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Rumor: Dijit And Miso Are Close To Merging, As Social TV Consolidation Continues | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | ? Today, TechCrunch received a tip that San Francisco-based social TV startups Dijit and Miso could be close to combining forces in what would be the latest round of consolidation in that segment. The deal would likely involve NextGuide app maker Dijit acquiring patents, IP and other assets from Miso in exchange for some amount of cash or equity in the combined entity, we’ve heard. It’s not clear how many of Miso’s employees would join Dijit, or how the two would combine product or technology that they’ve been working on independently. That said, while there are still a number of details to work out, the deal could be done as soon as next week. We’ve reached out to both companies for comment. Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman declined to say anything. Meanwhile, I’ve yet to reach Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi. (If you’re reading this, Somrat, please call me.) The merger would combine two startups who have both spent the last few years pivoting while searching for market traction. Miso, launched in 2010, came to market as a along the lines of GetGlue and others. But it eventually transformed itself — a couple of times — most recently which is aimed at letting people share moments from their favorite TV shows. Along the way, it’s from investors that include Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media. Dijit, too, had done the and has also pivoted a couple of times. At one point it positioned itself as a universal remote control, connecting to multiple devices through the . More recently, however, the company has been working on a , which it hopes to connect directly to set-top boxes from your existing cable provider. Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman has told me in the past that the startup had raised some seed capital last year, but the company hasn’t disclosed exactly how much. If the deal happens, Dijit and Miso won’t be the first (or the last) “second-screen” or “social TV” companies to explore hooking up with each other, or with others in the space. Not too long ago, Viggle . But that deal — which never came through — and the . That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or the other try to find another partner to tie up with. After all, Viggle had previously , among others. We’ll keep you posted on what comes next. |
Cube26’s Technology Turns Your Face Into A TV Remote | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6QIpEabg-U] The hardest thing about watching TV is finding the remote after a long, slovenly lounge on the couch. aims to improve on that situation by turning your TV, phone, or tablet into a face-detecting powerhouse. What does that mean? Basically, your TV or other device will know when you’re looking at it, who is in the room with you, and, more importantly, it will pause the program, call, or game when you leave the room. Founded by Cornell grads Saurav Kumar and Aakash Jain, Cube26 is still in beta, but from what I saw it works quite well on multiple platforms. For example, in addition to the aforementioned “bathroom pause,” the system can tell when you’re talking on the phone and put other devices on hold. You can also use the system for parental control as it can recognize people in the room and plan content accordingly. “Other players in vision control are generally focused on one specific area, for example concentrating on hand-gesture detection for TV control or face recognition or body control,” said Kumar. “We believe in making the interaction with devices as natural as possible. For example, when you want to mute the volume for a device, instead of using hand gestures to do some pre-defined pattern, how about you say ‘ssshhh!’ to make a ‘keep quiet’ gesture?” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0R6pplpRJ4&feature=player_embedded] The company is bootstrapping now and expects to have some traction in OEM hardware over the next few months. They haven’t named any hardware partners, but they were at CES to look for distributors for the technology. The project aims to take a holistic approach to system interaction. “For vision control to be natural we believe that the solution is to leverage a wide range of vision signals from the user – both implicit and explicit. Signals include presence detection, gesture, age and gender detection, face recognition and eye tracking, and hand gestures.” In other words, the system works best with passive, instinctual commands. Unlike the Kinect and similar motion controllers, the system is always watching the room for changes, allowing for a more integrated experience. The founders came together at a startup weekend organized by Microsoft. They got together for six months of development and focused from making eye-tracking systems for marketers onto “natural control” of devices. Again, much of this tech is fairly pie-in-the-sky right now, but as the speed of embedded systems improves I don’t see why this couldn’t be embedded right into a TV or phone, thereby adding real smart features to otherwise dumb devices. |
Former Zynga ‘Fixer’ Guru Gowrappan Heads To App Search Startup Quixey As EVP Of Products | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | App search startup Quixey is bringing in some senior management help to grow its business. The company has hired former Zynga executive Guru Gowrappan as its new executive vice president of products. Gowrappan held several roles at Zynga during his time there. Nicknamed “ ,” he led M&A integration during , which brought Words With Friends to Zynga, as well as last spring’s . Gowrappan was also instrumental in Zynga’s Japan operations, where he held the title of COO for that international division and helped launch three new games in the market. He also worked with the CEO and CFO during . Prior to Zynga, Gowrappan had worked on several monetization and global initiatives at Yahoo. He joined the web giant as part of its and worked on more than 500 projects and launches through Yahoo Media, Listings, and various regional products. At Yahoo he held various roles in operations, M&A, strategy and product execution. With all that experience at firms like Zynga and Yahoo, what attracted him to becoming a part of Quixey? Gowrappan compared today’s app search world to where web search was before Google took over. That is, most app search and discovery is done through directory structures by navigating through various categories on Google Play and the Apple App Store to find what you want. This is akin to the directory structure of the web that Yahoo and others envisioned before Google made full web search better. According to Gowrappan, Quixey wants to be the Google of app search, as that becomes ever more important. Quixey CEO Tomer Kagan says the company is nearing 100 million queries a month. It also has a number of partners that are providing valuable data points to improve its algorithm. Those include Ask.com, Singapore-based carrier Starhub, Chinese mobile browsers Maxthon and Boat Browser, Applorer, and the Skyfire Horizon browser toolbar that is preloaded on AT&T phones. The result is that Quixey has a lot more data to go on, according to Gowrappan. With him on board, look for Quixey to boost monetization over the next few months. We’ll keep you posted on new developments. |
Radio Freaks Out: First Cox Media-Owned Radio Station Turns Over Control To Listeners 24/7 On Web And Mobile | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | Today, a Cox Media-owned radio station in Florida’s Tampa Bay is shifting its entire format to listener-controlled radio, now putting its audience in control of the songs that play 24 hours a day. It’s the first station among Cox Media’s 86 U.S.-based properties to do so on both web and mobile, if not the first in the U.S. to experiment with the format. Is this what the future of terrestrial radio looks like? It just might be. What the future of radio looks like is a question that radio stations everywhere – and not just here in the U.S. – are struggling with. After all, what hope does radio have when anyone can play any music, on-demand, any time they want? The answer, as it turns out, may be to mimic those services their listeners are abandoning them for, and then attempt to add value. That’s certainly the case with Cox Media Group’s , which today at 5 PM ET, is making an extreme shift to user-controlled programming for the first time. The station had been building its new platform in stealth, in partnership with (aka “Listener Driven Radio”) which today offers “crowdcasting” solutions for 160 stations worldwide. Its services range from simple music research (users voting for favorite songs) to full-on listener takeover of the radio station’s queue. Most of these crowd-controlled stations are experimenting with the technology, however, offering users the ability to vote on a song or control a short block of programming. They turning the entire station over to the listener base. But perhaps they should. In the first four hours of teasing its launch, 97x received 31,000 song votes. To give you an idea, the station, in a typical week, usually has around 300,000 people tuning in. Assuming traction continues at this pace, it could translate into a massive leap in listeners. The Tampa station is only the second among LDR’s partners to try such a thing. The first, an urban radio station in Ft. Wayne, Ind., went to 24/7 user-controlled programming, and then rocketed itself up from No. 20 in its market to No. 1 over the course of a year. But in that instance, the listeners had to go to a website to make their selections. Tampa’s 97x rollout includes both an iOS and Android applications, and several innovative features which make it unique. I spoke with Keith Lawless, VP and Market Manager for Cox Media, about what makes this particular station’s approach so different. “Listeners don’t just control the music,” he told me, “they’re actually on the air.” The apps, he explains, include an “Open Mic” feature, which lets users record a 10-second introduction, dedication, song request, or whatever else they want to say, using their smartphone. The audio clip is then sent to the studio, where the DJs (who are now rebranded as “music guides”) play it in conjunction with whatever song clip it’s referencing or in another timeslot that makes sense. These DJs, or guides if you will, aren’t completely out of a job with the listener takeover, you’ll be glad to know. They’ll still vet those audio clips, of course, fill the queue with new music, and they still have some say over what goes on the air. That is, it has to match the station’s format. “You may suggest ‘Justin Bieber’ and I’m not going to put it in there because it’s not that kind of station,” Lawless jokes. But, he also says that the station is no longer limited to its playlist in terms of what’s going on the air. In the case of 97x, it already had a larger selection (250 songs) on its playlist, compared to the 100 songs that a contemporary-hits station generally plays, but with the user-control takeover, that playlist expands to 1,800. And users can even request songs outside the list if they want. “You may come up with a deep cut from an artist like Red Hot Chili Peppers, and we go ‘wow, we’ve had a couple of requests for that, let’s put that in the queue and see if people start voting for it,'” says Lawless. Not only does the new platform introduce the user audio recordings feature, it’s also now meeting with local businesses to sponsor its “rewards” platform. To encourage user engagement, the station doles out its own badges for participation. For example, the “Early Bird and the Worm” badge (referencing a song by The Used), might offer those who voted between 4 AM and 6 AM a free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. To some extent, this type of carrot-and-stick system might be needed in order to keep users engaged. No other LDR partner station has attempted this on mobile, and only one has tried the 24/7 format. “It’s important that the votes continue along the way…we have to keep it fresh,” Lawless says. “We can’t have app fatigue. Everyone’s had that app they loved so much, and then two months later they delete it out,” he worries. To keep things interesting, the apps also use notifications to alert users when their audio recordings will play on-air, or when their favorite track or artist is about to play. Users can request to be alerted through SMS, email or even Twitter. And they can share their recordings, badges, votes and favorites songs on Facebook and Twitter, too. Lawless says that Tampa’s 12-year old station 97x was a candidate for this radical change because its Arbitron ratings weren’t doing that well, despite the fact that other efforts, such as its popular concert series “The Next Big Thing,” have drawn large crowds. Last year’s event was even the biggest one to date, he noted. Given the target audience here – young alt rock listeners – a station like 97x could almost be the canary in the coal mine, in terms of what’s happening to radio. The younger users just aren’t listening like they used to. Maybe putting them in charge will bring them back. The radio industry, like so many others, has been slow to adapt to the disruption of the always-on broadband age and the widespread adoption of mobile devices that allow users to download an app that plays whatever music they want and, for a small fee, hear that music without any ads – . To combat this trend, Clear Channel, which operates over 1,200 radio stations across the U.S., has copied – – the innovations from streaming music startups, which it offers in its mobile application. But while Clear Channel is trying to blend the modern music streaming experience with traditional “live radio” on mobile, other companies have attacked the problem differently. For example, , a crowdsourced social radio platform, which , has been trying a similar model to LDR’s in that it, too, brings crowd control to terrestrial radio. Today, Jelli has expanded its user-control platform to 70 radio stations across the U.S. Some of its stations, too, have launched a 24-hour user-controlled format, says Jelli CEO Michael Dougherty. “Imitation is the best form of flattery,” he says of the Cox Media-owned 97x’s recent shift. “[I] would love more stations to do this,” he tells me. “I think it is very important for radio to leverage its strengths, including local community, group listening and a ‘social DNA’ which can be amplified by platforms like Jelli.” Initially, LDR’s platform and Jelli seem a lot alike, but Victor Caballero, VP of Operations at LDR, says the two models are actually quite different. “We both entered the space around the same time,” he says. “Jelli is more concerned about getting their brand out in the marketplace, and we’re not…we’re designed to help our affiliates own their interactive platform, and brand it however they want to,” Caballero adds. That is, unlike Jelli, where users download a Jelli-branded mobile app and then pick their local station, LDR’s customers use the technology in their own self-branded apps and websites. And so while there have been a few 24/7 stations out there, such as those on Jelli, there hasn’t yet been one that has done it exactly like this. Not only is 97x doing this under its own branding, it’s doing it on mobile, with social media integration, “open mic” recordings, notifications, badges and rewards. “I haven’t seen any station launch it on this level, with the app, with the marketing, in a market this size, with a station this big,” says Caballero. “When you gather everything that comes together with this particular launch, it’s one of a kind in the world.” |
Ask A VC: Venrock’s David Pakman On Digital Music Startups, The New York Tech Scene And More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | Venrock’s joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio this week for , where we chatted about a number of things, including why he hasn’t made an investment in a digital music startup. This is surprising considering Pakman’s extensive experience in the music industry. Pakman was the co-creator of Apple Computer’s Music Group and the CEO of music retailer eMusic, and he also co-founded myPlay, which was sold to Bertelsmann’s e-commerce group. He also delved into the New York tech scene and discusses what the region will need to become a powerhouse. Check out the video above for more! |
Gillmor Gang Live 01.18.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. |
Facebook Is Cutting Off Find Friends Data To “Competing” Apps That Don’t Share Much Back, Starting With Voxer | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | Facebook is getting stingier about giving data to startups that don’t share content back to it. At least, that’s how it’s describing its decision to cut off a voice messaging app that it has recently begun competing against. Yesterday, Facebook told voice messaging startup it will cut off the app’s access to Facebook’s “Find Friends” data citing its on competing social networks. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed with me that it will enforce this on apps that use its data to bootstrap growth but don’t contribute anything. Voxer CEO Tom Katis tells us that it was contacted by Facebook on January 17th to say its Find Friends data access would be turned off 48 hours later. That will prevent Voxer from helping you auto-follow your Facebook friends when you join the service, which makes sure you have someone to chat with right away. Katis says Facebook stated that it views Voxer, whose walkie-talkie app has a couple tens of millions of users, as a “competitive social network.” Voxer disagrees. It doesn’t view its product as a direct competitor of Facebook’s social network or Facebook Messenger — it’s been live with Facebook more than a year without any issue, after all. Instead, Voxer tells us its “unique, patent-protected technology enables live, push-to-talk functionality combined with the benefits of a messaging application” but isn’t trying to be a wider social network. That may be why Voxer thought it was safe from Facebook’s , which states: “Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.” But late last month, Facebook added voice messaging to its standalone Messenger app. Then this week it rolled out VoIP calling to Messenger for iOS. Facebook seems to be getting very serious about voice messaging and taking on your telephone. Voxer similarly reduces your need for a home phone, or apps like Skype. This means Voxer qualifies as a competitor. But why single out Voxer when there are plenty of apps that vaguely compete with Facebook? Facebook has its own explanation of the Voxer block. Users do have the option to post an audio message they’ve Voxed over to Facebook, but since Voxer conversations are private, people rarely do. Also, the option is mostly buried. I couldn’t find it until I looked through Voxer’s help documents. If you slide left a previously sent message, it reveals a share button that lets you post your message to Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or email. That means Voxer is pulling way more data from Facebook than it’s giving back. If a startup shares back content such as photos or Open Graph stories, Facebook says they’ll be free to use its Find Friends Data. I believe that’s because Facebook can monetize that content with news feed ads. If a messaging app doesn’t share anything back and qualifies as a competitor, a spokesperson tells me it will only be able to use Facebook’s login system. They said Facebook won’t be asserting its vague “competing social network” policy more broadly than that, and it considers non-contributors to be a small class of apps – including Voxer. Voxer’s Katis responded to Facebook’s explanation by saying the policy is hypocritical. He believes Facebook either wants Voxer to share more, which would make it more of a competing social network but more of a contributor, or Facebook wants Voxer to use its data less. (In which case, why was Voxer in the clear for a year, and why have a developer platform in the first place?) Getting cut off from Facebook’s social graph could spell trouble for Voxer, which raised a massive $30 million funding round in April 2012 at a rumored $180 million pre-money valuation. That value could be hard to justify if it becomes much more difficult to retain users because they don’t start off connected to their friends. It depends on what percentage of users employ the Find Friends feature. We’ve heard it may be around 30%. This new policy is hugely problematic for startups in the messaging space, though, as they primarily deal with private conversations. What would they share back to Facebook that wouldn’t violate that privacy? Obviously who you message with and what you say shouldn’t become news feed stories. If you look at Facebook’s wide breadth of features, there’s likely tons of startups that could be considered “competitors” and don’t have anything to share. If they get hit with similar Find Friends cut-offs, it will be much harder for them to gain traction. Recreating your social graph manually via email addresses on every new app you use is a huge pain and could deter people from finishing on-boarding or ever discovering the value of a non-Facebook social app. There’s similarities here to . It ceased giving open access to tweets and required those that use them to reproduce them faithfully. It too was sick of others coining off its hard work; like Facebook, it also promised one thing to developers then did something different. Facebook is a public company, and it’s not going to act like a charity anymore. You could say Facebook had no obligation to be so generous in the first place. Unfortunately, though, in Facebook’s push to be the way the world connects, it’s about to make other apps less social. |
Digital Natives And Doctors Rejoice, Google Handwrite Gets Faster And Smarter | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | , a small but helpful tool that the search team introduced last year, has gotten a . The tool allows you to turn on a mode when you’re on your mobile device to “write” your search. A part of the update is the ability for Google Handwrite to understand overlapping characters and write more than one Chinese character at a time if that’s your search language of choice. From Google’s mobile search page on your device, just go into settings and enable “Handwrite” mode to give it a try. If you have sloppy handwriting, then you will be extremely happy to learn more about the update. Here’s what Google Product Manager, Lawrence Chang, had to say about the changes today: If you’ve tried Handwrite before, you may have had some trouble entering a lowercase “L”, the number “1”, or a capital “I”. Now, we provide alternate interpretations of your characters that you can select above the space bar. Similarly, in Japanese the characters “イ” and “ィ” look nearly identical but are different characters and produce different search results. If Google interprets your handwriting one way and you meant the other, you can now more easily make a correction. While this tool might seem like no big deal, the technology behind it is quite complex, especially the above-mentioned understanding of handwriting from millions of potential users. We don’t all write things the same way, and some of us have worse handwriting than others. Ahem. As far as overlapping letters, Chang explains a bit more on how in-depth Google goes to solve these issues: Compared with tablets, mobile phone screens are smaller and are a little more difficult to write on. Now, instead of squeezing in your letters across the width of the small screen or writing one letter at a time, you can write letters on top of one another. Say you’re in the grocery store and you want to look up a recipe for quiche on your phone. When you write the letters “q”, “u”, “i”, “c”, “h”, and “e”, it’s okay if they overlap and are garbled a bit. If Google wants to try and learn how to read your handwriting when nobody else in the world, including you, can, then more power to them. By learning how to read a multitude of handwriting samples, the company can then release functionality to scan documents of any type in, making it easier to convert them to digital format. This type of approach is how Google has tuned its Voice product, by allowing you to call GOOG411 to get restaurant information and phone numbers. You talk, Google learns. Now when you write, Google learns that, too. It’s actually quite handy and easier than “tapping” on the go. [Photo credit: ] |
Line, The Messaging App That Took Japan By Storm, Crosses 100M Users And Enters The U.S. | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | , , just crossed 100 million users globally 19 months after it originally launched. The app is one of the leading contenders in smartphone messaging in Asia and faces off against Tencent’s WeChat and KakaoTalk. As I’ve written before, , While Naver didn’t share details on daily or monthly actives, Line’s numbers put it up there among the top smartphone messaging players to watch. Line gives you free voice calls (like Skype or Facebook’s new overhauled app). Then there’s basic messaging, but Line is a bit goofier with sillier emojis and stickers. There are teddy bears juggling eggplants, bunnies with flames of anger in their eyes, and a shy balding man surrounded by little sparkles and flowers. (Yes.) Many are free, but some are paid — which is the secret to the app’s financial success. Naver last said Line was pulling in $3.75 million a month in sticker sales in July. But that figure is “a lot higher now,” according to Naver USA’s CEO Jeanie Han. She wouldn’t share figures though. On top of sticker sales, there are a bunch of brand advertising revenue streams. Like Twitter, Line also has sponsored brand accounts where Coca-Cola can sign up for accounts that users can befriend or follow. Brands can also sponsor packs of stickers. Like many other consumer mobile companies that have done well in Japan like GREE and DeNA, Naver wants to take Line global. It’s bringing the app to the U.S. and is signing up celebrities like Snoop Dogg to attract teens and twenty-somethings. They just hired , to run Naver’s U.S. office and expand Line’s reach in the U.S. They’re planning to attract new users through typical app marketing channels, but also through high-profile partnerships with celebrities and other brands. Can it be successful, though? , according to some data I pulled from a mobile data compression company called Onavo late last year. That app appeared to be actively used by 11 percent of iPhones in the U.S. on Onavo’s network. On the other hand, a smaller percentage of smartphone owners in the U.S. regularly use messaging apps compared to people in other countries, the data showed. So perhaps there’s room for everyone to grow. |
Uber Lowers Prices By 10% And Rolls Out UberX To All SF As Bay Area Competition Heats Up | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | is lowering its prices in San Francsico, as the company seeks to remain competitive with an influx of low-cost, on-demand transportation offerings in the city. The startup is also expanding availability of its lower-priced UberX service to all San Francisco users. In a , Uber announced that the price of an Uber Black ride will decrease by 10 percent compared to the cost in 2012. That includes both lower time and distance charges, as well as a lower base fare, all of which goes into effect Monday, January 21. The company is also making traveling outside of the city more appealing, as users will have the same basic rate whether they’re in San Francisco or in the surrounding Bay Area. And since users are now responsible for all bridge and other tolls incurred on a trip, drivers are more likely to go outside the city. But a cheaper, more simplified price structure wasn’t the only big announcement today. Uber is also making its UberX hybrid fleet available to all San Francisco users. UberX was last fall but was only available to select users. The news will make those cars more widely available, but the spike in demand could mean longer waits for rides using the cheaper service. When Uber first launched in San Francisco, it was nothing short of a revelation. Back then, cabs rarely came when called, and there was no way to know whether they would or not. Finally, for the first time, mobile users here were able to find reliable, on-demand transportation in the city. But a lot has changed since then, as there is suddenly an influx of alternative on-demand transportation options in San Francisco. Ride-sharing services like Lyft and SideCar now mean that users have the convenience and reliability of Uber at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, even cabbies today can be e-hailed through apps like Flywheel. The end result is that Uber is no longer the only ride in town. Anecdotally, I’ve known some previously hardcore Uber users who now check Lyft or SideCar (or both) for rides before moving on to Uber. (Although Anthony Ha foolishly still gives MORE THAN half his salary to Uber every month.) And with the marketing push behind Flywheel, Uber could soon be faced with being the third or fourth option checked for the tech-savvy in its home market. So it’s not surprising to see Uber reduce its prices as lower-cost options begin to gain traction in SF. The only question is if it will start doing the same in other markets where it operates, or if it will wait until the competition moves into other cities. Lyft and SideCar are both expected to begin rolling out into new markets aggressively in 2013, and Flywheel has already partnered with cab companies in most major markets. |
We Chat With The 4Moms Founders About Robotic Strollers, Creativity, And Baby Exoskeletons | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | Building hardware is hard and breaking into entrenched markets is even harder. However, the founders of , Rob Daley and Henry Thorne, managed to do both. 4Moms is a baby products company that aims to change the way we think about traditional products like play yards, strollers, and sleepy-time swings. Their products are beautifully-engineered pieces of machinery and the company recently closed on from Bain Capital. I’ve tested most of but I was lucky enough to sit down with Daley and Thorne to talk about the company and how they’ve managed to stay ahead of the baby products curve. The Pittsburgh-based firm builds their products by figuring out the pain points for the average parent. While many of us would find the Origami to be a silly bit of overkill, it’s a godsend for harried parents. The Breeze play yard – which opens and closes with one pull – is just about the best thing ever and the Mamaroo baby nappy-time thing is equally cool. In short, this gear is changing the way we coddle our wee ones. Daley and Thorne discuss the future of the company, their funding, and how to build cool hardware. The best comes near the end when we discuss future endeavors, but I won’t spoil it. |
US Government Still Leaning On Europe To Dilute Data Protection Reform Proposals | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | The U.S. government is continuing to lobby Brussels to water down plans to reform privacy legislation. The European Union’s executive and legislative bodies are in the process of reforming the region’s data protection rules — a long overdue wrangle since current legislation dates back to 1995, when Facebook was not even a gleam in 11-year-old Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. The — setting out its intention to harmonize data protection rules across EU member states, by establishing a single national data protection authority, and also give citizens more control over their data, including granting people the right to have data that companies and organisations hold on them deleted on request (a so called ‘right to be forgotten’), and a right to have their data ported to another service. Data holders would also have to notify service users of serious data breaches — “if feasible within 24 hours”. Other proposals include requirements for companies to have a data protection officer to oversee compliance. The new rules would apply to any companies and organisations processing EU citizens’ data — even if they are entirely based outside the EU. To enforce the new rules, the EC is proposing to strengthen independent national data protection authorities, including giving them the ability to fine companies up to €1 million ($1.27 million) or up to 2 percent of their global annual turnover. The proposals have now reached the European Parliament committee debate stage, with . There’s still a way to go before agreement is reached between all 27 EU member states enabling new legislation to be adopted — so there is still time for lobbyists to keep aggitating. European digital and civil rights association, the , has obtained a copy of what is purported to be the latest U.S. government lobby document (online ) — a document which calls on Europe to be more “flexible” in its approach, and warns that the reforms risk stifling innovation and growth, and jeopardizing the free-flow of information needed to fight crime and terrorism. The document warns: It goes on to urge that the proposals be “revised to ensure that security and commerce are not adversely affected”. The general thrust of the argument set out in the document is that the US does not want to be beholden to European policy decisions on privacy — favouring “interoperability” of respective privacy frameworks. There’s also an implied threat that trade and commerce between the US and Europe could suffer if the reforms themselves are not reformed. “Interoperability of our respective privacy regimes is critical to maintaining our extraordinary economic relationship, fostering trade and preventing non-tariff barriers, and unlocking the full potential for our economic innovation and growth,” the document states. “We urge the EU to look more toward outcomes that provide meaningful protection for privacy and focus less on formalistic requirements.” The document, which runs to five pages, goes on to address specific portions of the proposed EU legislation — arguing that standards developed through “voluntary consensus-based multi-stakeholder processes” are a better alternative to regulation where the internet is concerned, as they are more “flexible” and “adaptable to a quickly changing technological environment”. It also argues that user consent for use of personal data “need not always be express, affirmative consent” and that the scope of consent-based options that are offered to users should correlate with the “scale, scope, and sensitivity of the personal data that organizations collect, use, or disclose”. On the ‘right to be forgotten’ and the ‘right to erasure’ the U.S. warns the EU to make modifications to “avoid hampering the ability to innovate, compete and participate in the global economy”. “For example, we suggest that the EU reconsider the feasibility of placing obligations on a data controller for publications made by others after consent is withdrawn,” it notes, going on to voice concerns that rights to freedom of expression might suffer under the current proposals. The document also argues that the proposed 24 hours data breach notification law is not a long enough period for organizations to comply — and might also lead to over-notifications, causing consumers to ignore them or act unnecessarily on erroneous information. A very large portion of the document is given over to concerns about the impact of the proposals on the global transfer of data and free flow of information — with the US lobbyists apparently arguing that EU proposals could have “disastrous ramifications” for regulators, law enforcement authorities and litigants in civil cases. Assuming the document is genuine, it suggests the US government is continuing to lobby Brussels to dilute its proposals. Last October reported that the US Chamber of Commerce was lobbying European politicians to alter the proposed new rules on behalf of the U.S. business community. Adam Schlosser, senior manager for global regulatory cooperation at the Chamber of Commerce, told the publication it had been engaged in lobbying since March. “Some of the biggest concerns are providing flexibility for different business models, allowing for compliance with existing legal obligations (such as anti-fraud) both in the EU and in third countries, and actually creating a ‘one-stop shop’ that is predictable and consistent across member states,” Schlosser told TechWeekEurope in October. He described progress as “incremental”, adding: The business community will need sustained and continued efforts to develop a pragmatic approach that considers how a final regulation can actually work in the real world.” At the time of writing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had not responded to a request for an update on its current position regarding the EU privacy reforms. Sean Heather, vice president of the U.S. Chamber’s Center for Global Regulatory Cooperation, provided the following statement regarding the Chamber’s position: “The U.S. Chamber is firmly committed to protecting consumer data, but wants to ensure that regulations take into account the dynamic nature of information technologies like cloud computing and recognize that many industries must move data in order to move commerce. We will continue to offer input on how regulators and lawmakers can craft data protection regulations that take into consideration the real world implications on industry and the economy. Our engagement has often come at the request of officials of the European Union and some of its member states, out of their consideration for the existing arrangement between the U.S. and E.U. that governs these policy concerns.” Facebook has also been lobbying Europe about the reforms — with its own (smaller) team of lobbyists based in Brussels — calling aspects of the proposals such as the right to be forgotten . But it’s not just big tech companies that are voicing opposition. , the Association for Competitive Technology — an international non-profit association/advocacy group for startup-sized small and medium sized businesses such as mobile software developers — has also been lobbying Brussels on aspects of the reform that it believes would have a negative impact on startup businesses in the region. “The Commission views startups as lifeforms that don’t communicate with bigger businesses,” EU spokesman for ACT, Greg Polad, told TechCrunch. A particular bone of contention for ACT is that the latest amendments to the proposals — in the European Parliament draft committee reports — removed prior exemptions for SMEs to employ a data protection officer, replacing it with an exemption for companies that deal with fewer than 500 data points/subjects, a limit Polad describes as “ridiculously small”. Another admin and cost burden that SMEs could face as a result of the proposed legislation is a requirement for a business to pre-emptively conduct privacy impact assessments if it deals with certain types of data — an up front cost which Polad argues could disuade startups from trying to build their businesses in Europe. “If you’re saying to startups you have X, Y and Z costs to think about before you start operating then you’re not helping them to enter the market, and you’re most definitely not helping them to innovate and try and test out and experiment on the market,” he argues. |
Omega Releases An Anti-Magnetic Mechanical Watch That You Can Wear In Your Supercollider | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | Whether you’re polishing your magnetic death ray or powering up your Stargate, the effects of magnetic fields on your watch can be quite destructive. Back in the old days when scientists wore suits and nice watches to work, they would bring their timepieces too near certain pieces of equipment, rendering the movement useless. Rolex solved this by wrapping its movements in non-ferrous metal but their watch, the , could only handle up to 1,000 Gauss. That was then and this is now. Omega has decided to blow Rolex out of the water with their new Seamaster Aqua Terra. This watch movement is actually made of non-ferrous material that can stand up to 1.5 tesla or 15,000 gauss, about twice the magnetic output of a subwoofer, while an MRI can hit up to 70,000 at its peak. is what happens when you get metal near your MRI. The watch is a fairly standard three-handed timepiece but the new movement, the 8508, is what makes it special. The watch will ship this spring with pricing to be determined (expect something in the $10,000 range if not lower). Sound a little pricey? Tell that to yourself when you accidentally fall through a magnetic space-time vortex and your Timex stops ticking. |
After Growing Revenue 750% In 2012 And Conquering Video, Taboola Goes After Article Recommendations | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | had a banner year in 2012, serving nearly 1.5 billion video recommendations per day by year’s end. With all of its growth in video recommendations, the company also grew revenue by more than 750 percent in 2012. The startup now sees a huge opportunity to move on from recommending videos to tackling content of all types. The new product might seem a little counter-intuitive, considering recommendations for text articles have been around for decades, and there are no shortage of companies trying to tackle that problem. The difference, according to Taboola CEO Adam Singolda, is that it’s gone beyond just providing contextual recommendations to now also bringing in technology that it used to improve its video product and applying it to text articles. Video recommendations can be a tough nut to crack, especially compared to text. That’s due mainly to the lack of good metadata around video. Without it, Taboola was forced to use other information, like viewer demographics, social sharing, and user behavior, to determine which videos users are most likely to watch. Now Taboola is applying those algorithms to article text and getting impressive results. Singolda estimates that the company’s technology can yield three times the clickthrough rates and higher CPMs than other article recommendation offerings out there, depending on the type of content that it’s looking at. Taboola already has some clients using full-text recommendations, including Bloomberg, Businessweek, Meredith and Jerusalem Post. It signed up some as a result of already doing business with them on the video side, but it is also offering full-content recommendations as a standalone service. Like its video recommendations, it allows publishers to connect users with other content on their own sites, while also enabling them to have their content highlighted on related articles on other sites. In addition to the launch of its new article recommendations, Taboola has also hired a new COO, as it doubled headcount in 2012, and is on pace to double again in 2013. , former SVP at Zend and board member at Kaltura, just joined the company to handle operations. That’ll be necessary, especially as growth continues internationally. Taboola recently added an office in London, which is being run by former Groupon country manager Nadav Rosenberg. That office, which opened in the fall, already accounts for about 10-15 percent of all revenues. Taboola has raised $25 million since being founded in 2007, including a last summer. The company currently has about 70 employees, but expects that to grow to about 150 by the end of the year. |
Axcient Raises $20M To Help Companies Backup And Protect Data | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | , the hybrid cloud-based data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity startup, has raised $20 million in Series D funding led by Scale Venture Partners and Thomvest Ventures with Peninsula Ventures and Allegis Capital participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $53.5 million. Founded in 2006, Axcient wants to bring core data protection and recovery solutions to SMBs and large corporations for a reasonable price. Using Axcient, companies can combine storage, backup and disaster-recovery into a single solution. To do so, Axcient sends businesses a small device (typically about the size of a desktop hard drive), which they can set up in as little as 5 minutes and self-connects to Axcient’s cloud as well as the company’s network. With local, on-site hardware that use local network speeds with the added benefit of the creation of a secure tunnel to Axcient’s cloud, the startup has basically enabled organizations to take advantage of a SaaS-based hybrid cloud model which works for companies with 250GB of data or up to hundreds of terabytes. And the cost to the end-user scales from $100 a month to tens of thousands of dollars per month for enterprises with larger data needs. The company says the key differentiator for its service is its platform approach, which eliminates a multitude of antiquated technologies such as backup, business continuity, archiving and disaster recovery in favor of a single, unified platform that eliminates downtime and data loss And thanks to this approach, Axcient is growing fast. The company’s sales were up 100% in 2012, and Axcient protects close to 10 billion files and apps across thousands of organizations. Axcient’s client list includes the Make-a-Wish Foundation, Budget Rent a Car, Union Bank and Cellular One The new funding is going to be used to hire 50+ people in engineering, sales and marketing in 2013. |
Facebook’s “Dirty Likes” May Mislead Graph Search Initially, But Facebook Has Other Good Signals, Too | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | Apparently I “like” OfficeMax, Folgers, JCPenney, Kraft and several other big-name brands. At least, according to Facebook I do. Except, it’s wrong. It’s not that I these brands, really (well except maybe Folgers – I mean, yuck). But the truth is, I’m just indifferent to them. Why did I like them? I don’t recall. I probably saw a coupon. Maybe a freebie or contest. I was bored, and I had to click “like” to enter the drawing. This is a common situation among Facebook users, but not really a huge problem. For Facebook, however, it is. With – conveniently after turning off the ability for users to opt out of search – there’s now a greater need to think about the implications of Facebook’s “over one trillion connections,” and how representative they are of the people who created them. As a whole, Facebook’s “like” data may paint a relatively accurate picture of my public self – I like technology, apps, Star Wars, TV, family activities, and jokes about how much wine working mothers have to drink to stay sane (hint: it’s a lot). But when examined one-by-one, there’s a lot of junk data in there. Initially, when and if people begin to transition to Facebook search over Google, they will be searching for things of personal interest, like old photos, places to travel, new bars or restaurants to try, local singles with shared interests, and more. But further down the road, you can imagine Facebook graph search becoming a part of the consumer shopping experience, too. Say I’m looking for a new dryer, an HDTV, a new credit card, or maybe even a good sushi restaurant, and I want to know what my Facebook graph can recommend. The problem, as it stands today, is that Facebook would do a poor job of extracting that information . “Friends who liked X” is not a recommendation. “Friends who checked in at Y venue” isn’t either. somewhat via its , which has recently been prompting users to recommend or rate the restaurant, bar or other venue on a five-star scale. This data isn’t perfect either, because some friends’ ratings are more valuable than others’ ratings due to a variety of factors – their palates, biases, whether they’re wine-savvy, or similarities with a user’s own tastes, for example. But it’s a start. On the “like” front, though, the data is murkier. , GroupMe’s Head of Biz Dev, explained this problem in more detail in a thoughtful, if pessimistic, post: “ .” It’s well worth reading in its entirety. In it, Cheney says: The truth however is that the link between query intent and your social interactions for interests and places is much weaker than FB wants you to believe. In computer architecture they call an out of date piece of data “dirty”. Accessing dirty data is bad, wasting time and causing more harm than good. And in this context, much of the structured data that makes up Graph Search is just that: . It turns out as much as half of the links between objects and interests contained in FB are dirty—i.e. there is no true affinity between the like and the object or it’s stale. Never mind does the data not really represent user intent… but the user did not even ‘like’ what she was liking. He goes on to explain that the problem was created by the way the Facebook “like” system worked. The company told brands that users would see their posts in their news feeds if the users liked the brand’s page on Facebook. So the brands paid big money in terms of advertising dollars to acquire fans. “Across the board big advertisers were told to spend 50% of their ad buy solely on fan acquisition,” Cheney writes. He calls it a “dirty little secret in ad agency land.” This is why, today, Facebook users can’t request a coupon, get a free sample, enter a contest, hear about a limited-time sale, etc. via a brand’s page – they are forced to like the page first. This then establishes a connection between the brand and the user. And now Facebook is mining that connection to build its own search engine. Google has PageRank. Facebook has “like” data, check-ins, posts, comments and photos. . But that being said, while Cheney has a point about Facebook’s “dirty data,” I think that point of view also discounts Facebook’s capacity to innovate. Yes, some data is bad. But not all of it. And most importantly, it seems clear that a Facebook like, in the context of businesses and brands, will eventually have to become one signal among many in Facebook’s search results ranking algorithm. Just as engines such as Google rely on thousands of signals to determine where a link appears in search results, Facebook too could turn to other means to determine how much value any particular “like” has. For example, with a restaurant, it could also know not just whether you liked it, but when you checked in, how often you returned, who you were with, how often they return, how you rated it, what friends and friends of your friends rated it, and more. As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine also recently pointed out, , thanks to the photos’ geotags (location where the photo was taken). A photo says “I was there,” and it often implicitly implies an element of fun, too. As Josh noted, “I don’t see many people posting pics from the DMV.” With brands, determining a like’s value is more difficult, though. However, with Facebook’s advertising network, Facebook Exchange, , Facebook can gain access to other signals about user behavior in order to better examine what a “like” means. For example, Facebook could learn whether a user visited a brand’s website, when their visit(s) occurred, whether or not those visits later led them to the advertiser’s Facebook page (after seeing a Facebook ad, for instance), and then provoked the user’s “like.” Facebook could , which could bring in even more data, including perhaps one day, geolocation. That would solve the messy “check-in” problem. (Check-ins are a decidedly manual, privacy-sensitive way of getting location data an app could just if users gave it permission to run in the background.) The trick will be in finding the proper way to massage all these various signals into an algorithm that makes sense and determines the proper relevancy. And Facebook is still critically missing information related to users’ financial transactions, which is the end result of clicking “like,” at least in brands’ eyes. It currently has some access to purchase data, , but that may be limited to things such as grocery store purchases – data Facebook receives via Datalogix loyalty card data sets. Facebook clearly needs more of this kind of information. Facebook also doesn’t necessarily know if you ever ate at that restaurant you liked, unlike when you checked in, posted geotagged photos, or reviewed it. And it doesn’t know how much you spent there, either. That’s why if Google ever gets its Google Wallet mobile payments service into the mainstream, it could best Facebook on at least this portion: closing the loop. Still, Facebook does have access to a relatively powerful data set through Open Graph, which tells it not just what people like, but what they . Open Graph data comes in through any third-party app that auto-shares with Facebook, providing information on things like your media consumption behavior (e.g. bands, TV shows, movies, books), as well as info gleaned from things like food or travel apps, and it may also have a decent amount of information from local businesses, too. At the end of the day, the way I see Facebook’s graph search now is like looking at the bare bones of an idea, really the raw skeleton of what could one day become a more fully-fledged search offering. Today, dirty data will abound, perhaps. But when there are connections to examine (and growing), there’s also the possibility to find the golden nuggets of quality from among the junk. |
Nooly Wants To Be The Last Weather App You’ll Ever Need; Brings Realtime, Localized Forecasts To iOS & Android | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | While “the weather” generally makes for dependably boring conversation, the weather itself tends to be anything but dependable. Mother Nature is mercurial, and she has no problem raining on your parade at a moment’s notice. When it comes technology and the weather, the conversation (albeit boring) is usually dominated by the usual suspects, like expensive URLs and familiar incumbents, including Weather.com, The Weather Channel and AccuWeather — to name a few. Plus, Google offers realtime weather forecasts in search, and your iPhone and Android device have native weather apps right at your fingertips. Although gaining mindshare over these incumbents would seem to be a tall order, an Israeli startup called wants to re-start the conversation — namely by giving everyday weather watchers a more dependable (and localized) weather forecast on the Web and on mobile. The startup has been beta testing early versions of its patented technology for over a year now, but today it officially pulled back the curtain on its ready-to-wear mobile products. Nooly Founder and CEO Yaron Reich believes that, while people are far from being devoid of options when it comes to weather forecasts, today’s generally available consumer-facing options tend to be anything but dependable, instead relying on information that is frequently general and out-of-date. So, Nooly’s free iOS and Android apps offer instead technology that claims to be able to predict the exact minute a storm will start, get worse and dissipate, while delivering forecasts that are hyperlocal and offer near-realtime granularity. This means that all of Nooly’s predictions are localized to within 0.4 square miles of your current location and are updated every five minutes. As such, Reich believes that Nooly is the first weather app to offer these features, with a near-perfect degree of accuracy in one mobile product — while featuring its own unique predictions based on its long-developing proprietary algorithms. Of course, while the topic of weather can be about as boring as conversation can get, it probably doesn’t need to be said, but it also can have a big effect on your plans for your lunch break, your weekend camping trip, what you decide to wear and so on. Nooly, then, wants to deliver the most accurate, localized and up-to-date forecasts out there so that you, reader, can know how Mother Nature plans to impact your life on any given day so that you can plan accordingly. So what does Nooly offer, you ask? While it’s not the sexiest app on the design front, Nooly delivers weather predictions for over 20 million locations in the U.S., down to 0.4 square miles from you currently stand. For New York City alone, for example, Nooly offers over 1,500 predictions. The app features a table screen, which includes hourly forecasts, 15 minute forecasts (for the next 60 minutes) and 5-minute forecasts for the coming hour. Forecasts can be viewed list-style or on a realtime map, including your locations of choice, meaning that users can drop up to six “weather markers” to display the weather in realtime from those locations. Users can drag and drop markers and move the app’s “slider” to see how different weather conditions are forming and behaving at a given location. It also offers a weather prediction chart segmented in five-minute intervals or hourly steps in landscape or portrait mode, along with a search page, wherein users can peruse weather for specific addresses, like restaurants, parks, tourist destinations, etc. The app updates its forecasts every five minutes for the entire continental U.S. and Reich says that it’s one of a few “commercially available weather app that makes predictions by tracking and analyzing each cloud above the U.S.” and even bases its predictions off of “every convective cell within a cloud or thunderstorm. The founder says that, until now, this kind of technology has really only been available to government and federal agencies (like the military, the FAA, NASA and the EU Space Agency among others). Now, that sounds cool — as does the fact that its algorithms calculate (in realtime) data from over 260 National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) radars and two NASA satellites — but how the “h-e-double-hockey-stick” does Nooly pull that off? According to Reich, to advise pilots on severe weather events, the FAA uses an algorithm that tracks every cloud above the U.S., which just so happens to be developed by Nooly’s “Chief Meteorologists,” Professors J.R. Mecikalski and Daniel Rosenfeld of the University of Alabama-Huntsville and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, respectively. Nooly’s search and predict tools (for realtime forecasting within a 60-minute timeframe at five minute intervals) are protected by several patents developed by the startup’s Chief Meteorologists, which give it a leg-up on the competition like The Weather Channel and similar offerings from companies like and afford it a little protection from would-be poachers. As to where Nooly gets its data from: The largest portion of the app’s dataset comes from raw, three-dimensional radar data from the NOAA’s new network of over 260 individual radars. The app supplements that data with realtime satellite data from NOAA and NASA satellites, both for visible and infra-red channels, along with using data from ground stations (for validation) and other numerical models. All in all, this means that the Nooly algorithms are processing 11,300 MB of meteorological data every hour, resulting in almost three billion predictions for the continental U.S. and Canada alone every hour — or 69 billion predictions each day. That’s all well and good, but it’s not particularly difficult to make note of the fact that, if Nooly hopes to gain much mindshare in the Weather Market, it has to go up against big names like The Weather Channel. TWC is a highly-recognized name, which makes it easy for people to pick out among the options (and to trust) and has become one of the most-downloaded weather apps as a result. To curry favor amidst the brand recognition of The Weather Channels of the world, a startup has to go above and beyond, or else users are just going to stick to familiar territory. But Reich is optimistic based on the fact that it’s not unusual to hear complaints about TWC’s app (and that of others), regarding the accuracy of it’s local weather predictions. He attributes this to their reliance on “numerical models,” which are great for predicting the weather a few hours in advance, up to a few days, however, these predictions are statistically accurate only if the location in question is large enough and the time is at least one hour out. It also helps The Weather Channel’s accuracy that (according to its own website), for a prediction to be correct, rain drops don’t even need to hit the ground. (Wah, wah.) The numerical models in use today, the founder says, are pretty much incapable of predicting the formation of a single cloud and, instead focus on predicting the probability of conditions suitable for cloud formation in a given time (at least one hour) in a relatively large domain. To fight this, he says, companies need to incorporate “nowcasting” — or realtime prediction — that uses algorithms to actually track and make predictions based off data being produced by individual clouds. This is a tall order and why Nooly has been hard at work on its app for nearly two years. So, while The Weather Channel updates its predictions every hour (and thus its predictions are an hour old when they get updated), Nooly updates its entire prediction set and refreshes every five minutes. That’s where Reich thinks Nooly can win over TWC users and those looking for more accurate, realtime predictions. Although good luck explaining all that to the Average Joe, who just wants to know whether he should bring an umbrella to work or not. Another big area of opportunity for Nooly could be making its large and not-exactly-standard data set available to other applications and tools that want to offer realtime weather forecasts. One could see this appealing to navigation apps (Waze, anyone?) or social networks, who could use Nooly to showcase weather in a location by way of a “check in” or for scheduling and to-do list apps, which could let their users plan what to wear for their next meeting. As such, the startup is developing an API, which is currently in beta and available to select partners. The startup plans to open up its APIs more publicly later this year. Being hyperlocal brings with it wide range of challenges,” Nooly’s founder tells us. “We had to adjust our algorithm for different cities, like Seattle, which experiences shallow, constant rain, compared to New York, which often sees bursts of rain lasting a few minutes and impacting only a cluster of city blocks. San Francisco is also a tricky city, with a mostly calm climate, though the weather can change in very specific streets and neighborhoods. Hyperlocal is tough, but it was extremely important for us to get it right so that we can offer a differentiated user experience and solve a few of the biggest pain points in existing options — and planning your day so that you stay can stay dry. For more, . |
59% Of All Android Tablet Usage Comes From The U.S., And The Forked Amazon Kindle Fire Is The Most Popular Brand | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Android tablets have nearly caught up to iPad devices as the world’s most popular tablet platform, and some project that they iPads later this year. According to new research from app analytics company , the U.S., and specifically Amazon, should take the most credit for that trend: some 59% of all Android tablet usage came from the U.S., with over half of that attributed to Kindle Fire and Fire HD tablets, working out to a 33% share. The numbers are based on usage of apps with Localytics analysis and marketing data installed on them. Localytics says that in total there are 500 million+ unique devices running that software. That is enough of a lead, in the leading Android tablet market, to make Amazon’s Kindle Fire the world’s most popular Android tablet. But it’s a very regional victory for now, and would likely to come a surprise to Android users outside of the U.S. The U.S. is Amazon’s first and main market for the Kindle Fire, with Amazon only starting to roll out the tablets to other markets (first in the UK market), around a year after launching in the U.S. That means that some 89% of Amazon’s tablets “live in America, with most of the rest in Great Britain,” writes Localytics’ Daniel Ruby. “After those two, no other country has even one percent of worldwide Kindle Fires.” In the rest of the world, however, the Android tablet game is Samsung’s to lose. Ruby tells me that the Korean device maker’s Galaxy line accounts for 76% of all Android tablet usage across non-U.S. markets. Nexus 7 came in second at 15%, and Kindle Fire’s global share is just 9%. Localytics notes that if Amazon manages to work out its international distribution, then “their U.S. success suggests they could quickly dominate the Android tablet market worldwide.” Indeed, in the market where Amazon has been the longest, it has stolen a march on traditional competitors like Barnes & Noble, whose Android-based Nook has only 10% of the market in the U.S., and even less than Amazon outside of there. The rise of the Kindle Fire speaks to another, persistent trend in the Android world: the presence and success of “official” Google versions of the platform and those that are not. Because Fire is built on a “forked” version of Android, the Google Play app storefront doesn’t appear on it. That means two things: first, Amazon gets more control to push its own advertising, and its own services on the devices over those of Google and others — something it is doing more by extending payment services and for voice recognition services. Second, it means more legwork for developers and an imperative to create apps specifically for the Kindle Fire, if not with a view for global distribution today, then for the promise of it in the future. “Any Android developer with a focus on tablets should be distributing their apps in the Amazon App Store,” writes Ruby. “The degree to which Amazon has dominated their most serious geographical market should speak to the future potential, and since Google Play is unavailable on the Kindle Fire family, adding Amazon’s App Store as a distribution channel is important.” Figures from ABI Research in November 2012 noted that in the last quarter, iPad devices accounted for 55% of sales, while Android tablets accounted for 44%. |
Report: There Were 94 Tech M&A Deals in 2012 Above $100M, Average Deal Value Was $717M | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Towers Watson’s M&A practice recently published the results of Quarterly Deal Performance Monitor (QDPM), which is conducted in partnership with Cass Business School, and has examined the data on all deals over $100 million completed in 2012. The results are really interesting, especially when you look at what was happening in the public markets. In 2012, there were 94 deals in the tech sector with an average value of $717 million. In 2012, there were 768 M&A deals across all sectors above $100 million. Compare this to 2011 which saw 75 tech M&A deals with an average value of $512 million. Why the jump? One theory is that it’s a combination of the softening of IPO opportunities for large companies, as well as some of the effects of the rise in valuations over the past year. Amid Facebook’s surprising negative performance on the public markets, and the plummet in value of other tech stocks like Groupon and Zynga, going public at a billion-plus valuation wasn’t as appealing as exiting at a fairly high valuation. In 2012, we saw Yammer’s $1.2 billon exit, as well as Kayak’s exit (as a recently public company) to Priceline for Yammer could have been seen as an IPO candidate, but founder David Sacks chose to sell to Microsoft. Kayak was already a public company (and was performing decently on the public markets) but the Priceline deal was too good to pass up. Last year, there was also Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, and Cisco’s purchase of Meraki. Another point noted in the report — the high-tech sector, compared to other business markets, is more risky for companies conducting M&A. For example, in 2012, tech acquirers’ returns were -0.6 percentage points relative to the MSCI World Index and -4.9 percentage points relative to the MSCI Industry Index. This compares to say the telecoms sector, where acquirer returns were 9.9 percentage points relative to the MSCI World Index and 11.9 percentage points relative to the MSCI Industry Index. While some tech deals succeed in acquisitions, the report says that performance of buyers in the high-tech sector falls significantly below industry benchmarks and there is little to no shareholder value created. Why these deals don’t succeed is another story. The study highlights that the merging of companies of different sizes, development technologies and cultures often gets in the way of a successful integration. Photo Credit/Flickr/ |
uBiome Nears $200,000 on Indiegogo To Crowdsource Data About The Bacteria That Lives Within Us All | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Nope, this isn’t your average tech startup. No mobile apps here, or integrations with Facebook. Instead, this is a project that sits at the intersection of crowdsourcing and health. or research that relies on data contributed by regular people. In this case, Ubiome is looking at the human microbiome, or the very complex ecosystem of bacteria that resides within us. The amount of bacteria in the microbiome outnumbers human cells by 10-to-1 and it can keep us healthy by helping with digestion or synthesizing vitamins. Instead of looking at these trillions of microbes antagonistically, researchers want to understand how they affect our immune systems or digestive processes among other issues. They also want to understand how our behavior, like our diet or use of antibiotics, can affect the make-up of the microbiome. While the microbiome has been studied before, crowdsourcing a broader range of samples from the public could lead to other discoveries. Historically, researchers have analyzed individual species of bacteria in isolation, instead looking at how they function in a complex ecosystem. Some species can’t even really be reproduced in a lab, given that they rely on byproducts of other species in the human microbiome. Researchers are looking for how microbiome composition correlates with diseases like cancer and diabetes. “Involving the public directly in science has been a big passion of mine,” said co-founder Jessica Richman in an interview. “Using Indiegogo rather than going down a grant process to fund this was intentional.” Ubiome . With a Ubiome kit, you can provide samples — which are from your nose, ears, eyes, mouth and other — private parts. Yes, you contribute a stool sample. (But it gets degraded in a tube into a clear liquid.) With that data and at least a $79 donation, Ubiome promises a report on your personal flora and fauna. That report will tell you what species of bacteria reside in your microbiome, how it compares to others in the study, and the latest personally relevant research on the microbiome. If you’re in the very highest tier of donors at $10,000 a pop, you’ll get a personally designed experiment.
As for privacy, Richman said contributors will own their own data, and it’s their choice to share with scientists associated with the project. They can download their own data and share it at will. “We came to a solution that we’re comfortable with, and that’s for people to own their own data,” she said. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/53757258 w=500&h=281] from on . |
Lenovo Downplays RIM Acquisition Reports, Says It’s Looking At M&A Opportunities In General | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Lenovo has downplayed reports that the company plans to buy Research In Motion, saying that it is instead looking at acquisition opportunities in general, (link via Google Translate). If Lenovo does indeed decide it wants to court RIM, it may face significant regulatory hurdles. Canadian Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty that a Lenovo-RIM deal is something the government “would look at carefully.” Flaherty also responded “absolutely” when asked whether some local technologies are off-limits to potential overseas buyers. Canada has stopped international buyers from purchasing Canadian companies before. In 2008, the a $1.32 billion bid from U.S. Alliant Techsystems for British Columbia-based MacDonald Dettwiller & Associate’s satellite business, which marked the first time it had prevented a foreign takeover since at least 1985. On the other hand, Chinese oil company CNOOC for a $15.1 billion acquisition of Nexen in December. Reports of a potential deal helped to their highest price in a year, though other factors include the upcoming launch of BlackBerry 10 smartphones, as well as the company’s disclosure that it is its software or selling RIM’s hardware unit. Lenovo, which purchased IBM’s personal computer business in 2005, is focusing on acquisitions to continue growing its mobile business as it faces down competition from other tablet and cellphone makers. |
Help Key: Put Display Settings Back In The OS X Mountain Lion Menu Bar Where They Belong | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | I like my Retina MacBook Pro, in part because I have the option to switch to extremely high-resolution display modes when I’m way from my home Thunderbolt monitor and want as much screen real estate as I can get. But Apple did a curious thing in OS X Mountain Lion: They removed the option to put a display preferences item in the OS X menu bar. Luckily, third-party developers have stepped up and created a couple of fixes that actually go above and beyond the call of duty. is available in the Mac App Store, which should help those wary of installing OS tweaks feel a little more at ease, since it means this has at least passed a basic quality review by Apple, which isn’t true of all utilities that fiddle with OS X system settings. And what it provides is a menu that lets you change the display resolution of your Mac, and any attached external displays, without having to open System Preferences and click through to Display Preferences itself, a process made overly elaborate ever since Mountain Lion’s introduction. Display Menu is neat, and helps in a number of ways, but it is also limited in a couple of areas. For one thing, it doesn’t support the 15-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro’s native Retina display resolution in HiDPI mode. What that means is that you can’t quickly switch back to the “Best for Retina” option. But for attached displays, it’s absolutely perfect, and it’s free. If you want the native Retina resolution option, there’s a paid App Store alternative to Display Menu called “ ” that provides it – but only for the 15-inch Retina Pro for now. For the 13-inch, the native HiDPI or Retina modes aren’t yet supported, and the app costs $2.99. It’s possible an update will fully support the 13-inch, but judging by Display Modes’ developer’s website, which is pretty sparse, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Despite the limitations of both these apps, they do provide complete control over third-party displays, and they offer another trick owners of any Retina MacBook Pro might appreciate: the ability to change your resolution to a mind-boggling max of 2880 x1800 on the 15-inch, or 2560 x 1600 on the 13-inch version. Font is small at that extreme, but you also have a ton of desktop space to work with, which is perfect if you need to edit print resolution photos or run a number of applications at once and keep an eye on each. Retina or no, if you’re reading this article you likely miss the Display Preferences menu bar option that Apple inexplicably removed in the interest of ‘progress.’ These apps bring it back, with some added superpowers depending on what kind of Mac you’re using, affordably and without requiring any mucking about in Terminal. |
Twitter Expands Ad Services To Middle East, North Africa After Regional Users Tripled Over The Last Year | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Twitter yesterday that it has started selling advertising services in the Middle East and North Africa after users in the region tripled over the past year. The microblogging platform will work with Cairo-based agency Connect Ads to market its sales products across the region. While financial details of the deal were not disclosed, Connect Ads will lead sales of promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends, the microblogging platform’s three advertising products, in the region. Before yesterday’s launch in the Middle East and North Africa, the product suite was available only in the U.S., U.K., Japan and Latin America. Twitter selected Connect Ads as its sales rep in the region , when it was announced that the agency will manage all sales in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Twitter vice president of international operations Shailesh Rao said at a press conference in Dubai that “when we decided we wanted to prioritize in the Middle East region it was principally because we had a large user base here and was growing rapidly. The active user base in the Middle East has tripled in the last year. It’s one of the fastest growing regions in the world.” The Middle East-North Africa region (MENA) is a very important one for the company. In a statement, Twitter cited the report, prepared by Deloitte and the Dubai Press Club in 2012. The report said digital advertising is the fastest growing media platform and accounted for 4% of total advertising spending in 2011. Deloitte says digital advertising spending in the region will grow at an annual rate of 35% over the next three years to $580 million by 2015. According to the report, Arabic is the fastest growing language in Twitter history. There were more than 2M active Twitter users in the Arab region at the end of June 2012, who generated 172.5M tweets in March 2012. Twitter’s announcement comes two days after suggesting that Twitter is now valued at $9 billion after early employees sold $80 million in shares to a fund managed by BlackRock. Bloomberg speculated that the company may be prepping for an IPO by lining up buyers for shares to limit pressure on Twitter’s valuation after post-IPO “lockups” on shares are lifted and employees start selling stock. |
Marc Andreessen On The Future Of Enterprise | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | ************************ Yeah. So let me maybe start with sort of – top-down and bottoms-up is how we think about it, because both are important — so let me start with historical context and then maybe go to the stuff happening right now. Is that all set? So the computer industry started in 1950 and basically ran for 50 years with the same model, which was a model where all of the new computers, all the new technology, all the new software started out being sold for the highest prices to the biggest organizations. So originally the customer was the Department of Defense. It was the first customer for the computer. In fact, one of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was like one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don’t know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time. Maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in current dollars. And then five years later computers became — they dropped half in price and then the big insurance companies could buy them, and that’s when Thomas Watson, who ran IBM at the time, was quoted as saying, “There’s only a market need in the world for five computers.” The reason that wasn’t crazy when he said it is because there were only five organizations that were big enough to buy a computer. So that’s how it started. And then IBM came along and productized the mainframe, and then all of a sudden big normal companies — manufacturing companies and banks — could start to buy computers. And then DEC came along and came out with the minicomputer, and then all of a sudden smaller companies could start to buy computers. And then the PC came out and then all of a sudden individuals could start to buy computers. But the PC only ever got to hundreds of millions of people. It never got to billions of people. Now, the smartphone has come out and it can get to billions of people. And so it has always been this kind of trickle-down model for 50 years. We think that basically about 10 years ago the model flipped. And so we think that the model flipped to a model where, today, where the most interesting and advanced new technology now comes out for the consumer first. And then small businesses start to use it. And then medium-size businesses start to use it, and then large businesses start to use it, and then eventually the government starts to use it. But this is a complete change from the way it has always worked. Versus trickle-down. And the reason is because – the reason fundamentally is because now that you have got these things, you have — now that you have a computer in everybody’s hand, all of a sudden all these barriers — it used to be these barriers to market entry were so big, it used to be there just weren’t that many early adopters in the world. To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something. And now all of a sudden you have got this global market of all these early adopters that have smartphones connected to the Internet, and they can just pick up their things and run with them. And of course consumers can make buying decisions much more quickly than businesses can, because for the consumer, they either like it or they don’t, whereas businesses have to go through these long and involved processes. So that’s the big, big, big change that’s happened. And that’s been reflected in the entrepreneurial community, where entrepreneurs, especially between 2000 and 2008, entrepreneurs really only wanted to do — for the most part wanted to do consumer software, because that’s the only software that they could actually get anybody to adopt. It became very hard to get businesses to adopt new stuff. In the last five years, there’s been this sort of acknowledgment of the consumerization of the enterprise, which is consumer product development, design methods applied to business software, of which SaaS and cloud and all these things are examples. Salesforce.com, Evernote is an example. So now you have got the rise of this new set of companies that are sort of consumerized technology for businesses. Then from a bottoms-up standpoint what you said is exactly right, I think, which is that the new generation of employees grew up on smartphones and tablets and touch and everything, social networking and Twitter and everything else. And so if you take a typical mainframe or, even these days, PC-based system and you give it to a 22-year-old college graduate, it’s like beaming in products out of the Stone Age. Why would you do that? Why would you force people to use all this old stuff? And then that leads to the big thing that’s starting to happen right now, which is this “Bring Your Own Device” movement, where more and more companies are saying, well, basically, if I have to support smartphones and tablets anyway, and my CFO is probably carrying around an iPad and all my new employees are coming in with iPhones, so I have already got to support this stuff, so then I might as well encourage it. And I might as well basically have a model where instead of issuing a company laptop to everybody or even a company phone, why don’t I just let people bring in whatever device they want and just plug-in and access it. And then they get all excited, because then they say, well, not only are my employees going to be happier and more productive, but then I don’t have to buy them hardware anymore, so I can cut my budget. So that’s the big thing that’s starting to happen right now. We just invested in this company called ItsOn, that we announced yesterday. The mobile billing. The advantage — the thing that that’s going to be able to do is do split billing in a new way, between the business and the consumer. So on a single device you will be able to cleanly build data usage by application. So your employer can pay for your Salesforce.com and your Workday data usage on your phone and you get to pay for your Facebook and your Hulu usage. So that will be another enabler for a lot more of the Bring Your Own Device stuff. We have a bunch of stealth investments. I mean, this is a big, big thing — big change for us, so we have a bunch of stealth investments — I mean, companies that haven’t talked about what they are doing yet. Who else? I mean, there is a bunch, who else should we have — What’s that, Platfora? Yeah, Platfora is the actual user interface layer on top of Hadoop. So sort of Platfora and Cloudera kind of go hand in hand. Actually — we have another one actually that is — well, it sounds esoteric, but it actually is very relevant. We have a company called Tidemark, which is in a category. It’s called Enterprise Performance Management, which is kind of a weird term. It’s basically large-scale financial planning and analysis for big companies. The significance is it has a — I believe it only — I don’t know if it only or primarily, but I think it only has an iPad UI. So it’s the first complex financial system for big companies, where the assumption is that the user is on an iPad. That’s a really big deal, because that category of software, line managers and businesses have never actually used that software themselves. Instead they employ analysts to use the software who become highly trained on the software. By putting the iPad UI all of a sudden you can have anybody in the business have access to all the financial analysis and planning. Even in a very deep sort of sector of enterprise software where most people would never see it, this change is having a big impact. What else? Asana you mentioned. Yeah, exactly! Exactly right! Then of course Workday, of course, Salesforce.com, of course NetSuite, 37signals. We probably have three or four others in our portfolio that I am blanking on, but yeah, this is sort of the — and then by the way, the corresponding thing is that a lot of this is on how you run a business and then how you do marketing, of course; AdWords and Facebook and Twitter, all these systems and then all the enabling systems for that; so HootSuite and Marketo and — Oh, another one, GoodData. So GoodData is at the intersection of kind of marketing and business. So GoodData is an actual easy-to-use analytics package. It’s sort of like a supercharged version of Excel that lets you suck in data, you can suck in all your Facebook advertising campaigns, you can suck in all your Salesforce.com data, and you can run — you can actually, yourself, as a small business person, actually analyze and find friends and data. They are very good. So then you add up all these companies and you are like, “Well, okay, so number one, they are all basically new companies. I think who is not on that list are all the existing companies that sell business software.” Oh, right, right, right. I mean, the joke about SAP has always been, it’s making 50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like it’s really — yeah, the incumbency — they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash. So a lot of incumbent business software companies did what a lot of big companies actually did and other industries, media companies after the dot-com crash, which is they said, “Oh, thank God we don’t have to worry about this Internet thing. It’s over. Stick a fork in it. It’s not going to be a big deal.” And then it turned out that it actually wasn’t over, and they still haven’t adjusted. For now. The whole market goes back and forth in whether they prefer enterprise businesses or consumer businesses. The argument in favor of consumer businesses is you don’t have these crazy end of quarters like when the IT purchasing manager doesn’t buy the product and the company misses the whole quarter. The advantage of the consumer businesses is they tend to be much broader-based, much larger number of customers, that tend to over time be a lot more predictable. The advantage of the enterprise companies is they are not as subject to consumer trend, fad, behavior. But I would say the market is schizophrenic. So right now we are in an era where the market wants enterprise companies. I am just saying like wait a year, that will flip again; wait another year after that, that will flip again. It’s sort of the picks and shovels thing. Like everybody — it’s like the consumer businesses get really hot and then everybody realizes that there is lots of competition and that those models have — they are complicated businesses and they have their issues, and then everybody gets all excited about picks and shovels. And everybody rediscovers the picks and shovels analogy and says, ” Oh, the Gold Rush in California, the people that made all the money were the guys who were selling picks and shovels to the prospectors.” And then people realize the picks and shovels business is really hard, and then everybody says, “Oh, we should invest in the consumer company because they” — so it’s just — It’s cyclical. It’s deeply cyclical. But we are in an environment right now, to your point, where there has been huge rotation out of the consumer companies into the enterprise companies. Yeah. It’s unpredictable. All you need is for one of the new enterprise companies to completely whiff a quarter and their stock will collapse and then everybody will get all freaked out. I mean, it’s just a continuous — the reality is every single business is hard. There are no easy businesses in the world other than maybe Google, but other than that, there is no easy business anywhere in the world. So what happens is Wall Street gets enamored by the businesses that look like they are easy, until it turns out that they are not, and then Wall Street gets disillusioned and freaked out, and then rotates into the businesses that they think are going to be easy, and then they get endless disappointment. It’s like a seventh or eighth marriage at some point. At some point the problem isn’t with your seventh wife. At some point the problem is with you. There is no solution; it’s a permanent state of affairs. So this is a big part of what actually we do. A big part of why venture capital actually is important and enduring is because the public market is flighty and late-stage investors are flighty, and customers for that matter are flighty, and so you can’t — if you are running one of these companies you can’t — you just can’t rely on people being balanced. They are just not going to be. And so you have to have a level of determination to just stick through the good times and the bad times. And you need to have investors at the core of your company who are going to support you through that. The big advantage that we have as a venture capital firm over a hedge fund or a mutual fund is we have a 13-year lockup on our money. And so enterprise can go in and out of fashion four different times, and we can go and invest in one of these companies, and it’s okay, because we can stay the course. And then what happens is everything tends to get better, all the products tend to get better, all the companies tend to get better over time if they are working hard at it. So we are fine. Like if everything we are investing in goes out of fashion, we are not going to change anything we do, because we can’t change anything. We are already invested in these companies; we can’t sell our stock. We don’t have to sell our stock. So we just say, we will go back to work. And then at some point it really gets exciting again. So the big thing we try to do is be aware of the difference between the reality and the psychology, and the reality tends to progress in a certain way and then psychology tends to whip all over the place. It was very educational for a lot of us to go through the dot-com crash, because you remember, in 2002, like there were a number of universal truths asserted in 2002; the Internet didn’t matter, consumer Internet business was dead. Larry Ellison in 2002 came out and gave a speech and said the correct model for enterprise software, enterprise computing, will last for 1,000 years. He said all these kids that were trying all this new stuff and it didn’t work, and now we know it didn’t work, and so the model is going to be the existing IBM and Oracle for the next 1,000 years. And everybody kind of said, hmm, you know, that makes a lot of sense, like all that innovation stuff didn’t work, and so — Exactly, this is the fact. People reach a point where they start to get a little bit too rich, maybe a little bit too old, and they start to say these things. And then so here we sit 10 years later and we are in the middle of a complete reinvention of everything in enterprise computing, and it’s like, okay, like that’s the reality. People happen to be excited about it again at the moment. That’s great. I am happy for that. But wait two years and they will be depressed about it again, but that won’t keep it from happening. It will still happen. No, I don’t mean to make a specific prediction. I don’t know if it’s a year, two years, four years. Look, all of the products are going to keep getting better. All of the trends that we are talking about are going to keep continuing. Nothing is going to stop consumerization of the enterprise. Nothing is going to stop Bring Your Own Device. Nothing is going to stop Software-as-a-Service. Nothing is going to stop cloud. All those things are just going to keep going. I am just saying people are going to be — they are all excited about them now. At some point again they will be unexcited about them and then at some point after that they will be excited about them again. So it’s hard to draw conclusions about the importance of the trends or the progress of the trends by the current level of press coverage, the current level of Wall Street enthusiasm. Well, there is a whole bunch. So there is a big thing — there are a couple of big things that are happening. So one of the really big things that’s happening is, historically the best enterprise technology was only — it’s a trickle-down thing — the best business technology was only ever available to the biggest companies. And so if you were a Fortune 500 company with a big IT department, you had a huge advantage over a small business that was trying to compete with you, because you just had so much more budget and staff and professionals and expertise and access to all these big vendors and you could spend tens and millions of dollars on all this stuff. So it was very easy for — in the old world it was very easy for big companies to use IT as a weapon against small companies. The classic was Walmart versus local retailer, right? Walmart’s advantage in logistics and in pricing and in data analytics was just so great that they could kill small retailers at will. Today all the consumerized enterprise stuff is as easily usable by the small business as it is by the large business. In fact, it’s probably more easily usable by the small business than it is by the large business, because with a small business it’s like you can just use it, like you don’t have to go through a long process, you don’t have to have a lot of meetings, you don’t have to have committees, you don’t have to have all this stuff, you can just start picking up and using it. So the best technology for inventory management and for financial planning and for sales-force management and for online marketing can now be used just as easily or more easily by a small business. There is an opportunity here for a shift of the balance of power for big businesses to small businesses. And then for vendors, the companies we fund, there’s an opportunity to really dramatically expand the market, because a company like Oracle, as successful as it is, it only really has about 5,000 customers that really matter worldwide. Whereas, a company like Box or a company like GitHub could have 500,000 customers or 5 million customers that really matter, and that’s a huge change. So market expansion, small business versus big business, what else? Oh, the shift, the other big one, the shift from CAPEX to OPEX. So the shift from buying a lot of servers and databases and software licenses and networking equipment, the shift instead to just renting it all. So the shift towards cloud services. So we don’t have — no company that we invest in anymore actually ever buys any hardware. I mean, they buy their laptops and that’s basically it. And increasingly they might not buy their laptops, because their employees will just bring their own devices. But they don’t buy servers. They don’t buy storage devices. They don’t buy any of this stuff, they just rent on AWS. And they don’t buy sales-force automation software, they rent on Salesforce.com. And so having sort of a much lighter-touch way for businesses to be able to get funded, you just need a much smaller budget. And that’s why you see these — you see it in the startup world, you see three or four kids with laptops who are able to go do amazing things on a global scale for no money. And I think businesses are going to figure out more and more how to do that as well. All the above. They are all changing. I think they are all changing. I don’t know, it’s sort of all intertwined. I mean it’s all — because a lot of what businesses do is then offer consumer services based on all these changes. So it’s kind of all — that’s why I say it’s kind of all happening at the same time, a lot of the same stuff. I would say the consumer Internet companies — in a lot of ways if you go inside the consumer Internet companies and you see how they run, it’s how all their businesses are going to run. They are going to be doing all of the same kinds of things. The big businesses are just in the process of trying to figure out how to catch up. So everything, Hadoop and scale-out architectures and cloud services, and the whole thing it’s all — and use of new technologies like Box and GitHub, the consumer Internet companies all are just built this way. And then if you go inside a big consumer product’s company or a big manufacturing company, they are all trying to figure out how to make the jump. But it’s all kind of the same stuff. Yeah, this is the part where I get into the most trouble. Yeah, exactly! I don’t know if I am going to — let’s see, I am going to try and figure out if I am even going to answer the question. So I would say for sure — like the systems companies, like the companies that provide hardware, the server companies and networking companies, the bad news for them is the end customers are not going to buy as much stuff; the good news is the cloud companies are buying a lot of stuff. So for every server that’s not bought at a manufacturing company, there’s a server being bought at Amazon. So it’s a change in purchasing pattern for all the gear, but the gear is still being bought. I think it’s at the software layer where the big disruption happens. I think it’s application software in particular and just sort of an extended infrastructure software. It’s like anything for which there is a — any piece of installed software for which there’s a web or a cloud equivalent, I think is in real trouble, and I think that’s just now becoming clear. The other thing that’s happened is 2012 seems to be the year of the actual SaaS tipping point, like where big companies are now saying, you know what, it’s fine, like I can do it, I can do Salesforce, I can do Workday. Because there used to be lots of issues around can I trust the security issues or liability issues, and an awful lot of big companies are now saying, “You know what, I am going to save so much money, the service is going to be so much better, my users are going to be so much happier, more productive. I have got to make this stuff work on iPhones anyway, so I have got to do something new.” “My old software vendors are charging me these huge upgrade and maintenance prices. I can switch to SaaS for less than the cost of the maintenance on the old software.” Like, at a certain point it becomes –“Oh,” and then on security it’s like, “Yeah, I may have concerns about SaaS security, but it turns out I have the concerns about my own internal security anyway.” So every one of these companies has had an employee steal a laptop that has 25 million customer records on it, and they are like, “Well, okay, if I can’t even lock that down, then why am I that worried about whether somebody is going to break into Salesforce.com?” And by the way, Salesforce.com has gotten much better at security. So there is a bunch of new technologies coming out that are going to make cloud and SaaS even more secure, and I think are going to end up making — I think cloud and SaaS are going to end up being a lot more secure than anything inside the firewall. So that’s the other thing that’s about to happen. The problem is I have conflicts on this issue, because I am on the HP board in particular, so I can’t really — unfortunately I am kind of gagged on the topic of the big companies. This is exactly what I can’t talk about. I just can’t talk about it. So the problem is I can’t talk about HP and I can’t talk about HP’s competitors, so it’s just a no-fly zone for me. So I have to stick to the startups. Although I have a lot of opinions. You mean startups? So let’s see, there is this category of kind of outsourced work. Well, there’s TaskRabbit and Zaarly and companies like that on the consumer side; and then on the business side there’s eLance and oDesk and RentACoder. So these companies that are kind of for — in the sort of mechanical term, distributed workforces and outsource work being run online. So like oDesk, oDesk you can actually have remote contractors working on a project, and one of the features is that it actually takes snapshots of their screen every five minutes. You can see if — anybody who actually manages anybody, number one that sounds spooky, but number two, “Wow, that sounds great, like, I sure wish I can do that.” So there is sort of the whole category of an outsourced workforce that sort of — it goes back to what you said about the employees is, you will have — it feels a lot like in the new economy you will have a lot more contractors. You will have a lot more people with sort of fluid careers contracting on a project basis, and then all this technology is going to be an enabling layer for that. So anybody on their laptop, anywhere in the world, being able to tap in and be able to get work and do work, whether it’s for small companies or big companies like that. There is a whole layer of software there. We haven’t seen anybody really punch through on that yet, but I am very fascinated by it. We haven’t made an investment there yet. That’s one layer. Let me think, what else haven’t we done? I mean, Cloudera is I think a good — we haven’t actually done an investment at that. We haven’t done an investment at the Hadoop layer. We have done — Platfora is our investment, which is the intelligence layer above Hadoop, but Cloudera definitely deserves to be on the list. Zendesk and kind of its generation of companies are definitely for real, or so it appears. What else? We have been pretty active. I mean, we have been trying to take down mostly good companies. We haven’t done anything yet with this whole category of marketing, the new marketing software so like Marketo and HootSuite and companies like that, we haven’t really done anything yet, but that’s a big deal. It’s sort of like — if you are starting a new company it’s so obvious that you would want to do most of your marketing on Google and Facebook and Twitter, whereas a lot of the existing companies still haven’t wrapped their heads around that. Education — there is actually going to be more and more. So actually companies are going to get a lot more interested in education for two reasons. Number one is, a lot of companies need to actually educate their customers or their partners, and a lot of that has to happen online. And then the other thing is companies are having — if you talk to anybody running a company, they are having real trouble hiring enough qualified people. So companies are going to have to take a more direct role in educating the candidates or educating their current employees. So the sort of model of employees just show up and they are either educated or they are not is not working very well. There’s lots of mismatches. It’s one of the reasons unemployment is running as high as it is, is people just don’t have the skills they need for the jobs. So I think employers are going to have to get a lot more actively involved in making sure that the supply of candidates is actually educated and that they can hire somebody who doesn’t yet know what they need to know and actually educate and train them, and a lot of that is going to happen with the new technology. So we have this company Udacity as an example, that’s going to be, I think, important in all of that. Yeah, let’s teach them — right, exactly, the employer says let’s teach them the other 20 percent. And it’s like, well, instead of literally sending them to college, which presumably didn’t work the first time around or whatever, let’s just go ahead and provide them with the online training. Let’s set them up with their tablet at home with high-definition video. They can develop their remaining skills, or be able to retrain people once they are in the jobs. The other is there is this real issue, like for some people it feels great to never be tied to a specific employer and to always be doing contract work and be changing jobs every two years, and it feels like it’s fun and exciting and exhilarating. For a lot of people that’s really scary. And so the lifetime employment promise that the big companies used to be able to make was very compelling for a lot of people because it felt safe. So now you are in a world where the big companies can’t deliver — even if they wanted to deliver on lifetime employment, they can’t, and so then they have got sort of two choices. One is, do they start to basically be a lot rougher with their — they start to do a lot more layoffs, a lot more restructurings. I remember IBM — I don’t think IBM had a layoff for 50 years. And I was actually at IBM — I was an intern at IBM when they were ramping up for their first layoff I think they had ever done, and, like, the level of freak out in the company was beyond belief. And people had no idea what to do if they got laid off from IBM. And it turns out their skills weren’t actually very useful to work for any other company, because IBM was so unique in how it ran. So I think the companies have a real question about how do they develop their workforces, how do they make sure that their employees stay relevant for the purpose of staying inside a company for a longer period of time? And then how do you get the workforce over time to be a lot more flexible and adaptable, so that if you have to layoff a ton of people, or if you have to get out of a line of business, or if you have to expand into a new business, how do you get your current employees to adapt better to that? I don’t know if it’s the most, but it’s a big issue for every company. It’s a big issue for companies, because companies have hundreds and thousands of employees, it’s like, yeah. Sort of. Education is a big component of it, yeah, it’s possible, it’s possible. I don’t know. We will wait for the entrepreneurs to answer that question. They are a big one, yeah. Yeah. We think it’s the largest investment ever done. That’s the key thing. So they were beating off venture capitalists with a stick. So they actually — I don’t know if you remember this, they used to have on their website, they used to say — they had four metrics that they would put on their website. They had, I think, it was number of users, number of projects, number of code check-ins, and amount of venture capital that they had raised, and that final number was always zero, and they were really proud of that. So what they did was incredibly impressive. They reached a point though where they decided that they had the opportunity to become a very big and important company. And again, I would say there was a top-down and a bottom-up reason for that. The top-down reason was they are the place, we think, and they believe, they are the place where all the software code wants to live. They are the place where all the open source code increasingly lives. All other code increasingly uses a ton of open source code. And so all the software basically wants to be in the same place, and it wants to be in the place where all the open source software is. So they have an opportunity to be the main company that provides the systems for developing software, number one, which is just a very big opportunity, and they really decided to go for it, and that requires investment on their part. And then the bottom-up reason was because they have enterprise customers lining up, like they have enterprise customers bombarding them with interest in buying services on GitHub. And they did not have — at the time we invested they didn’t yet have any sort of sales or marketing kind of motion to be able to do it on. They didn’t have a Salesforce, they didn’t have the sort of pricing plans — the whole thing to be able to do that — and we have a lot of experience with that. Tons, it’s like the who’s who. I mean, they gave us access. One of the things they did in the diligence process was they gave us access to the email box that had all the incoming messages from all the CIOs and purchasing managers and all these big companies. And it’s literally like, “Hi! I am from big bank X and we already have like 600 people on GitHub and we want to buy an enterprise license. Who do we call and where do we send the check?” And they just had the email queue up this, and they didn’t have — they weren’t — like it’s just sitting there. And so we are working with them to help them build out the sales and marketing capability to be able to really go get all that business. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know, we will see how. I mean, aspirationally, yes. It should be a very big business. Historically companies in that market have been very successful. Big one, Rational is a big company that IBM bought a while back that’s in the same market. And then even companies, Mercury Interactive was a big company that HP bought that was in a similar kind of market. And then in the old days you had companies like Borland and Lotus that were very big in these markets. So this is sort of the new version of all that. So if it works it should be very — I mean, it’s working, so it should be very big. I don’t know. Probably in the second and third tier. I mean, usually when you have a funding boom, categories usually get overfunded. So probably it’s in the second- and third-tier competitors. We actually get yelled at for this a lot, but we really believe it. So the big technology markets actually tend to be winner take all. There is this presumption — in normal markets you can have Pepsi and Coke. In technology markets in the long run you tend to only have one, or rather the number one company in — the number one company in any consumer products — cars, the number one company in cars is, I don’t know, Toyota or whoever it is. Fifteen percent or 18 percent market share. The number one soft drink has only 60 percent versus Pepsi, but like what is Coke as a percentage of all drinks, it’s, I don’t know, maybe 10 percent. The big companies, though, in technology tend to have 90 percent market share. So we think that generally these are winner-take-all markets. Generally, number one is going to get like 90 percent of the profits. Number two is going to get like 10 percent of the profits, and numbers three through 10 are going to get nothing. And the problem is, of course, there is too much venture capital, and so companies three through 10 still get funded. So there are probably lots of sort of second- and third-tier companies that are getting funded right now that won’t succeed, but that won’t have anything to do with whether or not the winner succeeds. Well, the venture capitalists who are successful in investing in the winners will be very happy with this. The venture capitalists who are investing in the losers will be very sad. But everybody will get freed, because at some point there will be a bunch of companies — a bunch of startups that will go bankrupt, and then everybody will say, that must mean the whole sector is going down. I just think people get confused. People get confused about — it’s really funny watching the stock. Like the stock market does this all the time. It’s like one Internet advertising company will have a bad quarter and the other Internet advertising companies’ stocks will all drop. Maybe, but maybe it’s because the other ones are now taking market share away from the one that had a bad quarter. So I find the markets all have trouble processing cause and effect in the short-term and people get all confused. That’s permanent. I think it’s permanent. I think it’s human nature. There are certain things that can’t be fixed, and I think that’s one of them. I think it’s all the above. I think the changes are real. The businesses are good, which is nice. And then I think it’s also sector rotation. We talk to a lot of the big hedge funds, mutual funds. It’s really funny. We are talking about big hedge funds, mutual funds, about six months ago they all started saying, well, you know, we really think there is going to be a rotation from consumer and enterprise, and we are going to really get ahead of that. And I am like, yeah, you and 10 other guys in the last two weeks have told me the same thing. It’s like, good job, you are way out ahead on the leading edge on this. I get to the point where I am just like — my running joke has been, it’s like little kids, like everybody out of the consumer pool, everybody into the enterprise pool. So everybody out of the waiting pool, everybody into the hot tub. What happens when you have capital flowing in a rotation is, if all the capital starts to leave one sector and go to another sector, then all the stock prices rise in the sector that all the capital is going into, because everybody is buying those stocks. And then everybody says, wow, look at how much those stocks are going up. We should invest in those stocks. And so the up cycle starts perpetuating.And the down cycle similarly — a lot of reasons people have been selling out of the consumer stocks is because they have been going down, because people have been selling out. So the cycle is perpetuating. Investing. So the smartest entrepreneurs I think generally ignore all this. We really look for the entrepreneurs who don’t pay any attention to this. We really look for the entrepreneurs who say the following, they say: “I have this really good idea and I know it’s a good idea for the following eight reasons, and I have thought about it and I have worked in the field, and I know what I am doing, and I have talked to the customers and I have figured it out, and I am going to do it. I am just going to flat-out do it. And I am going to do it whether you fund me or whether you don’t fund me or I don’t get funded. I am still going to do it.” That’s the entrepreneur we are looking for. Sometimes that entrepreneur is in a sector that’s completely dead, and that entrepreneur is going to say, I know that everybody thinks that this sector is just dead, and in fact that’s probably why now is a good time for me to do this — is because I am not going to have very much competition. Well, so a lot of these companies you talk about now, like Workday and GitHub and Box, got formed and funded when everybody thought enterprise was dead. Just like the consumer companies like Facebook and Twitter got funded and everybody thought the consumer stuff was dead. So sometimes you get the entrepreneurs who are actually counter-cyclical. They are doing it precisely because nothing else is happening in that sector, and that means the big opportunities are just wide open. On the other hand, sometimes you get the entrepreneurs who say, “I know I am doing the 36th workforce collaboration system in the consumer side; Google was the 36th search engine, and I know it’s 1999, and I know the whole sector is overfunded, but I have a better idea. I know how to do it better, I know how to do it different. I have learned from the mistakes that everybody else is making, and I am going to be the winner.” And so we will fund either one. We fund companies in the hot sectors and we fund companies in the not-hot sectors. The only difference is the pricing, and the pricing varies basically by like 4x. But what we have just found or what we have sort of tried to learn from history is you can’t — for what we do you can’t really time the stuff. And the last thing you want to do is look at what’s happening in the public market today. And this is the thing that’s weird about how venture capital works — a lot of venture capital investments are decided based on whatever the NASDAQ is doing. No, we have not seen down rounds yet. We have not seen down rounds yet, but consumer rounds that are happening now — consumer growth rounds are happening now at 2-4x lower prices than they were six months ago. And the enterprise pricing is up a lot. Enterprise pricing a year ago was probably half what it is today. Maybe a third in some cases, and that made us happy at the time, but it’s all good. I think they are all on your list. Yeah, yeah. |
Twitter Is Finally Preparing To Release Its Advertising API In Q1, Say Sources | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | People have speculated that 2013 will be the year that Twitter will . That strategy could get a boost very soon with the entry of mass-market advertising: Twitter is finally gearing up to launch its advertising API some time in Q1. Aimed at large advertisers and their agencies, it will give them the ability to launch scaled-up campaigns across the social network, and it also opens the door to more sophisticated targeting and analytics tools in the process. According to several sources, the company has started briefing social media marketing agencies, which help brands and big advertisers plan and buy ads on social networks like Twitter, with conversations taking place just before the holidays. “I have been in discussions with Twitter and they contacted us right before the holidays saying it was getting close to having their advertising API ready,” one executive said. TechCrunch also spoke with a would-be advertiser, who said that his agency advised against changes in their Twitter ad strategy in the short-term “because their API will be changing” in Q1 of this year. Twitter declined to comment for this story — “We don’t have anything to share at this time,” a spokesperson told me. And it has not started sharing too many details about what the advertising API would entail, exactly, with agencies, “but we have been getting updates that state that it will be very close to what their current self-serve model is,” a source said. Twitter first introduced advertising on its platform in April 2010, and the self-service tool that is currently in place lets companies, and their agencies, upload ads to run across the social network covering formats like Promoted Tweets. But these are uploaded one at a time, which doesn’t work for large campaigns. “The value add that the ad API will bring is the ability to productively and efficiently grow and scale campaigns,” a source said. “One-at-a-time can be very time-consuming if you are managing multiple or very large campaigns for large advertisers. Also, it’s a challenge if you’re an ad agency operating in this manner.” Launching an advertising API is something that has, reportedly, been long in the planning, with this from July 2011 noting it would be coming “soon.” Equally in the air is whether Twitter will offer a separate advertising API, as Facebook does, or whether it would be rolled out as part of a wider update to its general API for other data calls: this was an idea Marketing Land , when Twitter noted in its API 1.1 release terms that “Twitter reserves the right to serve advertising via its APIs (“Twitter Ads”). If you decide to serve Twitter Ads once we start delivering them, we will share a portion of advertising revenue with you per our then-current terms and conditions.” But in either case, it does seem that this time around, the API is finally coming. Apart from several sources confirming that Twitter is talking up its advertising API, the startup has made several other recent moves that point to it super-sizing its commercial efforts. On January 22, it opened up a way for advertisers to (or to target several specific geographies at once), by adding support for different markets around the world. Twitter, which has 200 million monthly active users, says 70 percent of registered accounts are outside the U.S. On January 17, it expanded its Certified Products Program, which allows brands and businesses to better measure how they are performing on the social network, and to better manage their engagement. The expansion added new partners in areas like engagement, data analytics and data reselling. Twitter also appointed Zach Hofer-Shall to manage the program and expand it further. Part of that change, it seems, could see a further expansion of the role of those certified partners. A senior person at one of these partners, which focuses today on helping businesses manage their presence on Twitter, says that his company is soon planning to launch “something very unique with Twitter and advertising,” with the news planned for the next few weeks, which would also match up with the news of an advertising API. Agencies say they are ready and waiting for Twitter to launch an advertising API. “We are very excited to include Twitter ad API capability once it becomes readily available for release because large advertisers are ready to scale campaigns there,” said Luis Caballero, the COO of Blinq, the social media agency bought by Gannett last year. And the brands are waiting, too. “As an advertiser, we’re going to be taking more advantage of Twitter in 2013, and anything that they can do to enable this will be a good thing in my book,” one marketing head told me. The timing of an advertising API is also worth watching in the context of Twitter scaling up revenues and speculation of an IPO. Like Twitter, Facebook derives the vast majority of its revenues from advertising. Facebook launched its first advertising API as a limited private beta in late 2009, before , about 10 months before its IPO. : Twitterrific’s Ollie, |
Can Brands Tell A Story In Six Seconds Or Fewer? Ritz, Dove And Trident Think So | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Whenever a new platform launches these days, brands are instantly checking them out to see how they can “become a part of the conversation.” What that really means is how they can use a site like Twitter, or , to get your eyeballs, interact with you and, of course, sell you more stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s commerce at its purest. The story isn’t that brands try out new platforms. That’s boring. The interesting part is they approach them and . Now that consumers have the power to skip through commercials on programs that they record, creative advertisers have to start pushing the envelope on generating interesting and persuasive messages outside of the television set. I spoke with founder Gary Vaynerchuk, and his firm urges their clients to test new things out. When he says test it out, he means it: I tell our companies that there’s a 72 hour rule where you’re not even thinking about an ROI or how you can generate business. They should just try things out. Vaynerchuk’s companies are definitely , and the brands include GE, Ritz Cracker, Dove and Trident gum. The initial six-second vines include fun spins on their iconic brands, products and logos. What will it do for the company right now? Probably nothing, and that’s OK with the brands and VaynerMedia. Here’s a look at what Trident shared as its first Vine, just a few clips of people chewing the gum: [tweet https://twitter.com/tridentgum/status/294866814456979456] While this clip might not make you want to run out and buy a pack, it does humanize the brand a little more, making it about people and not the stuff that people stick under your airplane seat. Still though, you can see how this new platform brings out a new form of creativity, making you pack as much as you can into a six-second video. There are “real” people in this clip, not the models that we’re used to seeing on TV. Another one of Vaynerchuk’s clients, Dove, did something pretty fun in its first vine. When he told me that Dove was giving the new platform a chance, I asked him how Dove could possibly make its product seem interesting, clever or funny with six seconds of video. Apparently, the team thought about it and here’s what they came up with: [tweet https://twitter.com/Dove/status/294944595731685376] Once again, does this make you want to purchase a bottle of Dove hair products or soap? Probably not, but you have to admit that this is pretty cute and was created without trying to force in a way to make us give them money. Imagine if all commercials on TV were only six seconds long: That would be pretty wild and creative for brand managers. Instead of just butting into everyone’s streams with old-school advertising and a “call to action,” Vaynerchuk sees it as something else: Storytelling is changing, and unless brands know how to tell theirs in a quick, witty and purposeful way that is native to these new platforms, they will be left behind. When I think about what attracted brands to a service like Instagram, it took me a little longer to grasp how powerful that platform could be for a company. However, a brand like American Eagle perfectly leveraged Instagram to show off its latest fashion line, even showing off pictures of things that haven’t hit the shelves yet. When you viewed the photos within the app, it felt like a more intimate experience than getting a flyer in the mail or watching a few runway models on TV. You felt like the brand was talking to you, and that’s powerful storytelling. I also spoke to Brett Petersel of , and based on his past work with big brands, he’s intrigued by how companies can get involved on Vine without making it creepy or pushy: I’m curious to see how Vine will allow brands and companies to send their message across to their fans/followers in six seconds or less. Many people have a short attention-span, and I hope [brands/companies] tackle the time issue and use Vine in a creative manner. I’m looking forward to see who wins at this. One other interesting thing that I saw on Vine today was an account set up by Google’s YouTube. There’s no content on its profile as of yet, but think about what the product can do on this platform. If YouTube were to take a six second clip and use it as a teaser along with link to the full video on its site, that could generate all new traffic and interest for its content. Pretty genius. The most important part of this is the big win for Twitter. It , and many figured that the site would implement it in some way, but none knew what immediate impact it would have. The app is simple, clean and attractive to a wide range of users. If brands are already checking it out, then Twitter accomplished what it set out to do, which is to launch a completely new platform that will feed content into its own, rather than just rely on every other app and site for that content. This also means that Twitter will get first crack at monetizing Vine, which it will surely try to do. How? That’s not clear just yet, but if you’ve watched what the site has done with promoted tweets and special brand functionality, this could easily be ported over to Vine. How can Twitter infuse branding and marketing into its platform without pissing users off? Basically, just . What will happen after this 72-hour trial period that Vaynerchuk talks about? I’m sure that his team will figure out the next steps, and perhaps it could take a bite out of other platforms that aren’t generating the buzz that they used to for brands. [tweet https://twitter.com/Ritzcrackers/status/294933633150623744 center] [Photo credit: ] |
Fuelled By A $200K Seed, Free Mobile Marketplace Vendly Wants To Be A ‘Twitter For E-Commerce’ | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Chilean startup , backed by a $200,000 seed from — and now relocated to San Francisco and looking to raise a Series A this spring — wants to cash in on mobile by turning your smartphone into a free mobile marketplace. The Vendly iPhone app lets you sell (aka ‘vend’) items; impulse buy from your friends (or strangers); and help others sell their items by ‘revending’ (think retweeting) their item on your profile so that all your friends/followers get to see it, too. Why should you revend an item? Not just because you’re a nice person, of course. If your revend results in a successful sale you’ll get a commission for your help — or that’s the theory. The current version of the app does not incorporate the payment process but instead opens up an IM chat between buyer and seller so they can resolve how to pay between themselves. But the next version of the app will have payment baked in so Vendly can track and ensure commissions are paid. “The idea is to liberate the payments once the transaction is closed and approved by the parties (just like in Airbnb),” says co-founder and CEO . Vendly is free for sellers to list and sell items on the marketplace, which sets it apart from auction sites such as eBay that generally charge sellers to list and take a cut of any sale. But Vendly’s social component is its key differentiator, according to Strauss. The app wants you to find and follow existing friends to create a trusted network to sell to and buy from — letting you link Vendly with your Facebook account, or invite friends and contacts via email to help build this circle. Strauss says that Vendly’s founders — the two other co-founders are , CMO, and , CTO — saw an opportunity to create a dedicated social e-commerce app after being tagged in items their friends were selling on Facebook. “We know each other from high school but around a year ago we reunited and start discussing about how irritating it was that people tagged you in Facebook to sell their products. This is how we realized that e-commerce hasn’t been able to adapt to the people’s needs to sell and buy products,” explains Strauss. “This is why we decided to create Vendly as an instrument to allow users to buy and sell through an app specially designed for these purposes. The latter in an easy, safe, non-friction, mobile and fast way, allowing users to monetize their network by revending any product they find to their own network, earning commissions for their help.” The clean, uncluttered Pinterest-esque Vendly interface is clearly designed for the small screen and includes mobile-specific features such as the option to shake the phone to view a random item for sale, and all viewed items automatically saved in a timeline for easily flicking back through later. Listing an item is also quick and easy to do on a phone: a case of snapping a photo with your camera phone, adding a price, title, description and one of the 10 categories and hitting submit. The app also lets you cross-post to Facebook and Twitter for maximum exposure via the interface. Vendly users have mini profiles, listing how many items they have bought, revended and sold, plus how many followers/followings they have — with the idea being for buyers and sellers to establish whether they think another user is trustworthy based on who they know and how they interact. There is also a Vendly website — inevitably named — but it’s for browsing and revending only. If you want to sell stuff you have to get our your smartphone. There’s no doubt that people are getting increasingly comfortable with tapping ‘buy’ on their phones, and that’s the trend Vendly is aiming to surf. Mobile shopping , according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. during the holiday season. And late last year e-commerce site , up around double on the year before. compared to a year earlier, according to mobile analytics company Flurry. While buying from individuals is not the same as buying from a brand with a trusted reputation, buying from friends or at least people within your social circle is a step closer to that trusted scenario. Since Vendly launched on the App Store two months ago — and without doing any marketing at all, according to Strauss — they have accrued 5,000 users (a rate he says is doubling each month) with 3,000 published products for sale. “We are starting to grow very fast,” he says. Despite this early growth, Vendly’s service is still effectively in beta — with various features still being tested or yet to be properly rolled out, such as a proximity filter slider bar for the category search that lets users specify how ‘local or global’ the items they see for sale are, relative to their location. New versions of the app are being released every two weeks — but the aim is to have “the first robust version complete by the beginning of March,” says Strauss. Asked who he sees as Vendly’s main competitors, Strauss says it incorporates elements of various other services — including , and — but he maintains its main competitors are social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are being informally used to sell stuff. Since the big social networks aren’t streamlined for e-commerce, Vendly reckons there is an opportunity to step into the social space with a dedicated app. So where will Vendly’s cut come in? Strauss says the startup has three revenue models in mind for monetizing its free mobile marketplace in the future. Namely: premium accounts for retailers/producers who “desire to have more control over their products, massively promote their vends and want to have a better professional experience (including analytics, insights and others)”; an affiliate model working with companies, such as Amazon, eBay and Groupon to display their products on Vendly, in exchange for a commission; and a “CPC injection model” that lets vendors promote products on users’ timelines to reach more potential buyers. |
The Enterprise Cool Kids | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | No, this isn’t a by . Though he and his startup Box, the poster child of the are definitely included in the bunch. “You should definitely kick Aaron off the list. Just to mess with him,” Zendesk founder commented when he heard what we were writing. With VCs voting with their feet and this play period, we’re seeing a major shift of sentiment and momentum to enterprise startups. Perhaps the most major in a while, definitely as far as we can remember. Venture money that a year ago was going into consumer deals enterprise, as the Series A crunch and reticence about Facebook’s lackluster IPO has for photosharing apps and their ilk. In contrast to Facebook, a series of stellar enterprise IPOs like Palo Alto Networks, Splunk and (perhaps the original enterprise cool kid) Workday have fired the collective entrepreneurial imagination. “We see entrepreneurs come in every other day telling us how they’re going to reinvent Splunk,” Sequoia’s tells me. “The successful enterprise IPOs serve as beacons for the companies that come after them.” Although the VC profits baseline has traditionally come from enterprise deals, they certainly weren’t media darlings. Consumer startups, despite their high beta and tendency to be outliers, were the belle of the mainstream tech blog ball. “Consumer technology tends to create fewer winners. Its easier to keep track of what a Facebook or a Twitter may be doing than myriad enterprise software vendors,” NetSuite CEO notes. “[There it] may take decades to decide the actual winners.” But the hype changing. Conversations about “the next Instagram” at Coupa, The Creamery or on Caltrain have been replaced with staid assessments about the future of Big Data, storage and the cloud. The mobile, social, local gold rush of 2011 has been put on pause, at least as far as consumer Internet is concerned. VCs are with enterprise experts to handle the sharp shift in focus. We’ve even heard someone was working on something described only as, “a Path for enterprise.” While the phenomenon is recent enough that the exact flow of investment dollars from consumer to enterprise has yet to be captured in a study, the data points are beginning to pop up. For example 2012 was the in which consumer companies were less than 50 percent of investment dollars, according to a report it published this week. Expect to see many more of these sorts of reports. And more enterprise coverage on TechCrunch. Enterprise startups are finally the cool kids. Nay, sexy. “I would say the market is schizophrenic,” says Marc Andreessen, on why Workday > Facebook might not mean the end of investor interest in social. “Right now we are in an era where the market wants enterprise companies. I am just saying, ‘Wait a year, that will flip again; wait another year after that, that will flip again.'” For now it’s enterprise’s time to shine. Due to the ubiquity of mobile computing, the cloud and the Bring Your Own Device movement, the lines are blurring between enterprise startups and consumer startups. Is Google Apps an enterprise product? Is Dropbox? Is Evernote? With an increasing proliferation of these sorts of startups, we’re a far cry from the , where the only computing customers were literally big businesses. In the past everything was top down. Large corporations and the government spent a lot of money on R&D, and technologies developed in that R&D like the mainframe/computer, the color TV and even the Internet would trickle down from large institutions to the mainstream user. Once these products hit the mainstream, the gravitational pull of the mainstream and its purchasing power slowly changed the adoption cycle from top down to bottom up. “Consumers can make buying decisions much more quickly than businesses can,” Andreessen points, “because for the consumer, they either like it or they don’t, whereas businesses have to go through these long and involved processes.” He maintains that the reason the enterprise wasn’t particularly appealing for many entrepreneurs between 2000-2008 was that consumer software was the only software that anybody could adopt.” This is no longer the case, as the enterprise world approach. “The user is now the buyer, and the center of gravity is no longer in IT, it’s actually in the line of business themselves,” says , CEO of mobile first metrics management startup , outlining the factors in that evolution. “The cloud is not just a cost-based improvement, but a new computational platform. And mobile is surpassing the desktop.” “The demand for ‘consumer-grade’ enterprise technologies — from the standpoint of having strong UX, being mobile, and platform agnostic — is an irreversible trend,” says Levie. “To the point that hard-to-use enterprise software will soon become more surprising than well-designed enterprise software (give it a few years).” “Today all the consumerized enterprise stuff is as easily usable by the small business as it is by the large business,” Andreessen explains. “In fact, it’s probably more easily usable by the small business than it is by the large business, because with a small business, it’s like you can just use it. You don’t have to go through a long process, you don’t have to have a lot of meetings, you don’t have to have committees, you don’t have to have all this stuff. You can just start picking up and using it.” Because of this confluence of elements, an enterprise startup’s “land and expand” strategy has become more complex than having a huge sales force or wining and dining the CIO. It actually boils down to making a product that people want to use, as consumers are already using cloud products, and fall back on them when their older enterprise solutions fail. “The Exchange Server is down? No problem, I’ll use Gmail. Email policy doesn’t allow an attachment over 2 GB. No problem, I’ll use YouSendIt, Dropbox or Box,” Ron Miller . Box’s early business customers were CIOs who called into the company with concerns about security, irate that their employees were using the platform to covertly share files. Those calls eventually turned into deals. In fact, one could argue that consumer startup Dropbox was the best thing to ever happened to Box, familiarizing the layman with cloud file sharing. Box then innovated on the use case, by offering increased security and controls to appease CIOs and enterprise execs. “The first generation of this new enterprise wave was replacement technologies at lower prices (like Salesforce and SolarWinds),” says Asana co-founder “but the new wave is technologies that compete by being better products. The *new* inefficiency to compete against isn’t just total cost of operations (through SaaS) or cost – it’s beating them with a better product.” Because adoption is getting easier and other related factors, we’re seeing an onslaught of entrepreneurs building products for businesses that employees actually can use or want to use. We’re even seeing the emergence of companies like , which are enterprise only, but still display the ease of a consumer startup. Not only is the number of companies that are taking their design cues from the consumer Internet increasing, it is rapidly becoming the norm. “‘Enterprise sexiness’ has come from the increasing awareness that the new breed of vendors have gotten the consumerization thing right (especially with UI and mobile), and that the business models are known to be sustainable and viable,” says Workday co-founder . “Indeed, in the case of companies like Asana and Cloudera, some of the founders themselves came from the consumer Internet.” That consumer background is helping the companies below get a lot more notice from VCs to consumers to the media because they know how to pitch themselves — and yes many of them have pretty cool products, specifically targeting millennials just getting situated in the workforce. PeopleSoft, Aol’s HRM software, is as atrocious to use as its name sounds — I’d much rather be using Workday. While this list is by no means comprehensive (there are a ton of cool enterprise startups, and most people are vehement favorites), here are just a few of the new guard that are fast becoming household names — through their focus on intuitiveness and design, awareness of mobile and fresh approaches to decades-old problems. “The existing enterprise players are building software people tolerate,” as Rosenstein concisely puts it. “The future players are building software people love.” is a single sign-on service for companies — “Facebook Connect” for the enterprise. As a user, you can log in to your company’s admin page and access both private data hosted on your company’s server (intranet) and data from cloud products like Box, Salesforce and Google Apps. Administrators can easily manage the credentials across various applications and devices. Salesforce has just launched Salesforce Identity to compete directly with Okta. Okta is compatible with every web app you can think of. The startup has raised $52.5 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, FLOODGATE and Sequoia. is the solution for managing big data in a company, offering software, services and support for databases. When a user needs to analyze raw data to find a trend or to see if they can find valuable answers in unused data, Cloudera (built on top of Hadoop) allows them to complete more efficient queries. MapR and Hortonworks, but they are much smaller. For big companies, they can ask for custom solutions from IBM, but it’s a lot more expensive. Timing and it handles everything (software, development, support…). Cloudera has big funding as well, having raised $141 million from Greylock, Accel, Meritech Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel and others. The original “sexy” enterprise startup, allows you to store, manage and collaborate on your documents in the cloud. Founded back in 2006 (before Dropbox!), the company is helmed by the colorful Aaron Levie. Like Okta, Box’s main advantage is that it integrates well with many enterprise apps and offers security in addition to collaboration functionality. Interoperability is crucial: Users can find their files uploaded to Box in their favorite CRM apps, etc. Microsoft SharePoint, consumer products, Dropbox, Google Drive… It was there first! Box effectively competes by constantly iterating on its product, focusing on enterprise even when Dropbox caught on, and good partnerships. Box has thus far raised $284 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and others. Developers need a place to track and share their code changes, and , with social coding features that make it really easy for open source projects, is the repository of choice. GitHub is so popular that its version control technology, Git, is replacing SVN based on merit. GitHub offers premium subscriptions and self-hosted versions, and many companies and startups have switched to private GitHub repositories, some very early (Spotify). Google Code for the social coding aspect, self-hosted repositories on an Intranet. Git. Git is such an ace technology that developers couldn’t resist adopting it, and GitHub is *the* best way to use Git. The runner up in the category at the 2011 Crunchies, GitHub eventually relented and took $100 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz last year. is user-friendly help desk software that allows companies to handle support requests in bulk. Zendesk is IPO-bound and, like enterprise pal Workday, might be another point of light in a series of lackluster tech IPOs. Tons of companies are building desk software, and there are many open source apps for small and medium companies. (formerly Assistly, acquired by Salesforce) and Tender Support are quite popular, but Tender Support doesn’t have the same breadth of resources as Zendesk. Zendesk was the first modern help desk, but Desk.com is gaining a lot of traction with Salesforce behind it. The company has plenty of money in the bank, having raised $85.5 million from Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Matrix Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, GGV Capital, Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank. Taking the lessons they learned from an early stint at Facebook, co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein have built a beautiful and streamlined collaboration tool with a focus on to-do lists. The interface is flexible and easy to understand. In Asana, everything is a to-do item. The platform doesn’t try to do it all, but its design is very very intuitive, adhering humbly to its core goal of easing communications within a team. Basecamp from 37signals, from Salesforce, and other communication tools that may make it useless (think Yammer) and many small alternatives (Producteev, Flow, etc.). For all these companies, the closest competitor might be basic emails. The Asana product is relatively easy to use, and this is important for a latecomer to the collaboration software space. Pricing is friendly, too. For small companies, many of which have yet to switch to a collaboration tool, you can basically use it for free. Asana has raised over 38.2 million from , Founders Fund Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and angels like and . is a less expensive data-analytics solution for large companies. Companies can integrate GoodData’s platform into their own cloud-based SaaS products (i.e. Salesforce, Zendesk) and then access operational dashboards, data warehousing and advanced data reporting. IBM, SAP and Oracle. Cheaper than competitors, GoodData integrates easily with Zendesk and Salesforce to track, aggregate and analyze data. Its simplicity and “out of the box” integrations make it ideal for small and medium enterprises. GoodData has $53.5 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Tim O’Reilly and others. “The coolest thing to come out of Australia,” according to Accel’s , is low-cost project management software. It provides a series of enterprise web apps: Jira is a project-tracking tool focused on software development; Confluence is a more traditional collaboration and communication tool; and developers use many of its other smaller product offerings in their workflows. Finally, Atlassian acquired HipChat, a hip chat app. Open source project management solutions and native apps compete with Jira. Confluence competes with Basecamp, Yammer, etc. HipChat competes with Campfire from 37signals. Founded in 2002, Atlassian is not a kid anymore. Over the years, it has proved to be a reliable web app developer. The company has thus far raised $60 million in Series A solely from Accel Partners. is a provider of flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions. It has found a way to provide a large storage capacity with 5x the performance and 5x the capacity as existing products from EMC and NetApp. Nimble Storage has a unique caching system based on the flash storage commonly found in PCs and mobile phones. The result is a great speed increase, comparable to putting an SSD drive in your old computer. That technology is patented for online data storage. EMC, NetApp, Amazon S3 and other online storage solutions. Improving read/write speeds is a great challenge for hosting solutions these days, and Nimble is faster than its competitors, yet costs the same. It has received $81.7 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others. is a device management tool for system admins. Now that the BYOD trend is taking over businesses, admins have to find new ways to handle security settings and push mobile apps to employees — all of this across multiple phones, tablets and operating systems. MobileIron provides a single platform to manage all devices even though most of them are personal devices that employees bring to the workplace. In-house solutions and restrictions, checking security settings one phone at a time or choosing not to care about security. MobileIron makes it much easier for system admins to handle custom phone settings. If you convert one system admin, the entire company will switch to MobileIron. Since 2007, it has raised $96.8 million from Sequoia Capital, Storm Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. “They are all basically new companies,” says Andreessen, who agreed with many of the “Cool Kids” choices. “I think who is not on that list are all the existing companies that sell business software.” And being younger, more agile companies automatically makes them much more interesting. For anyone who’s read my post about SAP buying SuccessFactors, and misunderstood it, it’s not SuccessFactors that was boring (it’s not at all) but SAP — whose stock performance is its acquisitions of hipper players like SuccessFactors — itself. “The joke about SAP has always been, it’s making 50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations,” says Andreessen. “The incumbency — they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.” “We all secretly fear making the same mistakes as previous-generation enterprise software companies — bloating our products and building out costly sales operations,” says Zendesk’s Svane. “The new enterprise software companies that avoid these traps will be tomorrow’s winners.” So I was wrong, at least on a macro level: Perhaps there is no more compelling story in technology today than the David versus Goliath tale of enterprise upheaval. “Today is the most exciting time in enterprise technology history…” SuccessFactors CEO himself shares, “and we get to have no excuses for building a delicious user experience for everything we launch. Our benchmark is more delicious looking than Apple, simpler than Twitter.” And investors, public and private, increasingly agree: Being that we’re in a consumer rut, am I going to be writing about the enterprise for the next two years? The advantage of the consumer businesses is they tend to be much broader-based with a much larger number of customers and relatively faster adoption patterns. The advantage of the enterprise companies is that they have revenue numbers off the bat if they’re good, and thus they are not as subject to consumer trends, fads or behavior, which is why investors, having raised less money to invest in 2013 in the first place, are being cautious. “Folks have realized that businesses buy close to $300 billion worth of software ($285 billion according to Gartner in 2012),” says Rosenstein, “and that companies who exhibit those attributes have the potential to build *very* large businesses. This is compounded by the opportunity to grow very quickly, since the economics of scaling a software business have been forever changed by things like Amazon on the backend, and self-service sales on the frontend.” “The businesses are good, which is nice,” Andreessen adds, “and then I think it’s also sector rotation. We talk to a lot of the big hedge funds, mutual funds. It’s really funny. We are talking about big hedge funds, mutual funds — about six months ago they all started saying, well, you know, we really think there is going to be a rotation from consumer and enterprise and we are going to really get ahead of that. And I am like, yeah, you and 10 other guys in the last two weeks have told me the same thing. It’s like, good job, like you are way out ahead on the leading edge on this.” You have to give credit to the foresight of the Levies, Bhusris, Svanes of the world who took a bet on enterprise when it wasn’t the new girl in school. And, especially, the Ellisons and Benioffs for building the school. In fact, there is a salacious rumor making the rounds that Levie actually has a picture of Ellison as his iPhone home screen. “No comment,” he says. As DFJ partner brings up, “Interestingly, enterprise companies like Box that are gaining traction now were started in 2004-2007 when it wasn’t cool to be enterprise-focused. This shows some of the best innovations happen when most of the market is looking the other way.” “My running joke has been, it’s like little kids,” says Andreessen. “Like everybody out of the consumer pool, everybody into the enterprise pool. So everybody out of the wading pool, everybody into the hot tub.” And right now the enterprise is a pretty hot hot tub. |
VinePeek And VineRoulette Let Us Become Real-time Video Voyeurs | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Twitter’s new video-sharing service, , , which we’ve . My main complaint after a couple days worth of use is that I simply can’t find vines to enjoy. But a “Friday project” out of product incubator PXi Ventures could change all that, as they’ve launched a service called VinePeek. is a website that pulls in the latest vines one after the other. It doesn’t matter who you follow, who you know, or if you’re even on Vine or Twitter. A similar site, serves up random vines around the world and lets you view tagged vines in a fairly unique Both services offer real-time streams of all the latest vines from all over the world, and as you’ll learn once you click the link, video certainly brings a whole new level of awesome to the notion of social video. “We thought it would be cool if you could see the latest vines from around the world in real time, so as a ‘Friday project’ we put together a quick web application to string vines together in a continuous reel,” explained , co-creator of VinePeek. “We were immediately struck by the mesmerising and addictive effect of watching several seemingly-disconnected vines in quick succession: a ‘peek’ into people’s lives all over the world.” The app uses Ruby, Redis and the Twitter API to find new tweets containing vines. These are shown to viewers using HTML5 video. Since launching a couple days ago, the site has seen over 2 million views. The web app is “best viewed in a browser,” but it seemed to do just fine on my iPhone 5, especially with a 4G LTE connection. As it stands now, no Vine post is private. Twitter plans to add more layers of control to where you post and who can see what, but for now everything’s public property. However, your personal stream on Vine is only comprised of the Vine users you follow. Similarly, vines will only appear to you on Twitter if they’re posted by someone you follow, or RTed by someone you follow. and VineRoulette throw the whole idea of “following” out the window and simply present the latest vines in real-time, to the possible chagrin of folks who might be sharing private or semi-private moments with the service. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some random videos of to watch. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | null |
Twitter’s Vine Has A Porn Problem | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | If you build it they will come. , Twitter’s new video sharing platform, is currently experiencing a porn problem. As , by searching for the tags “#porn” or similar NSFW words, you can find content featuring exhibitionists of various stripes as well as porn video taken directly from laptop screens. All is not lost, however. Vine users can flag inappropriate video using the mobile app and, if flagged enough times, the system adds an interstitial roadblock that warns you of inappropriate content. Twitter has similar blocks in place for NSFW content and even accounts, but these features aren’t yet available on Vine. The company has long affirmed that the site is censorship-free except in cases of illegality. In fact, country-specific systems are in place on Twitter to ensure content illegal in Germany, say, is unavailable in that country but available elsewhere. Personally, I wouldn’t say the porn problem is widespread – it’s mostly penises right now, which is what you usually see when webcams and bored men get together – but it’s definitely problematic when are pulled from the App Store for similar infractions. How – and if – Vine cleans up its porn problem is yet to be seen, but right now it’s an expected evil (or not so evil) in a service that is on the cusp of mass appeal. A Twitter spokesperson has issued the following statement to us: Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video. Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the User account that posted the video may be terminated. Please review the Vine Rules ( ) for more information on these violations. |
CrunchWeek: Apple Earnings Land With A Thud, Twitter Launches Videos With Vine, Quora As A Blog Platform | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | In this edition, , and I (beaming into the TechCrunch TV studio via Skype as I was a bit under the weather) discuss how Apple’s has gotten a very from Wall Street, Twitter’s into video sharing with , and Quora’s recent expansion from its Q&A core to . |
Will Nokia’s Music+ Premium Service Be Enough To Dent Lumia Sales? Unlikely. | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | Nokia has had its free Nokia Music service for a while, allowing free music streaming on its Lumia handsets in the U.S. since last September. But the service allowed for only a limited number of song skips and playlists. Now it’s announced the impending launch of Music+, a premium music-streaming service that will afford an infinite number of skips and unlimited downloads to Nokia’s Mix Radio service. Music+ will “roll out in the next few weeks” and pricing will vary by region. In the UK it will be £3.99/month ($5.37), though the official U.S. pricing has not been announced yet. This makes it more expensive than Pandora One, but close to the lowest Spotify Premium subscription. Since Nokia Music is not ad-supported, this presents the challenge of wooing consumers with more features alone, such as the infinite song skips, unlimited playlists, offline use, higher quality streaming, lyrics and desktop access via the Music+ site. However, is this extra service going to be enough to lure people towards the Nokia Lumia handsets on which its offered? It’s unlikely, given the strong winds at the backs of Samsung and Apple right now. Speaking to Nokia’s Conversation’s mouthpiece Jyrki Rosenberg, VP Entertainment at Nokia, said: We spend a lot of time listening to how people use the service and have even managed to half the amount of skips per songs played, which is a combination of our systems and musicologists understanding and shaping Nokia Music around the users. Yes, but unfortunately, the fate of Nokia will not be down to musicologists but to the myriad other winds buffeting Nokia, not least of which will be the launch of the BlackBerry 10 this week. |
Iterations: Silicon Valley Slowly Awakens To Android (On Samsung) | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | TechCrunch . When the iPhone launched in 2007, Jobs proclaimed when it came to phones, Apple was likely, at that time, five years ahead of the competition. Well, those five years are up, and all of a sudden, as if on cue, many of the Valley’s smartest technology minds and observers have begun to slowly split up their attention between their primary mobile devices (iPhones) and the most recent Samsung lines of Android phones. How will the growth of Android affect the priorities of developers, which mobile platforms they chose to launch on, and the monetization formula for hardware (with Samsung’s ability to capture value) and software (apps) in a state of flux? There’s so much great analysis out there as to “Why?” and “How?” Android is gaining steam, so I won’t regurgitate all of that here. Either way you slice it, the typically iPhone-centric and iPhone-obsessed Valley is starting to pay more attention to the new Samsung Androids, everything from the tactile design to app performance and all things in between, include Android’s growth rate and projections. This isn’t to imply Android is on even par with iOS, but being “good enough” may be all that it needs given Google’s strategy so far. To date, most mobile “app-first” successes have been born on the iPhone, the most notable including the likes of new media darlings Instagram, new marketplaces such as Uber, and apps with freemium business models such as Angry Birds. All of these apps were launched a few years ago and enjoyed tremendous growth as the iPhone improved with each new version. Then, at a point when these apps felt the core product was solidified (and after raising serious venture capital), the companies applied resources to build for Android and dramatically increase their engagement (and revenues) with an audience hungry for apps they were excluded from enjoying. During this evolution, Apple squeezed the lion’s share of hardware profits from this industry, and also helped iOS developers earn billions of dollars in their app store marketplace. Now in 2013, people are starting to imagine the next five years of mobile, and it’s clear Google will have many things going for it. The number of Android handsets will be huge. Developers will be enamored by the size of the potential audience. Android is more “open” and may encourage a different style of app innovation that’s gated off from iOS. Of course, all is not rosy: It’s yet unknown how much money Android users will spend on apps and through app-actions, Android developers will need to make hard choices about developing for so many different types and sizes of devices in Android, and users may determine they want more consistent experiences across devices rather than ones that are skewed by Android. On top of this are the mega-unknowns, such as “What will Samsung do?” and “What to make of Google’s integration of Motorola?” and “How many Android devices run the latest OS updates?” Fun, indeed. Finally, we must follow the money. On devices, Apple continues to squeeze out almost every available inch of profit. This certainly won’t last forever, as reflected by recent corrections to Apple’s stock price to start 2013, though I suspect their stock will snap back to high levels soon given the company’s iPhone-based revenues alone (not including any other products or services) eclipses the total annual revenues of other major tech companies. Samsung will surely take more hardware profits as a percentage than they have to date, but we will have to wait and see just how much. When it comes to native services, Google is in a good position to monetize all types of search, either through their phone browser, voice control, maps, or anticipatory systems. I’ve heard Google knows a thing or two about how to monetize search. And, what about the money around and within third-party apps? Historically, most of the profits here have been routed through iOS, with the parent taking a nice 30% cut. There’s no doubt we’re going to start to see Android-first apps being built at faster rates, increasing the percentage likelihood that an Android-first app goes mainstream. The device fragmentation will be a huge burden for individuals and smaller companies (though I’m starting to see super-innovative solutions around apps and operating systems, which I’ll touch on in another post), but larger companies with resources and growth (and investment) may be in a better position to apply resources to Android to capture the growth curves in adoption. While it remains to be seen how dramatic this shift in devices may be — it’s way too early to tell, and I’m personally not giving up my iPhone until they pry it from my cold, dead hands — there’s no question the scale of Android, even with all the old devices and outdated software updates, will be at a scale. And, while it remains to be seen just how consistent an Android user’s willingness to run transactions within apps is, application developers, such as those creating new mobile-to-offline marketplaces, will likely be able to not only begin Android-first, but also extract revenues and profits once reserved for iOS. Jobs was right (if not conservative) about his “five years ahead” statement in 2007, though my bias is iOS is still miles ahead of Android today. But, no doubt Android is growing in numbers and performing well on Samsung. I wonder what he would predict about the next five years if he were alive today. I’ve tried to lay out an analytical view of what could happen as audiences grow and simultaneously shift, but the Apple loved by Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike is probably looking for something entirely new, something we don’t even know about yet. Will it arrive from Cupertino? Google is flush with cash, operating at tremendous scale with room to grow, showing no signs of slowing down, and even the most iPhone-loyal folks around the Valley are starting to take notice and envision a future many of them couldn’t see five years ago. |
Webdoc Dumps Confusing Name For Urturn, Adds Tools For Fans To Create Memes For Bands | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | I always thought Webdoc was extremely poorly named. While the platform had been used by record labels for fan engagement and marketing, the name really did not work. Pretty much any fool could see this and it’s amazing how long the team there took to realize this. Webdoc screams: ‘Microsoft Word on the Web’. Or something. Anyway, I digress. It’s no surprise then that the startup has with the more digestible name and some improved product features. So far it’s still free, as clearly they are trying to build scale and monetize. This of this as a meme-generator for artists and bands which those lovely record labels can control. Previously users could create collages with images, videos, text and audio, but Urturn has added to this other kinds of ‘expression templates,’ as it calls them, that allow you to, for instance, recreate a famous album cover and add other things such as an audio clip. In other words this is a platform to let the fans run wild and promote the music at the same time. In fact it goes quite far, allowing the use of HTML, CSS and even JavaScript via an API, still in beta. The result can be shared and embedded in websites, along with a ‘Your Turn’ button that prompts people to create their own collages and remixes of music artwork and multimedia around an artist. Bands like One Direction have used it with some success, and record labels Interscope Records, Polydor, Columbia and RCA have been signed up to apply it to artists such as One Republic, Mindless Behavior, 50 Cent, Ellie Goulding, The Saturdays, Alicia Keys, and Pink. |
Facebook’s Categorial Imperative | Devin Coldewey | 2,013 | 1 | 27 | adds some much-needed relevance to the huge proportion of its data hoard that no user has seen or, if we’re honest, thought about, in days, weeks, or years. But Graph Search is ultimately nothing more than a handy sorting algorithm, and it’s indicative of the fact that really, Facebook doesn’t understand the first thing about us. (As a quick excusatory aside, this doesn’t mean I think it’s useless, of course: The tool they’ve created will make it a snap to find that one picture of your friend on that camping trip in July of 2009 (or was it 2010)? And “Friends in Seattle who like Poker” is a great way to set up a card game. These problems, trifling though they may be, are solved. Also, a “sorting algorithm” is not in any way inherently bad, and many useful and powerful things can be described as such, so no slight intended there either.) The idea struck me when they were demonstrating how to drill down in search: “Friends of friends in California who read Harry Potter, like mountain biking, and speak Spanish and English.” Leaving aside the questionable utility of such a finely-pointed query, it drove home the fact that Facebook’s conception of each of its users is an endless series of nested categories. Zuckerberg’s joke slide showing a galaxy of pull-down filter boxes was more revealing than they let on. An individual, to Facebook, is the sum of their interactions with the site — can never be more. You are a collection of data, beginning as an empty vessel when you sign up, and gradually growing in complexity and depth. This much is self-evident. Facebook has a : Its reason for being may be to provide a service, but its means for being is to systematize individuality. —Let me unpack that. Everything you do on the social network contributes, in one way or the other, to your being categorized ever more specifically. The categories to which you belong may be obvious (male/female) or subtle (interpretation of “like”), and there are more or less depending on how much you interact with Facebook. If I decline to explicitly state my political preferences (or it simply never occurs to me), I’ll be excluded from searches like “Friends who are Democrats.” Yet, surely it’s obvious from circumstantial evidence — my liking a story about Obama, my linking to a left-leaning charity — that I am one. Facebook may be able to calculate the likelihood of my voting on the left side of the spectrum, but its model is crude, correlative. And of course it doesn’t dare to suppose, for a number of reasons. Certainly such a conclusion is obvious to you and me. We humans (let it be said without boasting) are the most finely-tuned detectors of social tendencies, and the most sophisticated engines for predicting behavior, that have ever developed or been developed. And is it not the goal of a system like Facebook, which probably observes ten lifetimes worth of human behavior every day, to ape that behavior, so to speak? And may it not do so successfully? I have my doubts. When you ask an engine of social knowledge for friends who like Indian food, and it returns all your friends who have liked the “Indian food” page or concept or whatever it is, that’s telling. Expecting it to do more would be a little crazy, since as I said, it’s just a sorting tool. What’s telling is not that there are limitations, but that you bump up against them instantly. Knowing a person, and the pieces that make them, isn’t a hard thing to do, exactly. You know hundreds, probably thousands of people. There are extensive records in your head, going back years: pictures, words, smells, ideas, and all. But you — you incredible machine, you — have interpolated all of that information into a single idea, a wavefront informed by every word and look you’ve ever exchanged with someone. It’s one of the most sophisticated things humans do, one of the most effortless, and also one of the most inimitable. I don’t mean to place the burden of totally simulating human social consciousness on Facebook. What I’m saying is that Facebook’s self-imposed limitations, as well as the limitations of a system to which all information is submitted voluntarily (as opposed to unconsciously), mean that all it can ever do is resurface information that you yourself decided not to internalize — probably for good reason. Graph Search lets you find things you already had and, apparently, didn’t care enough about to record them yourself. You can’t ask it for friends who are free tonight, or friends who have suffered from depression, or friends who have good taste in books. You could make a better guess on these things — these searches that matter outside of Facebook, which is to say searches that matter. Recall that the value we get out of Facebook is in the new things, not all the rest of the stuff. New things like friends’ photos and status updates, or news from the sites and brands we like. We dip our fingers into the river and the next day, when we return to the bank, where is the river in which we dipped our fingers? Facebook knows, and Facebook can tell you. Why? What use is a map of yesterday’s river? Certainly we asked for a way to track down that errant photo or acquaintance in the city you were visiting. And while what Facebook gave us addresses these needs, it irreversibly reveals how superficial is its understanding of people. People as categories. Nested categories. Demographics. As others have no doubt already pointed out, Graph Search resembles the drill-down demographic targeting of modern advertising. Facebook already had a nice big bucket labeled “males age 18-35 who like Baseball and Apple.” Put “Friends who are” in front of it doesn’t automatically make it a social tool for ordinary people (though it can be put to use). Facebook’s fundamental system of defining people is not the way people define each other. It’s the way people are reduced to sets of high-priority characteristics — it’s profiling, for tracking, targeting, and marketing. Facebook thinks this way because this was the way it was built to think — this is its categorial nature and its categorial imperative. A social network that operates on non-human principles can’t ever be anything but a ledger, crammed with cold observations. And while some may think that this sterile data can be tracked, shuffled, recombined, and interpreted, alchemically, turning the silt of the river into gold, I disagree. What emerges from these kabbalistic manipulations is useful to advertisers, of course, and also (once they are allowed to get their hands on it properly) academics like sociologists (and they are both welcome to it, I say), but for individuals it will rarely amount to more than a momentary diversion, or a modicum of convenience — not that such things aren’t at a premium these days as well. In other words, any value provided by Facebook over and above the service itself will be rooted in the mechanical reduction of human data, and useful primarily to those who think in categories rather than individuals. You know the type. Facebook is an amazing service and tool, and deserves respect both as a trailblazer and as a bricklayer, putting down first the notion and then the fact of a world-spanning social network. But it’s also ready to be replaced with something just as ambitious but far more personal. A social application that knows a person the way that person knows another is not a trivial advance. It does not exist now and likely will not for quite some time. Facebook is not it, nor is Google’s shadowy profiling of every passerby, nor any other community or group on the web or emerging today. Yet if people are going to use computers and the Internet (by any other name) to connect with one another, then this is the destination. Perhaps it is the boundary, towards which progress bends asymptotically, but I think not. Computers don’t think the way we think, they don’t see how we see or remember how we remember. But these are largely technical hurdles, tall enough that they look like insurmountable barriers — so we spread out along them until some long-legged visionary shows us the way over. It’s happened a hundred times before, and it’s happening in another hundred ways right now. Wait for it — ask for it — or build it. |
Parku Looks To Make Parking Spot Rentals Mobile-Friendly In Europe | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | Now that Airbnb and Uber have dramatically changed the markets for providing rides and temporary space, it’s natural that we’re seeing variants of their models being applied in other spaces. Parking seems like a natural place, since there is plenty of unused inventory in urban cities. There have been a few attempts at the space in the U.S. . A Swiss startup called is also attacking the concept. Because their local market is so expensive and supply-constrained, they believe they have a good chance at making this idea work. Co-founder Christian Oldendorff says there are as many as 250,000 privately registered cars that roll around Zurich every day. Even though there are 220,000 private parking spaces available, only 50,000 or so are freely available. On-street parking is almost fully occupied while the cost of renting a parking space per month can range from 250 to 1,000 Swiss francs every month ($273 to 1095). It’s a lot more than what you would find in a city like San Francisco, where parking spots in coveted neighborhoods range from $200 to $300 a month. Like with U.S.-based rivals, you can book spaces on the website or through a mobile app for certain days and hours. They’re hoping to scale up to 400-800 parking spaces soon within Zurich, and then expand more broadly within Europe. Because parking is so expensive locally in Switzerland, even as few as 350 parking spaces could produce a revenue run-rate of more than 1.3 million Swiss francs ($1.4 million) a year, the company says. In the U.S., Parking Panda has worked with garages in 73 U.S. cities to offer up to 10,000 parking spaces. . That company ran into issues signing up huge garages, which had owners that were reluctant to dramatically increase local supply and drive down prices. Oldendorff says it’s too early to see if his company will run into the same dynamic in Europe. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4M9dxZJev0&w=560&h=315] |
iRig HD Surfaces At CES | Jay Donovan | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | I spent a lot of time at searching for new audio goodness and one of the cool things I found was latest product called the . Not “officially” announced yet and missing a release date, there were still a few demo units at their booth in the South Hall. The iRig HD is an upgrade to the company’s previous and very popular guitar interface for iOS mobile devices. Essentially, it allows you to plug your guitar or bass directly into your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and use software to make recordings or affect the sound of your instrument. This HD version sports some new characteristics though: The iRig HD seems like the next logical step for working musicians who want to have a compact setup to record their ideas, but want to capture those ideas with the highest fidelity. It works with all existing IK Multimedia apps (like ) but will also work with other real-time processing apps like Garageband. |
The Weekly Good: Groupon Isn’t Just About Selling, It’s About Doing | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | When you think of Groupon, you immediately think of instant deals for restaurants and nail salons. That’s not all the company is about though, it’s about connecting people to businesses and helping you find interesting things to do in your area. Sure, it’s a business like any other company, but as we’ve come to learn, a lot of companies these days do non-profit work, mostly in the background. You know, when they’re not . We’ve been able to surface some of these stories, and I had a chance to speak with Groupon’s Head of Social Innovation, Patty Huber Morrissey, about what the Chicago-based company is working on. The program is called “ “, and here’s a quick video explaining it: ——— Most people think of Groupon as a website, an email, or a mobile app to find great deals. And while some think that our business model is easily replicable, it’s incredibly hard to build the thousands of relationships and historic expertise required to succeed in this business. Simply put, we connect organizations (merchants and charities) with consumers to build and support local economies around the world in 48 countries everyday. Our national campaigns tend to garner more widespread exposure versus our smaller, hyperlocal campaigns – we’ve worked with DonorsChoose.org, Feeding America and World Wildlife Fund, to name a familiar few. What many people don’t realize is that we feature 10-15 local campaigns around the U.S. every single week. Groupon Grassroots, our philanthropic program, is a team that facilitates local, project-specific campaigns in communities around the country. The campaigns look very similar to regular Groupon deals, and are sent to local subscribers in the daily email of each relevant market. The difference with Grassroots campaigns is that the project is designed to have a tangible, local societal impact, the organization receives 100% of the donations raised (versus regular Groupon deals), and Groupon even absorbs the credit card fees. While the exposure and raised funds are great, the real value of these campaigns is the skills and capacity-building we’re providing for these organizations. Our campaign organizers intentionally work with the “little leaguers” who are new to online engagement. While we could work with more established charities, they don’t necessarily need us as much; we can make a more significant impact by working with local changemakers, dedicated to their communities. The bulk of Groupon employees are young, passionate and dedicated to making a meaningful impact; we love that, and we’re building more opportunities to propel that enthusiasm with our Employee Volunteer Program. We’ve offered a variety of opportunities so far, such as playing soccer with local youth, assembling bikes from recycled parts and gardening at a local urban Chicago farm (among many others). Grown from The Point, the first group action, fundraising platform, we put a lot of muscle into being a company that provides a sense of purpose. We’re dedicated to leveraging our employees’ robust skill sets and connecting volunteer experiences with talent development and teambuilding objectives. The more mileage we can get out of our programs, the more resources we can put behind them. I’m most proud our commitment to the little guy. We provide a platform, tools and reach that a small business or organization couldn’t find elsewhere. On large scale, what we’re doing here is really powerful. Because of the hyperlocal nature of Groupon, many consumers don’t realize that Groupon is global. While that’s great because it feels personal, people don’t realize the power/influence we have to affect change globally. I just read a recent study by Civic Economics about the economic impact that locally-owned businesses have on their economies … We have the ability to shift consumer buying behavior on a global scale. Imagine how that would impact communities – helping consumers have a greater impact with each dollar they spend at a locally-owned business. We’re excited about that and many people don’t think about us in that way. My vision is for people to think of Groupon as a force for good, and as a champion for local business. Definitely. We recently named the internal team ‘Social Innovation’ to reflect our evolution beyond one program (Groupon Grassroots). We’re proud of what we’ve built with Grassroots and how it honors our roots with The Point, but our goal is to execute much more than just local campaigns. We’ve already launched our Employee Volunteer Program and will be expanding these programs to our European offices in the near term. What’s next – a social innovation lab. It will resemble an incubator for social intrapreneurs. Similar to Hub Ventures and Impact Engine, two accelerators for for-profit social entrepreneurs, we’re going to develop profitable solutions that promote societal and environmental change. There are so many enthusiastic, talented people at Groupon that we don’t want to limit the ideas to the seven of us on the Social Innovation Team. We want to source ideas from employees on the ground doing the work, talking to consumers and merchants everyday. One … That’s hard. We bucket all mission-driven organizations together – regardless if they’re for-profit, non-profit, or just an individual with some gumption; we care about impact. I attended Impact Engine’s Community Demo Day earlier this week, and the presentations I heard there from the eight for-profit impact entrepreneurs were impressive. A standout from the event was Collaborative Group. Entrepreneur Kathleen Wright developed a model that connects big brands, like J.Crew and Reef, to a network of pre-vetted artisans to solve the challenge of sourcing sustainable products profitably. In an age where philanthropy and government programs are not meeting the demands of society, and where businesses need more sustainable practices, the social entrepreneur is innovating with blended for-profit and for-purpose models to meet the demand on both sides. ——— It’s nice to see this component becoming a true part of the culture of many companies, as we’ve learned from Facebook, Google, and lately, Square: [tweet https://twitter.com/jack/status/289809936421109760] I’m sure that employees that get to participate in the programs feel better about the work that they’re doing too, as it’s usual for people to spend more time at work than they do with their families. Finding time to raise money for charities or volunteer at a local soup kitchen falls off of the to-do list as quickly as the hours roll off of the daily clock. Want to see all of Groupon’s active campaigns and results? . |
Pairasight Is An Embeddable, Open Source 3D Camera | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | This morning we sat down with the creators of , a unique system for adding stereo vision to almost anything, including glasses. While the company is still nascent, they do have a very compelling technology that could help EMTs, police, and military record their world wirelessly when on duty. The glasses can take stereo images at 5-megapixel quality and stream video wirelessly to their own encoding servers. The website is, shall we say, quite bold, but creator Chris Salow was very down to earth and explained that his mission was to build an open source product that allows for multiple use scenarios. He’s expecting to have initial prototypes built this year and will sell the glasses as well. |
White House Responds To Death Star Petition: Obama “Does Not Support Blowing Up Planets” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | I love the Internet so much. America’s netizens have demanded that President Obama consider building the legendary Death Star and . Unsurprisingly, they have thoughtfully rejected the request, claiming it would cost an estimated $850,000,000,000,000,000 and that “the administration does not support blowing up planets.” The White House was forced to offer an official response to arguably the silliest question in American history since the petition garnered the requisite 25K signatures on the WeThePeople petitioning system. [tweet https://twitter.com/darthvader/status/289920155851563008 align=’center’] After a cast a spotlight on the administration’s delayed response to the petition, the good folks in the executive branch finally coughed up an equally silly blog post, “This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For.” “The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon,” wrote Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget. In addition to a reasonable aversion for mass genocide, Shawcross worried that the costly weapon has a well-known vulnerability. “Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?” The White House did exploit the soon-to-be viral blog post to plug the administration’s own space agenda, including the International Space Station and the mars rover. We are aware this post conveniently doubles as a very clever marketing gimmick, but it’s too deliciously silly not to report (it also speaks to the oddities that the government must deal with when they experiment with open government initiatives). Finally, we get the feeling that the super-geeky blog post was a labor of love. “Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force,” concluded Shawcross. Read the full post below: “The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons: However, look carefully (here’s how) and you’ll notice something already floating in the sky — that’s no Moon, it’s a Space Station! Yes, we already have a giant, football field-sized International Space Station in orbit around the Earth that’s helping us learn how humans can live and thrive in space for long durations. The Space Station has six astronauts — American, Russian, and Canadian — living in it right now, conducting research, learning how to live and work in space over long periods of time, routinely welcoming visiting spacecraft and repairing onboard garbage mashers, etc. We’ve also got two robot science labs — one wielding a laser — roving around Mars, looking at whether life ever existed on the Red Planet. Keep in mind, space is no longer just government-only. Private American companies, through NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO), are ferrying cargo — and soon, crew — to space for NASA, and are pursuing human missions to the Moon this decade. Even though the United States doesn’t have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we’ve got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we’re building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun. We are discovering hundreds of new planets in other star systems and building a much more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that will see back to the early days of the universe. We don’t have a Death Star, but we do have floating robot assistants on the Space Station, a President who knows his way around a light saber and advanced (marshmallow) cannon, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is supporting research on building Luke’s arm, floating droids, and quadruped walkers. We are living in the future! Enjoy it. Or better yet, help build it by pursuing a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field. The President has held the first-ever White House science fairs and Astronomy Night on the South Lawn because he knows these domains are critical to our country’s future, and to ensuring the United States continues leading the world in doing big things. If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force. |
Pontiflex Raises $7.7M For Its ‘Mobile Signup’ Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | Mobile ad company has raised $7.7 million in new funding. The news was revealed in with the Securities and Exchange Commission and confirmed by Geoff Grauer, Pontiflex’s CIO, COO, and co-founder. In an email statement, Grauer said the round was led by , and is intended to grow AdLeads, a self-serve mobile ad platform where advertisers only pay after someone viewing the ad completes a sign-up platform. [ The company says the funding actually came from , which is backed by Blackstone’s GSO Capital.] Ten thousand local businesses have signed up since “The funding is a validation of Pontiflex’s signup ads model that allows small businesses to run profitable local ad campaigns in mobile apps across iOS, Android and Windows,” Grauer added. “With AdLeads, advertisers are paying for signups — and not wasted clicks or impressions.” The company has raised about $15.5 million total. Previous investors including New Atlantic Ventures, Greenhill SAVP, and RRE Ventures. |
PayPal Apologizes For Freezing Science Fiction Writer Jay Lake’s Cancer Fundraiser, Promises Greater Transparency | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | Earlier this afternoon, I started seeing a bunch of tweets from science fiction writers and fans about what looked a big screw up at PayPal. Author Jay Lake has been fighting cancer since 2008, and to raise money for a new treatment (whole genome sequencing), he pulled together a number of big-name writers to perform “acts of whimsy” when different funding levels are reached. (For example, fantasy author Neil Gaiman offered to cover a Magnetic Fields song on the ukulele if fans donated $20,000.) Within 24 hours, the campaign seemed like a big success, shooting way past the $20,000 goal. And then PayPal associated with the campaign, blocking Lake’s access to the funds. This seemed terrible in pretty much every way. For one thing, PayPal has faced other controversies over frozen accounts, like those of Regretsy and Diaspora. It was enough to make TechCrunch writer Josh Constine declare more than a year ago that “ .” In this case, however, PayPal didn’t let the situation drag on. Within a couple of hours, the , saying that it was “looking into the matter,” and then . Senior Communications Director Anuj Nayar said PayPal also apologized for the mistake and that both he and the company are donating to Lake’s fund. This is part of a larger shift, Nayar said, something he attributed to PayPal President David Marcus ( ). During our conversation, Nayar repeatedly referred to a “new PayPal” and to “a whole new world” where this kind of controversy can explode immediately on social media. But if it’s a new PayPal, why did this happen in the first place? Nayar said he’s still learning the details of the case, but he added, “It’s clear we made a mistake, and we fixed it as quickly as we could.” The company has done work behind the scenes to cut down situations like this, but at the same time, with 6 million transactions per day, they’ll never be eliminated entirely, he said. Nayar also plans to do more to “open the kimono” this year, so that people have a better sense how the process works. “We’re going to do a lot more communicating before making some pretty aggressive changes to our system to make sure that this stuff doesn’t happen,” he said. “At the same time, when we find out we’ve made mistakes, we’re committing to get it fixed and apologize.” By the way, if you want to follow Nayar’s example, . |
Angry Birds-Maker Rovio Crossed 263M Monthly Active Users Last Month | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | Rovio, the Finnish makers of Angry Birds, , with 30 million downloads in Christmas week alone and 8 million downloads on Christmas Day. The figure is about 30 percent higher For perspective, 263 million monthly actives is nearly as many as Zynga has. , and Rovio, which found its landmark hit on the iOS platform on its 52nd attempt at launching a game, has set increasingly lofty (and some say, crazy) goals year after year. At an interview I did with the company in November, the company’s chief marketing officer Peter Vesterbacka said he wanted Rovio to be the first entertainment brand with 1 billion a users a day (or as many as Coca-Cola interacts with). The path to that involves not just smartphone games, but loads of licensed merchandise, animated shorts, a feature length film, and potentially hundreds of . The company expects that around half or more of its revenue will eventually come from real-world goods (not virtual ones). |
“Now” App Scans Instagram To Find You Something Fun To Do Nearby | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | You’re bored at home asking “What should I do?” Meanwhile people nearby are shooting Instagrams of the fun events they’re at. that uses Instagram’s API to sort through photos in real-time, organize those from the same time and place into events, and show you the events as a feed. Now harnesses the powerful Instagram API to help you discover parties, concerts, and bar nights, and share them, too. French developer into existence last year, and it’s been gaining steam with its recent 2.0 update, which made it accessible worldwide. Now employs an intelligent combination of programmatic photo processing and human curation to give users an accurate look at what’s going on around them. First Now uses Instagram’s API to suck in all the photos taken nearby and clumps them together by time and location. Now super users then read the photo captions, choose the best shots, and organize them into categorized and titled events. This lets Now determine that 20 people posting photos of a musician with the caption “Shuggie Otis” at West 16th and 9th Ave in New York is actually a concert for Shuggie Otis at the Highline Ballroom. Events with the most photos and likes bubble to the top of your feed. Click through one to check out all the photos shot there. You can also filter the Now feed to see only music, art, parties, food, outdoors, or other types of events. And if you’re feeling some wanderlust, you can drag the map to anywhere in the world and search to see what’s going on in Tokyo, Rio, or rural Slovakia. Now also lets you share experiences with the app’s community and your social networks. Just select a nearby place, choose to include photos taken there by other people or insert your own, add a description, and post away. You can follow other Now’ers to keep up with their adventures. In the future, Broca hopes Now can make sure you don’t miss cool things in your neighborhood. It’s considering notifications of especially popular events nearby, and it has an email newsletter highlighting top venues. A clear route to monetization that Broca is considering would let event promoters pay for sponsored placement in the Now feed. For the moment, though, Broca is just happy Instagram is so generous with its photos. “I think a lot of people underestimate the Instagram API. We were surprised at how powerful it is.” He says most apps built on it just recreate the Instagram experience on the web and don’t actually do anything unique, but Now focuses on “the real-time photos API that gives you every photo in a geographic area. We use it in a smarter way to show you interesting information about those photos.” Instagram itself is doing some innovative things with its data set, like beefing up its “trending tab,” adding a photo map, and creating galleries of popular hashtags. But Broca doesn’t think the company will ever get too serious about events, leaving room for . And as for Instagram’s owner Facebook’s influence on the future of its sweet API? Broca simply says, “I hope they don’t change it too much.” |
Almond+ Expands The Router’s Domain, Adds Zigbee And Z-Wave Smart Home Control | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | The Almond, a router with a small touch screen that achieved significant success on Amazon thanks to a decent price point and excellent reviews, has a successor from parent company hitting Kickstarter soon. The comes with 802.11ac support, boasts a 2.8-inch touchscreen, and can be set up without even connecting to a PC. It’s the perfect router for a mobile-first generation, and the new version also builds in a smart-home hub that’s compatible with both Zigbee and Z-Wave standards. The Almond+ includes a small and attractive case that can be wall-mounted easily. Home automation functions can be controlled either from the screen on the router itself or from companion iOS and Android apps, allowing you to connect to the router and access all your remote home management functions in the same place, even from a cellular connection. It’s a natural addition to a device that any home these days pretty much has anyway; the router is often a passive device that users install and then don’t think about again until it fails. But adding smart home features means it’ll actually contribute a lot more use value to a household. It’ll be arriving on Kickstarter in the near future and will retail for around $100, while the original Almond will be $79, and can act as a wireless network extender if you’ve got the old one and want to upgrade to the latest version. |
In A Sea Of iPad Cases, Lazy-Hands Stands Out With Little More Than Velcro, Cloth, and Ingenuity | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | CES is all about the little guy this year. At least, . As easy as it is to spill a thousand words out over some new 300-inch floating TV that no currently breathing mortal will be able to afford, we aimed to route around the show’s bellowing giants and find the self-made gems so often lost in their shadows. Lazy-Hands is the epitome of one of these gems. Armed with little more than velcro, a humble booth, and a dash of ingenuity, they managed to catch our eye amongst thousands of competitors who were twice their size and nth as loud. The concept behind Lazy-Hands isn’t a complicated one: take a velcro patch and stick it to your device, wrap a couple of velcro-friendly loops around your fingers, and you’ve got an iPad (or iPhone, or Kindle, or whatever else, really) that clings to your hand wherever you might want to place it. It’s a simple product made of almost fundamental materials, and yet it pulls off something quite neat. Slapping a slab of velcro onto your $500 device obviously isn’t the prettiest solution, but it gets the job done in a universal way — and remember: this is a Mom N’ Pop operation. Let them ship a few thousand of these things and pull in a bit of tinkering money, then watch for what they come up with next. The Lazy-Hands runs from $9.00 up to $18.00, depending on the size of the device you’re installing it on and the number of fingerloops that you’ll need to support its weight. You can find them all . |
Polaris Closing Dogpatch Labs Locations In New York And Palo Alto, Says No Change In Investment Strategy | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | plans to close two of its incubator spaces — specifically the ones in Palo Alto and New York — while refining the approach in its two remaining locations. The news was first reported in . I called John Lacey, the firm’s director of communications, and he confirmed the news: “We are ramping down in Palo Alto and New York while increasing our efforts in Cambridge and Dublin.” Lacey also emphasized two of the points that Polaris partner Dave Barrett made in the Xconomy piece. First, when I asked if Polaris was changing the way it invests in Silicon Valley and New York startups, Lacey said, “Absolutely not.” Second, he noted that there’s been an explosion of startup accelerators and incubators in the past few years, especially in, yes, the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. “When we started Dogpatch Labs three years ago, the communities looked much different than they do today,” Lacey said. “And each community has evolved differently. Therefore we’re taking a different approach. But we’re not taking a different approach from the investment standpoint.” Barrett told Xconomy that in the markets where it’s closing down Dogpatch, Polaris will have a more “distributed” strategy, working to cultivate startups by working with colleges and other accelerators. It sounds like it’s embracing that approach even in cases where it’s keeping Dogpatch open. He said that in Cambridge, Mass., Dogpatch is moving offices and becoming more focused on integrating with other communities. And the European branch in Dublin is also growing. Dogpatch Labs had already seen some significant changes, most notably (which was honestly one of my favorite places in the city) in 2011. |
Groupon Acquires Realtime Location-Aware Service Glassmap To Help You Find Deals | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | Y Combinator company , a location-aware app that was big back in the day (last year), has just announced that is has been acquired by Groupon. A representative from Groupon has confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has indeed acquired Glassmap and is “excited to bring the team aboard.” This makes total sense, because Groupon needs to know where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing and like to do so that it can push more relevant deals to you. This is something that companies such as Google are also working on. : Today, we’re happy to announce that Glassmap has been acquired by Groupon! Our goal when we started building Glassmap was to help people find what was interesting and relevant around them. But in plainer terms, we just really wanted to mold all these fancy ideas and innovations of Silicon Valley into a simple and useful tool for the real world. Groupon has revolutionized how people today use technology to interact with the real world, and that’s why we’re so excited to join them. Together, we’ll be able to create even more amazing products. Most importantly, we want to thank all our loyal users for riding with us for these past two years. It’s been really fun for us, and we hope to continue delighting you with our efforts with Groupon. The Glassmap application will wind down and close on February 15, 2013. As the team mentions, it now has an opportunity to take what it has built and put it in front of a more mainstream audience – like outside of San Francisco. When the service launched, , and they told me about some pretty interesting location technology it was building, which doesn’t tax your phone’s battery like other apps. The team, Geoffrey Woo, Jon Zhang and Jonathan Chang, are all engineers who dropped out of Stanford’s MS program. Their focus in school? Distributed systems, circuits, web and mobile development, and industrial design. Quite a grab for Groupon. No word on what the purchase price was, but this sounds like one of those fancy acquisition/hires that we talk about all of the time, mostly surrounding Facebook and Google. Is Groupon about to get more hip? We’ll find out. [Photo credit: ] |
CES Is The Wild Wild West, Which Explains This Massive 1600lb Mechanical Spider | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | CES covers over 1.9 million square feet of the Las Vegas desert, and walking up and down the various lanes of gadget goodness can be hard on the old dogs. Luckily, we discovered this massive mechanical spider walking machine that does all the work for you. After all, it does have eight legs to my two. The , as it were, is a project out of the used to teach kids (and CES attendees) about zero-emissions technology in a more stimulating way. It was built by a team of artists and engineers out of Vancouver in 2006, and was eventually commissioned to switch to electrical energy in 2009, making it a much quieter, safer, and less smelly toy. In fact, the 1600lb spider is the world’s first zero-emission walking vehicle. And if that weren’t enough, it’s about as close as you can get to actually being Dr. Arliss Lovelice in the , crusading through the desert on a massive metal spider. Of course, the Mondo and Dr. Loveless’ contraption have one very important difference. The Mondo is a hero, not a villain. |
Swivl Introduces Their Updated Camera With DSLR, Tablet Support | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | The is an odd duck. When you first look at it you wonder what it’s for. But anyone who has given a speech or performed onstage will immediately appreciate this clever little device. The Swivl essentially follows you around the room as you speak, allowing you to record your video without a separate camera operator. We tried the Swivl a few months ago and came away impressed. Now, the founders from Satarii hit our booth with an updated version designed for more professional cameras including DSLRs and even tablets. The Swivl is now running a for its new version and has already raised $137,000, which is $17,000 over their $120,000 goal. Swivl is basically something you never knew you needed, which is pretty cool. |
Just Give The Dish DVR Its Nomination Back, CNET | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | Here we go again. There is a in the tech news media. Well I just can’t believe how this could happen in an industry that pays bloggers to review products from companies that then get advertised on those bloggers’ websites which pay those bloggers’ salaries … Ohhhhh. This time the victim of the business we’ve chosen is CNET.* CNET’s parent company, CBS, is in a , because it allows you to skip the commercials when you DVR content. Because this function is actually awesome, CNET, which purports itself to be a vehicle for outstanding technology, nominated the Dish Hopper DVR with Slingbox for its “ awards. Then, because some CBS lawyer sent an email asking for a repeal of the nomination, and someone at CNET made a pretty bad decision to run with it, poof, that nomination was gone. In its place was the unprecedented disclaimer: “We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product.” I am pretty sure this repeal or the disclaimer didn’t sit well with CNET editorial staff. Because it makes them . And, as an easy , it seriously damages the value and integrity of their site. You, readers, trust us to cover technology in a transparent way in order to help you make informed choices about what to buy and where to invest or not. For an editorial publication, losing trust with you, readers, is a bigger blow than our parent company losing a lawsuit. The power dynamic is pretty whack. Many have argued that by endlessly proliferating product announcements and reviews, tech reporters are basically just writing commercials for the companies they cover. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, the industry also continues to be plagued by the attitude that writers are somehow immune to the system’s flaws. As CNET’s strife proves, we are absolutely not. By covering technology and the bumpy road of innovation, we’re covering ourselves, and, because of the , that impacts both ourselves and the process. It’s likely that the CNET award or a positive review could increase the overall value of Dish during the trial and could affect the trial’s outcome. CBS’s legal team could be saying, “How are we going to prove to the judge that Dish is garbage in our lawsuit if you’re giving them an award?! (We want you to give us an award, too!)” Still, caving to corporate editorial pressure is bad news bears. The only time I’ve ever not written something I wanted to on TechCrunch was because I was asked not to and NOT Aol legal or Tim Armstrong (who apparently isn’t the biggest fan of my work). Just suck the conflict of interest up, CNET. We have so many s here at TC that we have to disclose them in every post and every one of our CrunchBase profiles, which isn’t necessarily the optimal solution, but it’s a start. If I were Lindsey Turrentine, the CNET Reviews Editor, I would find a way to give the Dish DVR its nomination back (they actually before the corporate order not to), just to prove . Seriously: You get fired? All of a sudden you’re the biggest badass in tech journalism and can write wherever you want. You don’t get fired? Your team and readers respect the pants off of you and you live to blog another day. CNET could be considered a TechCrunch competitor. Until they give the nomination back, not in my book. I originally published this post as “Just Post The Damn Dish DVR Review, CNET,” not counting it published before the nomination got pulled and the corporate mandate. Because of the confusion, I changed my headline, and some of the thrust of the post, but not before CNET tweeted back: “We did.” Is this, as Rafat Ali , a sign of open revolt? |
It Looks Like SV Angel Just Raised Another $30 Million | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | According to an , Silicon Valley investor SV Angel has raised a new round of funding for a fund titled, SV Angel-III Growth P. As we SV Angel filed another document with the SEC that indicated the firm was raising another $40 million for a new fund. SV Angel, which was co-founded by angel investors and has invested in companies such as Twitter, Zynga, Square, Hipmunk, Fab.com, Path, and Airbnb. The firm most recently in the spring of 2011. This specific fund from the form filed today appears to be a growth fund for the III fund. SV Angel could have raised this extra fund to participate in follow-on investments for seed companies. Last year, Conway announced that Lee is solely , with Conway still maintaining a large vested interest. Lee had said in May of 2012 that he was possibly raising additional money for the firm. As Conway told TechCrunch founder (who is a limited partner in SV Angel) last year, SV Angel typically invests in two to three startups per month, but five qualified deals a day are referred to them through their network. |
Sony May Kiss Low-End Smartphones Goodbye To Better Compete With Samsung And Apple | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | Sony Mobile’s top-tier Xperia Z may have been one of CES’s most pleasant non-surprises (seriously, is there anyone Sony didn’t brief about that thing?), and it turns out that the company’s future efforts may be more of the same. According to a recent with Xperia Product Manager Stephen Sneeden, Sony is contemplating leaving the entry-level smartphone market to other companies. “We’re ready to be a premium smartphone provider, logically then, at the very entry level is where you lose the ‘Sonyness,'” Sneeden told CNET. Should Sony really give this plan a go, they’ll be treading on well-worn ground. HTC announced its own intention to focus on producing a smaller number of nearly one year ago exactly, though it hasn’t been without its problems. The Taiwanese company’s strong hardware releases belie its recent sketchy . Motorola Mobility also intimated that it would take a similar route, and these days murmurs of a currently under development at MM continue to make headlines. We’ll soon see if CEO (and former Googler) Dennis Woodside sticks to his guns, as the company makes its transition, but in any case, it may be that Sony’s potential plans may end up doing more harm than good if enough companies decide to take a similar tack. If all goes according to plan, Sony hopes to be uttered in the same smartphone breath as Samsung and Apple within the next two years. I’m not entirely convinced that Sony would be able to make strides that great even if these two years go off without a hitch, but perhaps the company is owed the benefit of the doubt. After all, they’re clearly pretty damn good at crafting great smartphones when they feel like it; I was generally fond of the Xperia ion, and devices like Z have managed to in ways Sony has rarely been able to do with a smartphone. This move could be just what the doctor ordered, but I have a feeling it’ll be some time before Sony officially makes up its mind. |
Streamweaver Nabs $1.3M From Former Facebook Chief & Others To Bring The Split-Screen Experience To Mobile Video | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | You may have thought you’d seen every permutation of the video-sharing app, given the glut of new startups scrambling to become the “Instagram of Video,” or some derivation thereof. There’s , , , , , , , and if you wait a day, there will probably be a few more. , mobile video does indeed present a huge market opportunity, but it’s one that few (if any) startups have gotten right, and it’s a much harder nut to crack than many seem to realize. , a Nashville-based startup that launched back in September, hopes to stand out from the crowd by making the whole mobile video experience more social and collaborative. For Streamweaver, that means allowing friends to not only record mobile video simultaneously along or with friends, but view recorded content in a single, split-screen video as well. The iOS app enables users to connect with friends, invite them to record along with you and view their status while recording. Thanks to its making sharing videos pretty damn easy and the ability to stitch different video streams to produce multi-dimensional story-telling, Streamweaver has caught the eyes of investors. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised $1.3 million in series A financing, led by former Facebook Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly. New investors INCITE Co-Investment Fund and the startup’s previous investors, Tennessee Community Ventures and Mountain Group Capital also contributed to the financing. As a result of the round, Kelly will be joining Streamweaver’s board of directors, where he sits alongside Eric Satz of Tennessee Community Ventures, Byron Smith of Mountain Group Capital and Panopto CTO Eric Burns. Kelly, who joined Facebook in September 2005 when the social network had just about 25 employees, isn’t a complete stranger to digital video. After leaving Facebook in 2010, Kelly began investing in startups, adding Streamweaver to his recent investment in digital distribution service, GoDigital, and has produced several documentaries. When asked about his investment in Streamweaver, Kelly said that he was attracted to the social dimension that the startup is bringing to mobile video. “As mobile users, we all love to share content and connect with others on the go … and I’ve seen a lot of social startups,” he said, “but Streamweaver is making a difference in how we collaborate with each other and collectively create interactive content.” Thanks to the smartphone tech that’s now ubiquitous, capturing videos is as easy as tapping a button, but Streamweaver CEO Erik Carlson thinks that the social element has been limited to sharing. In light of this, social recording is beginning to take off, as there’s a lot of room left to make the act of capturing video on the go more enjoyable — and interactive. Simultaneous recording and split-screen viewing is a great start. While Streamweaver’s approach is reminiscent of social video platform, , but instead of creating a single video product that’s a mashup of different recordings, Streamweaver allows up to four people to record simultaneously, syncing that into one, split-screen clip. Users don’t have to be in the same place when recording and they don’t have to start recording at the same time — although their one-minute recordings do have to overlap at some point for the app to show the streams together in split-screen. Once a user starts recording a video (presumably of a cat), they can send invitations to their friends to join them. Those other cat lovers will get a push notification, can then open Streamweaver and view which users have joined and see who’s recording at the same time. The app then uploads the finished product to Streamweaver’s servers before allowing users to view their videos in split-screen and share to their social network of choice, or send via email or SMS. Check out here. |
The 21 Winners Of The Facebook, Gates Foundation Education App Contest Are Making College Easier | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Back in September, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a contest that aimed to challenge entrepreneurs and app developers to build awesome, innovative education apps on Facebook’s platform. The so-called kicked off with an EdTech hackathon co-hosted by the Gates Foundation and Facebook, located at the social network’s headquarters in Menlo Park. , the contest called on developers of all ages to create apps that “build pathways to college, build peer groups for in-coming college students and assist with college admission and securing financial aid.” The co-hosts distributed $18K in hackathon prizes in September, with the winners of the overall challenge vying to earn one of the $100,000 grand prizes. Today, The Gates Foundation and Facebook announced the 17 startups and apps that will be taking home those grand prizes. [For more, see below.] But first, while social technologies are certainly a fundamental part of the ongoing seachange currently taking place in education, one might ask, why encourage developers and entrepreneurs to build for Facebook? Instead, it might seem as if we should be encouraging builders to focus on disrupting archaic K-12 infrastructures, encouraging WiFi support and penetration in schools, helping low-income students to smart, digital devices and Internet access and push computer science and technology education into the core curriculum of our schools. To that point, Gates Foundation Deputy Director of Education Stacey Childress said at the time that “social networking sites are emerging as critical platforms for students — and low-income students especially — to allow them to build social capital outside the boundaries of their neighborhoods. Facebook contribues not only to academic success but their persistence as well … They feel more connected and are more likely to stay in school.” In turn, technology has proven its ability to democratize the access and distribution of information and Elliot Schrage, VP of Public Policy at Facebook added that Facebook’s Open Graph sharing system reduces friction and gives young people the opportunity to have their content or experiences go viral. Bringing social networking and education together, he said, has the power to use sharing to transform the way students live their lives and the way they learn. The Challenge focuses on developing apps for low-income and first-generation college students in particular, and many of the contest’s winners seek to capitalize on a growing trend within education technology: The personalization of the learning process, especially within the framework of education targeted at low-income and first-generation college students. But, without further ado, meet the 21 winners of the , with basic information about the startups copied below. The Challenge initially posted 17 winners, , saying that there are in fact 21 winners. After several cycles, we only count 20, but at any rate, all are now included below. That’s because we’ve now learned that the hosts have not yet posted the 21st winner, an app from NYU students called “WOOP.” So, 20 companies are listed below, but that’s where the 21st is just in case you were feeling robbed. — Currently in private beta, Applyful is a collaborative college selection platform, designed for college applicants to collect and share information with one another on the road to choosing a college. As applicants use Applyful to manage research during the application process, Applyful surfaces trends and insights to encourage more informed decision-making, while developing peer groups to offer support and interaction. Career Connect by ConnectEDU & CareerVillage — The Career Connect app is a partnership between , a technology company committed to connecting the world’s learners to life’s possibilities through clear education-to-career pathways, and , an edtech venture that creates social games that prepare students for careers. The Facebook app creates a forum for students to get answers to their college and career planning questions by leveraging their social network. Questions are searchable by any topic and multiple app users can respond to each question. — Beyond 12 is a technology-based service organization dedicated to increasing the number of underserved students who graduate from college. The startup’s new app, CoachMe, aims to provide college students with automated alerts delivered to their mobile devices and Facebook accounts to help them keep track of key deadlines. Students will be rewarded, in the form of badges, for completion and mastery of certain tasks and skills and will be able to share their successes, challenges and key lessons learned with their support network and peers. Ultimately, CoachMe wants to bridge the “information gap” and help students master the activities, behaviors and habits that increase their success in college. — The Chronicle of Higher Education recently announced that College Abacus has given net price calculators “the Kayak treatment.” In other words, just as Kayak created the “search one and done” experience for travel, College Abacus aims to be a free, one-stop search for comparing higher education pricing. Now available in Spanish and English, College Abacus allows college-bound students and their families to search and compare net prices — tuition and fees minus grant aid — across more than 2500 schools and counting. College Connect by Michigan State, University of Michigan and The Oxford Internet Institute — This app aims to provide high school students with a compelling visualization of their Facebook network. By identifying individuals likely to be valuable resources of college-related information and scaffolding the process of information-seeking, College Connect is targeting first generation students who want to build social capital around the college-going process. The app will be developed and evaluated by Bernie Hogan (Oxford Internet Institute), Christine Greenhow (Michigan State University), and Nicole Ellison (University of Michigan). — The College Board is a not-for-profit membership organization whose mission is to connect students to college opportunity and success. The College Board’s new mobile app is an interactive college action plan that puts under-served students on the path to college enrollment by helping them explore the key components of effective college planning: Academics, career discovery, college exploration, paying, and applying. The app offers a step-by-step approach to the process, visualizes student progress and includes a built-in support and encouragement system. — The College People, a Pittsburgh-based startup founded by former higher education administrator Wahab Owolabi and Carnegie Mellon University engineering student Neil Soni, is on a mission to create software that increases college access and provides tools for education administrators. Their first product, CollegeZen, is a community-centered web app that simplifies the college search, decision, and funding process while enhancing the experience for prospective students and parents with the belief that there is a perfect college for every student. Degree’d by Nuvana and 10,000 Degrees — Developed by 10,000 Degrees and Nuvana, this app will employ a socially networked gaming framework to deliver proven college success curriculum to low-income students and their families. Looking to leverage peer networks and project based learning through game mechanics, and to bridge information and action, the app gives students access to the information and support they need to succeed in higher education. — The NerdScholar FAFSA Community App will create a Facebook-enabled support network of students, parents, and administrators. The resource aims to increase the FAFSA completion rate among low income and first-generation college students. By promoting a social community and the support of a peer network, NerdScholar wants to improve financial literacy and enable any student to achieve their college goals. NerdScholar is a product of NerdWallet, a startup that is empowering students to make better decisions about their higher education. — FastForward helps high school students, community college students and any college student struggling with their future plans to visualize potential career paths, develop personalized college/career action plans and locate resources for taking action. FastForward puts the student in the context of various career paths, using their own photos and Facebook Timeline as a starting point for exploration, discovery and planning of careers. Unigo adds FastForward to its growing collection of tools as one of the largest college resources on the web. GradBadge by GradGuru — GradGears’ mission is to increase completion rates among community college students and accelerate their path to completion. The startup builds student-centered products that increase retention, reduce drop-out rates, and accelerates academic success. Its first product is GradGuru, a “community college advisor in your pocket.” Through earning badges, GradBadge helps enrolled community college students more easily understand and learn from their peers what behaviors lead to faster completion. GradBadge leverages the GradGuru platform, Mozilla Open Badges and Facebook. — Center for Student Opportunity (CSO) is a national nonprofit empowering first-generation college students on the path to and through college. The organization’s project aims to collect pledges and stories from first-generation college graduates to inspire the next generation of students who will be first. The I’m First web app features tools and resources to help aspiring first-generation college students and their supporters take the steps necessary to pursue and succeed in college. Mission Control Center by Logrado — Logrado is a social-mobile guidance system that supports students in accessing, persisting in and completing college. Students use their mobile phone or Facebook account to access interactive missions that guide them through critical steps in preparing for college. Mission Control leverages Facebook to allow students to collaborate with their peers and form personal success teams comprised of family members, mentors and friends to increase encouragement, engagement and the potential for success. Logrado enables schools and college access programs to improve the quality and scale of guidance, communication and individualized support for low-income and first generation students. — PossibilityU is an online program designed to help students find the college that fits, academically, socially and financially. Its blended learning curriculum and data driven tools are designed to give context to the million-dollar decision that each high school student makes, often with less than one hour of individual guidance. The company uses technology to personalize each students search, to visualize important trade-offs in the process and to persuade them to stay on time/on track. Raise by Raise Labs — Raise Labs is rethinking how college scholarships are accessed and distributed, particularly for low-income and first-generation college students. The Raise platform enables high school students to earn “micro-scholarships” towards college starting in ninth grade, based on their individual achievements and progress towards graduation. Raise helps students pursue their college ambitions with confidence and adds transparency to the scholarships process. Step4College — Step4College aims to make the college-going process more transparent, cooperative and easier to navigate for all students, particularly for underprivileged youth. The team plans to build an app that provides a comprehensive and resource-rich list of college readiness tasks, which are specific and personalized to the user’s needs, including state-specific requirements. The app will leverage social media platforms like Facebook so that students can publish the completion of their tasks, connect with friends and access additional functions. — Tractus Insight enables all college-bound students to develop highly individualized college application lists. The team compares the experience to harnessing the power of multiple guidebooks, a college counselor who knows you well and the suggestions of those you trust into a single app. Insight gives students, families and counselors the power to discover and research colleges that are a strong personal fit for each student. Transfer Bootcamp by The Melville Institute — Transfer Bootcamp is an online guidance app for students seeking to transfer from community college to a four-year university. The app helps students build a plan for college and identify their unique goals, graduate from community college on time, select the right courses for transfer and better understand their financial aid options. Transfer Bootcamp aims to eliminate the confusion of community college transfer and make higher-education accessible for millions of students. — Roadtrip Nation started in 2001 when a group of friends took a Roadtrip with this simple idea: Talk to people who do what they love, and you’ll get a better understanding of how to build a life you love. What started as a Roadtrip sparked a documentary series, live campus events, a video archive of hundreds of interviews and, most recently, curricula and resources to help at-risk students in disadvantaged communities gain access and exposure to life pathways. Roadtrip Nation’s latest endeavor, “What’s Your Road?” is a virtual roadtrip experience (in Facebook) where youth explore pathways aligned with their aspirations and connect with mentors in those fields. Zombie College by Get Schooled — is a non-profit that engages and motivates students using the media, technology and popular culture integral to their lives. It has designed Zombie College, an app that aims to be “as entertaining as it is educational.” The game has a low barrier to entry — no complex instructions — and is played in short bursts. The twist? The Zombie College game map is the college-going map. Students will continually play thanks to its addicting gameplay, while internalizing the key steps to go to college. |
Report: 2,277 Private Tech Companies Were Acquired For Over $46.8B in 2012; Google And Facebook Were Most Active Acquirers | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Private company M&A database released a number of interesting data points tonight in a report focusing on M&A transactions in the technology sector. According to the report, 2,277 private tech companies acquired in 2012. The acquisitions of public tech companies (i.e. Priceline buying Kayak) were not included. You can check out the full report In terms of pricing, $46.8 billion was the total price tag of 331 private companies acquired in 2012 (for those disclosing valuations and financials of the deals). Clearly this number would be much higher if incorporating the financials of those which were not disclosed. The report shows that 50 percent of exits are less than $50 million. Of the group, there were only eight $1 billion private tech companies acquired in 2012 (2.5 percent of all transactions). In fact, 80 percent of transactions were less than $200 million. Of the 2,277 companies bought in the year, 94 percent of them were acquired by strategic acquirers, with the remaining 6 percent taken out by private equity firms. And 76 percent of tech companies acquired in 2012 had not raised investment prior to acquisition. By sector, web and mobile commerce saw the most acquisitions, followed by advertising, sales and marketing and online news and information. No big surprise — Google and Facebook were the most active acquirers in 2012. Both did 12 private tech company acquisitions each. According to the CB Insights data, Facebook did more talent acquisitions (five in the year). Cisco and Google disclose valuations and financials most often. Following Google and Facebook, Cisco, Groupon, Twitter, And Oracle rounded out the top six in terms of quantity of private tech company acquisitions. Another non-surprise from the report — California saw the most private tech companies acquired in 2012. The state had more private tech companies acquired in 2012 than the next five states combined. New York came in second followed by Texas and Massachusetts. New York saw the highest share of Internet acquisitions. The UK led international markets with the most private tech company acquisitions in 2012 followed by Canada and India. So what’s the forecast for 2013? “With cash stockpiles of big tech companies and as non-tech companies see ‘software eating the world,’ expect a busy 2013.” In related reading, check out CB Insights’ . |
Foodspotting CEO Alexa Andrzejewski On The $10 Million Sale To OpenTable, And The Importance Of Telling Your Startup’s Story | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | So were very pleased to have Foodspotting co-founder and CEO stop by TechCrunch TV this afternoon (after what was certainly a very long day) to give us the scoop on the deal and what’s next for Foodspotting now that it’s part of a larger company. First, she said, the good news for Foodspotting’s users is that the app is not going anywhere — OpenTable is committing to keeping it intact and continuing its development. But I especially liked hearing about what Andrzejewski learned as a startup CEO, now looking back just after attaining the highly-sought-after “exit.” Here’s a bit of what she said: “For me the big thing was just being driven by a clear vision, and getting people excited about that vision, and being able to tell great stories. Back four years ago when I started, it was just the seeds of this idea. And the most important thing was communicating that to other people and saying, ‘Are you excited about this idea, would you use something like this?’ Being able to find a cofounder was about telling a great story, like, ‘I have this vision for this app whwere you can find bacon milkshakes or . Would you want to help build this with me?’ Throughout the way, meeting investors was about finding a great story, meeting potential acquirers was about figuring out a great story, saying, ‘What would this look like if we could work together?’ And crafting that story with the team we were working with. I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that the most important thing you can do as a founder is talk about your idea publicly. Don’t try to keep it held back. And share your story with everyone who will listen, because you never know who you’ll meet or connect with on any day.” The entire interview was very interesting, so please watch the video embedded above to see Andrzejewski talk about where Foodspotting will go next, the company’s history of pretty amazing parties, that highly-hyped “crackdown” on people taking photos in restaurants, what her favorite (non-foodie) app of the moment is, and more. |
Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe On Apple Patents, Says Judge Lucy Koh | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | In the latest development in a long and complicated series of ongoing lawsuits between the two companies, Judge Lucy Koh has found that Samsung did not willfully infringe Apple patents. Last August, a jury , awarding the Cupertino company $1.05 billion in damages after it found Samsung guilty of infringing on patents for features including the ‘380 “bounce back” scrolling functionality. Samsung’s lawyers asked Koh to consider whether or not the ruling could be challenged during the post-verdict proceedings. While Koh overturned the jury’s ruling that Samsung’s acts of patent infringement were willful, she denied Samsung’s motion for a new trial. This means that she also denied Apple any damages enhancement for willful infringement, which could have resulted in a tripling of parts of the award, post detailing the case’s background and analyzing Koh’s latest ruling. The Verge has copy of Koh’s ruling. |
City Authorities Confirm Apple R&D Center Will Open In Shanghai This Summer | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | According to a report in the (link via Google Translate), the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce has confirmed that Apple will open an R&D and procurement management facility in the city this summer. Apple has been emailed for comment. The facility will consist of three buildings in Pudong district that will cost Apple a total of $8 million in rent each year. According to , Apple posted Shanghai-area job listings on third-party HR sites on January 27. The positions it wants to fill include an AppleCare team manager, SPS business analyst, and an admin assistant for the Apple Online Store. The new Shanghai R&D center is yet another sign of how important China is to Apple’s growth. Earlier this month, CEO Tim Cook said during a visit to China that the country, now Apple’s second largest market, will . In a data sheet it released with its earnings report last week, Apple started breaking out China as a standalone region after including it for years in a group called “Asia-Pacific.” Apple’s jumped 67% year-over-year to $6.8 billion and in the company’s earnings call, chief financial officer Peter Oppeheimer said the company established a new operating segment for China “given the contribution of that region to our business. |
Chief Game Designer Brian Reynolds Leaves Zynga | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Another key member of Zynga’s team has left the beleaguered social game maker. This time it’s chief game designer Brian Reynolds, as . The company confirmed Reynolds’ departure, but did not offer any details about why Reynolds is leaving or his last day. In a statement, Steve Chiang, president of games, said: “Brian has a long history in the game industry and has been a great partner to the creative leaders at Zynga. I want to thank him for his leadership of the Zynga Baltimore studio in the design and development of FrontierVille, which brought many innovations to social gaming. We appreciate Brian’s contribution and we’re proud of the deep bench of creative leaders who are leading the next wave of game innovation at Zynga. We wish Brian the best in his next chapter.” Reynold has worked at Zynga since 2009, when he was hired to found and lead Zynga East in Baltimore. Prior to that, he was a co-founder and the CEO of Big Huge Games. Reynolds was a lead designer on games including Civilization II and Alpha Centauri. This is the latest in a series of high profile executive exits over the past year. In November, to take on a new role as vice president of corporate finance and treasurer at Twitter. Gupta’s exit came the same week as , who left Zynga to take a job at Facebook. Other resignations since summer 2012 include COO John Schappert, infrastructure CTO Allan Leiwand, chief creative officer Mike Verdu, chief marketing and revenue officer Jeff Karp, chief security officer Nils Puhlmann, among others. In addition, the company also had , including the closing of its Boston office. Zynga replenished its executive roster with a , but the company’s shares have struggled over the past year, falling more than 80% since the beginning of March. |
Intuit’s New Payments Directions In NFC, Passbook And Facebook Revealed In 20+ New Products | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Yesterday took a step into social commerce with the acquisition of the team, technology and patents of . Today, it’s revealing more about how it plans to expand its services into new areas to complement its bread-and-butter business of payrolls and accounting software, with over 20 new products. They include those in payments technologies using NFC and Apple’s Passbook, consumer-focused big data apps, and new products for its Mint financial-management range. A handful are getting launched this year and some tomorrow, while the rest are still in the experimental phase, Mint says. Although today’s event is happening one day after the Payvment acquisition, Intuit tells me that’s more coincidence than intentional, but taken together they point to how the company is trying to be more aggressive and innovative about how it plans to develop its product lines going forward. The various products were unveiled at an innovations showcase at Intuit’s HQ in Mountain View. Here is a rundown of some of the more interesting among them, with some comments from CEO Brad Smith on the wider trends that they speak to: (experiment). This is one area where Intuit may expand on Payvment’s technology in social commerce and advertising, the two services that Payvment already offered to businesses. Here the idea will be to use Intuit’s mobile and online commerce platform, GoPayment, to push out discounts to customers via Facebook after they make a payment, facilitating repeat purchases. Brad Smith, Intuit’s CEO, confirmed that Payvment’s technology will be going here, but also into other areas in Intuit’s portfolio. “We were most excited about exploring the opportunities,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We wanted to get the team on board; it was an acqui-hire in that sense. Facebook marketing is one of several areas they will work on but what I like is how they can bring the social aspect into other areas.” (launching on Wednesday). This is a new extension for GoPayment, where users will now be able to use a smartphone or a tablet’s camera to scan cards for payment, rather than use the swiper. This is similar to the service provided by PayPal’s Card.io. I asked Smith whether he thought the mobile payments space would inevitably consolidate, given how many players are built on the Square model of dongles-and-mobile-devices. “Mobile payments right now is not a zero sum game,” he said, noting that 55 percent of businesses in the U.S. still don’t accept credit cards. “We are going to have tons of category growth, but it will come down to who has the best overall value proposition. Payments have to work with banks, accounting packages, and so on. We have all that. That’s why I feel good about our package. We have an ecosystem that supports payment. Consolidation will come down to a handful of people, but it will be about people who have the ecosystem and scale.” (experiment). This will be Intuit’s first foray into Apple’s Passbook loyalty and coupon/ticket aggregating service. Similar to its Facebook marketing experiment, Intuit will use Passbook to push discounts to would-be customers; here the idea is to make the service location-based and send them out when they are near a particular store via geo-fencing technology. (experiment). Yes, Intuit is looking to take the NFC plunge, but it is still in the process of figuring out if the technology is something that its customers would actually prefer to use instead of cards. “I can’t say it’s inevitable but it’s one potential scenario,” said Smith. “Whether we’re looking at NFC or the dongle, we’re casting all those scenarios. We need to have a bet in all of them but then let the market decide who will win. It’s the power of customer data. Not opinion.” (launching). This is one of several products where Intuit is looking to add more social services. Here, the company is expanding its invoice service QuickBooks to 40 markets, and in the localizing effort, it’s adding a wiki-style, crowdsourced element to let locals contribute new data to help others in their regions. “Social is huge for us,” said Smith. “We are looking at trends and how they will shift in the next 10 years and how companies will operate. And what we’ve found is that we no longer want to be consumers. We want to be participants: we choose what we want so we have to make our products configurable from actions to interactions. When you have 60 million customers who can share their wisdom, it can help power people as individuals.” (experiment). The idea here is to develop a big data-based service for small businesses and individuals. Using anonymized data from across Intuit’s 60 million existing customers, individuals will be able to get insights into how particular businesses or business segments are performing. “We see data as one of two things,” Smith told me. “The first is that it helps you do more things and the second is that it delivers new insights to help you improve your life, using data to get a better return on investment. Very few people have the data we have: We process 40 percent of the U.S.’s tax returns; we pay 1 in 12 Amercians, and we’re the fifth-largest bank in the nation based on bank data. So with users’ permission we can produce a lot of interesting insights.” QuickBooks Online Global
TurboTax CPA Select
Mint Home and Business
Purchase Rewards
GoPatient (a mobile companion app for doctors’ patient portals that lets patients refill subscriptions, see lab results, make appointments and pay their bills)
Data Connections
Tablet Banking (this is taking a current iPad app to Android)
Intuit Payment Network
Intuit Partner Platform
QBO Cloud Ecosystem
QuickBooks Financing
Snap Payroll
Health Debit Card
Live Customer Community
SnapTax Expanded Capabilities
TurboTax CPA
TurboTax for iPad
TurboTax Military Edition
TurboTax Refund Tracker |
FCC Documents Reveal A Smaller, More Powerful Apple TV Is Coming Soon | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | There’s a new Apple TV on the way. Per , the new model is physically slightly smaller and as noted by TheNextWeb, rocks an A5X SoC. With the faster core, the new model should provide a better user experience with a smoother UI and improved app performance. Plus, with the recent Apple TV update that added , it seems the Apple is about to make another assault on the living room. In traditional FCC fashion, the documents fail to reveal anything tantalizing about the upcoming model. There’s no mention of additional capabilities over the current model — nothing about Siri, motion control or anything hinting that this is something special. Without additional information, this model looks like an exercise in supply chain management rather than reinventing the Apple TV experience. It only makes sense for Apple to move the Apple TV onto the A5X, the same chip used in the third-generation iPad. It had to happen sometime. As Apple moves other products off the 32 nm A5 chip, it cannot forget its little hobby in the Apple TV. The revised 32 nm A5 chip is still used in the iPad 2, iPad mini, and the latest iPod touch. But with the exception of the evergreen iPod touch, the other two are set for changes sooner versus later. The iPad 2 will be cut from the team while Apple will likely release an upgraded iPad mini with an A5X to allow the hot little tablet to keep up with iOS revisions. Apple has long treated the Apple TV as a so-called hobby. But even though the company doesn’t treat it as a pillar of its business, the Apple TV remains the company’s best path into consumers’ living rooms. During its Q1 2013 conference call last week, the company that it sold 2 million Apple TVs during the holiday quarter, an increase of 60 percent over the previous year. There’s no word on when this new model will hit stores. But chances are, since it passed through the U.S. government wireless gatekeepers, it will be in the near future — maybe as soon as this week. |
WTF: Amazon Barely Ekes Out Profit On $21B In Sales, Hits Negative P/E, Misses Estimates, Guidance, Yet Stock Jumps 10% | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | You really have to hand it to Jeff Bezos and Amazon, which seem to continuously defy reality — and gravity. , and if you listen to the press, you’d think it was another home run. And if you are watching Amazon , you’d think this is the most buyable stock since the last time MG wrote about AAPL. Amazon is up nearly 10 percent since the market closed and, , the stock hit a record high on January 25th. In part that’s because, yes, Amazon is the Walmart of the Internet, e-commerce giant. Thanks to network effects, it’s impossible to ignore. In fact, I’m using it to buy a tinfoil hat right now. The other contributing factor is, of course, that Amazon increased its revenues, or global sales, by 22 percent to $21.27 billion in the fourth quarter. That’s huge, right? The list of companies doing $21 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter isn’t long. Cue the confetti. Those who regularly have the distinct pleasure of listening to Amazon’s quarterly conference call for investors know that the company rarely says anything of substance in these calls. Usually, executives deflect questions, reading canned lines and sticking to the appropriate PR speak. But this quarter’s investor call may have been the shortest in history. That’s probably because Amazon’s press release only tells one side of the story, and executives probably aren’t too eager to respond to any of those pesky naysayers. Here’s why: In spite of its $21 billion in sales, Amazon underperformed compared to analysts’ expectations. Of course expectations were high thanks to the usual holiday shopping bump for retail and e-commerce, but Amazon was expected to hit $0.27 EPS and $22 billion in revenues, and Amazon instead underperformed, coming in at $0.21 and $21 billion, respectively. That may not sound like a lot, and Amazon executives clearly think there isn’t much to be worried about, especially considering the company has $8 billion in cash. That’s nothing to scoff at, clearly, but there’s also the fact that the company’s net income decreased by 45 percent in the fourth quarter and growth is slowing. Amazon saw just $97 million in net profits in Q4. Yes, $97 million. That would be a big win for a company with $1 billion in revenue, but I’m probably not going out on a limb to say that it’s a red flag when you’re doing $21 billion. If you look at the profit/loss graph in Leena’s post from earlier today [also included at the bottom of this post], one sees that Amazon hasn’t tallied more than $177 million in profits … well, for quite some time. What’s more, , it’s almost comical that Amazon’s stock jumped after-hours. The irrationality of the markets in top form. The stock shot up this afternoon even after Amazon lowered its top-line guidance, projecting sales of between $15 to $16 billion, along with operating income. On top of that, Amazon’s physical book sales had the slowest growth rate it’s seen in the last 17 years. Of course, thanks to the new age of eBooks and its quarterly increases in revenue, Amazon has continued hiring, growing its staff to a record 88,400 in 2012. Meanwhile, global net sales saw the slowest year-over-year growth in recent memory, down 30 percent from Q3 and down 34 percent from Q4 2011. But here’s the real kicker: As has pointed out, the company’s LTM net income is “now officially negative.” From that “as of this moment, the company with the idiotically high PE has an even more idiotic N/M PE.” In other words, N/M represents the correlation between the company’s market cap and its net income is now negative. [ .] this P/E horror today, saying: For the year, the company reported a loss of $39 million, or 9 cents a share, compared to net income of $631 million, or $1.37 a share, in 2011. Incidentally, that means the company doesn’t actually have a trailing-12-months price-to-earnings ratio, since there were no earnings for the past 12 months. Yep, you read that correctly. There were no earnings for the past 12 months. HUZZAH! Hooray! Take my money, please. Take it! For some reason, the fact that Amazon is dealing with 1.9 percent margins, halting guidance, slowing growth, earnings and income misses and tiny profits seems not to matter to investors. People continue to buy Amazon stock, and the stock market at large continues to push higher as the Fed continues dumping money into banks instead of lending. is going to be fine. Phew. Well, you’ll have to pardon me, Paul, but I think I’m going to go against the grain on this one and offer the world’s slowest slow clap to Amazon while continuing to hoard all of my cash under my mattress and consider a move to Antartica. Next thing we know Bitcoins will be the new standard. I know Jeff Bezos and everything, but it’s hard not to look at Amazon earnings, mixed with the overall macroeconomic conditions, and not feel slightly to moderately nauseous. Or like you need a strong drink. More in . Before the heavy, mediocre breath from the confederacy of dunces gets too thick, let’s get a few things straight. Amazon is an incredible business, offers extremely valuable services and has weaved itself into the very fabric of American (and soon global) commerce. As such, it’s part of one of the fastest growing market segments on the planet. I’m not suggesting Amazon is going anywhere anytime soon, nor should it. It’s not going to crash, lay everyone off and run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Yes, part of the reason Amazon demonstrates such low profits is because of the amount of investment it has been pouring into innovation and infrastructure and diversification across what seems like 50 different markets and categories. That’s not rocket science. But therefore, no one should expect the company to be remotely profitable, right? Who cares, it totally makes AWS, geeks declare. And earnings shouldn’t enter the picture when you have a top line like that, right? No. I’d say there’s a very strong argument in favor of the fact that Amazon is going way too far in this direction and is heading for a reality check. Yes, Amazon credit for its focus on innovation. Case in point: Yesterday, “lets people upload digital video and put it into formats — h264, AAC and mp4 for now — that are usable on devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as PCs,” according to Ingrid. That’s a lot of free and cheap transcoding for the masses, potentially a threat to Zencoder and the Netflixes of the world. Amazon has an enormous distribution mechanism — enormous — and has come to represent the classic case of long-tail domination. It staves off its flagging original core business (book sales) by out-innovating in video, giving Netflix a run for its monies. Amazon is busy expanding the size of the video streaming market with its products, creating parellel models without having to appeal to Netflix (or anyone else’s) core user base. But Amazon is at risk of over-extending. It doesn’t break out numbers for the Kindle Fire, even though we’re told they’re totally doing fine. No, they’re contributing to the losses, which is fine for the company if it makes money elsewhere. But it’s not doing itself any favors by trying to lock users into its ecosystem around a mobile touchpoint that isn’t really up to snuff, even if it elbows users into having to buy it as its other businesses mature around it. None of this inspires confidence. , Amazon is nearly one-tenth the size of Walmart on the top line and, “while Walmart numbers there have grown just 10 percent in the last two years, it has in fact added nearly $39 billion in sales” … in turn, “Amazon’s 2011 sales were $48 billion.” Yet another reason this is unsustainable. The higher the numbers get the more pressure there is to maintain them. Icarus flies too high, etc. And, yes, AWS is a juggernaut. We get it. It leads among cloud developers, is a point of pride for Amazon (as it should be). Amazon analysts claim that it could be a $19 billion business on its own or worth $30 billion at an 8x multiple. Of course, many fanboys claim that this is where Amazon will make all of its money, in digital and cloud services like these where margins are higher. But nothing about that makes you nervous? All this is based on numbers Amazon doesn’t provide. It doesn’t break out its AWS margins and revenue, just to be clear. . Are you serious? And saying that when Amazon goes down and takes down a lot of familiar websites and startups with it, that it is somehow indispensable and therefore brilliant is just ridiculous. Sure, Amazon is probably making money on AWS, but how much? We don’t know. 500+ points? No way. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention AWS has proven to be pretty unreliable over the last year and there’s no reason to believe that its unreliability somehow gives it more appeal as Amazon tries to court enterprise customers. Why wouldn’t they choose Rackspace … or, say, Google. Sure, Amazon management looks brilliant because it goes against the grain and is willing to grind profits down to next to nothing for a long period of time to invest in growth areas and innovate. That’s great, but that can’t last forever. The fact that the majority of Amazon analysts consistently rate it a “strong buy” quarter after quarter is another sign that the motley fool momentum of its stock is bound to change. As Seeking Alpha notes, “the laws of economics deem that Amazon’s current business model is unsustainable and will continue to generate less and less marginal growth, to the point where we actually end up seeing negative returns produced by management.” You can only give the middle finger to your long-term shareholders for so long before things get hairy. I think that point is coming very soon for Amazon. But, hey, I’m just one guy. |
Search Ads, App Ads, Gifts, And FBX Could Make Or Break Facebook’s Q4 Earnings | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Facebook for several new money-makers in Q3 2012. will hopefully show if search typeahead ads, app ads, Gifts and Facebook Exchange are actually bringing home the bacon. If they’ve done well and are growing, Facebook’s future might look brighter to Wall Street. If not, Facebook will need new revenue building blocks to help it climb back to its $38 IPO price. Facebook beat expectations of $1.26 billion in revenue (up 7% from Q2), with $1.09 billion in ads (up 36%) and roughly $170 million in payments from games (down 9%). Those are the numbers Facebook is trying to beat handily tomorrow. It’s been a strong quarter for Facebook. It salvaged its share price from $19.50 before Q3 earnings on October 23rd to over $30 now. It also without a share price crash, which allows investors to forget about the IPO’s messy aftermath and focus on Facebook’s business. The bulk of Facebook’s revenue is likely to still come from its traditional bio and interest-targeted web and mobile ads. Facebook has had time to teach marketers how to use them and get them built into its Ads API for running massive campaigns. How it fares compared to projections will depend on if these achieved steady growth. The biggest news of the Q3 earnings call was that mobile had grown from zero in March 2012 to make up by the end of September. A report from ad platform Kenshoo earlier this month said it saw going to mobile, so the new official figure could be in that ballpark. Watch out for the percentage of ad revenue coming from mobile in the Q4 earnings report as a measure of how Facebook is doing today. I personally expect Facebook to show strong revenue progress and a big gain in mobile advertising, both as in total revenue and percentage of Facebook’s overall business. Unfortunately, this may be coming at the expense of user experience. The volume of ads on mobile and their prominence has noticeably increased over the last quarter, which is probably annoying some picky users and subtly diluting the value of the news feed for others. Looking closer, to Facebook’s Q4 2012 and beyond. Even if their total contribution to Facebook’s current revenue and profit isn’t massive, it’s their trajectory that’s important. If they falter, Facebook may be in a bit of trouble. The final quarter of 2012 didn’t see it announce any other significant new revenue streams. Since they always take some time to rev up, if these four aren’t showing promise, it could be awhile before Facebook has machinery in place to convince Wall Street $FB is worth more than the $30.79 it closed at today. On August 22nd, Facebook officially launched its search typeahead ads after two months of testing. They let advertisers butt in and show their app, Page, or other Facebook property above organic search results. For example, Zynga could show ads for FarmVille 2 at the top of the typeahead drop-down results for searches for the game “Dragon City” by competitor Social Point. Advertiser and rates were both high in initial tests of Sponsored Results by Facebook’s adtech partners. With a full quarter of ability, it’s time for Facebook to share some official results on their performance with users and their revenue contributions. If they’re raking in cash and if interest is growing, it proves the potential of a Facebook ad unit that doesn’t take up space in the news feed or sidebar like its primary ad products. This is so interesting because Sponsored Results in the typeahead are the model for monetization of Facebook’s new Graph Search feature, which will replace the old internal search bar where these ads live now. At the launch event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered my question on how Facebook would make money on Graph Search by saying typeahead search ads “extend quite nicely to this.” If Sponsored results are already performing well, Graph Search could become a core revenue stream in time in addition to a way to make Facebook more useful. The possibility of earning vast sums without filling the feed with ads that could drive away users might get Wall Street’s hopes up. Facebook has an enormous opportunity to be the for the burgeoning app economy. With the App Store and Google Play overflowing with choices, and breaking into the top charts the only way to rise from obscurity, developers need ways to gain traction. Launched in August, Facebook app install ads let developers pay to show off their apps in Facebook’s mobile news feed, with clicks/taps opening the App Store for free download or purchase, sometimes . Initial reports indicate app install ads are in fact at a reasonable price, so there’s big potential for them as more and more companies go mobile. They only became buyable through the Ads API a week before Q3 earnings were released, so we didn’t see their impact by then. On the Q4 earnings call, investors should be tuned into whether users are finding the ads inviting and if Facebook’s able to milk a bigger margin from them than its standard mobile ads. Facebook’s entrance into e-commerce that lets people buy physical gifts and gift cards for friends to all U.S. users on December 11th. That means it was only available to Facebook’s local market for the last three weeks of the quarter, the holiday gifting season, and its novelty may influence the initial rate of purchases. Still, what matters is essentially how many Gifts each user is buying. I ran some rough calculations about potential revenue from Gifts using the total number of U.S. users (170 million), the ballpark average price of a Facebook Gift ($15), the percentage Facebook may be earning per gift (perhaps 10% to 20%), and how many Gifts people will buy per year. For example $15 x 170 million x 10% x .5 = $127.5 million in revenue per year in U.S. on Gifts. That’s a pretty paltry sum. If Facebook can swing $15 x 170 million x 20% x 2 = $1.02 billion, that’s much stronger, but getting the average user to buy two gifts a year is going to be very tough. The numbers would look better if Facebook can figure out how to scale Gifts to international markets. Issues with localization, shipping, and less buying power in some nations may make that tough. There is a chance that Facebook could make it work in Western Europe, or at least the U.K. But first, Facebook has to prove that its birthday alerts, gift recommendation engine, giving flow, and ease of delivery can get people to open their wallets and eschew Amazon. The real-time bidding, cookie-based retargeted ads that Facebook launched as in June are now in full swing. advertisers target people who almost bought something on a site the next time they visit Facebook. Marketers are giddy over their in delivering easily measured returns on investment. Meanwhile, advertising technology platforms like Triggit are raising huge rounds and on the success of FBX. They’re essential to Facebook’s long-term revenue growth because they let it operate in the lucrative demand fulfillment part of the advertising funnel that Google search ads dominate, instead of the tough-to-measure demand-generation space. Some advertisers report FBX performs significantly better than Google’s retargeted ads and may be shifting ad spend to the social network. If FBX is as popular as people think, expect Facebook to make its performance a centerpiece of the Q4 earnings call. Facebook recently paused development of its off-app mobile network — another product with vast potential. My theory is that Facebook may be redirecting resources to making . It’s a big opportunity because mobile devices don’t store cookies that power retargeting, but Facebook’s cross-platform identity system would let it show people mobile ads based on their web browsing habits. An announcement about FBX for mobile during Q4 earnings or down the line could have investors excited. Check back to TechCrunch tomorrow at 1pm PST for our coverage of Facebook’s Q4 2012 earnings report. And analysts, if you don’t hear Facebook talk about the products above, be sure to ask. |
Rave ‘Reviews’ For North Korean Gulags On Google Maps | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | It’s no secret that the Internet has a hard time taking things seriously. “Best. Gulag. Ever.’, raved Google user, C. Quinn, about Yodok North Korean prison. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt probably expected his recent high-profile visit to the isolated dictatorship to have a more sobering impact on online discourse. But, after Google asked users to help identify important roads and landmarks for the newly mapped country, it should have expected . We’ve collected the most, er, thoughtful, reviews below of North Korea’s prisons. But, not everyone received 5-star treatment: Of course, this isn’t the first time the Internet has made comedy out of democracy. Earlier this month, the White House was forced to explain why it would not build a Death Star. Obama “does not support blowing up planets,” the White House. You can check out more reviews at by searching “North Korea gulag”. |
TC Cribs: Inside Romotive, The Las Vegas Startup Where A New Generation Of Robots Is Being Born | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | It’s great to go beyond TechCrunch’s San Francisco headquarters to check out Cribs in other locales — and our latest sojourn was particularly worth it. Earlier this month we were in Las Vegas for the , and while we were in town we headed over to the , which is the home of a number of startups — including maker . Romotive is one of the most buzzed-about companies in the quickly growing tech scene, so it was great to have co-founder and CEO give us a tour of his company’s digs and give us a hands-on look at the “Romo” robot. While the Romotive team has built hundreds of Romos themselves right there in its Sin City headquarters, the company just recently signed a production contract with an Asian manufacturer that will help the company scale up its output dramatically. That means that Romos will now be poised to enter the homes (and hearts) of millions of people across the globe. That idea might sound a bit scary at first, but I think after seeing the gadgets in action you will soon welcome our new Romo robot overlords with open arms. Who can resist those big blinking eyes? |
On An International Buying Campaign, Cisco Acquires Cyber Threat Protection Startup Cognitive Security | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Today, it seems that Cisco’s international buying spree continues. for $475 million in cash last week, the company announced this afternoon that it is acquiring Czech network security startup, . The terms of the acquisition were not made public. , Cisco Head of Corporate Business Development Hilton Romanski said that it will be combining the startup’s realtime behavioral analytics with its own cloud-based global threat intelligence system to create a “common policy engine that controls distributed network enforcement in an intelligent network.” Essentially, the goal is to allow Cisco to provide corporations and the enterprise with the ability to better identify and mitigate advanced cyber threats. The acquisition is yet another example of the fact that Cisco is looking to make moves. The company got in the buying mood back in November, when for $1.2 billion in cash. With its subsequent purchase of Intucell for nearly $500 million, the networking tech giant has invested nearly $1.7 billion in M&A over the last quarter. And, while Cisco is well-positioned compared to its networking rivals like Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper, the space is going through a big change these days, and Cisco is trying to make the necessary preparations given the diverse nature of its investments. That led to the company’s exit from the consumer space last week, , including the Linksys brand and products. The sale of Linksys, one of its largest consumer properties, followed its shuttering of its Flip video product line — another of Cisco’s well-known consumer brands — as the line began to suffer from the growing competition from smartphone cameras. At the time, Cisco CEO John Chambers said ( ) that the company was re-focusing on its four key business priorities, “core routing, switching and services, collaboration, architecture and video. Cisco’s acquisition of Meraki and Intucell both fall into the architecture and infrastructure camp (for both enterprise WiFi and mobile), however, its purchase of Cognitive Security shows that the company is continuing to reach into related sectors to protect its market-leading position. As Romanski details in the company’s announcement, since its founding back in 2010, Cognitive Security has been focused on network security research and “applying artificial intelligence techniques to detect advanced cyber threats.” The company, which now has 28 employees, set out to identify and analyze IT security threats through “advanced behavioral analysis of realtime data,” enabling businesses to more quickly and efficiently detect security anomalies. As mobility and cloud computing change the security landscape, traditional approaches are no longer sufficient to protect businesses amidst the evolution in cyber threats. Through its acquisition of the Czech security startup, Cisco will be able provide its enterprise customers with a brand of advanced security that their networks require today. Cisco also said that it will continue the long-standing collaboration Cognitive Security has with the Czech Technical University through its joint research program, saying that it “plans to continue to expand on this relationship going forward.” As a result of the acquisition, the startup’s employees will be joining Cisco’s Security Technology Group, led by Senior Vice President Chris Young. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2013 and is subject to approval by the company’s shareholders. Find . |
Amazon Misses: Q4 Sales Up 22 Percent To $21.3B, Net Income Down 45 Percent To $97M | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Amazon just lower-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings today. Net income decreased 45% to $97 million in the fourth quarter, or $0.21 per diluted share, compared with $177 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter 2011. Net sales increased 22% to $21.27 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $17.43 billion in the fourth quarter 2011. Analysts of $0.27 cents a share, on $22.26 billion in sales. The expectations of course are high because the fourth quarter includes the holiday shopping season. “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “After five years, eBooks is a multi-billion-dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70% last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a bookseller, up just 5%. We’re excited and very grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle and our ever-expanding ecosystem and selection.” Operating income increased 56% to $405 million in the fourth quarter, compared with $260 million in the fourth quarter 2011. The company currently has $8 billion in cash. For the year, net sales increased 27% to $61.09 billion, compared with $48.08 billion in 2011. Operating income decreased 22% to $676 million, compared with $862 million in 2011. The company took a loss of $39 million in the year, or $0.09 per diluted share, compared with a net income of $631 million, or $1.37 per diluted share, in 2011. Q4 for Amazon was eventful on the product, e-commerce and cloud fronts. The Kindle Paperwhite and while the device was sold out for some time, Bezos admitted that these devices . The company made a number enhancements and for its streaming service. Amazon’s EC2 service saw a in the quarter, as well. For the holidays, Amazon brought its biggest holiday season ever with over 26.5 million items ordered worldwide on its peak day. Amazon’s tablet was the most popular item for customers, the company said in December. The Kindle Fire HD was the No. 1 best-selling, most gifted and most wished for product. In addition, Cyber Monday 2012 was the biggest day ever for Kindle says worldwide, Amazon added, and during the holidays, apps and game sales were up 250% year-over-year. For the first quarter of 2013, net sales are expected to be between $15 billion and $16.6 billion, or to grow between 14% and 26% compared with the first quarter 2012. Operating income (loss) is expected to be between $285 million and $65 million, compared to $192 million in the prior year period. We’ll listen to the earnings call and report back on what Bezos has to say about today’s earnings. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 11 | null |
Ringadoc Raises $1.2M From Founders Fund’s FF Angel To Connect Doctors With Patients On-Demand | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | has a pretty big vision: To be the “frontline of primary care,” to let anyone and everyone pay a flat fee to instantly talk to a real doctor at any hour of the day. In pursuit of perfecting on-demand medicine, the startup announced today that it has raised $1.2 million in seed financing, led by Founders Fund’s seed vehicle, FF Angel. The raise marks the close of the second half of its seed funding, from Founders Fund, bringing its total to just over $1.2 million. Ringadoc Founder Jordan Michaels tells us that, initially, the company set out on a straightforward trajectory — providing on-demand service for people to reach a doctor at any time — however, they soon learned that this was something that doctors themselves wanted to give to their own patients. So, the Ringadoc team decided to build it. And, after an extended private beta trial, the team is launching Ringadoc Exchange this afternoon to let doctors triage their own calls from their iPhone or Android. The new Exchange platform enables doctors to more easily follow up with their patients, removing the need to continue paying for an expensive operator-based answering service. According to Michaels, the service is free for three months and then costs $50/month thereafter. Eventually, Ringadoc wants to allow doctors to charge patients for the calls or take calls from outside their own patient pool as well, features that will be coming their way in the next quarter. Michaels says that they want to allow doctors to get paid for some calls they’re doing with their own patients and offer a “premium” level of service and availability to their existing patients for a fee. The goal, while it may seem pedestrian, is an important one. Waiting in line at the doctor’s office, or waiting by the phone for your doctor to return a phone call about a diagnosis or an appointment, can be extremely frustrating. Ringadoc wants to give doctors the ability to respond more efficiently to their patients — whenever and however they want — in turn, ending the cycle of unreturned calls, and relieving pissed off patients and overworked staffers. “Patients are always going to call doctors on their own schedule,” says Joshua Kreiss, a neurologist in Menlo Park, CA. “Ringadoc allows me to quickly triage and follow up as appropriate, giving me enhanced control of a very important part of my practice. It’s a win/win for me and the patients.” Today, Ringadoc covers more than 500,000 patients in over 20 states in the U.S. through its platform — a number the team hopes to expand upon with its new round of seed financing. Traditionally, doctors have had to deal with 1970s-style technology to handle after-hours calls from patients. But the penetration of mobile technology has changed our everyday behavior to the point where we now expect the same ease of access and availability from our doctors. Ringadoc wants to prove to the medical community that adapting to this on-demand world can actually make their lives easier, rather than the alternative. The app allows doctors to control and handle patient calls on their own schedule right from their smart phone, responding to patients directly rather than requiring them to go through an operator. The app, along with the platform itself, was built with the support of Practice Fusion — the well-funded startup which offers a free, web-based Electronic Medical Records system that includes charting, ePrescribing, billing, support and scheduling for doctors and patients. Practice Fusion founder and CEO Ryan Howard currently serves on the startup’s board of directors and was one of its first investors. With its new funding in tow, Ringadoc plans to develop the ability for doctors to provide cross-coverage care and premium access to paying patients, while moving to uncover ways for medical practices to access alternative revenue streams. The app is currently available and . For more on Ringadoc, check out . |
Philips Bows Out Of Consumer Electronics Business | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Philips, a brand well known for their televisions and optical media devices, is leaving the consumer electronics market and is now focusing on medical equipment and lighting. The company sold its CE business to the Japanese manufacturer Funai Electric Co. for $201 million. Like , Philips found the CE market fraught with peril. The 80-year-old Dutch company originally built radios but backed Betamax in the 1980s and continued selling televisions and optical disk players in a saturated market. With competitors coming from all sides, the most interesting thing Philips could produce was the Ambilight system for splashing color behind a television based on the video on the screen. That was clearly not enough to survive as a CE maker. “Since we have online entertainment, people do not buy Blu-ray and DVD players anymore,” said CEO Frans van Houten to . The company saw a loss of $483 million which was double the loss in Q1 2011. CE is a slow-moving commodity now. Brand loyalty is dead and digital has made nearly every television the same. Philips’ decision to close up shop is a brave one and necessary. It will be interesting to see who else is taken up by the whirlwind of change coming to home CE. |
SimilarGroup Raises $2.5 Million To Take On Alexa’s (Often Terrible) Web Rankings With Its New SimilarWeb Service | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Tel Aviv-based , a company whose recently launched web measurement tool is out to topple stronghold in web rankings, is today announcing $2.5 million in new funding. The round was led by , the former President of Microsoft’s Israel Research and Development Center, and as a part of the funding, Lichtman is also joining the company’s board. The company’s other investors include , the original investor in ICQ, as well as private equity firm Naftali Investments, and . To date, SimilarGroup has raised $3.5 million in outside funding. Founded in 2009, until recently, the company was known for its suite of branded browser plugins (SimilarWeb, SimilarSites, e.g.) which offer users suggestions of other sites like the one they’re currently visiting, alongside other useful information like web rankings, traffic reach and traffic sources, for example. These plugins and others help power the algorithms behind the newly launched . But to take on Alexa, SimilarGroup has more up its sleeve than just a couple of plugins whose main user base may be marketers or SEO professionals. The company also has an undisclosed number (actually, they told me off the record – and it’s ) of consumer-facing plugins which range from social plugins to games and more. End users of these plugins may not be aware that they’re helping contribute data to SimilarWeb’s rankings, because they’re not branded “Similar–“. Combined, the company’s suite of plugins have been download tens of millions of times, and its online portal SimilarSites.com, today sees over 10 million visitors per month. It’s a lot of data to crunch – and thanks SimilarGroups’s plugins, the idea is that the company will be able to offer better and more accurate insights than Alexa. Alexa as a brand, says SimilarGroup CEO Or Offer, just isn’t trusted anymore. The toolbar is used by marketing people, not normal users. “And the website looks bad, with a lot of ads,” he adds. “We’ve worked very hard in this past year and a half to build SimilarWeb…We hope to be the next Alexa,” he adds. On the back-end, SimilarWeb uses its unique technology and its “enormous amount of data,” to offer measurements that are more accurate than Alexa. It’s something the company feels confident in saying, as they do their own internal comparisons of data accuracy regularly. While Offer declined to go on record with numbers here, he is claiming that the company’s data is highly accurate when compared to the competition. Since launching around ten days ago, he says engagement and repeat visits for the new platform are high – over half of users have returned, some spending over 5 minutes on the platform. Offer also talks of the quality of SimilarGroup’s 25-person team, noting the company has Ph.D.’s on staff with backgrounds in things like machine learning, big data, and statistics, for example. “We’re a very savvy technology company,” says Offer. “We have a huge server farm with more than 100 servers…every month, we analyze more than one billion pages around the web.” Not only is the company betting on the quality of its data, it’s also touting some unique features which allow users to delve in deeper to things like traffic sources, rankings, organic versus paid search, social traffic, related sites, and much more. (A comprehensive look into SimilarWeb vs. Alexa is ). And the data is also presented in a new, more engaging way – it’s provided in a clean, modern, almost infographic-like interface. Going forward, the plan with the additional funding is to launch to the public, which will serve as a source of revenue by offering users a subscription-based competitive analysis product. This will be available alongside the . Offer also notes that the “ranking API” will remain free for those who want it .”We want to distribute our rankings all over the Internet. We want to displace Alexa rankings, so the ranking API you can get for free if you email us,” he tells us. In addition to product developments, the company is planning to open offices in New York by year-end, where it will hire sales and marketing staff to sell its Pro product and other packages. |
VidCaster Integrates With Salesforce To Introduce Its Leadwall, A Paywall For Collecting Contact Information | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | Last summer, video platform provider VidCaster , letting its customers collect money for access to their videos. But its clients also asked for a way to request viewer contact information, and so VidCaster is now rolling out its . Instead of having users pay for access to individual videos or pay monthly subscription fees for access to channels, VidCaster is offering the opportunity to provide their contact information instead. That contact information could then be used by a company’s sales or marketing department to try and convert users who were interested in those videos. Collecting leads in exchange for content is nothing really new and is already used by webinar providers and other services. But the feature is new for most on-demand video viewers. For VidCaster, the new feature was introduced after a few of its clients requested the ability to request leads in exchange for access to videos. Companies like and are already using the feature to collect viewer contact info, but VidCaster is rolling out its to other customers. Instead of offering it as an add-on, customers will have access to the feature as long as they’ve signed up for VidCaster’s Business Plan or higher service plans. At launch, clients will be able to feed contact information into their Salesforce CRM, thanks to an integration that VidCaster worked on for that platform. Users need only add their Salesforce OID and choose which information they want to collect to get the feature up and running. While Salesforce is the first integration, VidCaster co-founder Kieran Farr says more are forthcoming. That will include additional CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and even other identity providers — such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
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BodeTree, The Financial Tool For People Who Hate Finance, Launches A Free Education Platform For Small Business Owners | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | launched early last year to help small business owners better understand and make sense of their financial data. The startup has been attempting to make the absurdly tedious world of financial software fun, or at least less crappy, pitching itself as a “financial tool for people who hate finance.” , BodeTree syncs with QuickBooks for data importing, but differentiates itself from similar tools by providing SMB owners with a realtime dashboard-style view of their financials (plus reporting and analysis), rather than being just another payments and invoicing app. By providing the mainstream with a simple way to convert raw financial data into actionable insight, Co-founder and CEO Chris Myers believes that BodeTree has the potential to add value by acting as an educational resource for small business. Across the board, small business owners are eager to better understand their company’s strengths and weaknesses and learn how to better identify and utilize their levers of growth, but the options remain limited. So today, the startup is going beyond the metrics and analytics with the launch of — an education platform dedicated to small business owners and entrepreneurs. The new platform aims to bring an extended classroom experience to BodeTree through open education, allowing small business owners to access educational videos on topics that range from accounting and finance to strategy and technology. The platform offers both introductory and master-level content, so users can brush up on 101-level skills or dig into more advanced content in a collaborative online class environment where they can learn directly from experts and engage in discussions. “There are so few quality resources for small business owners looking to learn and connect with others,” Myers tells us. “They’re either thinly-veiled advertisements or of dubious quality.” Over the long term, the co-founders want BodeTree University to become the Harvard Business Review for mom-and-pop small business owners. The biggest differentiator between the new platform and other educational sites, Myers says, is that it focuses on providing direct, personal access to thought leaders and experts from the Fortune 500 world and “will always be free.” Users can attend a live class taught by a respected marketing executive and connect with them immediately afterward, or peruse through the platform’s curated list of biz resources and book reviews, videos and blogs. At launch, the platform has over 100 pieces of unique content and includes classes taught by 10 different teachers, including Falon Fatemi of Funders Club — the founder of Infusionsoft and a former Googler. BodeTree produces most of its videos with its partner studio in San Francisco, but will also offer alternatives for those who can’t make it out to the Bay Area, either by doing the broadcast directly from their office or helping them find a local studio. At this point, all of its experts are volunteers, capitalizing on the good will of those looking to share their expertise with small business owners, although the founders said they’ll continue to evaluate as they get a better sense of demand. While the platform is open to all, Myers says that it was designed to provide a complement to BodeTree’s existing functionality. The platform essentially adds a social layer to the user experience, allowing users to connect with each other in community forums, compare notes and dig deeper into the issues they struggle with every day and get access to exclusive events and contests. “We want BodeTree University to play a part in bringing the Fortune 500 to the Fortune 5 Million,” Myers says, “and give small business owners the skills they need to stay ahead of the competition and scale their businesses sustainably.” Find , and let us know what you think. |
Bango Adds Telefonica To Its List Of Mobile Carrier Billing Partners For Facebook And Beyond | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | Mobile payments company — partner to Facebook, Amazon, BlackBerry and others to enable app and content charges directly to your mobile phone bill — has another major carrier partner: is enabling Bango payments via its payment API. The global deal (RNS statement embedded below) will mean that developers who make apps for Telefonica’s 314 million subscribers will be able to integrate a single API into their apps and mobile websites to enable two-click carrier payments across app stores in Bango’s network. These include Facebook’s App Center, Google Play, BlackBerry App World, Amazon’s Appstore, Windows Phone Store, Opera’s app store and an upcoming app storefront that Bango says it’s keeping under wraps for now. (My guess: an app storefront for Firefox Mobile, since Telefonica is a partner in that venture, but who knows — maybe it’s Apple finally coming around to carrier billing…) This deal builds on the news from that Telefonica had signed global agreements with Google, Facebook, Microsoft and RIM for billing content on their app stores. Meanwhile, Bango also counts among its other carrier customers. Financial terms of this new deal were not disclosed, nor were its revenue-sharing/commission details, which Telefonica says will vary on a country-by-country, store-by-store basis. Bango is not Telefonica’s first carrier billing partner. It also works with Boku, which received a led by the carrier last year. Jose Valles, the head of BlueVia at Telefonica Digital, says that working with one does not cancel out the other. “This is not exclusive,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “This is about enhancing the ecosystem. Not all companies work with Bango and not all companies work with Boku, so we will be collaborating with both of them.” Nor is the the first time the two have worked together. Bango first provided Telefonica with a carrier billing solution some (without the use of an API to interconnect to third party sites). Although Telefonica has been offering carrier billing for a while now via its own payment APIs, the difference here is that Bango has already forged the deals with multiple app store providers. This makes its single API more powerful and less complicated to implement. “It gives us a focus on app stores and frictionless, low-click payments,” said Matt Dicks, head of marketing for Blue Via, Telefonica’s developer platform. “That’s not what telcos do very well.” Blue Via is integrating Bango’s API with other APIs that link into Telefonica services, such as messaging, VoIP and more. Bango says that apps and other content enabled with carrier billing have a 77 percent conversion rate, compared to 40 percent for content that requires credit card or other payment information. But there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make carrier billing ubiquitous and used more. “The big Internet companies are still not fully engaged about the opportunity with operator billing,” admitted Anil Malhotra, VP of strategic partnerships for Bango. In that sense, these deals work both ways for Bango. The more carrier partners it racks up, the more likely companies like Twitter, Nintendo and Sony will also integrate billing into their services — if and when such a need arises. That is also boosted by another initiative launched by Telefonica — to integrate more carriers onto its API platform. The first of these is , with more expected to be announced in due course. “BlueVia is a bold and valuable initiative by Telefonica to establish a unified set of billing APIs. We will standardize on BlueVia to connect with Telefonica’s 314 million subscribers around the world and look forward to welcoming other operators who join this initiative, as Telenor has done,” said Bango CEO Ray Anderson in a statement. Although the opportunity for carrier billing is one that applies to any market, one of the big aims in this deal in particular is for emerging markets in Telefonica’s footprint — specifically Latin America. In countries like El Salvador, Venezuela and Brazil, credit and debit card penetration is relatively low, so Telefonica, developers and others in the app ecosystem need other routes for payments. This is where carrier billing perhaps comes into its own, as a mass infrastructure for the “next billion” smartphone users to make mobile content purchases on their devices. Release below. Cambridge and Madrid, January 17th, 2013. Bango (AIM: BGO), the mobile payments and analytics company, and Telefónica Digital today announce that they have signed a Global Framework Agreement. The two companies will partner globally to create an enhanced direct-to-bill payment experience for mobile app stores. The partnership will combine Bango’s frictionless payment experience with Telefónica’s BlueVia Payment APIs, connecting over 314 million chargeable customers worldwide to the Bango Payments Platform. The ability to pay for digital goods and services via a mobile phone bill or prepay credit is a key way for content owners and developers to fully monetize their products. This is especially the case in developing markets, such as Latin America, where penetration of bank accounts and credit cards is very low. Trials of direct to bill in Telefónica operating businesses have proven its ability to drive sales. Where Bango has introduced operator billing to developed markets with high credit card penetration, sales of digital goods have increased significantly. By integrating the single BlueVia billing API into the Bango Payments Platform app stores will benefit from Bango’s enhanced user experience for mobile devices, which generates higher payment conversion rates, especially from Wi-Fi-connected and other “off-network” devices. This is particularly important for the future of mobile payments as more than half of smartphones browsing app stores use Wi-Fi connections. A key goal of the partnership is to accelerate the availability of a standardized and open payment platform for all app stores and content providers and to dramatically improve the customer experience. The platform will be available to all app stores, supporting operator-billing and other payment methods through a single, common platform. The advantage to the customer is a seamless payment flow with no requirement to enter personal information or leave the payment session. As well as technology to improve the user experience, Bango is contributing to the partnership its market-leading expertise in managing payments at mass scale, developed over several years with industry-leading partners such as RIM, Facebook, Opera and others. The Bango platform expands the attractiveness of operator billing to third parties by automating all settlement processes, including tax reconciliation, local currency support and providing sophisticated analytics and reporting that enable App Stores to optimize the mobile user experience. Telefónica is rolling out direct to bill capabilities in its operating businesses and earlier this year announced global, framework agreements with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and RIM. Bango CEO Ray Anderson commented that “Telefonica and Bango share a strategic vision: to widen access to paid content by standardizing and simplifying operator-billed mobile payments. BlueVia is a bold and valuable initiative by Telefonica to establish a unified set of billing APIs. We will standardize on BlueVia to connect with Telefónica’s 314 million subscribers around the world and look forward to welcoming other operators who join this initiative, as Telenor has done”. Speaking for Telefónica Digital, Jose Valles, Head of BlueVia, said: “At the heart of every great service is first class customer experience and both Bango and BlueVia share the vision that mobile payments must be seamless and low friction for the customer. Through this partnership, we are delivering a mobile billing ecosystem that empowers the app store and content owners to achieve mass scale in their business through global reach and a payment method far broader than credit cards”. The partnership between Telefónica and Bango was negotiated by Telefónica’s Financial Services and Global Partnership teams, based in Madrid and Silicon Valley and headed by Joaquín Mata and Wayne Thorsen, respectively. Photo: |
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement About Her Office’s Handling Of Case Against Aaron Swartz | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | After accusations of and a with nearly 40,000 signatures , U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz has issued a statement . In it, Ortiz defended her office’s handling of the case, saying its conduct was “appropriate” and that it would not have sought a : The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law. Since Swartz’s death last week, many have criticized Ortiz and MIT for their handing of Swartz’s case after the university detected his attempts to download millions of articles from JSTOR in 2011, saying that their harsh treatment of the 26-year-old hacktivist contributed to his suicide. MIT has launched into its actions. The case against Aaron Swartz was after his death. Here is Ortiz’s full statement: As a parent and a sister, I can only imagine the pain felt by the family and friends of Aaron Swartz, and I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy to everyone who knew and loved this young man. I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life. I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably. The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law. As federal prosecutors, our mission includes protecting the use of computers and the Internet by enforcing the law as fairly and responsibly as possible. We strive to do our best to fulfill this mission every day. Picture . |
Uber Gets More Super As It Expands Into Germany | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | Uber has that it is expanding into Germany, where “Secret Ubers” are now operating in Berlin. The on-demand car service company’s first passenger in that German capital was another startup founder, Alexander Ljung of Soundcloud. The company said that its Berlin cars are still in testing phase, and that “more Ubers are getting on the road every day.” This is just the latest move in Uber’s efforts to live up to its name. Last month, Uber nailed down the of Washington, D.C.’s city council after months of facing regulatory hurdles in the U.S. capital. It also launched UberTAXI, its , last week. But the company still has to deal with some upcoming hurdles. At the end of this month, it’s in Toronto, as city officials dispute the legality of its service, and it will face increased competition as other ride-sharing services like Lyft, SideCar, TaxiMagic and FlyWheel look to expand to other cities or ramp up their marketing efforts. Here’s the rest of the press release: Ahh Berlin… the city with Michelin-starred restaurants hidden in garbage alleys, world-class galleries tucked away out of sight, and one of the world’s greatest party scenes living it up in deceivingly isolated basements until well after sunrise. Take these dichotomies and you’ll start to notice them regularly among the many talented hyphenates defining modern-day Berlin: meet a consultant-baker-DJ today, a producer-writer-software developer tomorrow.
No wonder then, that in typical underground fashion, Secret Ubers have slipped into this exciting melting pot of art, fashion, music, and some of the coolest tech startups we’ve ever seen. And just in time for Fashion Week, not to mention the other 132,786,453 events going on that make Berlin THE place to be for everyone interested in pretty much anything.
Case in point: we spotted Alexander Ljung, Co-founder of the rockstar startup Soundcloud, catching a ride from their Brunnenstraße office (or “Moonbase,” in Soundcloud-speak) to their Gormannstraße office (aka “Rebase”) for a pizza and drinks event. Easy as (a pizza) pie — Uber driver Imran arrived at Moonbase in his long Mercedes S-Class to bring Alex and his buddies to lunch in style, comfort, and fun.
We’re still in testing phase, so if you don’t catch a Secret Uber at first, try again soon and maybe you’ll be lucky. More Ubers are getting on the road every day to help on-the-go Berliners (is there any other kind?) make it to all of the meetings, events, and parties on their calendars. Backseat’s so comfy, you could finish up your emails, catch up with friends, or even get a little shuteye before making your entrance.
Uber on!
Team @Uber_Berlin |
In The Fight Between Netflix And Cable Operators, High-Quality Streaming Video Is Being Held Hostage | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | Last week at CES, Netflix announced that a number of ISPs had , which provides a more direct connection between it and a cable operator, of its streaming video. And for those who do participate, Netflix has a bonus: Due to those efficiencies, it will be able to offer up Super HD and 3D video to their broadband subscribers. But here’s the flip side: One cable provider is arguing that because Netflix isn’t offering it Super HD or 3D content, that it is essentially discriminating against ISPs based on whether they deploy Open Connect boxes. which reads: “While they call it ‘Open Connect,’ Netflix is actually closing off access to some of its content while seeking unprecedented preferential treatment from ISPs… We believe it is wrong for Netflix to withhold any content formats from our subscribers and the subscribers of many other ISPs. Time Warner Cable’s network is more than capable of delivering this content to Netflix subscribers today.” Forgetting the irony of a cable provider for preferential treatment of the services it provides over their network, here’s the real punchline to this story. If Netflix weren’t witholding Super HD content, Time Warner Cable would likely be crying foul over how the streams its subscribers generate were choking its network and slowing down data connections for everyone. It’s true — Time Warner Cable can deliver that content today, but in doing so, it would be creating incredible strain on network peering points, and it would drive up Netflix’s CDN costs. The whole point of Netflix’s Open Connect is to relieve that strain and to make delivery of high-quality video more efficient for all parties involved. And doing so makes ultra high-quality and 3D video delivery more affordable and actually kind of tenable. In that sense, providing access to providers who are willing to directly peer with Netflix and cache locally only makes sense. But making sense doesn’t always count when you’re an incumbent video provider and you have a smaller competitor nipping at your heels with a lower-priced offering. Netflix already takes up about a quarter of all peak downstream traffic. Even so, Netflix can’t match the quality that can be delivered via coax — not over IP — and Time Warner Cable and other incumbent providers have little incentive to enable it to do so. By installing Open Connect boxes free of charge and peering with Netflix, cable companies would basically be giving it the tools to also offer comparable picture quality. But why would they? Meanwhile, some cable providers — most notably Comcast — have used their last-mile connections as a competitive advantage against streaming video services. At a time where data caps loom large, Comcast enabled its streaming video service delivered via Xbox game consoles to . Not so for Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services available via Xbox. Time Warner Cable isn’t Comcast. And one of the reasons that this fight with Netflix is especially surprising is that, unlike Comcast, Time Warner Cable has been pretty straightforward about leading with its broadband services rather than its video services. It recognizes that in the future one of its key differentiators will be its ability to quickly deliver Internet services — including streaming video services — to its subscribers. If Time Warner Cable were really serious about that, it would work with Netflix on making its delivery better. Instead, it’s blaming Netflix for not clogging its network further. |
LoopMe Wants Less Noise In Mobile Ads, Gets $500K Seed Round Led By Ex-AdMob MD Russell Buckley For Its Inbox Solution | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | Advertising has been one of the chief routes for developers and publishers to make money from apps and other mobile content, but there is (literally) a small problem: Handset screens have a finite amount of space, so too many ads feels claustrophobic and crowded, and downright intrusive when you click on them accidentally. On the side of ad providers and developers, working with the different ad formats and device formats can be cumbersome. , a new startup out of London, is attempting to solve this with technology that does away with the noise of mobile ads by consolidating them into an “ad inbox” that you access instead through a small button. The company has already attracted some heavyweight customers, and today it is announcing its first outside investment: a $500,000 seed round from a group of advertising and investing veterans. The round was led by Ballpark Partners’ Russell Buckley, the ex-MD of mobile ad network AdMob (sold to Google for $750 million), with participation from John Taysom (founder of Reuters Venture Capital), Torben Maajaard (founder of Ciklum and AdQuota) and Peter Barry (founder of Vodafone Ventures in Silicon Valley, and a past investor in mobile ad company Amobee, sold to SingTel for $321 million). The co-founders, CEO Stephen Upstone and CTO Marco van de Bergh, both hail from Velti and used some of the proceeds of that company going public to fund LoopMe. In an interview with TechCrunch, Upstone said that the main purpose of selecting the investors it has was to “bring in expertise to help us grow.” That will include hiring more people and honing its technology, but also opening offices in Asia and the U.S. to bring in more customers. That customer base has already picked up some steam since LoopMe officially launched in August 2012. Upstone says that it has over 100 advertisers right now, with mass-market brands, including Honda, Amazon, U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer, and several mobile carriers using its service. Apps that carry LoopMe’s “inbox” button include the Hobbit and FIFA football games. I must admit I was a little skeptical at the thought that people would click on a small box in order to be served many ads all at once. The idea seems to run counter to a lot of what you see these days on the Internet, where ads are made increasingly hard to avoid. Upstone says that in fact it is the opposite. “Five to 10 percent of people who come into an app with our inboxes will go into that inbox,” he told TechCrunch. “And that’s been pretty consistent.” And what they get when they go into the box is often a selection of offers, but with the officers all consolidated into a single screen, this appears to perform better than individual banners, he notes. “Once you are in our inbox, response rates are 10 times better than straight banner ads,” he claims. (Typically, click-through rates on standard mobile display ads in mature markets is between 0.25 percent and 0.5 percent.) Once in the inbox, users can vote ads up and down to note which offer the best bang for your viewing buck. Over time, Upstone predicts that this will also help with engagement. A walkthrough of how it works is below. Perhaps because Upstone knows all too well that digital advertising often follows the law of diminishing returns — the more ads that are out there, and the more people become accustomed to them, the less they click — LoopMe is trying to take a very different approach to the medium: “It’s about respecting the consumer first so that we have a business in 5-10 years time,” he says. “We do not want to bamboozle consumers, but create a loyal group of users. In this, LoopMe is not alone. Companies like — the mobile ad network that is based around rewards — is also trying to use the medium of mobile ads in a more engaging and more customer-focused way. Their message is clearly speaking to the wider ad industry, with as one of the startup’s strategic investors. Although LoopMe serves the ads through these inboxes, Upstone does not call the company an ad network. Instead, he describes it as an “ad tech provider” and creator of a “new ad unit.” Part of the advantage of that is that this leaves the door open for LoopMe to integrate with other ad networks as it continues to grow, and those networks continue to seek out new formats that keep developers embedding and consumers clicking. |
A First Look At Silvercar, The Future Of Airport Car Rentals | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | For those of you, like me, who hate incumbent car rental firms, seems like a breath of fresh air. The startup is focused on providing a better quality of experience for airport car rentals, mainly by adding technology to its cars and using mobile apps as a way to simplify and improve the whole process. The startup announced last month that its . The company actually launched on Monday, making revenue for the first time after a long period of securing financing, getting cars, creating mobile apps, and getting the whole system to work together. I’ve had to provide an alternative to the typical horrible experience of airport car rental. It sounds like a great idea. But it’s difficult to judge the quality of a service without actually trying it out, right? So I took a trip down to DFW for the day and demoed the Silvercar experience for myself. Before flying down to Dallas, I downloaded the Silvercar app, created a profile, and booked my first car rental. The app requires a decent amount of user profile information before you get started, including the user’s name and password. In addition, Silvercar requires a valid drivers license number and phone number. Before picking up their cars, they’ll need to enter a valid credit card — not a debit card — and pre-select the insurance that they’d like to carry. (More on that later in pricing.) Ultimately, the information that you enter is no more than you’d need for your standard car rental. But it will save you time later, since you don’t have to go over the information with a rental car agent at the Silvercar rental location. Booking a reservation is as easy as picking a location (for now, just DFW), and selecting a date and time for pickup and return. Users can specify their flight details, but it’s not necessary. This information can also be added on Silvercar’s website, including profile information or reservation info. But since using the service requires the app for unlocking the vehicle, potential customers shouldn’t try to book anything unless they have an iPhone or Android phone and can download the app. Silvercar is like most other car rental agencies in that it has a booth at DFW’s ConRAC (consolidated rental car facility). The big difference is that you generally don’t have to talk to personnel there unless you really want to, or unless you’re walking up on a whim. The company has, hands down, the quickest time from airport terminal to getting into a rental car that you can possibly imagine. That’s because once you’ve got your profile built and have booked a reservation, you don’t actually have to talk to anyone to get the keys to your car or get on the road. You can walk right up to the cars in its designated parking area, choose the car you like (they’re all identical, so there’s not that much choice involved), and unlock it by scanning a QR code in the driver’s side windshield. For walk-up users who perhaps haven’t heard of Silvercar, there are employees who can walk them through registration and booking through any of the iPad terminals at the booth. But they’re completely unnecessary for customers who have pre-booked. Just walk up to a car and get going. The Silvercar rental area has a gate that automatically recognizes when a car is leaving, thanks to low-power wireless signals. There’s a similar process for closing out your Silvercar rental. Just drive the car through the gate and it automatically knows that you’re bringing it back. Once you’ve pulled in, the car wirelessly signals back to the home base how much gas is left in the tank and determines the cost of refilling it based on market rates from and other sources. That way there’s no exorbitant price gouging on gas upon return, although there is a $5 service fee attached when refilled. Just as there was no need to talk to an attendant when checking out a car, there’s no need to do so when returning it. Silvercar automatically recognizes when the car has been returned, and simply creates an invoice on the fly that will be sent to the associated email address. I received my receipt while waiting for the shuttle to pick me up and take me back to the airport terminal. Unlike other rental car companies, Silvercar has just one make and model of vehicle: The Audi A4. And since all the cars are the same, there’s just one price, regardless of the one you pick. Silvercar claims that its rates are competitive with similar full-sized rentals from other agencies. The difference being that rather than getting a Chevy Malibu or a Toyota Camry, you’re getting an Audi. And you’re doing so without having to pay for add-ons like GPS that come standard in all its vehicles. For my rental, the daily rate was $110 before taxes, gas, and insurance, but Silvercar says rates could vary depending on seasonality. On the insurance side of things, Silvercar has a number of options depending on how comprehensive you want your coverage to be. You can select from your own personal insurance or corporate coverage, or if you need to get supplemental coverage from Silvercar, there is a $7 per day charge for just you and your belongings, $28 charge for collision insurance, or $14 for liability insurance. Since I don’t have car insurance and have never driven a car as nice as an Audi before (and am unlikely to again), I picked the $49 “everything you need” option, which includes all that. While it was better than any other rental car experience I’ve ever had, it wasn’t completely without some minor snags. For instance, I had some difficulty getting the mobile app to accept my credit card info. I ended up entering it through the web experience, so it eventually worked out, but that could be problematic for a customer in a rush. The reservation booking system also had a weird bug related to picking the correct day of the week. And, frankly, I’m not a fan of the time slider that runs along the bottom of the reservation page — it just doesn’t seem intuitive. Other than that, the only problem I had was finding a car that would unlock when I scanned its QR code. I tried three cars on the lot before I found one that would unlock. The first said it was unavailable. The second said it was not in the system. But I’m pretty sure all of these technical problems were second-day issues that will be cleared up pretty quickly. All the Audi A4s that Silvercar has available are tricked out with certain features to make the experience unique. In addition to scanning a QR code to unlock the vehicle and let the company know which one you’re taking out, users can also connect their phones with the cars. Phones can be paired via Bluetooth to enable drivers to sync up their address books and make hands-free calls while on the go. The car also has a built-in 3G data connection, which allows passengers with tablets and laptops and otherwise unconnected devices to have Internet access through in-car Wi-Fi. For urban transportation, there’s Uber. In the hotel industry, there are places like the W. In air travel, there’s now Blackjet. Each costs a premium over standard or economy options, but promise a better, premium experience to users. There didn’t exist any comparable offering in the rental car industry before this. That’s one reason Schneider and the company’s investors think the startup will prosper in what is generally a commodified marketplace. I’m usually a cheap traveler, and don’t know that I personally would pay the premium to use Silvercar. (I almost exclusively book economy cars when I rent.) But I could definitely see business travelers flocking to this service. The ease of getting in and out of the airport rental dock is well worth the time users would save. And while I didn’t drive my Silvercar for very long, I’m assuming that the quality of the Audi A4 will continue to hold true over time. Some readers might be wondering, “Why launch in Dallas?” And “When is Silvercar coming to my city?” The short answer, at least for the first question, is that Silvercar launched in DFW because it was able to get space at the airport’s ConRAC, which is generally the place at the airport where all the rental car booths are congregated. The thing is, those consolidated facilities only have a certain amount of room, and rental car agencies typically sign long-term leases for the spaces, on the order of five to 10 years. DFW was one of the airports that had an opening in its ConRAC, and so Silvercar decided it would be a good place to launch. In addition to that opening, there are a fair number of business travelers who come through the airport, for whom a luxury vehicle at a decent rental price probably doesn’t seem like a bad deal. According to Schneider, Silvercar is interested in expanding, especially to markets like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, etc. — markets that are tech-savvy and have a decent number of customers for what is (admittedly) a premium-type experience. The main problem is getting into the ConRAC facilities in those markets. Even so, the startup hopes to roll out into one new market per quarter. But realistically, Schneider wants to prove that the Silvercar model works before the company starts aggressively expanding and setting up shop all over the country. It’s still just the first inning of what is a very long matchup, between a tech-focused upstart like Silvercar and an industry that hasn’t changed a whole hell of a lot over the last few decades. |
Twitter.com Experiencing “Rendering” Issues, So If You Like Ugly Websites, Visit It Now (UPDATED) | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | While that became popular in years past, Twitter.com is indeed . According to a tweet by its support account, engineers are working on a “rendering” issue. A lot of Twitter users rely on mobile and desktop apps, so they might not visit the website at all. For those of you who do, though, the problem is impossible to miss. Refresh a few times, and every other page-load or so doesn’t have CSS rendering within your browser. This rendering issue means that Twitter’s site isn’t showing up in its full, beautiful, glory: [tweet https://twitter.com/Support/status/291707287343620096] Check it out: It’s pretty ugly, in fact. Let’s hope that Twitter fixes this soon. Or if you’re into website design circa 1996, this might be right up your alley. Want to see how many people tried to tweet from the messed up version of the site? Check this out. Some users are reporting that things are back to normal, but we’ll let you know once we hear back from Twitter. You are now free to tweet in prettiness again: [tweet https://twitter.com/Support/status/291716855368916994] [Photo credit: ] |
Hack Design Teaches Design To Hackers, Has Already Signed Up Over 20K Developers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | Most developers are famously not great designers, but some of the best products come from teams where developers know a bit about design and the designers know a bit about what the developers do. wants to get developers up to speed with the basics of design by sending to developers a about design. There is clearly a need for this kind of project and Hack Design has already signed up over 20,000 developers just a few days after soft launching on Hacker News. The Hack Design team, led by Wells Riley – a product designer at – Stanford student Kevin Xu and product designer Alex Baldwin, has assembled a group of who all have strong backgrounds in design and who have worked on products ranging from Pinterest to Square and Evomail. In an email to us earlier today, Xu likened the project to “Code Year for design.” Unlike projects like Codecademy, the experience during the is not so much hands-on as it is about reading various about design and development and the basics of web typography. Over time, though, the experience will surely become more hands-on, and Xu tells us that some of the later lessons “will consist of highlighting articles, creating and critiquing each other’s design work, and interactive games to practice certain design principles.” For the time being, Xu tells us, the project is “just an experiment,” and the team isn’t focused on creating any revenue. If you are interested in giving Hack Design a try, you can sign up or take a look at all the available lessons . |
Social Gifting App Wrapp Hits 1 Million Users (Because People Like Free Stuff) | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | Social gifting startup is today announcing that it has grown its user base to 1 million within 14 months – proof that people really do enjoy freebies, it seems. The company, which allows users to send both free and paid digital gifts and gift cards to friends, also had a busy holiday season, hitting 1 million gifts sent per week during the period. And it saw 100,000 gift redemptions per week by the end of December. In total, there were 7.4 million gifts given to date, the company tells TechCrunch. For what it’s worth, Wrapp’s 1 million users, over half of which are U.S.-based, isn’t the same as downloads, but rather means active users who have both downloaded the app who have sent at least one gift through its service. Most users send more, and the average Wrapp user – the highly coveted female, age 20-35 – sends around five gifts per month. In its announcement, the company compares its rise to 1 million users by positioning its climb against other well-known startups, which is interesting. Pinterest reached 1 million after 20 months, Twitter and Gilt Groupe after 24 months, and Kickstarter and Airbnb took 30 months, the company says. But these aren’t really apples-and-oranges comparisons, because Wrapp is about gifting layered on top of social, while Pinterest and Twitter are mainly about social. Meanwhile, Gilt is for shopping, Kickstarter is for fundraising, and Airbnb is for travel. It would be more fair, perhaps, to compare Wrapp with other “gifting” startups, but its biggest competitor in the U.S. would have probably been Karma, which was just a month after . (Wrapp was founded in Sweden, actually). Meanwhile, other competitors like or are a little bit too new on the scene to make for a worthwhile comparison, and semi-competitor , not “social gifting.” And then, of course, there’s what became of Karma: , which has a potential market of some 170+ million (though likely only a fraction of that switched on). Plus, outside of , Facebook is mainly about shipping physical gifts, not virtual ones, like in Wrapp. The problem here is that the other gifting startups aren’t sharing their user numbers publicly at this point, so these comparisons are hard to come by. (We’ve asked Distimo and App Annie for some numbers, but the companies haven’t yet come through. Will update if they do. : provided some figures for us, indicating that Wrapp was the most successful among the three – Gyft, Wrapp and Giftly – in terms of rankings until December 20th. At that point, Gyft became more highly ranked overall. Giftly is not ranked in the top 400 in any subcategory, meanwhile.) So why is Wrapp so popular? I suppose that can be summed up in this App Store review: “ ,” writes an unknown user. When you’re talking about a service that basically offers you free money, and allows you to send free trials, subscriptions, and gift card dollars to friends, you can see why people would be wary. I mean, really, free money usually like a scam. But it’s not. It’s the retailers themselves who are providing the funds for these cards, and they’re doing so because it allows them to target specific demographics of users, very narrowly, thanks to the Facebook data. The brands see it as a way to reach the customers they want, or as a way to get them to try new products. Seventy-five percent of Wrapp’s users are women, with an average age of 32 to 33. Not only is that a highly sought-after demographic (especially among apparel brands), Wrapp COO Aaron Forth tells me that when Wrapp’s gift cards are redeemed, the total value of the transaction is between four to six times above the free component. He says that the majority of Wrapp users are taking advantage of the free/sponsored gifts. These, unlike plastic gift cards, expire within 30 days. The paid gift cards – those where you add value on top of the free card – are good forever, though. The company’s biggest value is in increasing foot traffic to its brick-and-mortar retailer partners like Gap, H&M, Old Navy, Office Depot and others. It also works with online sites like Fab, Hulu, Zappos and others, but the bigger vision is about providing e-commerce-like targeting tools to the offline retailer. During the holidays, Wrapp scored a deal with U.S. gift card distributor , which will see its 400-some brands made available in Wrapp’s app, which the company hopes will later convert into direct relationships once the retailers see the traction. This would address users’ main app store complaint about the service: “ ” Wrapp has now raised $10.5 million in venture funding from Greylock Partners, Atomico (the VC firm formed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and others), Creandum and others. |
Facebook Graph Search Makes Privacy Seem Selfish | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | The subtle impact of is that when you share openly, you share for the benefit of mankind. And when you don’t, or share to just a few people, you’re robbing the world of your knowledge, recommendations, and content. The question for each of us now is whether we prioritize our contribution or our privacy. Facebook’s mission has long been “making more open and connected,” but until now, Facebook’s service has been better at connecting us to . The news feed and Timeline deliver what we post to people who already know us. Sharing was about self-expression — offering up a digital representation of who we are. What we shared could end up helping people, but we got a narcissistic boost from all those Likes and gained social capital in the process. Sharing wasn’t entirely altruistic. Graph Search creates a potential audience for our content who we’ll never meet. Your Like of a gentle dentist or a tranquil park, your photo of a historic landmark or must-see event could influence decisions of people for the better. But you won’t know that. Your aid falls outside your network to those who stumbled across your donation via Graph Search. This redefines our relationship with the Facebook share box. There’s suddenly a reason to share even if you can’t immediately foresee how or to who it will be valuable. Those warm, fuzzy Likes and the chance to make people think you’re an expert might make you share things you thought your friends care about. However, the fear of getting zero Likes and annoying your friends may have discouraged you from sharing things that could assist someone eventually. A broadcast to the news feed was simply the wrong medium for your local dentist recommendation. But if there were a way to take a quiet action that would be indexed by Graph Search, you might be much more willing to donate your advice and experience to Facebook. The problem is this doesn’t really exist. The closest approximation would be to publicly share something and then hide it from your Timeline. But that won’t actually hide Page Likes from the news feed, and people may not care if their addition to the graph can be pulled by friends who visit their Timeline. They just don’t want it pestering their friends from the homepage. Facebook needs to build this quiet contribution. Why? Stow the cynicism for a moment and remember there are souls out there who really love to help others. While there are badges and elite status, altruism is the foundation of thriving communities like Yelp and Wikipedia. Not coincidentally, Facebook Graph Search challenges Yelp because it too can attract and offer up recommendations. If Facebook makes it easy to lend a hand, people will. Its graph could flourish, the world might find it truly valuable, and Facebook could turn it into a business that supports further innovation. — There is also a potential dark side to Graph Search — a chilling effect on sharing. When Facebook launched the news feed in late 2006, 750,000 of its 12 million users joined a group protesting the feature. They claimed that while all the stories in the news feed were only shown to people their authors allowed, it violated their “privacy through obscurity.” The effort that was required to find something on Facebook before news feed was protection enough. Despite concerns, people eventually grew to cherish the information stream. Facebook went through another round of grumbling when it launched Timeline. Suddenly old posts could be dug up much more easily. But again, there was a degree of protection from employers, family, and romantic interests thanks to the friction of browsing through years of content in search of something offensive. When Graph Search rolls out publicly, we may see the same sense of violation, but magnified by the ease of search. Before you might have shared something widely or publicly that might damage your reputation — a drunk photo, a controversial article, a joke in poor taste — but you’d assume its audience would typically be people who got your updates in the news feed. Graph Search’s efficiency penetrates the armor of friction to discovery. A recruiter doesn’t have to comb years of Timeline. They can search for photos you’ve taken in Cancun. They can search for “people named Josh Constine interested in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.” And soon Facebook plans to index posts, meaning all your status updates and links can be dredged up. Some people have nothing to hide. But for others whose identities aren’t necessarily aligned with their bosses or their parents, Graph Search could be a nightmare. Others still just don’t care about helping out. They’re not going to go to the trouble of Liking their favorite dentist in case it might assist a friend or a stranger. And finally there are people who just feel uncomfortable sharing so openly. There’s nothing wrong with being any of these. If you don’t want to contribute, that’s fine, and it’s your choice. But now that Graph Search exists, it’s a choice you have to make. |
eBay And PayPal Expect To Do $20 Billion Each In 2013 Mobile Commerce | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | eBay strong earnings today, thanks to growth in mobile adoption, as well as improved performance in the Marketplaces business. The company also released its mobile commerce numbers for the year, which blew past original estimates. In 2013, eBay expects each to exceed a whopping $20 billion. PayPal and eBay both expected $10 billion in sales/payments volume for the year, individually. However, eBay mobile finished the year with $13 billion in volume – more than double the prior year – and PayPal mobile handled almost $14 billion in payment volume, more than triple (250 percent exactly) the prior year. eBay says that the growth in marketplace mobile sales is due to increased adoption of eBay’s mobile apps and increased engagement from new features and products. In fact, eBay’s suite of mobile apps attracted more than 4 million new customers in 2012. John Donahoe said on eBay’s earnings call that PayPal’s mobile payments volume accounted for 10 percent of total payments volume in 2012. |
StumbleUpon Lays Off 30% Of Staff As It Restructures Company Into A Profitable State | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | today laid off 30 percent of its staff, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch. The move, which brings StumbleUpon’s employee count from 110 to 75, is part of a larger restructuring plan that will bring the web content discovery company to profitable operations in the first quarter of 2013. “The main drive here is to become more streamlined and to better execute against our goals for 2013,” StumbleUpon’s CFO and interim CEO said in an interview this afternoon. Now that 40 percent of StumbleUpon’s traffic is from mobile devices, he said, a “rebalancing” of the engineering team was in order. While the bulk of today’s layoffs impacted non-technical company divisions such as marketing and community, some desktop-focused engineers were also let go. Bartels was keen to note that StumbleUpon is not having trouble on the top-line part of its income statement. The company’s revenue has grown by 300 percent in the past three years, and it now has 80,000 paid advertisers including the likes of Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods. “The company is in a healthy financial state,” Bartels said. “What this change does do is it brings us into a profitable situation.” It seems that StumbleUpon’s newfound profitability could make the company more attractive to a potential acquirer. But when asked if that was a factor in the restructuring, Bartels said a sale was not a priority at the moment. “The way I see it is that profitability allows us to experiment more,” he said. “The board and the leadership team here want to be an independent entity. We’re not looking at strategic options right now. We want to continue to grow and continue to hire.” StumbleUpon has had a unique history: The company was by longtime CEO Garrett Camp while he was pursuing a post-graduate software engineering degree in his native Canada. Shortly after taking on just $1.5 million , the company was in a splashy $75 million deal. The post-deal integration did not go as planned, though, and in 2009 Camp and one of his original co-founders Geoff Smith with the help of a group of investors, with Camp reassuming the role of CEO. For the first couple of years after the buyback, things at StumbleUpon had apparently gone swimmingly. The company boasted and engagement, brought on $17 million in , and attracted a number of to join the fold. But the past year or so has brought some well, stumbles. Newcomers in the content discovery and sharing space such as took off . After a big redesign fell flat , Camp in May 2012 to focus on other projects. Another major once again drew mixed reviews — and according to some metrics, its traffic was . Bartels acknowledged today that the first half of 2012 did bring a “softening” in user growth, but he said that reports of the company’s demise in user growth were exaggerated, as many third-party data sources on app growth do not accurately monitor mobile users. Regardless, he said, being profitable should bring the flexibility needed to make sure StumbleUpon’s mobile users are better served. And despite today’s turmoil, StumbleUpon’s interim CEO says that he is committed to building a stronger future from this point on. “This is on a one-time event. This is not going to be a slow-drip effect” into a series of layoffs and cost-cutting moves, Bartels said. As StumbleUpon continues to be a very fun app to use, and for many people on the web, here’s hoping that is indeed the case. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 29 | null |
Thanks To Growth In Mobile And Marketplaces, eBay’s Q4 Revenue Up 18 Percent To $4B, Net Income Up 22 Percent | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | eBay’s Q4 and full-year 2012 earnings , with revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2012, increasing 18 percent to $4 billion, compared to the same period of 2011. The company reported fourth-quarter net income on a GAAP basis of $751 million, or $0.57 per diluted share, and net income on a non-GAAP basis of $927 million, or $0.70 per diluted share. Net income was up 22 percent for the quarter. Analysts eBay to post earnings of $0.69 cents a share, on revenue of $3.98 billion. eBay says the increase in non-GAAP earnings per diluted share was driven by double-digit user growth across the portfolio, strong gains in mobile adoption, and accelerating growth in the company’s Marketplaces business, reflecting a 19 percent increase in U.S. gross merchandise volume (GMV), excluding vehicles. For the full year, revenue increased 21 percent to $14.1 billion, compared to 2011. The company reported net income on a GAAP basis of $2.6 billion, or $1.99 per diluted share, and net income on a non-GAAP basis of $3.1 billion, or $2.36 per diluted share. eBay says that it enabled more than $175 billion of commerce volume (ECV) in 2012, representing growth of 18 percent. ECV is the total commerce and payment volume across all three business units consisting of Marketplaces GMV, PayPal merchant services net total payment volume, and GSI global ecommerce (GeC) merchandise sales. “We had a great finish to an excellent year, with fourth quarter results exceeding our expectations,” said eBay’s president and CEO John Donahoe in a release. “eBay Marketplaces in particular had a terrific fourth quarter, with growth in the U.S. accelerating three points, outpacing ecommerce.” “Mobile continues to rewrite the commerce playbook, and we continue to be a mobile commerce and payments leader,” Donahoe added. “eBay mobile finished the year with $13 billion in volume – more than double the prior year – and PayPal mobile handled almost $14 billion in payment volume, more than triple the prior year. In 2013, we expect each to exceed $20 billion.” PayPal’s active account growth accelerated to 15% and ended the year with approximately 123 million registered accounts. PayPal added nearly 2 million accounts a month in the fourth quarter, representing the company’s fastest active account growth rate in years. Payment volume increased 24 percent, producing revenue growth of 24 percent, thanks to merchant and consumer adoption coupled with geographic expansion. PayPal’s mobile payment volume reached nearly $14 billion in 2012, up more than 250 percent over the prior year, as more consumers used their smartphones and tablets to pay online. The company’s Marketplaces business delivered a record $2 billion revenue in the fourth quarter. Active user growth was up because of mobile site enhancements designed to streamline the shopping experience on eBay and emerging markets. Mobile commerce volume in 2012 grew more than 120 percent to $13 billion driven primarily by increased adoption of eBay’s mobile apps and increased engagement from product innovation. eBay’s suite of mobile apps attracted more than 4 million new customers in 2012. GSI revenue for the quarter increased 10 percent to $398 million driven primarily by a 17 percent increase in GeC merchandise sales. Same-store sales grew 19 percent. The theme of the quarter (and the year) for eBay was mobile. eBay and PayPal had a very mobile holiday this year. PayPal said that were up 193 percent from last year and eBay’s total mobile volume in the U.S. was up 153 percent on the day. also saw similar jumps in spending for the company. Beyond just being the holiday shopping season for eBay and PayPal, the fourth quarter also brought a few new product additions to the marketplace, . The company its same-day shipping service called eBay No to New York, and on shipping for merchants. At the start of the quarter, PayPal CEO David Marcus the company’s reorganization and restructuring. The company also a number of payments pilots in international markets, including mobile check-ins. Additionally, PayPal a branded cash loading card, called the PayPal My Cash Card, which allows users to load up their PayPal accounts using cash instead of bank transfers. |
TechCrunch Redesign Mockup [Do Not Publish] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | There are a bunch of people in this meeting who I don’t know. I think they . They don’t know who I am either. Half of the people in this room are sick, myself included. I’m going to go get a flu shot once this flu is over. Are you even allowed to do that? There’s a There’s another Now we’re being asked to draw boxes and circles and triangles to represent what we feel should be the future of the TechCrunch homepage. All my drawings are about boxes in boxes in boxes — and murder. Eldon has a new haircut. I think the TechCrunch homepage might be better if there were hearts on it in addition to circles and triangles and boxes. Also, Justin Timberlake. Timberlake So modern and fresh and clean. Responsive. I wonder if Tim Armstrong teleports in somewhere here when he comes to the West Coast (into the nap pods?). Beam me up, Arianna! Matt thinks we need to have a second screen experience for all Disrupt content. Something about “beautiful photos.” Why is it always “beautiful photos”? Never “just okay” photos. Most photos are honestly just okay. I still think we should revert back to the old “classic” TechCrunch logo but just have Timberlake follow you around as you navigate the site. Also, not get the site flagged for That would be nice. Fuck it, let’s just copy . |
Facebook Rolls Out VoIP Calling To U.S. iOS Messenger Users | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | Facebook originally started testing a new for users of its Facebook Messenger app for iPhone in Canada early this year, and now the service is available to U.S. users as well. The free call button app now shows up in the app for U.S. users, in any conversation where both parties are using the Facebook Messenger app. This is a pretty handy feature for users of the social network, especially since unlike with Skype, Viber or other VoIP calling apps, you already likely have a wide network of contacts you’d actually want to have live voice conversations with built-in and ready to go on Facebook. And while it isn’t entirely free on cellular connections, since it uses your data connection, it is completely free at home on Wi-Fi, which means it can likely replace a home phone for a lot of users if they’re still hanging on to one, or at least for-pay at-home VoIP services. As Josh noted in his post on the pilot launch in Canada, this isn’t built on the Skype network, which one might guess based on the partnership between the two companies for voice and video chat. Instead, it’s Facebook’s own attempt to own every channel of communication for its users. It looks like the Canadian trial went well, but we’ll be watching to see how this works with the much larger U.S. user base. |
Microsoft Launches HelpBridge For iOS, Windows Phone And Android, Lets You Alert Friends And Family When Disasters Strike | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | When a disaster happens, chances are you want to get in touch with your loved ones as soon as possible, either to tell them that you’re fine or to make sure they are. To make this easier, Microsoft is today, a mobile app for , and . HelpBridge, which is based on Microsoft’s platform, lets you notify your friends and family by SMS, email or a message to your Facebook wall that you are okay when a disaster happens. Those messages can include your location, too. For the time being, HelpBridge is only available in the U.S. “When disasters occur, the first thing people who were impacted want to do is to reach friends and family,” said James Rooney, program manager for Microsoft Citizenship’s Technology for Good program, today. Rooney also noted that while technology was instrumental in helping people connect with friends, family and relief efforts after the recent disasters in Haiti and Japan, those efforts were very specific to the disaster region and quickly become obsolete in the time after the diaster. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPYVHmW5GX8] That’s only one layer of the app, though. In addition, Microsoft partnered with a number of organizations like , , , and to make it easier for people to help after a disaster strikes. The app, for example, allows you to quickly send a text message to donate money to relief efforts and to make larger donations via PayPal. You can also use the app to donate goods and to find volunteer opportunities (both in your vicinity and nationwide). This obviously isn’t the first app to try to solve this problem. There are “ ” apps for all the major mobile platforms that perform many of the same functions, though none of the ones that I’m aware of also include the ability to donate and volunteer. This, by the way, isn’t Microsoft’s first foray in this area. A few years ago, the company also offered the Vine.net emergency broadcast system, though it’s not clear what happened to this project. |
‘Bi-Partisan’ Official Inauguration App Is a Sexy Liberal Data Spy | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | [ .] Watching the live stream of President Obama’s inauguration on the official smartphone app could make you a lucrative target for liberal spam. Buried in the terms of service for the and gorgeous Inaugural 2013 application is permission for the non-partisan Presidential Inaugural Committee to share data “with candidates, organizations, groups or causes that we believe have similar political viewpoints, principles or objectives,” to Politico. “It seems like classic bait-and-switch,” said Kathy Kiely, managing editor of transparency watchdog, the Sunlight Foundation, “This is a committee that’s formed to throw a celebration for an event that should be nonpartisan. Theoretically, the whole country should be involved. It’s a patriotic, banners-and-bunting and parades kind of day. And oh, by the way, if you use this app, we may be harvesting your emails and sharing it with our friends in the Democratic Party.” The app’s minor obsession with collecting telephone numbers, GPS data, and permission for notifications are all perfectly justifiable to help crowds navigate the chaotic and event-filled occasion. But, privacy advocates find it troubling that the fine-print on the PIC’s website says it can use activity data “without limitation in advertising, fundraising and other communications in support of PIC and the principles of the Democratic party, without any right of compensation or attribution.” In an email to Politico, PIC spokeswoman, Addie Whisenant, explained the data mining policy, “Regardless of party, it is appropriate for a presidential Inaugural Committee to support and reflect their party’s ideals and causes.” All of this hand-wringing could be over-hyped, but it would be difficult to track if users actually get put on liberal donor lists. The fact that the PIC hasn’t categorically denied efforts to hock spam at users is certainly troubling. Its too bad, too. The is positively gorgeous. The navigation, layout, and features are all top notch. It’s like a sexy spy–a sexy, sexy, spammy spy. |
Jody Sherman, Ecomom Founder And Longtime Web Entrepreneur, Has Died | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | , a longtime web entrepreneur most recently known as the co-founder and CEO of healthy kids products site , has passed away. He was 47. Details on the cause of death have not been confirmed. The news was relayed earlier today to close friends, family, and business associates, and has spread this evening from a written on his profile today by his wife Kerri, which reads: “This is Jody’s final post, and it isn’t coming from Jody. He’s gone. This is not a bit of his wonderful twisted humor. This is sad and real and forever. He didn’t say goodbye to anyone because he knew he couldn’t. So I’m saying it for him. If you are reading this it’s because you are connected to Jody in some way. He loved you, respected you, admired you, valued your presence in his life, or felt some combination of any or all of these things. And he would want each and every one of you to know and understand exactly that. Please post anything you have to say to or about Jody here.” Sherman, who grew up in Miami, Florida, in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s after a five-year-long career in the US Navy. He later moved to the Los Angeles area where he became a leading face of the scene and co-founded the e-commerce site . In recent years, he relocated his own family along with the company to Las Vegas as part of the project there. Sherman has become well known and loved by many who worked with him over the years for many things: His sharp mind, his vibrant humor, the breadth and depth of his travels and experiences (and the great stories that resulted from them), his willingness to share his knowledge about business and life with others, and of course his love of surfing. In an August 2011 interview , Sherman was asked what he’d like to be remembered for. He answered:
“I’d like to be remembered for being helpful to others. I’m not sure exactly what that means but it feels good whenever I know that my advice or my time spent with someone was of benefit to him or her. I don’t know that you have to impact huge numbers of people at once – although I am trying to do that with Ecomom. Personally, if I can be of real use to even one person at a time, I feel like I’ve been lucky enough in my life that I’m obligated to pay that forward.” He will certainly be missed. |
Building Digital Literacy: JobScout Brings Its Online Learning Platform To iOS To Teach You How To Find A Job | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | It’s easy to get lost in the Silicon Valley and Bay Area tech bubbles, where it seems that everyone carries five phones, owns three laptops and just had lunch with a sentient robot. But, the reality is outside of the bubble is a little different. Digital literacy is a privilege, and more the exception than the rule. Not everyone owns a computer or is employed at a startup that just raised $10 million. In fact, was 9.8 percent, significantly higher than the U.S. average at 7.8 percent. Christina Gagnier, Stephanie Margossian and Carter Fort co-founded last year to help address this problem — to help combat unemployment through digital literacy. With funding from the California State Library (through the Library Services and Technology Administration Act) and support from the California Technology Agency, JobScout set out to create an online learning platform to help teach Californians (and everyone else for that matter) the basic skills required to help find a job in an increasingly digital world. JobScout is part of the state’s larger digital literacy effort, , which aims “to promote and foster digital literacy and digital citizenship” in California and, in turn, help to energize local economies, boost innovation, competitiveness and improve the overall quality of life for residents by giving them the tools, skills and education they need to find jobs (and keep them). Initially launched as a web app, JobScout is today officially launching its app for iOS, through which it hopes to bring the power of its web platform to mobile, especially for those who might not have access to a computer. While the app has broad applicability and seeks to provide value whether one is a first-time job seeker or a Baby Boomer looking to re-enter the workforce, the co-founders tell us that the platform is particularly geared towards Millennials. By offering educational content to help users learn resume building and other related job-seeking skills, JobScout wants to make it easier for young people to navigate the job search process, something that is sure to hit home for Millenials, which have one of the highest levels of unemployment — currently at around 25 percent. “While people used to be able to check the classifieds or pick up an application at a local employer, these days most of the job search and application process has moved online,” says JobScout co-founder and CEO, Christina Gagnier. “For many people, this is a problem because they do not know how to make the most out of all the Web offers, or, for young Millennials, may not know how to apply their tech savvy to finding work. While this may seem unbelievable, 60 million people in the United States alone are considered digitally illiterate.” To address this, JobScout makes a variety of lessons on how to best use the Web to look for job opportunities (on the Web and on iOS), supported by a gamified platform that allows users to earn badges for completed lessons (and presumably make the whole experience more engaging). In addition, the app’s “One Stop Job Shop” allows users to search for openings, save listings, apply and track their progress with interview dates and times, while its “ResumeBuilder” offers a simple, easy-to-use, fill-in-the-blank-type resume system. On top of that, JobScout offers one-click submission with pre-formatted cover letters and provides ideas for how students can earn money through micro-entrepreneurship while on the job search, walking users through TaskRabbit, Etsy and other platforms. It’s also backed by its web-based platform, which offers a social community where users can connect with each other and share experiences, techniques and tips, as well as a dashboard, additional lesson content, and so on. Of course, all that being said, you may feel as if you’ve heard about JobScout before. Today, it seems as if there are millions of online educational platforms, but the truth is that many of them target higher ed (Coursera and its ilk) or more general academic content for higher ed or K-12 (like, say, Khan Academy), or offer more advanced lessons in entrepreneurship, technical skills, web design or trade-based skills (like Skillshare, Lynda.com and CreativeLive, to name a few). So, JobScout may not be as much of a me-too idea as one might initially suspect.
And, while the gamification of education should be approached with a skeptical eye (especially for tools targeting the academic side of education, for use in or around the classroom), it could prove to be more valuable in JobScout’s context and for an audience of young people. The co-founders believe that, in the end, the platform’s value doesn’t emanate from its badges, but instead the consolidation of meaningful lesson content for a broad range of web-based skill sets. Rather than targeting schools, districts or high school teachers, JobScout is going after the masses — the 60 million Americans without regular Internet access. “People need to learn what a URL is, how it works and why it’s important before they can learn about HTML or CSS,” Gagnier says. And while that may be cause for eye-rolling for those who spend 24/7 in the tech industry, it’s important. It’s the same reason that California’s — it’s not always all about wowing geeks with sexy tech, it’s about bringing utilitarian, modern tech to everyone else to improve our quality of life. That’s what moves the needle, not just creating yet another online, distance learning platform for well-educated, technically-proficient non-minorities to brush up on the fundamentals of natural language processing — or whatever it may be. JobScout is a free (so cost-effective), self-guided tour of the job search process for those who may not be overly-familiar with the ins and outs of the Web beyond using Facebook, YouTube and Google — and maybe not even that advanced. Its content is created by the startup itself in correlation with the Basic Digital Literacy Skills Framework developed by the State of California. ( .) As for JobScout-the-business, the startup is also now offering white-label solutions for institutions that want to offer job search learning resources to their communities. So, while the startup is backed by $800K in federal grants, that’s where the for-profit company plans to begin generating revenue, and it already has a few institutional customers on board. Plus, the platform also includes basic analytics through “COMPASS,” so that institutions can get visibility into activity on the platform and make more informed decisions. Going forward, the team plans to add to its platform with another app that will provide similar educational and learning tools for healthcare — in other words, to help the novice navigate the byzantine world of healthcare in the post-Obamacare world. JobScout also intends to launch a Spanish language version of its app this year, something the co-founders say is already in high demand. While it may not necessarily be for you, JobScout is beginning to go down a very important (and valuable road). By offering valuable job training and easy tools to learn digital skills, JobScout or some hybrid thereof will likely make waves in the job market. At launch, it offers 31 lessons, but its resources will grow quickly and it’s smart not to limit itself to California — even though it’s a huge market (and opportunity) to start with — and the more language editions it offers, the broader the potential reach. Digital literacy, FTW! JobScout , and on . |
NewVoiceMedia Takes $20M Led By Highland Capital, MMC To Build Contact Centers In The Clouds | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | , an enterprise startup riding the wave of cloud-based services, has raised $20 million for its business of contact center solutions, which currently serves 8,000 agents in 30 countries. The Series B round was led by Highland Capital Partners and MMC, with participation from existing investors Eden Ventures and Notion Capital, and brings the total funding for NVM to $26.3 million. In an interview by email, NVM’s CEO Jonathan Gale says that the new investment will be used to help the UK-based company expand further into the U.S., as well as product development in workforce optimization and multi-channel solutions. The company already sells products for marketing, sales, service desks and other operating divisions; and it also targets home workers and small businesses through to larger enterprises. The goal with new product development is to combine functionalities to meet how businesses run themselves, and also to ensure that its products remain cost-effective. “They are likely to have invested in a CRM and are looking to maximise that investment by integrating additional services,” notes Gale. But that’s not to belittle the amount of investment needed to crack the U.S. — a must-have market for any serious enterprise tech startup, in the mind of Laurence Garrett, the Highland partner who will be joining NVM’s board. “It is really tough for European companies to do America properly and correctly,” he noted in an interview. The enterprise market for cloud services has been in the ascendent for some time now, with investors like Andreessen Horowitz putting tens of millions of dollars, and a , into backing startups that tackle the space from disruptive angles. While there may always be a public appetite for hearing about the latest and coolest consumer tech service, the enterprise startups often fly a little lower but can be just as revolutionary and game-changing in what they ultimately achieve. NVM’s disruptive angle is in the area of contact centers, specifically replicating — for a fraction of the price — the offerings based on costly customer premises equipment that helps customer service teams route calls, offer automated responses and integrate live responses with customer record access. NVM’s business comes from two directions: The first is the larger enterprise looking to cut down operational expenditures, choosing to leave CPE behind in its next upgrade cycle in favor of lower-cost cloud solutions. The second is the smaller company that never had the scale to invest in physical contact center solutions before but is now able to consider less-expensive, more flexible customer service options in the cloud. NVM is not the only company tackling this area. Cloud competitors include Five9, Contactual and Interactive Intelligence; and of course on-premise companies like Genesys, Avaya and Aspect are also trying hard to remain in the game. Gale notes that NVM stands apart because of its heavy investment in “the security, availability and performance aspects of its service,” with the status of these played out in real time on a . With a lot of cloud services competing on price — NVM’s offering for a minimum of five agents and one supervisor — cloud companies longer term may seek bigger margins and more multi-channel efficiency by way of consolidation. But for now NVM has continued to make itself as adaptable as possible, with native integration with Salesforce among its features. “The objective is not to address the agent desktop market directly, but to integrate seamlessly with it bringing voice, chat, email and social channels to the desktop through intelligent queueing and routing,” notes Gale. “Couple this with management reporting, analytics and management tools (like workforce optimisation) and that represents a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity annually.” For Highland, the decision to invest was influenced in part by the leadership at NVM: one of Gale’s past roles was as VP of business development at MessageLabs before it was sold to Symantec for $695 million. “He really understands the software-as-a-service business model,” notes Garrett. “At NVM, he’s taken a great business and made it better.” The company now is seeing year-on-year growth of 200 percent, as well as an annual run rate of over $15 million, with customers like Parcelforce, PhotoBox, QlikTech and SHL showing that the company can “grow well on modest capital,” Garrett says. “Once we see that criteria met for a European startup, we get excited.” |
Qihoo Gets Double Dose Of Bad News As Apple Cuts Its iOS Apps And It Receives Unfair Competition Warning | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Qihoo 360 shares slipped after it disclosed today that its iOS apps had been removed from the iTunes stores without warning, . The Chinese security software maker also received an unfair competition warning from the Chinese government, according to the Beijing Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau’s . But Qihoo didn’t let its no good, very bad day keep it from taking a jab at its main rival Baidu (AKA the Google of China). Qihoo CFO Alex Xu told Bloomberg that his company’s apps had been “abruptly removed” from the iTunes store last week for no apparent reason. This is not the first time Apple has removed Qihoo’s apps from its store. About a year ago, they were before being reinstated. At that time, Qihoo that the ban was caused by “unusually high numbers of positive/negative feedback by unknown sources,” which triggered an automatic temporary removal. In separate news, the company was issued an executive warning that its use of anti-virus software in Internet browsers was considered unfair competition. Perhaps as a distraction, Qihoo also told users today that rival Baidu, the Chinese search behemoth, is using a plug-in that can determine whether or not Internet users are on Qihoo’s browser, and display a pop-up window saying that the Qihoo browser is incompatible with Baidu’s system. Qihoo has accused Baidu of unfair competition since Qihoo launched search engine 360 Secure Browser, a direct competitor to Baidu’s flagship product, in August. At that time, Qihoo told the BBC that Baidu, which holds about 80% of the Chinese search market, had been aggressively holding on to its user base by redirecting Qihoo users who searched for Baidu-related services to its own search page. Baidu has also made its own moves onto Qihoo’s core security software business. In October, Baidu launched its new Baidu PC Faster suite, which against Qihoo’s potential plans to enter the fast-growing Southeast Asian market. And earlier this month, reports surfaced that Baidu is planning to become a strategic investor in security software company Kingsoft, which would make it an even stronger rival against Qihoo’s security business. In an emailed statement, Baidu did not respond directly to Qihoo’s accusations, but it did say that it “has since come to our attention that one of our competitors has intentionally spread unfounded rumors on the Internet” about an upgrade to its Phoenix Nest customer management system. Without naming Qihoo’s browser, Baidu added: “Ensuring data security is a complex and arduous task. Improvements in data security will from time to time clash with certain companies’ interests and, as a result, lead them to make unfounded accusations against their competitors.” Qihoo has been emailed for comment. |
Samsung Buys Medical Imaging Company NeuroLogica | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Samsung that it has acquired medical imaging company NeuroLogica, part of the multinational conglomerate’s plans to build a leading medical technology business. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “The acquisition of NeuroLogica is another important step in the expansion of Samsung’s medical imaging business,” said Tod Pike, senior VP at Samsung’s Enterprise Business Division. The press release also stated that the purchase is part of Samsung’s plans to expand its medical imaging business. Boston-based NeuroLogica was founded in 2004 and is known for its portable computed tomography (CT) scanners, including the BodyTom and CereTom. Samsung is into the medical device sector and . Last November, Samsung Electronics America, a subsidiary of Samsung, announced the addition of Samsung Health & Medical Equipment, which merged employees from Samsung Medison America, its ultrasound machine manufacturer, into its Enterprise Business Division. Samsung had acquired Medison in 2010 and its medical technology business as a “key element in Samsung’s 2020 vision to explore new areas of growth,” said the company at the time. |
We’ll Publish Your Story If CNET Won’t | Jon Orlin | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Editorial independence is kind of at TechCrunch. When our , or might have an issue with a story, we write it anyway. So we have an offer to make to the writers at Its parent company, CBS, that CNET’s , barring something changing, will be its last. A disclosure statement on a recent news article states bluntly: “CBS, the parent corporation of CNET, is currently in active litigation with Aereo as to the legality of its service. As a result of that conflict of interest, CNET cannot review that service going forward.” Well, CNET now can, via TechCrunch. CNET staffers, we’ll happily publish any news article or review you want to write about Aereo or Dish AutoHop or anything else that you are prohibited from publishing on CNET. We’ll let you do this anonymously and we’ll keep your identity completely confidential. To protect your identity, you don’t need to from your corporate email address, though you’ll need to prove you’re legit. We’ll also pay you our regular, modest freelance rate for the story. Because although not all of us here, we’re all very actively invested in And if your own company won’t give you the platform to do so, we will. |
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