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Facebook Patents Point To An All-Seeing, All-Hearing Instagram Video
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Josh Constine
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Facial recognition, landmark detection, and even audio cues picked up through your phone’s microphone could let Instagram Video intelligently suggest a cover frame for mini-movies or even tag them, according to recent Facebook patents. The tech could route each video to the right people and put its best (motionless) foot forward so it gets viewed amongst the sea of more easily-consumed photos. When I a month ago, it was hard to envision how they’d be applied. Facebook hadn’t been putting much focus on recording video in its own app. The schematics described choosing a cover frame for videos you shot — something Facebook’s camera didn’t offer — while the patents imagined using every sensor possible to help you make that choice. It was all a little hazy. The made it a lot clearer. Currently after you’ve shot an video on , you can scrub your finger across a timeline to choose what’s shown as the video’s thumbnail. This is a costly extra step in the publishing process that makes Instagram Video feel more sluggish than Vine. While picking a cover frame might seem mundane or annoying, it hugely important. Videos are just a much bigger investment to view than photos. You can gleam the beauty of a classic Instagram as quickly or slowly as you want. With video, you’re at the mercy of the director. Deciding to watch a video is a time investment. Maybe only 15 seconds, but on mobile that can feel agonizingly long if the content is boring. The only clues to whether that investment will be well spent are the author’s reputation, the description, and the cover frame. Not all frames of a video are ripe for being paralyzed, pulled out on context, and put on display as the defining moment of a moment. Right now Facebook automatically gives you about 15 frames from across your video to choose from ,though you drag your finger to choose frames in between. There’s no suggestion of which is best and it defaults to the first frame of the video. But with these patents, Facebook and Instagram could pick out the most interesting moments of your video, determine who and what is in them, and recommend tags or what to use as your cover frame. The patents were granted in April 2013 and filed for in October 2011 by Facebook and its employees , , and . The patents are for Based on Social Components and Identity Recognition (’80), from captured video sequence (’00), and sequence based on social components (’65). Essentially, they describe technology for looking at each frame of a video as if it were a photo. Detection algorithms can then be used to identify people, written words, brands, and landmarks through facial and pattern recognition. “The image capturing process may analyze frames of the sequence of video frames to identify…a place (e.g., Eiffel Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite National Park, Hollywood), a business or an organization (e.g., a coffee shop, San Francisco Giants), or a brand or product (e.g., Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton).” This could let Facebook suggest formal tags of people, places, and brands in a video, or just quietly log that information as metadata to be used for determining who to surface the video to in the news feed. For example, the video could be shown more prominently to people nearby, who Like those landmarks or brands, or who are friends of those who appear in the video. Though Instagram uses an unfiltered feed, it recently added a that could take advantage of this kind of detection. That same information could also be used to suggest the best possible cover frames, such as ones featuring people or famous places. The patents also outline picking the best frame by detecting good lighting or contrast, and even detecting preferred facial expressions. If you pan over a couch full of friends, Instagram could suggest a cover frame where they’re all well let and smiling. The patents also describe using data from a phone’s accelerometer to pick a still, stable image for the cover frame rather than a blurry one. What most excites me, though, is the potential use of microphone for determining the most interesting moment of a video: “The image selection process may analyze content of the voice segments (e.g., by using a speech recognition algorithm) for indication of importance (e.g., “Say cheese!”, “Cheese!”, “This is beautiful!”, “Amazing!”) That means Instagram could potentially *hear* you shouting with joy when your camera lens hovers over a beautiful sunset, skyline, or smile, and then make it easy to choose that part of the video as the cover. As the battle to be the premier social video app rages on between Instagram, Vine, and other competitors, serious technology like this will become a factor. The apps need to stay lightweight with a minimum number of steps before publishing. While extra features and editing tools might appeal to power users, it’s the elimination or simplification of core flow that may turn the tides for one developer or another. Lucky for Instagram, its parent company Facebook has spent years envisioning how to smooth the media capture and sharing experience. Boz, Garcia, and Soleio seem to have had foresight that technology would eventually make recording video almost as easy as snapping a photo. If there patents bear fruit for Instagram, consuming video could get easier as well. and we might actually watch more of the moments our friends are capturing.
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Indian Streaming Music Service Dhingana Launches Ad-Free Paid Subscriptions
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Catherine Shu
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, a streaming music service for Indian and Bollywood tunes, announced today that it is launching , its first subscription service for iOS and the second part of its monetization model. Gold subscriptions, which cost $1.99 a month and are available as an in-app purchase within Dhingana’s , include premium features such as ad-free service, the ability to download and sync unlimited songs across up to two devices and access to streaming music in high-definition quality up to 320 kbps. Dhingana is not currently releasing updated user statistics, but as of October 2012 it had 15 million monthly active visitors, with 40 percent of those visitors located outside of India. The music service launched in 2007 and spent its first few years building its content and user base before taking the first step toward monetization with the in August 2012. The company said at the time that ad sales would make up about 70 percent to 80 percent of Dhingana’s revenue, with the rest coming from subscription services. Dhingana Gold subscribers can also access music offline, a potential draw for users with limited data plans on their mobile phones. “We have embarked on a three-pronged strategy for monetization at Dhingana,” Dhingana CEO Rohit Bhatia said by email. “The first being advertising on the mobile and web platforms, the second is an in-app Gold subscription on iOS and the third will be subscription on Android devices with mobile operator billing.” “Our users have been requesting for the ability to download songs and enjoy music without ads for some time now. We carefully crafted our Gold subscription service to meet our users’ demand while at the same time giving them a premium music experience like none other,” added Dhingana co-founder and COO Swapnil Shinde. The streaming music service has offices in Pune, India, and Sunnyvale, Calif. It in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Helion Venture Partners and Inventus Capital Partners.
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SnapPages Takes Aim At The Wixes And Weeblys Of The World With Major New Redesign
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Rip Empson
| 2,013
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Today, the website creation market is dominated by a handful of veteran players, as companies like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace now own the majority of mindshare and boast tens of millions of users between them. While many smaller players ended up in the deadpool during the market’s land grab, one veteran startup has managed to survive — and bootstrap its way to profitability. Today, five-year-old website builder is rolling out a major redesign and upgrade that aims to lure aspiring site builders away from the bigs by offering a service that purports to be accessible to everyone — whether a novice or a wily professional. Broadly speaking, today’s website creators tend to cater to one side or the other, SnapPages CEO Steve Testone explains. There are a number of services out there that claim to give you the tools to get a website up and running in a hot, New York minute, even if you’re a card-carrying Luddite. Given the target audience, this requires removing as many barriers to entry as possible and, as a result, they tend to prioritize ease-of-use and simplicity. For the non-technical this is great, but what if you’re looking for a little more support and a little more horsepower? Generally, the focus on ease and simplicity comes at the sacrifice of power and flexibility — and vice versa. Thus, in building its new platform, SnapPages’ priority, the founder says, was to try to strike a balance. To do this, the team attempted to create what Testone calls an “app-centric platform” — in other words, the platform is designed to break its interface (and to a similar degree, the user experience) down into smaller chunks (apps) that are easier to work with and can be used as needed, removing some of the friction from the equation for novice users. Prior to the redesign, SnapPages was also at a place where, if it actually hoped to survive for another five years in an increasingly crowded space, the platform was in sore need of a new coat of paint and some updated tech. As a result, the team has completely re-designed and re-programmed platform from the ground up. For starters, that means that SnapPages is now finally HTML5-optimized. Whereas the platform’s apps were originally written in Flash and its websites were in HTML, the CEO tells us, at launch, the entire package is HTML5 and optimized for touchscreens. The startup has also made its new “Themes” much more customizable, giving users the ability to resize elements, increase margins and customize colors and have those changes auto-updated throughout the theme (on multiple pages) without touching any code. Furthermore, because its old themes had gotten pretty stale, SnapPages has created a new library of themes users can choose from — and the same goes for typography. On top of that, the new platform offers color linking, color menus, the ability to customize your site’s navbar and add custom social icons and footer menus, to name a few. Rattling off a list of features is lame, to be sure, and if you’re just looking for the basics, features like “advanced typography” won’t have much appeal. But SnapPages’ comparative strength seems to be this: Making it easy to create a website without all the bells and whistles and, if you’re more design and detail-oriented, providing additional layers of customization to do just that. (While presenting it through a UI that’s reminiscent of PhotoShop and thus feels familiar.) Furthermore, customizations like tweaking the positioning, width and look of your navbar generally require some familiarity with CSS or other programs/languages. For novices, that’s daunting, but the tech-savvy expect more options and control over customization. It’s a tough line to walk, because it’s so easy to go too far in one direction. But, by using a drag-and-drop interface for template changes and an improved WYSIWYG for more transparent previewing, SnapPages is trying to walk the line. Some readers will say, “but what about WordPress?” While WordPress is one of the more powerful site creation platforms out there and customizable, yes, at its core, it’s a CMS. This comes with its own set of upsides and downsides. WordPress can scale up (and offer customization, support, hosting, etc.) from the solo, casual blogger, all the way up to professional publishers (where I happen to be writing this from). Even if that means giving up some of the publishing potential and features, SnapPages is going in a different direction. Though it supports publishing features and has a newsletter creation tool and so on, it doesn’t cater to publishers in the same way WordPress does. So, if you’re a blogger, SnapPages may not be for you. Instead, it’s going for the general approach (hence the comparison to Wix and Weebly) and, while it supports a range of features, it’s not for the enterprise use case. Simply put, the goal, the CEO says, is to give users a basic toolbox of apps to build their websites, with an app to manage content, another to manage themes, one for your files, one for photos — and so on. Users can make changes to all of them at once or one at a time, publishing changes to their site in real time. SnapPages 2.0 also brings the promise of improved infrastructure, as it now includes cloud hosting and a CDN infrastructure for user websites. Meaning: SnapPages has moved to the cloud with the goal of adding speed and scalability to customer websites, because no one likes slow, gummy rendering, people. No one. If not because it’s well-designed, fits most use cases and is pretty easy to use, then you might at least become a fan of SnapPages story: In an era where every other startup seems to have $10 million in the bank, the startup is somewhat unusual. It doesn’t hail from Silicon Valley, hasn’t raised any outside capital and has remained afloat without spending anything on advertising. Since it’s had no more than three full-time employees at any given time, and for much of that time, Testone was flying solo. Furthermore, its growth has been measured rather than explosive, and it doesn’t really have any vanity metrics. The Austin, Texas-based startup has managed to bootstrap its way to profitability, but that didn’t happen quickly. Instead, it’s grown slowly via word-of-mouth and by allowing professional designers using its platform to contribute to the development of its apps and themes. It also listens to what customers want. When SnapPages first launched, it strove to limit the amount of customization options available to users. However, its new platform is singing a slightly different tune, instead ratcheting up customization options — alongside the addition of key functionality like optimizing site rendering and layout for mobile — while keeping things simple. Going forward, it would be great to see SnapPages open its doors to third parties and allow developers to build apps on its platform and pushing flexibility one step further. But for now, if users buy into SnapPages’ purported balance of simplicity and ease-of-use, the new platform could show itself to be a worthy alternative to the Wixes and Weeblys of the world. Or not. Depends whether you’re into the whole David vs. Goliath analogy thing. Video demo of the .
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Dropbox’s Quest To Make Every App Work Offline
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Josh Constine
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*Screeeeech* That’s your favorite app slamming on the brakes the second it loses its data connection. It seems ridiculous that apps can’t function offline, until you realize that cloud data sync isn’t some simple technology any developer can afford to build. That’s where comes in. “Users shouldn’t even need to know if they’re connected or not” CEO Drew Houston tells me. It’s a timely statement, considering Houston and I are speaking in the middle of the white-carpeted pavilion of …where the wi-fi is down. As much as we’d like to believe the whole world is blanketed in sweet, sweet Internet, it’s not. In the developing world, the information superhighway is often just a muddy path. Mobiles in the mid-western United States cling to the few bars of reception they can get. Even LTE havens like San Francisco have their service holes. And if you get too many people in one spot, say a park or a music festival, everyone’s data speed slows to a crawl or craps out entirely. In these cases, you can’t tweet. Can’t load your own city’s map. Can’t view the Facebook news feed, upload a photo to Instagram, or search your old Gmails. And that’s just the big guys. Barring a few notable exceptions with limited offline capabilities like Evernote and Google Translate, many apps simply fail when the data stops flowing. Time won’t necessarily solve this problem. Years from now we may conquer the Earth with connection, but it won’t always be fast. “Offline vs online doesn’t have to be binary” says Dropbox VP of Engineering Aditya Agarwal. “There will always be a spectrum. Offline today will be slow-line tomorrow.” That just doesn’t jive with Dropbox, whose mission is to give its access to their data and files anywhere, but also . If you were expecting some flashy surprises at DBX, you’d be disappointed. And that’s a good thing. Instead of diverging from its core purpose to expand into new areas, Dropbox kept it tight. Founded in 2006, the problem of weaving all our data together is big enough for Dropbox to stay laser-focused. This isn’t Facebook, with its “move fast and break things” culture of trying a ton of products and seeing what sticks. It’s only got 300 or so employees that it refuses to spread thin. Just because it’s not a giant yet doesn’t mean all the decisions come from the top, though. Houston explains, “If you tell people what to do all the time, they think ‘OK, it’s not my job to use my brain.'” That management style and concentration led to today’s most exciting announcement. Sure, there were and Yahoo’s Mail for Android app. Houston strutted across the stage explaining how apps can use the new Drop-Ins functionality to easily pull in files from a user’s Dropbox. But the real-game changer is how Dropbox plans to power data syncing and offline functionality for any app that wants help. It’s a new , though really it’s the reapplication of what Dropbox has done for files in the online world, but for in-app data in our occasionally disconnected universe. With the Datastore API, developers can upload their users’ structured data to Dropbox so it’s safe and can be synced back to any device. That way if you add a to-do list item, beat a game level, or edit a photo on your iPhone, you can pick up right where you left off on your iPad or desktop. It sounds simple and obvious, but the backend work it requires is a huge undertaking, especially for small startups. Agarwal tells me that sure, Amazon’s Kindle apps remember what page of your book you’re on across devices, but “they’re also a great, really big company with a lot of engineers.” Dropbox lets any developer, no matter how small, piggyback on its years of syncing technology for free. Where I see the magic is when you’re offline and go to make a change or add something in one of your Datastore API-equipped apps. Dropbox keeps track of the changes locally, then syncs them when you get a strong enough connection. Dropbox could make sure the emails or messages you write offline get delivered, keep you from redundantly toiling away at Candy Crush levels, or save your airplane musings. It could be especially helpful while traveling when you want to use apps without running up data roaming charges. You can use them offline, then they’ll sync their data through Dropbox when you get to a wifi connection. Dropbox will need to move fast to push Datastore API adoption to the 100,000 apps already on its platform and beyond. , and have all been ramping up the backend services they offer developers. They each control their own mobile operating system they can integrate data sync APIs into. Dropbox doesn’t. But that might be what helps the startup win. It’s platform agnostic. No horse in the race. It’s building for all users, and therefore all developers. , which is a tad worrisome, but the company hopes its partners will spread the idea that data storage is a modern necessity. “No app is going to get a Editor’s Choice Award because it works offline, but it’s these little details that add up to a great experience” Houston tells me. But in the future, offline functionality anchored on Dropbox could become a big draw. Every email app could work like Outlook offline, you could comment on or @reply your last pull of news feed posts or tweets, and you’d never have to worry about your latest photo or video creation disappearing in the ether because of a failed upload. “Once you have that experience with one or two apps you wonder why it doesn’t work like that in everything” Houston concludes. “Every app is going to be designed this way in the future and we wanted to get started on that now.”
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LG’s Secret New Phone, The Optimus G2, Gets Leaked A Month Early
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Greg Kumparak
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You know that big announcement LG has scheduled for next month? The that more or less shouts “HEY WE’RE ANNOUNCING A PHONE CALLED THE G2 AT THIS EVENT”? Yeah, so, the G2 seems to have just leaked. Whoops! Someone just dumped a bunch of stills on our sister site , all showing off what’s purported to be LG’s newest flagship Android handset. Squint your eyes and you might mix this handset up with the Google-branded (but LG-made) Nexus 4, save for one big (and pretty damned weird) change. The sleep and volume buttons? The ones that someone long ago decided should live on the sides of the handset? They’re, uh, on the back of the G2. Beneath the camera lens. Why? I have absolutely no idea. Because it’s different? As if the photos weren’t enough, someone took a solid 60 seconds of video showing the device and put it on YouTube. Curiously, the video’s leaker just created their YouTube channel today, and the G2 video is their first and only at the moment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xRtCJmcw-6A#t=0s And if you’re the type who cares more about what’s under the hood — don’t worry, some of that leaked, too. According to the leaksters, it’s got a 2.3GHZ Snapdragon 800 CPU, 2 GB of RAM, a 5.2″ 1080p display, and a 13-megapixel camera. (In your friggin’ pocket. Your late 90s/early 2000s desktop computer just threw itself out of a window.)
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Google Wallet Launches Promotion With Popular Android Apps In A Bid To Increase Its Brand Recognition
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Catherine Shu
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Several Android apps are for customers using Google Wallet’s “Buy with Google” button, as the company tries to ramp up adoption of its payment processing service. The button, which allows 2-click checkouts on mobile apps, is one of the strategies Google is deploying in its . While the “Buy with Google” button for Android allows Google Wallet to leverage , relatively few merchants are using it. These include , , , (mobile site also), , , and Uber, all of which are currently offering promotions to customers who checkout using Google Wallet. Other apps with the button include , , and . The company unveiled the in May, which gives merchants and developers selling physical goods and services (as opposed to in-app purchases of virtual items like those sold in games) the ability to offer customers a 2-click checkout with payment credentials stored on Google Wallet. Google announced in May that it will shut down Google Checkout on November 20. The move is part of the company’s effort to focus on turning Google Wallet into a PayPal rival, and it follows several moves by the company to retool its checkout process for the web, mobile web, Android apps and more. These include the “Buy with Google” button, integrating Google Wallet into Gmail and allowing Chrome’s 750 million monthly users to sync their Google Wallet payment credentials with the browser, which then auto-complete forms on e-commerce sites that have implemented Google’s API. Google is pitching Google Wallet as a way for online merchants to decrease shopping cart abandonment by customers frustrated by the often tedious and time-consuming task of filling out an online payment form. As Google pointed out during I/O, on mobile devices is as high as 97 percent. Shoppers often begin researching products or stores online, but abandon the process at checkout because many merchants don’t offer mobile-optimized experiences, and it’s harder to fill in forms on a small screen. Even if Google Wallet does manage to offer a more pleasant checkout experience, it still faces an uphill journey as it competes with PayPal. released in February, only 8 percent of respondents used Google Wallet, compared to the 48 percent who had used PayPal. Google Wallet also suffers from lack of consumer recognition–just 41 percent of respondents were aware of the product, compared to 72 percent for PayPal. While hosting a promotion on popular apps like Uber and Airbnb might help Google Wallet increase its brand awareness, it still has plenty of work left to do before it makes a sizable chip in PayPal’s market share.
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Tencent Starts Testing Its Highly Anticipated Games Platform On WeChat, Its Blockbuster Messaging App
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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While messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, MessageMe and Path continue to duke it out in Western markets, the place to watch all the real action continues to be in Asia, where apps like Tencent’s WeChat, Line and KakaoTalk innovate in China, Japan and South Korea. This week, Tencent, , finally started testing its long-awaited games platform on WeChat, the messaging app that in about two years. Tencent thinks of WeChat as , instead of being limited to the mainland Chinese market. The company said earlier this year that outside of China. The app’s quick rise as the social networking platform du jour of China has also made it a very interesting target for developers, and the community has been waiting for a games platform to roll out for months. (Think of the anticipation that surrounded the launch of the original Facebook platform back in 2007.) Why? Look at the singular power that South Korea’s KakaoTalk has been able to have in mobile games distribution there. The messaging app in Google Play, the dominant app store there. Developers are expecting Tencent to reassert its distribution power on smartphone platforms through WeChat, especially because there are so very many Android app stores that have proliferated in China. No Western equivalent has been able to replicate this power yet, although with Facebook now making north of $300 million a quarter on mobile app install ads and sponsored stories on the mobile news feed, the . The , is a game developed by in-house team Tianmei Yiyou. There are 10 more games that are slated to come, including We Love Pang, We Runner and Fight the Landlord, The games aren’t available to international users yet, just to Android users of WeChat in China. This makes sense, as Android has emerged as the dominant smartphone platform over the last year-and-a-half locally. In Tencent’s platform, there are basic mobile-social gaming features like leaderboards against friends and the ability to share scores with friends. Naturally, there is also a payments infrastructure behind the platform, leveraging Tencent’s Tenpay and WeChat Payment.
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Apple Said To Be Working On “Mogul” Slow-Motion Video Recording Feature For New iPhones
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Chris Velazco
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These days it seems like just about every smartphone player worth its salt is devoting time and resources to upping their camera game, and Apple is no exception. A new report from points to snippets nestled within iOS 7 beta builds that seem to indicate the company is working on a camera feature called “Mogul” that will let users record video at 120 frames per second. That’s a considerable leap over what the iDevices are currently able to capture. Apple says the iPhone 5 can record video at “ ,” and a wrap-up slide from Apple’s 2013 WWDC presentation confirmed that iOS 7 would effectively push that limit to 60 frames per second. The end result? Crisper, smoother video. A quick look at all the 120fps videos on YouTube (not perfect comparison, I know) should give you a hint of what iPhones may eventually be capable of. Don’t expect to see the feature go live any time soon, though. Despite their coaxing, the 9to5 team wasn’t able to get the feature running on current generation Apple hardware, which they’re taking as a sign that Mogul is actually meant for a forthcoming version of the iPhone. By the time Mogul sees the light of day, Apple’s rivals may be well ahead of it in terms of camera prowess. Samsung’s Galaxy S4, Nokia’s Lumia 920, and HTC’s One are the latest in a growing pool of smartphones that let users shooting slow-motion video (the two former records at 120fps, but HTC doesn’t specify). And then there are devices like Nokia’s Lumia 1020, which sports a tremendous 41-megapixel camera sensor and, if it’s anything like the 808 PureView that came before it, can capture some . So sure, if the report pans out and Apple really does push the so-called Mogul feature out the door someday, they’ll be walking down a path already traveled by its rivals. I suspect that won’t present too many issues for Apple, though; iOS aficionados will latch onto it just as they did with the similarly late Panorama feature in iOS, and Mogul may wind up making slow-motion video a must-have for smartphones going forward. (Seriously, I’m just waiting for someone to whip up a Vine or Instagram knock-off devoted to slow-mo clips of people tripping over things.) The sheer amount of mobile camera options means that consumers will ultimately be able to capture moments more effectively with their iPhones or Lumias. However, the smartphone camera war is already weighing heavily on some camera manufacturers, which are struggling to keep their businesses in order while high-powered camera phones devalue the venerable point-and shoot. Nikon is a great example, according to . Company president Makoto Kimura hinted at the possibility of a “non-camera consumer product” to help offset flagging point-and-shoot camera sales. Some have already taken that to mean that Nikon . It used to be that imaging innovation trickled down from devoted camera companies to the rest of the consumer gadget market. How long until things start flowing in reverse?
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Tom’s Planner Acquires Gantt Chart Service Competitor Gantto
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Stephanie Yang
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Tom’s Planner, a web-based , has acquired a competitor in providing Gantt charts to track projects: Y-Combinator-backed . The company plans to merge Gantto’s users and features into one platform under the existing brand. Gantto launched its product in 2010, less than one year after Tom’s Planner, and allowed subscribers to create their own charts and presentations to show project progress and management. At the time of acquisition, Gantto had about one-third the amount of its purchaser’s 120,000 subscribers. CEO and founder Tom Ummels tells me that while focuses on user-friendly interaction, it lacks the more complex tools that Gantto offers. “In that way we differ, and so we’re hoping now to combine the experience with all the feature-richness with the ease of use of Tom’s Planner.” With his eye on two other industry competitors, Ummels declined to give financial details of the acquisition. Tom’s Planner it was buying Gantto for its strong market position and active user base. But of course, those users aren’t guaranteed to stick around once Gantto disappears. Ummels tells me his plan to prevent attrition includes giving all existing users two more months before the service ends. Any time during those months, he says, they can “sign up for free accounts, export a schedule and import it in Tom’s Planner and just have a go at it.” There are many companies in the project management service field, some of which include Basecamp and Microsoft Project, which has over 20 million users. The balance now will be in keeping Tom’s product easier to use while adding in more of Gantto’s features. To that end, Ummels says Gantto features will be introduced as plug-ins, rolling them out as they are developed. With three account options ranging from $0-19 a month, all plug-ins will be available for the most advanced subscription, with some included in cheaper plans.
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Google Finally Brings Voice Calling To Hangouts, But Not To Its Mobile Apps
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Chris Velazco
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Some Google fans were mighty miffed when Google removed the ability to make voice calls from inside Gmail, but now the feature is back, flying under . Instead of just being able to place calls from within Gmail though, users can dial up friends and family while poking around on Google Plus or by using the Hangouts Chrome extension. This won’t come as much of a shock if you’ve been paying attention to Hangouts history: Google brought the ability to receive VoIP calls to Hangouts by way of Google Voice integration back in May, so it’s only natural that the company would eventually complete the circle and . Don’t fret if you don’t see the option to place a voice call just yet, as Google says the feature will be rolling out over the next few days. That initial group of scorned Googlophiles will probably just be happy to have their feature back, but it’s hard not to look at calling within Google+ as a shot across Facebook’s considerable bow. The social giant rolled out its own free VoIP calling service to users in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. earlier this year, but Facebook’s approach was to bake the feature into its Messenger mobile apps. This makes sense considering the nature of the device the apps were running on. However, Frankly, that’s a shame. Google has already said that Hangouts is “the future of Google Voice,” which is a great sound bite, but the Google Voice experience is in dire need of repair and we’re still waiting for some fixes. I’ve been using Google Voice for years. I still give my Google Voice number to just about everyone I meet. But the sheer convenience of a single number routing calls and messages to all of the phones I’ve got buzzing around my office is offset a bit by the generally lackluster apps (especially the iOS version) and the slow rate of improvement that the service has seen. Hangouts really might be just what the doctor ordered for Google Voice, but the wait is becoming unbearable.
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Twitter Media Launches Blog To Fight Attrition By Teaching You What To Tweet
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Josh Constine
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Twitter wants to prove it’s not just for broadcasting the mundane details of your life so it just the . The site plans to feature great uses of Twitter for “TV, sports, journalism, government, music, movies, social good and beyond.” It joins Google Inside Search and Facebook Stories as another media endeavor designed to help inspire our use of today’s top technologies. Technically the site launched on July 2, but Twitter kept it quiet so it could build up some content. Along with end users, the blog is trying to educate the media about how to tap Twitter for interesting content. Posts so far include a deep data analysis of (Andy Murray’s celebration tweet now has over 92,000 RTs), a visualization of , and the story of a . Confusion about what the whole point of Twitter is might be contributing to its drop-off rate. While hundreds of millions have registered for Twitter, some past their or before they give up or just lurk without contributing. The TwitterMedia blog could give them something to talk about.
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Dropbox Says It Has No Plans To Charge Developers (Or Otherwise Change Its Business Model)
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Anthony Ha
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One of the questions that came up a couple of times during the press Q&A at Dropbox’s DBX developer conference: What does today’s news mean for the company’s business model? Given and platform expansion announced today ( ), could Dropbox try to make money from advertising? Or by charging developers? Co-founder and CEO Drew Houston told reporters that’s not the plan. Instead, he wants to stick with the company’s existing business model, which involves charging subscription fees for pro and business users. In fact, he said that the simplicity of how Dropbox makes money is part of its appeal, because it means there should be fewer surprises down the road. “You don’t have to look around and wonder where our money is coming from,” Houston said. I’m not sure if the “you” in question was referring to consumers or developers. But I think it kind of applies either way, whether it’s a consumer worried about Dropbox selling their user data or covering the site in ads, or a developer worried that they’re going to end up competing with Dropbox down the line. Houston’s other answers addressed these possible developer concerns explicitly, saying that the company will stay focused on creating its “core experiences” as good and as simple as possible. And on user data, he also said that Dropbox has specific terms covering how it responds to government requests for data, and that it has been expanding its security team. Monetization came up again a few minutes later, when Houston was asked specifically whether he’d consider charging developers, particularly if the platform expansion increases Dropbox’s costs significantly. Once again, the answer was no. “We’ve never taken money from developers and we don’t have any plans to,” Houston said. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Dropbox will never, ever do it (“it’s conceivable that there would be services in the future where there would be some cost associated with the developer”). But, he added, “because we have a strong core business model, I don’t think that monetizing developers will be an important thing for us for the foreseeable future.”
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Foursquare Checks In With Feature Phones: A New App For Nokia S40 Phones And An Asha Preloading Deal
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Ingrid Lunden
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has made a name for itself out of the growth in smartphones, but as it tries to build up business in newer markets, it’s covering all of its bases. the company announced an update to its app for feature phones, specifically for Nokia’s range of S40 devices — which include its Asha handsets, sold and marketed as low-end smartphones. It looks like this may have been the first time in years that this app has gotten attention. Along with the new app, Foursquare also inked a deal with Nokia to come preloaded on new Asha devices when they hit the market in coming months. While Nokia’s Symbian smartphone platform has died, and while Windows Phone (Nokia’s new smartphone platform of choice) has yet to gain much critical mass, S40 is actually putting up a respectable performance. According to these figures from , it’s third after Android and iOS for worldwide mobile platform market share, with 13.9 percent of the market at the moment. Looking at how that breaks down in different countries, the picture is more interesting and points to how a strong presence on these devices could be a good way specifically for targeting users in emerging markets. Again, from : “Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Nokia S40 phones, and now they’ll all have access to Foursquare,” the company writes in the blog post. “Now, all those people can use Foursquare to make the most of where they are and where they’re going.” For a company like Foursquare, fighting for mindshare among smartphone users and their millions of apps, going into slightly less-crowded territory like this is a smart move, all the while helping it continue to achieve critical mass for its location services, advertising and more. It also refocuses a little more attention on Nokia’s other line of business in a week when all eyes are on what it might reveal on the 11th — quite possibly Nokia’s most high-end smartphone yet. Still, it’s a move that appears to be a more recent decision. When I met CEO Dennis Crowley during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, he was squarely focused on building out new products, making use of all the fancy gadgetry of smartphones and not focusing on lower-end devices. Fast forward a year to , he admitted that the company hadn’t done any proper work on low-end devices in years. “We have a bare bones one that is not very pretty, which supports feature phones. We’ve had that since 2009,” he told me. “It’s not super sexy. We think our stuff is so niche that for now we don’t have HTML5 in our strategy. We’re a small team so we have to focus on where our users are.” Looks like that focus has expanded to pick up new users, some on feature phones.
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Path Doubles Down On Stickers In Version 3.1, Alongside New iPad Design And Real World Friending
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Billy Gallagher
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Path , released a new iPad design, and introduced a new way to add friends in person today. Any sticker, old or new, can now be used in comments to respond to friends’ moments. Path in version 3.0 in March to extremely positive feedback. In the first 24 hours after the launch, Path saw a million messages sent and made more money than it had in its entire lifetime as a company. Facebook followed suit, adding stickers and then , which could develop into a sponsored content business for the social network. “With our Messaging release a couple of months ago, we introduced a new way to communicate with the people you care about on Path,” the company wrote in a post today. “Since then, it’s been our goal to give characters, faces, and icons to those day-to-day triumphs, annoyances, and logistics. Stuck in traffic? A promotion at work? In desperate need of caffeine? Feeling silly, lovestruck, or frazzled? There’s a sticker for that.” The company’s blog has been , which seem to be a major focus for the company, both for user experience and revenue. In addition to doubling down on stickers, Path improved navigation for its iPad app, making it easier to compose and share moments. Finally, Path made it easier to send friend requests in person. The app will generate a QR code, which your friend can scan in person and instantly become Path friends. The update is available now for iPhone, iPad and Android.
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Keen On… Draper University Of Heroes: Tim Draper Is Looking For The Best And The Brightest (Is That You?)
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Andrew Keen
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Do you have spark? Are you a hero? If so, may want to get inside your head. Draper, best known, of course, as the founder and a managing director of , has founded a “new kind of university” in an old hotel in San Mateo designed to attract the “best and brightest”. Named , Tim Draper’s vision is to train young entrepreneurs by, as he told me, “getting inside people’s heads” and “changing the rules”. Draper University of Heroes is a college of disruption, offering both urban and rural survival training and literally changing the rules on everything – from baseball to Monopoly to adding the nuclear option to Risk. It’s a radical idea – both in an educational and business sense. Instead of full time faculty, classes at Draper University are taught by friends-of-Tim like former Apple Store supremo Ron Johnson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh as well as by Draper himself. It’s a “R&D center” for entrepreneurs, he explained, with student entrepreneurs getting access to the Silicon Valley accelerator run by Draper’s son, Adam. Annual fees are $9,500 and the deadline for the upcoming September term is August 5. Only heroes need apply. So what are you waiting for?
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Dropbox Launches Datastore API And Drop-Ins To Sync Data To And From Apps
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Josh Constine
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Today Dropbox launched two powerful new APIs for syncing and viewing data within apps that will help the company expand beyond the traditional “file” storage system it has built its service on. The Datastore API can save any structured data or metadata for an app. It lets developers protect their users’ data even when they make changes offline. It is essentially a syncing API, which lets developers store a user’s contacts, to-do items and other data across different devices and platforms, both online and offline. The Drop-Ins API, and the new native Chooser, let developers pull down files from their users’ Dropboxes for display within the app. They could make sure you never lose the latest items you add to a to-do app and can access your cloud-stored photos from any app. The goal is to give developers cross-platform support (iOS, Android and JavaScript) so users don’t have to use multiple APIs for different integrations. The new API also handles conflict-handling to avoid overwriting other developers’ work and what they call a “Datastore Explorer,” for developers to view data as it is updated. Combined, the two new APIs illustrate the company’s efforts to give developers a way to use its back-end environment for moving and syncing data across platforms and devices. With its file system firmly in place, the move gives Dropbox a way for developers to give users deeper access to their accounts.
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With 200+ Buyers Signed Up, Acquisition Marketplace Exitround Announces First Exit (But Won’t Say Who)
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Anthony Ha
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, the website that launched earlier this year that lets startups anonymously seek acquirers, is announcing that it has facilitated its very first acquisition. Pretty exciting, right? But what’s the startup? Who did the acquiring? Well, co-founder and CEO Jacob Mullins isn’t saying. He claimed that he’d like to share details, but the acquiring company wants to keep the deal confidential. (And in this case, the acquirer isn’t just trying to keep Exitround’s involvement secret. Apparently the acquisition hasn’t been announced publicly at all.) That’s a little disappointing but not too surprising, as one of Exitround’s main selling points is confidentiality. Startups are matched with potential acquirers based on some of their basic characteristics, but they’re not actually identified or put in contact unless the team expresses interest in a specific company. Still, if you believe Mullins (I do, but maybe that’s because we used to work together at VentureBeat), the news is a sign that there’s really something to the idea. It’s only one acquisition, but since it’s only been , and three months since it went live, he said “thrilled” that it has gotten this far this quickly. There are several other deals in progress, he added. Another sign of interest: Mullins said there are now more than 200 potential buyers on the service, including 16 public companies and nine companies in the Fortune 500. Those buyers go beyond the big tech companies that you’d expect and include fast-growing startups and companies outside the tech industry entirely. On the other side of the marketplace, namely startups seeking (or at least considering) an acquisition, Mullins said there’s been broader interest than he expected — it’s not just small teams that are looking to exit gracefully through an acqui-hire, but also larger startups with funding and real technology. The average startup on the site has a team of seven people, with five of them holding technical positions, and has raised $634,771, Exitround says. When we last covered the company, Mullins told me he was treating Exitround as a side project from his job as a senior associate at Shasta Ventures. Since then, he’s left Shasta and is now working full-time on the service, as has CTO and co-founder Greg Dean (formerly of Avira and SocialShield). He also said he’s working on raising an angel round of funding. As companies have started using the site, Mullins realized how tough it can be to actually figure out which companies might be interested in buying which startups, he said. Over time, the goal is to build recommendation technology that can make those matches “in a more highly software-based and scalable way.” Another goal is to do more to guide startups about when they should be looking at an acquisition and how they should go about the process — for example, Mullins said he wants to produce more content around that topic. To that end, Exitround is also announcing an “industry council” with experts on the corporate development and acquisition process. Their job won’t be producing the content themselves or working directly with startups (though that may happen on a case-by-case basis), but rather to guide Exitround’s strategy. The council consists of:
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U.S. Venture Capital Investment Amounts Doubled In Q2, As Bay Area Companies Raised More Than NYC, LA, Boston Combined
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Billy Gallagher
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Total new capital invested in the United States tech industry rose from $1.9 billion in April to $3.8 billion in June, a 100 percent increase in two months, according to quarterly data from . The data, which is specific to the United States, breaks down new venture capital raised by round type, investor, company, geography and more. In the second quarter of 2013, $9.2 billion was invested in over 1,347 rounds. The rounds break down to 500 angel rounds, 306 Series A, 109 Series B, 102 Series C and later, and 330 unattributed rounds. This data set doesn’t include some investments, such as private equity and post-IPO investments, and thus is lower than the total funding for the quarter. The San Francisco Bay Area still dominates other regions, as companies in the Bay Area raised more capital in Q2 than Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, the next three regions in total capital raised, combined. Bay Area companies raised $3.2 billion in 316 rounds, while Boston companies raised $1 billion in 84 rounds and New York startups raised $800 million in 142 rounds. Los Angeles companies raised a bit under $500 million in 81 rounds. Biotech companies led the way in amount of money raised, followed by software startups. On average, Biotech companies captured 30 percent of total funding per month, followed by software at 19 percent. The most active investors, in terms of number of rounds they participated in, were , , , , , and . All data for this story comes from CrunchBase, TechCrunch’s free database of companies. You can check out CrunchBase’s monthly reports and download the .
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Hateya Uses Augmented Reality Glasses To Help Firefighters Escape Burning Buildings
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Frederic Lardinois
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Firefighters are trained to go into burning buildings, but even with all of this training, they can get disoriented in the pandemonium around them. , Belgium’s finalist for Microsoft’s 2013, says this is a leading cause of deaths among firefighters and a problem that technology can prevent. The team developed a system that uses a helmet with augmented reality glasses, as well as a small computer and sensors inside the firefighters’ clothing to keep track of his location. To find his way out, the firefighter would just have to follow the arrows that will appear on the glasses. The system works autonomously and just a click of a button built into the clothing enables what Hateya calls the “ComeBack” system. Because it’s being used indoors, GPS would obviously not work to get precise location data, so in the current prototype, the system measures the steps a firefighter takes inside the building and a compass to determine the route somebody took inside a building. This approach, the team argues, is very accurate, though they are also looking into alternatives to make the positioning even more precise. The four Haute Ecole De La Ville De Liège students behind this project are already testing this project with a number of fire companies in Belgium. Even though the ComeBack unit can easily work on its own, Hateya also added another component to the system that makes it far more capable by creating both a mesh network between the different ComeBack devices when there are multiple firefighters in a building. In addition, there is a “back office” application that a supervisor outside of the burning building can use to get a full picture of the situation, including information about the location of every crew member. In its current iteration, the system uses Wi-Fi, but the idea is to use more conventional radio technology with a wider range in the next iteration. In the next version of their system, the students want to enable more two-way communications systems that would, for example, allow a supervisor to plot a route of a building when the original way was blocked, as well as a video feed that will give those outside the building an even better idea of the situation inside.
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The Next Version Of Mailbox Adds Its First Integration With Parent Company Dropbox
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Anthony Ha
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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston just announced that the company will be launching a new version of Mailbox, the iOS email app that . This will be the first real integration between Dropbox and Mailbox, he said. The demo was pretty brief, in part because the integration looks pretty straightforward. If you include a link to a Dropbox file in your email, it will actually be viewable from Mailbox as if it were a normal file attachment. It sounds like this eliminates one of the few reasons that you’d still want to include a regular email attachment rather than just using Dropbox to share files. In other words, you don’t have to worry as much that mobile users who receive a Dropbox link will be annoyed because they have to jump to Dropbox in order to read whatever you sent them (though of course this will only benefit Mailbox users). Houston didn’t announce a specific release date for the new app, but it sounds like it’s coming up soon. He mentioned the app while onstage during the keynote for Dropbox’s first DBX developer conference, where he also announced that and shared some significant platform improvements.
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Cooliris Continues Push Into China and Russia, Shaking Hands With Tencent and Yandex
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Victoria Ho
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Photo-sharing startup is continuing its push into two of the world’s biggest Internet markets, China and Russia. The Kleiner Perkins-backed company has just partnered with Tencent in China to pull images from Tencent’s microblogging platform, , into . On top of that, it is also expanding its relationship with Yandex, the Google of Russia, to pull images from Yandex’s search engine and its cloud storage product, , into Cooliris. Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed. Cooliris made its name in 2008 with a browser add-on called PicLens, which would stretch a set of photos over a sphere or display them as a wall you could virtually walk across. It used to make its money embedded in the “photo wall” it rendered in browsers, but since it transitioned to a mobile app strategy in 2012, freemium add-ons will be the way forward, said CEO Soujanya Bhumkar. The company plans to release premium features as part of a subscription plan later in the year, he said. So it makes sense that it’s keen to push further into China and Russia. After its first move into China via a with , aka China’s “Facebook,” in December last year, it enjoyed a 30-fold traffic spike. Bhumkar added that the number of photos that users have interacted with — shared or expanded from the thumbnail view — has also gone up from 300 million to 550 million in the past six months. “We’re expecting to hit new milestones for user growth with these new partnerships bringing us to international users,” he said. About 60 percent of Cooliris’ 3 million iOS users are in the U.S., with Asia its next-largest market at 30 percent. The company is looking to push further into Asia rapidly by working with established names there, he said. This is not its first partnership with Yandex, either. In February this year, it struck a deal with , Yandex’s photo hosting service. Yandex currently accounts for about 65 percent of Russia’s search market, and its Disk product rivals Dropbox, with about half of the several million files uploaded daily to Disk photos and graphics, according to Yandex. For content providers, the benefit of feeding images to Cooliris is the potential of gaining an additional audience in the 3 million Cooliris users. And users are encouraged to share their photo streams with other users, or publish them on social networks, which could further increase visibility for the content. Cooliris vice president of business development, Sebastian Blum, said Tencent hopes to bring Weibo’s content to international markets, and that the deal with Cooliris was part of that plan. Although the company has pointed at an April release date for an Android version, its app currently remains iOS-only. It will release a web version in the future as well, said the spokesperson. That’s a little strange, given that the company started from on the web before . But since July 2012, it has moved its focus almost entirely to its mobile product, and it looks like that’s where it’s going to park its resources for the foreseeable future.
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O2 Becomes Second UK Carrier To Turn On LTE; Will Go Live August 29, But With No iPhone Support
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Ingrid Lunden
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Looks like the honeymoon period for and LTE in the UK is over. This morning, Telefonica’s O2 announced that it would turn on its on August 29, becoming the second operator to offer 4G in the country. Initial cities will be London, Leeds and Bradford, with 10 more cities to come by the end of the year. The first services at the end of this month will cover 5 million people — that’s potential, not actual, subscribers, and will not include support for the iPhone 5, which will not work on the 800MHz spectrum that is part of O2’s initial rollout. The end of the honeymoon also signifies the beginning of the price wars. Initial tariffs will start at £26 ($39) per month, O2 says. In comparison, a contract-free, data-only, mobile broadband rate from EE is currently priced at £15 per month, and a voice-and-data tariff starts at £21 per month. There will likely be different allowances included in these figures — for example, the voice-and-data service is SIM-only and you bring your own device. Plans from EE that include devices also start at £26 per month. O2 says that those interested in registering for its LTE service can sign up . But you can argue that O2 will be launching with a bit of a setback: its initial rollout of LTE will not support the iPhone. Back in February 2013, O2 was part of a group of operators — BT, EE, O2, Three and Vodafone — who were all ($3.5 billion). As part of that, O2 forked over £550 million for spectrum in the 800MHz band. But the iPhone currently does not support LTE in that frequency, while Samsung’s LTE devices (and others from BlackBerry, HTC and Nokia) do. O2 is posturing with confidence over this discrepancy. Telefonica UK’s CEO Ronan Dunne told the that he “would be frankly gobsmacked if their roadmap didn’t address that issue.” Still, that’s not the same as a concrete guarantee that this will be addressed soon. Given the iPhone users are still some of the mobile world’s biggest adopters of premium-priced devices and services, and also some of the world’s most avid users of mobile data, this could become an issue. In the meantime, O2 is doing something else: it’s offering customers who do own an iPhone 5 an to another device that will be supported. The so-called “4G phone promise” will let users who bought an iPhone 5 from O2 between September 2012 and March 2013 upgrade at any time without breaking contract. This is not a free upgrade, in that users still need to sign up for a new contract on the new device. However, O2 offers to reduce the remaining line rental by 25%, along with a guaranteed price of up to £295 for users recycling their iPhone 5. Tapping into iPhone users, even under these circumstances of luring them away from iPhones in favor of devices that will see those users spending more money on O2’s network overall, is a logical move for the carrier. O2 is the UK’s equivalent of AT&T: it was the first network to have the iPhone and has continued its strength in that category as a result, even as Samsung and other Android makers have gained a lot of smartphone users in the process. Kantar WorldPanel for example that Android OEMs took over 55% of smartphone sales in the previous 12 weeks, compared to iPhone’s 30%, and Android is currently growing faster than iPhone in sales. EE’s LTE network, which launched in October 2012, has a big head start just in terms of setting out its stall. It is currently live in 95 cities and aims for 110 cities covering 60% of the population by the end of the year. In June of this year it announced 687,000 customers and is aiming for 1 million by the end of this year. First mover doesn’t always mean biggest in the long run, of course: Three, at the time a totally new operator, was the first to offer 3G in the UK market years ago, but it’s far behind the other three incumbent players today. It looks like O2 made a point of acting as fast as it could; it notes that the news comes a day after Ofcom cleared the use of spectrum for 4G services. “It’s great that I am able to announce O2 4G the day after the spectrum has been cleared for use,” noted Ronan Dunne, CEO of Telefónica UK, in a statement. “Digital connectivity will be made ubiquitous by 4G and become the oxygen of modern life. It is our intention to use 4G to inspire the nation through the possibilities of technology, encouraging people to live more, do more and be more with O2.” The hurdle, at least in the early days for all UK operators, will remain whether consumers will be willing to pony up more money for faster mobile services than they have today. O2 is supposedly going to be bundling in extra services like music with its packages to entice users. I’m not sure how well that ever worked for 3G services, although consumer tastes for streaming media, and device specs, have certainly contributed to a more fertile ground for marketing and service bundles like these to work better this time around.
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The Pinterest Roadmap Revealed
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Josh Constine
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The rise of Pinterest wasn’t all cocktails and cupcakes. It conquered huge scaling challenges to become the world’s keepsake box. Now as the we ditch the desktop for mobile, how will Pinterest evolve to connect us with the things we love? Today Pinterest’s head of engineering Jon Jenkins gave a surprisingly candid look at the past and future of Pinterest journey to build the interest graph. Now Pinterest is a team of 140, with 70 engineers, , and a massive headquarters in San Francisco. But at the start, it was just the three co-founders Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, Paul Sciarra, and a single engineer. Pinterest began as a few guys with a mission “To help people discover the things they love and then do those things in real life. With only one engineer, it was almost lucky that Pinterest didn’t become popular yet or the whole thing could have come crashing down. Jenkins says that “traffic was doubling every month and half” and provided this traffic graph, though with no Y axis about exactly how many page views the site receives. He explained that the site wasn’t exactly built to last at first. “It was originally written in Python, but when you build a website [for a small user base] you don’t think about modularity very much. And when a million people show up on your door step you’re just trying to keep the thing from falling down.” In August it released new versions of its iOS and Android apps that would serve as the modernized foundation of the future of its business on the small screen. Pinterest began learning how people used the service differently depending on their device. For example, in the daytime it sees a lot of phone use as people try to discover new things. They might walk around the grocery store with a recipe pin open on their phone to help them find ingredients. “Then in the evening we see tablet usage increase significantly as they’re trying to make that recipe” Jenkins says. Pinterest this year began showing when you pinned something, and providing pin recommendations via email. It also launched expanded pins so recipes would show ingredients, movies would show reviews, and products would show prices. Most recently, it began using the feed editor to recommend more content to you. With big plans afoot, Pinterest also rewrote its entire site — not to handle traffic, but to let multiple engineers enhance it simultaneously without tripping over each other and causing non-stop bugs. “How can we create modules that let engineers go in and work without screwing over the other developers?” He’s convinced that the new modular Python architecture “will allow the organization to scale.” Looking forward, Pinterest has five big projects its working on: : Unlike other social networks, Jenkins says that “Pinterest isn’t fundamentally about connecting people to other people. It’s about connecting people to interests.” For years you had little but your own brain and the boards you browsed to find pinspiration. But now Pinterest is lending a helping hand thanks to a ton of data analysis. “Pins can’t exist unless they’re assigned to a board. Out of those boards, we try to identity interests through collaborative filtering, associative rule mining, natural language processing to provide discovery. I can pin five shirts I like and Pinterest derives my interest in fashion.” Recommendations could make Pinterest even more addictive for hardcore users, and help it retain newbies until they’re hooked. “Figuring out how we’re going to scale the data repositories for pins will only become more complicated as we grow internationally” Jenkins said. That why he says “we’re hiring pretty aggressively” in areas including machine learning, data mining, operations, and infrastructure. Expect more pin types to gain like recipes did. “Useful” could also end up as a euphemism for “buyable”. Pinterest is renowned for driving traffic to ecommerce sites. If it could bring more of the shopping experience inside its site and apps, it could provide value to users while also arguing that it deserves a revenue share or commission from merchants. Pinterest’s best known and most frequently copied element is its masonry grid design which allows for rapid intake of visual information. Now it’s trying to get the infinite scroll part of the grid to work on small screens with limited storage. “It’s easy to load things but your phone gets very angry with you if you don’t unload things”, Jenkins says. There’s also be a bit of bringing the mobile onto the grid, as Pinterest tries to take what it’s learning on mobile back to its website. That could include touch capabilities for touch-enabled laptops like the Chromebook Pixel. “People keep asking ‘When are you going to release an API?'” Jenkins wouldn’t give a firm answer but did reveal a bunch of details. “We are working very closely with a very select set of partners to figure out what the API is that we should release. We are going to work with content providers to offer extended functionality so they can understand how the content they produce is being used in the Pinterest system. Content providers want distribution. If we can help them understand what resonates they’ll be happier, and Pinners will be happier as well.” Don’t expect it to be rushed out “ Today, Jenkins says that depending on what external traffic monitoring site you look at “we’re a top 15 site in the US and higher than that in terms of apps.” comScore at 48.7 million global monthly users. And while you might think Pinterest is a big popularity contest, Jenkins says that if you talk to long-time users, “many of them pin for themselves. They’re not using Pinterest to put on a show or posture externally. People view it as an act of self-expression.” Just because our world is being digitized doesn’t mean we’ve lost our desire to collect. If Pinterest executes on this roadmap, it could build tree big enough for us all to nest in.
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Eyeing Potential Growth In Asia, Fab Raises $10M From Singaporean Telecom Giant SingTel
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Leena Rao
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Amidst and shortly following a new in new funding, Fab is announcing an additional contribution to its Series D round of financing. Singaporean telecommunications giant SingTel Group has put $10 million into Fab, and according to the design-focused ecommerce company, the Asian company will will be a key partner wIn helping Fab explore expansion opportunities in Asia. CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg that SingTel will be instrumental in helping Fab expand to Asian markets. He writes: He also addressed some of the changes taking place at the company, namely the layoffs and ditching the flash sales model: Fab, which was valued at $1 billion in this round, is going to be raising around $100 million more as part of its Series D (Goldberg said in tonight’s post that more Series D investors will be announced in the future and he will share the news as it happens). Part of this new financing is going towards Fab’s next pivot as an international design powerhouse. In May, Fab debuted its new design store, which makes it more of an integrated e-commerce site. The company is also experimenting with brick and mortar stores. As we’ve said in the past, international is a huge potential growth area for the company, particularly in Asia. Tencent and Itochu invested in the first part of the Series D and it comes of no surprise that additional money is coming from Asian investors as well. In the past, Fab has been expanding via acquisitions as well so it should be interesting to see if the company scoops up an startups in Asia for its big push into the region. Stay tuned.
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Zynga’s Threatened At Least One “… With Friends” Startup Before, And It Went Nowhere (So Far)
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Anthony Ha
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The news broke this morning that the makers of for allegedly infringing its With Friends trademark. There’s been about the case (I was particularly amused by Will Oremus’ suggestion that Zynga has become “ “), but one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is the fact that Zynga has tried to stop other companies from using “With Friends” names in the past. Specifically, to a startup called Apartment 7 saying that it had to change the name of its dating website, and that it had until May 24 to comply. Well, May 24 has come and gone, and today’s news reminded me to check in with Apartment 7 co-founder Jared Tame. CupidWithFriends is still up and running, and Tame told me: We didn’t hear back from Zynga. We told them no and it’s been a little over 2 months now. We mentioned in our response that their non-response would signal a mutual agreement that we would not enter the gaming space and they would not further pursue legal action against us. Back in May, I reached out to Zynga and Bang With Friends, because it seemed like any complaints that Zynga had with CupidWithFriends would apply to Bang With Friends too, but neither company commented. Now it seems that they were already discussing the issue. Zynga’s lawsuit, which I’ve embedded below, doesn’t offer a specific timeline about communication between the two companies, but it does say that after “significant” efforts by Zynga to get in touch with the Bang With Friends’ then-anonymous founders, “Defendant engaged in discussions with Zynga about changing the name from ‘Bang With Friends’.” However, it says those discussions were either “a ploy” or that Bang With Friends has reconsidered. The lawsuit also acknowledges that Bang With Friends isn’t the only company that Zynga has taken legal action against: Zynga has diligently policed its rights in the WITH FRIENDS Family of Marks against such would-be infringers, including through the use of cease-and-desist letters, by instituting opposition proceedings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (“USPTO”) Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, by direct outreach to infringers, and through other means. So why is Zynga suing one company but not the other? Well, a Zynga spokesperson declined to comment on Cupid With Friends, and Bang With Friends hasn’t responded to my request for comment either. One obvious difference is that Bang With Friends is much better-known — in fact, the lawsuit cites several examples where the press compared Bang With Friends to Zynga’s With Friends family of games. Plus, in contrast to Tame’s statement that he has no intention to go into gaming, Zynga’s suit suggests that Bang With Friends has more competitive plans: In the weeks since [May], Defendant’s plan to expand its infringing activities aggressively was revealed by a person identified as a “Bang With Friends” investor. To Zynga’s great surprise, this investor stated that Defendant intends “to go from ‘Bang’ to ‘Hang’ to ‘Tennis’ to ‘Games’ to other activities.” that Zynga was granted in relation to “computer game software” and “entertainment services” in June of this year (it already had the trademark on specific titles like Words With Friends), so I suppose there could be more legal action in the works. by
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NSA Responds To New Reports On Top-Secret Spying Program, XKeyscore
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The National Security Agency thinks we have been misled by ‘s report of a new tool, , that allows agents to read the content of email and private social media chatter. “Allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true,” reads a press release issued by the agency today. “Access to XKEYSCORE, as well as all of NSA’s analytic tools, is limited to only those personnel who require access for their assigned tasks.” Earlier today, released details about the previously top-secret surveillance tool, which reportedly allows authorized analysts to search the name, date, and content of internet communications (picture above). The Guardian argues that this power and was given to scores of analysts, such as their informant, Edward Snowden. “Our tools have stringent oversight and compliance mechanisms built in at several levels,” continues the report. “Not every analyst can perform every function, and no analyst can operate freely. Every search by an NSA analyst is fully auditable, to ensure that they are proper and within the law.” However, outspoken critic and Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden implied that the executive branch has been dishonest in its reporting. After the White House declassified the order requiring Verizon to hand over telephone meta-data, Wyden : “The newly declassified briefing documents released today show that the executive branch repeatedly made inaccurate statements to Congress about the value and effectiveness of the bulk email records collection program that was carried out under the USA PATRIOT Act until 2011. These statements had the effect of misleading members of Congress about the usefulness of this program.” So, should we believe the NSA? .
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Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second
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Josh Constine
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Your standard iPhone camera app is actually pretty slow, able to take just three to six photos per second at 8 megapixels each. But with , you can shoot 20 full-resolution photos per second thanks to a breakthrough in discrete cosine transform JPG science by its inventor. Twenty frames per second is fast enough to capture shot-by-shot animations or every gruesome detail of an extreme sports crash. and lets you hold down your finger to take a constant stream of photos. You can then pick your favorites from a burst you shot, or view them as a “living photo” slideshow you can scrub back and forth through, kind of like . John Papandriopoulos has a PhD in electrical engineering and has been building SnappyCam for two years. He calls it the fastest smartphone camera app on Earth. He essentially reinvented the JPG image standard in order to learn how he could speed up the process of capturing, buffering, processing and compressing photos on the iPhone. His goal? To put the continuous shooting power of a big, professional Digital SLR camera in your pocket. SnappyCam version 2 was reasonably … snappy, but it had to sacrifice image quality. It could only take 20 photos per second at a 3-megapixel resolution. Then last week, Papandriopoulos had a Eureka moment. Through some complex mathematical algorithms and taking advantage of the iPhone 5’s dual-core processor, it can now take full 8-megapixel photos at 20 frames per second. Papandriopoulos tells me the speed “is kind of unbelievable. That’s actually the limit of the hardware.” To put the speed in perspective, SnappyCam is about 4X faster than the normal iPhone 5 Camera app, and more than twice as quick as the Samsung Galaxy S4’s 7.5 shots per second. Papandriopoulos claims that other iOS camera apps built for speed like , and often degrade photos to 0.3-megapixel postage stamps when they try to get up to 30fps, and can only do around 4fps at full resolution. SnappyCam isn’t just for the latest iPhone owners. On the iPhone 4S it gets 12fps at an 8-megapixel resolution, or 15fps at a 5-megapixel resolution. That’s way faster than the Samsung Galaxy S3, which only handles 3.3fps at full resolution. All this science boils down to letting you choose the best smile from a portrait, review your baseball swing, capture your dog jumping around, and a lot more. Next Papandriopoulos is working to let you export the interactive animations SnappyCam creates so you can share them on Facebook. The way Instagram helps you see art in everyday life, or Vine allows you to capture a moment, could let you see the world in slow motion.
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Fullscreen Gives Video Creators The Tools To Collaborate And Make More Money On YouTube
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Ryan Lawler
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is one of the newer multichannel networks to appear on YouTube, and, unlike some others, it’s focused on providing technology tools for its creators to understand their audience and better monetize their videos. As part of our in Los Angeles, we stopped by Fullscreen to get a demo of its platform and learn more about how it’s helping creators. Fullscreen CEO George Strompolos, who previously had been part of the partner development team at YouTube, told us that he founded the startup with the vision of creating a global media company in partnership with thousands of creators all around the world. But in order to build the video network of the future, the company would have to build technology tools to help creators achieve their goals. The most recent incarnation of that is the , which it launched earlier this month to give creators a better way to understand their audience, while also providing better monetization tools. The goal is to help increase the chances of success for those creators on its network. That’s worked for some of the creators we spoke with, including Andre Meadows, founder of the channel “Black Nerd Comedy.” Meadows says he’s a “one-man band,” doing filming and editing all by himself. But Fullscreen has helped him move beyond hobby status to actually make a business out of his videos. Check out the video above for a demo of the Fullscreen platform and my talk with Strompolos to learn more about what Fullscreen has to offer. And keep coming back every Monday and Wednesday over the next several weeks to learn more about other new video companies that have emerged. Or check out the other videos we’ve shot around this new YouTube economy:
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Spotify Doubles Revenues In 2012 While Losing Money, Highlighting Royalty Squeeze
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Alex Wilhelm
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Spotify’s 2012 results are out today, with that the private company had revenue of 435 million euros, and a 58.7 million euro net loss. The revenue figure is impressive, more than doubling 2011’s 190 million euro tally. However, the company’s net loss widened in the year, even as it saw a dramatic expansion of its top line from 45.4 million euros to the aforementioned 58.7 million figure. Spotify notes, in the document that Reuters attained, that as a company it “cannot exclude the need or desire to raise more funds in the future to fund future growth initiatives.” The company is essentially stating that it may again lean on outside capital to grow its operations and, presumably, find profits. Spotify, its documentation revealed, pays around 70 percent of its revenue in royalty costs. So, for every dollar that flows into Spotify, 70 cents goes right back out the door to rights holders. I pay, like many of you, $10 to Spotify monthly for both desktop and mobile access to its tunes sans advertisements. From this perspective, I pay the music industry $7 per month to listen to its music, and $3 to Spotify to deliver it. A music company with growing revenue, low cash reserves, and a niggling loss? That’s not just Spotify, it’s also Pandora, a rival to the Stockholm-based company music streaming company. Pandora, for its most recent quarter, the , lists its “content acquisition costs” at $82.85 million. Its gross revenues for the period totaled $125.5 million. Pandora therefore pays out 66 percent of its revenue to cover the cost of the music that it spins out to its vast listener network. Pandora and Spotify pay, therefore, around the same royalty rate. And it’s strangling them both. Spotify is unsure if it will need an additional shot of capital to make it to profits, and the public markets, and Pandora is shedding cash no matter how you measure it: Total cash and cash equivalents: Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments: Total cash equivalents and marketable securities [fair value]: Pandora lost $28 million in the quarter, up from $20 million the year before, even as its revenue grew from $80.7 million to $125 million for the comparable first quarter in fiscal year 2013 and FY 2014. — If growing their revenue isn’t an effective tool for the firms to find short-term profits, as their expenses do not decrease as a percentage of revenue given their fixed royalty costs, can the two companies not run out of gas? In the short term, they are more than safe. Spotify can raise capital from the private sector, and Pandora, as a public firm, has ways to raise rash. However, the longer term efficacy of their business model is perhaps somewhat unsettling; if profits can’t be found in greatly expanded revenues, from whence can they be sourced? The simple answer is that royalty rates may need to ease to allow the two firms to find positive margins on their businesses. Last year, Reps. Chaffetz and Polis introduced the Internet Radio Fairness Act, which aimed to do this at least for Pandora. As : “According to statistics provided by Chaffetz’s office, Internet radio services pay more than 55 percent of their revenue in royalty fees, while cable and satellite stations pay between 7 and 16 percent. ” However, as we have seen, that 55 percent number is quite low. For fun, if Spotify paid the 55 percent rate, would it be profitable? Using back of the envelope scribbling, the answer appears to be yes: 70 – 55 = 15. Fifteen percent of 435 million euros is 65.25 million euros, which is greater than its first-quarter loss of 58.7 million euros. So, the company would have booked a profit in the realm of 6.5 million euros. If that rate were further decreased, Spotify and Pandora would in fact be comfortably profitable. However, even at the 55 percent rate, both companies’ chances of knocking out real net income appears far healthier. There could be cost cuts at both firms, but as long as the 66 or 70 cents they take in leaves before they take into account other expenses — development, advertising, content delivery, and so forth — the squeeze will remain in place. The question then becomes whether the music industry will hug the two so hard that in the end each suffocates. Something has to give.
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Max Levchin Wants Us To Mine Hurricanes For Energy
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Josh Constine
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Health care, finance, education, food, and transportation are the five big tech opportunities that PayPal co-founder Max Levchin outlined today at Mixpanel’s . But perhaps the most interesting tidbit he dropped was his dream of harnessing hurricanes for energy. Hurricanes release as much energy as a “50-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes,” Levchin said. Some says it might be closer to 10 megatons in terms of heat energy released, but only 10 percent of that is converted to mechanical wind power. Still, there’s an immense amount of energy available if we could figure out how to mine it. Levchin offered no ideas for how exactly to do that. It’s a pretty crackpot scheme we’ll have to leave up to the hurricane research center. But Levchin did say it would require that we be able to predict a hurricane’s path, “and to predict it you need to understand weather data.” That need for better big-data analysis was the theme of the talk. “Every data driven business is one of arbitrage,” he said. Essentially, if you can be the first to use data to predict what happens, you can exploit that knowledge to improve the system. Levchin said that these aren’t 1 percent or 2 percent [improvements], but 500 percent reductions in healthcare costs. If you know what factors contribute to a health-care problem, you can counteract them at the source rather than pay much more to fix what they cause. That’s the promise of big data.
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Evan Spiegel And Bobby Murphy Say Alleged Snapchat Co-Founder Never Had Equity
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Billy Gallagher
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Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy have said in new court documents that alleged co-founder Reggie Brown never had equity in the company. In February, against Snapchat claiming that he has been robbed of his stake of the company. Since then, we’ve and that Brown was heavily involved in the early stages of the company. Spiegel has even admitted that Brown for a disappearing-messages app. Now, we’ve learned that, despite his significant involvement, Brown may not have had equity in Snapchat. In the summer of 2010, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy had just completed their sophomore and senior years at Stanford, respectively. They were working on a startup called Future Freshman that would help high school kids get advice and help with applying to colleges. Spiegel and Murphy split equity in the startup, but it failed to gain traction and the two eventually gave up on it in March 2011. In April, Brown, self-described as close friends with Spiegel at the time, came up with the idea for a disappearing-messages app. Brown went to Spiegel with the idea and they recruited Murphy to join them and program the app, initially named Picaboo. In the summer of 2011, the three were living at Spiegel’s father’s house, on Toyopa Drive in Los Angeles, and decided to rename Future Freshman LLC as Toyopa Group LLC. “We discussed that change together,” Brown said about renaming Future Freshman LLC Toyopa Group LLC, but he notes, “I didn’t understand it as the same company.” In a July 13, 2011 email, Brown sent Spiegel a draft of a press release for Picaboo, in which he wrote, “Picaboo is a licensed product of the Toyopa Group, LLC.” Despite understanding that Future Freshman was renamed to be the Toyopa Group, which owned Picaboo, Brown seems to have thought he had equity in the Toyopa Group, as Picaboo was his idea and he was working alongside Spiegel and Murphy on the project. Spiegel and Murphy seemed to think that they had all of the equity of the Toyopa Group, as it came from their joint venture, Future Freshman. When asked in his deposition if he thought that Brown knew he had no equity in Future Freshman, Murphy said, “I don’t know what he believed. All I know is that, again, he was invited to join us that summer, do some work.” One night that summer, the three had a drunken argument over Brown’s role in the app; the next morning, they talked more level-headedly about Brown’s contributions. “Essentially, they were talking about switching me out for a different marketing person,” he said in his deposition. “So, you know, I had to protect myself. Who is not going to protect themselves in that situation?” A source that Brown would go out constantly, partying at all hours and not working on the app, while Murphy coded and Spiegel worked on design. The source says Brown added virtually nothing to the team beyond the initial concept. On August 11, 2011, Brown filed a patent entitled, “Timed, Non Permanent Picture Messages for Smart Phone Devices,” that listed his home address and contact information as the sole contact information, and listed Murphy, Brown, and Spiegel as the co-inventors, in order. On August 16, Brown, Murphy, and Spiegel had an argument on the phone during which Spiegel was offended that his name was listed last. Spiegel hung up and allegedly changed the passwords and forced Brown out of the company. After the call, Spiegel texted Brown, writing, “I want to make sure you feel like you are given credit for the idea of disappearing messages.” “In the last phone call before account passwords were changed, the point of that was, again, Evan and I had a prior conversation in which we expressed concern that [Brown] would ask for equity,” Murphy said in his deposition. “And we knew that he had the original patent applications in his control. So in that phone call we wanted to hear what he thought he was entitled to given the work–given the work he had done. He, I would say, exaggerated that. And Evan [Spiegel] hung up and I think he–I don’t remember specifically what he was asking for, but it was a lot more than we would be willing to give him. “He claimed that he had created the original idea and that he had designed the ghost,” Murphy continued. “And there was some disagreements between Evan [Spiegel] and Reggie [Brown] about what that meant.” After Spiegel hung up, Murphy says he stayed on the phone and listened to Brown, who Murphy says asked for equity “somewhere in the range of maybe 30 percent.” On May 6, 2012, The New York Times’ and its prowess as a sexting app in the first major media coverage of the app. On May 8, Brown emailed Spiegel to settle the matter. “I understood both then and currently that my role in the process was of a different nature, and was thus willing to accept a significantly less portion of equity than either of you,” Brown wrote. He said he spoke to patent lawyers, who told him “due to the provisional patent application…I still currently own a third of SnapChat’s IP.” The patent Brown filed has not been approved by the U.S. Patent Office, and could have been removed by Brown, Spiegel, or Murphy at any time. “In the summer, we had discussed a 40-40-20 equity breakdown; I am, however, willing to negotiate on this,” Brown continued in his email. “If we can come to an appropriate agreement, I am willing to forego the process of litigation.” Brown is now suing for a full, undiluted third of the company—which would at around $267 million. His claim is mainly based on the patent application, which has not been approved, his initial idea for the disappearing photos app, and his early role at Picaboo and the Toyopa Group. So far, we haven’t seen any evidence of a written agreement stipulating how the equity of the Toyopa Group was to be divided. We may get a bit closer to the truth at tomorrow’s hearing, during which a judge will rule on from representing Snapchat. Brown’s representatives, Lee Tran & Liang, filed the motion because Brown spoke with and sent documents to a Quinn Emanuel lawyer, Anthony Alden; Alden later said Quinn Emanuel would not be representing Brown, and a few months later, Snapchat hired Quinn Emanuel. The firm has erected an ethical wall, shielding Quinn Emanuel employees from discussing anything related to the case with Alden, but Lee Tran & Liang argue that this is insufficient and that Quinn Emanuel should be disqualified based on precedent. The legal documents, which are at times dry but do feature a naked man gesturing to Brown during a deposition and a brief mention of my colleague Jordan Crook and myself, are below. The six documents filed by Snapchat, totaling 185 pages, on July 19, are below in what I think is descending order of interest to readers: by
The five documents filed by Brown’s representatives, Lee Tran & Liang, totaling 120 pages, on July 25 are below in what I think is descending order of interest to readers: by
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Airbnb Updates Mobile Apps To Give Hosts Tools For Listing And Managing Spaces From Their Phones
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Ryan Lawler
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Peer-to-peer marketplace company has released new versions of its mobile apps that will give users better tools for managing their listings on the go. The app also has taken a big step forward by enabling users to list their space directly from their smartphones. The new versions of the Android and iOS apps are in part a response to increasing mobile adoption by Airbnb users, but also an acknowledgement that getting them on mobile apps speeds up the process. Hosts who use the company’s mobile apps tend to be more responsive than those who are only on the website, because DUH, the mobile phone is always with them. That means they are quicker to respond to prospective guests and more likely to confirm a booking. Airbnb mobile engineering lead Andrew Vilcsak said that hosts using the mobile apps respond three times faster than those who are only on the website. And so bookings happen potentially eight times faster from the apps. With that in mind, Airbnb wanted to make its apps even more useful and powerful, with more tools for managing their listings on the go. With the latest update to the Airbnb iOS and Android apps, the company now lets hosts list their spaces directly from within the app. For first-time hosts, it will even provide them with a guide for how to do so. The app was built to simplify the process of listing a space. For instance, it has location verification to ensure that the space you’re listing is where you say it is, as well as instant phone verification. To list a space, users must also upload photos, which is easy because they can upload them directly from their phones. In addition to making it easier to list a space, hosts now have more tools for managing their listings as well. The app has an updated calendar feature that will allow hosts to show when their spaces are available. They can also fully update and manage their listings, including photos, descriptions and whatnot.
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Yelp Beats Street Estimates In Q2 With Revenue Of $55M, EPS Loss Of $0.01
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today , reporting second-quarter revenue of $55 million, and a per-share loss of $0.01. Analysts the company to lose $0.04 per share on revenue of $53.3 million. That’s a beat, but not a massive victory. However, the company’s net revenue increase of 69 percent compared to the second quarter of 2012 has sent its stock up nearly 7 percent in after-hours trading. Investors like what they see. The company’s vanity, if perhaps useful metrics, point up and to the right: Average monthly traffic for the company is up to 108 million unique visitors, representing growth of 38 percent year over year. Yelp now has 51,400 “active local businesses,” up 62 percent in the last year. After adjustments, Yelp’s EBTIDA came in at $7.8 million. The Great Mobile Shift continues apace, with Yelp showing 40 percent of its advertisements on mobile devices. However, while companies such as Facebook are , Yelp’s 40 percent number is only a 4 percent improvement on its first-quarter figure. Also, the company doesn’t break out its mobile revenue as some other companies do, merely its mobile advertising share, which could easily not correlate directly to income portion. Yelp’s cash position is essentially unchanged in the past six months, growing by under $2 million to rest at the end of the quarter at $96 million in cash and equivalents. All told, it was a solid quarter for Yelp, slightly beating expectations, keeping its cash in place, and growing its traffic. Still, if it wants to fundamentally change how the market values it, an acceleration will be required.
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Stipple Partners With Getty Images For Smarter In-Image Advertising
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Anthony Ha
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is announcing a partnership with that integrates Stipple’s technology for in-image advertising with Getty’s library of photos. Technically, there was nothing stopping someone who published Getty’s photos from including Stipple ads inside those photos. However, the new integration should make those campaigns more effective, particularly by tapping into the Getty metadata. Stipple co-founder and CEO Rey Flemings said that one of the things that has “hindered” the use of photos online is the fact that most publishing systems strip the relevant metadata from those images. Thanks to the new partnership, Getty’s tags will be applied to its photos throughout the Stipple network, and those tags can then be used to place ads. For example, if a Hollywood studio wanted to advertise its new film, it could run a campaign across Stipple’s network that targeted all Getty photos that feature cast members from the film. The companies say this should improve the reach of brand campaigns and increase monetization for publishers. You can . Craig Peters, Getty’s senior vice president of business development, said the company is always looking to help its publishers monetize (after all, they’re probably going to be happier about paying for Getty’s content if they’re actually making money from those photos), and that Getty is working with Stipple specifically because the company “can basically align the interest of advertisers and publishers,” delivering ads that are effective and don’t annoy users because they’re actually relevant to the image. “It really does unlock a lot of the value that sits in that visual asset online that has been under-monetized and under-appreciated up until this point,” Peters said. In order to take advantage of the new integration, publishers have to be working with both companies, but that’s a group that includes People.com, Condé Nast, and Gannett.
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Sarah Perez
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Adobe Buys Satellite For Tag Management Technology, Makes Deeper Move Into Marketing And Ad Tech
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Ingrid Lunden
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Following on from its , which closed earlier this month, today made its fourth acquisition of 2013. To further strengthen its marketing and analytics business, Adobe has bought , a tag management technology that helps marketers with analytics and media tracking across web sites. Satellite had been part of a larger interactive marketing agency called . The news was passed along to us via an email from Atlanta-based Satellite, which it sent out to customers and partners. We’re trying to find out the financial terms of the deal; for now, it looks like Search Discovery is spinning off just the Satellite business, rather than whole company joining Adobe as well. Satellite says in its customer letter that it will continue to operate a business-as-usual service “for the time being.” It looks like the main significance of this for Adobe is two-fold. First, it is bringing one more piece of functionality to its . That portfolio already offers services such as Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager, Media Optimizer, as well as the new services from Neolane. The main idea of tag managing services is to consolidate code for different analytics, marketing and advertising services, implemented by websites to monitor how their content is used. Each piece of analytics/marketing/ad code means speaking with different third-party services, and that can slow a site down. Satellite claims to speed up loading times for sites by consolidating that code and taking it out of the markup language behind the site. It’s aimed at both small and large enterprises, who can use the platform to handle multiple sites. (That could mean that Adobe may use it itself as an SME-targeted, cloud based offering.) Chris Gleason, performance strategist, 22squared, notes that Satellite will help fill out what Adobe already offers in analytics, which also includes assets from past acquisitions like Omniture. Adding new products by acquisition, as it does in so many cases, is about buying operations that are smaller and therefore more responsive to market demands. “It’s not easy always easy for big companies to move quickly,” he says. “Adobe is trying to create an end-to-end solution for marketers to manage, track, test and optimize their sites. Having a user-friendly and flexible tag management solution is another step in that direction for Adobe.” And this also points to the other potential significance of this acquisition: it appears to put Adobe closer into the domain of marketing services where Google also is playing. Google in October 2012 , appropriately called Tag Manager. Like Satellite, Tag Manager attempts to take some of the pain out of managing all of the different bits of analytics and tracking code that comes across a web site to make it more usable by marketers. Satellite today notes that the Adobe acquisition doesn’t mean that Satellite will become an exclusively Marketing Cloud-shop: “Adobe will allow the use of Satellite for the deployment of services within and outside the Adobe Marketing Cloud,” it notes. But it also notes that while Adobe will continue to support existing integration between Satellite and Google Analytics, it will “no longer provide professional services to implement Google Analytics.” Satellite notes that there is some overlap already between what it offers and what Adobe already does, which should help Adobe drive more business to its platform. “Both Adobe and Satellite have robust partner networks that help facilitate the delivery of our market-leading technology and services to marketers worldwide,” it notes. “Due to our common focus on providing the best solutions available to marketers, we expectedly share some of the same partners. The addition of Satellite to the Adobe Marketing Cloud will enable the combined partner network to deliver the world’s leading set of marketing solutions to an even broader base of customers.” We’ll update this post as we learn more.
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Socrative Gets $750K From True Ventures, NewSchools To Bring Realtime Student Response System To K-12 Education
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Rip Empson
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TechCrunch has learned today that , an intelligent student response system aimed for K-12 classrooms, has quietly raised $750K in seed financing from True Ventures, NewSchools Ventures and a handful of angel investors in Boston — where the startup is headquartered — including Jean Hammond and Eileen Rudden. According to our sources, the startup closed the majority of its round in April, but has added a few investors since then and has mostly remained mum in regard to its financing and investors. The initial prototype for Socrative was developed in 2010 by Amit Maimon at MIT, who then brought on co-founders Benjamin Berte and Michael West after graduating. The co-founders bootstrapped for two years before joining Imagine K-12’s incubator and picking up a bit of seed funding as a result. The startup has grown steadily since. Berte tells us that, over the 2012-2013 school year, Socrative saw 116 million questions answered and 278K quizzes created and shared across 3.2 million individual teacher and student users. Towards the end of the school year, Berte says, the platform was adding new teachers at a rate of 1,000/day. For those unfamiliar, Socrative is a free, cloud-based student response system, which is available via the Web or mobile apps for iOS and Android that allows teachers to create and distribute quizzes and conduct polls in class. Students can then respond via their laptops, tablets or smartphones, allowing teachers to get a more “realtime” understanding of student comprehension and to aggregate and store that data to track student learning curves. The idea is to allow schools to upgrade their old hardware, or their “clickers” (and clicker systems) that one might use in a large introductory class, for example, replacing them with a more digital system. Socrative and its clicker platform 2.0 allow teachers to create and distribute a number of types of quizzes, including true/false, multiple choice, graded short answer or short response, whether they be teacher-paced or student-paced. To put it simply, Socrative is doing for K-12 what does for higher education. (It also follows Pearson’s acquisition of student ) Like Top Hat, the system allows teachers to add gamification elements to quizzes so that students can compete against each other, view leaderboards, or display live results to get class discussions started. All in all, it’s a way to update the formal assessment standards that still exist at most schools today. Going forward, Socrative plans to launch a design overhaul in early August, with multi-selection multiple choice questions, Common Core assessment tagging, back channel-style discussions and student quiz navigation being a few of the enhancements one can expect. Berte also tells us that Socrative is in the process of integrating with Google Apps for Education so users can access Socrative via Google Sign-on and export assessment reports and so on to Google Drive. For more, find
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Evernote Competitor Catch.com Shuts Down Its Note-Taking Apps, Company Heading In “Different Direction”
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Sarah Perez
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(formerly known as Snaptic) is shutting down its Evernote competitor, called Catch Notes, which allowed users to capture and save notes on iOS and Android, as well as on the web through browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and IE, and even via email. The company announced the closure in a message posted to its and in an email sent to former Catch.com users yesterday (see below) which explains that the service is closing August 30. Users have until then to export their data from Catch.com via . The tool produces either a CSV or ZIP archive of your data, which can be imported into OneNote, Springpad or Simplenote, per Catch’s further . The startup, which had previously raised $9.3 million in and Series A funding led by Boston-based Excel Venture Management, hints in its announcement that the team is now taking the company in “a different direction” following the Catch.com closure, but didn’t provide any other details about what their plans are at this time. It’s unclear what will become of Catch’s other applications, like and , following the news of the Catch shutdown, as the company has not yet responded to our requests for more information. While it’s odd that no mention was made of those applications in the brief announcement, the timing of the news is odder still, given that , the company announced the debut of a business-level collaboration service called . Interestingly enough, that product’s homepage is still live today instead of redirecting to the notice about the Catch shutdown. That could indicate that this is indeed the new direction the company has chosen to pursue. Unlike the personal note-taking service, the Team product is focused more on project management and offers enterprise-level features. The company’s consumer-facing mobile apps were fairly popular in months past. For example, the Android application had reached somewhere between 5 million and 10 million installs, , where more limited competition had allowed the app’s solid design to stand out a bit more than on iOS. Users there are already lamenting the loss, begging Catch.com to reconsider, or release a paid version. The iOS app was only moderately popular, having reached the top 100 in Productivity apps in 14 countries worldwide, and was ranked 198 in Productivity in the U.S. In past years, many and had listed Catch’s app as a “top” productivity tool for mobile. And, as a TechCrunch reader just pointed out, the app also benefitted from promotions in Apple’s own retail stores, as well as being featured on the Apple.com homepage. But Evernote has long since surpassed Catch as the preferred note-taking tool for PC, web and mobile, with native applications for desktop, phones and tablets, as well as a standalone web app. (Oh, and in outside funding, too.) We’ve reached out to Catch.com to see if its founders can share any more details on how they came to this decision, or what the company’s future plans now involve. We’ve yet to hear back but will update with details following that conversation if and when it occurs. In the meantime, Catch’s current users should proceed to grab their data from the service before it’s too late. Below, the full announcement: Catch has made the difficult decision to take the company in a different direction. As such, we will be terminating service next month. We value our users and have greatly enjoyed providing Catch to millions of people over the last several years, but it is time for us to move on. Catch will no longer be available after 30 August 2013. Please follow these directions to download your data before this time. We thank you for your support. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at support@catch.com. We apologize if we are not able to respond to all emails. – The Catch Team
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Google Testing Local News In Google Now, As Well As The Limits Of Feature Bloat On The Android Assistant
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Darrell Etherington
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Google is testing out local news cards for Google Now according to a new , which cites Google’s VP of Search and Assist as the source of the info. The local news card is in the experimental A/B testing phase, with the aim of gathering feedback from users about whether it should go live to the broad Android user base. The news would tell you things like nearby crimes, as well as restaurant openings and more, but tailored to your specific interests and bound to geolocation coordinates. It’d be kind of like having your town’s daily newspaper delivered directly to your phone, but perhaps more hyperlocal and having that change depending on where you are at any given moment. It sounds like a good idea, despite the general failure of local news initiatives like Patch, since it works by collecting news from other sources and is probably a better and more sustainable approach to digital local news than new reporting bodies. But in the larger picture of Now, it begins to beg the question of what Google wants its Android assistant to really be. Google Now is a service that provides quick access to the information that’s most immediately pertinent to you at any given time. Right now that means popping up flight schedules, transit stops and travel ETAs to key locations like home and work, as well as weather and more. It’s the “more” that becomes potentially troubling; Now is currently pretty easy to pick up and understand, but Google has to think carefully about what new features it brings on, lest it become feature-burdened and unwieldy. The good news is that Google is doing A/B testing with this and other new features it’s contemplating bringing to Google Now. And it’s also true that not all of the cards need to be activated, or turned on by default. But even just making them available risks overcomplicating the service and making it less intuitive and natural for users, which is a big part of its appeal. Also, local news, while a neat trick, doesn’t seem all that useful in an instantly digestible context like this one. I have one request for Google around Now: keep it clean. There’s a lot the personal assistant ‘could’ do, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot it should.
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Grockit Sells Social Learning Platform To Kaplan, Goes All-In On Learnist, Its “Pinterest For Education”
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Rip Empson
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If you haven’t heard, some of the former giants of the education world haven’t been doing too well, particularly academic publishers, as evidenced by McGraw-Hill’s and Cengage’s . The bigs are faced with a slow death, or slow rehabilitation (with death still a possibility) by digitizing their content and services — and digitizing fast. Kaplan is one of those familiar names, as the 70-year-old test prep company recently , while its venture capital arm moves to invest . Today, it’s taking another smart step toward a digital future by snapping up the test prep assets and social learning platform of veteran EdTech startup, Grockit, the San Francisco-based maker of social learning apps and technologies. Why is this a smart mutual decision? Well, for starters, as Kaplan CEO Andy Rosen recently said: “Continuing to cultivate new innovations in education technology is critical to the future of the company and the industry at large.” Yup. For many of these old hands of education, developing digital tools internally will be equivalent to starting from scratch. There has been a new wave of education startups that are innovating and building mobile apps and software across the educational spectrum. There’s a ton of early-stage capital moving into education, but not so much in the series A and B range. Education startups are starting to feel the crunch and will continue to for the foreseeable future, which presents a great opportunity for what corporate acquirers there are in the education space. As a matter of fact, , and as you can see, Kaplan ranked fourth on the list in the number of acquisitions it made over the last three years. With its acquisition of Grockit, the company is just one purchase behind Blackboard and Macmillan, and it really wouldn’t be surprising to see Kaplan continue playing the role of EdTech buyer. As long as it has the cash, there’s no reason not to continue. It’s also a smart move, because Grockit went through a significant shift of focus over the last 18 months or so. The startup first came on the scene in 2006 as a video test prep course for standardized tests, before re-launching at TC50 in 2008 as a social learning service, combining game-ification with personalized, adaptive learning-based test prep programs. The idea was to become a more effective way for students to study for tests — either by themselves or in groups. While Grockit has survived, it never quite exploded, and in May of last year, it launched Learnist, which was dubbed its “Pinterest for education.” The team had developed Learnist internally, sort of on a whim as an experiment to potentially use as a feature add-on within their existing solution. They launched it and it took off over the last six months, so eager to ride the wave, they shifted their focus completely to Learnist. Last December, and that cemented it. While the raise was behind the Grockit name, really it was for the market opportunity the founders and investors saw in Learnist. As a result, no surprise, but we’ve heard from sources that, as a result of this shift, the founders have been looking for a buyer for Grockit since. With Kaplan having one of the most recognizable names in the test prep market, the deal makes a lot of makes sense. And, from what we’ve been hearing, although the two companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, it works out well for Kaplan, because it doesn’t exactly break the bank, while allowing it to acquire digital test prep solutions it can presumably put to use fairly quickly. In terms of what exactly Kaplan acquire, Grockit founder Farbood Nivi clarifies, telling us that “Kaplan acquired the Grockit name, the Grockit Test Prep business, and the Grockit technology and platform.” However, Kaplan is not hiring any of its employees, who are all staying on to help build the new platform, which has been spun out of Grockit as its own company under the Learnist name, he explains. The funds from the round the company raised in December are staying with Learnist and everything remains largely unchanged in day-to-day operations, just as it’s been for the last year, Nivi added. As to the sale, “it will considerably increase our runway and give us options without dilution, so it’s huge for us.” At the time of the acquisition, the founder says that “over a million people” were using Grockit and, collectively, people had spent “decades studying together” on the platform over its five-odd-year history. “As we seek to better understand the role of social learning and gamification in test prep effectiveness, the acquisition of Grockit branded assets accelerates our own efforts,” Kaplan EVP Rochelle Rothstein said in the company’s statement today. “We’re looking forward to exploring platform synergies to improve our student experience.” More on the and .
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Quip Is A Beautiful New Mobile-First Word Processor From Ex-Facebook CTO Bret Taylor
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Josh Constine
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30 years later and our word processing software hasn’t evolved, not even to adapt to mobile. That changes tonight with the launch of , a freemium new word processing app from former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor’s new startup. Quip works on desktop but is designed for . It automatically formats documents to the size of your screen, offers in-app collaboration and messaging, and even works offline. “Quip is a modern word processor optimized for the era of tablets and phones”, Taylor tells me. We’re in the middle of a transition away from the desktop computer, yet word processors have stagnated. For dramatic effect, Taylor dropped a screenshot of MacWrite (shown to the right) into the Quip introduction post, and told me “It’s comical how similar that looks to what we use today.” The shift to mobile is so seismic that it trumps the importance of all the legacy word processing features and “gives us an opportunity to change this software”, Taylor says. That’s an opportunity Microsoft was stupid to wait so long to address. It’s only just getting a real version of mobile Office out there. While full featured, it’s billed as a mobile companion to Office for desktop rather than truly mobile-first, and on iOS it’s only for . Quip’s freemium model has a lot of runway when you think about how widespread the need for document editing is. Quip looks polished, which makes sense considering Taylor specifically left to start the company with Kevin Gibbs, the father of Google Apps Engine. Taylor redirected his backchannel.org site to Quip.com in December 2012, to the world. While no details were released, our own Ingrid Lunden sniffed out that it might be a collaborative writing app based on the pen in the app’s icon and a patent for cloud collaboration awarded to the startup. Now we have all info. So ? First it adapts documents to whatever size or shape screen you’re working on. If you’re on an iPhone, an embedded photo could appear full-width, but on an iPad it would appear on the right surrounded by text. The collaboration tools might be the most exciting part. You can share any document with another user, and when they first open it you’ll get a notification. Taylor says this lets you jump in and walk them through the doc using Quip’s internal messaging system. “It feels like sitting at a desk with someone around a piece of paper” Taylor tells me. All your collaborative edits and messages are turned into a chat-like thread you can follow. To find your future co-writers, Quip asks you to sign in with Google and let it access your contacts. That might seem like a snub to Facebook, but really it just denotes that Quip is built for serious business, not just playing around with your friends. On the iPad you’ll see the communication stream right next to your document, whereas you slide it out on iPhone. You can @ mention people to call their attention within documents, quickly add images, link out to other Quip docs or folders, and use formatting tools to add your own style. I love the “Use most recent photo” option alongside the standard “Take with camera” and “Select from Photos”, though its a shame that’s only for Quip messaging and not document editing. From the Quip “desktop” home page of the app you can see all your current documents and check your inbox for new updates and messages. If your connection drops while you’re writing, no sweat. Quip will synchronize your documents back to the cloud when you get your connection back. Taylor says he loves how seamless this works while he commutes on San Francisco’s BART subway which has spotty mobile reception. The elephant in the room is how Quip works with Microsoft Word. Right now there’s no special way to import docs from Word or export them to the old girl. Quip only spits out .PDFs. However, Taylor says his team worked hard on flawless copy and paste. Quip will preserve formatting when you copy text to or from Word. Quip is free for personal use, but charges per user for a business license that lets you collaborate with more people. It’s available now for , and , and Taylor says an Android app is in the works. Typing tools were a lucrative business for Microsoft on the desktop. That opportunity in mobile let Quip raise $15 million in Series A funding led by Peter Fenton at Benchmark, which pays for its 12-person team. This isn’t Taylor’s first startup rodeo, luckily. After co-creating Google Maps, he built FriendFeed which later sold to Facebook. Quip will have to displace the now-misinformed idea that word processing is best done on the desktop. The other writing apps it will face off with include Apple’s own , stripped down but cheap apps like , and more advanced but pricey options like . Quip does have a bit of a learning curve. Not necessarily because there’s much wrong with the design, but because you have to unlearn a lifetime of Microsoft Clippy-instilled habits. There are a few awkward gestures in Quip for iPhone. You pull down from the top to reveal your desktop, but I found myself accidentally opening the iOS notification tray. Once you get the hang of Quip, though, it seems like it could finally let you express your inner wordsmith from your couch, commute, or coffee spot. Quip might be a word processing app now, but its ambitions could be much bigger. It combines features of some of the top productivity, collaboration, and workplace communication apps. It may be able to steal time away from Google Docs, Hangouts (Gchat), Asana, Yammer, and Skype. Today it only replaces those tools for tasks surrounding text document editing. But imagine if once Quip gets word processing sorted, it goes after spreadsheets, or presentations. Quip has the team and funding to go hard at this huge space. I wouldn’t be surprised if it became an hot acquisition target. The only problem is Taylor and Gibbs have earned their nest eggs already, and might be able to hold out and see this through The applications of an integrated communication and collaboration platform are vast. If no one else builds this mobile-first, and Quip nails the user experience, we could be looking at the start of a big company.
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Google Offers Glass Explorers An Invite To Make A Friend A Glasshole, Too
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Darrell Etherington
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Google is bringing more into the program, and it’s doing that the best way it knows how: by letting current users invite a friend. Those among you old enough to remember when Gmail first started will remember this was once the only method to get on board with that service, and now Glass-owning folks can ask a single friend to join them in testing out Glass before its wide consumer release. Current Glass members are getting emails from Google detailing how they can bring someone new on board, as . Explorers invited via this extension to the original program, which Google seeded via invites sent out to lucky winners selected from a Twitter hashtag-based competition, must be U.S. residents, 18 or older, and able to pick up Glass in person in SF, NYC or LA. Google likes to welcome new Glass users in person, as you might recall from the . Glass will likely still cost the $1,500 the company charged its first round of Explorers, but the expansion of the program hopefully means we’re inching closer to the day when Google decides to make Glass available for the general public. That’s not happening until at least 2014, according to the latest from the company, however, and all that this latest program extension means is that Google is likely looking to draw feedback on the experimental platform from a wider group of beta testers. New developments in the works for , which will allow software to run on Glass itself, independent of an attached smartphone. The so-called Glass Development Kit (GDK) isn’t yet out for public release, but it’s based on the Android SDK and Google is if they’re getting impatient. So Explorers old and new could have some exciting new software to play with very soon. If you’ve been jonesing for some face computing, now’s the time to start harassing that Glass-wearing friend.
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Nexon Takes A Strategic Investment in Rumble Entertainment To Expand West
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Korean gaming giant Nexon is making another deal to expand into Western markets with a strategic investment in . They didn’t disclose the size of the deal except to say that it was an all-cash investment for a minority stake in the business. Nexon’s CFO Owen Mahoney also joins Rumble’s board. Nexon’s announcement comes just on the heels of another strategic new startup. Nexon is making these deals to expand into Western audiences, after building up longstanding franchises in China, Japan and South Korea like MapleStory. While Nexon generated nearly $450 million in revenues in the first three months of this year, European and North American markets contributed less than 5 percent of the company’s revenues during that time. In contrast, China makes up nearly half of Nexon’s revenue base. So the company is looking to grow its presence in the West at a time when barriers between international markets are falling. Rumble is led by Greg Richardson, a 15-year veteran in the business, and the team has people from Zynga, Activision, BioWare, Blizzard, Playdom, Electronic Arts, Turbine, LucasArts and RockYou. Their mission is to bring triple-A quality titles to mobile platforms, which so far have been good for casual and then now, midcore games. The company has announced games like KingsRoad, a medieval action role-playing game; Ballistic, a 3-D first-person shooter; and Nightmare Guardians, a multiplayer tower defense game. All of these titles aren’t fully released yet; they’re either in open or closed beta. They had previously taken $15 million in funding from gaming-focused Signia Venture Partners, then Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
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YC-Backed Slidepay Tries To Be The “Android” Of Payments Against Square’s Apple-Like Tack
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Back in February, I wrote that was trying to build a point-of-sale system for small and medium-sized businesses that would eventually give analytics about inventory. Cube has since pivoted, and now they’re going after a completely different market under a new name, . They’re trying to offer that want the ability to accept credit card payments through a reader. For example, , an app for contractors who might do repair work on homes, now has a way to accept payments through a Square-like reader without kicking their customers out to another payments flow. Slidepay is essentially a white-label version of Square. Square an API for third-party developers, but hasn’t ruled out the possibility of building one. There are some strategic reasons for this beyond preserving a high-quality customer experience. The more of a direct relationship that Square can have with its customers, the more opportunities it has down the line to earn a cut of revenue through future services and products without being crowded out by more powerful players in the payments ecosystem. But that also leaves room for a white-label service like Slidepay to exist. “We take a very Android-like approach to what Square does. They want to own the end-to-end experience where everyone has to go through their experience and everything has to be processed through their brand,” said Charlie Pinto, the company’s CEO. “We want people to provide their own applications.” Under this approach, Slidepay takes 2.5 percent of each transaction plus 10 cents, or 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction if a card isn’t present. There aren’t any other set-up or monthly fees. They have other deals for businesses that are processing more than $10 million per month. They own the merchant account and handle underwriting and identity verification, which increases Slidepay’s risks and liabilities. But Pinto feels they have a good internal system for dealing with fraud without going into specifics. “We feel we built a really good risk platform and we verify every person who processes payments,” Pinto said.
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BeRecruited, A Networking Site For High School Athletes, Is The Top Pick For Elite Training Camp
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Eliza Brooke
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, the LinkedIn of college athletic recruiting, has become the official recruiting provider for , a training center and school in Florida that has turned out athletes like Maria Sharapova and Eli Manning. After 15 months of development, the site also launched its newly revamped website yesterday. BeRecruited CEO Vishwas Prabhakara told us that IMGA approached the company out of a desire to provide recruiting advice and networking to its campers. Between its seasonal camps and academic year program, the Florida based academy trains over 35,000 high school athletes each year. While coaches know to watch full-time IMGA students, pairing with beRecruited closes the loop for students at other schools who attend shorter term camps there. IMGA coaches will receive training from beRecruited on how to answer questions about the recruitment process, and students will now get a badge on their beRecruited profiles indicating their participation at a camp or event. This will help coaches pick out students who are particularly serious and motivated, Prabhakara said. The site now has over 1.5 million registered student athletes from over 20,000 high schools across the country, along with 25,000 college recruiters of an estimated 40-45,000 in the nation. While beRecruited is already the most prominent site of its kind, this endorsement by IMGA adds weight to its place in the recruiting world. According to IMGA, 60% of their graduates are recruited to Division 1 schools, with 38% going to DII and DIII, versus a national 2% of high school athletes playing D1. Prabhakara could not provide specific numbers on how many recruitments are currently closed by way of beRecruited as it is self-reported information, but he did say that tens of thousands of students have written in to say that they were recruited through the site. And that number is vastly underreported, he added. BeRecruited follows a freemium model, giving more proactive students the option to upgrade (IMGA students will likely receive discounts). The site is free to coaches, simply to avoid the hassle of navigating university expense accounts. Although other recruiting sites have come and gone, Prabhakara said that beRecruited’s biggest competition is the mom and pop advisers of the world: Division 1 college athletes who have moved back home and use their firsthand expertise to help high schoolers with the process. BeRecruited has been under the leadership of Prabhakara, Art Chang, and Joe Pestro since , which Prabhakara was CEO of at the time. This offline partnership brings with it the marked presence of the nation’s top high school athletes, which should help incentivize that remaining 20,000 college coaches to join the network. Regardless, the advantages of having a universal database for potential recruits are obvious, and beRecruited is in a good position to become that source.
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Memes Give Facebook Fans A Voice Amidst Comment Chaos
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Josh Constine
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Whispering in a riot is how I would describe commenting on a Facebook Page’s feed posts. No matter how thoughtful they are, your words get drowned out. But a combo of new features is fulfilling Facebook’s promise of two-way conversation. Devise a comment that resonates with others, make it a catchy image macro meme, score enough Likes, and your message gets hoisted to the top of the thread. For years, comments on Page posts were utter chaos. A churning sea of disjointed nonsense and inanity. There was no threading. No ranking. Comments just flooded in reverse-chronologically. On popular Pages, comments would come so fast that there was no chance for meaningful discourse, and anything smart you said got buried immediately. I basically never commented on Page posts because there was no point. Finally over the last few months, Facebook wised up. In March it began rolling out comment threading so you could actually reply to specific other comments, . Still there was no way to find the best comments beyond sifting through the haystack. And trust, a good share of admins weren’t putzing around reading their comment reels either. Too much time for too little insight. That means they weren’t hearing the consensus of their fans, or feedback about whether their posts were on the money, erroneous, or in bad taste. They mostly just went by Like count. But then in June Facebook began letting Page admins . Reels defaulted to showing “Top Comments” at the top, with admins allowed to switch them back to “Recent Activity” first as before. Suddenly, smart, poignant, or funny comments could rise above the din. Click on the comments section of a news feed post and you’ll see those top comments first. Visit a Page’s Timeline and they’re shown below each post automatically. Still, you needed to have a way with words to get enough Likes for your comment to get bumped to the top. At least until July 18th when Facebook rolled out the option to . Suddenly, a new call and response communication style came to the social network. The fact is that image memes are punchy and eye-catching. They can rack up Likes a lot faster than text and therefore are more likely to become Top Comments. And while only the Internet savvy will know how to slap an LolCats-style image macro together with tools like , at least some fans’ opinions will be heard. In my favorite format, when you look at a Page’s photo post in the full-screen theater mode, you see the comments prominently splayed out on the right sidebar. It feels like the proper balance of original to response content, and enables some hilarious sight gags. What’s important is that this is a step for Facebook away from being a broadcast medium and toward fostering discussion. Sometimes that discussion is an argument, with fans calling out the admins for posting something false or insensitive. Sometimes it’s a chorus, where a top photo comment reinforces or enhances the original content. And yes, sometimes totally unrelated memes will filter into places of prominence, detracting from the conversation. But hopefully as the novelty of photo comments wanes, they’ll let fans actually reach each other and the Pages they follow. If you’re witty and can wield a meme, your voice on Facebook just got a lot louder. Criticizing the admin for posting something that had already been posted.
— Getting the message across: This Page is for funny, and this post wasn’t
— Photo commenter tells the other half of the story — Commenter says “Oh, let me help your imagination” — Sight-gag gold — Pikachu trolling — And this could be just the beginning
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Matt Edelman Is Stepping Down As CEO Of Digital Magazine Platform Glossi
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Anthony Ha
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, the maker of the digital magazine platform of the same name, is announcing that CEO Matt Edelman is stepping down from his current position and taking an advisory role with the company. Edelman first , back when it was called ThisNext and focused on social commerce. at the end of last year, pitching it as an easy way for both consumers and professional publishers to build slick-looking digital magazines. To explain Edelman’s departure, Glossi sent me the following statement from investor Sumant Mandal, managing director at Clearstone Ventures: Glossi, the DIY digital magazine platform, continues to shine with 30-40% month-to-month growth since its December launch. Matt Edelman and his team have done a phenomenal job building upon the pioneering social shopping platforms, ThisNext and StyleHive, to create a new and exciting rich media self-publishing platform for content creators including bloggers, marketers, publishers, small businesses, agencies and most importantly, individual users. As the company heads into the next stage of its evolution, Matt Edelman will transition from CEO to being an advisor to the company where he will continue to remain engaged in the business well into the future. All shareholders, investors and team members, including Matt, are excited to see the continued growth of the Glossi product and remain committed to its success. More news around senior team additions to follow. Glossi isn’t announcing a new CEO right now — presumably, that’s what the “more news” part of the email is referring to. So is the departure voluntary? Well, we were initially tipped off by someone saying that Edelman had been fired. The fact that we’re hearing the news from an investor, rather than Edelman himself, seems suggestive, as does the fact that the announcement is coming before a replacement has been found. On the other hand, the statement itself is a little cryptic on this point, and it does emphasize that Edelman isn’t departing entirely.
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Microsoft’s Windows OEM Revenue Fell 10% In FY2013 Without The Windows Upgrade Offer
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Alex Wilhelm
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Post-PC, indeed. Today Microsoft released its , detailing its financial performance on a per-division basis with decent granular breakdown. In addition to the news that the Surface line of tablets brought in a lower-than-expected , Microsoft explained its declining incomes from the sale of Windows to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). In the year, Microsoft recognized $540 million in deferred revenue stemming from the conclusion of the Windows Upgrade Offer. OEM revenue for Microsoft declined 3 percent in the year. However, if you take out the Windows Upgrade Offer, OEM revenue for Microsoft fell 10 percent in the year. Selling copies of Windows to Dell, Lenovo and others to ship on their personal computers is the quintessential Microsoft activity, and the company is simply doing less of it. The larger PC market has been in decline, . And that loss was an improvement on the first quarter’s decline of more than 14 percent. Microsoft has a dry telling of this fact: “This decrease [in OEM revenue] primarily reflects the impact on revenue of the decline in the x86 PC market, which we estimate declined approximately 9%.” The x86 PC market is PC market, essentially. Yes, some tablets run on x86 architecture, but that’s a minor quibble. The 9 percent figure is interesting, as it describes the contraction of the PC market for part of 2012 and part of 2013, given Microsoft’s annoying fiscal calendar. Estimates for the past two quarters describe accelerating decline. I believe our new favorite parlor game shall be entitled: “How Hosed Is The PC Market This Year?” OEM revenue remains a key income and profit source for Microsoft, but one that is certainly soft. The larger Windows division, however, remains a financial rock: $19.2 billion in fiscal 2013 revenue leading to $9.5 billion in operating income. That’s a damn fine profit margin. Still, as Microsoft’s new products, such as Azure and Office 365 and Lync begin to post-billion-dollar revenue figures, the center of the company’s gravity continues to slowly drift.
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Anthony Ha
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The 5 Best Answers From The Mars Curiosity Rover Team’s Reddit AMA
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Billy Gallagher
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A group of engineers from the Mars Curiosity Rover mission session today. In addition to questions about the mission and Mars, the Curiosity Rover team responded to numerous comments about how to intern or work at NASA and what the process is like, but did not respond to several questions about SpaceX, Elon Musk’s privatized space exploration company. The team did an , shortly after the Rover landed on Mars, and returned this year a week before the one-year anniversary of the Curiosity landing. The team gained more positive sentiment for Curiosity on the thread — at the time of posting, it is at the very top of Reddit, with over 2,350 comments. As my colleague , there are a lot of talented people in tech right now with the ability to solve big problems that are choosing not to. It’s refreshing to read about the Curiosity team’s efforts to explore Mars. Here are five of the most interesting responses from the team: “The results from our first rock drilling told us that the past environment, when that mudstone rock formed, was suitable for life. The mudstone formed in an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided the chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbial life, if life existed then. This ancient wet environment was not harshly oxidizing, acidic or extremely salty. All the necessary chemical building blocks were available.” “Over millions of years the water evaporated because the atmosphere got too thin to support it in liquid form. Mars does not have a global magnetic field the way Earth does, which helps shield the atmosphere from stripped away by the sun’s damaging radiation. So while there is plenty of CO2 and H20 ice, no liquid is possible. If life arose on Mars, it would have been millions or even billions of years ago, and preserving evidence of life for billions of years is very hard. So the evidence could be there and we haven’t found it, or life didn’t arise. We have to find out!” “It is doubtful Curiosity will make it all the way to the top of Mount Sharp, although it would be great if it did. What we’re really hoping for is to drive up the rock layers near the lower flank of Mount Sharp to look for clues to what the past environment was like and how environmental conditions changed with time from older rocks at the base to younger rocks higher up.” “For me landing was the most intense moment. We all gathered together with all the team members who had put so much into this mission that we were on the edge of our seats waiting to hear how the 7 minutes of terror would end. The feeling when we got that first photo back of the wheel on the ground was one of the greatest feelings in the world.” “On Sol 200, we had a hardware problem on the rover that then caused the software to not work properly. After looking at the data, we decided the safest thing to do would be to swap to the back-up computer that didn’t have the problem. We did this as soon as we could by getting a large (70m) station over Madrid and sending hardware commands that bypassed software to swap computers. We then had to wait the round trip light time (~ 30 minutes at the time) to get the signal that it had all worked fine. It did and now we are on the back-up computer!” “Well there are large features on Mars such as long canyons and extinct volcanoes. If you mean most important thing we wish to find, we want to know if life ever arose on Mars and if life has arisen elsewhere in our solar system or universe.” You can .
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California Regulator Proposes New Ride-Sharing Rules In A Victory For Uber, Lyft And SideCar
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Ryan Lawler
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The California Public Utilities Commission issued its today, granting a huge victory for companies like , and . The proposal follows months of discussions between the regulator and the startups, which seek to connect passengers with drivers who haven’t been licensed for commercial driving. The PUC is calling those operators Transportation Network Companies (TNC) and has built a new regulatory framework for them. The key portions of the proposal revolve around public safety and ensuring that drivers have had background checks and are covered by insurance in the case of an accident. The proposal requires that TNCs: Discussions between the PUC and the affected startups have been ongoing since last summer when Uber, Lyft and SideCar received for operating unlicensed charter party services. While each of the three have individually reached interim agreements with the PUC, the regulator has also been working on a new framework for regulation that falls outside the existing rules for taxi or limo services in the state. The new regulations, if adopted, should clear up uncertainty for the companies in major cities, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. They could also set a precedent for the adoption of ride-sharing rules that those startups could propose in other states and jurisdictions. At the same time, the PUC has been lobbied hard by taxi and limo organizations opposed to the new rules. In San Francisco today, taxi drivers gathered outside government buildings to show opposition to the acceptance of unlicensed drivers roaming the streets. In the past month, officials at the San Francisco International Airport from Uber, Lyft, and SideCar. Safety remains the key issue facing these companies, as opponents argue that they’re not subject to the same requirements of taxi and limo services. At the same time, Uber, Lyft and SideCar maintain that their community drivers are subject to more stringent background checks than taxi or limo drivers. The existence of an identity layer for both drivers and passengers also ensures that the companies will know who was in the car in the case of any incident. The PUC proposal also is happening as venture money is pouring into local transportation startups. Uber from TPG that will value it at $3.5 billion. Earlier this spring, of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.
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Streetlife, The U.K. Local Social Network, Raises Further £600K From Archant Digital Ventures, Shohet & Cie
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Steve O'Hear
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The U.K.’s , a local social network that lets residents connect and converse with their neighbours and foster a stronger sense of community, has raised £600,000 in a new round of funding. The investment comes from existing backer Archant Digital Ventures, the incubator and investment arm of regional U.K. media company , and new investor Shohet & Cie. The additional capital will be used to give Streetlife a marketing push, rolling out the brand across more of the U.K., and in what looks like a case of stepping on the gas, the startup says it plans to raise a further £3 million by year’s end, with the aim being to “fully capture the U.K. market.” The perceived lack of local community, particularly in highly populated urban areas in the U.K. (and I suspect in other developed countries), is arguably a major a problem in a post-industrial era where people frequently move, commute quite far to work, and, rather strangely, don’t actually talk to their neighbours. That’s the problem that Streetlife has set out to solve, at least on the consumer end. To achieve this, the site provides a platform for local residents, community groups, local authorities and businesses to “exchange practical information, advice, opinions and resources”; users sign up using their postcode to start and join conversations with others in their locality, and declare what local topics they are interested in and how much of their profile they want to share and with whom — a sort of “local Facebook,” if you will. It’s a proposition that is seeing Streetlife boast close to 100,000 users in more than 500 “communities,” says the company. Of course, with a laser focus on local social networking comes an obvious business model in the form of local advertising, which also points to Archant Digital Ventures’ financial interest in the startup. The regional media company’s incubator/investment arm, run by Serge Taborin, is charged with finding new opportunities in the digital space that build on Archant’s legacy as a local newspaper publisher and provider of other local media and advertising-funded ventures. The idea is that the startups it can exploit the media company’s significant regional reach to gain traction and monetize through local advertising. Unsurprisingly, when I met with Taborin a few months back he made quite a convincing case for why U.K. startups with a heavy local focus might want to consider Archant Digital Ventures as an alternative or complementary partner to early-stage VC or competing accelerators/incubators. Doing so also potentially opens the doors to be acquired by Archant itself — the latest example being the majority stake it acquired in Planningfinder.com just last week. Interestingly, however, not only is Streetlife able to benefit from Archant’s long-standing relationship with local advertisers and its existing consumer base, but content on the site is also feeding some of the stories picked up by local journalists writing for various Archant properties. That’s a nice symbiotic relationship, and reminds me of the way Twitter helps generate story leads (and low-hanging fruit) for national media. Along with Archant, Streetlife’s previous backers include Paul Ettinger, one of the founding team behind coffee chain Caffè Nero, Steve Pankhurst, founder of Friends Reunited, and Gi Fernando and Ankur Shah, co-founders of Techlightenment. Today’s new round of funding brings the total raised by the startup to £1.4 million.
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Surface Scorecard: Microsoft’s Tablet Had FY2013 Revenue Of $853M, Or $3.4M Per Day
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today in an , Microsoft revealed a very interesting fact: Its Surface tablet hybrid line brought in revenue of $853 million in the company’s fiscal 2013. However, the Surface line didn’t become available for sale until October 26, giving it in the market during the financial period. That places Surface revenue on a per-day basis . Extrapolated for a one-year period, that financial rate puts the Surface line on a run rate. However, I would wager that revenues for Surface were highest at launch of the Surface RT and Pro, and lower in between, so the per-day and per-year estimates could vary. Reviews of the figure have been decidedly negative. The Next Web’s Josh Ong that the revenue figure confirmed that the tablet line is a “financial failure.” Tom Warren over at that the total revenue for the devices is less than the that Microsoft took during its last quarter. And underlined that the $853 million in revenue is again less than the $898 million in new costs that Microsoft called “primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.” If Surface were a standalone business, it would be dead. However, as a Microsoft division, it is anything but. Microsoft as a company has tectonic financial wealth in the form of past profits stored as cash. It has decided to enter the OEM world, and has, to my knowledge, continued with the Surface project, slow initial sales be damned. There is a firm, recent precedent for the company to continue to invest in this way: Windows Phone. It took two full years of hard scrabble work to get Windows Phone to a point in which it was healthy enough to walk a bit on its own. Put another way, until Windows Phone 8 and the recent Nokia handsets, the smartphone line was sucking air. Perhaps not as much as Surface, given that the line of tablets has caused material damage to Microsoft’s short-term profits — the $900 million charge was $0.07 in lost EPS for the company in the last quarter. However, Microsoft has the money, and if it wants to can continue to pour it into Surface, as it did with Windows Phone, and Bing, and other properties that it finds to be strategically important. Does Microsoft want to cede complete hardware primacy to its OEM partners that have failed for so long to demonstrate innovation and forward-looking thought? I don’t think so, no. Naturally, Microsoft would prefer if Surface lost less money, but I don’t think that Microsoft is done with this project yet. A decent test: If the rollout of the next-generation Surface line is muted, we could be watching the door close.
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TC Cribs: A Tour Of Kiip, The Motorcycle-Friendly Startup In The Heart Of San Francisco
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Colleen Taylor
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Hello again, tech company voyeurs, and welcome to a new episode of , the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the walls of the industry’s coolest companies to see what it’s really like for the smart whippersnappers who work there. For this latest episode we headed straight to the heart of San Francisco to the headquarters of , the startup that runs a rewards-focused mobile advertising network. Kiip is situated in a part of the city that has a lot of auto repair shops — and in fact, the company’s office was a former garage — so there’s certainly a tough industrial theme there that contrasts nicely with the digital realm that Kiip’s products live in. Check out the video embedded above to see Kiip co-founder and CEO show us all around the inside of the company’s office, which is full of funky street art, interesting places to work and play, and plenty of free motorcycle parking.
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A Newbie’s Impressions Of Logic Pro X
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John Biggs
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Pro-level audio and video software has always been daunting. While the average computer user knows how to operate them in a general sense (the advent of non-linear editing has essentially changed how we think about what we shoot and record) the addition of pro-level features like effects, mixing boards and MIDI instruments may make Trent Reznor drool but frightens bedroom guitarists. Apple released a few weeks ago to what I can only describe as quiet fanfare. The reviews spoke most highly of the built-in virtual drummer that can quickly and easily build backing tracks for your compositions and a remote control iPad app that allows for virtual control of your recordings via the tablet. Professionals lauded Apple, wondering if a new version would ever appear at all. However, I wanted to assess how usable this new software was for someone more accustomed to Garage Band and other simpler editors.
Upon opening the app, the new user will find herself in an environment reminiscent of the old game Adventure — you’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. The app supports a number of templates, including prepared tracks for electronic music, songwriting and music scoring. Most entry-level users will want songwriting, which supplies eight clean, empty audio tracks or, if you’re the type, a pre-set collection of loops, audio and MIDI tracks in the electronic template. To use the app properly, you need a good condenser microphone or a MIDI device like a keyboard. You can also use the iPad app as a sort of mini-keyboard to input MIDI music. As with any computer program, the old adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is true here. If your tracks are difficult to hear or your inputs are too low — that is your microphone isn’t picking up enough audio — you’re going to have a bad track. There are multiple effects and techniques for fixing audio in the app, but good recording technique is important. There are multiple types of tracks in Logic Pro X, including audio recordings, MIDI and loops. Upon installation the app downloads 2 gigabytes of amazingly useful loops and fills, including music familiar to users of GarageBand, as well as sound effects like ticking clocks, comical horns and crowds. For example, while piecing together a set of audio interviews I was able to create a little transition between speakers by adding a ticking stopwatch and the sound of a crowded bar that matched the sound bed of the interview perfectly. This could have been done quite easily in GarageBand, to be sure, but the speed and feature set of Logic Pro gave me a larger, more expansive palette with which to work. That, in short, is the biggest difference between entry-level apps and Logic. The sheer number of controls and editor tricks essentially turns this into a portable, professional recording studio for $199. Bouncing tracks to disk — that is, “rendering” them the same way you render video — results in some of the highest-quality recording I’ve ever done on my Mac, and that’s high praise. What does it sound like? First, please understand that I’m a horrible guitarist and only now getting better. That said, here is a guitar demo of a that outputs directly as a USB device. I started with the bass line — that squawk in the background — and then added a few power chords over it. These were both audio recordings. I then looped the bass line and added a drummer track which quickly “listened” to the music and added applicable rhythms. It was surprisingly simple to record and export the entire song to SoundCloud using the share function. I recorded it on a brand-new iMac, and rendering time for the audio took a few minutes. [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/102574679″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] Next we have a charming little techno song that I wrote in approximately five minutes. Because the loops can be transposed to any key, I selected a few MIDI and digital recordings and tuned them to C Major. The drums were looped in first then the little techno dance weirdness. The electric piano you here is a MIDI file. One version of the file is played in an instrument called Crystal Pad, and the other one is in Mellow Poly. I offset them slightly and added some strings and a synth to the end. I didn’t have to know the BPM of each drum track — the samples automatically set themselves to the proper speed. It was so surprisingly easy that I couldn’t help but feel a bit pleased with my bad self. I rendered this on a new MacBook Pro and it too took a few minutes. [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/103087501″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] As this is a look at the app from a newbie’s perspective I urge you to visit where actual studio-savvy folks may have more to say. However, Logic Pro X is clearly plenty powerful without being overwhelming.
Should you upgrade? When I first used Logic in about 2009, the app was akin to the cockpit of a fighter jet circa 1990. There were plenty of computer controls and other gewgaws to make things easier on the pilot, but you were still going to crash on take-off if you couldn’t read the dials correctly. I would equate Pro X with the cockpit of the new Dreamliner, all easy-to-use, touchscreen-inspired controls with just enough complexity to please the old timers and a simplicity that will encourage new users to jump right in. Given that I probably couldn’t have created those two bits of music in an earlier version of Logic, I would say that Apple was successful at dumbing things down just enough for idiots like me. What could Apple do differently? Not much without alienating long-time professional users. The banks of dials and controls are important for serious audio tweakers, and musicians will appreciate the amount of control they have over every instrument. Because the app is so similar to other multi-track audio apps I’ve used, I was able to dive in right away without having to look at a bank of sliders or understand the various icons. A bit of exploration brings up far more customization and therefore beyond my ken, including the ability to control a cleverly designed robotic drummer system that gives each percussionist a charming, hipster name like Aiden, Anders and Max (with an anarchy symbol for the A, naturally). In short, Apple has turned this into an app that will please long-time users while still paving a path for GarageBand converts. Singers and guitarists will also enjoy the Flex Time recording features like pitch and timing correction. With the right microphones you could record a studio-class album using these tools with little more than a guitar and your rebel spirit. A guitarist friend of mine commented when he saw some of the features that he “wished he’d had these tools in high school.” “Although,” he added, “I’d probably have never gone to class.” All is not sunshine and roses in this redesigned app. It is still daunting, and without an understanding of the terminology things can get rough. The small buttons next to each track, M, S, R, and I, stand for Mute, Solo, Record, and Input Monitoring. If you didn’t know that, you’d be at a loss to explain how to mute individual tracks without turning down the volume setting. In addition the ability to create stacks with individual tracks is a bit confusing until you realize stacks are simply containers for a few tracks – say a backing bassline and drum track that you want to use over and over or a large orchestral section over which you want granular control. You can turn these stacks up and down like single tracks and even reuse them in other projects. Like most other pro-level tools, I’m sure I’ll hear from users who will complain that Logic is overblown or unusable, referring instead to their ability to record 20-piece jazz bands using a Tascam 8-track digital recorder and Sony’s Acid (my musician friend can do this and more using software he hasn’t updated since the early 2000s). That said, I consider tools like Logic to be equivalent to typewriters in the 1960s: You could find a better one if you looked, but sometimes an Olivetti portable with just the right amount of key travel was exactly what you needed, and all of them got the job done. What advice can I offer the newbie at Logic? Get a good microphone — I have a Blue Microphones Yeti but you can find something similar — and MIDI keyboard. That, in short, is all you need to get started. Then follow the directions to Carnegie Hall, and practice, practice, practice. I’ve decided to move from GarageBand to this version of Logic in order to edit our podcasts and my occasional forays into songwriting, and I would argue that this would have been impossible in the previous version of the app. The complexity was just too daunting and those twisty little passages, all alike, were too dark for my meager lamp to illuminate. Now, by fitful torchlight, I can attempt to use the app the way the pros use it and, most important (and at the risk of mixing games), I’m in no danger of being eaten by a Grue.
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Was Promised Flying Cars, But Would Settle For Something Practical
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Sarah Perez
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After your has been and for you. After you’ve been driven to and fro in , and flown in . After you for weekends on end. After you’ve had your , and , and . After you’ve your friends for the millionth time. After you’ve figured out is, and what airline will get you there. After you’ve decided between five-star hotels or staying in a quirky . After you’ve and and and used up all those . After you’ve organized and updated your , and checked out all the new releases, and . After you’ve all your favorite shows on demand, and filled up your with titles. After you’ve recorded your and and . After you’ve . After you’ve and . After you’ve and retweeted. After you’ve posted, and liked. After you’ve . After you’ve bought and and a and . Will you have any free time to build something for the rest of us? It’s just that a small percentage of people believe that the toughest challenge we face today is that we haven’t figured out how to effectively share our iPhone photos (we have: it’s called email), or we can’t seem to find to hang on the walls of our . But far outside the Valley, there are families who are buying their first computer, and it’s a . And they didn’t wait in line for it. They walked in the store and got the cheapest one that “has the Internet” and “lets you do email” and “has a few games.” Some of these are the same people who are trying not to lose their homes, or who are working two or more jobs. They are planning grocery and clothing budgets and fretting over how to pay for bills and college educations. They’re paying off credit cards and student loans. They’re clipping coupons and deal hunting. While technology is no longer inaccessible and unfathomable to them the way it was in the IT-controlled era, it’s also not seen as the answer to every problem. Mainly because they have problems that technology is still failing to solve. Do you know what it’s like to apply for jobs right now, for example? It’s a nightmare. You browse through a decent-enough aggregator like , sign up for alerts and save the ones you like. But when you click through to apply, each company’s website has its own complex system requiring manual entry of everything you already have detailed on your resume and cover letter. Sometimes you can upload your resume and it can import some of the times, places and job titles — which it inevitably gets wrong. Other times you click “Next” over and over to correct mistakes, such as the previously unmet password requirements, or selecting the response you had missed from one of the dozens of drop-down boxes, or putting a date or your phone number in their preferred format. And then, when you finally get through, you’ll find that you’re only one page in out of a 10-page job application process. What hell! As if this is the only company where you’re trying to find work, and not you’ll probably apply to over the next few weeks. (Really, just because exists doesn’t mean everyone is using it — or even that, eventually, everyone will.) And hey, did you know that you can actually walk into grocery stores and walk out with free food, but the only people documenting what’s basically a hackable loophole in the couponing system is an assortment of who have the free time needed to sit at home and clip, print and stack and match coupons? I mean, that seems like something more people would get into if it weren’t so labor-intensive. Oh, and do you know how tough it is to truly evaluate nearby schools, caregivers, extracurriculars and activities, because it’s all Yelp reviews and flawed rating systems and word-of-mouth? (Nah, probably not — because your Yelp reviews are to die for, aren’t they?) And did you know that some of those debt-consolidation companies are actually trying to ? Do you have any idea how much gas costs today? Or mobile data? I’m thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, and know people who lost their homes, and who working two jobs that barely total the income of their previous one. I also know what it’s like to live on a fixed income, where a subscription-based anything is considered luxury. I know there are people who don’t think that $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000 or even hundreds of thousands of dollars is a lot of money, but I also know people who don’t even have a bank account. I know people whose entire lives could be changed with someone else’s annual shoe budget. These aren’t just the working poor, or until he can help you test your new iPhone app beta. They’re regular people. Friends, family, neighbors, employees, colleagues. (Maybe they can’t afford the rent where you live, so you haven’t met them yet?) Some are college graduates with years of experience. Some have industry-specific skills instead. Some are trying to balance raising children and working from home. You can call them if you want, but they’re really just people who are living lives accompanied by technology rather than obsessed by it. And they’ll care when you build something that matters to them. Another ex-Googler/Facebooker/Appler/Yahooer-backed mobile photo-sharing application is probably that something. But whatever, right? ? Why worry about , or ? Why solve boring problems like for employees? Or or ? Or help to ? Or ? Why ? Or providing to find ? Why ? Or even work on something harder like or ? It would be so much cooler to build the next . After all, you make anyway just by repurposing the same old social friending/following model for a particular niche (Facebook for X) or iterating on the feature set (but the photos disappear!). Look, it’s not that everyone has to solve the everyman or everywoman’s problem or, god forbid, change the world. It’s just that some of you and you choose not to. Plain vanilla tastes fine, and it’s so much harder to invent new flavors when the world you live in is so inexplicably struggle-free and creamy smooth that you have to invent solutions to the things that aren’t really problems, but just a function of being alive and human, employed and not starving to death. Things like . Or . Or taking a picture with a smartphone and sending it to someone. The best technology makes computing effortless and accessible to more people. It improves lives and pushes humanity forward the way the invention of the personal computer and web once did. And yeah, maybe sometimes it reminds us of things we read in sci-fi novels or seem to like magic. It’s not cliché to say that’s what we should aspire to. Technology transforms dated business models and makes things obsolete. It flattens hierarchies and gives people voices. It connects and corrupts and dissolves and erodes the past. At its best, it is a remarkable, world-changing thing. At its worst, it is just another thing. I . Maybe there only one guy capable of building flying cars ( , if we’re being specific). But I doubt it. And if you’re not building something akin to flying cars, then I’d settle for something practical.
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Google Rolls Out New “Views” Site For Geotagging And Sharing Your Android Photo Spheres
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Chris Velazco
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If you’ve got an Android device running version 4.2 or later, chances are you’ve tried capturing a photo sphere — one of those nifty little 360-degree panoramas that let you spin around to capture your surroundings until vertigo sets in. Instead of just letting those photo spheres languish on your phone or on your Google+ account, though, Google has thought up something for them. You know what I’m getting at (the headline was probably hint enough). Google has fired up a new Views page that lets users tie their photo spheres to specific locations for when static maps and satellite fly-bys just aren’t immersive enough. The process is simple enough: once you’re logged in to Google+ and mosey over to the Views page, you’re given the option to import all of the photo spheres stored in your Google+ account. Haven’t uploaded them to Google+ yet? That’s fair — you can upload them to Google Maps straight from the stock Android gallery app, too. Google Product Manager Evan Rapoport also confirmed that users who share those photo spheres will also be able to view them from their own Views user page, which looks a little something . As you’d expect, you’ve got easy access to a grid of all your photo spheres, but a single click lets you pull out into a wider map view to see where all of those spheres were captured. It’s all rather neat, but to be quite honest it’s about time Google managed to make the whole photo sphere experience meatier. Sure, they’re easy enough to shoot, and the end results are generally pretty impressive, but users were always fairly limited with what they could do with those photo spheres after the fact. At least now users who have dedicated themselves to creating awesome photo spheres (I’m sure there are more than a few people who fall into that category) have a centralized spot to show off some of their most impressive work. Of course, it’s not hard to see how Google benefits from this. As intrepid as Google’s crew of drivers and trekkers are, there’s only so much in terms of resources the company can devote to making the world’s varying locales accessible from a web browser. Now that it’s easier for folks to share their photo spheres, Google can now theoretically serve up on-the-ground views of any (human-accessible) location in the new Google Maps. I wouldn’t expect Google to get terribly far in that endeavor until Android 4.2’s adoption figures , but it’s certainly something to keep an eye out for.
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Rover, A “Dogbnb” Site, Raises $3.5M And Nabs Commercial Promotion From Petco
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Eliza Brooke
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, the Airbnb of dog sitting, has raised a $3.5 million funding round led by Petco. The pet specialty giant, now one of Rover’s largest investors, will be joining the site’s board of directors. The two are at work on commercial promotion of Rover across Petco’s lines of business. Rover CEO Aaron Easterly told us that this fundraising is more of an ancillary round than an official series. The important thing, he said, is the strategic relationship with a leading pet supplies retailer. “When we were in our early stages we talked with people at Petco. We thought we had very similar philosophies on how the pet business was evolving,” Easterly said. “We had similar values, so we agreed to stay in touch. We rekindled that conversation after our Series B, as we were a little more mature and had a lot of growth to point to.” Easterly said that the site’s biggest growth challenge and greatest opportunity is the 90 percent of dog owners that do not use commercial solutions for housing their dogs while they are away. Easterly derived this stat by looking at the existing market size in the American Pet Products Association National Pet Owner’s Survey and comparing it to an estimate of how big the market would be if all dog owners used a commercial service when they traveled. This is calculated by using Census data on households, the National Pet Owner’s Survey, and U.S. Travel Association. Most of this 90 percent of people don’t even think to look for a service like Rover, Easterly said, and instead turn to family and friends for dog sitting. It’s a visibility problem that Rover has thus far sought to rectify with mass-media campaigns in TV and radio, and that promotion by Petco could go a long way in alleviating. Although Rover faces competition from similar sites like , Easterly said that their true competitors are those family and friend dog sitters. Rover’s 150,000-person member base is relatively broad, but it does skew older than one might expect of a startup: Their biggest single demographic group is women aged 35-45. This is the group that sees itself as pet parents rather than pet owners and cares about whether their dog gets to sleep in a bed, Easterly said. These owners may be more likely to spend extra money on their pets, but at an average price of $30 a night, Rover is within most dog owners’ means. This is Petco’s first investment in an early-stage, offline company, Petco VP of Business Development Ted Root tells us. Working with Rover is an opportunity to grow the service side of their offerings, which already includes in-store grooming and vaccinations. “We believe that there’s rapid growth opportunity in certain slices of the service segment in the pet specialty arena,” Root says. “There are lots of mature services like grooming and things along those lines but boarding is highly fragmented… We see the opportunity to take advantage of a formalization of this super fragmented market where people have leaned on friends and family for a long time.” Rover specifically complements Petco’s Pooch Hotels, daycare and boarding locations where dogs can play with each other. Dog owners want variety in their overnight options, and Rover is helping Petco deliver that. The involvement with Rover also provides another online growth avenue to Petco, which is strong in its brick-and-mortar presence. The commercial evidence of the Petco partnership will become visible in the next few months, Easterly says, although he did not provide specifics on what that will look like beyond Petco offering Rover’s services to its customers. Although Petco will be its main focus in the coming months, Rover also plans to release its Android app soon, as it is currently only available for iPhone. The mobile apps are primarily focused on keeping pet owners in contact with their pooches while they are away, through photo sharing and text communication. Rover in Series B funding led by Foundry Group last February after closing a led by Madrona Venture Group in April 2012.
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Opera Proposes NEX Packaging Format For Browser Extensions, Hopes To Make It A Web Standard
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Frederic Lardinois
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today a proposal for , the Navigator Extension format, a new vendor-neutral browser extension packaging format that it hopes to turn into a future W3C standard for packaging cross-browser, add-on development. Currently, Chromium-based browsers use Google’s for delivering browser extensions. Opera, which recently switched to Chromium, says it developed NEX to “find a solution that would allow us to extend the Chromium CRX feature set without compromising the current ecosystem that has grown up around that format.” Because of this, NEX is basically a super-set of the CRX environment that developers are already using today. It supports a majority of the standard Chromium APIs for browser extensions, as well as Opera’s . By default, Opera will also continue to run many CRX-based extensions. Opera notes that its competitor Mozilla is currently driving the on normalizing the packaging and manifest format for browser add-ons, and the company clearly wants to play a more prominent role in this process. For users, Opera says, an open standard like NEX would allow them to switch browsers without being locked in to one specific vendor just because an extension they really need is only available on one browser. For developers, the company argues, this system would make their lives “easier and promotes shared innovation [that] continues to produce a healthy, competitive web ecosystem.” The company also hopes that this kind of work will “make engaging at a shared System Applications API level much more useful [for browser vendors] – since the outcome of such discussions would likely make the lives of web developers easier while developing browser add-ons in the future.”
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American Intern
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Billy Gallagher
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I live in the Milano building in Crescent Village in North San Jose. As Silicon Valley apartment complexes go, the . It’s got swimming pools, tennis courts, a fitness center, a gaming room, a 23-seat movie theater, and roughly 1,750 apartments spread over five buildings. Since I moved in last month, I have had loud parties, late-night hot-tubbing sessions, and generally involved myself in other, nefarious, un-neighborly behavior. I’ve even jaywalked. Hundreds of other Google interns live here, but my business card reigns supreme over theirs. I’ve checked. We Google interns are the young princes of the Valley. We earn hefty salaries, are shuttled between our private quarters in Crescent Village and the Google campus in lavish corporate buses, and are given free laundry services, gym memberships and dancing lessons. Don’t even get me started on the food at the Google cafes. But I digress — back to my Crescent Village home. My fellow interns and I frequently commandeer the hot tubs at night for parties, even in the middle of the night. Security is powerless to stop us. The neighbors frequently complain about the loud music and screams coming from my apartment late at night. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.
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Samsung Moves In On Apple’s Turf As Construction Starts On Its New Silicon Valley Headquarters
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Catherine Shu
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Samsung will break ground on its . Designed by architecture firm , the new campus is part of Samsung’s aggressive effort to build a more significant presence closer to rivals like Apple and Google. Due to be completed in 2015 at a cost of $300 million, the building will house 2,000 employees. When finished, the 10-story-tall building will stand alongside the eye-catching headquarters planned by other tech companies, including Apple’s and Facebook’s . Located at the intersection of North First and East Tasman Drive, Samsung’s headquarters is meant to help it carve out a more significant presence in Silicon Valley, where it plans to compete with other tech giants like Apple and Google for talent. In January, California governor Jerry Brown singled Samsung’s planned HQ in his State of the State speech, saying it “will place at least 2,500 people in high-skill, high-wage jobs.” Its new headquarters are also part of Samsung’s efforts to establish a reputation as a technology innovator by transforming the company’s culture and strategies, which previously meant that most of its tech and products were developed internally, by partnering with tech entrepreneurs. In addition to its flagship campus, Samsung has also on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, which houses its new $100 million early-stage-capital Catalyst Fund. The company also plans to launch a startup incubator in Palo Alto near Stanford University. In return for pumping money into Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem, Samsung hopes that founders and engineers will become more keen on working with the South Korean tech giant. Some of the deals Samsung has recently inked with U.S. startups include the and in a round led by Samsung Ventures. Before its expansion plans, Samsung’s footprint in Silicon Valley was relatively modest, with its U.S. semiconductor headquarters located in a non-descript office building on North First Street in San Jose. Its new building, which includes two 10-story towers, an “amenity pavilion” and parking garage, is meant to “encourage interaction among staff, invite the community on campus and attract employees in the highly competitive tech market,” .
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Facebook Slowly Making Home More Livable With Customizable Launcher Dock And Now Folders
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Josh Constine
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When Facebook Home launched, its launcher was awful. No dock, no folders, no widgets — basically none of the personalization Androiders know and love. Even if they wanted their friends to come first, few were willing to sacrifice their customized home screen. But with last month’s new favorites dock and , Home’s biggest cracks are getting patched. The problem is that Home , rather than seeking to augment it. Most obviously, it buries your apps two taps deep. First you have to open its full-screen news feed on the lock screen called Cover Feed, and then use a gesture to bring up the launcher. The only customization allowed of the launcher was which apps sat on your primary home screen. That’s still a bit messy, and the rest of your apps would be listed out in a redundant and tough-to-navigate secondary screen you had to scroll down. If you frequently wanted to access a variety of apps beyond Facebook, it was quite a hassle. There was no Dock or folders to help organize your apps, and no widgets to give you the info trapped inside them at a glance. As I wrote, some of the team who users, since Apple’s phones are very popular among employees of the social network. That meant they didn’t necessarily realize how important widgets were to people, and may have discounted the annoyance of reorganizing their home screen from scratch since they expected some friction when switching platforms. But for long-time Android users, Home overwriting their personalized home screen and leaving them with no way to reconstruct it was a deal breaker. Home launched in April and by a month later, Facebook had read enough 1-star reviews to know this wasn’t acceptable. Slow downloads and almost non-existent sales of the HTC First that comes pre-loaded with Home showed that a terrible launcher was weighing down more popular features like Cover Feed and Chat Heads. In May, it announced it was working on Dock, a persistently visible tray of your favorite apps that sits on the bottom of your launcher, just like on iOS. A month later it launched so you could at least always find your email, phone or text messages button. With today’s update, when you drag apps on top of each other, they create a folder you can name. Many iOS and Android users employ folders to keep their home screens manageable and tidy even if they’ve downloaded dozens of apps. You might put all your news reading, restaurant finding, or puzzle gaming apps in the categorized folders. That makes it a lot quicker to find a certain app than trying to recognize it amidst a sea of icons or using search to pull it up. Facebook now says it’s working on widget support — another sacrifice Home users wouldn’t have to make. It’s also trying to improve the NUX — the new user experience of Home. Right now it’s quite confusing, especially for tech novices and Android virgins. With NUX, dock, folders, and widgets worked out, it might finally be a fair fight between Home and more traditional versions of Android. Facebook would sure like to see the usage rates go up considering how long it’s worked on its “ system”. [ : Facebook Home does properly import your folders from your non-Home Android homescreen when you first install it. Originally this article stated that Home doesn’t import folders as it doesn’t import them when you reactivate Home, but in fact it does for new users, and that’s what’s important. That means Home is finally becoming a layer over the top of your existing Android operating system, rather than a replacement for it. Because users no longer have to go through the work of reconfiguring their folders, they might now be more likely to try Home.] Home’s appeal is already limited to serious social networkers. To stand a chance, it needs to be purely additive, . Once it’s no longer hampered by objective technical shortcomings, people will be able to make a unbiased decision about whether they want to organize their world around people or apps.
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Amidst Few Exits, “Dabbling” Investors And Dearth Of Seed Capital, A Growing Digital Health Market Turns To Crowdfunding
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Rip Empson
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Over the last few years, digital health has emerged as a market rife with opportunity, and both startups and investors are beginning to take notice. doubled from 2009 to 2011, for example, and that growth continued to accelerate throughout much of 2012. But fast forward to today, and, while the space continues to move forward and investors remain optimistic, the digital health narrative is no longer quite so black-and-white. This week, San Francisco-based startup accelerator Rock Health on the state of the industry, and, while digital health funding rose 12 percent in the first half of 2013, for the first time, the market showed signs that its growth is beginning to slow. Though Rock Health’s reports (and data) are by no means complete, they do give an increasingly accurate look at trends evolving within digital health, especially among startup investors. To break it down: For the first six months of 2013, the report found that 90 digital health startups received a total of $849 million in funding, representing a 12 percent increase in the amount of capital invested and a 25 percent increase in deal volume compared to the same period last year. However, while these numbers appear to indicate that growth continues unabated, compared to the market’s torrid growth rate (of 73 percent) over the same period last year, it appears that the flow of capital into digital health has actually begun to decelerate. That being said, there is a silver lining given that this deceleration is somewhat reflective of what’s going on across the map. For instance, during the first quarter, venture investments across all sectors dropped 6 percent compared to the same period last year, and, more locally, venture funding in traditional healthcare continues to drop. Medical device funding and biotech, for example, fell by 29 percent and 2 percent, respectively. So, ultimately, while digital health may be entering a period of deceleration, there’s still reason to be optimistic, and as we move forward, an increasing share of the venture capital that has been reserved for traditional healthcare investments could begin to move into digital health. What’s more, Rock Health found that investors have done more deals in digital health this year than in 2012, and the report points to an increasing awareness among investors of the market opportunities beginning to emerge in the digital health market. , for example, that venture firms are slowly beginning to increase the number of partners dedicated to investing in digital health and that both federal and academic activity have begun to increase as well. Overall, the report found that 146 investors participated in one or two deals in 2013, a healthy uptick from the 92 firms that invested in digital health over the same period last year. What’s more, a handful of firms became particular active in the market this year, with Social+Capital Partnership leading the way among all firms with five digital health investments, followed closely by Norwest Venture Partners. On the other hand, like any emerging and active space, while investors are beginning to pay attention, they’re still doing more dabbling than actual investing. Rock Health co-founder Halle Tecco attributes this to the fact that the prevailing perception among investors seems to be that it’s still a little too early to be making any major commitments to digital health. It’s much the same story that one finds in the education technology space as well. What’s more, for investor to begin making major commitments en masse, digital health startups are going to need to demonstrate more differentiation going forward. While startups have been flooding into the space over the last few years, there are a lot of me-too and copycat businesses out there, and we haven’t yet seen the big results that have been promised in all the hoopla over digital health’s potential. To that point, a few big exits would go a long way to encouraging investors that are still sitting on the fence that it’s time to get into the game, but thus far, those head-turning exits are still absent. Rock Health’s report also identifies another important (and telling trend) in digital health: While an increasing number of startups matured to series C-level deals during the first half of the year, digital health investment continues to skew towards later-stage deals. And, while wealthy individuals have begun to back health startups with increasing frequency, experienced, veteran angels investors remain in short supply. “While the tech sector has companies like Google, Facebook and eBay/PayPal, which have spun off dozens of active angel investors, we still haven’t seen ‘the Facebook of digital health,'” Tecco tells us. The emergence of a handful of key players in the market — or a few billion-dollar success stories — would go a long way towards creating “an active angel pool that could help support the next generation of entrepreneurs” and offer exit opportunities to fledgling startups, she says. Early employees and executives at the biggest tech companies have gone on to become active angel investors in related verticals, contributing to the overall success of their respective markets. As a result, it seems that, not until the first generation digital health startups — more mature and well-capitalized players like Practice Fusion or Castlight, for example — go public or get acquired for big dollars, will we see that new generation of angel investors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the dearth of seed and angel investors in digital health, Rock Health found that startups have increasingly begun to turn to alternative sources of capital, like crowdfunding platforms. For entrepreneurs, especially those building companies with hardware components, crowdfunding is becoming an attractive option, the report explains, with 38 digital health campaigns having raised over $4.5 million across Indiegogo, Kickstarter, Medstartr and Fundable in 2013. Indiegogo, for example, has seen the number of health-related campaigns skyrocket by 2,279 percent in 2013, while AngelList identified a 272 percent increase in the number of health startup profiles created on its platform this year. Furthermore, when one considers the uptick in general health-related campaigns, the move towards crowdfunding increasingly appears to be an industry-wide trend. Both for digital health startups and for people turning to crowdfunding platforms to help pay medical bills or cover the cost of surgery, for example. The majority of general crowdfunding platforms, like Rally.org, Fundly and GoFundMe, to name a few, have recently seen health and medical fundraisers become their fastest-growing category. , an online fundraising platform for medical bills, recently surpassed $50 million in medical contributions on its platform, 70 percent of which came in the last 12 months. Given how quickly the space has begun to move forward, says co-founder Ethan Austin, the company expects to see that figure increase to $120 million over the next year. What’s more, when TechCrunch recently asked co-founder James Beshara if the “group-funding” platform had been seeing similar data, he told us that health and medical “has definitely been one of [Crowdtilt’s] fastest-growing categories.” In November, these campaigns represented 3 percent of the total dollars raised on the crowdfunding platform and, by April, they had increased to 16 percent of total dollars, Beshara says. That being said, thus far, it seems that the majority of health-related crowdfunding activity has been taking place on general crowdfunding sites, and not necessarily on health-specific platforms. However, while the class of dedicated crowdfunding portals remains fairly small, its numbers are growing. As they begin to proliferate and inevitably help to mint a few winners, there’s no doubt that this will begin to encourage more angel investors and seed-stage funds to jump on the digital health bandwagon. For now, crowdfunding portals seem to be carrying the weight, but over time, that may change, as more investors begin to take a cue from veterans like Esther Dyson. For more, check out Rock Health’s full mid-year report in slide form below: [slideshare id=23728823&doc=digitalhealthfundingmidyearupdate2013-130701041603-phpapp02w=640&h=480]
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More Nokia Lumia 1020 Hardware And Camera Details Surface Ahead Of Official Launch
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Chris Velazco
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In case you’re somehow immune to all of Nokia’s incessant teasing, the company’s going to unveil a shiny new smartphone on Thursday in hopes that a tremendous camera will endear the thing to the masses. The folks at got their collective hands on a new render of the forthcoming flagship — which is apparently going to be called the Lumia 1020 — along with some juicy tidbits about what else Nokia’s camera-crazy device has going for it. To briefly run through the laundry list, Nokia’s new Windows Phone will reportedly pack 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage (alas, there’s no microSD slot here) and NFC. Of course, the real moneymaker is the device’s camera, or so Nokia hopes. It’s no secret that the 1020 will sport a whopping 41-megapixel rear camera sensor, but WPCentral’s Daniel Rubino has shed a bit more light on how the device will handle those images. Should his intel hold true (and I’m willing to bet it does), the 1080 “takes the image in a 32MP and 5MP at the same time in 16:9.” Also onboard is an f/2.2 lens, which just so happens to match EXIF data from an image apparently posted from the device by . And for you strident mobile camera nerds, the 1020 is said to sport optical image stabilization, a feature that didn’t even make it into the phone’s ambitious (and chubby) ancestor. Smartphone manufacturers are constantly latching onto anything they think will afford them an advantage against the other guys, and considering the absolutely stupid popularity of mobile photo sharing, engineering a top-flight camera for a phone is perhaps par for the course. What’s interesting is to look at just how these companies go about their business in this regard. I’ve already ranted a bit about this and the issue of diminishing returns that could stymie it, but Nokia’s approach stands in stark contrast to, say, Samsung’s. Samsung was content to cobble together a cameraphone that was more camera than phone, a move that has the potential to seriously limit the S4 Zoom’s mass-market appeal. I mean really, who (save for the most ardent mobile photogs) would walk into a store and purchase a phone with a tumor-like camera pod protruding from its back? But a staggeringly good camera in a package that doesn’t look like a misguided point-and-shoot? At first blush, that certainly seems like the smarter way to go. Then again, Nokia simply has to play it smart — they don’t really have the sort of resources to throw lots of things at walls in the hope that something sticks the way Samsung often does. And, as crappy as it is, thought engineering and envelope pushing aren’t always enough to make a device a financial success. As always, Nokia is gambling here — it hopes the promise of a game-changing camera is enough to load the die, and we’ll soon see if the company is right.
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With Declining Nook Sales, B&N Says Lynch Out As CEO, Huseby Steps Up, Big Strategic Review Planned
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Ingrid Lunden
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Looks like things at Barnes & Noble will get a bit worse before they have a chance of getting better. The bookseller has just that William Lynch has resigned as CEO, effective immediately, as the company commences “reviewing its current strategic plan.” No details yet on what the review will entail: B&N says it “will provide an update when appropriate.” Lynch is getting replaced, effectively, by Michael P. Huseby, who had been the CFO and now has been appointed Chief Executive Officer of NOOK Media LLC and President of Barnes & Noble, Inc. Meanwhile, Max J. Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble College, will continue to lead education, reporting to Huseby. Huseby and Mitchell Klipper, Chief Executive Officer of the Barnes & Noble Retail Group, will report directly to Leonard Riggio, Executive Chairman of Barnes & Noble, Inc. Given the company’s focus now on simply turning around what they have in front of them, it seems not too surprising that they’ve put a financial man effectively at the helm of the company. (Huseby joined a , and prior to that he had been CFO at pay-TV provider Cablevision.) Still, it points to a company not currently set on being visionary, and instead hunkering down to business. And it stands as a contrast to 2010, when . Coming from leading B&N’s web division, he was seen as a signal of how B&N wanted to jump into a digital future with two feet. Jump B&N did, but maybe with a bit more belly flop than was intended. Its NOOK e-readers never managed to beat back competition from the ever-strong Amazon, and the move into NOOK tablets, based on Android, never quite hit the mark, either — a position that only seemed to get worse over time. B&N’s last quarter saw the company report a , more than double the loss in the quarter a year before. The NOOK division specifically, the thing on which B&N has pinned its future, made only $108 million in revenue in that period, a 34% drop from a year ago. Competition from Amazon and its Kindle products, as well as a host of other e-reader and tablet makers, have weighed down on the company and turned that splash into a thud. The last quarter’s results signalled something new: B&N used its earnings to announce a drastic change in direction for the NOOK device business, by opening up the brand to tablet OEMs. It’s not the only change the company has made. In May, B&N . Seen as another sign of retrenchment, now moves like these look to be possibly just the first steps in what the company decides to do to try to turn things around. Where will this ultimately go? Don’t forget that we heard a while back that , so a sale to someone, somewhere, could be in the wings. Barnes & Noble owns 78% of the tablet and e-reader division, with Pearson and Microsoft the other shareholders. Other appointments announced today include Allen Lindstrom, who had been VP and the Company’s Corporate Controller, taking over the CFO role of of Barnes & Noble Inc, and Kanuj Malhotra, VP of Corporate Development, now CFO of NOOK Media LLC.
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TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise
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Colleen Taylor
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, the San Francisco startup that runs a marketplace for outsourcing errands and temporary work projects, has laid off a number of staffers as part of a larger restructuring, TechCrunch has learned. Reached via email, TaskRabbit founder and CEO confirmed that layoffs have taken place, though she declined to provide specific numbers of how many were let go “out of respect for those team members who were affected.” She explained the situation thusly: “We realigned the company to support our key business opportunities, namely mobile, geographic expansion, business services and our marketplace operations. We’re getting leaner in certain areas and expanding in others. For example, this week we brought on Ian Arthurs as VP of Marketplace Operations and are actively searching for a VP of Product. “I want to emphasize that TaskRabbit’s business is healthy and our growth remains strong. Since May of 2011, we have 11x’ed our monthly revenue and task posting volume and several of our markets are consistently experiencing thirty percent month-over-month growth.” One person who was laid off said the announcement was made on Monday of last week, and that 13 people — 20 percent of the 65-person headcount that — were let go with one month’s severance. In addition, the person said that TaskRabbit’s remaining employees were offered the option to leave on their own accord and receive the same one month severance package. However, a TaskRabbit representative said that those details are “not accurate,” but declined to be more specific or disclose the company’s current headcount. According to the former employee, the move wasn’t entirely surprising, since Busque said at the beginning of this quarter that there would have to be changes unless growth increased significantly. Apparently TaskRabbit sent an email to all the non-laid off employees on Sunday night telling them that there would be a company strategy meeting from 1pm to 7pm, and that they shouldn’t come into the office before then. So when everyone else showed up on Monday morning, they were alone in the office to receive the bad news. TaskRabbit, which was founded in 2008, has taken on . The company started as a purely consumer-focused product to let regular people outsource their odd jobs and tasks to others, but it has indeed been increasing its focus on the enterprise space in recent months. Earlier this year TaskRabbit debuted its “ ” portal to help businesses hire short-term workers for events such as South By Southwest, and in May it with services to help cover other types of temp employment. TaskRabbit is one of several venture-backed startups in its space that has shifted gears in one way or another of late. Zaarly, which as a “reverse Craigslist” for outsourcing odd jobs to neighbors, has since to focus on virtual local storefronts; Exec, which as a service for hiring people online to run errands at a flat hourly rate, has for its flagship business and directed a large part of its focus onto house cleaning services.
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Why Twitter Finally Killed The “Auto Follow” For Good
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Sarah Perez
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Fresh on the heels of a spam report that painted Twitter , the social network has finally taken steps to crack down on one of the tools often used by those attempting to game its service: the Auto Follow. In Twitter’s parlance, an auto follow refers to an immediate and programmatic means of following another user back after they follow you. There’s an argument to be made on both sides of this issue. On the one hand, a portion of Twitter’s user base took advantage of auto-following in order to rapidly, and therefore inauthentically, raise their profile and their seeming popularity on Twitter in order to give themselves an air of trustworthiness they would otherwise lack. There are a number of places where you can find lists of auto-following Twitter accounts, which a new Twitter user could follow to quickly build up their “fan base.” (For example and .) In addition, several third-party applications previously offered Auto Follow as a service, as it was permitted until late last week through the Twitter API, though it was no longer a feature available directly on Twitter itself. One such service, , even had its own hashtag (#TeamFollowBack) whose junk tweets you may have spotted in your own Twitter stream from time to time. It claims to have handled over 334,000,000 Twitter followers to date. Others, like , for example, offer a suite of tools that help Twitter users better manage their accounts, of which Auto Follow was only one option. SocialOomph has since had to . As of today, users will have to manually vet new followers in order to engage with them through other means, including DMs (direct messages) and Auto DMs, the latter of which was oddly disallowed via Twitter’s API changes, though often more obnoxious to recipients due to their overly solicitous or spammy nature. “Our system still automatically applies certain user-defined criteria to new followers and only presents those new followers that the user would want to follow-back for manual approval,” explained Patricia Morris on behalf of SocialOomph (via email). “The ‘undesirable’ new followers are automatically excluded, and that automated exclusion is not prohibited by Twitter’s rules.” She also referred to the change as “very shoddy and amateurish behavior of Twitter to spring this rule change as a surprise on developers with absolutely no prior warning or road map.” However, that seems par for the course for Twitter, which routinely sidelines third-party Twitter developers , . Twitter explained the decision to end the Auto Follow as being in the best interest of its users. As noted by a member of Twitter’s Platform Operations team in the comments section of the just before the July 4 holiday in the U.S., accounts which engage in the immediate follow-back may find themselves with noisy timelines. Twitter’s best practices documentation was updated to explain that consequences for abuse going forward will result in the suspension of accounts and applications. Also banned per are the “get followers fast” applications and services. These, too, recently an estimated multi-million-dollar industry. In the past, there was suspicion that Mitt Romney’s campaign had bought fake followers when his follower count . This practice, however, has been a common means of establishing a new, high-profile account’s worthiness and authenticity, something Twitter almost necessitated due to its otherwise opaque procedures for having a Twitter account “verified” (i.e. given a seal that indicates the person is who they claim to be). The flip side of the argument against automation is that there are a number of accounts on Twitter that use the service differently than the average user. For example, businesses and brands that want to communicate, market to, or provide support to their customers would often auto-follow their followers so they could better communicate with them privately through direct messages. This was especially important when a customer wanted to provide the business with personal information like their name, address, phone or email. Though in theory, an immediate return follow by a business may prompt the consumer to engage with a company through a DM, in practice, users tend to simply tweet their questions and frustrations (sometimes not even referencing the business’s Twitter handle) into the air, and then are either surprised by a reply or ignored by the business in question. On the occasion a connection is actually made, the business’s rep still generally has to prompt the user to follow them so they can DM back and forth. This behavior really isn’t impacted by Twitter’s new rules. According to FriendOrFollow founder Dusty Reagan, the Auto Follow has been on shaky ground ever since . (Yes, it used to be native!) “They also made it clear early-on that automated unfollowing was a risky endeavor. I always kind of felt that auto-follow-back would eventually be against Twitter’s terms of service, so we never included it as a feature in Friend or Follow,” he says. The practice remained acceptable for some time as high-profile accounts like @britneyspears would attempt to follow all their fans back. But as Twitter grew in size — today it has over 200 million monthly actives — it has become more and more uncommon. Reagan points out that even some of the most heavily followed accounts . While the Auto Follow may have become unfashionable and unsustainable, at the end of the day, the fact that Twitter decided to finally switch off the feature via API is also, to some extent, an admission that its previous spam reporting system has failed. Case in point, one commenter on the Twitter blog even suggested a crowdsourced model where users can mark Twitter accounts as being spam as an alternative to switching off Auto Follow — apparently not realizing that the feature has . Unfortunately for Twitter, the API changes alone may not be enough to squash spammer activity entirely. Already, this unsavory group has proven itself to have a level of sophistication that at times . Twitter’s crackdown is merely a Band-Aid on the larger problem with the network’s design: that its users have been taught to value an easily gameable metric like follower count as one of a success, instead of focusing on the quality of a user’s content. That’s not a problem unique to Twitter, of course — it seems to be the nature of social media in general, sadly.
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A Month After Going International, Social Commerce Platform Fancy Raises $53 Million
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Eliza Brooke
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, the shoppable rival to Pinterest, is said to have raised $53 million from investors, bringing the company valuation to $600 million, Bloomberg . The July 3 disclosing the funding round did not name the full roster of investors. A Bloomberg source “familiar with the matter” said the backers include American Express, Len Blavatnik, and Will Smith. AmEx President Edward Gilligan, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Kering chairman Francois-Henri Pinault, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are listed on the filing. COO Michael Silverman declined to comment to TechCrunch on how the company will be putting this investment to use, but it could have something to do with the announcement last month that Fancy would begin shipping worldwide. The international expansion was the result of demand from non-US users, who account for just under half of all users, Silverman told TechCrunch last month. As we , Fancy does face tough competition in the U.S. from sites like Polyvore and Wanelo, which rank well above it on the iPhone app store. Moving internationally could lower the field of competitors. Often compared to Pinterest for its image sharing format, Fancy has been working on the idea of social commerce since it directly on the site in February. Another, presumably smaller part of the Fancy business model is sample subscriptions. The company started selling its Birchbox-like “Fancy Boxes” in September 2012 and in February. Fancy could be looking to expand this further, but it seems secondary to the international commerce move at this point. Fancy told TechCrunch this morning that they are now seeing about $100,000 per day in sales. They are also claiming nearly 8 million registered users and over 12 million unique visitors across all platforms last month. We’ll be watching to see where these numbers go in the months following Fancy’s internationalization, especially if this latest investment round has anything to do with it.
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Jelly Bean Tips Past Majority Adoption Among Android Users With 37.9% Share
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Darrell Etherington
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Google updated its , and for the first time Jelly Bean has pulled ahead as the most-used operating system. That’s probably been helped by a number of OEMs pushing out Jelly Bean updates to their handsets recently, including the AT&T Galaxy S2. Gingerbread is still a close second, however, indicating a lot of older devices are still in use. Google provides monthly updates on OS version share and this one takes into account data collected (based on Google Play store usage) over a two-week period ending today, July 8. Jelly Bean has been approaching a majority share, but this is the first time it has passed it, thanks to a 32.3 percent share for versions 4.1.X, and a 5.4 percent share for versions 4.2.X. Ice Cream Sandwich, which was sandwiched between Gingerbread and Jelly Bean, is less popular than both with the next biggest chunk of 23.3 percent. Jelly Bean is the most current version of the Android mobile OS, so this is good news both for developers and for Google. OS updates almost always bring new features for developers, but developers need the OS to actually be used by a large number of users before they can adopt those new features, and adopting those new features is what Google and other mobile platform operators will attract and keep new users. Fragmentation is often cited as a big problem for Android, and Google has taken steps to address that, including expanding its Nexus program to include more devices. Both Samsung and HTC now offer their flagship handsets (the Galaxy S4 and HTC One) via Google’s own Play store, featuring “Google Edition” monikers that grant them updates in time with Google’s own Nexus line of devices, which is to say as soon as they become available. That, combined with ongoing efforts to push updates out faster to eligible hardware via carriers, is helping Google make progress in terms of getting people on newer versions of the OS faster. I’d still prefer that every Android phone had the option to change it to a “Google Edition” quickly and easily, without expert technical knowledge, but maybe that day’s not too far off, if Google really wants to ramp up the speed of adoption of new OS versions.
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Hasbro Takes A 70% Stake In Mobile Game Maker Backflip Studios For $112M
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Toy maker Hasbro to take a 70 percent stake in Boulder, Colorado’s Backflip Studios, the mobile game maker behind Dragonvale, NinJump and Paper Toss. The company was started back in 2009 and never took any outside funding. Their initial games were super-simple like Paper Toss, where players flip a wad of paper into a trash can. But they later got into tower defense games and then eventually into casual simulation games with Dragonvale, where players take care of and raise pet dragons. They’ve seen about 300 million downloads so far and Dragonvale has consistently ranked in the top 20 highest-grossing games on iOS in the U.S. But Backflip may also have been spending quite a bit on marketing, reducing its profit margins as Hasbro said in a statement that the deal will be “neutral to slightly accretive” to its financial earnings this year. With the deal, Backflip will continue making their own games, and then they’ll also publish games using Hasbro’s brands, which include Monopoly, Transformers, My Little Pony and Magic: The Gathering. Backflip has already done work with outside IP (intellectual property) before when they released Army of Darkness Defense. I had heard for years that Backflip had explored various acquisition and funding opportunities over the years, but one didn’t come to fruition until this year. As I’ve written before, there’s are will to pay and what independent or venture-backed gaming companies are willing to sell for in this market. The deal values company at $160 million, which is another bellwether for the valuations in the industry. One of the top, top-grossing iOS gaming companies in the entire world, Supercell, in its last funding round after they made $179 million alone in the first quarter. The last few big deals in this space in Western markets were about a year ago with for $210 million and
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Samsung Said To Launch Four Versions Of The Galaxy Note III By The End Of The Year
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Chris Velazco
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Talk about trying to cover bases. Korean news outlet reports that Samsung’s Galaxy Note III isn’t going to be an only child when it launches later this year — instead, it will be joined by up to three siblings that will apparently debut at the same time. The Google translation makes it bit tricky to discern what’s going on, but ETNews claims that while the four devices will feature the same applications, processors, and hardware platforms, they’ll sport different configurations of displays, cameras, and cases in a bid to appeal to certain sorts of computers. As the report goes, the most premium of these Note IIIs will feature a flexible display and a metal chassis, components that won’t appear in the more cost-conscious variants meant for different markets. What’s more, the size of the display will vary slightly between those different versions — they’ll reportedly range between 5.68 and 5.7 inches. At this stage though, the Note III itself is still a wild card — techies and pundits expect Samsung to officially reveal the device in Berlin like it did . Earlier rumors also alleged that the Note III would have y (which doesn’t jibe with this new report) — either way the device will definitely strain some pockets, but thankfully not as much as Sony’s gargantuan 6.4-inch Xperia Z Ultra. Rounding out the purported spec list is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.3GHz and 3GB of RAM, which would propel the phone to the top of the heap in terms of horsepower (though LG’s Optimus G2 may be right up there with it). As always, you should take all this with a hefty grain of salt, but this is nothing if not a well-worn strategy for Samsung — the company has made a habit of crafting what they imagine will be a popular new smartphone, and then pushing out spin-offs based on that original design meant to appeal to different niches. We saw it with the Galaxy S III and its little brother the S III Mini, and Samsung saw fit to expand the Galaxy S4 family in a big way with three curious variants revealed over the past few months. So far the Note series of phablets haven’t been subjected to Samsung’s desire to endlessly tinker, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see if that wasn’t the case for very much longer.
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Play With An MIT Tool That Visualizes How The NSA Can Map Your Relationships
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The brainiacs at MIT created a cool visualization program to map how the National Security Agency can understand your relationships based on who you contact via email and how often. While we still don’t know whether the NSA is collecting the content of phone calls and Internet activity, and that the government broadly mines so-called “meta-data” about whom users interact with. Readers can link their Gmail accounts to MIT’s “Immersion” tool . There are two immediate pieces of information that a stranger could learn from a map of email relationships: 1. The NSA could identify teams and its leaders. In my map, TechCrunch editors Eric Eldon and Alexia Tsotsis have a giant presence, surrounded with an interconnected web of our team. 2. Big nodes without any linkages reveal relationships that are best kept hidden. I have some sources that I only email directly. The fact that they never interact with anyone else is suspicious. These nodes are a blackmail goldmine: a mistress, a doctor, or a drug dealer. There has been over than the content of emails, and this new tool drives the point home in a very personal way. [ ] [tweet https://twitter.com/FISA_Court/status/354045655662067712] –The IRS accidently published tens of thousands of Social Security numbers. They have since been removed. –“It seems that when the IRS went to upload a bunch of records on the nonprofit industry, some unfortunate soul simply forgot to redact the thousands of identifying numbers. ” [ ] –Despite Germany’s freakout over NSA psying, whistleblower Edward Snowden claims that Germany is spying on citizens, too. –“They are in bed with the Germans, just like with most other Western states,” he told Germany’s Der Spiegel. [ ] –Pentagon Paper’s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg penned an OpEd in the arguing that Snowden was right to flee the country. — “But Snowden’s contribution to the noble cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution is in his documents. It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives — still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or his living the rest of his life in prison.” When news reports starting pouring in about Asiana Flight 214’s crash landing into SFO, local station KTVU reported that the plan had flipped over, which was kind of ridiculous given other reports. They issued this explanation via Twitter. [tweet https://twitter.com/KTVU/status/353600377096118273]
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Lightspeed Ventures’ Bipul Sinha
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Leena Rao
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This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Lightspeed Ventures’ Partner 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. Sinha, who focuses on investments in cloud services, and infrastructure and social utilities/apps, has backed Nutanix, PernixData, Bromium, and Peel. His past investments include Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn) and LiveProfile (acquired by RIM). Previously, Sinha worked at Blumberg Capital where he led investments in data center software infrastructure and internet. He also worked in investment banking at Banc of America and was Director of database and middleware products with Oracle. Since Sinha makes investments in both consumer and enterprise companies, we’re curious what unique factors he takes into account between the two sectors. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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With Today’s Updates, Twitter Apps Finally Sync The ‘Read’ Status Of Your Direct Messages
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Anthony Ha
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Twitter updates to its Android, iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps today, as well as its desktop and mobile websites, plus TweetDeck. The main improvement isn’t a huge change, but it does eliminate one of the most annoying aspects of the apps — namely, the fact that they couldn’t tell if you had read a Direct Message on a different device or app. In other words, if you read a direct message on Twitter for Mac (for example), then opened up Twitter for iPhone, the DM would still show up as unread. I don’t think it ruined the Twitter experience for anyone, but even for someone like me, who doesn’t get too many DMs and gave up on the “inbox zero” instinct years ago, seeing those read-yet-unread messages could be pretty exasperating. Thanks to today’s updates Twitter says that issue is going away — though you’ll need to make sure you have the latest version of whatever apps you’re using in order for the changes to take effect. I tried it out myself, and seeing Twitter accurately reflect my reading behavior made me pretty happy. In addition, Twitter says its mobile apps have an improved search experience, with full bios when you search for people, and a “similar accounts” preview. And the iPhone version includes a new “tweet composer” (shown above) that allows you to reply to a tweet without jumping to a new window (so you can see the context for your reply as you type it). It’s also supposed to include a new “people” button in the navigation bar, though I’m not actually seeing that one yet.
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Google And Make Magazine Beat The Classroom With Virtual Science Camp For Teens
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Josh Constine
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Science class is about to look a lot more boring. One million kids logged on to Maker Camp last summer, so today Google and Make Magazine (affiliated with Maker Faire) the second year of its , which teaches teens to build, hack and explore. The six-week program on Google+ includes virtual field trips to NASA, CERN, and Disney Imagineering plus the opportunity to make tensile strength towers, glowing candy and potato canons. Each day kids join counselors on a new project or field trip and use Google Hangouts to get advice and share their experiences. Campers can join from home on their desktops and via mobile, and — new this year — they can visit a local Make Camp affiliate site, such as a library, where they can congregate in person. Google hopes the campers will share photos and videos of their creations on its social network . Despite Google’s recent real-world hardware endeavors like self-driving cars and Google Glass, its roots are in the intangible world of ones and zeros. So it partnered with Make magazine, leaders of the maker movement that encourages do-it-yourself science and art projects. Maker’s Bay Area event saw 120,000 attendees in 2013, and Make magazine has a readership of 300,000. Dale Dougherty, founder of Maker Faire and Make Magazine, explains that the virtual summer camp “isn’t a textbook. It’s not like ‘let’s learn about velocity.’ It’s ‘let’s build cars and rockets and figure out what makes them go faster.’ We’re trying to figure out a set of experiences that gets you interested in science.” At the kickoff event at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, I watched a few young campers race boats they built from two-liter soda bottles. As they learned fluid dynamics and rotor technology through trial and error, the smiles on their faces illuminated the potential for a more participatory approach to science education.
One camper, Isaac, told me he decided to join the program after creating a Tesla coil as part of a young makers club. When I asked why he wanted to attend Maker Camp he explained that “Otherwise, I’d probably just be sitting around playing video games.” Not designing video games, not building a tree house. Just sitting around. And that’s a problem. Right now, schools are doing kids a disservice. Science is portrayed as a mixture of theory and memorization. Students do “labs”, but they’re often just following heavily scripted sets of instructions rather than testing their own hypotheses. That’s a shame, because the real scientific process is a lot more fun, and those foundational experiences with tinkering can turn kids into serious engineers down the road. Dougherty tells me the whole point of Maker Camp is “to see yourself as a producer, a creator, and think of science as something you get to do things with. It starts with silly stuff but grows into more meaningful things. Science is changing the world around us and we’re either part of it or subject to it. I want to infect kids with the kind of gene that has them saying ‘I want to get my hands on this.” That’s much different from what Isaac tells me his science class is like. “All the testing. I don’t know how useful it is.”
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Home Remodeling Platform Houzz Adds Reality Check To Remodeling Dreams, Launches Cost Database For Renovation Projects
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Frederic Lardinois
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If you need a bout of house envy, there’s no better place to go than , the increasingly popular platform for finding ideas for your home remodeling projects and the professional that can realize them. Today, however, the service is adding a bit of a reality check to these dreams. The company, which currently sees 14 million users every month, recently surveyed 100,000 homeowners in the U.S. about their projects. It’s now and in its mobile apps to give homeowners a better idea of what remodeling projects in their local areas typically cost. For example, the tools show homeowners what a kitchen or media room remodel costs in their area. Besides the average, which wouldn’t be all that useful, it also highlights the stats for the lower, middle and top third. Using its existing database, Houzz can also draw upon its huge database of envy-inducing photographs and prices for specific items. This way, for example, you can see what a certain kind of countertop will do to your budget, as well as the pros and cons of the different options, thanks to the growing number of how-to and style guides on the service. For the time being, this tool is only available on the . It’s not available through its , but the company tells me that’s coming soon. The data the company uses to power this tool, as Houzz co-founder Alon Cohen told me last week, is based on the largest survey ever done on remodeling activity. The company, he said, decided to give this information back to the community. Cohen believes it will help homeowners budget their projects. Currently, the survey shows, half of the homeowners who start these kinds of projects don’t actually set a budget or go over budget. In addition, the tool should also help the company’s network of more than 230,000 professionals get a better idea of what they can charge and show homeowners how their rates compare to the average. Houzz plans to update the data over time.
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Greg Kumparak
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After 9 Months, The Softbank-Sprint Merger Will Be A Done Deal On July 10
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Jordan Crook
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It’s been nine months since we first of , and the story is finally coming to a close. Japanese mobile carrier that it expects the deal to close on Wednesday, July 10th after nine months of various obstacles. The FCC approved the merger on July 5th. Here’s the official wording: SoftBank Corp. will invest approximately USD 21.6 billion (approximately JPY 1.8 trillion*) in Sprint Nextel Corporation and currently anticipates consummating the transaction on July 10, 2013 (EDT). This comes after a recent for a whopping $25.5 billion, which would have effectively stolen Sprint right from under Softbank’s nose (a nose, I might remind you, worth $20 billion). Dish threw its hat in the ring in April, long after Softbank and Sprint confirmed their betrothal, at a time when networks were consolidating all over the place. Dish, at the time, was also rumored to be interested in T-Mobile, which itself was in the midst of merging with MetroPCS. Sprint, the nation’s third largest carrier with 55 million customers, reported that it had to assess the offer from Dish. Dish had taken a clear interest in the mobile video consumption habits of wireless users, an idea it had presented . Despite considering it, Sprint asked that the FCC continue its review of the Softbank deal, which was 140 days into the 180-day period when Dish made the offer and asked the FCC to halt the process. After all, the duo had put into the merger. Months before this, in December, the Softbank-Sprint deal faced a concerning a secondary deal with Sprint and Clearwire. As a term of the Softbank merger, Sprint was not allowed to acquire Clearwire for anything more than $2.97/share, or $2.2 billion. Sprint had originally offered $2.90/share for 100 percent stake in the broadband provider. Clearwire had told Reuters in mid-December that the offer was simply too low, and that they were looking for something in the range of $5/share. Three days later, however, for exactly $2.97/share, the maximum it could pay under the terms of its agreement with Softbank. Yet today, seven months after Sprint closed its Clearwire deal, three months after Dish tried to snatch Sprint away from Softbank, and three days after the FCC gave the deal a go, Softbank believes this is the homestretch. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNZH-emehxA&w=640&h=480]
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ObamaCare Gets Price-Comparison Technology On Oct 1
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Gregory Ferenstein
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President Obama just held a blindingly fast press conference on open government, which probably left most citizens scratching their heads in confusion over one of his geekier executive obsessions. The most important point is that citizens will be able to comparison-shop the costs and features of health-care plans, just like we can now do with flights and car rentals. You can check them out at , which recently got a major user-design overhaul. A signature assumption of Obamacare is that transparency in health-care plans will lead to greater competition and increased savings — . It remains to be seen whether costs will continue to drop. Aside from health care, there are two other big takeaways: 1. One of Obama’s first executive orders was to create a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO), a senior advisor charged with engineering novel ways to solve government issues. The top priority was releasing government data to citizens, just like with the weather and satellite data that now fuels modern GPS hardware. The president gave a general overview of the these projects, most of which were announced at our own Disrupt New York conference last year. Read about them . 2. National Security Agency fiasco aside, the president has been a champion on collaborative government. The first class of “ ” is designed to bring the user-friendliness of private-sector websites into the federal government. The president seemed particularly giddy over moving federal websites into the early 2000s, with auto-fill forms for government services. For those of us in the open government community, this quote from Obama gives us goosebumps: “We, the people, recognize that this government belongs to us. It’s up to each and every one of us to make it work better; we can’t just stand on the sidelines.” The 800-pound gorilla in the room is obviously the NSA spying scandal, which hangs the scent of hypocrisy all over these cool initiatives. If anyone can create an awesome “Joe Biden Silently Approves” meme from the picture above, we’ll change our feature image with it.
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Pixate Raises $3.8M Series A From Accel Partners To Bring CSS Styling To Android And Mac App Development
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Catherine Shu
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Pixate has closed a $3.8 million Series A round from venture capital firm Accel Partners. The Palo Alto-based plans to expand its engineering and support teams in order to build Android and Mac versions of its platform, which allows developers to style apps using CSS. It will also increase the quality of its support and improve developer resources and release the full version of Pixate Engine for free. In addition, Pixate announced the launch of , which is where it will publish beta versions of Pixate, as well as prototypes and experiments of other technologies and projects. Pixate 1.0 for iOS, which launched to the public in January, gives mobile developers a platform to style their native applications using CSS. In , co-founder Paul Colton told Sarah Perez that Pixate’s goal is to make it easier for developers to create image-focused apps so they don’t have to rebuild the entire app each time a new graphic is added. Pixate allows designers to focus on editing stylesheets on a framework that has CSS for styling apps and a behind-the-scenes vector-scalable graphics engine. Pixate’s tech is integrated into existing mobile apps via an SDK. The Palo Alto-based company received seed funding from Y Combinator/YC VC and raised an additional $60,000 on Kickstarter, half of which came from strategic investors Walmart Labs, Appcelerator and Grupo.mobi, which put in $10,000 each (the donation limit).
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We Were The (1000+). Goodbye, Google Reader
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Sarah Perez
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Today, Google Reader’s remaining users will “Mark All As Read” one last time. There are two schools of thought on Google’s decision to move on from its aging RSS aggregator, which was never adopted by the mainstream: one, that it’s pretty much the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet. ! And two: ? Even though I count myself as someone who falls into that former group, it’s hard to argue against Google’s thinking in the matter. Following websites using RSS feeds is just not something the “normals” do. So an RSS reader like Google’s remained in the hands of the tech elite, the domain of the IT crowd, the programmers, the researchers, the journalists. The rest of the world merely surfs the web, and now they just tweet. But Google Reader was special because it was one of the last remaining places on the Internet you could really call your own. In every other way, the nature of news reading on the web these days and the social services that now dominate your attention are crafted by others who dictate what you will read and when. Whether browsing through an editorially run news site, parsing your Twitter stream or reading your Facebook news feed, the links before you are those that others have deemed important. There’s value in this signal, of course — a sense of what’s trending in the larger world allows for serendipitous discovery. But it’s also a relinquishing of control. Oh sure, you can choose who to follow, but it’s not the same as choosing which news sources’ feeds you will subscribe to, why, and how often you will read them. In Google Reader, I’ve gleefully stuffed websites into collections like “B-List” and “C-List” and “Can’t Miss” and “Panic Button,” instead of more proper names like “top tech sites” or “Apple bloggers.” It’s my decision which headline collections get scanned with a glance, and which writers will see me devouring their every word. Meanwhile on Twitter, every missive is as important as the one that preceded it. A photo of your cat. News from the war. A beautiful sunset on Instagram. A government overthrown. It’s a real-time firehose of information that you dip into as you can. There’s no unread count. You just refresh and refresh and refresh for more.
Having never caught on as a social network in its own right outside of a niche group of users, Google Reader couldn’t rival something like Twitter. The writing was on the wall for its demise when in order to make room for deeper integration with Google’s newer social network Google+. The move, essentially a big to Reader’s small but highly engaged audience of users, may have come as a surprise to some, but with the internal thinking at Google, perhaps it was a miracle that Reader was being given any sort of development attention at all. In , Brian Shih, who became Reader Product Manager in fall 2008, spoke of how the team had to fight internally for what, in terms of Google’s scale, was a small project. “Someone hung a sign in the Reader offices that said ‘DAYS SINCE LAST THREAT OF CANCELLATION.’ The number was almost always zero,” he said. At Google, senior execs only cared about absolute user numbers, not on growth or market share. But even though Google Reader could never compete in numbers with Gmail or other Google products, it wiped out the market of RSS competitors, while letting its 800-pound gorilla sit and rot. Today, Google is too busy trying to change the world with and , and to care about Google Reader. It’s thinking of how to and — lofty goals that leave no time for a silly little product from Web 2.0’s early days. At least by shutting down Reader, Google is admitting that its stewardship in this area has failed. Google can’t — and no longer wants to — do it all. We’ve seen evidence of that already in the systematic shutdowns of other dated, stagnant services through Google’s “ .” Google Reader was not the first, nor will it be the last, that fails to survive these cuts. Google Alerts and are other prime candidates at this point. We’re retiring Reader on July 1. We know many of you will be sad to see it go. Thanks for 8 great years! — Google Reader (@googlereader) Ever since Google’s announcement this spring, many new services have stepped up to help fill the void Google Reader leaves behind, . None of those that now vie to become the new incumbent even have search built-in, for example. A few promise “yeah, it’s coming” but too many startups begging for a second look think that merely supporting RSS feeds makes them a Google Reader clone. Google Reader wasn’t a list of things to read. It wasn’t a collection of RSS feeds. It was your own, personal Google. A search engine built on top of the sites you cared about. A Google News with the stories you wanted to see. A taxonomy where you chose the labels, and drove the SEO. Google Reader was your web, slice of the Internet. Social media, now, is theirs. Reader’s death isn’t the end of a product, it’s the end of an era. , , , . Now we have to accept and adapt. Google Reader, thank you for eight great years. Goodbye. OK kids, it’s time. Throw this on in one tab open “All Items” in & “Mark all as read” One. Last. Time. — Jason Shellen (@shellen)
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Ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason Releases Hokey Rock Album To Soundtrack Your Pivot (Review)
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Josh Constine
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If you’re a tech exec who finds Nickelback a bit too edgy, Groupon’s former CEO Andrew Mason has just released an album for you. Now available on and , “Hardly Workin'” is 80s alternative rock about how to run your startup. I can’t tell if it’s a joke or not, but, regardless, it will make you laugh, either with or at Mason. “I was climbing Machu Pichu / As I beheld the splendid view / An idea came for 100 million / Of shareholder value” is the kind of lyrical brilliance you’ll find on Hardly Workin’. Mason moans and croons over generic alternative rock — the kind that wouldn’t make the cut on a Huey Lewis and The News album. [spotify id=”spotify:track:5XbxDwo7o0dDCan8lLnxjz” width=”300″ height=”380″ /] Mason seems to have found some serious clairvoyance in the four months since he . The first line of the album goes “If you’re seeking business wisdom / You don’t need no MBA / Look no further than the beauty / That surrounds us every day.” Mason’s sense of rhyme is basic, but you still have to hand it to him for being able to cram in so many insider-y tech references. One clue that this all might be a gag is his reference to riding his GTS 300 to work. Is that some badass sports car or motorcycle? No, it’s his Vespa. But “Risin’ Above The Pack” and “K.I.S.S” are straight-up instruction manuals to getting promoted and avoiding design bloat. If Mason is pulling a fast one on us, he’s going all the way. His about the release has zero signs of sarcasm. “Executives, mid-level management, and front-line employees are all sure to find valuable takeaways.” He goes on to say that managers should actually be playing this for their staffs. “Sure, you can just leave copies of Hardly Workin’ on your employees’ desks and achieve an incremental increase in productivity and morale but…try ending your next all-hands meeting with ‘It’s Up to Us,’ for example.” Wow. Things get a bit creepy on “My Door Is Always Open,” a duet with a coquettish-sounding female vocalist. He sings “Now that you know that I want to listen please visit my office more,” and she sighs “I feel much more comfortable coming to you.” The sexual harassment innuendo hangs like a barnyard stench over the meandering country ballad. At least it’s followed up by “Stretch” featuring Bishop Lamont from Dr. Dre’s Aftermath label. Glam diva vocals, a brooding nightclub bassline, and Mason singing through a robo-vocoder — it’s actually just a little cool. Then you realize it’s about setting stretch goals for your company’s quarterly review. “Quantify your best and then add twenty percent.” Uhh, just try to tune that out and nod your head. You’re not going to bump Hardly Workin’, ever. But you might give it a spin for fun, and it’s worth that much. Maybe not $9.99 on iTunes, but you could endure a Spotify ad or two just to hear someone in tech do something truly silly. Hate the album, but don’t hate the crazy misfit rebel troublemaker who recorded it. That’s what we’re supposed to celebrate. And if you are in fact a founder or tech exec, you might take Mason’s management lessons to heart, even if they’d be better delivered via PowerPoint. [spotify id=”spotify:track:6bN4gmKw2VSX3CwIIkvNKN” width=”300″ height=”380″ /]
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Zynga Missed The Pivot To Mobile, So Can A Veteran Console Exec Revive It?
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Although shares jumped by 10.4 percent today on is taking over Zynga as CEO, the most important audience the company needs to address for a real, long-term turnaround is not investors. It’s the game developer community. Because here are the new economics of hit mobile games: : 100 people. in the first quarter, with $104 million in profit. : 20 employees servicing the hit game Puzzle & Dragons. in revenue in April. Those figures are just from Japan, and they have about 300 employees. Compare that to Zynga, which has 2,400 employees, and made just $4 million in profit on $264 million in revenue in the first three months of this year. It doesn’t matter if you’re publicly traded. Or an which is how founder and former CEO Mark Pincus likes to refer to his company. Or that the company has close to $1.7 billion in cash and short-term and long-term investments on its balance sheet. The companies that are succeeding on Android and iOS, which is where Zynga wants to diversify, are incredibly lean and operate with a great deal of internal freedom. So what you need is a person with the charisma and social capital to attract the best game designers, artists and producers in the world. Unfortunately, Zynga has hemorrhaged so much of its original talent over the last two years, that it is unclear if it can recover. There are simply too many other profitable, privately held companies for good talent to go to. On top of that, the early stories about and then as a place to work. At the same time, the kind of talent that made Zynga successful in the beginning — the people who gave it the number-crunching, aggressive edge to succeed where older gaming talent didn’t — aren’t necessarily right either in this new era. Production values keep going up and other competitors have learned from Zynga’s data-obsessed, detail-oriented approach. Mattrick needs to turn around Zynga’s reputation as an employer. There are definitely some points in his favor: He was a highly respected executive at EA and then went on to run the Xbox division at Microsoft. And it does help that he’s overseen the creation of content for dozens and dozens of different platforms over his three-decade career. But consoles are not where the high-growth opportunities are anymore. While his network might provide world-class console talent, it’s not always clear that they transition well into games-as-a-service or games on other platforms. There is also the potentially politically sticky issue of reporting: Notice how Pincus as chief product officer will have to report to Mattrick as CEO who will then report back to Pincus again as chairman of the board. So while Mattrick has the big company, operational experience that may appease investors, it’s not clear yet whether he’ll send the right signals to reverse the outward flow of talent on platforms that really matter for Zynga’s future.
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Can Pincus Still Make Zynga An “Internet Treasure”?
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Josh Constine
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“An Internet Treasure is something that consumers can’t remember what life was like before they had it,” Mark Pincus back in 2009. Then, Zynga had hit titles and cash flowing in. Today, Zynga’s shares sit at a third of their IPO price and it lacks a blockbuster game. With the , if Zynga wants to become an institution, it’s now or never. Very excited to welcome don mattrick as our new ceo — mark pincus (@markpinc) Onstage at , Zynga board member John Doerr and Pincus discussed what being an Internet Treasure really means. Doerr explained “I believe there are some companies and some brands that give generations pride. The Internet is the cornerstone of our generation in business. An ‘Internet Treasure’ is a company on the Internet that makes us all proud to be alive right now.” When asked what the term meant to him, Pincus revealed: “Like so many of you guys I’ve spent my whole career pursuing new ideas and venture creation, and it wasn’t until Bing and John introduced this idea of Internet Treasure to me that it brought the ‘why’ into better focus. I realized we all have this opportunity to create, at a consumer level, products and brands that people can’t imagine life without. And I think Facebook and Amazon, and BlackBerry and the iPhone are products we can’t imagine life before, and we can’t ever imagine life without. For me it became a mantra and a rallying cry inside of our company that helped create the far-out vision for all of us to come back to “is that on the path to building an Internet Treasure?” We all talk about being sustainable and profitable but for what purpose? The idea that this greater purpose and opportunity for what we’re all doing — it was really inspiring for us.” That purpose, Zynga’s mission, is “Connecting the world through games.” Taken earnestly, it’s admirable. People spend much of their time slogging through work they’re not passionate about, separated from the people they love. Games can offer a simultaneous respite, while also drawing us closer together and making memories. Zynga arguably has a better chance of succeeding at that mission than past generational games companies like Hasbro (owner of Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley) or Nintendo. Games of the past were typically played by people who were already physically connected — you had to be sitting next to each other to play. But with the Internet and mobile phones, Zynga has an unprecedented opportunity to bring us together even when we’re apart. It can squeeze joy out of the downtime moments of everyday life. It can let us escape without being alone. But the rise of the technologies that enable Zynga also brought a newfound ability to quantify the success of a game, for better and worse. Zynga co-founder Eric Schiermeyer, who , instilled a culture of metrics-driven game design. Zynga A/B tests every pixel to find out exactly what drives more engagement, retention and payments. You could argue that that strategy is what vaulted Zynga onto the world stage in the first place. There’s no denying that it takes success to fund the creation of things people care about. However, that process of homing in on what causes people to whittle away hours tending a virtual farm and pay as much as possible to protect it can suck the life out of a game and its designers. That’s led to a constant exodus of talent, as well as crushed morale where game designers feel like the bean counters make the final calls. Whether Mattrick and Pincus can change that power dynamic will determine whether Zynga ends up a blip and flameout at the end of the 2000s, or a company that brings happiness to another generation — the mobile generation. I believe they can despite all the . Unfortunately, I didn’t hear enough of that in the emails to Zynga’s staff today from the two executives. Mattrick sounded too buttoned-down, like a business man rather than a gamer, when “We too, have all the makings of a successful service and business and we have the opportunity to create lifelong relationships with our customers through our high-quality products.” Zynga’s quest to become an efficient, financially sound company must be signaled to shareholders but kept away from its designers. Otherwise the great game developers already there will tune out or drop out, and new ones will flow to Zynga’s competitors. At least “Zynga has so much more potential ahead, the opportunity to be an Internet Treasure” and ” I’m excited to…return Zynga to its leadership role in inventing and growing Play as a core human experience.” But he also focused on how Mattrick “turned Xbox into the world’s largest console gaming network, growing its installed base from 10 million to 80 million and transformed that business from deep losses to substantial profits.” Profits and growth. Zynga needs those, but they need to be byproducts of creating games that connect us, not the goals themselves. Zynga won’t become a generational company by beating estimates and delivering returns for shareholders. Those may restore confidence in the giant, and win it the funds and prestige needed to fuel its mission. But to become an Internet Treasure, it must foster a culture and build games that put fun first.
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New App Lets Google Glass Owners Control Their Teslas Like Rich-Ass Robo-Wizards
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Greg Kumparak
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Do you have Google Glass? Do you have a Tesla? Yes? Seriously? Who the hell are you, Batman? Anyway — there’s now an application that lets you bring these two extravagant toys together, allowing you to control a bunch of things in the Tesla by way of Google Glass. Why? . The app’s developer, Sahas Katta, he’s also able to pull the car’s compass direction/speed, but hasn’t come up with anything clever to do with that data yet as Google Glass cards can’t be updated quickly enough. You can find here. If you actually need that download link, I’d like to be part of your entourage.
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Facebook Is Experimenting With Becoming A Mobile Games Publisher
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Facebook is testing what could finally bring it direct revenue from the mobile gaming ecosystem beyond advertising. The company is working with a handful of small mobile game developers to do publishing by offering distribution through mobile ads in exchange for a cut of revenue, according to sources familiar with the program. Facebook confirmed it’s working on tests for new mobile game distribution, but didn’t share more details publicly. While Facebook has been earning and other fees, with most of that coming from virtual currency transactions inside social games, it hasn’t been able to replicate that business on mobile devices, because Apple and Google both control the world’s two major smartphone app stores and already take a 30 percent cut on digital transactions. It does, however, earn a big chunk of revenue from mobile game developers through normal mobile ad buying, a business in the first quarter. The thinking is that publishing is a very, very old model that goes back to the world of console gaming, so it’s a structure that is already familiar for gaming studios. In the console era, a big gaming company would market, distribute (and often edit) games from smaller studios that lacked the resources to promote their work. At the same time, smaller developers are having a hard time finding audiences when they are competing against bigger companies like Kabam, King and Supercell, which now have the power to spend millions of dollars per month on marketing. The initial costs of producing and distributing a competitive mobile game have gone from the hundreds of thousands into the millions of dollars for titles that have a shot at the top-25 grossing spots. So in this experiment, Facebook is partnering with smaller, independent developers, not the bigger guys. They’re also primarily focusing on distribution. They aren’t really editing or tweaking games for content or financing their production, which is what other publishers sometimes do. From a global perspective, other social networking platforms in Asia, such as Kakao in South Korea and WeChat in China, are starting to exercise power on mobile platforms in some fascinating ways, despite operating on platforms like Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. of the top-10 grossing games in South Korea on Android, the biggest smartphone platform there. it will bring games to its hit messaging app WeChat later this year. So again, perhaps we’re seeing Western social networking platforms and messaging apps taking cues from Asia, instead of the other way around. Facebook introduced sticker packs earlier this year, a feature that became popular on Japan’s dominant messaging app Line. But sources familiar with the program at Facebook say that the Kakao model is not exactly what the company is aiming to replicate, since Kakao’s distribution methods might be a bit too untargeted and spammy to make for a good user experience. Instead, Facebook is emphasizing highly targeted ads. On the developer side, some of the feedback I’m hearing is the typical skepticism that comes with the publishing model in general. Today, since mobile developers can simply “self-publish” just by putting their apps in the store, there’s a pretty longstanding debate about what value publishers can really add. When games aren’t successful, neither the developer or the publisher make very much money. But when games are hits like with the original Angry Birds, which was published by EA’s Chillingo label, there can be friction later when the original developer questions why they’re paying a massive revenue share to another party. They can also go down other routes by releasing games that are similar to the original and re-routing users to the new version of the game, where they won’t have to pay the original publisher. Then there is some historical tension between app developers and Facebook, with the company tweaking and dialing up and down traffic for certain categories of apps like the original quiz and vampire biting apps back in 2007, to and last year, and so on. Developers might be wary about partnering with a company that has a record of being sometimes capricious with delivering traffic to certain apps. In any case, Facebook may feel that it isn’t fully realizing the potential of the mobile app economy. Through mobile advertising, the company basically turned on a $1.5 billion-a-year business in about six months. While advertising has always been the mainstay of Facebook’s model on desktop PCs and mobile devices alike, there are many revenue possibilities on mobile devices that the company has yet to fully explore.
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Cameron And Tyler Winklevoss File For $20 Million IPO Of Their ‘Bitcoin Trust’
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Colleen Taylor
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Buckle up, people: We might be closer than ever to our first official Bitcoin IPO. It was just a couple months back that it emerged that , the investment firm/family trust founded by and (of early Facebook fame), had bought up approximately one percent of all the outstanding quantity of , the alternative digital currency — a portion that . The firm has gone on to invest in startups that deal exclusively in the Bitcoin space, . Today, it looks like they are looking to spread the ownership of some of that investment around to the public — with all its potential gains, and losses. An entity called “The Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust” has apparently filed for an of 1 million shares, to raise up to $20 million in capital. A ticker for the stock has yet to be determined. The filing explains the entity’s mission thusly: “The Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust (Trust) will issue Winklevoss Bitcoin Shares (Shares) which represent units of fractional undivided beneficial interest in and ownership of the Trust. Math-Based Asset Services LLC is the sponsor of the Trust (Sponsor) and [TRUSTEE] is the trustee and custodian of the Trust (Trustee) using proprietary and patent-pending technology to administer the Trust. The Trust intends to issue additional Shares on a continuous basis.” We’re reading through the filed documents, and working on getting more details from the Winklevosses directly, so this story will be updated as the information becomes more clear. For now, check out the interview I had just a couple weeks back with Cameron and Tyler here at the TechCrunch TV studio. We talked in depth about why they’re so bullish on Bitcoin and their plans for future investments in the currency.
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Yahoo Acquires Bignoggins, A One-Man Fantasy Sports App Maker
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Greg Kumparak
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Oh, you thought Yahoo was done with the whole acquire-everything-in-sight bit? Nope! Yahoo has announced that they’ve acquired Bignoggins Productions, a one-man iPhone development shop which had previously built a handful of fairly popular Fantasy Sports mobile apps. Up until today, Bignoggins had at least two apps in the store: Fantasy Monster ($5), and Draft Monster ($3). Both apps were built as all-in-one tools, meant to let Fantasy Sports nuts manage their pretend football/baseball/basketball/hockey teams across Yahoo, ESPN, and NFL’s competing services. The bad news: as part of the acquisition, all of Bignoggins’ apps were immediately pulled from both the App Store and Google Play. The better news: in on his own site, Bignoggin’s founder (and sole full-timer) Jerry Shen says that the tech he’s built so far will soon be baked into Yahoo’s official Fantasy Products products.
The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but I’d bet that Shen probably made out alright in the end, here. His $5 app had thousands of reviews and had danced around the top of the App Store’s best selling Sports apps a few times — it was almost certainly selling well enough to keep it’s creator fed and happy. Not bad, for a company that never had to hire a second employee. To quote his personal site: I’ve never hired any full time employees. As a result, I would talk to myself frequently about the direction of the company. After one particularly fiery argument I nearly fired myself but reconsidered once I realized I had no employees. Oh, and he never took any outside investment: I’ve never taken any outside funding. Not even from my mother. Unless you count raising me and paying for college. Ok I guess that counts. But other than that, 100% bootstrapped, baby! Most importantly, Shen says this is what he’s always wanted: “I’ve been playing Yahoo! Fantasy since high school, and have wanted to work here since college, so this is really a dream come true for me.”
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Snapchat’s Spiegel Admits Brown “Came Up With The Idea For Disappearing Picture Messages” In New Court Documents
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Billy Gallagher
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a disappearing picture is worth $800 million, what’s an idea worth? Reggie Brown on Thursday in a California court to disqualify Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Snapchat’s attorneys, Quinn Emanuel. The documents also show evidence that may support Brown’s claim that he is a co-founder of Snapchat. In February, Brown , claiming he co-founded the popular photo messaging app, which at an $800 million pre-money valuation, and was forced out by Spiegel and Murphy. Spiegel called the lawsuit “utterly devoid of merit” in February. Brown’s filing on Thursday included some of the evidence that had been found by Brown’s lawyers during the discovery stage. Keep in mind that during this stage Snapchat can say very little publicly; so while these documents are interesting, remember that this is one side of the case, and we aren’t seeing Snapchat’s supporting documents. For example, that there is a paper trail of Brown being willing to take a smaller share of the company. As I wrote then, “A source says Brown, an English major, acknowledged that he “had a little less to contribute but was still working on what he could do” and that there were emails about Spiegel and Murphy taking equal cuts that were larger than Brown’s. Spiegel majored in product design and Murphy studied mathematical and computational science.” Here’s what Brown’s lawyers divulged in court documents this past Thursday, and what each piece really means: “• Contrary to public statements made before the litigation, Defendant Spiegel admits that Plaintiff came up with the idea for disappearing pictures messages;” This corroborates what sources told me in March regarding the founding of the company, and obviously is a blow to Snapchat’s public image, as Spiegel and Murphy had previously denied Brown’s claims and said the idea was solely theirs. “• After Plaintiff invited Defendant Spiegel to work on this project, they together tried to recruit a coder/programmer. After being turned down by other fellow fraternity brothers, Plaintiff and Defendant Spiegel settled on Defendant Murphy as the project’s coder;” While it’s sort of interesting that Murphy wasn’t Spiegel and Brown’s first choice for their coder, sources say he has done a great job leading the technical aspects of the application and company. Bouncing ideas off friends and being rejected by busy classmates is also commonplace. “• On June 9, 2011, in a text message to Plaintiff, Defendant Spiegel referred to his father’s house, where Plaintiff and Defendants Spiegel and Murphy were living and working on the Application as “startuphou5” (which means “startup house”); • On June 28, 2011, Defendant Murphy sent a mass email to his friends asking them to try the beta test version of the Application that he, Spiegel and Plaintiff have been working on, and signed the email as “Bobby, Evan, Reggie;” • On July 1, 2011, Defendant Spiegel’s father (an attorney) sent a text message to Plaintiff’s mother, and acknowledged that the three of them were equal collaborators on the startup: “thank you for your gracious note. It is delightful to have Reggie with us this summer as he, Evan and Bobby work on their startup. They are working hard, having fun and seem to be learning a lot […];” “• On July 8, 2011, around the time the Application was launched on iTunes store, Defendant Murphy listed Plaintiff as the “CMO” (and Defendants Murphy and Spiegel as “CTO” and “CEO”, respectively) on Crunchbase, a database of tech companies;” Nothing really new here — this is basic evidence showing that Brown worked with Spiegel and Murphy in the summer of 2011. “• On July 17, 2011, the three of them took a picture together to celebrate the Application’s launch on iTunes store with a cake decorated with the start-up’s ghost logo (designed by Plaintiff). John Spiegel’s girlfriend emailed them the picture with the following note: “The launch of something great!!!;” “• On July 21, 2011, Defendant Murphy tagged Plaintiff as an “employer” for Picaboo Facebook;” The cake picture has circulated on all the blogs; nothing new here. “• On July 23, 2011, several days after launching the Application, Defendant Spiegel texted Plaintiff to report on the increasing popularity of the Application and stated that “[t]his thing is a rocketship;” • On July 27, 2011, Defendant Spiegel emailed a blogger about the Application, stating: “I just built an app with two friends of mine (certified bros our frat just got kicked off campus)”– referring to Plaintiff and Defendant Murphy;” While Brown’s lawyers paint Spiegel as a mindless frat bro, the full email chain shows a much shrewder Spiegel managing the media and having a long-term vision for the product. Sources told me Brown’s original idea for the app arose from a conversation about sexting; indeed, the blogger Nicole James immediately jumped to sexting when Spiegel pitched the idea to her. “Ahh, okay. So it’s like, the best way to sext, basically. Cuz you can’t save the images?” James wrote. “Some people use it for that..but it’s also the best way to quickly share an ephemeral moment with a friend - think celebs (blake lively?), cute guy on the street, where you are…it makes the images you send special the most exclusive photos in the world haha,” Spiegel replied. “I like it,” she shot back. “Blog target #1 acquired,” Spiegel wrote to Murphy and Brown. A few months later, in September, James on her Tumblr blog: “My internet friend Evan [Spiegel] created this app called Picaboo whereby you can send a photo to anyone else who has the app, but you set a time limit on the photo, and it’s only from one to ten seconds. There is NO WAY for the person to save the photo. Imagine all the n00dz you’d get cuz people would feel so safe about it!!!! Evan emailed me one day asking me to check out his app… For Evan’s sake, as he’s probs reading this, I should mention he is not my sexting partner — he sends me photos of like, the beach and tacos and other stuff people do in California, while I send him photos of Times Square and taxis and a woman handing out coupons dressed up as a busted-ass Mickey Mouse getting cited by a cop (for real). You know, New York shit. Now we are photo friends! It’s neat.” Even though James still thought the app was for sexting and pitched it to her readers as a sexting app, she herself was using it in the same way as most current Snapchat users: as a personal photo sharing tool, just as Spiegel envisioned. “• On August 11, 2011, Plaintiff filed a provisional patent application for the Application listing him and Defendants Spiegel and Murphy as “co-inventors;” • On August 11, 2011, Defendant Spiegel told Plaintiff the following after Plaintiff (who was visiting his family in South Carolina) suggested that Defendants Spiegel and Murphy celebrate the filing of a patent application: “No chance were celebrating wo you bro;” • On August 16, 2011, the three of them had a blow-up on the phone when Defendant Spiegel got offended over the order of the names listed as co-inventors in the patent application (his name was listed last). After the call, Defendant Spiegel sent a text message to Plaintiff to apologize and acknowledge that Plaintiff came up with the idea for the Application: “I want to make sure you feel like you are given credit for the idea of disappearing messages…” This also corroborates what sources told me in March — that a patent argument caused Spiegel and Murphy to shut Brown out of the company. However, the patent was not the , which Spiegel and Murphy filed in August 2012. The patent discussed here was much broader, essentially for an app for disappearing photos. A letter from Cooley LLP, representing Snapchat, to Brown in May 2012 alleges that Brown’s ownership claims were tied to this patent. The letter explains that the patent was unlikely to be approved and that Snapchat was “confident that the subject matter of the application falls under ‘prior art.'” The letter cites a patent held by that covers the handling of impermanent message content, and argues that Brown’s contribution was the “unremarkable observation that impermanent transmitted messages would be desirable.” In the Cooley letter, the firm argues that “unless and until a patent issues…your claim is to 1/3 of nothing.” The patent has not yet been approved, and has likely been removed by Spiegel, Murphy, or Brown. A representative from the United States Patent Office an “inventor can ask for an application not to be published at all until the patent is actually issued.” The patent is eventually abandoned if it is never issued, and if an application has multiple inventors, any of them can file a non-publication request. “Of course, the Company has developed proprietary technical solutions for the handling of impermanent message content, but you had no role in developing such proprietary technical solutions,” the Cooley letter continues. “Accordingly, the Company is confident that you are not the owner of any Company intellectual property.” Meanwhile, Brown’s lawyers are pushing for Brown to receive a full third of the company — not an equal share to Spiegel and Murphy. “Our position is that it would not and should not be diluted because each subsequent investor knew or should have known about Reggie’s interest in the company,” James Lee tells me. “If we were to take this all the way to trial our position would be Reggie is entitled to the full 1/3…we would not be asking the jury for parity with what Evan and Bobby have today as a result of their improperly ousting Reggie.” The two sides will meet in court on August 1 to address the motion to disqualify Snapchat’s lawyers.
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Greylock Adds Former Quora, Facebook And Twitter Alum Andy Johns As ‘Growth Strategist In Residence’
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Leena Rao
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How to get customers for your product is a these days as we see the rise of the “growth hacker.” Venture capital firm Greylock Partners is making an interesting move today relating to this new focus, adding Andy Johns as a Growth Strategist in Residence. Johns most recently worked at Quora where he , including email retention and more. He also worked in growth at Facebook, where he established SEO efforts at the social network, and he helped build a growth system at Twitter. According to Greylock, Johns has accelerate growth nearly 10x at each of the three companies, first creating the frameworks and data models to understand engagement and then coming up with programs based on those learnings. Traditionally, the EIR role has been around bringing in successful executives and entrepreneurs in-house who need a place to hang out for a while as they figure out what their next company will be. Many times these execs will also advise and help the firm’s portfolio startups, as well. While the entrepreneur in residence role has existed for some time now, Greylock has been adding a different twist to this program over the past few years. In 2011, Greylock brought on as a Data Scientist in Residence, which at the time was a new position for a VC firm to add. Having an expert in growth, especially one that has been part of some of the fastest-growing social networks of recent time, is yet another value-add for its startups. Greylock principal Josh Elman, who worked with Johns at Twitter and Facebook, says that the firm’s philosophy on hiring EIRs has always been to bring in the best in their field who can spend time with the firm. “Andy is the expert on user growth,” he says. As Greylock explains, creating growth and engagement for startups is even more challenging in this climate as there are so many dynamic distribution channels, including Facebook, Twitter, iOS, Android, Google+, Pinterest, address books, push notifications, email, SMS, and others. “In a world where users have an ever-increasing set of options, navigating all of these to build long-term durable systems for engagement has become increasingly challenging,” the firm says. “We decided that we wanted an in-house expert to help us and our companies with this on a full-time basis.” In his role as Growth Strategist in Residence, Johns is going to help portfolio startups navigate these challenges and create durable user growth and engagement. He’ll work with startups on measuring and creating the right metrics and dashboards, developing new features and tests to increase growth and engagement, among other things. Elman says that people are realizing that using Facebook and Twitter can help grow user bases, but to sustain this growth and engagement is a separate challenge. Johns has been able to create network effects for a number of well-known (and fast-growing) companies. It’s also worth noting that Greylock last week scored another talent win, to the investment team covering enterprise.
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Shervin Pishevar And Scott Stanford’s New Startup Studio Sherpa Is Raising $150 Million For New Fund
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Leena Rao
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As earlier this year, Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar and Goldman Sachs managing director Scott Stanford left their day jobs to build a new, company-building venture and VC fund called Sherpa. According to an SEC filing released today, Sherpa is raising around in funding. Of course, this is not a final number, and this could fluctuate as the funding closes. The news of Pishevar and Stanford’s new venture was back in March. At the time, we heard that Sherpa was going to introduce a new model for building and creating companies through a mix and match of strategic corporate partnerships and working with well-known entrepreneurs. Sherpa is divided into two parts: First, there will be The Foundry, which Pishevar at the time said will use funds and assets from a number of strategic corporations, combined with help from some well-known entrepreneurs to create new companies. There was also a corresponding fund that was created to invest in those new companies. The Sherpa Ventures Fund, as titled in the SEC filing, could be this fund. This new hybrid model for both startup creation and investing is just part of the happening in the VC world. Many entrepreneurs are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC (in Shervin’s case, he did join Menlo Ventures but left the firm to start Sherpa) to instead create a studio-like holding operation and fund. Considering Pishevar’s experience as a serial entrepreneur (he’s founded — and sold — a number of startups) and Stanford’s background of coordinating and financing the IPOs of companies like Facebook and Zynga, it should be interesting to see what Sherpa has up its sleeve. We’ve reached out to Pishevar for comment and will update accordingly.
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Snapchat Founders Face New Twist In Legal Battle As Alleged Co-Founder Files To Disqualify Their Lawyers
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Billy Gallagher
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Reggie Brown claims to have co-founded Snapchat, and in the latest twist to his suit against the company, he’s trying to disqualify its high-profile law firm. Brown filed motions in a Los Angeles court on Thursday to disqualify the law firm of (“Quinn Emanuel”) from representing Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Snapchat Inc. Brown alleges that he was advised by , a Quinn Emanuel lawyer, on his case against Snapchat from November 2012 to January 2013. In April, Quinn Emanuel began defending Spiegel and Murphy after they replaced for this case. Before Alden began representing Brown, Quinn Emanuel had Brown sign a waiver saying it did not represent him, but Brown says he and Alden did not limit their discussions, and he believed they were confidential communications between an attorney and client. A representative from Cooley LLP said they could not comment for this story, as Cooley LLP is still Snapchat’s corporate counsel. Brown’s lawyers say Alden has not been one of the Quinn Emanuel attorneys representing Spiegel, Murphy, and Snapchat in the case, but that case precedent shows the entire firm should be disqualified. “Mr. Brown signed a written contract saying Quinn Emanuel could represent the Snapchat defendants if we turned down his matter, provided the partner to whom he spoke was not involved in our representation of Snapchat,” Quinn Emanuel said in a company statement. “Mr. Alden has been ‘walled’ from the matter pursuant to that agreement. It’s disappointing that Mr. Brown is refusing to honor his clear written promise to our firm.” Snapchat, the hot ephemeral messaging app, at an $800 million pre-money valuation. Brown in February 2013 alleging that he for an app for self-deleting photos in the spring of 2011; he claimed that he worked with Spiegel and Murphy on the app, then called Picaboo, until they forced him out of the company in August of 2011 following an argument over a patent filing. “As you might imagine, seeing accusations in the media and not being able to share our side of the story is incredibly frustrating,” Snapchat said in a company statement. “Our team has spent the last two years working hard to make Snapchat what it is today. We will continue to focus our energy on building an awesome company and we believe the merits of the case will stand on their own in court.” Until the case is resolved, Spiegel, Brown, and Snapchat can say very little publicly, so the advantage is heavily in Brown’s favor to try to win over the court of public favor. According to the filing, Brown reached out to Spiegel and Murphy in mid-2012 to settle their dispute out of court. On May 16, 2012, Cooley LLP, Spiegel and Murphy’s representatives at the time, sent Brown a letter, calling his actions “a transparent and desperate attempt to shake down Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy for a share in a company to which you contributed nothing.” On November 2, 2012, Brown reached out to Alden seeking representation; Alden confirmed to Brown that Quinn Emanuel had no conflict of interest for the proposed lawsuit, and Brown signed a waiver from Alden that said, among other things, that Brown was not represented by Quinn Emanuel and that Quinn Emanuel could represent other parties down the line if they so chose. In the court filing Brown says Alden told him, “This was just ‘a precaution we need to take.’ Given these assurances, I just signed the document and did not ask any question about it.” From November 2012 to January 2013, Brown and Alden discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Brown’s proposed case several times on the phone, and Brown sent Alden a USB and several emails with key documents for the suit. “Mr. Alden and I did not limit our discussions in any way,” Brown claims in the motion. “Given the nature of our discussion and Mr. Alden’s assurances, I believed that our discussions were confidential communications by and between an attorney and his client.” On December 12, 2012, and separately reported that Snapchat was raising a Series A round led by . Brown writes in his motion, “On or about December 12, 2012 I informed Mr. Alden that an article had been published indicating that Benchmark Capital was funding Snapchat. At no point did Mr. Alden (or anyone else at the firm for that matter) disclose to me that Benchmark Capital was a Quinn Emanuel client. Furthermore, at no point did anyone at Quinn Emanuel discuss with me any conflict, actual or potential concerning Quinn Emanuel’s representation of Snapchat, Inc., Toyopa Group LLC or Benchmark Capital.” Brown’s attorneys write in their motion that Quinn Emanuel had a conflict at this time because Alden was counseling Brown, while Quinn Emanuel client Benchmark had invested in Snapchat, which would dilute Brown’s claimed ownership interest in Snapchat. Additionally, Quinn Emanuel listed , which provided Snapchat’s seed funding, as a potential defendant in the waiver that Brown signed. On January 10, 2013, Brown says Alden sent him an email informing him that Quinn Emanuel would not represent him “at the current time. He says Alden never gave any reason for this decision. Alden then referred and introduced Brown to his current representatives, (LTL) on January 14. On February 8, Snapchat announced it had round led by Benchmark Ventures, and on February 21, Brown filed his lawsuit. Spiegel, Murphy, Snapchat, and the Toyopa Group (one of Brown, Spiegel, and Murphy’s original names for their organization, before their Pictaboo app became Snapchat) retained Cooley LLP to represent them. Brown, Spiegel, and Murphy had their respective depositions for the trial on April 5, 8, and 9. During Brown’s deposition, he confirmed that he had sought legal counsel from Alden and Quinn Emanuel. On April 30 2013, Spiegel, Murphy, and Snapchat substituted Quinn Emanuel for Cooley LLP as their representation. Brown’s representatives, led by Luan Tran and James Lee, learned that Benchmark Capital , and asked for a one-week standstill of litigation; the two parties then underwent two unsuccessful mediation sessions and agreed to another standstill until June 20. On June 27, after the parties agreed to another stay, Tran filed a motion stating that Alden “has an incurable and non-waivable conflict of interest,” and that Spiegel, Murphy, and Snapchat “attempt to gain an unfair tactical advantage by hiring the same law firm that Plaintiff [Brown] consulted with.” Tran claims the waiver Brown signed is invalid due to its breadth and scope, and that Quinn Emanuel needed to have Brown sign a second waiver once a real conflict (Benchmark) emerged. “In the end, no amount of spin can allow Defendants to hire a law firm to litigate against the same party that the law firm was just counseling on the same case,” Tran writes. “No court has tolerated this, and this Court should not be the first one to do so.” Brown’s motion to disqualify will be heard in a Los Angeles Superior Court on August 1. Until then, neither side can litigate. “Reggie [Brown] continues to look forward to litigating this case for his full one-third interest in the company,” Lee tells me. Benchmark Capital and Cooley LLP declined to comment for this story. Lightspeed Capital did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
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Darrell Etherington
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New Update Lets Google Glass View Websites And Listen To More Voice Commands
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Chris Velazco
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And Google Glass’ slow march toward market readiness continues. The development team shared a few details about an upcoming update on the official , and it finally unlocks some oft-requested features for all those Glass Explorers to start mucking around with. The changelog is a pretty significant one — users will soon be able to initiate calls and send messages to Gmail contacts, and rather than having to navigate to the OK Glass launcher card before issuing a voice command, users can boss their headgear around without having to touch anything. But most importantly though, Google is now letting users view webpages through Glass. The post makes it seem as though the touchpad mounted on Glass’ right side will be responsible for most of the navigation — users can swipe forward and backward along the panel to scroll up and down, and there are multiple navigation schemes to fiddle with. Thankfully, there’s one tailor-made for those who generally feel impervious to embarrassment: users can pan around their favorite websites by touching two fingers to the touchpad and moving their heads to and fro. You know, nice and discreet. It’s a little hard to visualize, but current Glass Explorers won’t have to wait too long to see it for themselves as the update is slated to go live over the next few days. Frankly, it was only a matter of time before Google let those particular cats out of the bag — we’ve known that Glass had the ability to fire up a browser and listen to voice commands outside of that launcher card ever since an enterprising developer named Zhuowei Zhang uncovered a slew of so-called and . Naturally, there’s still plenty on that list that hasn’t been publicly implemented yet (think video stabilization and a Cliplet feature that records short snippets of video, to name a few), so expect a boatload of new updates between now and Glass’ tentative release date later this year.
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Zynga Officially Names Microsoft’s Don Mattrick As CEO, Pincus Stays On As CPO And Board Chairman
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Josh Constine
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In an to all employees, Zynga just that veteran executive Don Mattrick will be the gaming giant’s new CEO, and former CEO and co-founder Mark Pincus will now be its Chief Product Officer as well as remaining the Chairman of its Board of Directors. Mattrick comes from Microsoft in a sudden move, and was previously at Zynga competitor Electronic Arts. Pincus explained in an email to staff and a that “I’ve always said to Bing and our Board that if I could find someone who could do a better job as our CEO I’d do all I could to recruit and bring that person in. I’m confident that Don is that leader.” He also noted “Zynga has so much more potential ahead, the opportunity to be an Internet Treasure and deliver on our mission of connecting the world through games.” Update: Mattrick has now sent an email to all employees, saying that “Only Zynga combines engineering, industry-leading product management and analytics to deliver products that strike a chord with consumers and add real value in their lives…We have the opportunity to create lifelong relationships with our customers through our high quality products. Zynga is a great business that has yet to realize its full potential.” Until today, Mattrick was Microsoft’s President of Interactive Entertainment. He most recently delivered the news that following backlash in response to announcements that its new Xbox One would have digital rights management preventing users from freely swapping games and would require an Internet connection to play games. Microsoft CEO Steve to his employees saying “This is a great opportunity for Don, and I wish him success. Don’s directs will report to me and will continue to drive the day-to-day business as a team, particularly focused on shipping Xbox One this holiday. Thank you, Don, for setting us on a path to completely redefine the entertainment industry.” As the new CEO he inherits a tough job of completing Zynga’s transition from a web-focused Facebook games company to a multi-platform developer with its own properties and a focus on mobile. The this morning via Kara Swisher to positive reactions from Zynga shareholders who boosted the company’s stock price 10.43% to $3.07. After hours the stock has gone up another 3.58% to $3.18 following the announcement. Zynga is still struggling to recover from a disastrous IPO at the end of 2011 and a string of soggy games that have failed to bring in the users or dollars the way its old hits FarmVille and CityVille did. The question will be whether Mattrick can restore morale and get Zynga producing beloved games again while simultaneously laying off employees to make the company more financially sound.
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Win A Ticket To DBX, Dropbox’s First Developer’s Conference
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Elin Blesener
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On July 9th, Dropbox kicks off . Tickets are no longer available for the invite-only one-day-event, but we have ten tickets to give away. Dropbox told us that the three focuses of the one-day conference will be learning about newly launched features on its platform, giving developers a chance to meet and get help from Dropbox API engineers and designers, and highlighting what third parties have built on top of Dropbox so far. Developer conferences have become all the rage with companies in the enterprise — a distinction Dropbox is chasing. Many think of it more as a consumer-facing cloud storage service with its magic folder where you can put files to make them accessible from anywhere. But Dropbox has spent the last year touting itself as a serious, secure backend for big operations. Learn more about the conference and follow @dbx2013 for the latest news and livetweeting at the event. The conference was originally invite-only but registration is now closed to the public. The only way to get in now is to win one of these. Here’s how to win. 1) 2) – Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us what you would build for Dropbox.
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GOP Maj. Leader Eric Cantor On NSA And Investing In Small Government Technology
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The House Republican Majority Leader and Congressman with the most charming southern drawl, , sat down with me at for an interview on the National Security Agency, Immigration, and the conservative case for supporting government-funded technology. Because Cantor didn’t want to conduct our interview in a federal prison, he obviously couldn’t divulge state secrets. So, I only had one question for him: If Congress isn’t perfect, why should we trust it to oversee spying programs in complete secrecy? Cantor’s body language revealed a lot more than his answer: he immediately broke out into a big smile, leaned back, took a deep breath and said “This is a challenge…We do have a fundamental problem of distrust on the part of the populace towards Washington.” I pressed Cantor on what specific steps he could take to provide more public oversight of the NSA, but didn’t get any. “I think there is certainly information and processes that are disclosable, that don’t get into national security secrets, that could help us engage in a national discussion in the importance of the national intelligence agencies.” In fairness, has any solutions that would allow substantive public oversight outside of Congress. The Electronic Frontier Foundation a new internal watchdog, the Church Committee, named after the 1970s body that first came up with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, which must approve NSA spying requests. But, as critics note, the FISA court , only . A few legislators the the ability of the NSA to spy on Americans and forcing it to reveal more information to Congress. But all of these solutions depend on complete trust in the Federal government. Until then, I can’t blame Cantor for being vague: He’s not alone. , Cantor has been an advocate for both federal scientific funding and civic engagement tools. “If we can limit the government’s role by allocating resources to finding cures for disease, you will have that much less reason to be involved in someone’s health care,” Cantor tells me. In other words, the conservative case for spending federal tax dollars on technology is a kind of long-term investment in small government. Empower citizens to be smarter, healthier and more innovative now, the less we’ll have the government to do for us in the future. “The dream of open government is to empower citizens.” To that end, Cantor has genuinely been a leader in tech and direct democracy. He’s championed open legislative data, which will allow the public to more easily research laws and who supports them. He’s also built a Facebook tool to track and support legislation, . Last, there’s , an SMS-based voting project that allows the public to suggest which federal programs that House Republicans should vote to cut. Cantor is also cautiously optimistic that his colleagues will adopt , Project Madison, which permits the public to suggest line-by-line amendments to legislation. “I am one who thinks that more involvement leads to more knowledge and better product.” Project Madison gives America a real shot at greater direct democracy. We’ll be watching to see if Cantor upholds his promise and presses his colleagues to adopt it. The House of Representatives is going to take its sweet time deliberating immigration reform. While the last week, Cantor says it will go through the long-winding “regular order” of debates and commissions. “The House is going to proceed in taking on each one of those issues, giving them the time they deserve and hopefully arrive at the solutions we’d like.” The House Republicans have been a long-time proponent of more . He didn’t give specifics on what kind of reform he’d like to see on this latest bill, only that it’s going to take some time for the House to combine all of their separate bills, including . We’ve partnered with Issa’s nonprofit, the open government foundation, in crowdsourcing ideas ( !) Shepard Fairey is ok letting activists remix his iconic Obama photo to protest the NSA [ ] [ ] [ ]
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Resolute.VC’s Mike Hirshland
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Leena Rao
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This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show Resolute.VC founder and investor is 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. Hirshland is the founder of Resolute.VC, a seed-stage venture capital fund . Portfolio companies include MessageMe, Bark, Inc, Bitium, Card.com, Homejoy, MessageMe and Smile by Webshots. Prior to founding Resolute.VC, Hirshland was an early-stage investor at Polaris Venture Partners, and led investments in Automattic, Quantcast, Q1 Labs (acquired by IBM), Six Waves/Lolapps, KISSMetrics, Formspring, BlackArrow, Thing Labs (acquired by Aol) and Mail Bypass. Hirshland also conceived and led the San Francisco launch of Dogpatch Labs. With his new fund, Hirshland has been open about the fact that he prefers being a lead investor in rounds and dislikes what he calls “headless” seed rounds that lack a lead investor (aka ). We’re interested to see what his thoughts are on this trend and why entrepreneurs continue to raise party rounds. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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Bebo’s Founder Michael Birch Says He’s Bought Back The Social Network For $1M, Plans To ‘Reinvent’ It
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Ingrid Lunden
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Another turn in the twisted life of social network , which has unfortunately gone in the direction of a downward spiral for much of the last couple of years: the site appears to have been bought back by its founder Michael Birch for $1 million. Birch originally sold the company to Aol (owners of TechCrunch) for some back in 2008, and has since been a part of the group that has tried to rescue Bebo after Aol offloaded it. Birch now says he wants to “re-invent” it: We just bought Bebo back for $1m. Can we actually re-invent it? Who knows, but it will be fun trying… — Michael Birch (@mickbirch) For a pretty tiny pricetag, this won’t be a case of “reinvent or die trying,” but it will be interesting to see how and if Birch can inject something new into the company, years after Bebo fell well behind the likes of Facebook and Twitter in the race among social media platforms. The move comes about seven weeks after Bebo , at which point it was put under the receivership of the Burke Capital Corporation, which has been of its assets. Confusingly, prior to that Chapter 11 filing, the company had been jointly owned by Criterion Capital Corporation, as well as a consortium of investors that include Birch and his co-founder wife, Xochi. It appears that part of the issue has been that the group was unhappy with how that co-ownership arrangement was working, and so was intentionally trying to move it into a sell-off state, starting in . In other words, Birch’s strategy has been going to plan so far. But shareholder wrangling is one thing. Now comes the hard part: trying to figure out if there is any life left for Bebo in an overcrowded market. We’re reaching out to Birch and other shareholders, as well as Burke Capital, and will update this post as we learn more. : Shaan Puri, the CEO of Monkey Infero, the incubator financed and run by Birch, confirmed to me that indeed Birch had won the auction for the assets — he had been one of three bidders. Puri says that unlike the last time that Birch bought into Bebo, with Criterion and other shareholders, in this go he will be sole owner, developing it via Monkey Inferno: “It was important for us to be able to control our own destiny here,” says Puri. “That was part of the appeal.” Monkey Inferno currently has 21 full-time employees, and it has started to work on a relaunch of the site. But Puri was mum on what this will entail: no comment on whether it would be mainly mobile or online/desktop; what would be its business model; or even if it would be another social network. But he did note that Monkey Inferno is hiring mobile developers, and that Bebo would be in some way returning to its roots: “Bebo has always been about connecting people and was fun,” he said. “At its peak it had more on time site per user than Facebook. We want it to continue to be that: a place to help people to connect and that will be fun to use.”
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Fly Or Die: Form 1 3D Printer
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Jordan Crook
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Early leader in the 3D printing space Makerbot may have just been acquired for , but we still can’t forget about the 3D printer out of FormLabs. It started as a Kickstarter project, which received 6x its , topping in one week. Since, we’ve had the chance to and pit it against the Makerbot. However, the two are quite different: The Form 1 shines a laser onto a metal surface through a layer of resin. Using a process of photopolymerization, the slices are laid down one after the other creating a solid object that lifts out of the resin as it is built. Think of the Makerbot as a stalagmite maker — the material is laid down on a platform — while the Form 1 is a stalactite maker where the object hangs from the platform that slowly moves up. They also have different price tags: The Makerbot where the Form 1 goes for . However, Biggs found that the Form 1’s resin-based approach offered much more precision and a higher resolution result. Two flys.
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