposed to settle the European Commission’s investigation into its business practices. A number of other countries, including Canada, are also currently looking into the search giant’s business practices.
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Laptop Week Review: The Toshiba Kirabook
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Chris Velazco
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Toshiba isn’t exactly known for churning out attractive, high-end notebooks, which is why the company’s new Kirabook is such an oddity. It’s a handsome little thing if you’re into very (and I mean very) understated designs, though I imagine at least a few people will think the Kirabook looks downright dull. The Kirabook is wedge-shaped like many of its other ultrabook brethren but it’s thankfully very light on branding (save for a small, chrome-esque Toshiba logo slapped on a corner of the Kirabook’s lid), and a finish that comes as a result of the magnesium alloy chassis is nice enough. Sadly, that magnesium frame doesn’t mean the Kirabook is immune to scratches, something I quickly learned after stowing the thing in a checked bag while flying to Austin. It’s got a respectable spate of ports for an ultraportable too: AC power aside, there are a total of three USB 3.0 ports plus an HDMI out, a headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. If anything, the real eye-catcher here is that sumptuous screen. The Kirabook plays home to a 13.3-inch display running at 2,560 x 1,440 (that makes for a pixel density of 221ppi), and Toshiba likes to crow about it being the highest resolution display available on a Windows notebook. Credit where credit is due, that display is one of the Kirabook’s most notable high points: colors are generally vivid and bright, and the panel seems hardy enough to handle even the most frenzied touch inputs. That’s not to say it’s without its shortcomings though. There’s a bit of light leakage around the edge of the display panel and viewing angles aren’t the greatest — looking at the thing dead-on is pleasant enough, but there’s a bit of color distortion to be seen once you start moving around. But there’s one big problem when it comes to the display, and it has nothing to do with the panel itself. I won’t belabor the point too much — by now you’ve probably already made up your mind about Microsoft’s divisive OS — but the biggest disappointment is that Windows 8 and the apps that run on it just aren’t completely tuned for these HiDPI screens yet. Cruising through the touch-friendly start screen is a visual pleasure, as is firing up apps like Internet Explorer, Maps, Vimeo, and Netflix since they all thrive on these sorts of displays. Jumping into the desktop is another world entirely, and it’s full of applications and menus that appear blurry and ill-suited for such a neat display. What a bummer. When it comes to performance, the Kirabook manages to hold its own very nicely. We like running Geekbench around these parts, and on average the Kirabook scored between 7500 and 8000 when it came to running 64-bit benchmarks: very solid numbers, and there wasn’t anything that came up during my day-to-day use that managed to flummox the little guy. That is, except for gaming — the lack of a discrete GPU in a $2000 machine is concerning, and the integrated Intel HD 4000 plus the need to push a crazy number of pixels means that there will be very little Bioshock Infinite running on the Kirabook unless you dramatically crank down the quality. Speaking of day-to-day use, the Kirabook has more than enough juice to get you through the day. I’ve been toting the 2.9 pound notebook around for the better part of a week, and I’ve consistently been able to camp out in coffee shops and keep the Kirabook going for just over six hours. There’s little question that the Kirabook is actually a pretty speedy little bugger, but there is a caveat. The downside to all that power is that the tiny fan nestled on the Kirabook’s bum will fire up after even slight provocation, and it’s just loud enough to be grating if you decide to do anything processor-intensive for a while. If you work in environments with plenty of ambient noise it may not be much of a problem, but be warned — those of you who like to work in quiet, zen-like tranquility will probably get pretty miffed. I haven’t fiddled with many of Toshiba’s older laptop keyboards, but the consensus seems to be that they were largely rubbish. Keyboard snobs may just turn up their noses after a few moments with the Kirabook’s 6 row affair, but despite the fact that the keys feel a bit small I found that using it to peck out posts and emails wasn’t too bad at all after a break-in period. Sad to say, the trackpad was a completely different story. See, the trackpad occasionally seems to forget what it’s capable of — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to two-finger scroll in Chrome using the trackpad before the Kirabook suddenly stops accepting multi-finger inputs. This may not seem like a big deal to some of you (especially since the Kirabook sports a highly responsive, glass-covered touchscreen) but it’s tremendously frustrating to discover what worked 5 seconds ago doesn’t work any more for no apparent reason. The elephant in the room here is the price tag that’s attached to this highly portable package — the configuration I’ve been spending time with will set you back a cool $1,999. Toshiba has tried to temper the sticker shock by loading the Kirabook up with full versions of Photoshop Elements and Norton Internet Security (ugh), not to mention two years worth of premium support from a dedicated team of Kirabook specialists all within the United States, but the price differential will probably be enough to make some would-be ultrabook purchasers balk. If you’re an artist looking to get some work done, I suspect the blurry, pixelated text and images that result from mixing a hi-res screen and applications that aren’t really ready for it may be enough to get you running for the hills. On the plus side, Photoshop makes full use of what limited screen real estate the Kirabook affords you and it’s easy enough to get into the swing of things… if you’re willing to squint, that is. Hooking the Kirabook up to an external monitor helps quite a bit, but the sketchy trackpad means you’ll definitely need other peripherals to chip in too. If you’re a founder looking for a smart way to spend your newly-raised seed funds, you’d probably do well to stay away from the Kirabook. That’s not to say it’s a bad computer, but the crucial bang-for-the-buck factor is notably absent here. The most basic touchscreen-laden Kirabook retails for $1,699, or $100 more than an a higher-end 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. That’s not an insignificant premium to pay when the Kirabook is marred by a few prominent issues. And sure, you can pick out a slightly less expensive version that eschews the touchscreen, but then there’s really no point in Kirabook in the first place.
13.3 inches may seem a little cramped for coding, but that multitude of pixels means that you’ve got plenty of real estate for crafting apps and tapping into APIs. Arguably the price tag is still too steep if all you’re looking for is a machine to run Visual Studio, Android Studio, or good ol’ Notepad++, but there’s nothing here that would immediately disqualify the Kirabook from being a coder’s companion. You know, for all of the little things Toshiba either got wrong or didn’t execute that well, I still actually really like the Kirabook. The company took a shot on something different, and even though this first iteration isn’t exactly a home run, it has made me rethink the prospect of spending my own money on a Toshiba computer. Once the Kirabook drops in price (which shouldn’t take long since Intel’s new Haswell chips are barreling down the pipeline), Toshiba’s nifty premium ultrabook may find the success it deserves. For now though, it’s just too pricey and too unpolished for anyone but the biggest Toshiba die-hards to splurge on — here’s hoping that Toshiba manages to firm up the formula when it comes time to whip up the Kirabook 2.
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Laptop Week Review: Lenovo Yoga 13
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John Biggs
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Convertibles were all the rage back in the 1950s (thanks to tailfins and the Corvette) and in the early 2000s (thanks to Microsoft and Sony). In the 2000s, however, we saw convertibles in the form of laptops that could twist and turn themselves into tablets. The result, usually, was a not-very-good-laptop folded into a not-very-good tablet. That’s what makes the Yoga special. This 13-inch laptop is as plain as can be – it has just two USB ports and an SD card slot – but becomes much more usable when you realize the various configurations you can bend it into. For example, as a laptop the screen stays straight up and there is a small central Windows button that you can either press or ignore under the screen bezel. You can also fold the laptop in half along one edge, essentially tuning off the keyboard and making the screen one big tablet. Finally, you can fold the Yoga into a tent, allowing you some modicum of control over the laptop via the keyboard or allowing you and another user to view the screen head-on. To be fair, the “folding” features are more of a gimmick than anything else. The vast majority of the time you’ll be using this in either standard laptop mode or tablet mode. However, unlike the Microsoft Surface, you don’t have to worry about the screen flopping over at inopportune moments, which is a huge plus.
The Yoga can be rightly termed the perfect Windows 8 machine. Touchscreen access was surprisingly smooth and responsive but it wasn’t mandatory. This is a handsome, cleverly designed laptop that works as both a keyboard-based and touch device. Performance-wise, however, you’re going to take a bit of a hit on this device when compared to similar i5 devices. They Yoga 13 hit a Geekbench score of 4,664, which is low. The i5 MacBook Air, for example, gets about 5,000 other Core i5 laptops can hover at about 8,000 depending on the machine. The laptop lasted for 5 hours of standard use. The Core i5 in this model was enough for most work thrown at it but it’s still considerably underpowered. Other users I talked to mentioned some latency issues with the trackpad although I didn’t experience them during use. That said, I’m loath to ding the laptop on performance simply because Lenovo did something very unique with their laptop and made something that I’d actually carry. The goal of these reviews is to show some of the most unique and usable laptops available now, not the latest and greatest in terms of chipsets and processors. In terms of speeds and feeds the Yoga 13 does not shine. However, when it comes down to usability and class, the Yoga 13 is a real contender. . Photographers, artists, and media types will love the big, bright screen and the unique “bendable” spine makes it easy to share the screen with multiple users or flip it over to show off a snapshot or sketch. While it’s not exactly a Wacom digitizer – you basically get a capacitive touchscreen that will respond to simpler, passive styli – this laptop is definitely something you can get a little work done on. I would worry, however, about the limitations of the i5 processor and the on-board graphics. I wouldn’t recommend, say, rendering video or handling massive RAW files. Think of this as a showcase machine, designed to display your work after it is complete. . The Yoga is almost custom-built for salesmen and business folk. Want to get a point across? Fold this puppy up and treat it like a mini-whiteboard. Want to give a presentation? Lay it out flat like a tablet and swipe through the slides. Finally, when you have a bit of alone time and need a laptop, it’s right there and ready to go. If you’re running a Windows shop and need something that can act as both a tablet and a PC, this is probably your best bet right now. As an exploration of the Windows 8 form, this thing is great. . I’m not certain that this is the right laptop for a coder. It’s definitely a cool idea but the value intrinsic in the folding hinge is lost on folks who probably need the machine to act as a primary typing device. I’d recommend looking at this thing in terms of whether or not you’d use the touch features on a daily basis and make your decision that way. The Yoga is a gimmick, to be sure. However, I think it does a good enough job at being a laptop and a tablet that the interstitial positions don’t matter as much. The Yoga 13 is everything the Surface was supposed to be and, although I do enjoy the Surface Pro, the Yoga is a superior experience.
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Pandora Stock Jumps As Revenue Beats The Street, Grows 58% To $128.5M; Mobile Ad Revenue Hits Record High
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Rip Empson
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Pandora has had a busy quarter. In March, the social radio company saw its , leaving the board to scramble to find a replacement. On the bright side, Kennedy’s exit, while likely a result of stress, followed relatively good times for Pandora. And it’s continued to push forward since. Pandora launched an , surpassed (with over 140 million accessing Pandora via mobile) in April, then launched for U.S. users and deepened with a new Timeline App. Today, Pandora’s reflected this flurry of activity, as the company saw GAAP total revenue increase 97 percent year-over-year to $83.9 million (with non-GAAP mobile revenue of $86.7 million), which outpaced mobile listener hour growth at 47 percent year over year. Meanwhile, total revenue came in at $125.5 million, representing 55 percent year-over-year growth and non-GAAP total revenue of $128.5 million. What’s more, share of total U.S. Radio listening for Pandora grew to 7.33 percent in April — an increase from 5.86 percent in the same period last year. This news followed from Pandora for the fourth quarter as well, thanks chiefly to mobile revenue growth of 111 percent year-over-year (to $80.3 million), which caused the company’s stock to . Based on this performance, Wall Street to (mostly) continue for Pandora in the first quarter, with forecasts pegging revenue at $123.9 million (on losses of $0.10 per share) for the quarter, compared to a loss of $0.09 per share for Q1 last year — and revenue of $123.5 in Q4. And so it did. Of his company’s performance, Kennedy said: Mobile listening hours and mobile ad revenue reached record highs, with growth in mobile ad revenue exceeding growth in mobile listening hours. During the quarter, we successfully implemented a mobile listening limit, enabling us to manage our content acquisition costs with minimal impact on listenership or revenue growth. Pandora’s subscriber base surpassed 2.5 million, adding more net new subscribers in the quarter than in all of fiscal 2013, giving Pandora the largest US streaming subscriber base of any music service. It’s also interesting to note that Kennedy resigned after last quarter (as mentioned above), yet Pandora’s release today names him as Chairman and CEO. It seems either Pandora’s copy editors need more coffee or their communications team knows something we don’t. Perhaps Kennedy’s resignation (due, understandably, to ) was a bit more abrupt than intended and announced early. Although that’s not totally clear at this point. All in all, it was a strong quarter for Pandora, with advertising revenue showing a 49 percent year-over-year increase to $105.1 million, with non-GAAP subscription and other revenue coming in at $23.4 million — a 114 percent year-over-year increase. Non-GAAP basic and diluted EPS were $0.10, right in line with Wall Street’s expectations, while the company ended the quarter with $75.4 million in cash, compared with $89 million after the prior quarter. (Cash used in operation activities came in at about $12.6 million.) Some other notable metrics: Pandora’s total listener hours grew 35 percent to 4.18 billion for the first quarter, compared to 3.09 billion for the same quarter last year. According to Kennedy, Pandora’s mobile listening hours hit an all-time high this quarter, alongside significant growth of its subscriber base (which Kennedy claims above makes it the biggest in the U.S.). As to guidance, non-GAAP revenue is expected to fall in the $155 million to $160 million range, while Pandora expects non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of -$0.02 and +$0.01.
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On-Demand Delivery Startup Postmates Is Preparing For Launch In New York City
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Ryan Lawler
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is looking to expand its business and make mobile, on-demand deliveries a widespread thing throughout cities around the country — that we already know. The company has been operating in San Francisco for a while, and about three months ago. But where will it land next? All signs point to New York City. Postmates has a mobile app that allows customers to get food from restaurants, groceries and even goods from retailers like the Apple Store or Nordstrom delivered within an hour for a low, fixed price. Thanks to a little scouring of the Internet and some clues that the company has left behind (as well as a photo from a local tipster), we have reason to believe that the Big Apple will be the next city to have delicious lunches (or anything, really) delivered with just a few clicks of the Postmates mobile app. The picture-taker was not punched in the face immediately after taking this, btw For those of you in New York, don’t get too excited — yet. People who have downloaded the app there can’t quite use it yet, several of my sources have confirmed. That said, a tipster in New York swears that he saw a Postmates-branded bike courier tooling around the city, and sent along this photo. (Thanks, Jesus!*) Anyway, if Postmates is about to launch in New York City, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Back when I talked to him about Seattle, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann had mentioned it as an ideal market for future expansion. Oh yeah, and the startup has been trying to on Craigslist for about a month now. The company has also recently been looking to in New York over the last few weeks. Want more proof that an NYC launch is probably coming soon? Well, Lehmann is in New York City . Coincidence? We think not. No idea. ;) I'm in New York. Want me to look into it or is someone on its way? — Bastian Lehmann (@Basti) (For what it’s worth, he hasn’t responded to our requests for comment.) In March, Postmates announced that it had as it looks to expand. Other investors include Crosslink Capital, Matrix Partners, SoftTech VC, AngelPad, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Scott Banister, Paige Craig, and Jawed Karim. ==
* Tipster’s name was not actually Jesus.
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Google Starts Using Computer Vision To Let You Search Your Google+ Photos
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google almost completely revamped the Google+ last week, but somehow the company didn’t get around to announcing one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire yet: Google now uses to let you search your own photos for things like sunsets, food and flowers. I also tried terms like “cars,” “beach” and “bikes” and Google consistently returned the right results. This search is built into Google+, but you can also use the regular Google search and use the query term [ ] to find the right images. That’s a huge step forward for photo search in Google. As Google rightly notes, “searching for your photos can be challenging because the information you’re looking for is visual.” I know I’m anything but diligent about tagging my photos, so this new search feature actually allowed me to find random images I had uploaded to Picasa Web a long time ago. As Google’s Vic Gundotra noted when he announced the at I/O last week, Google wants to help its users manage their photos. “Organizing photos is often a hassle,” he said, but oddly enough, the company didn’t announce this search feature at I/O and instead waited a week before launching it.
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Homeland Security Reportedly Warns 3D-Printed Guns Are “Impossible” To Contain
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Gregory Ferenstein
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A new bulletin from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns that lethal, undetectable 3D-printed firearms may be “impossible” to contain, Fox News reports After a Texas law student for the world’s first fully printable gun, the files have allegedly been downloaded more than 100,000 times, from the U.S. State Department. “Significant advances in three-dimensional (3D) printing capabilities, availability of free digital 3D printer files for firearms components, and difficulty regulating file sharing may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers who obtain or manufacture 3D printed guns,” a May 21 bulletin from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center obtained by Fox News. The threats to plastic guns are so grave that private citizens who control the distribution channels have banned them from their networks. Notorious free-information rogue, Kim Dotcom, and one of the largest consumer-facing 3D printed manufacturers, Makerbot, . Still, they exist on the same peer-to-peer file sharing services that distribute pirated entertainment (and legal software). “Even if the practice is prohibited by new legislation, online distribution of these digital files will be as difficult to control as any other illegally traded music, movie or software files.” The solution: universal searches. One law enforcement source told Fox News, “The only security procedure to catch [the 3D firearms] is a pat down. Is America ready for pat-downs at every event?”
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Lambda Labs Is Launching A Facial Recognition API For Google Glass
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Sarah Perez
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, an early-stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says. The move comes on the heels of a Congressional inquiry into Google’s new wearable technology, which is still very much in the prototype phase. The startup’s facial recognition API, , is already used by 1,000 developers, including several major international firms. It now sees over 5 million API calls per month, and is growing at 15 percent month-over-month. Balaban also says that the company has been cash-flow positive since November. Now that same API has been to enable both facial and object recognition. Applied to Glass, the technology will enable apps such as “remember this face,” “find your friends in a crowd,” “networking event interest matching,” “intelligent contact books,” and more, Balaban explains. (You can see what apps developers are tweeting about .) As potentially amazing/horrifying as that technology sounds, any apps using the technology couldn’t do so in real time – that is, you couldn’t just walk around automatically recognizing people you see through Glass. The way Google’s Mirror API works right now is that you first have to snap a photo, send it to the developer’s servers, then get the notification back. The lag time on that would be several seconds at least, and would depend on how fast you could take a photo and share it. A , though, may change that. “There is nothing in the Glass Terms of Service that explicitly prevents us from doing this. However, there is a risk that Google may change the ToS in an attempt to stop us from providing this functionality,” Balaban says. “This is the first face recognition toolkit for Glass, so we’re just not sure how Google, or the privacy caucus, will react.” The privacy caucus he’s referring to has to do with the Congressional inquiry from earlier this month where eight members of Congress Google CEO Larry Page with over half a dozen questions about Glass’ capabilities and the potential impacts to user privacy. The Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, a group led by Texas Republican Joe Barton, wanted to know if Glass would collect data from users without their consent, whether or not Google would consider privacy before approving third-party apps, and a host of other things. One of those questions was whether or not Glass would have support for facial recognition. That’s something Steve Lee, Glass director of product management, has already answered. In a statement offered to , he replied, “We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place.” That’s not a solid “no,” of course. It’s more of a “no, for now.” Glass is simply too new of a technology to begin limiting what it will or will not do, at least in such definitive terms. Facial recognition, however, doesn’t appear to be specifically prohibited in , which inform Glass developers what they can and can’t do in their applications. That means, for now at least, Lambda’s facial recognition API for Glass developers would be permitted. The only cause that would impact its use, according to Google’s policies, is one that says Glass is “not intended for use in connection with applications and services that might be subject to industry-specific privacy regulations.” Obviously, lawmakers could still enact such a policy, if they chose to do so. “Assuming Google and Joe Barton’s Privacy Caucus don’t attempt to stop us, [the API] will be available to everybody within the week,” Balaban says. Google, it should be noted, has long since had the technology to build apps capable of facial recognition itself, but has always tread very carefully to not incite a privacy backlash. In 2011, that Google was developing a mobile app that would allow users to snap pictures of people’s faces to access their personal information. That app never arrived, but facial recognition has since made an appearance within Google’s photo-sharing service Google+ Photos (previously Picasa), where users can now opt in to have their face recognized. This makes finding “pictures and videos of you easy,” explains on the technology. Perhaps one day, users will be able to “opt in” to having Glass apps identify their faces, too? Time – and Congress’s reaction – will tell.
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With Metrics Up Since Acquisition, Parse Could Get Developers Integrating Facebook And Buying Ads
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Drew Olanoff
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After being , the mobile back-end service Parse has been busy integrating itself into the company, as well as launching new services like . The service has built tools to help developers focus on the front-end of their product, while handling all of the messy back-end things like cross-platform compatibility and testing. Naturally, Facebook integration is easier than ever for mobile developers thanks to the acquisition. Its been , and during a whiteboard session at its Menlo Park headquarters, the company discussed just how far its come. Doug Purdy, Director of Product Management, and Mike Vernal of Facebook Platform led the discussion. Ilya Sukhar, who recently joined Facebook with Parse, sat in on the discussion as well. Purdy set up the conversation about next steps by saying: “We’ve been thinking about how we can provide tools to developers to enable a more cross-platform world. We’re trying to create a platform that developers can build something that spans over devices and makes people the center. Regardless of the device that you or your friends are on, everyone can have a rich experience.” Sukhar, talked a bit about Parse’s beginnings and day four at Facebook: If you think about applications broadly, there’s the front-end, and below the hood there’s a lot. The data side, how you sync it back to the server, the databases. None of these things bring value to the users or differentiate apps. Our SDKs make this dramatically easier for everyone. I was originally building mobile apps myself. I was spending a lot of time building things over and over again, things that were quite hard and painful. It’s time that I could have spent on the actual user experience or the utility of my app. So I decided to build Parse. We’ve grown from one person to 24. Since day one, we’ve had 80K apps, 200M installed apps. Generally, the community is very excited. All of our metrics are up and it’s been a really fun time. It’s good news that things are going smoothly, and it’s clear that Facebook sees Parse as a huge part of its developer ecosystem push for the future. As far as new services, Sukhar says the team, which is still operating independently, speaks to developers about what should come next. One of the top features that gets requested is functionality around push notifications and offline mode. The clear value for Facebook is that Parse’s platform could be the easiest way to urge developers to use Facebook ads. Once you get rid of the complexity of building out a backend for an app, you can pay attention to promoting your app more. Hopefully that promotion will come via Facebook, as Purdy mentioned comScore’s findings that the site is the top way to discover new apps. On whether less backend worries will lead to more promotion, Sukhar said: “This is something we’ve heard: ‘Parse has done well for me to get things out to market, but now I need users.’ We don’t have anything specific to announce today, but it’s clear that Facebook has the solution.”
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Box Buys French File Storage App Folders To Help Rebuild Its Mobile Apps
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Rip Empson
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It was just two weeks ago that fast-growing enterprise cloud storage company, Box, went out and and Y Combinator grad, Crocodoc. Apparently Aaron Levie sees what Yahoo is doing and he wants to show that Box is ready to do a little acquiring of its own. Today, Box followed up with its second acquisition in as many weeks, the tech behind French mobile app and Box, Dropbox and Google Drive client for iOS, . Developed by Martin Destagnol, Folders and its tech will be integrated into Box’s new iOS app, which is currently in development (now with support from Destagnol). Again, Box already has a version of its storage service on the App Store, but like many other companies of its ilk, the service hasn’t necessarily been putting its best foot forward on mobile, so to speak. Folders, on the other hand, was developed by Destagnol exclusively for mobile and to simplify file-sharing and complementary functionality for users on the go. And it shows: Folders is a good-looking, elegant app. I say that in the creepiest way possible, obviously. In its , Box revealed that it’s planning to release a new version of its iOS app “later this year,” and Folders’ design and optimizations appear to be a big part of the mobile revamp. Furthermore, the motivation behind the Folders (and Crocodoc) acquisitions is not only to upgrade mobile, but the big “impact they can have” on the overall “Box user experience.” VP of Engineering Sam Schillace : I’m a firm believer that even applications developed primarily for the enterprise, like Box, need to be pushing the leading edge for user experience and design. They have to be ‘consumer-grade’ in terms of their usability, simplicity, speed and performance. This definitely raises the bar for enterprise software design and engineering, but there’s no doubt that the higher standards are a big win for users and a massive opportunity for Box. With the service now used by 15 million people at 150,000 businesses across healthcare, financial services and retail, the company is at a key point in its growth cycle. (Though who isn’t, let’s be honest.) Thanks to building enterprise software (it’s a low bar in enterprise, people), the company is moving across industries and will probably show up on the public markets in the next year or so. Box has established itself, but in doing so, it’s now competing with the big boys, and although innovation in enterprise tends to move at the pace of a speeding glacier, the company has to keep pushing forward if it wants to take that next step. The consumerization of enterprise is nothing new at this point; companies and, more importantly, end users expect applications and services that are easy to use. That look familiar and “social.” Whatever that means. Levie is a champion of this new generation of usable, consumer-friendly enterprise tech, so Box needs to lead there. And, at this point, there’s nothing that embodies the consumerization movement better than mobile and the BYOD trend. Box has to work (and look) better on mobile than the old set of Enterprise leaders. To wit: When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users. Adding the Folders technology and Martin’s expertise to Box will help us to continue to improve how people collaborate and engage with their content on Post-PC devices. In the near term, Box for iOS will become cleaner, faster and more beautiful throughout 2013.
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Google Adds Notification Center And Rich Notifications To Chrome Beta 28, Will Work Even When The Browser Is Closed
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Frederic Lardinois
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This isn’t exactly the launch of Google Now for the desktop, which many of us have been patiently waiting for, but Google today that it is bringing a richer notifications experience to Chrome, starting with the . This definitely feels like it brings Google Now yet another step closer to the desktop. These new notifications, which developers can to their own Chrome and extensions, will pop up outside of the browser window and live in a center outside of the browser, so users will be able to receive notifications, even if the browser is not open. This feature is now available for Windows and Chrome OS users. Google says it’s coming to OS X and Linux “soon.” Chrome, of course, already features basic web notifications (and if you’re a Chrome and Google Apps user, you’ve probably seen them from services like Gmail). These rich notifications go a step further, though, as developers can add their own full-bleed icons, images, headlines and short messages to them. Developers can also decide for how long notifications should stay on the screen by specifying different priorities for each alert. The new notification center will be available through the Windows system tray or from the Chrome OS launcher. Last week, Google also announced its new . While Google doesn’t mention them in today’s announcement, there is no reason why those push notifications couldn’t soon arrive in the new notifications center, too. You can find a full changelog of what’s
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Ex-Googler Ben Ling Brings His Operations Experience To Khosla Ventures
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Ryan Lawler
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Former Badoo COO and ex-Googler Ben Ling has joined , according to sources. Ling, who has held senior operations roles for a number of big companies in the mobile and Internet space, has been added to a growing team at Vinod Khosla’s venture firm. ( Khosla Ventures just , starting this week.) Ling most recently served as COO of Badoo, where he was hired to oversee product, engineering, partnerships, and business operations at the company. , but . Prior to Badoo, Ling spent a number of years at Google, where his last role included overseeing images, videos, books, news, and finance as its senior director of search products and local business products. At YouTube, Ling was senior director of partnerships and platform, where he was responsible for music, movies, sports and news, as well as mobile, TV and API partnerships. In his first role at Google, he oversaw the company’s e-commerce products, including Google Checkout and Product Search. At Facebook, he served as the director of Facebook Platform, working on developer relations at the fledgling social network. There he helped build Facebook Connect, which is the social network’s hook into a number of third-party websites. In addition to his senior operations roles, Ling has also been an active angel investor and advisor to startups. Recent investments include Fab.com, Palantir, Square, PracticeFusion, and Quora. Ling has also held an advisory position at Pinterest and Pulse. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Ling told us that most of his experience as an entrepreneur has been in operations roles, helping companies like Google and Facebook scale their businesses both in terms of users and bringing in revenues. Meanwhile, over the last four years, he’s been working as an angel investor, identifying great products and teams and helping them to scale. “In terms of thinking about my next steps, and thinking about what I could do next, I wanted to maximize the impact I could have by helping entrepreneurs to grow their businesses,” Ling said. He said that the opportunity at Khosla Ventures enables him to do that, since there are a lot of “parallels and similarities” to what he was doing as an angel investor — evaluating teams and talent, helping companies scale and with their hiring strategies. Ling said that we can probably expect to see him make investments in a lot of the same areas that he’s worked in previously — that includes companies focused on e-commerce or shopping, developer networks, search, finance, and local. He’s also had some experience with three-sided ecosystem businesses, such as the Facebook platform’s network of users, developers and advertisers. Of course, Ling isn’t the only operations specialist to join Khosla Ventures. His hire comes just a few months after . Part of the reason Khosla Ventures has been interested in bringing on entrepreneurs with that type of experience is that they can provide guidance for startups who need operational experience. Rabois, who is now 10 weeks in at Khosla Ventures, said, “Our organizing philosophy is to provide assistance to entrepreneurs and help them to build the most interesting companies they can… It’s about understanding what entrepreneurs need is less capital and more formative advice. Every time we evaluate a company we ask whether we can help this entrepreneur build something special.” Both Ling and Rabois say that they’ve been impressed with the quality of entrepreneurs and the quality of the Khosla Ventures team as it works with those startups. With that in mind, Rabois said he’s really excited about building several big businesses as part of the Khosla Ventures team.
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Doctors 3D-Print An Emergency Airway Tube To Save A Child’s Life
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Score one for technology: Doctors 3D-printed an emergency airway tube that saved a 20-month old baby boy’s life. After imaging the boy’s faulty windpipe, doctors at the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital printed 100 tiny tubes and laser-stitched them together over the trachea (video below). [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O82nC9ro6Io] “Quite a few of the doctors said that he had a good chance of not leaving the hospital alive,” said the mother of the baby boy, who suffered from a severe version of tracheobronchomalacia, causing his bronchus to collapse. Desperate for a solution, the doctors obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to surgically sew the 3D-printed splint on the child’s airway. “It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK,” University of Michigan Professor Dr. Glenn Green, who came up with save-saving solution, with his partner Dr. Scott Hollister. “The material we used is a nice choice for this. It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that’s about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body,” added Hollister. Considering that most of the news around 3D printers has been about , it’s nice to know that people are also using humanity’s newly found technological powers for good.
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The Constitution And The 3D Printed Plastic Pistol
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Ansel Halliburton
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By now, you have probably heard about the Liberator, designed, assembled, and test-fired by Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. Is it legal? Last week, the State Department’s arms export office from its website. Defense Distributed complied with the takedown letter right away, despite strong language on its website promising it would be “a home for fugitive information” and “No object file will be censored unless it is malicious software.” Predictably, it didn’t take long for the CAD files to make their way to BitTorrent, where they’ll be available forever. It’s worth reading the , which is only two and a half pages long. In a nutshell, the letter demands the takedown while it decides whether publishing firearms-related CAD files online violates ITAR. ITAR, which stands for the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, are rules that the State Department promulgated under the Arms Export Control Act. One part of ITAR is the United States Munitions List, which is a master list of products and technologies that can’t be exported without prior government approval under a licensing system. Because Defense Distributed didn’t seek an export license, there’s a problem. Are CAD files munitions? The State Department believes the Liberator files fall under the Category I of the US Munitions List, which covers firearms and related “technical data.” says “technical data” includes “blueprints, drawings, photographs, plans, instructions or documentation” about “the design, development, production, manufacture, assembly, operation, repair, testing, maintenance or modification of defense articles” — so that appears to cover CAD files for guns. Unsurprisingly, Defense Distributed is the takedown demand: “It seems we may have to have our rights declared in court to simply keep developing gun files to put into the public domain. DD’s right to exist is being challenged.” What will probably happen next is that Defense Distributed will apply for an export license, which the State Department will deny, and Defense Distributed will sue to get a judge to issue an order that the State Department can’t block it — and that is where things will get interesting. Because the Liberator is made mostly of plastic, Defense Distributed also has to contend with the Undetectable Firearms Act. This law, first passed in 1988 and renewed in 2003, makes it illegal to “manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive” any firearm that can’t be detected by x-ray machines. Gunsmiths with a federal firearms license (Wilson has one) can build guns to test them for compliance, but other than that, undetectable guns are completely contraband. Wilson packaged the CAD files with detailed instructions, including an admonition to DIYers to include a block of metal in a hole specifically included in the design for that purpose. It’s up to the person doing the printing to comply, though. If you don’t put the metal block in, you could be in big trouble. It is probably just a matter of days until the ATF or FBI start knocking on the doors of people who’ve already started posting online. Notably, the Undetectable Firearms Act bans the atoms, but not the bits: you can possess CAD files for an undetectable firearm without violating it. That’s an easy legislative patch, but it will run into free speech problems. I predict the Constitutional wrangling will focus on the First Amendment, not the Second. (For foreign readers, the First Amendment to the US Constitution provides extremely strong protections for citizens’ freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment provides a right “to keep and bear arms” — although the language is a mess and reasonable people disagree on how to interpret it.) This is going to spawn some strange bedfellows: I would not be surprised to see the NRA and ACLU on the same side in this fight. Why is this a First Amendment case? One of the issues is whether the government can prevent citizens from publishing gun blueprints. A big gateway question, though, is how to characterize Defense Distributed’s CAD files in the first place. Is a CAD file expressive speech that should be protected, or a functional thing that should be regulated? This distinction is important because the government has tremendous power to regulate things, but far less power to regulate speech. When courts first started to come to grips with software, they came out on the side of protecting it as speech despite its functional aspects, but they might view 3D printing files differently because when you “run” them, you get things. relaxing the crypto ban (more on that below) recognized the speech–functionality distinction: Because the export of encryption software, like the export of other encryption products described in this section, must be controlled because of such software’s functional capacity, rather than because of any possible informational value of such software… In addition to the CAD files themselves, there is also Wilson’s act of publishing them. Is the act of publishing a functional gun blueprint speech? Two Supreme Court free speech cases give a partial roadmap. The first is , in which the Supreme Court upheld a criminal conviction for burning a draft card. The Court found the defendant’s conduct was expressive, but still upheld his conviction because the law under which he was prosecuted — a prohibition on destroying draft cards — had justifiable military purposes that outweighed his free speech right. One could see courts today taking a similar path by finding that the government’s interest in controlling the flow of firearms and military information outweighs Defense Distributed’s right to publish gun design files. The other is the Pentagon Papers case, . There, the New York Times sought to publish damning internal Pentagon documents about the Vietnam War. Even though the material was directly related to national security, the Court allowed the New York Times to go forward, finding the newspaper’s speech interest was greater than the government’s interest in preserving the confidentiality of classified information. The case helps Defense Distributed to the extent it struck down a prior restraint on speech, but publishing proof-of-concept plastic pistol blueprints is not in the same league as exposing government misconduct. This isn’t the first time courts have had to sort out the mess when innovation hurtled into arms control law and the First Amendment. The US Munitions List used to cover a wide range of cryptography software, a restriction only relaxed in 1996 by an Executive Order by President Clinton — who, even then, perhaps, realized the futility of censoring the spread of code. Before that, though, PGP creator Phil Zimmerman was criminally investigated, but never charged, for violating ITAR. The issue made its way to the courts in 1997 in , where Daniel Bernstein, a UC Berkeley computer science researcher, sued to be allowed to publish his cryptography research, which included working code. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that it was unconstitutional for the government to prevent Bernstein from publishing his crypto software. Judge Patel held that blocking Bernstein’s publication amounted to a prior restraint on his speech that violated the First Amendment. Defense Distributed will likely follow ’s path. The State Department’s takedown demand probably qualifies as a prior restraint, to which courts are incredibly hostile. But the ability to download a file, press “Print,” and have gun parts come out could also tip some judges toward calling gun CAD files functional things and allowing the government to regulate them. There’s more to this than law, however. There is also ethics and common sense. Even if you publish 3D-printable gun blueprints, you? What are the consequences of doing it? Nobody in the 3D printing industry is going to thank Wilson for bringing heat from the State Department and Congress. Wilson’s stunt could well lead to new restrictions and regulations on the nascent digital manufacturing industry, even before it has had a chance to figure things out for itself. (Scaremongers like won’t help either.) And for what? The Liberator isn’t about to liberate anybody — it will probably melt or explode after one or two shots. Given the case, even if he wins, Wilson may not even be breaking any new legal ground.
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With Google Play For Education, Google Looks To Challenge Apple’s Dominance In The Classroom
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Rip Empson
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, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being . Amidst Larry Page’s (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.) Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience. Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate. Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer. Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list. Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content. Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump. While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere. Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard. Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users. The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company. While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education. Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market. For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system. Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example. With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education. Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.” And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something… Google
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Google’s Three-Hour I/O Keynote Boils Down To These Highlights And One Theme: Foundation
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Drew Olanoff
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Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers. We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company that closed the day at . Key areas of the business saw updates, all relaying the important foundation necessary to move Google forward over the next 10 years. From search to maps, everything is getting a new coat of paint, a new polished experience and a focus from every team within the company. The only announcement that didn’t fit into a “category” was its . Some are calling it a Spotify-killer, but to us, it seemed like a necessary and inevitable announcement. The day started out with Android, with the news that more than from the Google Play store, thanks to . That’s great news for developers, showing that consumers really care. To make their apps better, Google introduced a new tool called the , which makes developing in multiple languages and for multiple screen sizes easier than ever. The takeaway is that Android is massive, is and all developers should consider building apps on its platform first, rather than second. That little project that Google worked on, you know…the browser? It’s the No. 1 browser in the world, to the tune of , and Google isn’t afraid to tell you all about it. Oh, it’s also a platform upon which to build apps, so developers should be doing that too. The takeaway is that if you’re building apps on the web, people love Chrome and Chrome offers all of the open tools you need to build gorgeous things. Whether you think that Google+ is a Facebook competitor or not, the 41 features introduced today will get your attention. The stream itself, which now has 190 million monthly active users, is now . Google says that the stream was flat, so it needed a fresh take. If you’re into taking photos, Google has finally integrated all of Nik’s professional photo suite goodies and will now Not a photographer, but chat with your friends a lot? GTalk, Talk, Google Chat or whatever you’ve been referring to it is gone. , and it’s an app for iOS, Android and the desktop. It has video and text chats, complete with emoji and presence. We’re just glad that they didn’t call it Babel, which was the real internal name for the project. The takeaway here is that Google knows that you want to talk to your friends and family. It thinks that if it can integrate features to facilitate your communication from anywhere — at your desk or on your phone or tablet — they have you covered. Search is getting smarter these days. Google knows that you go to its site whenever you can’t think of something, but it wants you to be able to ask it questions naturally. You can do that on Android and iOS with Google Now, but the company announced . Speaking of Google Now, you can get . Knowledge Graph, which fires in little snippets of information when you perform a search, . The takeaway here is that Google wants even more of your searches, but would rather you sit back and relax while performing them. There’s no need to think about how to get the best search result, simply ask a question. Getting the gist yet? Google is refreshing all the things to make them easier to use, develop for and discuss with your Mom and Dad. Speaking of Mom and Dad, they probably use Google Maps to get just about everywhere. Mobile Maps users will get a , while the desktop experience got such a that they’ve only made it available in preview mode as to not give anyone a heart attack. Want to see it for yourself? . The takeaway here is that Google Maps has been a force for almost 10 years. It was time to make the product more user friendly, helping you discover new places and not just get from point A to point B. Google’s CEO Larry Page made a , a day after discussing his vocal issues. He even discussed without the moonshotters being bothered. All in all, it was a solid day for Google. There were even . The future is bright for Google; the foundation for everything has been (re)laid out. . We’ll be here for the rest of the week, hanging out with developers and listening to some roundtable discussions. If you want to watch the full keynote, have a gander here:
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Google’s Products Are Just By-Products Of Its Quest For Tomorrow
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Josh Constine
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Google isn’t about search, apps or devices. Those are just vehicles, and there’s no destination. That’s because Larry Page’s Google is on an unending pursuit of the future, not just next quarter’s earnings. The scattershot of projects Google revealed today at had just one unifying factor: They further that pursuit, or empower the curiosity of others. Google is lucky. It takes a lot of fuel to shoot for the moon. Fuel that most tech companies don’t have or are unwilling to burn. But Google has ads that pay for everything the company does. The armies of employees, the seas of servers, and the laboratories for experimenting in both the digital and physical worlds. I talked to a Google Chrome engineer the other night. He described his job as almost academic. No one ever talks about money — how much things cost or how much they would make. His job is simply to let people access information as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s the future, and a browser is just the by-product. Google didn’t launch its new on-demand subscription service just because it wanted to get into music; Android is Google’s push to see the potential of our phones. Music is a fundamental companion to being on the go, so why not let people listen to any song they want? All Access was just something Google had to do to see our lifestyles merge with mobile computing. Digital communication shouldn’t just be a degraded version of talking with someone in person. When we can share, emote and collaborate seamlessly no matter where we are or what device we’re on, brilliant things will happen. So out springs a new cross-platform messaging version of . Google isn’t trying to desperately win market share and engagement with today’s , it’s just another step towards the future of navigation. Google also wants to accelerate other intrepid explorers chasing what’s next. new cloud messaging capabilities, Android Studio for testing apps, extra location APIs, and an easy app translation service. It knows it can’t unlock the future by itself, so it lets others forge their own keys. Compare all this to the other tech giants who seem myopically focused on today’s wars for display ad and mobile hardware dollars. Apple and Samsung seem busy with another iteration of their latest smartphone, or linear innovation for watches and TVs. Even if Apple is secretly concocting wetware computers that go inside our bodies, it still seems to be in service of building “beautiful” products and making money. Facebook has its hands full with mobile with projects like Home, and Amazon is making TV shows. They all seem vulnerable. One or two flops away from fading. A crummy iPhone, a hip new social app, and suddenly the tides could turn. Meanwhile, Google has leapfrogged into the next decade with exponential innovation. And that’s the plan. Google’s CEO “we should be building things that don’t exist.” {Update: After the keynote with co-founder Sergey Brin who explained “It’s important to be willing to take risks, and we do take risks, I’m very excited about these [tapping the Google Glass he was currently wearing]. We’re willing to make bets. Some of them pan out, some of them don’t. But I think there are a lot of companies that as they grow they become more conservative.”} Google doesn’t have to be conservative. Search, maps, Android — they aren’t going to disappear. And with that foundation, Google is free to try, tinker and even fail. But when it fails, it learns, and for Google, that’s the whole point.
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Hands On And Walkthrough With The New, Much More Beautiful Google Maps
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Darrell Etherington
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Google took the lid off of its at today, which is a dramatic redesign of the long-standing navigation and place-finding software across all platforms. We got a chance to go hands-on with the new Maps, which is still a beta product, with access only given out to a few select users so far. In the video above, you check it out in action as a Google rep gives us a walkthrough. The new Google Maps takes a bunch of stuff that Google has been working on from Knowledge Graph to make, as it put it during the keynote, billions of apps for billions of people. That means you get a lot more personalization pulled into the experience, surfacing local landamrks that are likely important to you, as well as one-click directions from stored locations like your home address. Places frequented by your friends and acquaintances will also be pulled in to complete the picture. The whole experience on a Chromebook Pixel was fast, responsive and remarkably intuitive. All the new touch controls seem perfectly designed for use with the Pixel’s touchscreen display, and reduce dramatically the number of steps required to do things like call up directions. The in-building panoramas and 360-degree images are very impressive, and truly do give you a sense of both the inside and outside of a location, but don’t expect the images to be all that comprehensive for most locations at launch. Overall this looks like an awesome improvement to the Maps experience, and it’s hard to see any spots where the progress isn’t a good thing. But it’s very different, so expect some pushback when Google does eventually push this live to a wider audience.
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The App Store’s 50B Downloads Vs. Google Play’s 48B: Android Closes The Gap
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Darrell Etherington
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Apple had a bit of a head start when it came to mobile software sales, since it launched its App Store earlier than the Android Market — now called Google Play. The gap between the two, which was more pronounced in terms of initial downloads, has begun to close. Today both Play and the App Store announced very similar milestones. Apple has been counting down to its 50 billionth app download for a while now. In fact, the assets were leaked via the Apple website backend code earlier today, so we all knew it was coming. Coincidence that it would land on a Google keynote day? That’s hard to tell, but Google had its own milestone to announce: 48 billion downloads announced onstage at I/O today. The announcements give us a unique opportunity to compare download numbers from both stores on as equal footing as possible, and the result is a snapshot of two app stores that are neck and neck — at least in terms of straight downloads. That doesn’t take into account paid vs. free apps, or how much revenue each makes from ads and other sources. But as you can see from the graph, it marks one area at least where Google used to trail considerably but is now catching up. Also the fact that Google’s Android OS now accounts for a majority percentage of global smartphone sales means it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a lot of people downloading apps.
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See The New Google+ Photos Experience In Action, Making Your Pics Better
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Darrell Etherington
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Google+ is getting a , which is rolling out to users now. Initial impressions show a work flow that makes it easier to tweak pictures quickly and even automatically, without requiring that you learn a huge amount about Photoshop or other editing software. It’s something that’s designed to be mostly a non-destructive, light-touch product by default, just tweaking things like vignetting, skin smoothing and color balance to make elements pop. If you do a lot of volume image editing, bringing in lots of photos and essentially running the same few tweaks on each, this could be a simple way to replace that with something better, especially since Google+ allows for full resolution uploads to its cloud-based image locker service. I’m so far pretty impressed with the Google+ image tweaking experience, particularly the Motion feature that stitches together images taken in quick succession to make GIFs. If you’ve ever dug into creating your own shareable GIFs, you probably know that it’s not as straightforward as it appears to be. Motion takes the hassle out of that, deliverying on a very specific need that could help fuel the next generation of BuzzFeed writers and Redditors. For Google, bringing an improved photos experience to Google+ is a way for it to compete with other social networks like Facebook and their media-focused add-ons like Instagram. It’s also going to be trouble for startups like Shoebox that are also looking into cloud photo organization and management. Will it help the social network from Google become more social? We’ll see.
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Watch Robots Fight With Lightsabers At Google I/O [TCTV]
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Josh Constine
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Meet the PR2 personal robot from While it might look like the PR2 is just for fun and games, it’s actually designed for universities. Willow Garage sells the PR2 to schools and provides the ROSS open-sourced operating system for controlling it. This way Ph.D. students don’t have to waste time building a crummy robot of their own, and instead can run their experiments on a powerful, reliable learning machine. And seriously, this thing is powerful. It’s got two lasers, a 5-megapixel camera, and an Xbox Kinect for vision, two pairs of stereo cameras for depth perception, a telescoping spine and seven-degrees-of-freedom arms for movement, and wheels that can propel it at one meter per second. and the PR2 could democratize robotics and turn us all into tinkerers. Be sure to watch the video to see the PR2 cut me down like a true Sith Lord, as well as perform less evil operations.
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TC Makers: 3D Printing Wizards At Shapeways Show Us Their Brand New Queens Factory
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John Biggs
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It’s rare to see a company that is so established yet as cutting-edge as . The company, founded in 2007 as a spin-off of Royal Philips Electronics, began as a one-off 3D printing service that offered basic plastic items for sale online. Over the years, however, the company has branched off into some amazing materials – steel, ceramic, and even sandstone – and they’ve already been able to support full color printing in 3D. Now the company is opening a series of facilities in the US and they invited us to their first print shop in Long Island City, New York. In this massive, warehouse-like space, the company has set up a number of acrylic printers as well as a small customer service team. They plan on expanding further, adding more machines to an already impressive array. The goal is to offer 3D print shops close to major US metropolitan areas to reduce wait-times and to spread out the manufacturing process among different factories. The company will have 30 to 50 printers in the LIC location once it is complete. I spoke with co-founder Peter Weijmarshausen about the process, the printers, and what it takes to become a 3D-printing powerhouse in a nascent market. It’s great to see such a cool company expand and it’s even more fun to get to tour the facilities even before the machines, printers, and staff becomes fully operational. Enjoy the tour and tune in next time for another TechCrunch Makers!
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Google Makes Email More Interactive With Customizable Gmail Action Buttons
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google today a small but cool update to Gmail. For emails where the developer has enabled this feature, Google will now show action buttons next to emails in your inbox that let you take actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the to add their own actions to Gmail messages. Google says developers could, , use this for confirmation emails when somebody registers to a site, or they could present magazine subscribers with a one-click action to renew their subscriptions or review a product, movies, restaurants or services. Developers could also use this to augment flight confirmation emails and allow users to respond to a meeting invitation right from the inbox without ever opening the email. should be easy for developers who simply have to add a straightforward piece of code to their emails. More importantly, this makes emails more interactive than ever before. For the most part, email providers do not allow any code to run inside an HTML email. While Microsoft has experimented with whitelisting a few email senders and allowed them to run scripts inside the inbox, Google seems to be willing to open its system up to any developers. It’s important to note that the company has implemented a couple of that should ensure that the user’s information remains safe. All actions, for example, have to be handled via HTTPS URLs, and hosts must have vaild SSL certificates. , a popular all-in-one cloud-based business app for accounting, billing, project management and CRM, for example, has already implemented the buttons, and others will surely follow very soon.
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After Being Hit With A Cease And Desist, Car-Sharing Startup RelayRides Suspends Rentals In New York
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Ryan Lawler
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It’s becoming increasingly commonplace for startups in the so-called “sharing economy” to take heat from regulators who seek to hold them to the same business standards as incumbent businesses. The latest company to come under fire from regulators is peer-to-peer car-sharing startup , which received a cease-and-desist notice from New York State’s Department of Financial Services (DFS). The DFS has charged RelayRides with “false advertising and violations of insurance law,” which it says could put the public at risk. Along with the cease and desist, the department has issued a “ ” due to intricacies in New York insurance law that could leave those who use car-sharing services like RelayRides liable in the case of an accident. In short, the DFS warns that the insurance from RelayRides’ provider Hudson Insurance Company may not cover damages that occur while a car is being rented through the service. Furthermore, participating in these types of car-sharing programs could be a violation of their existing policies and could result in the cancellation of their insurance. As a result, RelayRides has agreed to while it tries to work with the department on the issue. In a blog post, CEO Andre Haddad said the company would honor existing reservations in the meantime. The suspension of service was announced one day after the startup . That acquisition was meant to add some technology in the form or proprietary hardware that could be used to make car sharing more easily accessible. RelayRides isn’t the only “sharing economy” startup that has come under fire recently. The cease-and-desist against the car-sharing startup comes at the same time that ride-sharing startup SideCar is coming under regulatory scrutiny from local officials in Austin, Philadelphia and New York City. Airbnb also is being looked at more closely in major metropolitan cities like New York, where .
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Twitter Archiving Service TweetBackup Hits The Deadpool As Owner Backupify Focuses More On Enterprise
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Ingrid Lunden
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Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. — the Cambridge, MA cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down , a company originally founded in Sweden that Backupify in 2010 for an undisclosed amount. Tweetbackup has posted a note about the closure on , as well as — yes — on its , noting that new signups are stopping as of today, and that existing users will have 30 days, until June 28, to keep logging into their accounts and back up their Twitter data elsewhere. After 45 days, it , “we will begin purging the data from our Amazon servers.” On of the FAQ pages that Backupify has created to answer some questions about the service, it suggests a couple of alternatives to TweetBackup’s subscribers: for business users, the company recommends Backupify’s own-branded service; for consumers, it suggests going somewhere else altogether, either , owned by one of , Symantec; or . We are reaching out to the company to find out more, but it looks like this is part of a larger strategy at the company to reposition itself more closely on its enterprise services and away from lower cost/free consumer offerings. In fact, this may not be too new of an idea: “We always intended to have Tweetbackup users join Backupify’s base Twitter service,” Backupify’s Jason Ellis notes. And in July 2012, when Backupify announced the in which Symantec invested, it noted that the free services (TweetBackup was one) were there for lead-generation for paid apps. It is not clear how many active users TweetBackup has at the moment. In 2010, the company had a policy of requiring users of its service to follow it on Twitter — evidenced at that time because was the at the height of its controversy with Amazon and PayPal over contributions via their payment systems. By that measure, Tweetbackup had around 57,382 users, although the same platform is likely also used as part of Backupify’s wider Personal Apps social media backup service. Last year when Backupify announced its of funding it had 170,000 users, free and paid. Backupify offers paid standalone products to back up and . “ , which include Facebook and Twitter, has a freemium model. It will backup personal apps free for a limited amount of data and then charge for more features and more storage space. (Prices for paid services range from $3/month/user for the most basic Google Apps backup through to $50/month for 10 licenses of 1GB each for Salesforce.) Given that Twitter has now made its own archiving service more widely available, perhaps the writing was on the wall for whether Backupify would ever be able to translate Tweetbackup into a more profitable service without more investment to enhance the product. Monetizing even appeared to be one of the issues behind the company’s acquisition back in 2010: “They’re the number-one ranking company in Google for Twitter backup,” Rob May, co-founder and CEO of Backupify, said of the company at the . “I guess they had some problems monetizing their user base, and so were looking to sell.” Meanwhile, there are other services like and SocialSafe that back up multiple social media accounts. Both of these are now offering free, six month licenses to TweetBackup refugees.
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Natasha Lomas
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Indoor Mapping Startup Meridian Adds Notification Zones To Their Strategy
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Jay Donovan
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Indoor mapping software startup , continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to . Called , the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon on the map…Bam! They get a push notification. To be sure, it’s a real marketing opportunity and a concept underserved by the current, mostly GPS-based location awareness model for mobile devices.
There are several geo-fencing platforms out there — , , and all come to mind — so what is the big deal here? Meridian’s VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison, believes there are several differences in the Meridian approach. First of all, this notification system will work even when the accompanying app is not open nor in active use — essentially working while the app is in background mode — without significant battery drain. Other geo-fence providers might be able to do this via GPS or cell tower triangulation, but not by WiFi sensing, which is how Meridian works. This means that once the WiFi network the location is using is recognized, that network can “wake up” the app and send push notifications when different Zones of the store are passed through. Most importantly, per Meridian’s secret sauce and strategy, this works with Wi-Fi triangulation for indoor maps and can function at a sensitivity of about 10 feet. This gives the system an advantage in locations where GPS antennas often fail — like, say, in a casino under ground parking garage.
To , the company has built a CMS and rapid app building platform so that partnered companies can upload maps of their locations into the CMS. Once their location maps are digitized and uploaded to the CMS tool, the geo-fences can be drawn on the location maps. The new or existing WiFi hotspots in the locations are then coupled with the map data. Accompanying mobile apps — also built with this system — can access the map data in order to display accurate indoor maps, based on location. Now the push notifications have been added to the mix.
You may have uncovered what could be seen as the Achilles Heel in the strategy, in that a brand’s native app must be built with Meridian’s app rapid builder technology (another offering they have). That could seem like a limitation for brands that already have their own app, and don’t want to rebuild with Meridian’s proprietary app-building tool. However, Jeff said the team is currently piloting an SDK approach for the Zones platform, so brands with existing apps can use the new push notification system with an existing app. This will be deployed in the coming months. Meridian is currently wrapping up live pilots with The Bellagio in Las Vegas and also with Fernbank Museum. They’ve also received some recognition from Cisco as a provider of indoor mapping technology and Cisco has actually integrated some of Meridian’s technology into their own hardware platforms.
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Death By A Thousand Cuts? Google Wallet’s Plan To Take On PayPal Leverages Chrome, Android, Google+, Gmail & More
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Sarah Perez
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Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements from today’s Google I/O developer conference is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants, such as PayPal. It plans to do so with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more. It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand cuts, leveraging everything from Chrome to Android and even Gmail. What Google hasn’t quite worked out yet is how all this will tie together in the long run, but you can see the plan beginning to form. Let’s start with the browser, the de facto home for online shopping. It’s not news that the checkout experience is broken. Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest pain points for today’s merchants, mainly because their websites have traditionally offered only cumbersome and tedious forms for shoppers to fill out in order to make a purchase. As noted , one of the hardest things you can do on the web is try to buy something. The process takes around 21 steps, the company explained. Of course, Google is exaggerating here a bit – billing and shipping details are usually the same, but Google counted each field (street, ZIP, etc.) twice. That being said, things are even worse on mobile. Google notes that is now an outrageous 97 percent. Again, that seems high ( the source for that figure), but the trend Google is illustrating with these slightly puffed up figures is not. For comparison’s sake, Monetate’s data put global cart abandonment at 82 percent as of Q4 2012. The company has been seeing increases in cart abandonment – which had been around over the past several years – due to an increased number of shoppers doing research on mobile phones and other devices. As they reach the point of checking out on mobile, they’re now more likely to give up and move on because of the increased difficulty of the experience on mobile’s small screen, combined with retailers’ failure to roll out mobile-optimized experiences even as percentages of mobile shoppers continue to grow at record rates. A number of startups have been attacking this challenge in various forms – , , , , , and more. Google’s plan? Leverage Chrome. , with more than 750 million monthly active users today, up from 450 million just a year ago. Now it will begin baking a speedier checkout experience into its browser by syncing your billing information and other details within Chrome. What that means is that when you visit a website using the Chrome browser, including the Chrome mobile browser, you’ll automatically be offered a prompt with your billing profiles. Chrome can then use autocomplete functionality to fill in information for you, such as your address, ZIP code, credit card info and more. This functionality is being introduced via a new requestAutocomplete API, which Google describes as “an aspiring web standard that will allow users to bypass pages of form fields with an imperative API for requesting details the browser knows.” Google says this decreases the number of steps in the checkout process from 21 to just 3. Overall, it’s a worthy attempt at solving the problem with online checkout, but it still suffers from some potential obstacles to broader adoption: Website owners will have to implement the functionality (the API) on their end, and unless this “aspiring” web standard becomes an “actual” web standard supported by all browsers, its impact would be limited. This feature is still in its early days, but it’s designed to be open. Presumably, the company would still want to at least offer support for payment information retrieved from users’ Google Wallet accounts, if not actually it. (Theoretically, payment info could just be saved directly in Chrome or any other browser without the need for a Wallet account.) While the above describes what will first be a Chrome-only feature to start, Google Wallet has already found a way to support the web and mobile web through more traditional means. In addition to supporting online checkout through Wallet, last fall, , which allows e-commerce website owners to support checkout via Google Wallet on mobile devices. This is independent of the browser or mobile operating system, however, making it more like an alternative to the PayPal button. It’s a bit confusing because with the new Chrome autocomplete functionality, it seems there will be some overlap between the two. Site owners would end up implementing two APIs to be fully supportive of Google users: one to speed up checkout through automated form-filling in Chrome (likely pulling payment credentials from a user’s Google Wallet), and another if they wanted a Google Wallet button on their site that users could click to instead be walked through the Google Wallet checkout flow. Which is better? How will these two tie together? For now, Google can’t say, only noting that it’s still “early days” for the Chrome autocomplete API and it’s probable that Google Wallet will be supported in some way. But nothing is definite yet. It’s indicative of how Google needs to bring its separate teams together in order to tell a more cohesive story about payments. that the Wallet team has been too “siloed,” which has caused some issues. (See part #5 below, for example). Android is the , so it only makes sense for Google to take advantage of that fact to pull in more users’ payment information. After all, today’s users are already using Google Wallet to purchase paid applications for Android devices, as well as in-app purchases, so why not extend Wallet to support purchases of physical goods, too? That’s just what Google did. With the new , merchants and developers selling physical goods and services (as opposed to virtual goods like those sold in mobile games), can now offer their customers 2-click checkout. At launch, the company has signed on a number of new partners, including , , , , , , , , , and . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSIztv65g2w?feature=player_embedded] The service ties in also with Google+, allowing users to register and sign in to the apps, similar to Facebook Connect, and then tap to checkout without the need to enter billing or shipping information. Another vector in the fight to topple PayPal is person-to-person payments – like paying the babysitter or paying your dad the money you borrowed, for example. Digitally savvy folks today still largely turn to PayPal to make this happen. Google’s plan here? Leverage Gmail. It’s simple and ingenious really. The familiar email “attachment” icon has just become another onboarding experience for Google Wallet. , the service’s 425 million+ users can hover over the attachment paperclip icon, then click the $ icon in order to “attach money” to their message. Of course you’ll need a Google Wallet account first. For now, the feature is only available in the desktop version of Gmail, but it will certainly come to mobile in time. The only area where Google is lacking a solid strategy is in real-world payments – an area where competitor PayPal has been ramping up quickly in recent months. PayPal has been working with , to be integrated into their point-of-sale systems. It has separately announced integrations with , gas station and convenience store-focused , , and more. Google has been trudging along with its NFC-based Google Wallet app. The app uses technology whose broader adoption has been slow to pick up here in the U.S., in part due to a lack of support from Apple, as well as swirling questions as to how much of an improvement tapping your phone at point-of-sale really has over a card swipe in the long run. Google had that would allow users to switch between their preferred payment methods on the fly while still using a physical card at point-of-sale. For whatever reason, just ahead of Google I/O. Combined, all of the above areas on their own can’t be considered a PayPal killer by any means. But as they become more tightly integrated over time (assuming Google can get its teams together to focus on the bigger picture beyond their own product’s development and focus on the global stage), you can see a viable threat to PayPal starting to shape up.
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Google Maps API Gets A Visual Refresh, Available For Opt-In Today, Coming To Most Sites In August
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Frederic Lardinois
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At its I/O developer conference, Google today a new Maps API for mobile developers, updates to Maps for Android and iOS and a completely refreshed Google Maps experience on the desktop. After the main keynote, however, Google also announced a for sites that use its . The refreshed look, with new base map tiles, default markers and window style, will become the default in the Google Maps API experimental branch (which, despite its name, is actually the most-often used branch) on August 15. Developers can also opt in to use it today by just changing a . It will roll out to the release branch, which is used by most Maps for Business customers, in November. The company said that more than 1 million sites use the Maps API, and all of them will get this visual refresh over the next few months. These sites reach about a billion users every week. This is what it’ll look like: Google says it “carefully designed the change to work seamlessly with all existing sites,” so developers don’t have to make any major changes to their existing sites. Here is a full list of all the major changes:
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Google Folds Wallet Support Into Gmail So You Can Send Money As Attachments
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Chris Velazco
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Phew. Google just spent three hours or so showing off new developer tools, APIs, service overhauls, and the occasional gadget, but not everything the search giant rolled out today got a turn under the spotlights at the Moscone Center. Case in point: according to a post on the official , Google Wallet support has been baked into Gmail, so users will soon be able to send each other money by simply shooting each other emails. In the coming weeks and months, a dollar sign will start popping in Gmail accounts of people who already use Google Wallet, and a quick click lets users define the recipient and the amount they’d like to send along as an attachment. Since all of these transactions run through Google Wallet, the usual caveats are in place — sending funds from a connected bank account is totally , but those who prefer to pay with credit or debit cards are subject to an additional 2.9 percent fee tacked on. You also need to be over 18 to take part in the funding fun, though. Google is far from the first company to tackle the concept of sending money via email — rolled out a method of transferring funds to people if you had their cell phone number or email address two years ago, but the setup process involved could be more than a little tedious if the recipient wasn’t a member of the same bank. At this point, it’s too early to pass judgment on Google’s approach, but the company seems intent on making the process much easier on all the parties involved, even if the person receiving the money isn’t a Gmail user. More importantly, it’s possible that folding a level of Wallet support into Gmail could see adoption of the payment platform tick upward. After all, Google said around this time last year that Gmail played home to , and a considerable chunk of them will eventually find themselves able to transfer money without many headaches involved. Google’s to streamline the process of buying things from within an Android app could certainly play a role in expanding Wallet’s prominence. These developments may not seem as downright prominent a push as, say, a that would solidify the service’s presence in meatspace, but former Wallet chief Osama Bedler is out, and that ship has sailed. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA8m0JOoNYQ&w=640&h=360]
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Larry Page Wants Earth To Have A Mad Scientist Island
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Greg Kumparak
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Larry Page thinks we are, as a population, too negative. Especially the tech community. It’s a topic that he tackled a few times during his surprise Q&A after this morning’s Google I/O keynote, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite bits from the entire three hour presentation. The solution? Amongst other things, Larry wishes the world had some sort of permanent Burning Man-esque place for crazy builders to just be crazy. A place with less societal pressure, and without antiquated laws makin’ things sticky. Early on in his post-keynote speech, Page dug into the tech community for focusing too much on Company A vs. Company B:
“… We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.” It’s something , and have been meaning to go back to for a while now. Even when something is quite clearly labeled as an experiment from day one — as with Google Glass — we collectively rush to lampoon it. “No one in the entire world would want this!”, shouts one site. “It’s the next Segway!” shouts a dozens others. “But at least they’re trying something crazy,” shouts pretty much no one. Is Google Glass a bit strange? Absolutely! It’s weird as hell. But it’s also a rare example of a company using their mountain of spare funds to . It’s Sergey Brin gettin’ his Tony Stark on. It’s something we . It doesn’t have to win or lose. Few companies have the resources and talent to build crazy, real-world crap just to see what happens. Even fewer of those are willing to. In response to a question on how we could change the tide, and make the world a more positive place for people to build weird new things:
Yeah that’s a really good question. I think people are naturally concerned about change. We’re changing quickly, but some of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] cant be right if it’s 50 years old — that’s before the Internet. Maybe more of us need to go into other areas to help them improve and understand technology. We don’t want our world to change too fast. But maybe we could set apart a piece of the world .. I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
(If you think about it, this is what Google is doing with Glass, constrained to limitations of not actually having a dedicated physical space to do it in) Is it a bit ? Sure, though it’d probably involve more rockets and robots than it would Leopard-Men and Beast Folk. But I’d buy a house there — or at the very least, I’d book myself an annual trip.
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Samsung To Launch 5G By 2020, Hits Speeds Of 1Gbps In Tests
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Catherine Shu
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has developed core technology that will allow it to deliver high-speed 5G wireless data connections to consumers by 2020, the company . The system allows data transmission up to several hundred times faster than current 4G networks. 5G mobile communications technology is the next generation of 4G LTE networks tech and can offer data transmission speeds of up to several tens of Gbps per base station. Once 5G networks are commercialized, they will allow users to transmit massive data files, including UHD movies and remote medical services, “practically without limitation,” Samsung claims. 4G connections have gradually become available to consumers around the world since 2008, but many countries, including , are still working toward launching their LTE networks. Samsung says, however, that its new adaptive array transceiver technology overcomes the limitations that millimeter-wave bands had when transmitting data over long distances. It transmits data in the millimeter-wave band at a frequency of 28 GHz at a speed of up to 1.056 Gbps to a distance of up to 2 kilometers. “The millimeter-wave band is the most effective solution to recent surges in wireless Internet usage. Samsung’s recent success in developing the adaptive array transceiver technology has brought us one step closer to the commercialization of 5G mobile communications in the millimeter-wave bands,” said Samsung executive vice president and head of digital medial and communication R&D ChangYeong Kim. Samsung isn’t the only company to announce that it has developed 5G core tech. In February, NTT DoCoMo confirmed that it had .
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Another Trailer Pops Up On Vine As Marvel Teases New TV Series “Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
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Jordan Crook
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Though it’s but a baby in the app world, Vine is already making brands, advertisers, and especially media industry members chomp at the bit for some 6-second looping action. The latest to join the herd is Marvel, who a six-second teaser trailer for its upcoming “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” TV series. For those who were fans of the Avengers and other Marvel films, this should be a sweet little Sunday afternoon treat. But if it doesn’t satisfy, have no fear. A real teaser, one that lasts longer than 6 seconds, will debut tonight during ABC’s Once Upon A Time. It’s interesting to see how brands are managing to pack a full trailer, some of which can last up to three minutes or so, into a six-second Vine. Most recently, the producers of the new Wolverine movie on Vine. That, just like this Marvel teaser, used the quick-cutting nature of the app to show tons of action and very little plot. However, it’s worth noting that Agent Phil Coulson, a character from the Avengers who was thought to be dead (as noted by ), appears within the Vine, giving a hint at what to expect in the series. Interestingly enough, Vine seems to appeal to people both inside and outside the movie industry. Tribeca Film Festival loves the app so much that it started a to see which creative producers could come up with the best possible Vines. It was a . Even advertisers are thinking outside the box, with a new web app called looking to create awesome, interactive music videos for artists based on matching lyrics in the song with hashtags on Vine. Pretty neat, right? This is far from the end of seeing brands use Vine, but as more and more jump on the bandwagon (and the difference between a consumer-made Vine and a brand-created Vine becomes more and more apparent), it’s worth wondering how Vine plans to treat advertisers and brands. As you may notice, there’s a huge difference between Vines that are clearly made within the current restrictions of the app, and something like the Wolverine or Marvel teaser, which is obviously on a more professional level. Check out the teaser Vine below:
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Bought My Mother’s Day Flowers With Affirm, And Here’s What It Was Like
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Alexia Tsotsis
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My parents have yet to receive their Christmas gift. Because they are skiers, I bought them last December, and because of some issue with either the ZIP code or security code on my credit card, my charge keeps getting rejected. I have tried five different cards. I have called AmEx. I’m about to call Chase since I just got a new card, and sit there and go through the transaction step-by-step with them to make sure there’s not some sort of security thing on my card’s side preventing the transaction from going through. I’m going to do that once this post is finished. Why won’t you let me give you my money, AmEx? My mom did, however, receive her Mother’s Day gift yesterday, and the payment experience was exactly the opposite of the middle-class problem described above. That’s because I challenged myself to use startup, , as a payment method. Optimized for mobile, Affirm lets you pay without a credit card via phone in literally two taps (that’s their marketing pitch, in case that’s not obvious). It “loans” you the money with no fee, then gives you 30 days interest-free to pay it back. Affirm monetizes by charging a fee to merchants in return for guaranteeing payments through its risk assessment. Right now the service is only available if you’re buying something from , which is fitting. I don’t know about you, but lots of people are happy to pay $20 more for the convenience of not having to call a random florist by your mom’s house and pay by credit card over the phone during normal business hours. You can always get cheaper flowers by calling a local florist, but I prefer to do my parent gift shopping at 1 a.m. on my cell phone in bed so … “Given 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s culture of innovation, we are always looking for innovative experiences to test and learn [!],” 1-800-Flowers head of VP of Mobile and Social Amit Shah told me on why they chose to be Affirm’s guinea pig during their high season. “This is an important focus for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as we have been in the mobile space for more than five years — serving a rapidly increasing number of our customers who are using our mobile site and apps to send gifts every day.” They’re on to me. The real simple Affirm/1-800-Flowers integration lets you choose “Affirm Express Checkout” as one of the payment methods when buying your “Fields Of Europe ™ For Mom Large” and then asks you to log in with Facebook or Gmail to your Affirm account to complete the order. No credit card numbers, no security codes, no phone calls to customer service. Hallelujah. Because it is Affirm then texts you that you’ve completed your order, and you have about a month to log back in to Affirm to pay for your blossoms. I forgot about it after I did it, and about a week later Affirm emailed me to remind me that I hadn’t paid. So I did. Right then. “It’s hard to build something really convenient,” Levchin said in an interview about the startup, below. Though he wouldn’t confirm the rumors, we’re hearing that, in addition to Levchin himself through , a lot of the (i.e. Levchin’s homies) went in on the company’s $3 million – $5 million seed round, namely Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Competitors include and . Now it sucks that Affirm wouldn’t let me use a promo code to buy my overpriced bouquet, especially since overeager Google Wallet desperately wants to pay me $10 just to try it, but overall Affirm was worth it. (Levchin says that the Promo Code feature is coming in a new release.) Other than that, I wish that all online checkouts were this painless. This kind of friction removal has the potential to greatly expand the e-commerce market, bridge online-to-offline payments and engender trust among users. Are you there AmEx? It’s me, Alexia.
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Video News Specialist Wochit Raises $4.75 Million From Redpoint, Cedar Fund, And Greycroft
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Ryan Lawler
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Video is becoming an increasingly important part of news coverage online. But it’s also expensive and time-consuming to produce, and many publishers don’t have the resources to create them on their own. A startup called is changing the economics around video production for breaking news, and has raised $4.75 million to make their technology available to more publishers. Wochit makes it easier for news organizations to have timely videos around breaking stories as they happen. By licensing raw footage from original sources, the startup produces videos that can be repurposed and embedded onto publisher sites. But the secret sauce is in how Wochit brings those pieces together — by automating the process of editing footage into watchable segments. According to Wochit co-founder and CEO Dror Ginzberg, the process is about 95 percent automated, which drastically reduces the time and cost associated with producing timely news videos. For news organizations that aren’t local to where a particular news story is breaking, or for those who don’t have the resources or personnel to produce the content themselves, Wochit enables them to publish and monetize videos related to the news. For each story, Wochit creates a template video that can be used by any news organization, but it can also provide more customized videos for individual publishers. That allows them to provide white-labeled videos with their own branding, incorporating their own media and basing content of the video on the text of their stories. Altogether, Wochit is making hundreds of news videos daily, which can be embedded on publisher sites. Not only are they producing them, but they’re also updating them to provide new context and information as it happens. They also help publishers to monetize, allowing them to sell their own video ads along with or split ad revenues for ads that Wochit has sold. To advance its go-to market strategy, Wochit has raised $4.75 million from investors that include Redpoint Ventures, Cedar Fund, and Greycroft Partners. The company was founded by Ginzberg, who previously founded image syndication platform , as well as CTO Ran Oz who was a co-founder and CTO of BigBand Networks. It now has 20 employees, with offices in Israel and New York City.
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Mobile Messaging Apps: A Primer
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Natasha Lomas
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The global mobile messaging app space is the new social battleground. Startups that would have had little chance of unseating Facebook’s dominance on the web are attacking Zuckerberg’s empire by refocusing social networking around the mobile phone contacts book. Enter your phone number, and these apps already know who all your friends are. No need to go laboriously recreating your social graph. Your network is already sitting on your phone, just waiting to be switched on. Smartphone growth is clearly fuelling the trend. More and more cross-platform messaging apps are exploding onto the scene to take advantage of the powerful feature-set of a comms device that’s never far from its owner – racing to leverage the opportunity to disenfranchise Facebook and build comms and content empires of their own, adding more and more social features to keep users engaged and socialising within that app, not elsewhere — from photo-sharing with built in Instagram-style filters, to HD video calling, to meme-creation tools, to cutesy cartoon characters. The phone is the tool being used to drive a wedge between Facebook and its users. Little by little, these mobile messaging apps are eating away at the mindshare of grand web-based social networks, even as they recreate their own social content platforms online to extend and bolster their mobile offerings. Facebook was slow to recognise the threat but has since countered with its own , and additional offerings like . How seriously Facebook is taking the mobile messaging app threat now is evident in its most recent mobile effort: – an Android launcher that seeks to elbow its way past rival apps by foregrounding Facebook’s own chat channel atop other apps. But Home may already be too little, too late. With limited availability, the launcher can’t yet reach very far – it’s had only around one million downloads to-date — and will likely never make it onto iOS. There’s no word on active users of Home but the those who are downloading it, with only a two-star rating on Google Play so far. Facebook’s strategy of trying to stop the runaway mobile messaging train by standing on the train tracks looks like a pretty forlorn hope. A better bet is for it to drive usage of its own mobile messaging apps – but that’s where the geographical variation of messaging platforms poses a huge challenge. Different messaging apps are . There’s huge and growing mobile messaging variation, as more and more companies wise up to the opportunity and launch their own messaging attacks. A recent example is the Bharti/Softbank telco joint venure messaging app, , that has grabbed more than five million users since launching in December. Another contender is U.S. startup , which last month in 155 countries and 32 languages. Add to that Google looks to be readying a new unified messaging play of its own, codenamed . Below is a primer on some of the biggest mobile messaging players in the space at present – it’s by no means a comprehensive list, but even looking at this handful of larger players gives a sense of how diverse the space is, and how many serious assailants are scaling the walls of Facebook’s grand social citadel. Zuckerberg and co are now fighting a war on scores and scores of fronts. The big question for Facebook is whether there can be just one social messaging winner, and if not how can it stay relevant when there’s so much chatter taking place elsewhere? As Enders Analysis analyst notes in his latest newsletter: “There are so many mobile comms apps with over 1m downloads on Google Play that I’ve given up counting. Not clear to me that there’ll be a consolidation, either.” [Top image by via ] April 2009 (mobile app) 49 months Free text, VoIP, group chats, send videos/photos emoji, desktop client 280 million+ Global Unknown 16 $800 million when Microsoft acquired the company in 2011 * July 2009 46 months Free for a year then $0.99 yearly subscription; or one-off cost of $0.99 text, group chat, share location/photos/audio/video preloaded on a dedicated hard key on Nokia Asha 210, anti-adverts 200 million+ 100+ countries Spain 23 Rumoured to be $100 million annually * March 2010 38 months Free : text, VoIP, group chats/calls, send photos/audio/video, photo wall games, stickers/emoji, celebrity accounts, Android launcher in the pipeline 90 million Global South Korea 13 $45 million in 2012 * October 2010 30 months Free text, share photos/images/videos emoji, cards: aka HTML5 apps inside the platform including games, meme-generator, sketches, YouTube videos etc; open API 50 million+ Global Canada/Australia 13 None yet * December 2010 29 months Free text, VoIP, group chat, desktop-to-desktop video calling, share photos/location : stickers/emoji, desktop client 200 million 193 countries/global 27 None yet * January 2011 28 months Free text, VoIP, HD video chatting, group chats, send audio/photos/location, walkie-talkie mode, live group chat emoji/stickers, photo wall, locate nearby/other WeChat users who are also looking to connect, leave audio messages for strangers to pick up, official accounts, desktop client, open API, gaming platform in the works 300 million : 30+ countries China 15 None yet * June 2011 23 months Free text, VoIP, group chat, social timeline, share photos/location/audio/video Kawaii characters with own cartoon show & merchandising, stickers, games, celebrity accounts, desktop client 150 million registered users Global Japan 12 : $59m in Q1 2013 * August 2011 21 months Free text, VoIP in select markets, send photos/audio stickers/emoji, Chat Heads (on Android), integration with desktop Facebook Facebook does not break this out but estimated 60 million in November 2012 Global 22+ Unknown Not disclosed
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What Games Are: There Is No Iron Throne Of Games Anymore
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Tadhg Kelly
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As I am a medium-sized geek, I find myself thinking of the famous Cersei Lannister quote: “ ” This is essentially how the games industry has behaved for the longest time. It has a history of generational prize fights, of kings and contenders and pride going before a fall. It was a place where previous winners became abject losers, from Atari to Sega, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. And there were many young that never got out of the gate. The real kingmakers were developers. Faced with the choice to work with one dedicated platform or another, or try their hand at PC distribution, many would evaluate based on appeal and conventional wisdom about the market’s tastes. So, depending on who courted them best, offering the best tools or the best business opportunities, developers would always choose and then become locked in. Porting costs were expensive and difficult. A virtuous circle of audience and developers then formed, each propping up the other until such time as the platform started to feel played out. The only consistent exception to this rule was Nintendo, who developed both the platform and its games, and so needed a smaller audience to thrive. Yet the pattern started to shift somewhere around 2005. According to the normal order of succession, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 should have become king when Sony fumbled the ball. But actually it was Nintendo, with the fresh-faced and deliberately cheap Wii, who rose to prominence and left the other two achieving a kind of détente. A common assumption of the time had it that the industry had simply moved from a phase of monopoly to oligopoly, but there were a couple of other factors at play. One was that – outside of a couple of very big third parties – developing games for these formats became prohibitively expensive for most studios. So the platform holders took a greater hand in developing and publishing the successful games on their own platforms. This led to smaller choices. A second factor was that, after years of sputtering, smartphones finally managed to roar into life in 2007, and in the following year the world learned what an app was. Apps started to change perceptions of value around software and games, as did social gaming. Foundational ideas like how the economics of gaming should behave, and consequently what game products should look like, raised significant questions. The numbers indicated stagnation, or even contraction, of the console idea. The Xbox 360 was launched eight years ago today on and went on to sell around 70-75 million units. Sony’s Playstation 3 launched in November 2006 and also sold about 70-75 million units. Nintendo’s Wii also launched in November 2006 and has sold just shy of 100 million units. These are all pretty good, but none is close to the Playstation 2 (155 million units). Meanwhile the iPad has sold at least 100 million units in three short years, the iPhone is north of 250 million and the combined sales of Samsung’s Galaxy models probably dwarfs that number. A third factor was technology. Developers don’t really have to make the choice to go with any one platform any more. At the high end of the scale, big publishers opted for Epic’s Unreal engine, which made it much easier to port between multiple game systems. And at the lower end, in particular has made it much easier for game makers to get into many arenas cheaply. That in turn has affected how they think, such that making games these days is no longer an all-in business. Now the virtuous circle can, and frequently does, extend beyond the platform. This leads me to the idea that there is no longer one Iron Throne of gaming. That the very notion that a hardware monopoly, or even an oligopoly, will continue to own the market is archaic. Most of the interesting stories about games have come from non-traditional sources over the last few years. Technological innovations like mass asynchronous social gaming happened beyond the Wall, and a decline in PC sales and console software sales corresponded to a rise in tablets and apps. The Wii, despite its initial roar, faded quickly. So did products like Kinect. The market changed, becoming much more chaotic and faddish in some respect. But also much more tribal. Here’s a small example: Five years ago I regularly bought Xbox 360 games at my local GAME store. GAME wasn’t my only source of games (Amazon was another) but I often found it the easiest to browse and the most immediate delivery vehicle. An average purchase would probably be around $30, and time from purchase-to-playing could be measured in hours. This weekend, on the other hand, I opened my iPad and downloaded , , Oregon Settler, Ace Patrol, , and Year Walk. Some of these games were free (as in free-to-play), some were $2 or $3. Most of them are pretty good and some of them look beautiful. After my purchase they had all downloaded and installed in about 10 minutes, and then I was playing away. It sounds trivial, but that kind of elegant experience and low price fundamentally undoes many of the basic precepts of the old way of looking at things. I don’t just mean that the games are cheaper and more easily accessed (although that’s a part of it). They are much more disposable. $0.99 spent on Angry Birds Friends is just a lot less of a commitment than $69.99 spent on Call of Duty, and that means players are much more likely to drop a game if it’s not instantly engaging. It also means that players have access to vastly more games and can try tons of them before they find the one that’s right for them. This means that marketing stories, as opposed to platform stories, are more important than ever. Recognition, resonance and so on matter more because the one thing you (as a game maker) don’t have is the guaranteed attention that comes with a platform sugar daddy. Almost all the really interesting stuff is happening anywhere but console because of access and price. It’s relatively easy to be on iOS (though hard to be successful there because of so much competition) compared to Xbox Live. It’s much easier to connect to fans through general-purpose devices that also sell games than games machines that also sell content. This applies just as much to the bingo-gaming business or the frontier of indie development. Some would say that all this proves is that Apple became the new king, but if so Tim Cook wears a fairly disinterested crown. The iOS shift was more like the old computer revolution than a dedicated gaming movement. And while games certainly make up a huge part of that experience today, Apple (and Google and Facebook, too) operate a curation/aggregation marketplace rather than the traditional dictatorial console platform. There is no king any more, not like we used to know anyway. And little need for him to return. In the Song of Ice and Fire, Daenerys Targaryen is on an extended quest to form her armies and return to take back the crown of Westeros in the belief that this is her divine right. At some point I think, perhaps in a later book, there’ll come a moment when she realizes that she was wrong. In fact my bet is that the Iron Throne is eventually melted for scrap. I feel a similar way about games. A common counter-argument to all the new school game thinking seems to say “Okay, okay, fine. All these touch-based games are all well and good, but they can’t do Halo 4.” In other words, phones and tablets are for casuals, but real gamers know the score. They know that the mono/oligopoly approach is right, and is where the good games come from. They are waiting for a new king. Actually, “real gamers” (whoever they are) are actually often to be found playing indie games on Steam and funding Kickstarter projects. Many of the most significant games in that sphere get their first breaks elsewhere, such as Minecraft. Many of the big trends happen well outside official platforms, where the conversation is more connected. Meanwhile the would-be kings operate what amounts to a television model, while Valve is proposing to create a Steam Box that gets around the console problem once and for all. This means dedicated devices like the PS3 are actually second- or even third-string platforms now. My friend Mike Bithell, for example, released first on a variety of small PC-download stores, then Steam, and only much more recently on PSN. He doesn’t need official sanction to go make his game, just Unity and some way to accept credit card payments. And that means Sony comes calling to him rather than the other way around. In addition, the presumed hardware advantage of consoles is less impressive than ever. Halo 4 may weave a big song and dance, tell a story, and also put you in the game world with haptic feedback. But when I look at wonderfully stylized games like Year Walk, I remember that the actual story in Halo 4 felt largely like a re-run of bad Babylon 5 episodes. And as for the joypad factor? Well OUYA, Gamestick, and other microconsoles are becoming more and more interesting. They’re trying to bring a lot of that app store thinking to your television at a low price, and while that idea has yet to cross the chasm into the mainstream, it seems only a matter of time. At the moment, more “royalist” elements of gaming journalism tend to think of microconsoles as 3DOs (primarily asking who are the devices supposed to be for) and evaluating their chances based on the criteria of “proper” consoles. But, , that’s probably the wrong way to look at them. However what is apparent is just how trivial they could make the joypad-gap seem. And did I mention how they almost all work with Android and Unity? It’s highly unlikely that any major console will win the Iron Throne ever again. Gaming is changing from a monarchic model to something approaching a democratic one, where a flood of formats and cross-platform solutions overcome monolithic ideas of quality and price, and of the need to choose a platform to be the king. The old kings are still carrying on as though they’re playing the game of thrones, trying to out-maneuver one another with a raft of press events. But what you’ve got ask yourself is whether all of that is just so much noise and bluster celebrating the emperor’s new clothes?
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Quickoffice In The Browser: The Reason Why Microsoft Is Suddenly So Scared Of Google’s Productivity Tools
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Frederic Lardinois
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We’re just a few days away from the start of , the search giant’s annual developer conference, and while we actually know very little about what Google plans to announce during its massive, three-hour keynote on Wednesday, there is something brewing in Mountain View that has Microsoft’s Office division . Over the course of the last week, Microsoft a very negative anti-Google Docs campaign that fits the mold of its more general anti-Google ads. But why the sudden focus on Google’s productivity tools? That reason, I believe, is in the browser. Quickoffice, which Google last June, allows users to read and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the iPad, iPhone and Android. Unlike Google Docs, which remains a relatively limited productivity suite when compared to Microsoft Office, Quickoffice does a very nice job at allowing you to open and edit Office files without losing the document’s layout and other advanced features that Docs can’t currently handle. Just last month, Google brought Quickoffice and the new Chrome Office Viewer for displaying Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Google doesn’t say so explicitly, but it’s a fair assumption that this tool uses some of Quickoffice’s magic as well (it was previously only available for Chrome OS). http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qK2T3GVJafM When it comes to editing Office documents in the browser, Microsoft’s own Office Web Apps are an underrated gem in the company’s lineup, and right now, Google doesn’t have anything in its repertoire of web apps that comes even close. Quickoffice, however, is coming to the web. When Google introduced the Pixel Chromebook in February, it also dropped a hint that it was , using its own Native Client technology. At the time, Google’s Sundar Pichai said that many people love Google’s productivity apps, but in the business world, Microsoft Office is still the de facto default. Having Quickoffice available for Chrome and on Chromebooks, he said, “completes the story for a lot of users.” During the February event, Google said that it would take about three months to launch the browser-based version of Quickoffice with full editing capabilities – and that puts the launch date almost exactly in line with next week’s I/O. Microsoft knows that the competition in the online productivity space is about to heat up and may just put it on defense. For many potential Office 365 and Office Web Apps users, a full-blown Office-compatible productivity suite in the browser from a company like Google presents a very viable alternative to using Microsoft’s tools. It’s no surprise then that the folks over in Redmond are launching their anti-docs marketing campaign now.
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SideCar’s Sunil Paul On Working With (And Battling) Regulators
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Anthony Ha
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co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul was part of what may have been at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this month. Sharing the stage with Hailo CEO Jay Bregman (I’ll be posting an interview with Bregman later) and NY TLC Deputy Commissioner Ashwini Chhabra, Paul positioned his ridesharing startup as an organization standing up for innovation and choice in the face of regulation. I interviewed Paul backstage, where I asked if he’d be able to find common ground with the regulators. “I think, actually, many of the public servants that work in those organizations, they do want to serve the public,” he said. “I think the system sometimes keeps them from being able to do that, but their personal desire is to do a good job and serve the public. The public is definitley served when we’ve got more choice, when systems are safe, and they’re fair.” Naturally, Paul argued that SideCar’s system is both safe and fair, thanks to the safeguards enabled by smartphones and social media. He added that SideCar itself shouldn’t be regulated on a local level, because it’s just an information provider and matching service — it doesn’t actually dispatch drivers: That might sound like a subtle difference [but] that’s the difference between a Match.com and arranged marriage. So I think in a dispatching system, regulators … should have more control simply because the driver doesn’t know where you’re going, the passenger has no choice, prices are set. In a matching system like ours, there’s complete freedom, the destination’s required, drivers and passengers have a choice over who to give a ride to, and there’s no set price. We also talked about SideCar’s difficulties in New York, where two of its cars were impounded. In response, SideCar is asking supporters to . ( .) That might not seem like a particularly effective strategy, but Paul seemed confident that things will change if politicians believe that’s what people want. “If people take action, politicians will listen,” he said. “Regulators may not listen, but politicians will listen, and ultimately politicans are the ones that will make the rules.”
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Google Must Not Like Sports, As Google Now Will Crash When You Try To Add Or Remove Teams From The Sports Card
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Drew Olanoff
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Google Now is a great feature for Android users, and now . The idea is that the more you use Google products, the more it learns about you and the better information it can spit at you proactively. However, if you try to interact with Google Now, specifically on which sports teams you’d like to follow, the app will crash. Not only will Google Now crash, but you’ll get continual pop-up messages telling you that Google Search has crashed, the app that runs the Now experience. It’s quite annoying and it’s something that people have been reporting on . Even though Google employees have interacted with the community, there’s still no real fix. I tried to delete the Giants, since I’m a Phillies fan, which you can do by tapping on the information button of the Card: It will let you add or remove teams without any problem, but once you go back to Google Now, it crashes and you start seeing this beauty over and over: There’s no official fix from Google, with the only being “Thank you for staying engaged on this issue. We’re continuing to look into it.” The employee then encourages you to send feedback to Google from within Google Now…which you can’t do because the app crashes. The only real fix that I’ve found for the issue is to go into your app settings for the Google Search app and clear out the app data and cache. That will at least let you open up Google Now again and put an end to the annoying crash alerts: Once you open up Google Now again, you’ll have to go through the original process of agreeing to use it and sit through the tour of example cards. However, don’t go ahead and edit the same Card again, or it will start the hellish loop all over again. It reminds me of another Android bug, the one where the team . It’s probably something that should have been picked up on during a regular QA process. Let’s hope that Google releases an update to its OS at the I/O conference, so that us sports fans can actually enjoy one of Now’s core functionalities. Or maybe, Googlers just really hate sports. Maybe its users don’t like sports either since this bug isn’t making a ton of noise, or are they just letting Google Now pick the teams that are closest to them? Regardless, it’s annoying. [Photo credit: ]
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Crowdsourcing An Alternate Name For ‘Ride Sharing’
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Ryan Lawler
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It’s been about a year since and entered our lives, bringing the idea of a peer-to-peer marketplace for urban transportation to San Francisco. Since then, they’ve expanded to other cities, providing a way for passengers to open up their mobile phones and find rides from other regular people who have time and a car to get them there. Oh, and have we mentioned that , essentially saying that they’ll offer peer-to-peer rides in any city where their lower-priced competitors play. We at TechCrunch have been referring to this phenomenon as “ride sharing.” Not a post goes by, however, without someone jumping into the comments to point out that the phrase is inadequate to describe what SideCar, and Lyft, and Uber are actually doing. To be clear, the services that these companies offer are far removed from the sort of casual carpooling that is legal — and even encouraged — as a way to cut down on car ownership, reduce greenhouse gases, and the like. As commenters and opponents like to point out, so-called “ride share” companies usually operate more like unlicensed taxi or limo services than as a way to connect two people who share a common destination. But in markets like San Francisco, they’ve become a welcome alternative to the constrained taxi supply and relative high cost of Uber’s traditional black car service. Competition means more options, more drivers available, and ultimately, more choice when trying to get from point A to point B in a limited amount of time. Still, there’s that little problem of terminology. I like raide sharing because hey, it’s easy. And it’s kind of an accepted way to describe what Lyft and SideCar do. But it’s not exactly totally accurate. Drivers are sharing rides, sure, but one could argue that cabs and limos are as well. And so-called “ride share” drivers, while not commercially licensed, are also participating in background and driver checks and getting paid — kind of like cabbies. SideCar has been pushing the idea of “ride matching,” mainly due to the “destination” aspect of its app. Unlike Lyft and Uber, it requires passengers to enter not only where they’re originating from, but where they’re going. As a result, it argues that its service is perhaps a more pure example of the ride-share ideal since, hey, everything’s voluntary and drivers don’t have to go out of their way if they don’t want to. For SideCar, it’s a differentiator, but it’s not a reason to re-define the market. So anyway, dear reader — now is your chance to make me change my headlines and stories forever more, to influence the way that we describe this brave new world of urban transportation. Come up with a new descriptor, three words or fewer (preferably one or two) to explain what the hell it is SideCar and Lyft do, so the commenters will leave us all alone and stop complaining that these companies are just glorified unlicensed taxi services.
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Nokia Teases New Lumia’s Camera In Prime Time TV Ad, Ahead Of “See What’s Next” London Event On Tuesday
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Natasha Lomas
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Nokia has run a TV advert teasing a new Lumia device it’s widely expected to unveil at an event in London on Tuesday. The advert ran during a prime time evening slot on Channel 4, during a screening of The Inbetweeners movie. The teaser advert focused on the camera of an unnamed new Lumia smartphone, with close up shots of the lens and flash, and the words “more than your eyes can see” and “the new Nokia Lumia is coming”. Nokia sent out invites to “see what’s next” as “the Lumia story continues” last month, ahead of the May 14th event. Last week the mobile maker unveiled a new flagship smartphone for the U.S. on Verizon, unboxing the — a device that had been widely leaked ahead of its official launch, including by Nokia who published with the Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5. It also took the wraps off an update to its Asha range: the Series 40-based $99 is the first device to run Nokia’s new Asha touchscreen UI. With recent updates at both the bottom and top of its mobile ranges, speculation about what it will show at Tuesday’s event has run the gamut from the rumoured , to and possibly even the long rumoured leap (back) into . Judging by today’s teaser the EOS device looks to be the most likely candidate for unboxing on Tuesday. As well as the camera lens, the teaser appeared to show a device with metallic trim or a metal casing. The EOS device has to have an aluminium casing, rather than the polycarbonate/plastic Nokia has used on all other Lumias to-date. Nokia’s original PureView smartphone, the Symbian-based 808 PureView, had a 41 megapixel camera — something Nokia has not recreated on its Lumia Windows Phone-based line, despite repurposing the PureView branding for its flagship 920. It will certainly be interesting to see where Nokia takes the Windows Phone lens next, and whether it can bring the full 41MP PureView experience to the platform. Nokia’s camera teaser was followed in the second ad break by a lengthy Vodafone iPhone ad, focusing on the iPhone’s camera and various camera apps. Someone in the Channel 4 ad sales department has clearly been busy.
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If You Can’t Afford $605K For Coffee With Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey’s Charity Auction Is At $5K With Four Days Left
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Drew Olanoff
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It’s nice to see people in a power position in the valley give up their time for charitable causes. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, recently offered up his time for probably , to benefit . The current top bid is a whopping $605K, and the auction ends in two days if you’ve got the cash to donate. If the “Cook Experience” is a bit too rich for your blood, then you might be interested in hanging out with Twitter co-founder and Square CEO, . His , benefitting , gets you a full-on lunch with the man at Square’s office in San Francisco. Whereas Cook’s auction took off with huge bids immediately, Dorsey’s hasn’t quite gotten off to the same start. There’s only one bid right now, and it’s for $5K. Sure, Apple is a company with more mainstream appeal, and a visit to the offices in Cupertino does sound fun, but Dorsey came up with Twitter. That’s worth at least $100K, right? All kidding aside, the BUILD organization is doing great things for entrepreneurs, stating their mission as: “…to use entrepreneurship to excite and propel disadvantaged and disengaged students through high school to college and career success.” Here’s the pitch for Dorsey, whose auction ends in four days: Learn from one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time, Jack Dorsey, as you and seven of your closest friends sit down to lunch with him at his newest business, Square, headquartered in San Francisco. At the end of the day, this is a great way to raise money for charities, but the winning bidders probably have a plan as to what they’d like to get out of the meetings. It would be interesting to get to talk to the person who meets either Cook or Dorsey, so if you’re that person, definitely . Even if it’s under strict NDA…which would be nice to know, too. If you score the Dorsey lunch, you can even bring seven of your friends. Maybe you’ll even get invited to cameo in one of his infamous Vine selfies:
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Google To Take On Apple’s Game Center Soon, Leaks Suggest
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Greg Kumparak
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Games dominate the mobile app ecosystem. Seriously. It’s easy to forget that as we all search for the next big, hype-worthy app of the moment, but it’s the truth. Eight out of the ten most purchased apps last year were games. Nine of the ten highest grossing apps in the App Store last year, all games. Combine this with the fact that Apple’s Game Center was launched almost 2.5 years ago, and it’s a bit strange that Google has yet to launch a Game Center-esque hub of their own for Android. If a string of recent leaks hold true, they’re finally getting around to it. The guys over at tore apart a just-released APK for “Play Services” — the behind-the-scenes grunt app that handles things like app updates — and have unearthed a host of details suggesting that Google is on the verge of launching a centralized gaming hub for Android that’ll handle everything from game invites to leaderboards. In the absence of anything more official, the hub is tentatively being referred to as “Google Play Games”. Could this be part of the reason why Google ? While it’s not clear exactly which features will be ready to go on day one, there are breadcrumb trails for all of different functionality. Here’s what Play Games appears to be able to do: None of this stuff at the moment, as the hacked-apart APK only contains a small chunk of the puzzle. With Google I/O just days away, however, you can almost certainly expect to hear more about this next week.
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Iterations: Snoopify, The Greatest Mobile Photobombing App Of All Time
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch . “What are the cool new apps you’ve seen lately?” To this oft heard question, lately, there have been lots of answers. So, mobile is indeed exciting and moving fast. And, just recently, a fun new app came out that instantly captured my attention — no, it’s not from a Stanford dropout or from the “innovation lab” of a large technology company. No. It’s from — excuse me — . Yes, that’s right, the same artist so many of you grew up with. He’s diversified his musical career into the business of his own branded apparel, a television show, and now he invades the greatest consumer stage of our times — our mobile phones. And, what’s more impressive is just how he did it — the genius to observe and iterate, to pull out the nuggets of lessons we have learned and package it together with marketing that’s both fun, easy, and devilishly derivative yet simultaneously novel. The app is called “ .” I think it’s both a noun (the app) and a verb (as in, to “Snoopify” a photo). Essentially, you can take a new or existing picture, and then open up a box of Snoop stickers (that’s right, stickers) and overlay them onto the picture before sharing it on every social platform . Most of the stickers, as you can imagine, have something to do with Snoop and his brand, which makes for a hilarious “Snoop filter” on these doctored photographs. The first time I downloaded the app, I “Snoopified” about five times in the span of 10 minutes and shared them everywhere. Snoop has essentially digitized himself and appified a scalable way to photobomb any picture with his signature brand. And, this is the best part — if you want to unlock the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pages of stickers, pull out your credit card because they’re locked behind a paywall. In-app purchases. Genius. From a marketing and branding standpoint, this is all fascinating to me. Look at the intersections of trends here: (1) Photos remain the in our mobile world. Like SnapChat showed with their expiring images, there’s no end to the creative manipulation mobile software can offer to pictures. (2) Influencers with their own global, diverse audiences can leverage networks like Twitter and Instagram to breakthrough the of the iOS app store minefield. There’s the tactic of growth hacking, yes — and then there’s the pure organic lift a celebrity can leverage to surpass everyone else. And (3) Stickers. Just a few months ago, was hemming and hawing about Path’s latest 3.0 update which include new sets of free and paid stickers, perhaps influenced by the growth of mobile messaging apps in Asia (such as Line, an app which raked in US$50M+ in Q1 of 2013 by selling virtual goods in-app). So, Snoop and his team watch all these trends converge, and steal a page out of the apps like Line and Path. Great artists steal, right? And, what do you know, it worked — I bought stickers, my first in-app purchase of a digital good. Brilliant. I’ll be writing more about the overall trends I’m seeing at the app layer here in my column this summer, but an app like Snoopify, which rose quickly in the charts earlier this week, breaks convention with how much of the startup world views how apps are supposed to be made and distributed. Distribution may, in the end, be just as, if not more, important than the actual app. Maybe. The creator of the app doesn’t actually have to do the hard-coding of the software — he or she can commission it, and it can be developed elsewhere. Of course, as I finalize this post, the app has already slipped in the charts. When I started drafting this post a few days ago, “Snoopify” was in the Top 25 trending free apps according to App Annie, but now as I finalize this early Sunday morning, it’s slipped to #36 (on AppData) and #58 (on App Annie) and is ranked #156 for grossing according to the official Apple App Store. An app like Snoopify was destined to be faddish and not a business. Or, maybe this is just the first move by Snoop Lion to cut into the iPhone, on the app level. At scale, it’s an incredibly clever technique to extend his brand on top of other peoples’ pictures — the greatest photobomb at scale….ever! Perhaps he doesn’t see enough quality engagement on his work in popular music apps like Spotify or Rdio or other myriad music apps. Maybe he’s tired of Instagramming and receiving hearts in return, or maybe Twitter is just for distribution to his fan base. Maybe after stickers, he’s going to open private messaging inside his app, or broadcast scenes from his next concert to a select audience. (I’m having fun with this, naturally, though it’s not out of the realm of possibility.) The opportunities on mobile are continuing to prove endless, and for someone as creative as Snoop, even a little mobile icon can represent the largest of sandboxes. Of course, not every artist can go to the lengths that Snoop went to in developing and promoting his mobile app, but of the ones who do have this luxury, Snoop’s foray into the app store was a brilliant move, complete with a built-in revenue model, a platform for showcasing his brand, and artfully blending some of the biggest trends in consumer mobile behavior we have all collectively observed. Well played, Snoop — well played.
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You Can’t Have It Both Ways
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John Biggs
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Gun control is control of all guns. This tautology, in a developed society, is non-negotiable. If guns can exist in our country, then gun plans can exist, and, although I’m firmly on the side of draconian control over most weapons, I find the move to ban Defense Distributed’s plans for their unconscionable. Guns exist, so these plans, too, should exist. To be clear, I think are libertarian claptrap. His jingoistic adoption of the Liberator name – the name of the simple guns airdropped on German-occupied territories to strike fear in the hearts of the Nazis – insults the memories of war dead. Even a pacifist would see the value in a last armed struggle against an enemy of unknowable power. Yet no pro-gun pundits see the supreme disconnection between the struggle of an unfree people and the rights of a gunshow weapons purveyor to a frictionless transaction. But even though we don’t need a Liberator, now have it. And that is where I will defend these ridiculous plans to the end. Like the before it, the Liberator is the product of a fevered mind full of conspiracy theories and unrighteous anger coupled with a severe lack of self-awareness. The Cookbook’s author, 19-year-old William Powell, wrote his “treatise” as a reaction to the Vietnam War. He felt strongly enough that he would risk his life and limb – and the lives and limbs of countless other impressionable teens – by releasing a compendium of arguably risible improvised weaponry. But his right to publish, to produce, should never be in jeopardy. His aim was true but his target was wrong. The same goes for Wilson. 3D printing is an important new industry. It makes it as easy to play with plastic as BASIC made it easy to play with bits. I can foresee a situation where a child would design and print a plastic shiv or a fake grenade or any number of potentially dangerous items. This is how exploration works: you go to the extremes to understand the center. I remember one summer – I was probably 11 or 12 – when my friends and I found some old glass doors in the back yard. My friends and I spent an afternoon cracking the glass and making “knives” – essentially finding pieces of glass we could hold on to without cutting ourselves. We named knives – Hawkeye, Samurai – and put them in a cloth-lined briefcase I used on my “spy missions.” My parents found us later in the the back yard playing with shattered glass. I was grounded. We never got the clubhouse. The same goes for the Liberator. The foolish mind will see a pane of glass and sees a knife. The wise mind sees the same door and will use it as the entrance to a greenhouse. That we didn’t see the useful application of these doors made us idiots. We can fear 3D printing. Even if we ban every digital file, someone out there will make something dangerous and slap the sash of liberty on it. In the end we live in a world of chaos tempered solely by intelligence and compassion. It is my undying hope that those latter facets of our nature will win out and so I understand the value of tinkering. The speed with which Wilson ignored his own “No Takedown” rule shows us how stern and staunch a freedom fighter this boy really is. But I’d much rather see a vibrant – if sometimes misguided – marketplace of ideas than a culture of fear-mongering and bloviating. Only a fool would download and print Wilson’s gun. But, if guns can remain in our lockboxes and closets, it is the fool’s right to do so, no matter what.
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Blinkbuggy Wants To Reinvent The “Baby Book” For Parents To Capture Memories Online
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Leena Rao
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For generations in the past, parents have carefully put together “baby books” that capture the first years of a baby’s life in photos, hand prints and more. My mother created one for me, and it’s something that I treasure. But in the world’s digital age, the photos and memories of our babies are captured most often on mobile phones. Any paper is stored in a file cabinet or thrown away. And there hasn’t been a product that is specifically tailored towards recreating the baby book online—until now. Enter , a new startup from a Googler that wants to help moms and dads create virtual baby books. The brainchild of Google ad sales manager Emma Weisberg, Blinkbuggy is focused on mothers and helping busy moms collect and connect all the most important moments in their children’s lives. As Weisberg explains, today’s parents have 10,000 photos on a hard drive, 1,000 one-off shares on Facebook, 100 related emails and comments from family and close friends, 50 video links on YouTube, and more. You could attempt to centralize this on Flickr or another photo-sharing site, but the written memories and timeline format is missing. With Blinkbuggy, you can upload photos, record your memories (emails, written notes, artwork, milestones) within one cloud-based service. The UI of the site makes it look like a photo album meets post-it wall. You can also create albums for multiple children within one interface. Another key issue for parents putting these memories online is privacy. Weisberg says that you can set your privacy to be completely private, or you can add people on an email invite basis. The privacy controls are fairly simple, and you can even choose to share specific content with friends and family. If you do invite others to share in the stories, they can contribute their own memories as well and comment on photos, quotes and more. What makes Blinkbuggy compelling is that it’s more than just an album of memories. The startup provides a super easy way to organize all the massive content that we have on our children. By uploading and then tagging these memories, you can easily find them when you search the site. Weisberg, who is staying on at Google for now, says that next up is a mobile app, the ability to print albums and video uploads.
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Facebook’s iPhone Culture Builds An Overzealous Home On Android
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Josh Constine
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Facebook didn’t realize just how important widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home was a huge mistake. That’s because some of the Facebookers who built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I’ve confirmed. Lack of “droidfooding” has left Facebook scrambling to add these features, whose absence have contributed to just downloads for Home since launching a month ago. As I wrote in November, Facebook has been — carrying and testing Android devices. You can see the posters encouraging employees to pick up a droid below. The issue was that Facebook handed out iPhones to employees for years. Facebookers could request an Android handset, but otherwise would basically get an Apple phone by default. That wasn’t as dangerous years ago when the iPhone still had more marketshare and Facebook users, but since then Android has . If Facebook wants to reach the largest audience, it needs employees living and breathing Google’s mobile operating system. The lack of droidfooders didn’t have serious consequences until . It replaces the lock screen, homescreen, and app launcher of compatible Android phones with a Facebook-centric experience. It offers Cover Feed, a big, beautiful way to browser the news feed the second you bring your phone out of sleep. the ability to build real-time information widgets, put your most used apps in a persistently visible dock, or organize your collection of apps into folders. When I first tried out Home, I admit I was , while those absent Android personalizations didn’t phase me. Why? Because I’m an iPhone user. First off, the iPhone doesn’t offer widgets at all, so I didn’t really know what I was missing. Second, I was running Home on a brand new loaner “Facebook Phone”, the HTC First. I didn’t expect to be able to port my iOS dock and folders to Android. I accepted that my experience would be somewhat unpersonalized. I was naive. The real problem? Facebook’s developers were just as naive. Employees I’ve talked to admit that iPhone users testing Home made Facebook fail to see how wrong it was to overwrite people’s widgets, docks, and folders. Unlike working on some standard app, sticking a new Android device in an employee’s hand to test Home wasn’t sufficient. It needed long-time, diehard Android users — something Facebook doesn’t have as many of internally as it would like. On Thursday at Facebook headquarters, VP of Engineering Cory Ondrejka and Director of Product Adam Mosseri admitted this is — one that’s dissuading people from downloading or actively using Home, and that’s inspiring the 1- and 2-star reviews dragging down store. Those reviews, people’s unwillingness to trade their personalized launcher for Home, other problems, and Home’s invasiveness have caused Facebook’s apperating system to slip far down the charts. It’s dropped out of the top 100 apps according to several analytics providers, . “There a lot of feedback that not having a Dock on Home is an issue” said Ondrejka. So instead of spending its first few monthly updates enriching Home with a better status composer or starting to monetize it with ads, Facebook’s team is backtracking. Instead of pitching Home as something that “replaces the lock screen and home screen”, Facebook is shaving it down into on top of your existing phone. , first Facebook will offer a more in-depth new user onboarding experience that illustrates exactly how to access your other apps. Next, it will introduce “Dock”, pictured on the right. It’s a way for users to import their old navigation bar of their four most frequently used apps. Mosseri tells me Facebook doesn’t want users to have to sacrifice the work they did customizing their Android in order to use Home. Eventually, expect Facebook to add an app foldering system or folder importer to Home, as well as a way to display widgets. “We wanted to ease the transition from your old launcher to your new launcher,” said Moserri of the planned changes. Facebook would have known to make that s priority before Home launched, but its iPhone culture meant there was no one to cry foul. Team members didn’t have old launchers to transition from. Home has big potential. People who do get by its shortcomings and settle into Home see a 25% increase in the time they spend on Facebook. But it’s stuck at under 1 million downloads and likely many fewer active users because its overly aggressive invasion of Android scares people away. Never has it been more apparent. If Facebook can’t get Androids in more pockets at 1 Hacker Way, it will continue to misstep in mobile.
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Google Quietly Kills SMS Search, Closing One Way Of Connecting With Mobile Users Who Don’t Have Data Plans
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Ingrid Lunden
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is well known for its regular bouts of spring cleaning when it kills off a number of products in , but it also sometimes makes quick changes in between the bigger announcements. One of those has now hit its portfolio of SMS-based products aimed at users of lower end devices: Google has quietly closed down SMS Search. People began to notice the service stop working on Friday, and asked about it in one of (good thing those haven’t been closed down yet) and on . Jessica S., a Google employee, the record straight: “Hi everyone, Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Streamlining our services enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives. Thanks,
Jess” For those of you who didn’t use it, SMS Search was a service Google had created that let users send search queries by text message to a short number, in this case 466453. The search results would also come back as text messages. These would not be links to further web pages, but actual information, playing on the many services that Google offers on its desktop search portal for things like currency conversions, weather and local listings. This was mainly intended for feature phones without data connections: But the search could also be used on smartphones: Google’s hasn’t removed a link to SMS Search yet, it goes to a .
Trying to find a picture of how SMS Search looked, I came across (on Google) a link to its page, which appears to still have an active link, but as points out that won’t work because it uses the same short code number as the U.S. service did. In some regards, you can see why Google would choose to axe SMS Search. The number of feature phone sales is on the decline worldwide as more and more people make the shift to smartphones. In the last quarter of 2012, says the number of mobile phone sales worldwide was a 472 million units, compared to 478 million a year ago, but at the same time smartphone sales increased by 58 million to 208 million (it has yet to release its quarterly figures for Q1 2013). It could be that Google is simply doing this to stay one step ahead of the times. Or it could be that, as with other products like , it was not getting enough use of the service. For now, Google’s other SMS products that let you , update your , check your , and send and receive SMS text messages through , appear to still be working; but users will inevitably start wondering if these will be next on the chopping block. We’re reaching out to Google to ask and will update as we learn more. Photocredit:
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Ryan Lawler
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Why Zuckerberg’s Lobby Is Collapsing Like A
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Gregory Ferenstein
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At this very moment, Mark Zuckerberg’s political lobby, FWD.us, is probably taken aback at how reviled it has become, both from the public and . After all, there are , including Facebook’s own Political Action Committee, which routinely offer Republican candidates campaign cash for political favor. So, why, after discovering FWD.us indirectly supporting the controversial Keystone Pipeline initiative, have would-be supporters flooded their Facebook page with scathing comments, and its A-list supporters, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk, ditched the group? Unlike other lobbies, FWD.us burst on to the scene with from its celebrity founder, promising to galvanize the latent civic passions of Silicon Vally’s netizens in a noble crusade to advance the knowledge society. While one hand extended towards grassroots supporters, the other reached into its wallet pocket and discretely doled out funds to controversial candidates. There’s a reason most lobbies don’t bother with grassroots activism: communities don’t get excited about the kinds of soul-crushing moral compromise necessary in DC politics. So, when FWD.us rolled up with millions in hand claiming to be the voice of the technologists, those who felt misrepresented freaked out. Even more confusing, when confronted, FWD.us chose to do something no other major organization in technology has done: it remained silent. Even the notoriously tight-lipped Apple holds a press conference after public uproar. Californians haven’t become jaded to the kinds of secrecy common for Wall Street banks and campaign SuperPACs. The unfazed backdoor dealings caricatured in Netflix’s (addicting) series may work for lobbies based in our nation’s capitol, but Californians evidently won’t tolerate it in their backyard. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams a link to a scathing blog post from Branch CEO, Josh Miller, explaining, “In service of noble causes, FWD.us is employing questionable lobbying techniques, misleading supporters, and not being transparent about the underlying values and long-term intentions of the organization. More discouragingly, the leaders of the technology industry (and of FWD.us) have built their careers on bringing meaningful change to the world. They should be doing the same in Washington.” FWD.us would-be grassroots supporters agree, “Will Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values to get a few engineers hired & get immigration reform?”, wrote one commenter on their Facebook page. Folks in San Francisco had a sense that FWD.us understood technologists’ natural aversion to Washington culture, “People in tech have often felt a cultural disconnect from the political process, which is a shame considering we are naturally idealistic,” went a press release of FWD.us’s launch last month. True to their word, unlike any other lobby, for grassroots activism, with the audacious aim of that brought down the entertainment industry-funded, Stop Online Piracy Act, and helped smartphone taxi service, Uber, overcome the Washington DC regulators. But, unlike Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to push for Immigration reform, FWD.us’s grassroots promise is nowhere to be found. Like many of us at TechCrunch, tech luminaries have been begging FWD.us for a hint of transparency, “It’d be easier to believe that FWD.us will be a positive force if we knew the full breadth of its agenda,” popular blogger and entrepreneur, Anil Dash. Unfortunately, they refuse to talk to anyone. , Director Joe Green didn’t (or couldn’t) be interviewed, instead opting for a generic story about the value of immigration reform. See, their strategy feels like patronizing, as though us overly-idealistic Californians can’t possible deal with the realities of DC politicking. As Dash concludes, not only can we handle the truth, we’re begging for a dose of reality, if it’s the best way forward, “It’s already clear that with FWD.us, the tech industry is going to have to reckon with exactly how real the realpolitik is going to get. If we’re finally moving past our innocent, naive and idealistic lack of engagement with the actual dirty dealings of legislation, then let’s try to figure out how to do it without losing our souls.” What have been the results?–near unanimous condemnation from every corner of Silicon Valley. Just last week, superstar innovator Elon Musk, , after a list of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, boycotted Facebook over FWD.us-funded ads that praised Republicans for supporting the Keystone pipeline (below) [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iih8K0U27k&feature=player_embedded] Ironically, the group can’t post a single update on Facebook without being flooded with angry comments. Just 18 hours ago, after FWD.us about a congressional immigration hearing, 50% of the comments are about Keystone, “How can you justify completely selling out on he keystone pipeline in order to further your own immigration agenda? This is politics at its worst.” In other words, FWD.us poisoned its only mechanism for grassroots activism: social media. Forget Twitter, forget Youtube, forget Tumblr. Every conceivable social platform permits open dialog, which has now become the bane of their existence. , the reader comments were largely positive. Most readers (including myself) were excited to see what a team of technology titans could accomplish. But, since then, the suspect secrecy is killing their trustworthiness. Their calculation is clear: a win on immigration reform will absolve their sins. They’re wrong. Since they’ve chosen to mimic other lobbies, their accomplishments will be indistinguishable. So, each of their investors could just as easily fund a tech lobby employing the same tactics without the public heat. Personally, I like the organization and its mission. We routinely and . But, evidently, FWD.us underestimated just how little tolerance their supporters have for compromising the value of truthfulness. I understand the consequences of writing this piece: when Joe Green eventually does speak, it certainly won’t be with me. But, until then, I’ll leave them with one thought. If FWD.us is so committed to traditional DC politics, perhaps they should also take Frank Underwood’s advice on transparency, “There is no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt than a flood of naked truth.”
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Cyber Security Startup Lucent Sky’s CLEAR Makes Securing Web Sites A Breeze
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Catherine Shu
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One of the most nervewracking and tedious parts of developing a Web site is making sure that it is safe from data theft and other security breaches. Taipei-based startup ‘s mission is to make cyber security easier for developers. The company says its software CLEAR is the first commercially available program for automatic application vulnerability mitigation. Now available in a hardware version for enterprise use and a developer edition through the company’s , CLEAR helps ensure the security of Web sites by looking for weaknesses in its coding and then presenting developers with secured source code that is ready for deployment. “The difference between what we do and other Web security tools is that we are able to automatically mitigate vulnerabilities. We upload source code to a cloud or locally deployed server and scan it to automatically detect and mitigate,” says Melinda Jacobs, Lucent Sky’s operations director. “Other solutions can only discover vulnerabilities.” The hardware version of Lucent Sky CLEAR Enterprise Edition can automatically secure Web applications at a rate of up to 200 vulnerabilities per second. The developer edition of Lucent Sky CLEAR, which is available for sale to developers working individually or within organizations, checks for cross-site scripting and privacy violations, which Lucent Sky says accounts for 90 percent of flaws in most Web sites. The company was founded in January 2012 by Jim Liu and Scott Wu, both of whom previously worked as cyber security consultants. Liu began developing CLEAR when he repeatedly encountered the same vulnerabilities in clients’ Web sites. Originally meant to help Liu speed up the process of identifying flaws in source code, Lucent Sky CLEAR was made available for sale in March 2012. Lucent Sky has since worked with clients including departments of Taiwan’s military and government, a Fortune Global 500 company and several firms within the financial industry. “We found it to be particularly useful for banks because they have a large amount of data that is rapidly updating and there are a lot of consumer security concerns with online banking that make it a good fit for automatic vulnerability mitigation software like CLEAR,” says Jacobs. The company received seed funding from and and is currently raising an angel round.
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Pixel People Hits $700K In Three Months After Distributing With Chillingo
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Victoria Ho
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, an iOS game, has raked in $700,000 over 2 million downloads in the span of three months, said the game’s maker, Lambdamu. The key to their success, according to a company spokesperson, was a distribution deal with Chillingo. The small Singaporean company has ten employees and has been around since 2009. This is its first hit. The game falls under the “casual strategy” genre that requires users to lay out a town with buildings and inhabit it with pixel residents. One of the objects is to find new occupations for residents by “DNA-splicing” two jobs together to make a new one. Most of it is somewhat logical—an architect and a dreamer makes an artist, and a doctor and photographer makes a radiologist. Since its launch, the game has enjoyed coverage on big games sites received and . It seems the secret to Pixel People’s success was Lambdamu’s decision to go with a big-name publisher, Chillingo. Chillingo was responsible for launching mega titles, and . It was in October 2010. Lambdamu CEO, Ivan Loo, said the PR blitz driven by Chillingo that accompanied Pixel People’s debut was unlike what the firm had seen before. “We’ve been trying to get an IGN contact for the longest time,” he said. Clearly this was the perfect storm—a proper distributor meets a great game—but it’s interesting to note how much difference the deal actually made. After Pixel People launched, it hit its first millionth download within the first two weeks. This the second game that the developer has launched with a publisher. , a smaller firm, published an earlier title, . Loo didn’t comment on the support it got from Six Waves, but said its relationship with the firm was merely for “distribution.” A quick look at the Six Waves site doesn’t show any blockbuster title, so it’s probably safe to assume that the company wasn’t able to give it the kind of boost that Chillingo could. Interestingly, Lambdamu was keen to go with Chillingo in spite of hearing they weren’t going to provide much support after the game was released. Loo said Chillingo helped with some packaging of the product before it was released, but “we needed a huge PR splash.” Now that Lambdamu’s riding high on Pixel People, it may not go with another publisher. Lambdamu’s chief creative officer, Abhishek Radhakrishnan, said the company can probably push its next title on its own. “Even if people don’t know Lambdamu, we can say ‘from the makers of Pixel People’ on the next game’s splash screen,” he said. It’s a common situation publishers find themselves in with developers who have made it big. Angry Birds developer, Rovio, declared that it after its initial success with Angry Birds. Rovio has since self-published subsequent spin-offs of the popular title. Chillingo COO Ed Rumley said in a that a publisher’s value remains in its ability to help indie developers put a bit more polish into their games before release, as well as offer its marketing clout. For now, Lambdamu is Pixel People with new content, but Loo is not expecting the game’s 200,000 active monthly users to last into perpetuity. “We’d be very happy to hit six months profitability and a year for its shelf life,” he said. It remains to be seen whether the Pixel People name is sufficient to float Lambdamu’s next project. It’s developing a game called together with a book coming out from Singaporean author Adeline Foo, where the characters in the latter’s upcoming book will play the game. Expect it later this year.
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Dots
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Matt Burns
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I’m addicted to . It’s ‘ new game. 389. That’s my high score. No power-ups. I’m pretty proud of it. The game consumes my time. I no longer browse reddit during my “private times”; I play Dots. Dots is simple. It’s elegant. The game has restored my faith in mobile game development. But more importantly, it’s fucking addictive. I can’t put it down. Dots a simple game: just connect adjoining dots of the same color to clear them from the board. You have 60 seconds. Clearing dots by making squares is the way to high scores. Use your dots to buy power-ups. That’s it. That’s Dots. Like Angry Birds and Temple Run before it, Dots demonstrates that a simple game with replay value is the key to a successful mobile game. I always want to play just *one* more game. And since the game only lasts 60 seconds, I’m assured that I won’t waste that much time. I might not best my high score, but I’ll give it another go. Dots is simple. That’s important. The first time the game loads, the user has to connect two dots to advance to the next screen. Instructions are not presented. Just two dots. After poking the two dots, users will naturally drag a line between them. And from there, they’re hooked. When the app launched Jordan called Dots she’d ever seen. I won’t argue with that statement. The game is lovely. The betaworks title is also very popular and within its first week. Dots is the epitome of a good game. The barrier to entry is set very low, but yet the replay value is very high. This is the golden formula that few games have achieved. Pacman and Tetris are classic examples. Both were massive hits because it didn’t take any skill to get hooked. Just gobble up the dots or line up the blocks. It’s that easy with Dots. My 3 year daughter gets a kick out of connecting just a couple of dots. My 6-year-old got 114 his first time. Even Bejeweled, the hit game turned bloatware, is a great example. How many of us wasted weeks of our lives playing that game on a PDA or a feature phone? More recently Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds proved that smartphones can be a legitimate platform for casual games. Even now, years after their release, they’re still widely popular titles. Why? Because like Dots they’re easy to play and crazy addictive. Sadly my love of Dots won’t last. There will come a day where I’ll move it from my home screen to a folder where it will live out its time on my device next to Words With Friends, Letterpress, Angry Birds Star Wars, and Temple Run OZ. That’s just how these things work. Eventually I’ll grow tired of connecting dots and listening to the game’s satisfying pings. And then, probably a year from now as I mindlessly clear up space on my iPhone, I’ll delete Dots, not even pausing for a second to reminisce about our time together. But right now, I’m living in the moment, hiding in the bathroom, ignoring the needs of my children and the yells from my wife while I try to best my high score. Just one more round.
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MC Frontalot Brings Us Eine Kleine Nerdcore
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John Biggs
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMgsAD3D948&feature=youtu.be] TechCrunch favorite and filmmaker have created a video for “I’ll Form The Head,” a rap song about a Voltron-esque group of heroes fighting a worm monster in their rhino robotic vehicles. Each one wants to form the head, and they explain their reasoning in surprisingly eloquent terms. Why are they rhinos and not, say, giant robotic cats? Mr. Frontalot explains why in the first part of the song: The song comes from album Solved and is hilarious. He is backed up and and while it’s clear that the gold rhino deserves to be the head, the other rhinos to seem to be solid pilots who deserve a little screen time. Hopefully M. Frontalot , ensuring me another opportunity to state my case in re: me being the head.
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Fundraising Trouble At Kids Clothing Startup Wittlebee Leads Sean Percival To Give Up CEO Role
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Josh Constine
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Co-founder Sean Percival is walking away from his CEO position at the children’s subscription clothing startup after it had trouble raising a Series A. Amidst a tough fundraising climate for e-commerce startups, Sean says he thinks Wittlebee will continue operating but it’s up to the board of directors. No replacement has been selected yet for the renowned content ninja and former Myspace VP. Percival originally broke into the startup world after starting a website in 2006 and then selling it for $100,000 in 2009. In the meantime he worked at Docstoc and Mahalo before becoming the VP of online marketing at Myspace. He left in July 2011 to get into subscription commerce. Wittlebee launched out of Los Angeles’ Science incubator in January 2012. It was designed to get parents great deals on kids clothing by sending them monthly packages with eight items. At the time of the subscription service was that it packs about $80 worth of clothing in a $40 box. He told us “With Wittlebee we save parents time, money and reduce those ‘mall meltdown’ moments.” Wittlebee seed round from , , , and . Sometimes referred to as the “Birchbox for babies,” Wittlebee made its . Last we had heard, Percival and his co-founder Gabe Harriman were trying to raise a Series A. That apparently wasn’t so easy even though Wittlebee’s revenue was growing. Percival tells me “While the company has done fairly well, the market conditions for e-commerce funding are not great. So the last few months have been a challenge for both the business and myself. We have been working hard on finding the best go forward plan but time has run out, at least for my involvement.” As for a new CEO, Percival says, “This is still being worked out so nothing to announce at this time.” I asked if Wittlebee would keep operating and outfitting kids, to which he answered, “I believe so and this is to be determined by the BOD. The company was continuing to show revenue growth this year despite the challenges of being undercapitalized.” Percival started the company just as he became a father. Now a little older and wiser, he’s looking to the future. What’s his next adventure? “At this time I’m not certain. I’m talking through a few opportunities and might even do something crazy, like start another business.” The issue for Wittlebee seems to be that, while seed funding has become easier to find, the flood of startups that it permits is indeed causing a Series A crunch. While engineer-heavy software startups may be able to find a soft landing through an acquisition, e-commerce startups like may have a tougher time. Regardless of what happens, in the age of startup success theater, it’s nice to see a founder be so frank about his company’s challenges. Not everyone has to be all the time.
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Our Favorite Startups From China-Based Hardware Accelerator Haxlr8r’s Second Demo Day
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Ryan Lawler
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Hardware is becoming a big deal, and now it’s easier than ever to start building your hardware startup, thanks to the proliferation of crowdfunding and easier access to materials. One particular startup incubator, called , is looking to accelerate that trend, with a program that . Today in San Francisco, Haxlr8r had its second demo day, introducing 10 new hardware-based startups which just spent the last two-and-a-half months building hardware in Shenzhen, China. Part of the appeal of HAXLR8R is that startups looking to build something new can move from idea stage to rapid prototyping thanks to the program’s proximity to all the electronics and factories that are necessary to build the hardware products they want to create. “As a maker, and as someone who likes building things, it is the best place in the word to build products,” Haxlr8r program director Zach Smith said. Unlike software, where you can build and prototype in the same day, hardware makers need a way to iterate more quickly. “In Shenzhen you have access to high-end prototyping tools.” Today’s demo day had a diverse group of companies, with everything from WiFi-connected lights to air robots to brain-scanning headbands to, um, mobile phone-controlled sex toys. But these are the three startups were our favorites: is designing the WiFi brain which will power the next generation of connected products. It’s created the Spark Core, a small electronic circuit that can be embedded directly into hardware devices, to cost-effectively integrate wireless connectivity into them. In addition to selling its own components, for big OEMs, Spark will enable them to integrate Spark’s design into the core of their own circuit boards. Along with the Spark Core, the company is launching a cloud platform with an API to enable OEMs to connect their products to services and apps online. Unlike some platforms, which operate a platform as a service, Spark Core is pitched as a “platform as a component.” Instead of paying monthly for a service for a product that OEMs only sell once, the Spark Cloud has a one-time fee associated with each product that connects. Spark has raised a seed round, and gotten about $250,000 through a campaign on Kickstarter for hobbyists who want to try out its Core and embed it into their own products. That said, it’s raising a Series A round of funding to extend its functionality to more devices. How can you not love the idea of a sex toy that is controlled by your mobile phone? has not only built a $99, waterproof vibrator, but it’s added built-in Bluetooth connectivity. That allows users to hook up with an app that has a whole bunch of “fantasies” — that is, audio-erotic scenarios that can be listened to and are designed to match the movements and intensity of the device itself. “Sex is part of our human basic needs, and the reason we love sex so much is because of orgasms,” said founder Dema Tio. “The problem is that not everyone can have an orgasm. Half of all women don’t have orgasms during sex.” Vibease, he believes, gives women the best orgasm experience ever. The idea is not just to have a vibrator, but also to provide a marketplace for fantasies which sell for $0.99 each. The U.S. sex toy industry is a $15 billion business, and the erotic novel market is a $1.5 billion business. Vibease straddles both of those markets. It sees the fantasy market also as a way to sell more vibrators. While Vibease is coming to market with its own vibrators at first, the company hopes to open up to other manufacturers by letting them add connectivity with its chip. By licensing their technology to others, it could add the same functionality to other sex toys in the future. I’m a sucker for bike startups, especially those who make my ride more safe. As someone who bikes everywhere everyday, I have a bit of a bias on this point, but has built something awesome: The startup has created handlebars that have integrated lights, bluetooth, and GPS connectivity to fundamentally change the way you get around. Helios handlebars are available in bullhorn or drop bars, with a lumen front light, as well as side lights that have a range of functionality. With Bluetooth built in, the handlebars connect to your mobile phone and provide a number of things you can do with them. For instance, you can set the lights to act as turn signals, or as a visual speedometer so that you know how fast or slow you’re moving, or as ambient lighting that you can set with your phone. The handlebars also work to deter theft by acting as a tracking device. With GPS built in and a 15-day backup battery, they can enable you to track your bike if it’s been stolen and fure out where it is. For those of us who are paranoid about having our bikes stolen, the setup provides a little piece of mind. Honorable mention goes out , which is creating not only an awesome little drone, but also a cool brain and mobile app to easily control it.
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Devin Coldewey
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Google Launches Version 1.1 Of Its Go Programming Language, Promises Noticeable Performance Boost
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google today of its open source . It’s been since Google launched version 1.0 of Go. The language, which puts an emphasis on concurrency and speed, has seen three maintenance releases since then, but the team has been conservative with bumping up its version numbers. This new version, however, the Go team writes, introduces a number of significant performance-related improvements that warrant the new version number and existing Go code should run noticeably faster when built with Go 1.1. Version 1 was meant to show that Go had arrived at a level where users could expect a certain level of maturity and stability, as well as . Today’s release, the team , lives up to this promise. It introduces a number of significant languages and library changes, but all of these remain backwards-compatible. “Very little if any code will need modifications to run with Go 1.1,” the team writes. Among the changes in this new version are, “optimizations in the compiler and linker, garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation, and parts of the standard library.” The new version also introduces , makes some changes to (which should lead to more succinct and correct programs, Google says), as well as a new race detector, which can find memory synchronization errors. Over the last few months, Go has definitely seen an impressive increase in developer interest and quite a few companies have now adopted it as their go-to language for problems that can benefit from Go’s support for concurrent programming. CloudFlare, for example, uses it to run important aspects of its , to power some parts of its infrastructure, as do and an increasing number of startups and established companies. While , Google’s browser-based replacement for JavaScript seems to have trouble catching on, the company is clearly on to something with Go and the language, which was first conceived in 2007, looks to have a bright future ahead of itself as developers look for a modern language with built-in garbage collection and concurrency.
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Wednesday Night’s Human Matchmakers And Coaches Take Some Of The Work Out Of Online Dating
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Anthony Ha
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If existing dating websites aren’t working for you (or you’re too busy to try them out), you can get help from paid matchmakers and dating coaches on the just-launched service . According to the startup, users connect their Facebook accounts and are then given three recommendations. (You can see a mock-up of a recommendation email below.) If they’re interested in dating one of them, they then pay $50 and are set up with a date on Wednesday night at 8 p.m. (or occasionally Thursday). They’re also connected with a dating coach who can provide advice via email or text. The website comes from the team of Jared Tame and Teng Siong Ong who are already working on two other dating services — and . ( .) When Tame emailed me to tell me about Wednesday Night, I asked why the pair decided to launch yet another dating site, and he said: Wednesday Night is something that really excites us and it appeals to a lot of people we’ve spoken to who are too busy for online dating. Women want to be matchmakers and give guys advice on how to talk to girls, dress, behave, etc; many guys need help and don’t want to do all the back-and-forth messaging and setting up a profile. Tame’s response touches on one of the issues facing any dating website — managing the balance between guys and girls. That seems like a particular danger given Wednesday Night’s concept, which might attract a lot of socially awkward guys but not as many women. The Wednesday Night website tries to address this, arguing that the service isn’t just for men: “We understand the pain exists for women on dating sites where they’re approached by lots of guys and receive too many messages.” Tame added that matchmakers can also look for dates outside the Wednesday Night network, and if they agree, they automatically become part of the database. Still, I’m guessing that it will be mostly guys who are actually paying for the service. Does that create a weird dynamic? Well, I’d argue that most dating sites have a slightly skewed dating dynamic, and Tame argued that by paying for the drinks upfront, you avoid “awkward ‘who pays’ or ‘let’s wait while I close my tab’ situations.” (Of course, part of the fee is also going towards Wednesday Night and its matchmakers/coaches.) As for why the dates take place on Wednesday and Thursday night, Tame said it means they won’t compete with weekend plans. Plus, if it’s a good date you can schedule a follow-up for the weekend, and if it isn’t, the mid-week timing means there’s an easy excuse to end the date fairly quickly. I also asked whether this is really a scalable tech business, and Tame replied that Wednesday Night has built software that “helps matchmakers quickly profile a user based on their Facebook account, schedule dates, as well as search for potential matches.” He also said that there’s a dashboard that helps matchmakers track their performance — the ones that get more positive reviews get paid a higher commission. If you’re interested in trying out the site, TechCrunch readers can get a $10 credit by .
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P2P Currency Exchange TransferWise Raises $6M Led By Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, With Participation From SV Angel, Others
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Steve O'Hear
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Here’s some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. , the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it’s closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s — the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor’s international fund. We also understand that Ron Conway’s SV Angel has joined this round, along with a small number of angels, and TransferWise’s IA Ventures, Index, Seedcamp, and TAG. This brings the total raised by the company to $7.35 million since its launch just two years ago. Originally billing itself as the “ ,” TransferWise enables individuals and to send money between countries for a fraction of the price that banks and others charge, using a peer-to-peer, “crowdsourced” model — where money destined for transfer doesn’t unnecessarily actually leave each country. It passes on these saving by charging a small flat fee per transfer. (It’s the P2P element that playfully draws the Skype comparison, as well as the fact that TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus was the Internet calling giant’s first employee, while other members of his team also worked at the company.) The company also pitches itself as the preferred method of money transfer for European startups, recently garnering with an offer to waive the fees for a total of $100 million worth of international money transfers for qualifying startups using the TransferWise platform. Interestingly, Thiel was one of a host of names publicly endorsing the campaign, so we probably should have known something was going down. Hinrikus tell me that the new funding will enable TransferWise to continue expanding, both in terms of the number of currencies it plans to support, and in raw head-count. It started out offering British Pound and Euro transfers, and has since for the U.S. Dollar, Swiss Franc, Polish Zloty, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Krone. In total, the company claims to have transferred over £125m worth of customers’ money, saving £5 million-plus in banking fees (though it isn’t without ). Meanwhile, the team has grown to 33 members of staff. “There’s another dozen currencies to be launched this year and 20 more people needed in the team,” says Hinrikus. “Also we need to launch locally in key European markets – Germany, France and Spain.” Hinrikus says TransferWise continues to grow between 20-30 percent a month, which to date equals roughly 10x year-on-year growth. “Doing what’s in the pipeline puts us on track to do another 5-10x this year,” he says. Staying on message, London-based TransferWise (with an office also in Tallinn, Estonia) is now calling itself a Tech City startup. Tech City, by Joanna Shields, ex-Google, AOL/Bebo, and most recently Facebook’s head of EMEA operations, is the UK government’s re-branding of the London tech scene and, specifically, East London’s “Silicon Roundabout” area. Cue the now prerequisite statement from Shields: “Transferwise is a shining example of the successful businesses that make Tech City a thriving ecosystem. London has a real strength in financial services and technology, with many companies like Transferwise transforming financial services for consumers, for the better.” That said, TransferWise’s HQ is on Shoreditch High Street, which doesn’t get any more Silicon Roundabout than that. And certainly, a $6 million series A is no mean feat for a European startup, and nor is attracting a top tier Silicon Valley investor like Peter Thiel.
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Akimbo Lands $850K From Rackspace Co-founder & Others To Bring Prepaid Debit Cards Into The Social, Mobile Era
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Rip Empson
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With the proliferation of smartphones, we’re now able to use these mobile, mini computers to do just about everything we would do on our desktop while on the go. Yet, in spite of this evolution, mobile payments seems to be lagging behind. We use our phones to capture pictures and video, and share them instantaneously, but the average smartphone carrier is less comfortable with the idea of paying for a meal by swiping their phone. People want a mobile wallet, and it seems only a matter of time before someone gets it right, even if a winner has yet to emerge. Part of the reason for the slower rate of adoption is the perception that mobile payments are insecure, rife with hidden fees and are the very opposite of seamless — or cross-platform. Akimbo launched its eponymous card in March to take on the increasing number of players in the mobile payments space each taking a slightly different tack, from Green Dot and NetSpend to LevelUp and Dwolla. In contrast, the Akimbo Card is designed to be an alternative to your walled-in virtual bank account, with a social and mobile spin. Like LevelUp, Akimbo wants to stand out from the pack by offering a fee-free platform through which users can send and request money to any email address, Facebook friend or mobile phone. Simply put, it’s PayPal meets a Visa pre-paid card. In other words, Akimbo allows users to access transferred funds from ATMs and any location that accepts Visa debit cards. In an effort to target the some 10 million young people who use prepaid credit cards, Akimbo enables users to link and load the card with their bank accounts with cash or via direct deposit. This means that the startup’s proprietary platform not only allows cardholders to send money via email, Facebook post or SMS, but to reserve sent funds to be added to future card accounts, meaning all sent funds are guaranteed to the recipient. Once the funds are collected, the recipient receives the money, along with a depository account and payment tool to access the funds. The Akimbo founders believe that it is the first and only Visa payment product to offer this capacity. By building a cardholder network, Akimbo believes that it can establish a more defensive position and benefit from some barriers to entry (and competition). Currently, almost 40 percent of cardholders use their Akimbo account to share money — a number Akimbo will look to increase as it moves forward to give it some protection from the growing number of competitors in this space. Going forward, the founders want to turn Akimbo into the first prepaid card product with an account management portal based in HTML5, and the team is currently working to release a new website (and account management tools) that “auto-optimize” to all devices, be they mobile phones, tablets, TVs or desktops. With young people increasingly accessing the Web primarily from their smartphones, the founders see this mobile accessibility (and flexibility) as critical to the mobile payment user experience, overall, and to getting a step ahead of the competition. Going forward, the startup also plans to integrate with PayPal and Amazon, along with adding credit and debit card-loading and card-linked discounts and deals. Akimbo sees the “prepaid industry” as one that’s been slow to innovate and has thus found it difficult to capture new audiences. So, by adding capabilities that enhance prepaid as not only a payment tool but as a budgeting tool as well, Akimbo sees the potential to create a prepaid card that’s actually valuable — something you’re not embarrassed to be carrying around with you. To move forward with its planned integrations, discounts and HTML5 development, Akimbo is announcing today that it has secured another $850,000 in angel funding. The investment was led by Rackspace Chairman and co-founder Graham Weston, former CEO and Chairman Emeritus of Cullen/Frost Bankers Tom Frost and Akimbo co-founder Tom O. Turner. The round adds to the $1.35 million in seed capital the startup raised early on, beginning in 2010, bringing its total to $2.2 million. Akimbo spent the next two years building out its technology, officially launching its social and mobile bank account alternative in March. Since then, Akimbo attracted 50K users, as the company has grown to over 15 employees, and, if growth continues at the current rate, the founders say they hope to hit profitability in early 2014. For more,
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Facebook Kills Social Roulette, The App With A 1/6 Chance Of Deleting Your Facebook Account
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Josh Constine
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If you want a digital detox, you’re going to have to pull the trigger yourself. is an app that would delete one in six users’ Facebook account data, but its founder confirms it’s been blocked by Facebook so it no longer functions. While there’s no specific policy prohibiting apps from deleting your data, Social Roulette is clearly counter to Facebook’s mission and business model. Social Roulette launched on Saturday as an online version of Russian Roulette, the lethal real-life game where a player places one bullet in a six-chamber revolver pistol, spins the cylinder, and fires the gun at their head. You die, you lose. But on Social Roulette, it’s implied that having your Facebook account deleted means you won. If you’re hit that one in six chance, the site explains “we can completely remove all your posts, friends, apps, likes, photos, and games before completely deactivating it.” Otherwise, it just posts to Facebook saying you survived the game, and encouraging your friends to risk their digital lives. describes itself, saying “Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it’s a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture. Is it time to consider a new development in your life? Are you looking for the opportunity to start fresh? Or are you just seeking cheap thrills at the expense of your social network? Maybe it’s time for you to play Social Roulette.” Co-founder Kyle McDonald tells me he came up with the idea a few weeks ago, but hacked it together in just four hours with Jonas Lund and Jonas Jongeja after Lund had an idea for how it could actually work. The app capitalizes on exhaustion with social networks. The dizzying stream of information, constant success theater, and perceived “responsibility” to be contactable can grow tiresome after a while. When I asked co-founder McDonald about the philosophy behind Social Roulette, he told me,”Everyone talks about deleting their Facebook account, but we rarely take action. Sometimes we need a simple game to help take the responsibility off our shoulders, and provide a moment for reflection. Social Roulette is more of a provocation rather than a tool.” Social Roulette seemed to be looking for a fight, considering it’s t-shirts of its logo, which rips off Facebook’s and sticks it inside a chamber of a six-shooter pistol. Facebook has aggressively pursued others who’ve tried to coin off of . Facebook has also recently shut off API access to apps it like Vine, as well as ones like that back to it. Facebook has also blocked apps without specifying a reason but that have been accused of spamming like . Now McDonald tells me, “It took us 4 hours to create the project, and it took another 4 hours after the launch for Facebook to respond by blocking the API key and restricting our ability to create Facebook applications. The app was flagged by an automated system for ‘creating a negative user experience.’ After review, they decided they don’t like our logo either. We tried to follow the but we must have misunderstood them.” You could say the shut down was a bit murky as there’s not a specific that the app’s data deletion function violates, but Facebook typically enforces the spirit, not the letter, of the law. It might end up adding a specific provision banning apps that focus on deleting your data. Facebook tells me in an official statement, “We take action against apps that violate our platform policies as laid out here: , in order to maintain a trustworthy experience for users.” It didn’t specify which policy, though. However, the app did allow users to circumvent Facebook’s account deactivation feature, which is designed to let people turn off their account but turn it back on later without losing their content and connections. This could be considered a violation of Facebook Platform Policy I.3 that states “You must not circumvent (or claim to circumvent) our intended limitations on core Facebook features and functionality.” This brings up the larger issue of where Facebook draws the line when determining when something is too close to its native functionality. Some developers believe the Facebook Platform is unstable because of Facebook’s power to pick and choose who can do what. Without API access, Social Roulette can’t let people login with their Facebook account, or delete content from their profile. Surprisingly, McDonald is optimistic that Social Roulette will win Facebook’s approval and live on to kill another account. “We’re currently working to address this and other issues and expect a return to normal service some time this week.” I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Facebook’s goal to connect the world and earn money through advertising based on their personal data is directly threatened by Social Roulette. Facebook purposefully makes deleting your account tough so you don’t do it in a momentary fit of anger. Even if it receives jeers for shutting down apps at will, it’s not going to put that gun in any third-party developer’s hands.
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Q&A Pioneer Formspring Says It’s Been ‘Saved’ From The Deadpool, Is Now Under New Management
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Colleen Taylor
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, the pioneering Q&A site that allowed people to invite other internet users to “ask me anything” anonymously, is apparently back from the brink. In a and a , Formspring announced that it has been “saved” and is now “under new management.” Great news friends, Formspring has been saved and is now under new management. Get ready for some cool and exciting new features!! — Spring.me (@springdotme) It was just two months ago that , with founder and CEO writing in a company blog post (which has now been deleted) that it had “been challenging to sustain the resources needed to keep the lights on.” At that time, the company planned to close down its online Q&A platform on March 31st and eliminate users’ access to their data on April 15th. The last-minute deal announced today indicates that the planned closure didn’t go through after all. Details on who exactly is in charge now, and what Formspring has in store now that it’s sticking around, have not been provided. We’ve reached out to Olonoh and several Formspring investors for more information and will update with anything we hear. It’d be good to see Formspring get another lease on life, as vague as the details around its resurrection are at the moment. The company raised a total of and garnered a huge following in its heyday. Though Formspring’s as young people moved on to other social networking trends, it’ll be interesting to see if they can somehow recapture its audience with a new spin on its old app — or something new entirely.
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Hacker Andrew Auernheimer Placed In Solitary Confinement For Tweeting From Prison
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John Biggs
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Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer has been placed in “administrative segregation,” prison shorthand for solitary confinement for “investigative purposes.” Supporters believe he was locked down and given no Internet access because of his ability to send Tweets to a third party who relayed them on his . Auernheimer has not sent electronic messages since April 8. In a , Auernheimer writes: It has been a week of this and I feel completely alone and abandoned. I don’t even have my loved ones or attorney’s address (they took most of my papers and I happened to have your address on a property slip they didn’t toss). and am unsure when or if anyone will find out about my situation. His pro bono attorney, Tor Ekeland, has not been able to contact Auernheimer since his lockdown. Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for programmatically scraping user information from a public AT&T website and sharing it with Gawker.com. and attempted to blog from behind bars until his lock down.
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Google Commemorates The 37th Anniversary Of Atari’s Breakout With Image Search Easter Egg
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Drew Olanoff
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If you’re an old-school gaming nerd, then you might remember a little game released by Atari called Breakout. The idea was simple: just hit a ball around and break things. Don’t let the ball get past you, or you lose. It was heavily influenced by Pong. The game’s . Whether it was in or May of that year, Google has decided to commemorate the occasion with a little easter egg in image search that will suck all of your free time from you. It’s good to see Google doing these kinds of things away from their normal doodle, especially since a lot of their users might not remember Breakout. Go to and type in “atari breakout.” You won’t get to click through images though…instead the experience gets turned into a fully interactive and playable Breakout game, using the search results as blocks: Kick some butt and then share your score on Google+: Of course, if you’re really looking for images of Atari’s Breakout game, then you can simply click on “return to image search.” But that’s no fun. Happy Breakoutting.
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3D Printing Is The Future, But What Kind Of Future?
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Chris Nesi
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The crescendo of media reports about the advent of a DIY has caused an understandable uproar. In the wake of so many high-profile, mass-casualty incidents involving firearms — and a lot of impotent rage by our elected officials — it seems counterintuitive that, as we circle the wagons around the idea of passing rational gun legislation at the federal level, we can also literally create a gun. When I was in high school, some classmates brought a crinkled copy of “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” that they printed off the Internet. I, being an inquisitive teenager, flipped through the pages with a certain morbid curiosity. I didn’t know you could make a tennis ball bomb, or even develop thermite plasma that could melt through steel, in your basement or garage. Of course, the rational part of me knew I would never experiment with such ingredients, but I couldn’t help but be a little concerned about the people who would. Now, the Internet is no longer the provenance of a select, geeky few, but rather is a mainstream information source that often eclipses television and leaves radio and print media in the dust. What was once accessible only by people in the know is now highly publicized. The Liberator is the first widely distributed 3D-printed pistol to hit the Internet. It can be manufactured using a commercially available 3D printer. The instructions, created and given away by cyber-vigilantes/anarchists Defense Distributed, even contain a step to include a piece of steel to avoid running afoul of the , though how they plan on ensuring that less-than-scrupulous DIY gunsmiths don’t simply ignore that step remains unclear (however, the point could be moot, as the law is set to sunset in December of this year if it is not renewed). Numerous tests have confirmed that when properly assembled, the weapon can fire at least one .380-caliber round without harming the user. There is no question that the ability to use a 3D printer to create, on-demand, just about anything you can draw up in a CAD program is the future. The disruptive potential across nearly every industry for this technology is incalculable. From the medical field to manufacturing, empowering consumers to produce will surely up-end the natural order in mostly good ways. However, removing all friction from the process of obtaining a lethal firearm could put a functional handgun in the hands of someone acting impulsively. How many times have you been brought to a boiling rage? The kind of fury where everything that connects you to the human race fades into the background and you feel like you could almost kill. If you were peeved enough to go through with it, you likely couldn’t obtain the requisite gun before your anger subsided to a manageable level where the thought of killing repulses you — as it should. So much of the conversation about tightening gun legislation in the U.S. is focused on keeping guns out of the hands of the criminally mentally ill. But what about when an otherwise rational person is driven to a near-murderous rage? Aren’t the hurdles to obtaining an impulse-buy handgun a buffer between the fleeting notion (and temporary desire) to harm another human being and an actual violent crime? If pushing a button and snapping a few puzzle pieces into place was all it took to convert that inert, lethal rage into something real, would it lead to more crimes of passion? The U.S. State Department seems to think so, and has demanded that links to plans for the Liberator (good luck with that). This technology is already being used for the betterment of mankind. 3D printers are already being used to create an for a child in South Africa. Even NASA and has plans to create a zero-gravity 3D printer, which is slated to be taken aboard the International Space Station sometime next year. This technology is in its infancy, and, to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, learning what we can do with it will hopefully not outpace learning what we should. Free information advocates and gun advocates alike defend the distribution of the Liberator’s plans as the latest battle on the frontier of Internet freedom, saying that all information should, without vetting, be easily accessible by anyone and everyone. But the stakes are higher than ever. We’re not talking about shutting down sites hosting illegal copyrighted material for download. We’re talking about life and death now. Guns exist for one purpose — to shoot stuff. Some people point to the high price of a 3D printer as an obstacle to a world with an unknown number of amateur gun distributors, but if there is a profit to be made, a few thousand dollars becomes not much of an impediment. The high cost of the materials and equipment has certainly not stopped large-scale illegal drug laboratories from being operated by the rankest amateurs. Should we support an avenue for people with more intellect than sense to manufacture deadly weapons simply because of the perceived freedom it entails? I’m not sure. But I, for one, had hoped we’d perfect a 3D-printed replacement heart valve or water purification device for developing countries before yet another way to kill people.
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LanguageTwin: A New Way For Language Students To Practice What They’ve Learned
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Frederic Lardinois
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Learning a language is never easy. One thing that’s usually missing in the way students learn a new language is the ability to use their new skills while talking to a native speaker. , a startup I met at the in Corvallis, Ore., last week, aims to do just that. The service brings together language learners for peer-to-peer interactions to give students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom while having a conversation or acting out real-life scenarios. It’s worth noting that this is not a freemium service. LanguageTwin only plans to work with colleges and K-12 schools right now and will charge these schools a $25-$35 fee per term (or a slightly discounted price per year). The idea here is that the service will pair students from two different countries and then allow them to talk to each other over video chat. Right now, the team is focusing on students who want to learn Spanish (with French, German, Mandarin and other languages on the roadmap) and has run a number of tests with 5,000 students from over 100 universities in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Chile, Costa Rica and a number of other countries. As the name implies, the original idea behind LanguageTwin was to assign a “twin” to every student in the system. Say you are learning Spanish. LanguageTwin would set you up with a student in a Spanish-speaking country who is trying to learn English. The problem with this, as the founders told me, is that it’s not easy to coordinate the schedules of two students living in different parts of the world, and students shouldn’t be penalized if their twin decides to forget about a meeting or turns out to be flaky. The system the team now uses is more flexible than the original scheme and allows users to find new ‘twins’ every time they use the system. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apoQaMYxYM?feature=player_detailpage] The twist here is that teachers can use the system to assign students to use LanguageTwin for a set number of minutes every day or week. All of the chats are recorded and teachers can play them back at their leisure. Some teachers who have used the system, the company’s co-founder Michael Lucia told me, also pick one random LanguageTwin session from their students in place of an oral exam. The video chat, which is at the core of the service’s platform, also features text chat capabilities, a translation tool and, most importantly, a folder with assignments and a few ice-breaker questions to get less-structured conversations going. Professors can, of course, upload their own content to the service. As Lucia told me, it’s this framework around the chats (plus the ability to record them) that makes very different from just using Skype to start a conversation.
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The Austin TC Meetup + Pitch-Off Is Go-Town On May 30: Get Tickets Here!
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Jordan Crook
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Who’s ready to party, ya’ll? That’s right. It’s finally happening. The is officially underway, starting with the beautiful, historical and sometimes rowdy city of Austin. We want to see who has the chops to represent the great state of Texas in our 60-second pitch-off competition. Tickets are $5, and are available . The event will be held at , and begins at 6pm on May 30. Even if you don’t have a startup to launch in the pitch-off, come on over and have a beer, talk tech with myself and John Biggs, East Coast Editor and Matt Burns, Senior editor and watch entrepreneurs fight against the clock to impress the likes of us and some local tech big wigs and VCs. But perhaps this is the big break you’ve been waiting for? Entrepreneurs, dreamers, visionaries, and founders, we beseech thee. , wow us with your wares, and maybe take home one of our amazing prizes. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013. Second Place will receive two tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt, and Third Place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Plus, all those startups who are selected to pitch at the meetup will get 15-minute one-on-one meetings with TechCrunch writers and editors to discuss your pitch, product, and get feedback. More mature startups who wish to present their wares to the attendees rather than be judged by us TechCrunch folk can also purchase a demo table . Our past meetups have been a huge success, and when we added in a , where entrepreneurs have one minute to pitch the judges with just words and mic, the TechCrunch meetup series really found its stride. The New York Pitch-Off led to a few startups getting into the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt, and the pitch-off winner found itself launching on-stage in the Disrupt Battlefield. But . Austin, you’re up next. So make this Texas girl proud, and show the world how the stars at night are big and bright (clap, clap, clap, clap) deep in the heart of Texas.
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Twitter Acquires Big Data Visualization Startup Lucky Sort, Service To Shutter In Months Ahead
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Sarah Perez
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, a Portland, Oregon-based startup behind a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch that helped to discover patterns in live data streams, has been acquired by Twitter. Terms of the deal were not immediately available, but the company has via its website that it will be shuttering its service in the coming months, and several members of the team will now be relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco offices to join the company’s “revenue engineering department.” The startup had operated somewhat stealthily until early 2012, when word came out that it has a half-million seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (founders of Invite Media) and several angel investors, including Adam Riggs (Shutterstock.com), BankSimple co-founder Alex Payne, plus chaos theory physicist, quantitative trading pioneer, and roulette wheel hacker Norman Packard, Ph.D., who became the Chief Science Officer at the firm. Packard is not joining Twitter, but CEO , , and , are moving to San Francisco. With the company’s first product, TopicWatch, users could sift through social media, government filings, news and commentary in real time to find, summarize and analyze any text-based content. It was more than a “social listening” or “sentiment analysis” firm – those were only subsets of its overall capabilities. Analysis of Twitter data was also only part of what this platform could accomplish, as well. In effect, Lucky Sort was a big data play – it used NLP (natural language processing) techniques to discover information from huge, unstructured data sets. What made it unique was its ability to derive structure without having to first define a database of nouns, verbs, etc. as traditionally would be the case with NLP. Instead, Lucky Sort was moved towards data mining through statistics rather than input ontologies. Last November, the engine was put to practical use with the social network for traders, StockTwits. The relationship offered the entire historical database of StockTwits (everything that had been tweeted or shared within the community), as well as a real-time feed coming into its service. These data sets were made available in Lucky Sort’s analysis interface, allowing investors to come in and examine how chatter in the StockTwits community has correlated with price action. This could produce visualizations (like the one below), which could be operated via touch – including on the iPad. Today, Lucky Sort says that three of its team members are headed to Twitter, and a plan to transition customers off of its platform is underway. Asked what he meant by Twitter’s “revenue engineering department,” Pepper would only say, “it’s where we’ll be shoveling coal into the money printing machine.” However he did say that as far as he knew, Twitter is not interested in getting into the finance vertical itself. “They wanted our technology and expertise for other things,” he says. Lucky Sort had raised a total of $600,000 before the acquisition, with $100,000 coming from , StockTwits CEO and co-founder. The startup joins other recent Twitter acquisitions, including another previously data-focused service , as well as (which led to Twitter Music), , , , and more. The company’s official is below: Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter! Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis. Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter! Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout. We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter. In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour. Best, Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort
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Google I/O 2013: What’s On Tap For Nexus Smartphone And Tablet Hardware
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Darrell Etherington
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Google’s big annual developer conference kicks off on Wednesday, and while , we’ve also seen reports that suggest the Nexus line of Google-branded hardware won’t go completely untouched. The rumors suggest that we won’t see a brand new Nexus phone at Google I/O this year, but what we could see instead is a . In fact, the existing version seems tailor-made for a couple quick internal hardware upgrades to inject some fresh life into sales and activate some new buzz around the product, which by most accounts has been selling fairly well, especially when compared to previous Nexus flagship phones. What we’ve heard indicates that the Google Nexus 4 will appear at I/O boasting a 32GB internal memory upgrade, along with built-in LTE support. There’s an LTE-capable wireless radio built into the current Nexus 4, but it lacks a proper signal amplifier and as such remains officially disabled. Nearer the Nexus 4’s launch, you could activate it with a backdoor hack, but Google quickly shut that down. Both these spec bumps would be easy enough to accomplish, and are both considered the most noteworthy obvious flaws on an otherwise very impressive device. And a new spy shot making the rounds today backs up earlier claims we might see a , which so far only ships in black, which could be another factor in convincing new buyers to take the plunge. It’s not clear how exactly Motorola’s devices will fit into the Nexus line, but it’s also worth mentioning that a new device labeled the has just been spotted making its way through the FCC, which suggests it might arrive very soon. What precious little info the filing contains suggests that this could be the fabled XFON we’ve been hearing Motorola is working on for Google, and it could theoretically make an I/O appearance, but this could also be yet another smartphone already on Motorola’s roadmap pre-acquisition, and there’s no guarantee we’ll see it at the show either way. There’s less buzz around new Nexus tablet hardware making an appearance at I/O, but there are some indications we could see some upgrades there, too. KGI Securities analyst Mingchi Kuo says there’s a , with a high-res, 1920×1200 display, an improved processor and a decent rear camera. Reuters also reported earlier that a , powered by a Qualcomm chip just like Kuo reports, but they’ve pegged that tablet for a release in July, which suggests we might not see it at I/O after all, except maybe in a preview capacity. Google demoed the original Nexus 7 at I/O in 2012, however, before bringing the device to market in mid-July 2012, so we could see a similar pattern repeat itself here. I’d hesitate to suggest we’ll hear about much more beyond the Nexus 7 in the tablet category. Sales of the Nexus 10 have reportedly been quite low so far, and that device was only introduced in partnership with Samsung late last year. Google will likely want to give it a bit more time to try to pick up sales, or might focus its Nexus tablet efforts on the apparently more popular 7-inch market instead. Earlier rumors suggested we might see a , too, but while it reportedly sits on Samsung’s roadmap for the year, there’s been nothing so far to indicate we’ll see it at I/O. We won’t see Google’s bizarre boondoggle make an appearance at this year’s conference, and we didn’t really need to predict its absence, but it’s nice to have it. The Nexus Q was if you recall, but it was an overpriced, precious gadget that essentially screamed “niche,” and a small one at that. Kuo said in the same report that detailed updated Nexus hardware that we’d see Google come back up to the plate with a stronger Apple TV-type device later this year, but it doesn’t look like we’ll see that at I/O. Pichai said in his interview this morning that Google doesn’t have “much in the way of launches of new products” at the moment, but that leaves wiggle room. It sounds like he’s trying to manage expectations, and a couple of upgrades to existing product lines would be right in line with something Google hopes will impress, but not on the scale of something like a new smart watch or the original Google Glass reveal.
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Daft Punk Fights Piracy With Convenience, Streams Entire “Random Access Memories” Album Days Before Release
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Greg Kumparak
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After weeks of teasing, endless itty-bitty leaks, and about a zillion radio plays of they’d released so far, the of Daft Punk’s new has just hit iTunes, days before the official release. The catch: it’s streaming only right now. You can find the . Hit the “View in iTunes” button, then just tap the “Listen Now” button. Enjoy your early taste of the album you’ll be hearing all summer. While a few sites are declaring this a “leak”, that’s almost certainly not the case. Apple did something similar to this leading up to the recent release of Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 album, and the promotional text of the stream specifically suggests that you “pre-order the album” — which isn’t something they’d say if it wasn’t intended to go up a bit early. “Why would they do this?” you might ask. “Isn’t this just giving pirates a hi-fi copy to spread around?” Yes — but that’s very much not a worry at this point. We’ve got just four days before the album’s official street date. The album is almost certainly on trucks around the country. Once it’s on the trucks, it’s being ripped and uploaded to the Internet, almost without fail. Streaming your album early, on your terms, is the new “accidental” leak. It’s fighting piracy with the only tool that can really fight it: convenience. A massive chunk of people who download leaks do it just to get a taste; to say they heard it early. By giving those people the taste they want through a sanctioned, official, high quality means, you’re nixing the need for them to download a bootleg copy. Will it eliminate piracy of the album? Of course not — but it’s one small nudge upwards in a hugely uphill battle. (Plus, artists make most of their money by way of touring these days anyway — and if there’s any show worth seeing live, it’s Daft Punk)
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China’s SeedAsia Opens For Business, An Online Equity Crowdfunding Platform For Startups Across Asia
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Victoria Ho
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, an equity crowd-funding site based in China, has just launched. The company is offering stakes in selected early-stage startups to people. “It’s kind of a hybrid between Kickstarter and private investment,” said co-founder . The startups to be listed would have ideally gone through some some sort of incubation program and would have shown promise. They can apply offer between $50,000 and $1.5 million in equity through SeedAsia’s platform. SeedAsia takes a 5 percent “administration fee” and another 5 percent “distribution fee” from the investor. Potential investors need to apply and be screened, and SeedAsia has set the minimum investment commitment at $2,000 per member. “It costs about $20,000 to $30,000 at minimum to be an angel investor, so this lowers the entry barrier for people,” he said. SeedAsia is the first equity crowd-funding site to launch in the region, although the has been taking off in the US, where there are apparently over . One of them, , recently cleared US regulators, paving the way for more such sites to flourish. Hong Kong-headquartered is the first fund to be listed on SeedAsia. The company offers a mobile platform to deliver short consumer surveys. It had $1.25 million in seed funding in 2011, according to AngelList, and counts clients such as P&G, Nike, Colgate. It has already gathered more than 14 million survey responses for its clients, it said. Russell said the crowd-funding scene is a lot less developed in Asia than it is in the West. The culture is such that potential investors are still more keen on property than in an online startup, he said. Cultural differences also persist. “The local Chinese developers don’t like being transparent with their ideas and sharing, while Westerners don’t understand why the Chinese aren’t as transparent. The truth is, you have big players like Tencent that can copy you easily, which is why people aren’t as open with sharing here.” SeedAsia has taken on some advisors to raise investor confidence in its portfolio clients. and founder, , is one, and has been brought in too. Ramos founded Chinese seed fund, .
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Hasselhoff Has Germany, Path Has France
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Alexia Tsotsis
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As one is , I was checking rankings this a.m. just to make sure that my old mainstay app was still in spot No. 3 when Path was the in France. Now I’ve never really clicked with Path, rarely checked in with people there (it’s super awkward to name drop digitally) and have too much FOMO to stomach scrolling through all the things you people are doing on weekends without me. Though I found the , I didn’t actually use the app at all until people began to say things like, “Did you see all the crazy stuff he/she posted on Path?” So I log in every once in a while to use it, morbidly curious, thinking that only people in my rarefied circle use it to brag or complain about their personal lives off of Twitter. Because of laziness, I still use Twitter to complain and brag. There are plenty of things I don’t use that are popular ( ?), but I’m particularly fascinated by Path’s . Seriously, how does one go from No. 740 in overall French apps on May 8th to No. 1 on May 11th? Dave Morin swears that the startup isn’t using cost-per-install networks like AppGratis or any other sort of paid promotions other than a small number of Facebook ads, which he maintains are not particularly effective. And although the app of being overly spammy and from Facebook’s social graph API, it (with the exception of ) isn’t more egregious in its outreach than something like Facebook. In fact, I just onboarded myself again to Path to test whether it was handsy with the invite process and have come to the conclusion that if you experienced the same process I did, and you’re any sort of meticulous person, it doesn’t “spam” your friends. As in, don’t check “Invite Friends” if you don’t want to do that and it won’t invite them. Do you need me to repeat that? Anyways, God only knows what Path is doing to get users in France if it’s not paying for promotion (we’re working on a whole ‘nother story about this). It might be some sort of where the product market fit across cultures is . I’ve been asking the French I know why they think this is happening, and, though many of them have no idea, French blogger came up with some theories. In his own ( French-as-a-first-language) words: There is one thing that it is VERY important to understand about France: you’ve got Paris on one side and the rest and the other side. For sure we have other big cities but interestingly enough, Paris is one of the major city for Twitter but is France is rank 17 (I think). I believe Path is big in Paris (not in France) and some other cities which is slightly different. – A need to go private especially that in France we have really true strong relationship. – Directly connected to the way Facebook evolved (this is not private anymore) and people are a bit fed up/ afraid and just use Facebook for what it became (a mix between professional and personal). – Twitter is too complicated for many. – In France, mobile operator are supporting the smartphone so you don’t have to pay for it – I think the penetration rate is comparable to the U.S. (50%) – A lot of bloggers talked about Path (me for example) as a solution for having a private relationships for true real friends For example I wrote several article but one in a major french Newspaper called Le Figaro on that specific subject . Also there is a strong trend amongst teenagers since a month as they don’t want to share private stuff in a place where their parents are. Path #1 in France ? Like really ?? — Ouriel Ohayon (@OurielOhayon) As others Path has a hard row to hoe over the past three years, having to engender trust as a “private” social network while quickly demonstrating venture-validating growth.
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Tune In At 9 AM Tomorrow For Our Live Coverage Of Google I/O 2013
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Greg Kumparak
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Tomorrow is Day 1 of Google I/O, and you know what that means: it’s keynote time! We’re rolling out to the event in force, and will be bringing you along for the ride with our up-to-the-second liveblog and coverage Remember last years keynote? It was pure, absolute madness. Skydivers! Dudes on BMX bikes jumping from rooftop to rooftop! It was like Cirque Du Soleil minus the elaborate costumes, the singing, and the sexual tension. So, fine, it was nothing like Cirque Du Soleil — but if only for a day, Sergey Brin got to be the closest thing we’ve seen What’ll we see? An , perhaps? A dramatically ? Google’s long-rumored unified chat system, or their equally gossiped ? Connectivity allowing, our liveblog should start flowin’ just before 9 AM Pacific (That’s 10 AM Mountain, 12 PM Eastern, 5 PM London time, and… well, )
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Brent Brookler Shows Off Flowboard’s iPad Presentation Builder
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Anthony Ha
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is trying create the best tools for “interactive storytelling” on a tablet. And the best way to illustrate those tools is through a demo, so founder and CEO Brent Brookler stopped by the TechCrunch office today to show us the app. First, Brookler showed us the beginning of creating a presentation. He chose a template, imported media, and was able to directly manipulate that media using the touchscreen. Then he showed us a finished presentation (it was kind of a like cooking show, where you skip all the boring stuff in the middle). The presentations look great on the iPad and, by allowing users to zoom in on specific images or topics, Flowboard enables the creation of presentations that “go deeper.” The easiest way to understand what Flowboard is doing is to think of it as presentation-building software for tablets, but Brookler said he’s not trying to compete with PowerPoint. “We don’t have tables and charts and bullets,” he said. “We’re going after really interactive storytelling. We feel like are iterating and innovating on what the presentation medium should be. … We’re living in a world that’s all Internet-based, and it’s all touch and multimedia. And it’s app-focused — it’s a mobile-first product.” (To be clear, even though Flowboard’s focus is on tablets, the presentations can be viewed on any device.) Brookler also showed off some of the features that Flowboard has added since it , including snap guides that make it easier to move elements into place. He also said upcoming releases will include YouTube integration and an “undo” button. If you like what you see in the video, you can .
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Google’s Reportedly Launching A Music-Streaming Spotify Killer At I/O This Week
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Darrell Etherington
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Google is ramping up to deliver a streaming music service, which could debut as early as tomorrow at the I/O keynote, sources have told . The report has since been picked up by other publications, including The , which confirms that this is indeed the case according to its own unnamed sources, “people briefed on the plans.” That Google would be working on a streaming, Spotify-style music service should surprise exactly no one. It’s been the elephant in the room among the major purveyors of digital music, including Apple, Amazon and Google ever since Spotify and competitors like Rdio emerged and started picking up steam and adding users. Neither Spotify nor Rdio have come anywhere close to unseating the big guys in terms of users or music revenues, but that doesn’t mean that Apple and Google haven’t noticed the growing trend towards streaming. Juniper Research said recently that streamed music revenues will grow by more than 40 percent in 2013, by the end of the year. That’s still peanuts compared to the revenue Apple alone drives from iTunes music sales each year (it paid out to record labels in 2012, which is after it takes its own cut). The Google streaming service has been in development for a while now, according to rumors, but negotiations have now progressed to the point where it’s ready to launch, with all three major record labels signed up. There won’t be a free option, says the NYT, but instead there will be a paid subscription available at or around the going rate at competing services, or roughly $10 per month. If true, this means Google’s negotiations with streaming services have progressed far faster and further than . Both Apple and Google had previously raced to introduce cloud-based digital locker services for Google music, which allowed people to access tracks they’d previously purchased remotely from a variety of devices rather than stream tracks Spotify-style. That seemed like a sure precursor to a true streaming service, but labels were reportedly reluctant to go all-in on that model originally. The strangest thing about this is that Google is reportedly still doing the YouTube-based streaming music service that had previously made the rounds, in addition to this new one, which will apparently operate alongside it. How these work, especially in terms of what they give users access to and for what cost, should provide an interesting look at how Google is looking at dividing its media business efforts. We’ll likely find out tomorrow if this Google streaming thing is for real, live at the I/O keynote right here on TechCrunch.
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A Chat With Daniel Guermeur, Founder Of Das Keyboard
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John Biggs
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I’ve been enamored with the Das Keyboard since it launched in 2005. These supremely clicky, IBM-style keyboards are some of the most rugged mechanical input devices you can buy. Their Pro model — an all-black monolith with black keys and no key markings — is the gold standard for Gibson-esque console jockeys who believe that the best keyboard can be used as a weapon and shouldn’t be touched by mere mortals. The company just launched a new “quiet” version of its Das Keyboard, , and I thought it would be fun to talk with , founder of the company who went from being an open-source software maven at the turn of the century to making one of the most sought-after and coolest keyboards on the market. While Guermeur still works in software, his clicky Das Keyboard is probably his most lasting legacy in the gaming and programming world, a unique tool suited to unique professionals. The company started in the year 2000 as a software company. At that point, we started with open source software. We actually commercialized or distributed one of the first point and click content management systems. Within 30 days of that software being released, it was No. 1. It was the most downloaded server software on SourceForge. We had been selling there, so our model was to provide tech support for that open source software. We did pretty well until the end of the dot-com boom, and at that point, every, most software companies had trouble finding customers, so we had to downscale a little bit. But we still kept going with that. We were pure software at that point. Me being a software person, I spend my time on the computer, like 8 or 10 hours a day every day and the weekends and so on. Even more than 10 hours, I guess. One day I realized that I’m a pretty slow typist and if I typed faster, I would actually achieve more. I kind of tried to understand why I was slow and it was because I was looking at the keys. So I thought, hey, if I could not look at the keys, my mind will know where the keys are. It will memorize where the keys are. So I asked my assistant to find me a keyboard with nothing on it, no key inscriptions and she came back, saying, “Hey, it doesn’t exist. I could not find one.” So I told her, “Hey, could you contact somebody, could you find a factory in China and have them make one just for me?” And she did. And so three months later, I received a blank keyboard, totally black and totally blank and I typed on it. And amazingly enough, I doubled my speed within 30 days. So I was pretty happy because I was very slow. I was around 30 words a minute, now I’m at 65, something like that. And I kept it on my desk and the amazing part is that people who came to my office, friends and colleagues say, “Hey, wow, you have a blank keyboard. You must be really good.” I said, “Yes, that’s me, I’m really good.” So there was this cool factor I didn’t know about before people told me, that it really looked bad ass. And so I kept going, using my keyboard and after about a year, I had so many requests from people asking me, “Hey, where did you buy that keyboard? We want to buy one because it’s so cool.” I said, “Hey, let me do a little study and you’ll be able to buy it from my website within one month.” I went to see my friend, Maurice Miller, who’s one of the founders of Rackspace and I told him, “Hey, I want to ask your sysadmins to test my keyboard to see if they would buy it because a blank keyboard is something that nobody wants to buy except crazy people like me.” My assumption was that people who are in the tech world, like sysadmins and programmers, they would like that because they were more or less like me. They said that they really liked the keyboard. About 60 percent said they would buy it, so I thought, “Hey, it’s a marketing result.” It was an informal marketing survey, nothing scientific. I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive — 60 percent — it’s incredible. I’ve got to try that, to set it up online.” What I did is I created a one-page website over the weekend. I took a picture of my keyboard. I think it was on Monday we made the website public. It was linked to a stock Yahoo store, totally ugly. The whole website, the concept was that the blank keyboard is only for the geeks — for the ubergeeks. That was the angle. We sent one email to Gizmodo — a five-line email — saying, “Hey, Gizmodo. We’ve got a kick-ass, a bad-ass blank keyboard called Das Keyboard,” and we sent them the link. That’s all the marketing we did. I thought, they probably won’t publish that, ever, but my idea was that if I sell 15 keyboards, then maybe there was a market. Then if I have totally misjudged the opportunity I’ll sell probably five, so between five and 15. Actually, Gizmodo published a little blog post, and within five days we had millions of visitors. The keyboard was featured in the New York Times. In the print edition we had a picture of the keyboard. It was on Slashdot, CBS News, we got MTV, World News Report, we got a ton of people talking about the keyboard. We got millions of visitors. The web server was so busy we had to upgrade the machine. It kept crashing. We got thousands of orders within a few days. Hey! Thank you so much. Wow. That’s awesome. Yeah, so I’m talking to you. I think you are, yes. Yeah, that’s really awesome. Hopefully at some point we can meet in person so I can shake your hand. We had a huge demand, and we didn’t plan for that so we didn’t have any inventory. We identified a few possible suppliers, but we didn’t talk to them. We said, “Hey, what do we do? We are a software company. We know nothing about hardware, and we have customers.” We said, “We should try to deliver within three months.” We contacted the customers and said, “Hey, we are out of stock. Are you willing to wait three months, and then we’ll ship?” The vast majority said, “Yes, we are totally wanting to wait three months because that keyboard is so bad-ass. The blank keyboard, we want it.” We said, “OK.” Then we worked really hard to procure all the keyboards and deliver them. That’s how it started. At that point we decided, “Let’s upgrade the quality of the keyboard,” so we have been starting to improve the design, improve the technology, always focusing on the highest possible quality of every component we use. Then we actually were able to carve a niche with positioning, which is Das Keyboard is the ultimate typing machine, where everything we design, the spirit of it, is to have the best, highest quality possible. The best typing experience possible. That was our idea. We think people spend at least eight hours a day typing on a keyboard, which makes a keyboard very important. That’s the object many people touch the most in their entire life. It’s a keyboard. That’s why we think, if you have a very responsive keyboard, very comfortable, your whole life gets upgraded. I don’t know what kind of keyboard you use, but I can tell you our customers really love it. When we have a new opening here on Metadot, they come and they start typing on it. They just love it. We started with the blank keyboard. That is the one I have on my desk. Then we said, “Hey, there is a lot of demand for a high-quality, very tactile keyboard, but with inscriptions,” so then we decided to do it as well. We call it the Professional. The blank one is the Ultimate. The other one is called the Professional. We went through several generations of products. The latest one is generation No. 3. It’s the latest, and we have several flavors. Two models — which is Ultimate, blank one, and the Professional — and within those we have options, like the typing experience. One is the blue key switch, which is the most clicky. We have the brown key switch, which we call Soft Tactile, so it’s less clicky but still very tactile. Less clicky means also it’s not as audible as the blue key switch. Today, we launched what we call the . It’s a quiet key design. It’s a red key switch with a quiet key design, which makes it very quiet. The tactile feel is absolutely unbelievable. Maybe we should send you one like this so you can… That’s the demand we have now. It’s a little bit like the tomato sauce. You have tomato sauce with the gigantic piece of meat, and some people like that, and some people prefer when the meatballs are smaller, or a lot smaller. There is like a flavor of experience that people want to have. What’s amazing is that, on paper, the specifications are very similar, but the user experience is so different. It’s a combination of things. First of all, the switch technology is German. I’m French, and my partner is German, so we looked at a good name; we looked at a blank keyboard, and so on. A good name that actually meant something for many people was the word “das,” which is German for “the,” and “Keyboard” is really honest, so it will be “The Keyboard,” but with some German elements to it, which is about high quality, high performance, and good reliability, like the German concept of technology. That’s the idea behind it. The answer is yes. In the ’80s, already I heard that the keyboard is dead — people are going to use voice recognition within a few years. I thought, “Wow, that sounds cool. I want to use that.” But the reality is that when people do serious typing they use a workstation, and they have a big screen. They have an awesome mouse, and they need to have an awesome keyboard. If you check on Google Trends, the search trends of “mechanical keyboards” — just those two words — you will see that the demand has been exponentially increasing in the last years. There is a huge demand, and I think the demand is going to increase, even though people buy less desktops. I think people who are still doing that are buying better-quality components that they use for a longer time. Hence, I think Das Keyboard is the key to doing that. We have lots of things in the making. A lot. If you look at the competition, typically they do, “Hey, we have a keyboard. Now we are going to do a mouse, and maybe some different keyboards, more keyboards, so 20 keyboards or 50 keyboards.” We are not going to do that. We have a different strategy. It’s a strategy that nobody has done yet. I cannot tell you all of it now, but the idea is that we’re going to focus on a very limited number of keyboards and we are going to increase the kind of products we sell, different kinds of products. The concept that we are trying to address is that people want to be more productive when they work and we are going to give them tools so they are more productive in general. I know that Noam Chomsky has one.
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Cydia Substrate Comes To Android (Cydia Store Next?)
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Sarah Perez
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, a platform commonly thought of as the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, has just today of all places, in the form of Cydia Substrate*, a tool for developers to build code modifications to other applications. Though Android is by its nature more open and customizable than Apple’s locked-down iOS, it now has a growing collection of apps designed for power users who root their devices – a process that’s similar in spirit to the iOS jailbreak. Jailbreaking an iPhone makes a lot of sense because customizing Apple’s software, including its lockscreen and homescreen, is all but impossible. However, on Android, the perception is that many of the quirks and customizations you may desire can be managed through the installation of third-party apps, ranging from Android launchers that can change everything about the device (like Facebook’s Home application, for instance) to very specific tweaks that can change the device’s default behavior. That being said, rooting an Android phone gives users even more power to do things outside of the scope of what’s possible out of the box. In addition to being able to upgrade to newer versions of Android ahead of “official” releases, for rooted phones and tablets allow users to adjust CPU settings, define custom multitouch gestures, record video of their screens, undelete files, gain access to apps not offered in their country, adjust cache size, change permissions, and a host of other delightfully geeky things. Cydia could one day become a centralized place to find all those things, but at launch it is merely the framework. The only Cydia-enabled extension available at this time is , the “theme engine” that grew popular on iOS over the years as a way to customize more than just the phone’s background. On Android, WinterBoard works with themes provided by other customization platforms, including ADW Launcher, GO Launcher Ex, Launcher Pro, dxTop, and the T-Mobile/CyanogenMod Theme Chooser platform. According to a lengthy and detailed description on , the software will run on Android versions 2.3 and up, plus “equivalent” versions like CyanogenMod or the Kindle Fire. It will also work on ARM or Intel CPUs and even on Google Glass. (Are people rooting Glass? Do tell.) The Cydia Substrate has been tested on a number of Android devices, but as with rooting itself, it’s not the sort of thing for a layperson to undertake without a backup in place…and a backup plan, too, on the off chance things go awry and you end up bricking your phone. If, however, you feel comfortable going beyond the bounds of what’s officially approved, to get started with Cydia (after first gaining root), you can install the APK from or Google Play, then grant Superuser access to Substrate when prompted. Videos showing Cydia in action on Android have already started popping up on YouTube if you’re more curious than motivated for now: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGPKQgAb3S4?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] Cydia Substrate for Android is new, but its iOS counterpart is now being used by tens of millions of users, according to Cydia creator Jay Freeman.
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BlackBerry May Be Dabbling In Phablets With A 5-Inch Z10 Refresh
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Chris Velazco
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BlackBerry’s wryly jovial CEO Thorsten Heins spent quite a bit of time talking up the new mid-range Q5 at this morning’s BlackBerry Live keynote address, but the folks in Waterloo may be working on a follow-up smartphone that’s staggeringly different from the one we saw today. According to a report from , the struggling Canadian company is working an all-touch BlackBerry smartphone with a 5-inch display. KnowYourMobile’s Richard Goodwin goes on to note that the device is currently in testing being tested at by unnamed Canadian wireless carrier, and the anonymous tester providing the info pointed out that the device would make its official debut within the next few months. For what it’s worth, Jefferies’ analyst Peter Misek foretold of a last month, but his track record with this sort of thing . It should go without saying that you should be taking all of this with a mighty big grain of salt, but it’s an intriguing notion to consider. I mean, let’s assume for a moment that this report is accurate and that such a device really is being worked on behind closed doors — it’d be quite a bold move on BlackBerry’s part. It’s not hard to see that a considerable chunk of people have embraced large form factor smartphones, and it’s possible that BlackBerry wants to cash in on that consumer fervor. Then again, this whole thing is just loaded with question marks that could trip BlackBerry up as it works to reverse its fortunes. By embracing so many form factors so quickly, BlackBerry runs the risk of alienating users who have perhaps prematurely pulled the trigger on an earlier model. It doesn’t help that there’s plenty of competition in the hefty smartphone space, either. Samsung is leading that particular pack with Android-powered devices like the Galaxy Note II, but rivals like LG and Sony are working to give the Korean juggernaut some competition. Couple that with persistent rumors that Apple is working on a larger smartphone of its very own and BlackBerry’s 5-inch follow-up may wind up facing the same issues with standing out as the company’s current hardware crop does. The Q5 is a device that needed to exist — after all, a huge chunk of BlackBerry’s userbase can be found in developing markets where relatively few people could comfortably shell out the money necessary for an up-market device like the Z10 or Q10. If all goes according to plan, the Q5 may be the phone that helps BlackBerry maintain its strongholds across the globe. But a 5-inch BlackBerry? Heins and company will have to make an awfully strong argument for if it wants the world to give it a shot.
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RocketSpace Launches RocketU Developer Bootcamp With In-Person Classes For N00bs And Ninjas
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Josh Constine
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If you can’t program, the future’s looking bleaker and bleaker. And if you can, learning to manage other code monkeys could get you promoted. provider RocketSpace’s new is a tech professional education program aimed to aid engineers no matter where they are in their career. RocketU offers rookies and programming veterans alike a way to get an edge in the job market. There’s been a bit of a hubbub lately that there is actually no shortage of tech talent in America. “For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job. In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable.” Yes, the United States is graduating a ton of engineers. But startups and tech giants don’t want just any engineers, they want 10X code masters and visionary innovators. That can take more than a degree from a well-known university, and a lot more than some random Codecademy tutorials. It can take hardcore training in the latest programming languages, and understanding of how to cobble code together into great products. That’s where comes in. The program comes from , a in San Francisco that houses 130 startups and the 600 employees. It handles leases, bandwidth, firewalls, and security so founders can concentrate on their companies. With room to house classes, startups to introduce graduates to, and a well-known name in Silicon Valley, Rocket U could be a smart extension of its business. RocketU will offer a variety of courses, ranging from immersive 10-week developer bootcamps, to 3-week deep dives on advanced scripting languages and architecture, to 3-5 day professional development classes for techies. will be held at the RocketSpace campus with experienced teachers, and most coursework will happen there so you don’t have to worry too much about homework. The classes are on a pay-as-you-go structure, but require admission through a serious application process. Michelle Berry, the SVP of RocketU, tells me “the main differentiators are that we’re offering programs beyond the initial developer bootcamp, to make sure we’re providing skills throughout the career life-cycle.” She explains that long-time programmers can choose between training as expert individual contributors or as managers. After graduating, RocketU students get help with placement in tech jobs, including the startups RocketSpace houses. RocketU’s first full-length class will be a $10,000 10-week dev from July 22 to September 27th, and will focus on Python, Django, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, WebSocket, and jQuery. It will also teach databases, servers, team coding, and interview skills. The pre-requisite for admission beyond its (which closes June 9th) is a computer science or equivalent degree – or – two years of coding experience – or – completion of RocketU’s two-week Coding & Web Fundamentals crash course that runs just before the bootcamp. RocketU will be competing with other educational programs like the well-established , plus , , and an array of online learning tutorials. To win out, it may need name-brand professors, and an image that’s more independent than RocketSpace. Right now it’s website looks more like an off-shoot than a serious learning institution. Still, the climate is right for . To land a job at a high-potential startup or found one of your own, you can’t be rusty. You could work a job you’re not thrilled about to slowly siphon off skills, but it might be worth paying to get them taught to you directly. You want to be a ninja? Hit the dojo.
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I/O 2013: One Google, Under Page, With Unification And Usability For All
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Drew Olanoff
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This is the and there’s already been quite a bit of chatter about what the company will announce and share at the conference. One important thing to note is that there will only be one keynote this year, a mega three-hour session where Google will talk to the attendees about all of the important things that have happened over the past year and what to expect moving forward. For the first time in a long time, Google will be coming into the conference as a hot property in its entirety, a company that has many things going on that are getting attention. The truly important part of this I/O, which will be the third after Larry Page’s , is that Google is much more than just a search company. Last year, the focus was on the future, with . While there was other interesting news, such as , the focus and hype were generated by the exciting future that Googlers were concocting in Mountain View. Page missed last year’s I/O, , and we’ve reached out to Google to see if he’ll be keynoting tomorrow. This year, all the cards are on the table, and the new Google — Google Now, if you will — has to show developers that focusing on building on top of Google properties is the smart bet, even more so than for its rival Apple. Why? Because Google touches everything and everyone. From moms to CEOs, geeks to elementary school students, Google is surrounding us with the tools we need every day. The best way to look at Google right now is by slicing up the company into three categories, something that we’ve never been able to do with them before. Google started as a search company and this remains its No. 1 asset. It’s through this product that the company has figured out unique ways to collect and display information, something that has benefitted everything it has done since. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t gone to the web to “Google” something that they couldn’t figure out on their own. That utility has gotten social, thanks to Google+. Additionally, Gmail search results have been brought into the fray and other items unique to the person performing the search. The pure utility of search has also carried over to its Maps product, a space that Google handily owns. Once again, the first problem of figuring out how to collect geo location information all over the world was only part of the solution to how to provide a tool that people could rely on. It’s rumored that , potentially being announced this week. From the looks of what has been leaked, Google wants to make your map experience a bit more personal and social, too. The unification of Google’s productivity tools, another important utility, shows that Page wants consumers to feel like the company has something for all of their needs. Instead of hunting around for Google Spreadsheets, people simply have to go to Google Drive and create the document of their choice. That was a long time in coming. Ahead of I/O, the company announced , as well as giving them one place to buy more space. You have to have a browser to view the web, right? Well, Google has consumers covered with Chrome. The browser has become more of a platform for developers to build upon, giving them the tools to let consumers perform actions that they normally would in a tab on a website. This browser has become an operating system for its laptop and desktop devices. The Google Now feature is a perfect example of how all of this utility is being wrapped up into one useful experience, finding its way to every device and OS to serve as your personal assistant. Gmail has been continually improved, , but has become a bit cluttered with all of the other communication functionality that the company offers. Within Gmail, you’ll find Gchat, Voice and some Google+ features here and there. It needs work, and the . Eventually, no matter what Google product you’re using, you should be able to start and engage in a chat. This means that if you’re performing a search, the chat experience should follow you. Google Voice is still a product out on its own, doing well, but should be folded into Google’s overall chat strategy at one point. The optimal experience for a user is to go to one app to contact someone by voice, video or text and then do it without thinking about whether they’re using the right tool. Google’s not there yet, and the product will suffer over time if left dangling. Google+ on the other hand, has been leveraged as a way to tie all of Google’s products together socially. If you want to share a document from Drive, you can share it with your circles. If you find a cool place to eat on Google Places, you can share it with a circle. The concept of “circles” as a way to organize your contact list is the core purpose of Google+, with its stream and photo capabilities still serving as “nice to haves.” I would suspect at some point that you’ll be able to send an “Email,” which is just another type of message, to a circle from Gmail, much like you can from Google+. The company , so thinking of Plus as a Facebook competitor is a mistake. Both of the categories above are converging with Google’s most important focus, mobile. It’s open-source strategy with Android is paying off, with . It’s not just phones that fall under mobile, though; it’s tablets, laptops, and gaming devices like . At the end of the day, all of the utility and communication strengths will shine brightest on devices that you aren’t sitting at for eight hours a day. Picking up a conversation that you started on your desktop, finishing it on your tablet and then picking it up again in the morning from your phone is powerful. It’s possible with Google’s products now, but it’s not apparent to consumers. That’s why Google has been so focused on the presentation of its products and not just the integration. Want a visual? Here you go: Expect less bravado and more focus from Google. While the three-hour keynote will probably be split up among different products, expect to hear some of the same messaging. The idea of making things easier for users, more delightful and accessible by everyone, everywhere will be the battle cry. Google wants you to use its products, and it doesn’t care where and how you use them. Whether it’s on a video game system, a refrigerator or Glass, the company has something for everyone, whether they’re at work, in the car, in their bedroom or living room or out on a hike. We’ve been surrounded, but now it’s Google’s turn to tell us why that’s a good thing and how it’s easier than ever to get something out of it.
We might hear some gaming and music news, but expect it to fit within Google’s focused mission, and to not distract. The Mountain View giant is a busy company, but all of its products and efforts are finally moving in the same direction under Page. We’ll be updating you with all of the information on our live blog tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled. [Photo credits: , , ]
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Accel Partners’ Rich Wong
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Leena Rao
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This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Accel Partners’ in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Wong focused on software, mobile and Internet services investments for Accel and helped lead the firm’s investments in Angry Birds (Rovio), Atlassian, MoPub, Dealer.com, Qwilt and others. Prior to Accel, Wong was SVP/GM of Products at Openwave and was previously the Chief Marketing Officer at Covad Communications, the DSL provider. Considering his focus on mobile, Wong should have some interesting insights on where VCs are placing their bets. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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Let’s Talk About That 500 Startups Video
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Ryan Lawler
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By now you’ve probably seen that 500 Startups Accelerator , its sixth. And it’s got a and that is fucking awesome. You know what’s not so awesome? The video that accompanied its announcement. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKVScfsmQ-o&w=560&h=315] This video, like those which came before it, was put together by the startups themselves. It’s a spoof on , which . And yes, it’s 2013 and startups , but whatever. My problem isn’t with concept behind the video, but with the content of the message included within. Get over the jokey nature of the spoof and listen to the lyrics closely and you’re faced with an unintentionally cynical view of the startup ecosystem and today’s frothy early-stage investment climate. At the heart of all of this is the chorus: “I’m gonna raise some funds / Only got twenty dollars in my pocket / I – I – I’m raising, looking for millions / This is fucking awesome.” Note, the goal here is not to build lasting companies. There’s some talk about creating products that are the future, that will be used by everyone and your grandma, but those lyrics are drowned out by incessant demands for more and more cash. The most damning part of the spoof is the implication that the main goal of these startups is to raise seed funding and then a Series A, which will increase the paper value of the company for their investors. Or, worse, like Facebook, Google, or, . Sure, VCs do care about returns, but I’m willing to bet that “All I care about is makin’ my investors green” is not a mantra on which lasting companies are built. Nor is “give me your money, I’ll double your money” or “follow us on Angel List, if you don’t you won’t make shit.” There’s also the question of the role of the Accelerator itself. If Paul Graham is being criticized for saying YC’s Demo Day , what does one say about 500 Startups when it blatantly revels in the fact that the core mission of its startups seems to be cashing checks? I’ve got respect for the 500 Startups crew and applaud the founders for putting a video together on a short deadline. But these lyrics make me wonder about the toxic startup culture that produces such a thing. As one of my colleagues wrote on our internal message board: “500 Startups, and not a single person to say, ‘Hey guys, maybe this music video isn’t a good idea.’” Here are the lyrics, a blatant glorification of wealth accrual to : I’m gonna raise some funds
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket
I – I – I’m raising, looking for some millions
This is fucking awesome [Verse 1:]
Nah, walk up to a meeting like, “What up? I got big traction”
My hockey stick’s higher than scoble’s amsterdam vacation
market size fit, users on their seat, punching cards in
cahingin-caching Rollin in’, with my team, creating products that will be
the future but all i care is makin my inve stors green
Ima close my round now, Ima close my round now,
No for real I’m closing – ask your friends – can I get their checks now? give me you money, ill double your money,
show me your market illl double your market,
your mommy your daddy , your cousin your aunty
everybody will be using my product [2X]
I’m gonna raise some funds
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket
I – I – I’m raising, looking for some millions
This is fucking awesome [BRIDGE]
Hey Tech Crunch write us up
So we can blow this up
Don’t dare to get us wrong
We are 500 strong Hey seed funds check us out
Do it quick, or you’ll all miss out
follow us on Angel List
If you don’t you won’t make shit [2X]
I’m gonna raise some funds
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket
I – I – I’m raising, looking for some millions
This is fucking awesome
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Update Your Facebook Status And Comment Using Google Glass And Your Voice With ThroughGlass
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Drew Olanoff
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We recently wrote about an , but another one has come out that has a way more interesting feature, the ability to create status messages or comment on on the social network with the sound of your voice. gives you more opportunities to interact, rather than simply share. You can post a status update, then see all of the comments and likes that come in. If you want, you can even reply to the interactions you’re getting using the same voice commands. The app was built by Drew Baumann and Andrew Skotzko, and they’re calling it the best Facebook app for Glass…until Facebook releases one of its own: Just launched the best Facebook app ever** w/ for Google Glass. **Until FB +1’s me — Drew Baumann (@DrewBaumann) I’ve found that voice commands, for Glass or on any mobile device, are only useful for utility purposes, such as asking for directions or providing a search. However, for the first time, I’ve found that sharing a quick thought using the device might be useful. ThroughGlass is closer to something that Facebook would build itself. Once you install the app and turn sharing on for it, it gives you the option to “pin it,” which tosses it under all of the pre-installed Cards that Google provides you with. That way, you have instant access to the app, whenever you want to share a status update or photo: Tap status update, and then you’ll get the dialogue to start speaking your mind: Once you share your update, it will show up on Facebook like any other update would, allowing people to comment and like it: As people start interacting, you’ll be alerted on Glass and then given the opportunity to reply, which is what makes this app really useful: This is an example of the incremental improvements that we can expect for Glass apps, as developers start exploring the . For example, this is the first time that I’ve seen an app utilize the “pin” functionality, something that is akin to adding apps to a dock. As we wait for official apps from Facebook and Twitter, developers are trying to bring the future to Glass wearers now.
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