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Adobe Announces Lightroom Mobile For iPad And iPhone | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Adobe has heard the call from its users, and it’s bringing Lightroom to mobile devices, beginning with the iPad and coming soon to iPhone. The app offers the ability to work with RAW photos as you can on the desktop version, as well as smartphone and mobile images to get the most out of those shots you take on the fly. It automatically syncs with Lightroom 5 on the desktop, but there’s a catch – you need to be a Creative Cloud subscriber to take advantage of what Lightroom mobile has to offer, so owners of boxed copy Lightroom software are out of luck. Making Lightroom mobile a Cloud Service exclusive is clearly a selling tactic – Adobe knows people have been asking for this for a while now. But it offers a lot of great features for the price it incurs, too. As mentioned, it syncs all changes to your desktop automatically, and it works with almost any image format you might come across. It imports photos directly from your iOS device camera roll, and includes sharing options for popular social destinations so you can amp up your art before you reveal it to your network. There’s also a slideshow feature built in, and you can access your shared libraries from the web via the online Lightroom portal. The interface for Lightroom mobile is redesigned to work best on your iPad or iPhone’s screen, with the image taking up the bulk of the UI and sliders and touch-optimized controls taking up the remainder of the screen. All of the tools around exposure, color and tonal adjustments are here, just like in the desktop version, but the two versions of the tool (desktop and mobile) are definitely designed to be complementary, rather than having one replace the other entirely in your workflow. To get Adobe’s new Lightroom mobile, you’ll need to be a member of one of four Creative Cloud programs: Users will have to have an iPad 2 or later to run the software, and will also need to be on iOS 7 or later. Adobe says it’s working on an Android version, but firm plans on launch or release date for software compatible with Google’s mobile OS just yet. |
Colorbay Is A New Way Of Looking At Instagram, Flickr And Other Photo-Sharing Platforms | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | is a beautiful iOS app that lets you browse images from popular photo-sharing sites like , , and . If you are a longtime user of these services, Colorbay is also a time capsule that lets you rediscover old favorites. For example, Instagram because the service wants to make sure it “runs smoothly as the app becomes available to a growing number of people.” That might seem like a lot, but over the past three years, I’ve liked more than 300 photos on Instagram, including pics of my friends’ children as they grow up and images from design-related accounts that I save for inspiration. I have even more old favorites on Flickr because I joined in 2004 and was an avid user. Back before Facebook became widespread, Flickr was my favorite site because there tons of very active groups for things ranging from to . But I’ve stopped visiting Flickr as often as I used to, partly because most of the people I met on the site have migrated to other social networks. I also disliked and Flickr’s Favorites page was never easy to navigate in the first place. Now I depend on or to catalog most of my favorite images, but Colorbay’s “My Likes” stream is a welcome trip down memory lane. I found photos I haven’t looked at in almost five years, but still enjoy. It’s also a fun way to browse my own old snapshots. Colorbay, which is also available for iPads, displays photos in a mosaic-style stream that automatically plays unless you pause it. It currently allows you to browse your timelines and popular photos from 500px, Flickr, Instagram, , and . Colorbay’s cool “Throwback” feature automatically delivers a random mix of photos from all services, while “Lomography” delivers film (or film-like) photos with that tag. You can also search your own tags. Even if you don’t like to wallow in nostalgia as much as I do, Colorbay is also a fantastic photo discovery tool and a great piece of eye candy. |
Massive Security Bug In OpenSSL Could Affect A Huge Chunk Of The Internet | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | I saw a t-shirt one time. “I’m a bomb disposal technician,” it read. “If you see me running, try to keep up.” The same sort of idea can be applied to net security: when all the net security people you know are freaking out, it’s probably an okay time to worry. This afternoon, many of the net security people I know are freaking out. A very serious bug in OpenSSL — a cryptographic library that is used to secure a very, large percentage of the Internet’s traffic — has just been discovered and publicly disclosed. Even if you’ve never heard of OpenSSL, it’s probably a part of your life in one way or another — or, more likely, in many ways. The apps you use, the sites you visit; if they encrypt the data they send back and forth, there’s a good chance they use OpenSSL to do it. The Apache web server that powers something like 50% of the Internet’s web sites, for example, utilizes OpenSSL. Through a bug that security researchers have dubbed “ “, it seems that it’s possible to trick almost any system running any version of OpenSSL from the past 2 years into revealing chunks of data sitting in its system memory. Why that’s bad: very, very sensitive data often sits in a server’s system memory, including the keys it uses to encrypt and decrypt communication (read: usernames, passwords, credit cards, etc.) This means an attacker could quite feasibly get a server to spit out its secret keys, allowing them to read to any communication that they intercept like it wasn’t encrypted it all. Armed with those keys, an attacker could also impersonate an otherwise secure site/server in a way that would fool many of your browser’s built-in security checks. And if an attacker was just gobbling up mountains of encrypted data from a server in hopes of cracking it at some point? They may very well now have the keys to decrypt it, depending on how the server they’re attacking was configured (like whether or not it’s set up to utilize .) The exploit relies on a bug in the implementation of OpenSSL’s “heartbeat” feature, hence the “Heartbleed” name. Security firm Codenomicon has written an in-depth breakdown of the We have tested some of our own services from attacker’s perspective. We attacked ourselves from outside, without leaving a trace. Without using any privileged information or credentials we were able steal from ourselves the secret keys used for our X.509 certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication. It seems the bug has been in OpenSSL for 2+ years (since December 2011, OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f) before its publicly announced discovery today. it appears that exploiting this bug leaves no trace in the server’s logs. So there’s no easy way for a system administrator to know if their servers have been compromised; they just have to assume that they have been. The bug was discovered and reported to the OpenSSL team by Neel Mehta of Google’s security team. OpenSSL released an emergency patch for the bug along this afternoon. |
Amazon Fire TV Replaces Chromecast Atop Amazon’s Best Sellers List | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Don’t be surprised. The the top spot on Amazon’s Best Sellers electronics list. Google’s Chromecast streaming stick previously held the spot after displacing the Kindle shortly after its launch. Amazon has never detailed the metrics used to generate the Best Sellers lists. Clearly it uses data complied over a short period of time since the Fire TV just became available last week. Or the boards are rigged. With the Fire TV on the list, five out of the 10 best-selling electronics on Amazon are media streamers, including the Chromecast, two Roku models and the Apple TV. The Fire TV launched to and has since enjoyed a large product placement on the front page of Amazon. The tempting ad is impossible to miss. And apparently Amazon shoppers are taking the bait. |
After Raising $250 Million, Lyft Cuts Prices By Up To 20% In All Markets | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Last week, announced that it had raised a as part of its effort to compete against other on-demand ride services. Now the company is going on the offensive against its competitors, with a price cut of up to 20 percent in all of its markets. Lyft’s Spring Pricing initiative, which it is announcing to drivers in an email blast today, will lower the cost of rides for all consumers who use the service. But it won’t affect the amount of money that drivers take home. Instead, the company is temporarily suspending its 20 percent commission while testing out the new rates. With the cuts, Lyft is making a big push to acquire users in a market that is being increasingly driven by the cost of getting from Point A to Point B. In January, Uber announced a similar , which it claimed would make it the lowest cost provider for its users. Just last month, Lyft , which lowers rates in periods of low demand. The company has also been giving out free rides to users in newly launched cities as part of its “pioneers” program. The new rates come on the heels of that Lyft announced last week, from new investors that included hedge fund Coatue Management, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and Daniel Loeb’s Third Point. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and Mayfield Ventures also participated in the round. That amount nearly matches the last summer, although Lyft’s funding came at a much lower valuation. The new funding for Lyft will be used as it seeks to expand beyond the 30 markets that it currently operates in. But the money also gives the company flexibility to play around with its pricing in an effort to appeal to even more customers. |
A Satellite Startup Could Be Google’s Next Purchase | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | According to a report, Google is interested in buying , a California-based startup that builds high-resolution imaging microsatellites and provides a platform to view the data. Because apparently Google needs satellites now that . As states, the purchase would line up nicely with Google’s mapping ambitions. Skybox Imaging’s microsatellites would provide Google with its own fleet of cameras in the sky, allowing the search giant to capture its own imaging for Google Earth. Currently, SkyBox Imaging provides businesses and investors with sub-meter imaging captured by its constellation of satellites. The company produces and provides everything from the satellites in the sky to the data-analytics platforms used by its customers. Skybox Imaging has raised $91 million over three rounds of funding since it was founded in 2009. The Information also reports that the company is looking at additional venture funding in order to increase development. Its last round was two years ago a massive $70 million Series C round led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. While its aim is different, Google, like Facebook, is clearly looking for a way to spread its reach. Facebook’s move into drones is largely centered around providing Internet access. If Google is indeed purchasing Skybox Imaging, the move would further its quest to catalog the world. |
US Burns Through All High-Skill Visas For 2015 In Less Than A Week | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | And then there were none: As expected, more people applied for high-skill and high-degree U.S. work visas in the first five days of the application period than there were slots. This is precisely what happened last year. This indicates that the number of high-skill and high-degree folks out there who want to come to the U.S. is far higher than the number this country is willing to accept. Each year, 65,000 H-1B visas are awarded to high-skill immigrants, along with 20,000 advanced degree visas for the highly educated. In 2013, for the combined 85,000 slots in the first five-day period. If you apply in the first five days, your application is treated the same as the rest from that period. Given the massive popularity of the visas, a lottery is used to determine who gets one from that initial pool. Does turning away highly skilled and educated people due to an artificial cap on visas sound silly? There is investment from technology companies, those where many of those applying for the visas intend to work, to change the current status quo. High-skill immigration reform as a standalone entity. It was later lashed to larger immigration reform. And as such it has been on Capitol Hill. A disgrace, certainly, but also a disgraceful reality. Fwd.us, a group founded in part , has pushed for immigration reform. , another Fwd.us founder, lambasted current law regarding the cap structure of high-skill visas in an email to TechCrunch, calling the current set of regulations “dysfunctional.” He went on to state that it is “absolutely critical that House Republicans take action on immigration reform now to do right by American families and boost the American economy.” Given the current election cycle coming up, the chance of that is somewhat close to zero, but he has a point. |
Apple Puts iOS 7 Adoption At 87% As iOS 6 And Older Fade To Black | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Apple has just as measured by its own tracking of app usage, and iOS 7 and up now accounts for 87 percent of all iOS devices by that measurement, with iOS 6 making up 11 percent and older versions accounting for just 2 percent of the total picture. That’s a very thoroughly homogenous mix, given the comparable Android numbers; Google’s own mix shows that the overwhelming majority of devices are still on some version of Jelly Bean, with a big chunk on Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich, and only a relatively small 5.3 percent on KitKat (4.4) or higher. Apple’s numbers are slightly conservative compared to ones we’ve seen from other sources, too, including a couple of weeks ago, and still shows it hovering just below that threshold. The adoption has risen from 74 percent late last year, charting consistent gains throughout 2014 so far. Higher adoption means fewer headaches for developers, and a guaranteed consistency of experience across devices and users for both Apple its third-party software-makers. Google is trying to move some of its OS pieces into Play Store independent services to keep its experience easier to normalize, but Apple is still far and away the winner when it comes to the consistency of mobile OSes. |
USAID: Our Cuban Twitter Clone Was More Popular Than Reported | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Consider this my favorite correction in recent memory: USAID, fine purveyors of a Twitter clone called ZunZuneo in Cuba, would like you to know that it was more popular than reported. The project, widely ridiculed such as it was, was said to have peaked at around 40,000 users. Not so, according to USAID. In a , the U.S. Agency for International Development indicated that the “platform had around 68,000 users.” ZunZuneo is one of the zanier government projects I can summon to mind: Culture change by cloned tweet. You cannot improve on the story of the service. It’s tech gold. Here’s : Eventually, the program grew beyond what the government contractors felt they could control, and they realized they needed to exit their involvement to in order to conceal their role. At one point, the USAID even went to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to seek funding for ZunZuneo, which was part of a plan for it to go independent and become a legitimate business, with the proviso that new management keep its original ambitions for inspiring political change. Right. ZunZuneo was shutdown in 2012. Twitter has found out , but it would appear the costs of running ZunZuneo were too much for the United States to bear. Relations, always rocky between Cuba and the United States, are not likely to improve due to the situation. Still, ZunZuneo hit its stride and managed to attract a user base. According to USAID: “The project initially sent news, sports scores, weather, and trivia. After which, the grantee did not direct content because users were generating it on their own.” The government: Better at apps than half of Silicon Valley. |
Inside Jobs: Why Facebook’s Hardware Engineering Head Likes Getting His Hands Dirty | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | When you think about the upper echelons of technical fields like hardware engineering, you might think of lifelong academics with multiple degrees in engineering and math and science. But if there’s one thing that’s become clear in our series, it’s that the people that make the tech world tick aren’t always what you’d expect. Take . As Facebook’s director of hardware engineering, he leads the team that builds the actual hardware that stores the photos, thoughts, and memories of the more than 1 billion people worldwide who share their lives on Facebook. That’s serious technology, with very serious responsibilities. But Corddry didn’t learn about his field in the ivory tower of academia. He actually majored in photography, and dropped out of college a handful of credits shy of graduation to work full time at a startup. All of his technology experience has been built in the real world, rather than by studying books. It was fascinating to spend time with Corddry at Facebook headquarters to get an in-person look at how he works on a day to day basis. In keeping with his history, he puts a lot of importance on his team getting their hands dirty and knowing how servers work in data centers, side by side with the technicians who operate them. He told me: “There are so many people in our industry who design servers, yet have never seen a production data center. They’ve never been out to one, and they really don’t know what the real experience is and what the opportunities are. You need to know very well the people who use your product. You need to know the experience you are creating. It is insufficient to just write a paper about it, or just have someone else write a paper, and you read it. You really need to walk a mile in their shoes… I work as a technician. It’s not just my engineers. I’m out in the data center fixing servers myself. I do it multiple times per year.” Get an inside look at Matt Corddry’s job in the video embedded above. Producing, shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by . Production coordination and creative direction is done by . Original logo design by . Motion graphics and graphic design by . |
Red Hat Teams With Google Compute Engine To Ease Cloud Management | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Red Hat announced a deal today in which Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers could move their subscriptions to Google Compute Engine, a deal that could benefit both companies. Red Hat offers what it calls a “bring your own subscription” plan. For instance, Red Hat Linux customers can shift their installations from on-premises to a public cloud provider of their choice as long as it’s part of the approved list of cloud vendors (as GCE is). When Red Hat customers move an instance to Google Compute Engine using Red Hat tools, they will continue to get support from Red Hat, providing a single vendor to deal with in the event of any problems. That would presumably help alleviate any finger-pointing should something go wrong. Martin Buhr, product manager for the Google Cloud Platform saw the deal as an endorsement for the Google platform. “Red Hat’s announcement is a great vote of confidence for Google Cloud Platform as an enterprise grade place for customers to develop and deploy their applications. Many customers have requested the ability to deploy RHEL on GCE, and we are excited to be only the second cloud provider included in this program,” he wrote to me in an email. Red Hat sees this as a way to let a company decide how it wants to deploy — giving them options for physical, virtual or cloud, depending on their requirements — and they can mix and match as they see fit. Mike Ferris, Red Hat’s Director of Cloud Product Strategy, says the deal provides a way for enterprise users to comfortably use public cloud services. “Technology innovations in compute, networking, storage, and management have enabled massive, enterprise-quality cloud environments such as Google Compute Engine,” he tells me. “We are now solving the business and operational needs of customers through capabilities such as permitting customers to import images already hardened and approved by their IT group, consistently manage images and instances on- and off-premise, and provide service and support both on- and off-premise without any disruption to process or quality.” As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who has covered open source for years, says this is a deal that works well for both parties. “This is a natural move for both companies,” he wrote to me in an email. “Red Hat wants more cloud-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) cloud customers and Google wants more business clients. It’s a match made in open source heaven.” Google joined Red Hat’s Certified Cloud Provider program last November, just a month before it announced the general availability of Google Compute Engine. At the end of last month, Google announced massive price cuts to its service, clearly designed to draw customers away from Amazon Web Services. |
Sophia Amoruso To Speak At TechCrunch Disrupt NY | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Nasty Gal CEO intently knows what it takes to build a brand online, turning her popular eBay vintage shop into a revenue opportunity — and the envy of brick and mortar stores like Urban Outfitters — before she was thirty. A role model for young, unconventional women who want to lead, Amoruso will be joining us onstage at to discuss Nasty Gal’s casual conception, its whirlwind growth, and its future path toward total fashion and world domination. In addition, Amoruso will also be talking with me about her , a no BS exploration of what it’s like for women to climb to the top of their fields and organizations and stay there. Hint: Not easy. From her humble beginning as an ID checker at an Art School in San Francisco to her formidable position as head of one of the world’s most successful e-commerce startups, Amoruso has remained sharp, stylish, witty and, above all, a tough cookie. |
Rackspace CTO On Price Cuts And The Commoditization Of The Cloud | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Over the last few weeks, all the major cloud providers for most of their services. CTO said at the conference in Banff, Canada, today, that this is yet another example of the commoditization of the cloud. It seems Rackspace doesn’t quite believe this is the way to go. “People are dropping prices,” Engates said. “They are doing things that are in some ways not always the smartest things to do if you want to grow your business in the long run.” The current price wars, he argues, are nothing more than a race to the bottom. He says those who most benefit from this right now are the early adopters, the companies that already run most of their applications on the cloud. The problem with that, though, is that most companies aren’t using public clouds yet. The big wave of cloud adoption is still to come, and those companies will look for more than just cheap cloud computing instances and storage. “In the early cloud, you really need to know what you are doing,” Engates said. But big companies don’t always have the right expertise in-house, and those that want to make use of public clouds often still have to stitch those services together with their legacy systems. When it comes to infrastructure and technology, Engates believes that those services will be commoditized and prices will continue to drop. Because of this, that’s not where the value is going to be. What businesses are looking for, however, is expertise and a community — especially given that many of the cloud services companies rely on having open source underpinnings. For Rackspace, this means an investment in and participating in the open-source community. The company has also decided to focus on , data and digital as the areas where it believes it can add a lot of value. It’s worth noting that at least for the time being, Rackspace has the latest price cuts from its competitors. In the long run, however, it will have to drop its prices, too. |
The First $299 3D Printer Hits Its Kickstarter Goal In 11 Minutes | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Lots of things can happen in 11 minutes. You can grill a nice steak, you can bake a pan of cookies, or you can raise over $400,000 to build an ultra-compact 3D printer that, for a brief period, cost a mere $199. Called the Micro, the printer of $50,000 and is now well on its way to becoming one of the most interesting projects on the site. Created by , the Micro originally sold for $199 for early birds and his since risen by $100. It’s a tiny printer, to be sure, with a 4.5 cubic-inch build volume and a special internal spool that holds the filament inside the printer’s case. It can build objects 4.5-inches high, which isn’t much but it’s enough to have a bit of fun. Now, for the tough question: can M3D pull this off? The case for the printer itself should cost a little less than $20 and the extruder, pieced out separately, probably costs about $100 or so. A retail, so you could reduce that price slightly. Shipping will cost a few dollars – probably $12-$20 – depending on where it’s manufactured, so the $199 model was definitely a loss leader. That said, $299 is an entirely feasible price for a mini 3D printer. The founders, Michael Armani and David Jones, have done something quite intelligent: they’re building a very bare-bones printer with some very interesting software. If this image is any indication, you’ll be able to search for an open-source object and print it right from the app. The app resizes the object and prepares it for printing and the wee printer does the rest. It also has a self-leveling print bed, an amazing addition at the price. I doubt this will be the last $199 printer we see – the price will soon fall precipitously and when HP gets into the mix things will really change – but even at $299 this seems like a nice little entry-level device. Caveat emptor, though, because if this campaign takes off I’ll be very curious to see when and how these guys are able to ship all of the printers they sell.
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Uber Experiments With A Courier Service In New York City | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | On-demand ride service has already shown that it can get users wherever they need to go with just a tap on their smartphones. Starting tomorrow, it will begin testing out a new courier service in New York City. The new service, called , will appear on users’ home screens alongside its UberBLACK and UberSUV offerings, and will allow customers to have small goods delivered from one place to another. Once a user requests UberRUSH, a courier will arrive either on bike or on foot to deliver a package elsewhere in Manhattan, generally within an hour. It’s important to note that UberRUSH is not an on-demand delivery service in the same sense as Postmates or WunWun, in which users place an order and have goods brought to them. Instead, with the new service, couriers will pick up objects from Uber users and deliver them to a specific address designated by the customer. In that way, UberRUSH is more like a traditional courier service, used for transporting same-day deliveries around the city. https://twitter.com/Uber_NYC/status/452480045500874752/ UberRUSH deliveries will have a base fare of $15, and the price will depend on travel within and between various designated “zones” within Manhattan. The offering will be available from the Financial District all the way up to 110th Street, and the different zones are marked off at Houston Street, 34th Street, 59th Street, and Central Park. For each zone that a courier travels through, the cost will increase an additional $5, for a maximum of $30 per delivery. According to Uber New York City General Manager , the service will be available 24 hours a day beginning tomorrow. But Uber expects the busiest periods to be during general work hours — that is, when businesspeople in the city generally need to expedite documents and other goods within the city. Over the years, Uber has experimented with various non-ride delivery options, including everything from dropping off mariachi bands to BBQs to kittens. But this is the first time that the company will allow its users to have anything delivered for a fee. For now, that will be limited to things that couriers can carry themselves, either on foot or on a bike. You can imagine that will include business documents between law, financial, or realty offices, but could also include things like Airbnb users having keys dropped off to a certain location. Part of the fun for Uber will be figuring out how exactly its customers use the service and what typical use cases end up being. Once it knows that, it could potentially extend the availability of its service to other providers who wish to ride on top of the logistics network it’s already built. |
Xbox One Will Be Able To Upload Game Recordings Straight To YouTube Starting Tomorrow | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | You’ve just pulled of a truly epic, one-in-a-million shot in Titanfall. Your team is going nuts. Everyone on the opposing team is calling you a hacker. “Xbox, record that!” you yell, saving the last 30 seconds of gameplay to the console’s hard drive forever. Now… how to share it with the world? Up ’til now, getting the clip online meant sharing it to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Now, there’s nothing inherently with that; OneDrive is actually a pretty solid service — but when’s the last time you heard someone talking about their favorite viral OneDrive video? Never? Yeah. Probably never. If you want eyeballs on the video, you’ll probably want to put it on YouTube. You’ll soon be able to do that directly from the Xbox One. With an update expected to launch sometime tomorrow, the Xbox One’s YouTube app will have a new “My Uploads” section that lets you pluck videos from your One and toss them online with just a few button presses. You can trim the clip down or add commentary through the One’s built-in editor, or just toss them in raw. The app will also be getting a bunch of achievements that you’ll unlock for watching videos, because Microsoft has seemingly forgotten what the word “achievement” means. |
null | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | null |
Following GrubHub IPO, Online Food Ordering Platform EatStreet Raises $6 Million | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | , an online and mobile food ordering service which initially gained traction by targeting secondary markets across the U.S., has now raised an additional $6 million in Series B funding. The round included participation from Series A investors Cornerstone Opportunity Partners, Independence Equity, Great Oaks Venture Capital as well as from CSA Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and other angels. The company had previously a little over a year ago. Founded in 2010 by University of Wisconsin graduates Matt Howard, Alex Wyler and Eric Martell, the service initially took off in the startup’s hometown of Madison before expanding to nearly two dozen other cities across the U.S. as of . Today, EatStreet is reporting 300% average annual sales growth, and, more recently, rapid expansion requiring additional investment. In the last three months, the company added over 3,000 restaurants to its service. “We were able to accomplish this by providing restaurants with premiere technology and the best customer service,” CEO Matt Howard tells us. “With this new investment, we can accelerate this growth and ensure our restaurants will continue to receive the highest level of service,” he adds. The company expects to provide service for over 15,000 restaurants by year-end, in 150 U.S. cities. While Howard won’t disclose EatStreet’s revenue, he would say that annual revenue more than tripled from 2012 to 2013. For its , EatStreet serves as a one-stop shop in terms of getting set up for online ordering, with a range of services including custom websites and apps for online and mobile ordering, and even Facebook integrations. Businesses can edit and manage their menus and orders from an online dashboard, run reports, offer coupons, sending marketing emails, and more using the EatStreet software solution. With the new funding, EatStreet is going to heavily focus on its product, and specifically on improving the ordering experience from the consumer side. The company plans on revamping its iOS and Android apps as well as its mobile website in the near future. These changes have required a doubling of its development team, which today includes former Facebook and Google engineers. Additionally, the company is continuing to expand its footprint beyond those earlier secondary markets, and is beginning to move into larger cities. “We’re now engaged in an aggressive national expansion into 75+ cities, including larger markets like L.A. and Chicago,” Howard notes. The funding news comes at busy time for the online food ordering industry, with IPOs for and having recently brought a lot of attention to the consumer demand for these kinds of services, as well as the services’ which on GrubHub’s side at least have included slowing profits and potential themselves. That being said, investors seem to be enthusiastic about these services’ potential, with GrubHub shares after its stock market debut. |
Indian Software Product Startups Pitch Ideas To Fortune 500 CIOs | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | After years of working with India’s over $100 billion IT services industry for maintaining their software systems, application development and back office work, CIOs of Fortune 500 companies are now looking to tap into the country’s software product ecosystem. And this time, it’s not just about setting up a — instead, technology leaders from Citibank, Proctor & Gamble and Colgate Palmolive are among 50 top executives planting themselves in the front rows of a day-long startup pitching session organized by on Thursday. , an event organized by Indian software product think-tank iSPIRT, selected 50 product startups in India to pitch their ideas to these global technology buyers controlling billions of dollars in IT budget. Two of the biggest challenges faced by startup founders anywhere in the world are — getting early users, customers and raising money from investors to fund growth, experiments. While there are enough networks, accelerators and VCs helping startups pitch their ideas to investors, getting customers is still a daunting challenge. For software product entrepreneurs based in India, and looking to serve customers based in the U.S., understanding real customer needs takes too much of time. Piyush Singh, CIO of who was also the co-host of this event, said Indian startups need to learn early from enterprise customers. “It’s the end customers and users who determine whether a product will be successful or not. So we are trying to bring end customers early in the game, so these startups learn and go innovate,” said Singh. “Sometimes these product startups realize too late that they may have built a wrong product and it’s too late to pivot,” Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Partners said at the event on Thursday. InTech50’s list of software products pitching to the global CIOs included startups offering HR software, analytics, customer management, social analytics and IT help desk in the cloud. The startups pitching at the session brought a mix of mature, few year-old companies and some of the recently launched ideas. for instance, has already made its name by offering mobile marketing and analytics solution, and Ezetap too has had . Among the newer startups, gesture-based tracking solution , that takes ethical hacking to the cloud, , the social CRM startup that got recently and big data startup looked interesting. Also pitching were several recruitment startups such as , and . , a big data startup founded by former Facebook engineers, and counts Pinterest among its top customers, also looked interesting. As we wrote in February this year, , an ambition that may sound too bullish on the face of it, but not overly aggressive if you look at the rapid progress of startups such as Zoho, Druva, FusionCharts and Eka Software. There’s a lot going for Indian startup ecosystem lately, even if it’s far from being anywhere close to the Silicon Valley, or matching the success of Israeli startups. In 2013, VCs and angels invested around $1.6 billion in 293 startup deals in India. There are over 3,000 startups in India with around 1,000 being added every year to the list. Of these, nearly 43% are product startups, according to iSPIRT. For Fortune 500 CIOs exploring to work with Indian startups, it’s a huge shift after years of outsourcing their software development and back office work to the country’s biggest IT companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro. “Some of us are disappointed with their (big IT companies) lack of innovation and ability to co-innovate even after years of relationships. Hunting for disruptive technology ideas is a board agenda and we will go anywhere from Silicon Valley to Bangalore to identify such startups,” said a senior IT leader with one of the companies looking to work with Indian product startups. You can also . |
Prezi Puts On 10M Users Inside 5 Months, Hits 40M | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | The today that Dropbox has now hit 275 million users (far higher than the 200 million users it had in November 2013) is further proof that SAAS startups are now fully disrupting the old world. Similarly, old presentation software (hello PowerPoint!) is experiencing something of a gradual encroachment of cloud platforms, as today announces its hit 40 million users. This is up from the 30 million it in October last year, and a long way from the 200,000 users it garnered in 2009, its first year. To put this in context, when Evernote turned 5 years old (it was founded in 2007), they had 65 million users but they were heavily focused on US. International expansion only came later (they expanded to Germany as recently as 2013). Prezi, now hitting its 5th, is already in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, French and German. So in theory it’s on a pretty good footing. The company claims to have had around 55,000 new signups each day for the last six months. That said, the jury is out on whether it can fully disrupt the might of PowerPoint with it’s swirly user experience, or whether it will hit a natural plateau amongst users with its unique approach to presentations. |
Senate Patent Reform Bill Delayed Yet Again | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | A bi-partisan Senate bill aimed at curbing abuse of the U.S. patent system has been handed another setback today, with Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announcing that, for the fourth time, consideration of the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act will be postponed. Senator Leahy that he’ll distribute a new version of the bill after the coming recess. The senator expects that “the Judiciary Committee will consider that legislation the first week [it is] back.” While the delay will likely frustrate those in favor of the quickest possible reform, it appears that passage of the act faces little in the way of expected snags. The senator from Vermont claims that the bill has “ What is stuck at the moment is the details. As has been reported previously, the sticking point between the two parties is a . Republicans want the law to require the losing party in a patent-infringement suit to pay the other’s legal fees. A reasonable idea, certainly. Democrats appear worried that some suits that do have merit may not be undertaken, provided the possibility of larger legal fees if an even reasonable suit fails. Also, the idea of shifting fees to the losing party could induce individuals and less-capitalized companies to not pursue reasonable claims given that a larger company would have more resources, and thus could dump huge fees after a victory on the smaller party. A compromise appears close, , but elusive. The could provide enough time to get things in order. GIven that the bill is sponsored by both parties, barring complication, the act could clear committee by early May. |
Digital Postal Mail Startup Zumbox Hits The Deadpool | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | , the startup that created a service to deliver postal mail digitally in a paperless format, is shutting down. The company announced the shutdown in an email sent this week to users of the service, which was by InfoTrends writer Matt Swain. Zumbox is recommending that users export their digital documents by Monday April 14th — less than a week from today. It’s a big letdown from the expectations many people had for Zumbox just a few years ago. The company, which was founded in 2006, raised more than $28 million across three rounds of funding, the most recent of which was a in December 2010. The company’s website still includes some lofty promises, touting: “Your documents stored securely, forever.” However, Zumbox is not the only one who apparently couldn’t make such a service work: Rival postal mail digitizing startup Outbox in January 2014. Here is the email from Zumbox announcing the shutdown in full (via ): “Dear Digital Postal Mail Account Holder, We are sad to announce today that after more than five years of working to revolutionize the way mail is delivered, we have made the very difficult decision to shut down the company. All of us at Zumbox, along with our partners and the mailing community, remain committed to the concept of digital postal mail and have great confidence this capability will one day be the way you receive and manage your postal mail. However, at this point, the time and cost required to deliver on the vision is more than the market is prepared to invest. As a result, the Digital Postal Mail site will be taken down shortly. If you wish to export your digital documents, please do so by Monday, April 14, 2014. The username for your account is [redacted]. To export documents, choose Export Your Mail from the Settings menu within your account. Thank you for supporting Digital Postal Mail. The Zumbox Team” |
Veteran Apple Designer Greg Christie Departs As Jony Ive’s Role Grows | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Apple has confirmed the exit of long-time software designer Greg Christie, who was a vice president in Apple’s design department. “ The news of Christie’s departure was first this morning. Christie’s group will report directly to Ive instead of Craig Federighi. So, while Christie is leaving, this really denotes a shift of the Human Interface design group from Federighi’s direct responsibility. Federighi was put in charge of both iOS and OS X software after . According to multiple sources inside and outside the company, Christie’s exit has been known for weeks — and planned for even longer. His stepping aside has been designed to allow for a transition of leadership inside the Human Interface group. Christie worked under Forstall for many years, and there may have been plenty of times he didn’t agree with Ive, but there has reportedly been a distinct lack of drama in this transition. If there was any ill-will between Christie and Ive, it doesn’t appear to have taken the form of any open conflict and a flare-up of friction was apparently not behind this exit. We hear Christie will stay at Apple a bit longer working on “special projects,” in a similar manner to former SVP of Technology Bob Mansfield, until he exits. There will be big changes inside the HI group with Christie’s departure, regardless, so this should be an interesting period of transition that continues the changes Apple made when Forstall was removed and Ive was placed in charge of all Human Interface at Apple. Forstall engendered a great deal of loyalty at the company, and it’s likely some folks weren’t happy with his departure, or with the new design direction of iOS 7. But that ship has sailed and there is some sense in making sure that the department, under Ive, will have a focused approach when it comes to iOS design down the road. Notably, Apple stock vests on two dates each year — and one of those is April 15. Christie was also called upon to testify regarding Apple patents in the retrial with Samsung, and gave interviews in advance. Christie has been with Apple for 20 years, and was involved in the launch of the iPhone. |
Homejoy Comes To Clean Up The UK, Its First Market Outside North America, For £13/Hour | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Fresh off the back of a , is taking its disruptive cleaning service to new shores. Today the company is officially launching in the UK, its first market outside of North America, with its cleaning services costing £13/hour ($21/hour). Since opening for business in July 2012, Homejoy has been expanding faster than the mess in a teenager’s bedroom, with double-digit growth and now active in 30 markets across the U.S. and Canada. But Adora Cheung, who co-founded the company with her brother Aaron, tells me she thinks the best is yet to come. “London will be our biggest market in the world,” she says. “We think it will be comparable to NYC, which has grown extremely fast.” Believe it or not, this is not because Londoners are especially messy. Like many a metropolis, London is home to millions of people who work too much and may have a little disposable income that they can put towards a home care, and they are very smartphone friendly. It’s a magic combination that fits directly into Homejoy’s business model, where you can book a vetted cleaner with the touch of an app button, or the click of a mouse. And cleaners equally are able to take advantage of the platform to fill out their week or work, or to take on jobs just for the hours they are available to work. As with its existing service in its home market, in the UK Homejoy has been spending the last several weeks amassing a network of cleaners for its books, vetting them with interviews and cleaning tests. That beta period has seen “hundreds of cleans”, she says — one of the reasons she is so confident of future growth here. It won’t be without competition, however. Just yesterday, and likely timed for maximum impact, Rocket Internet launched its Homejoy clone, , which is starting out first in its own home market of Germany, but as you might expect from a Samwer enterprise, has big ambitions to go elsewhere. And other companies like , which launched last year in the UK, are also tackling the home cleaning market. and are both based in London and also provide a platform to book cleaners. Housekeep works on a sliding price scale, while Hassle costs only £10/hour (which in my experience is much closer to what cleaners cost in London). The existence of all these players could imply that either Homejoy will face price pressure quickly, or will need to prove that it’s actually doing something materially better to merit the extra charge (or find a way of attracting clients with something so sticky that they simply don’t end up hunting around for anything else). Cheung is very diplomatic about competition. On the subject of the Samwers and their well-timed launch: “It’s very flattering that Rocket Internet has picked up on it, but being the original player we think that we’ll do very well in Europe,” she says. She adds that the company is committed to growing organically, with no plans for acquisitions, the route that so many other e-commerce-based companies take when expanding into Europe. What may come next are expansions into further categories of jobs that help people out in their homes, repairs and other work. Of the £13/hour, cleaners will be getting “£8 or £9 of that”, she says. Photo: |
Meet The Coolest Investors In LA At Our TechCrunch Meetup Tomorrow Night | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | TechCrunch has officially descended on Los Angeles for the going down tomorrow night at Exchange LA. With smog in our lungs and the beach in our hair, we’re absolutely stoked to be hitting LA for the first time, and we hope that the cool kids of Southern California are just as excited. The Meetup will consist of lots of beer drinking, an on-stage interview with Michael Heyward from Whisper, and a rapid-fire pitch-off competition, where about ten companies will have no more than sixty seconds to wow a panel of expert judges. Speaking of our judges, it’s about time that I introduce you. We’ve nabbed some of the coolest investors in the area to join TC editors on stage and ask our startups the hard questions. Take a look: Mike is a User Experience professional, advisor and entrepreneur located in Los Angeles. With a background in Interaction Design, Visual Design and Product Development, Mike has developed and improved products for over 14 years. His experience in creating multidisciplinary strategies and tactics to solve research, design, and differentiation problems has repeatedly lead to positive results. Most recently Mike was the VP of User Experience and Design for Myspace. In this role, Mike was at the forefront of developing contextually appropriate methods towards attracting and developing top talent, user research, interface standards and improving the product experience. This served as the foundation for moving the offering from the legacy social network to a social entertainment destination. Greg joined Upfront in 2013. Prior, Greg was the Chief Marketing Officer for HauteLook, a leading online flash-sale retailer. Launched in December 2007, Los Angeles based HauteLook was acquired by Nordstrom, Inc., in March 2011 for $270mm. Prior to joining HauteLook, Greg was Executive Vice President of Business Development and Strategy at Live Nation, responsible for strategic direction and key business partnerships for Live Nation’s ticketing and digital businesses. Before Live Nation, Greg held a number of leadership positions at eBay, including Sr. Director of Business Development at StubHub, where he led business development, partnerships, sales and seller development, including spearheading StubHub’s landmark relationship with Major League Baseball. Prior to transitioning to StubHub from eBay, he led eBay.com’s Event Tickets and Media businesses (including half.com) and was the business leader who led eBay’s acquisition of StubHub in 2007. Greg focuses on investment in businesses at the juncture of retail and technology. He is our resident expert on user adoption & acquisition with significant operating experience in marketing and BD at top online retail brands. Jason Yeh is a Senior Associate with Greycroft Partners and is a member of the Los Angeles office. His responsibilities include evaluating investment opportunities, sourcing new deals, and managing the growth of existing portfolio companies. Currently, he oversees Greycroft’s investments in Koding, Joyent, Nativo, and Kaleo. Prior to joining Greycroft, Jason was Director of New Media at MLB Advanced Media (MLB.com) leading the strategy and product development around user-generated content, social media, and gaming for MLB.com and each of the 30 team sites. As a representative of MLB Advanced Media, Jason has been an invited speaker at conferences around the world covering the intersection of new media trends and sports. Before working at MLB.com, Jason began his career as a business consultant in the retail technology practice of Kurt Salmon guiding clients such as Kenneth Cole, Macy’s, and Aeon. Tickets are $15 and . There is also valet parking available at the front door. In other news, it’s about time we reveal the amazing companies participating in our LA Pitch-Off: |
Automattic Acquires Longreads, The App For Discovering And Reading Long-Form Content Online | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | , the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired , the platform for discovering and reading long-form writing content on the web. Financial terms have not been disclosed. In an email to TechCrunch, Longreads founder and CEO Mark Armstrong (pictured here) said that the Longreads service will continue to function exactly as it did before the acquisition. Joining Automattic, he said in a company announcing the deal, will give his team the resources they need to continue to scale their product offering:
“Our team has always been small — Longreads is Mike Dang, Kjell Reigstad, Hakan Bakkalbasi, Julia Wick, Joyce King Thomas and me — and we’ve known that, to make good on our original vision, we’d need more help, from the community and from like-minded partners. …We see a huge opportunity to go deeper with our mission, both through Longreads and WordPress.com—to find undiscovered talent, to celebrate the work of writers and publishers you already love, and bring even more of the best storytelling onto the Internet. The WordPress.com editorial team is growing, and we’re excited to now be a part of it.” Longreads, which was founded as a simple service that shared curated links to long-form content, has never taken on outside venture funding. The service has expanded and sustained itself through an , where dedicated users have paid $30 a year for access to premium Longreads features. The membership model will continue to be available post-acquisition, Armstrong said in his blog post today: “If you are a Longreads Member, your generous contributions will continue to go toward our editorial budget, to ensure we can bring more stories to this community.” |
Hands-On Video Of Carousel, Dropbox’s Replacement For Your Camera Roll | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | We take more photos than we know what to do with, and that crummy camera roll that came with your phone can’t handle them. That’s why Dropbox built for and — to make managing your photos simple, just like it did with file storage. Lightning quick with automatic backup and an innovative chat feature, Carousel puts a lifetime of photos at your finger tips. Here’s our hands on look. at Dropbox’s big press event, Carousel loads photos so fast it’s hard to believe it’s pulling them from the cloud. There’s only a tiny bit of blurring if you whip through months of photos, and most of the time it seems to perform just as well as iOS Camera Roll. The slideable horizontal navigation wheel at the bottom makescwc scrolling back to ancient photos and videos a snap… …which make sense because the product was built by the team in late 2012. At the time, Snapjoy was lauded for its The killer use case for Carousel is sharing big volumes of photos and videos. Sure, it’s easy to text or email a friend a single shot. But 100 photos? 1000? Non-cloud solutions break down at this scale but Carousel handles them with ease. And taking a shot at Instagram Direct, Carousel’s messaging threads around shared photos make it a truly social app, not just some storage utility. The main issue with Carousel is that for it to really shine, you need to have all your photos in Dropbox. And that will probably exceed your 2 gigabytes of free storage. In that sense, Carousel could actually be sneaky way to get more people paying for Dropbox. This isn’t a tangent for Dropbox, it’s a smart marketing strategy: provide bonus value for storing everything in Dropbox. In the end, the camera roll is the last app built by your phone’s manufacturer or operating system-maker that’s still on most people’s homescreens. That makes it one the ripest areas for disruption and biggest opportunities to own one of those lucrative first homescreen slots. If Carousel can make photo management better while keeping it dead simple, many may be willing to give it a whirl. |
Dropbox Makes Another Nod Toward Business, But It Might Not Be Enough Yet | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Dropbox announced several product today that are designed to make it more attractive to IT pros who will administer the service in the enterprise. That said, not all are convinced that the company has gone far enough perfect its offering to larger businesses. , founder at says today’s announcements are a good first step, but that Dropbox still has a long way to go in terms of appealing to larger business customers. “Remote wipe, account transfer, and audit logs are a good step in the right direction.” he told me. But, he added, “While Dropbox is working hard to become enterprise class, it’s not something you do overnight. Security is one [aspect], but enterprise class integration, identity management, carrying context, encryption of content, tying back to the [content management system] are some features that are needed to get there,” Wang told me. Dropbox for Business does offer at-rest and in-transit encryption, it’s worth noting. Lawrence Hawes, principal at , and who follows online collaboration said that despite the new features, Dropbox still has a serious perception problem with IT pros inside the enterprise, and a few new bells and whistles isn’t likely to change that. “Today’s announced improvements to Dropbox for Business do little to overcome the realities and perception that Dropbox is not ready for the enterprise. The memories of well-documented incidents of security and privacy breaches of the Dropbox service, as well as its too-frequent service outages, are still fresh in the minds of those charged with buying secure, reliable IT for their companies. While some may give Dropbox for Business a first (or another) look based on the new features launched today, most corporate IT departments and buyers will continue to seek other alternatives,” Hawes wrote to me in email. Wang sees a battle playing out over the next 36 months in which Box, Egnyte, Dropbox and other players including Microsoft and its Office 365/One Drive, not to mention Google Drive, will be fighting for the hearts and minds of the enterprise users and their IT administrators. For now, Box and Egnyte remain the players to beat in this space in Wang’s view. From his perspective, the fight isn’t just about the back end where IT lives and breathes, but also the front end where users work — ease of use and enabling new ways of working are important factors there. It’s worth noting that Dropbox is a pure cloud play while Egnyte offers a hybrid on-premises/cloud solution. As Dropbox takes aim at Box, which , Hawes says it would be wise to remember the lessons Box has learned over the last couple of years when it comes to selling to the enterprise. “As Box has discovered over the last two years, large, complex organizations require far more in the way of administration capabilities that help to ensure information security. Dropbox remains far behind Box, and even further behind [file sync and share] providers that have designed and built their products for enterprises from the beginning, in their ability to attract and effectively serve business customers.” So while Dropbox added some much-needed administrative functionality with today’s announcement, they still have a long journey ahead of them to reach enterprise respectability. Still, it’s worth remembering that Dropbox claims 4 million businesses. What it’s offering works for some, and given the relative youth of its business offering, it’s not surprising that it’s taking the time to mature to a fully featured enterprise service. This leads us to the following question: what will Dropbox’s cadence be to expand its enterprise offerings? If it moves expeditiously, it could close any gap — perceived or otherwise — quickly. And momentum matters here: Perceived gaps in capability are less onerous when they are not expected to be long term issues. |
One Kings Lane Loses CEO Doug Mack To Fanatics | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | CEO Doug Mack is leaving the home goods e-commerce company. Mack will be joining sports site Fanatics as CEO. Mack joined OKL in 2010, and helped grow the company to its valuation. As of 2012, he says, One Kings Lane had around $200 million in sales, which has increased, we’re told. CFO Dinesh Lathi will be stepping into Mack’s role, according to the company. Here’s the internal memo: Hi Everyone, As we just shared in the All-Hands meeting, today we are thanking, celebrating, and looking forward. We’d like to say a big thank you to Doug. Doug joined us in June of 2010 when we were 15 months new. At that point in time, we were on a great trajectory with solid footing, and Doug partnered with us to scale this business to an unprecedented place. His business acumen, belief in the One Kings Lane brand and commitment to our future contributed enormously to get us where we are today. We wish Doug only the very best as he takes on his new venture. Given the strong momentum and path that One Kings Lane is on, we are also celebrating. Today, we have 500+ enthusiastic OKL staff members – your expertise across every aspect of our business is the reason we have become one the most admired e-commerce brands in the country. Every day – in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – we experience “OKL moments” that reveal our true company character: thousands of beautiful new products listed every single day across One Kings Lane and now Hunters Alley; a world-class creative team; above-and-beyond customer service; engineers that move the needle on business performance; creative solutions to accelerate growth; product improvements that excite our customers; and so much more! We are looking forward with enthusiasm and optimism. The only thing more exciting than the past five years will be the next five. As much as we have achieved, there are so many remarkable opportunities ahead. Every day, we live the old adage: the only thing that’s constant is change. We are thrilled that Dinesh will be stepping up to lead our company during this transition. You know Dinesh well – he’s been a critical senior leader here for quite some time. Since his arrival, Dinesh has shown incredible dedication, aptitude, devotion and passion. We, the Board, and the entire team are honored that Dinesh has been tirelessly and endlessly available to embrace any and all opportunities. It was only five and a half years ago that the two of us first met at the Burbank airport to discuss starting One Kings Lane. Fast forward to this very moment: we remain passionate partners, we are extremely confident in One Kings Lane’s future and every day we’re blown away by the amazing and talented people at this very special company. We look forward to partnering with you on our journey to building the first major global lifestyle brand for the home. Alison & Susan |
Jabra Solemate Max Review: The Sneaker Speaker Balloons To Basketball Player Proportions | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Jabra, like Jawbone, used to make Bluetooth headsets back when those were all the rage. Their popularity never extended beyond the ranks of particularly annoying real estate agents and I guess “rainmakers” in various fields, however, and so Jawbone, and later Jabra, turned their Bluetooth expertise to another task: making speakers. Jabra’s Solemate line now has an entry in the extra-large category, the Solemate Max, and it’s a sneaker-inspired audio accessory that’s looking to step all over the competition. The Jabra Solemate Max looks like the Solemate and Solemate mini that came before, which means it looks kind of like a weird sneaker with a big rubber tread. This is the design language Jabra has chosen to embrace, and the rubber bottom offers up grip in addition to a unique and eye-catching look. Jabra has opted for a blue-gray, silver and neon yellow color scheme with the Max model, which is decent looking and leans towards more modern design tastes. It also has the advantage of making the overall package at least give off the appearance of durability, thanks to the rubberized edges that seem like they can take a bump or drop or two. [gallery ids="985867,985868,985869,985870,985871"] One great design feature: there’s a lace-like auxiliary cable stowed in the bottom of the ‘sole,’ meaning wired sound is always within reach. The bad: the Solemate Max is much larger than even the Big Jambox, likely its closest competitor in other regards. For the money, the Solemate Max has to also produce max sound, and it does; it’s capable of filling a room, or of not getting drowned out by ambient noise when used outside at a BBQ for instance. The volume combined with the long-lasting battery (more on that below) makes for a great combo in a device like this. That said, this isn’t the speaker to please any finicky audiophiles. It produces bass-rich sound, and good sound given the Bluetooth connection, but it doesn’t render fine audio detail as well as some competitors including portable Bluetooth speaker. Features like NFC pairing with Android devices and a top-notch speakerphone built-in definitely make this an easier purchase, and if you need power, the Jabra is probably your best bet at the moment. Speaking of power, the Solemate Max has a whole lot of the other kind. It boasts 14 hours of battery life on a full charge, and in my testing, that worked out to be about right, though cranking up the volume can shorten that quite a bit. You’ll still hardly ever have to charge the Solemate Max, and it’s bound to be a great companion for taking to the lakehouse, camping or at the beach because of the long-lasting battery and 400 hour standby time. The charging feature is also nice, but as with most devices in this category, it’ll only work when plugged into a power source. If you want a decently rugged, still portable but large Bluetooth speaker that offers bells and whistles like speakerphone functions, this is probably the top option out there right now. But it’s also $400, which is a big investment to make on something like this when a smaller, less expensive option will probably fit the needs of most. Still, the Jabra Solemate Max offers much more powerful sound than you’ll get anywhere else, so it’s worth it for those looking for more than just a background soundtrack at a wine and cheese night. |
SpoonRocket Raises $10 Million From Foundation Capital And General Catalyst | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Apparently someone thinks there’s big money to be made delivering cheap, fast meals to consumers. , which promises to deliver $8 meals to customers’ doors in 15 minutes or less, has captured the attention of customers in San Francisco and the East Bay. And that has attracted investors like Foundation Capital and General Catalyst, which sources say have together invested at least $10 million in the startup. SpoonRocket, which declined to comment on the funding, has a simple goal — to be the fastest and most convenient meal option for its customers. The company does that by providing a food delivery service which makes a couple of meal choices available each day for $8 each. And those meals are generally delivered within minutes of an order being placed, either online or via mobile app. The company is able to deliver those meals so quickly because it keeps them warm in specialized heating compartments that are actually built into its cars. And the limited number of food options means that it can produce its meal options at scale, lowering the price and making them more widely available. While SpoonRocket has seen a lot of traction in both the East Bay and San Francisco proper, it’s hardly the only startup tackling the food delivery market. There are legacy options like Seamless and GrubHub, which by the way, . There’s Postmates, which just as it seeks to expand into new markets. And then there’s . A few weeks ago, San Francisco-based Sprig announced that it had . Sprig has a similar model, in which it also offers a limited number of high-quality choices with fast delivery times at a low price. While SpoonRocket seeks to serve its meals all day long (although in San Francisco it has ), so far Sprig has focused mostly on dinner delivery, specifically on weekdays. It’s also slightly pricier, at $10 per meal with a $2 delivery charge. Still, the similarity in the model — and the amount of money raised by both Sprig and SpoonRocket — points to a lot of people thinking there’s a lot of money to be made by delivering fast, wholesome, healthy food at an attractive price point. SpoonRocket, which was a Y Combinator graduate last year, had previously raised $2.5 million in seed funding. |
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A German Company Is Printing Food For The Elderly | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | A German company, , is working on a 3D-printed food extruder that creates food that literally melts in your mouth, allowing elderly patients with – the inability to swallow – to eat without choking. Biozoon uses molecular gastronomy to create food that can be “printed” using a standard extruder-based printer. The food solidifies and is completely edible but when it’s eaten it quickly dissolves in the mouth. Over 60% of older patients have problems swallowing. This could save lives by ensuring they don’t aspirate food crumbs into their lungs. The product itself can be molded and extruded in different ways and you can add colorants and texturizers to make things look and taste almost like the real thing. According to the website: The product, called seneoPro, will be available for use in 3D printers this year. It is true “customized” food and it’s a fascinating use of the technology. |
The Risk And Rush Of Supporting A Crowdfunding Project | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Last week, a small made news, as backers and journalists questioned the company’s claims that it could measure caloric intake using a wearable device. While the claims do sound wild at best, the company is sticking to its story — and is sticking by the project. The company behind the medical device has completed Indiegogo’s and PayPal’s fraud investigation, a well-placed source inside the crowdfunding company told TechCrunch. Healbe also satisfied marketing specialist firm MicroArts Creative Agency enough for the firm to take on the product. As far as Indiegogo, PayPal and a well-established marketing firm are concerned, Healbe is a legitimate . However, Indiegogo cannot confirm or deny the efficacy of the GoBe. And it doesn’t have to. So far, almost 2,000 Indiegogo users have pledged close to a million dollars to push the device into production. If legit, the GoBe would be a game changer. Healbe claims that the GoBe “precisely calculates calorie intake, burn, and metabolic rate during any activity, with no logging, tracking, or guesswork.” Along with counting calories, Healbe says the GoBe measures the wearer’s hydration levels, sleep status, and stress level. Apparently, all this is done through three sensors that measure the body’s so-called “glucose curve,” a term that, when searched for on Google, returns results related to diabetes in dogs and cats. As with most startups, Healbe conducted internal studies and its results that validate its claims. Yet, red flags still overshadow the project. has been on the GoBe’s trail for the last two weeks, citing medical doctors who question the device’s abilities. To be sure, the project looks fishy. All the patents that the company claims to own are MIA, just patent applications or listed to a former company (like this ). . The Indiegogo campaign lists the company as based in San Francisco, but the team is based in Moscow and St. Petersberg, a fact not mentioned anywhere on Indiegogo or its website. Its Russian creators are relatively unknown quantities — they, like their product, came out of nowhere. Even if the product is bunk, since its Indiegogo campaign uses the site’s Flexible Funding option, the company would have received any contribution made towards the campaign — even if it failed to reach its funding goal. This option is what sets Indiegogo apart from its chief rival, , where it requires projects to hit its goal to receive any of the pledged funds. With the Flexible Funding option, Indiegogo collects 9 percent of the total contributions. With eight days left to go in its campaign, the GoBe could hit a million dollars in contributions. If that happens, Indiegogo stands to earn $70,000. I talked to Brian Blanchette, president of MicroArts Creative Agency, the firm Healbe tasked with launching the GoBe. “We would not be working with them if it was a scam,” Brian said. He said that the MicroArts Creative Agency has been around for 25 years and worked with companies such as GE, Lindt, AVG and others to launch their products. Remember the ? MicroArts launched that device. Blanchette said he has seen and used the GoBe. “It works,” he said, explaining that the company, like other startups, only have a very limited number of working prototypes and not enough funding to send a unit to every publication that questions its claims. The company has offices in Moscow and an R&D center in St. Petersberg. Healbe is incorporated in Delaware for tax purposes — like half of the publicly traded companies in the U.S. Blanchette said the company is planning on moving its Moscow offices to the U.S. “to be closer to the consumer,” but the company is currently focusing on shipping the device to Indiegogo backers. It’s true that some of the devices will not ship to Indiegogo backers until July, a month after advertised, but that shouldn’t be considered anything out of the ordinary for hardware startups, he said. It’s true. It’s a rare feat for crowdfunded hardware to ship as initially advertised. Bunk or not, what happens if Healbe doesn’t ship the device? A person close to the matter at Indiegogo tells TechCrunch the company views itself as not responsible if the GoBe or any other device once featured on its site does not ship. The same is true of projects on any crowdfunding platform. In short, the platforms are the medium and whether or not customers trust and fund a project is entirely out of their hands. If Healbe does not ship the GoBe, that’s their problem, not Indiegogo’s. So who loses if the gamble doesn’t pay off? The customer, primarily, which is why these projects should always carry a healthy dose of caveat emptor. As we enter into a world where cool projects and even companies can easily go the crowdfunding route, the risks are becoming all too apparent. And, perhaps, that’s what makes this interesting. |
Mingleton Is Tinder For Strangers In The Room With You | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | A startup called is introducing that uses iBeacon technology to help you connect only with people you can see around you, or, as one of the founders puts it, it’s like Tinder “for the people in your immediate vicinity.” The app doesn’t actually require venues to have iBeacon or Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) devices installed in order for this to work, to be clear, but rather leverages Core Bluetooth and Core Location technology in the iPhone itself to help its users find one another out the real world. It’s not exactly a novel idea, though it looks like Mingleton may be beating Tinder to market with the technology. Last fall, was “maybe” looking into building something similar, designed to connect people in the same room, so to speak. “We want to make sure that if you’re in an area – at a venue, a bar, a club, TechCrunch Disrupt – the people you want to see…will surface on a map,” he said at the time, hinting that there was different technology that would facilitate those types of connections. Today, Tinder for its nearby features, but one could imagine the possibilities of using BLE as a way of finding people in super close proximity. In fact, someone already did – had speculated on this before. Mingleton is also similar to , except the latter uses the check-in model (like Foursquare), as opposed to BLE. The idea of tapping into BLE flips the idea of mobile dating apps on its head. Instead of seeing someone’s picture in the app before trying to find them in the room (damn those group photo shots!), you’re more likely to see them in the flesh first, and you turn to the app to find their profile and indicate your interest. Mingleton actually started out as a side project created by 24-year old Harvard grads, Obi Ekekezie and Joel Ayala. Ekekezie was pre-med at Harvard, but went to work in management consulting with Bain & Company in San Francisco after graduation, before returning to interview for medical school and pursue his longtime interest in programming. Ayala’s background is in finance, and he’s worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in the past, and is now doing corporate strategy and finance in the ad tech space. The two teamed up in mid-November and built a testable version of Mingleton in a couple of months’ time. By the end of January, they found some friends to test the app in San Francisco and Boston, then released an early version to the App Store the following month. Now that the app has been more stabilized with bugs squashed, the two are trying to spread word of Mingleton’s existence to college students at Harvard and elsewhere. Asked to explain how the technology works in more detail, Ekekezie said users would sign up with Facebook before being assigned a unique beacon configuration. “When another user detects your beacon configuration and then taps ‘See Who’s Nearby’ to see who it is, he or she pings our server to figure out who you are and if you’re relevant to him or her based on both of your stated preferences – for now just gender and age range,” he says. In other words, Mingleton is still showing relevant users based on Facebook data, at least for now. If a potential match, the app then allows the user to view your mutual friends and the hashtags on their profile. “From there, he or she can decide whether to ask you to mingle,” says Ekekezie. “If and only if you both express interest in mingling, we let you both know.” The app would make sense at particular venues, like bars, clubs, concerts, or other events where there are a lot of people, rather than something you could use from anywhere, as you can with Tinder today. For now the service is entirely free while the team focuses on user adoption and growth. It’s also iPhone-only, too, because Android devices can’t act as Bluetooth LE peripherals, which means , Ekekezie explains. However, that’s . Mingleton is not as polished as the bigger-name dating apps its taking on, but the younger generation of mobile users seems oddly to not care so much about looks. (See Snapchat, Flappy Bird, or YikYak to name a few of popular, but unpolished apps, for example.) But while it’s a nifty idea, Mingleton is definitely going to face a challenge in taking on the big-name dating app brands, including not only Tinder, but also things like Grindr, OKCupid, Match, Down, HowAboutWe, and many . Mingleton is a . |
Facebook Is Forcing All Users To Download Messenger By Ripping Chat Out Of Its Main Apps | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Facebook is taking its standalone app strategy to a new extreme today. It’s starting to notify users they’ll no longer have the option to send and receive messages in Facebook for iOS and Android, and will instead have to download Facebook Messenger to chat on mobile. Facebook’s main apps have always included a full-featured messaging tab. Then a few months ago, users who also had Facebook’s standalone Messenger app installed had that would open Messenger. But this was optional. If you wanted to message inside Facebook for iOS or Android, you just didn’t download Messenger. That’s not going to be an option anymore. Soon, all iOS and Android users will have a hotlink at the bottom of their Facebook app that will open Messenger. Notifications about the change are going out to some users in Europe starting today, and they’ll have about two weeks and see multiple alerts before the requirement to download Messenger kicks in. Eventually, all Facebook users will get migrated to this new protocol. And you can bet some users are going to be angry. The only way to escape the migration is to either have a low-end Android with an OS too old to run Messenger, use Facebook’s mobile web site, or use Facebook’s standalone content reader app Paper. In an , the CEO revealed an explanation for today’s change that Facebook’s PR team just referred me to: Essentially, Facebook sees Messaging within its main apps as slow, buried, and sub-optimal overall. Its numbers probably indicate that people message more and have a better experience on the standalone Messenger app. But forcing users to adopt a new messaging behavior could be very unpopular. Not everyone wants to manage multiple Facebook apps on their homescreen or stick them in a folder. A portion of Facebook users may prefer to keep things simple with one app for everything Facebook, even if it means it’s slower and it takes more taps to get to their messages. Facebook was criticized for its bloated main apps but this announcement seems like an over-correction, swinging wildly in the direction of each function having its own app. Obviously there’s merit to only having to maintain one mobile chat interface. It promotes faster feature development and better stability. And once users go through the chore of setting up Messenger and adapting to its style, they may enjoy it better. Personally, I like Messenger’s clean look and feel, playful sounds, and quick performance. Here’s our hands-on video for Messenger and an interview with its designers: Still, a unilateral forced migration is the exact kind of change Facebook users hate, and this will only breed more paranoia that their social network could change without their consent. Taking a slower “We’re switching everyone eventually, so you might as well do it now” approach might have gone over better than “Your familiar chat interface will be destroyed in two weeks whether you like it or not”. The only real explanation for moving this quickly is that desperate times call for desperate measures. Facebook is fighting a war overseas for the fate of messaging. While it , it still has to battle lean standalone messaging apps like WeChat, Kik, KakaoTalk, and Line. Unless forced, users might have stuck with the old Facebook app’s messaging interface instead of seeing there was something that could better compete with these other apps. That isn’t going to make this change much easier to swallow, though. |
Airbnb Expands Its Cleaning Service To Los Angeles | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | Hospitality startup has expanded its experimental cleaning service partnership into another market, according to an email sent out to hosts yesterday. The expansion also seems to be confirmed by the company’s , which now lists Los Angeles alongside New York City and San Francisco as markets where hosts can sign up to have their spaces cleaned in-between guest stays. Airbnb is offering cleaning services for as little as $55 for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit, according to the email sent to hosts. The service in New York City and San Francisco was made available through partnership with home cleaning startups Homejoy and Handybook, and we’ve heard that the latter company is leading the L.A. expansion test. For Airbnb, offering an inexpensive cleaning service to hosts is just one of a number of initiatives that the company is undertaking to make the experience of staying in a stranger’s home more hospitable for guests. Last fall it hired former Joie de Vivre CEO Chip Conley as its new head of hospitality, and since then has been rolling out a series of guidelines and suggestions to improve the quality and safety of guest stays. That includes cleaning, which Airbnb . But it also includes the launch of a to provide tips and tricks for guests before they arrive. For residents in the U.S., Airbnb has tried to push safety standards that include , and giving away units to help hosts meet that requirement. It’s also provided safety cards to hosts and first aid kits on a first-come, first-served basis. But the company reportedly has other host and guest service experiments in the works, which could include . For Airbnb, which has , offering those services are just part of becoming a global hospitality brand. With new funding coming in that , standardizing what guests can expect from their stays and adding extras will go a long way to further legitimizing its brand. Here’s the email sent to one host that was forwarded to TechCrunch: Hi [XXX], We’re excited to invite you to try a new cleaning service we’re piloting for Airbnb hosts in select LA neighborhoods! Airbnb Cleaning is affordable, easy to schedule, and can be tailored to include amenities such as linen service. Pricing starts at $55 for a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom. We built this service to address what Airbnb guests care about most (things like odors and refrigerators!). We also worked with hosts like you to understand how to cater to personal hosting styles and home setup preferences. We’ll save your preferences and set up your space exactly the way you want it every time. Click here to sign up! If you have any questions, simply reply to this e-mail and we’ll answer it promptly. Happy hosting,
Airbnb |
Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox’s Board As It Names New CFO, COO | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | , former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor has joined the board of cloud file storage and syncing firm Dropbox. Dropbox is in the news today after launching a number of new products and features at a morning event in San Francisco. The company , a photo storage and sharing service, along with the offering to the general public, and an Android client for its . Rice is a famous figure, known in almost equal parts for her ferocious intelligence, and controversial role in the Bush administration, which included on alleged weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was thought at the time to possess. BusinessWeek the board pickup in a longer piece on the company. According to the magazine, Rice’s firm has been an active advisor to Dropbox. TechCrunch confirmed the hire. What’s interesting about bringing Rice onto Dropbox’s board is how normal it feels. Dropbox needs people with international experience to help it at once deal with foreign governments that have blocked its use — — and as it works to spread a product developed in one country to others that are culturally different. Rice certainly possesses that expertise. Box, a rival to Dropbox, has also made a recent push to expand internationally. In a market as competitive as this, you must be everywhere. |
Elance-oDesk Launches In Australia To Compete With Freelancer.com | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | – launched today in Australia with a new country manager and two city managers based in Melbourne and Sydney. The company also said it plans to hire more city managers to oversee its operations in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane. Elance-oDesk, which says there are currently 161,000 Australian businesses registered on Elance-oDesk, or about 8% of all businesses in the country. In Australia, Elance-oDesk will compete against , which is based in Sydney and . Smaller challengers include , as well as , which manages Southeast Asia-based employees to handle customer service requests for small- to medium-sized businesses. The founders of Global Virtual Support recently launched , a virtual assistant business based in Singapore that currently targets Southeast Asia, but plans to expand to Australia soon. But Elance-oDesk is optimistic that there is plenty of room for growth in the country and claims that Australia is the top online hiring country when adjusted per capita. It said that in the last three years, Australia has seen a 235% increase in online hiring, with businesses spending $145 million in the same period. The company’s figures also show that in the last 12 months, 40% of jobs posted by Australian businesses were IT and programming-related, while 26% were design and multimedia projects. |
Comcast Cable President And CEO Neil Smit To Join Us At TechCrunch Disrupt NY | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 9 | In case you somehow missed it, the No. 1 cable provider in the U.S., Comcast, is in the middle of trying to acquire the No. 2 cable provider, Time Warner Cable. With the acquisition currently under review, customers, regulators and content providers have plenty of questions about what the deal will mean for them. Next month Comcast Cable president and CEO , who manages the company’s broadband and TV operations, will take the Disrupt NY stage to answer those questions and more. Smit after serving as CEO of Charter Cable for the four years prior. A former Navy Seal, he also served as the President of Time Warner’s America Online Access Business in the 2000s. Comcast already made its yesterday, in a lengthy blog post and FCC filing detailing the reasons why the acquisition will be pro-consumer and why it won’t be anti-competitive. Next month on Time Warner Cable’s home turf, Smit will be able to provide further clarification about why Comcast thinks the deal should go through. That’s not all we’ll be talking about, though. We’ll also discuss Comcast’s somewhat controversial , and what the chances are that the company . We might even ask him why everyone seems to hate Comcast and what the company can do about that. And Smit will be well-positioned to answer those questions. He will be the one to lead the combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable TV and broadband operations if the deal is approved. He’s also been working over the past few years to improve Comcast’s customer service while also pushing forward new on-demand and streaming services. Our interview is sure to be one of the highlights of the conference, which takes place . Join us. |
Box Might Put Its IPO Back In The Box | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Box was rumored to have filed to go public on . On March 24, its S-1 dropped, showing the world . Today the that Box could go public in June, far later than the market previously anticipated. Quartz, citing sources, that Box could go public around May 26. Why the delay? Both the Journal and Quartz cite a difficult market moment. Technology stocks that could be viewed as analogous to Box have taken a drubbing in the public markets. And other technology stocks that are based on less-similar businesses, but also bear the marks of investor optimism regarding potential future revenue growth, . If they fall, Box’s IPO share pricing falls. So, for Box to perhaps wait a few weeks in hopes of things swinging positive again is not a surprising idea. A source with knowledge of the venture capital markets and IPO timings told TechCrunch that, provided that Box hadn’t yet embarked on its road show to hawk its shares to investors, the delay is less a story than it might appear at first blush. I have not been able to uncover any information indicating that Box’s road show had in fact started. According to Fortune’s Dan Primack, while some sales calls have been made, they were not official calls fro the company: 3 notes on Box: (1) Some bankers have made calls to potential buyers.(2) These calls were not authorized by Box.(3) MOST tech IPOs r delayed — Dan Primack (@danprimack) As such, Box’s road show would have been initiated. So, Box didn’t go out there, try to road show, and run home, tail-tucked. What else could have happened? Another possibility could be that Box simply didn’t intend to go public as quickly as possible, given its fiscal calendar. As Box reported in its S-1: “We recently changed the end of our fiscal year from December 31 to January 31.” That means today is the last day of Box’s fiscal first quarter. Would it have embarked on a road show before it had its first-quarter numbers in mind? Perhaps, but I think it would have been an odd event. Box will presumably now begin wrapping its first quarter accounting, and update its S-1 when those figures are ready. Assuming a quick pace, a late May IPO seems possible. If not, early June would be reasonable If it is, then it could delay at its whim. That said, there is a cost at play: The longer it waits, the more investors presume that it is waiting until either they are willing to pay more for the firm or that it simply can’t support the valuation it wants to go public for. Neither paints Box in a light that investors would find seductive. Another firm that has fast top-line expansion and large bottom-line losses, AeroHive, recently indicated that during its road show it noticed “ ” in the market. Box would surely have noticed. |
Selling Your Company? Prioritize Dollars Over Prestige | Jason Lemkin | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Right after Adobe acquired EchoSign, I ran into a friend whose company had recently been acquired for several hundred million dollars (wow) after having raised very little capital. It was a great outcome. The acquirer was a public company, but not one you’ve likely heard of. I asked him if he had any regrets, learnings, etc. “Well, no. It’s a great deal. But it might have been nice if we’d been acquired by Oracle or IBM or more of a brand name.” Fair enough. If you’re acquired by Waste Management Inc. for $200 million — even with its $20 billion-plus market cap — it really won’t do quite the same thing for your resume as being acquired by Google and being made SVP of World Wide Something. It does sound pretty cool to get acquired for millions of dollars and then run Android, The Marketing Cloud, or Whatever Cool Sounding Job at Brand Name Acquirer. And maybe that will be cool. Clearly, Andy Rubin has had a great run at Google, for example. The thing is, though, once you sell, It’s Not Yours Anymore. In a similar vein, not that long ago, I bumped into two more friends, one who had sold to someone Google-esque, another Adobe-esque. Both were coming up on 24 months after their acquisitions, having been given great VP-level jobs at their acquirers. I asked if selling to Those Great Companies really mattered two years on. Did it mean anything to them at an accomplishment level, at a life level, at a journey level? They said no. It just didn’t matter who they sold to 24 months down the road. They just didn’t care. Not even one bit. Even though both were excited when they signed the deals to sell to a Great Tech Company. What’s my point? Having said all that, one key thing to make sure you do get right in any acquisition, because it can be so across the board, is the retention packages. If you do get acquired, the acquirer will put aside some extra consideration in the form of cash, stock, etc. to retain the team. All things being equal, the great tech leaders (Google, Salesforce, etc.) that do a ton of acquisitions have the best retention packages. Generally, much better than the next tier, because they do a lot of M&A, and they want to make sure it works post-deal. So make sure you understand how the retention packages really work. In that sense, i.e. the sense of money, selling to Google or Salesforce may be a better idea than Yahoo! or Waste Management. Maybe. I know it can sound very appealing — very desirable — to get acquired by Facebook, by Google, by Salesforce, by LinkedIn. By Any Very Hot Company. But you really think Kevin Systrom is so happy he sold for $1 billion to Facebook, looking at the WhatsApp guys? No way. The world changes so much, so quickly. And once you sell, you lose all control. If you do sell, do it for the money. Not the logo. |
Farfetch, An Online Marketplace For Designer Fashion Boutiques, Raises $66M | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | an online marketplace for independent fashion boutiques, has raised $66 million led by private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, with existing investors Condé Nast International and Advent Ventures also participating in the round. New investor Richard Chen, venture partner at Chinese VC firm Ceyuan, was part of the round. The company had in 2012, led by Index Ventures. The London-based company says the investment will be used to fuel the company’s international growth in the U.S., Brazil and Asia, as well as its omni-channel strategy. Launched in 2008, Farfetch.com is an e-commerce site that brings independent fashion boutiques from Europe and North America under one roof. The site curates a network of online boutiques from designer brands like Fendi, Gucci, and Chloé as well as from emerging designers. Currently, more than 300 boutiques, from Paris, New York and Milan to Bucharest, Helsinki and Honolulu list on the site, which offers clothing for both men and women. The company says it is seeing annual sales of $275 million and year-on-year growth of 100 percent. “This round of investment will help fuel a number of our key strategic goals including facilitating our omni-channel proposition, escalating the development of local language sites for key new markets (Russia, Japan, China) and accelerating engineering developments to help facilitate a dynamic responsive experience,” Farfetch founder and CEO José Neves Farfetch says. Fortune reported earlier this week that the was close to closing a new round. |
Facebook Will Soon Open-Source More Of The Core Technology Behind Its Paper App | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | At its Facebook today announced that it will soon open-source more of the technology behind its for iOS. In a few weeks, the company will upload the code for DisplayNode to GitHub. This is the asynchronous user interface technology the company developed for Paper, which allows it to render large amounts of objects on the screen without slowing down the application. Facebook says it still needs to test this code a bit more, but that it will be open for beta in the coming weeks. This tool is meant to help developers create user interfaces that offer consistently smooth performance. The company says this is especially important for apps that make wide use of touch gestures or use realistic animations like bounce and spring effects. If the main thread of an app stalls, Facebook said, that’s okay for a basic app, but if you use a physics-driven UI, those kinds of stalls immediately become apparent to users. Layout, rendering text and images, as well as working with system objects can quickly become issues for complex apps like Paper. With older, iOS 6-style apps, it was all right to have a bit of a delay before an application reacted to touch, but now, apps have gotten even more visual and users expect more performance. DisplayNode will join the six other parts of Paper that the company open-sourced recently. Just this week, for example, Facebook , the animation library that drives many parts of Paper’s user interface. |
Visible Measures Launches Fabric, A Self-Serve Ad-Buying Platform For Content Marketers | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Ad company is launching a new ad-buying platform called Fabric, which it says is “the first of its kind to focus on native experiences” and other ads that consumers “opt in” to. Fabric is a demand-side platform, which basically means that it allows advertisers to manage their data and buying on ad exchanges. Founder and CEO Brian Shin said it builds on a previous Visible Measures product, Contagion, a planning tool for . It ties a number of Visible Measures’ capabilities together, including its campaign data, its ad inventory, and its campaign projections. Put another way, Fabric is a set of tools to promote video and other content that advertisers are hoping consumers will embrace, i.e., content marketing. Shin argued that there are “no truly viral video campaigns,” because before content becomes viral, it needs a little advertising push. Visible Measures worked with VivaKi, the tech innovation arm of ad holding company Publicis Groupe, to develop both Contagion and Fabric. Sean Kegelman, executive vice president for product and commercial strategy at VivaKi Audience On Demand, said that Fabric includes a number of important features that allow it to move “from a planning tool to an activation tool”; it gives advertisers “granular” control of targeting and where ads actually show up, as well as the ability to optimize their campaigns to improve the performance as they run. Shin said the other big advantage is the fact that it’s self-serve, which should make it available to a broader range of advertisers than Visible Measures has previously worked with. The company, he said, has “a good reputation in the market,” but at the same time, “not much is known about us.” He’s hoping to change that. “We’ve been a little closed, and now we’re opening up.” |
PunchTab Raises $6.25M To Turn Loyalty Programs Into An Enterprise Data Business | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | , the startup led by YouSendIt ( ) founder Ranjith Kumaran, is announcing that it has raised $6.25 million in additional funding. The company started out by helping businesses run promotions and loyalty programs, such as giveaways. More recent products include for brands that want to reward TV viewers for checking in to a program or tweeting with a brand hashtag. More broadly, Kumaran told me that the company has become focused on enterprise customers, and on the data that it can provide those customers. (Companies already using PunchTab include Kroger, Arby’s, Nestle, and Harlequin.) “Loyalty, that’s really a means to an end, to drive better data collection,” he said. With these programs, PunchTab is trying to help businesses “build a 360 degree view of the customer.” For example, he said many companies have very little insight into customer behavior in physical stores. But with PunchTab, they can create a loyalty or engagement program that collects real-time data by offering users a reward whenever they upload a receipt showing that they purchased a particular brand or product. The funding round was led by existing investor Mohr Davidow Ventures, and it brings PunchTab’s total funding to $11.5 million. Kumaran said the company will be using the funding, in part, to build up its sales team: “Given the enterprise focus now, it’s a knife fight, especially in the marketing tech enterprise market.” PunchTab also says that in the first quarter of his year, it saw 400 percent sales growth compared to Q1 2013. |
Facebook’s New APIs Let Media Outlets Visualize Trending Topics And Hashtags | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | TV news and other media sources now have a way to show off what’s popular on Facebook and with whom. the Here’s how the new APIs work: For example, let’s say the TV show Dancing With The Stars wanted to display some visualization of Facebook data. It could use Trending to illustrate that its show is one of the most popular topics on Facebook, alongside world news and other big stories. It could use Topic Insights to display where the people talking about its show are, what their gender is, and what their other interests are. Topic Feed could let it show all the public posts related to Dancing With The Stars. And it could give out two hashtags for different dancing teams on the show, ask viewers to vote for their favorite team by posting their hashtag, and then compare the tally of the two hashtags to show the results of the poll. If the Topic Insights API sounds familiar, that’s because Facebook is calling it “an evolution” of its that launched last year. The media industry told Facebook the Keyword Insights API was too clumsy. They had to manually build a whole list of keywords to search for when they wanted to see anything people mentioned related to the topic. Now Facebook does that work for them. With Topic Insights, media partners just enter a topic term, and Facebook returns data about anyone who mentioned a world related to that term. For example, a Topic Insights search of “Red Sox” would also return people who mentioned the baseball team’s player or stadium Fenway park. So why would Facebook want this current-events chatter data on TV and other media? Because when users see it, it strengthens their perception of Facebook as a place to post public content plus chatter about current events, television, and other real-time news. |
Google Takes On Microsoft For Productivity Dominance Of Apple’s Mobile Platform | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Earlier today , two productivity applications for iOS. The unified apps work across iPhone and iPad devices. The new apps are just picking up their first ratings and ranks. Docs has picked up 23 ratings thus far, securing a four-star rating. Sheets is also rated four stars, with a total of 11 ratings tallied. Docs is slightly more popular than Docs. Here is Docs’ performance so far today on iPhone: And Sheets: I think that Google’s productivity applications have had a decent, if not quite muscular, first day — considering that they are launching into markets in which both Apple and Microsoft vend products, and in which their parent doesn’t have a home-platform advantage. (TechCrunch did note this morning that for now, the new apps appear to be iOS only, but it’s probably reasonable to expect them to eventually make their way to Android, too.) Microsoft has both an iPhone Office application, and recently released discrete Office apps for iPad, . The Office for iPhone app (Microsoft Office Mobile) isn’t massively popular. Here’s today’s data: On iPad, however, the new Office apps have had a big run, hitting the top slot on iPad (Word) in the United States, and also picking up several more of the top five ranks in . Four , Word for iPad was the top-ranked iPad app in 120 countries, after having launched in a total of 135. At that moment, Excel was top 5 in 125 countries, and PowerPoint top 5 in 126. Word slipped in the following weeks, but is again the top iPad app in the U.S. So, what’s going on here, and what does it mean? Frankly, I think that the release of Office for iPad undercut the release of Google’s productivity apps. Also, Microsoft released its products with far more pomp, . It also released three apps instead of two, making more noise inherently. But even given Google’s more modest launch, and later-to-market timing, we can’t chalk up more than a fraction of the popularity differential — at least thus far — to those factors. It appears that far more people wanted Office for iPad than iPad versions of Google’s Drive suite. Why, is a decent question, especially given the simple fact that Microsoft’s Office for iPad product is mostly knee-capped if you are not an Office 365 subscriber, and there are only a few million of those on the consumer side. You have to answer this question for yourself, but some reasonable guesses would be the remaining brand strength of Office, the fact that people are in some cases content to merely view documents, or that they simply don’t know that any other tool can do it. Does it really matter which third-party company manages to win more productivity market share on Apple’s platform? Yes. This is not only about market share on iOS or short-term revenues for either Google or Microsoft. Instead, it’s an important front of the larger platform wars. Let’s return to our : The [pressure Box is under] is amplified by a host of competition, and declining per-gigabyte fees. This cuts at what Box can charge for a key part of its value proposition, as larger, better monied players like Google and Microsoft . The dance that Google and Microsoft are playing is different from what Box offers, but here’s the new reality: Cloud storage without editing and collaboration tools is moot, as are editing and collaboration tools without cloud storage. Precisely. So, as each company both wants to ensure that it is the place where it stores your files, as then it can up-sell you editing tools, it also wants you to use its editing tools, so that you become more dependent on its cloud storage offerings. This symbiotic tautology creates a positive per-account revenue updraft for either Google or Microsoft, thus locking in long-term cash flows that have insane gross margins. The stuff that empires are built on or, in this case, sustained on. And does iOS matter more broadly for Google and Microsoft? You bet it does. Not only has , but remember that earlier note about what Google built today for iOS perhaps landing on Android — its own platform — in the future? Right. While Office for iPad had a more explosive start than Google’s new offerings have posted, this is a very long game. How long? Answer the following questions: How old is Office, and how long will cloud storage live? That long. |
Netshow.me, Brazil’s Answer To StageIt, Raises Seed Round | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Tired of ticket fees, sweaty seething masses of teeming humanity, clubs that smell of body odor and stale beer, and concerts that sell out before you can even take out your credit card? Well, if you live in Brazil, has a solution for you. The company is offering an online concert service for artists and musicians, much like , and has just raised a seed round of financing. Netshow.me launched its online concert broadcasting service six months ago, and on the back of its growth was able to attract the attention of none other than Rodrigo Borges, the co-founder of . “Most of my decisions to invest in companies are based on the entrepreneurs. The business model, the product, everything else you can change, but the entrepreneur you can’t change. And it makes a completely total difference if you don’t have a good entrepreneur,” says Borges. With Netshow.me’s co-founders Borges believes he’s found the right startup men for the job. “They are learning very fast, they understand how the entertainment market works and they have good results.” It’s not like the brains behind Netshow.me are wet-behind-the-ears newbies to the investment game. Daniel Arcoverde do Nascimento and his partner Rafael Belmonte left behind investment careers at the Brazilian financial management company . “We’ve been generating revenue since the beginning,” says Nascimento. “We were learning about the platform and learning in terms of user experience and how the fans reacted to the platforms and to the concerts…. Next month we’re going to raise to have 30,000 to 40,000 reals in revenue.” Netshow.me makes its money by taking a cut of the ticket sales and tips that fans leave at the end of each show. Artists can take from 52 percent to 72 percent of the total gross from a show and tips, while Netshow.me’s cut will range from 28 percent to 48 percent depending on the size of the band, Nascimento says. “Here in Brazil we have two main problems,” says Borges. “It’s difficult to go to shows, because public transportation is bad and security is bad. On top of that it’s expensive.” Beyond Brazil’s large cities music fans don’t have access to see popular concerts, says Borges. “It’s a way to allow these people to have access to a band they like. On the other side, for the bands, it’s a no-brainer because they can make a lot more money.” |
Waggl Raises $1.1 Million With A New Take On Enterprise Messaging And Polling | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | A new San Francisco-based startup has raised $1.1 million in seed financing with a new take on messaging and polling for businesses. The company takes its name from the informative dance that bees in a hive conduct to communicate with their fellows. At , executives can post queries to their employees for internal discussion through the service, and then have users determine what responses are the best through a polling mechanism. Launched in February as a spin-out from , Waggl is backed by a slew of individual investors including Jeff Snipes, founder and chief executive of Ninth House; Robert Hohman, the former president of Hotwire and founder of Glassdoor; James Gutierrez, the founder of Progreso Financiero; Ignace Goethals, a president of Smithkline Beecham’s animal health group; and Joe Abrams, a co-founder of Software Toolworks and Intermix, who joins the company as a director. Companies and organizations that have signed up for the service include, Sanofi, Kaiser Permanente, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The funding we’ve raised will help us meet product development requests and enhance our platform even further, as well as expand our customer base internationally,” said Michael Papay, Waggl’s chief executive in a statement. The company also says it has a partnership with Affero Lab, a human resources firm in Brazil to expand its presence in Latin America. Waggl has also partnered with Affero Lab – the largest human capital management firm in Brazil and lead distributor of SuccessFactors in South America – to expand the platforms’ offering outside of the U.S. The company is entering a pretty crowded market. earlier this month to expand its presence in the market; and that company is competing with and . |
Oracle Announces Its Cross-Platform Marketing Cloud | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Oracle today announced the launch of , a platform that combines technology from a number of the company’s acquisitions, including , , , and . As suggested by that list, the Marketing Cloud will cover a pretty broad swath of capabilities, allowing customers to run marketing campaigns (and manage data related to those campaigns) on web, social, mobile, and email. It also integrates with , and includes tools for content marketing. It sounds like a big part of the announcement is bringing many of the marketing capabilities that Oracle could already offer under the broad umbrella of the Marketing Cloud. In , Oracle emphasizes three big selling points — simplicity, readiness for enterprise use, and “customer centricity.” On the last point, it says the Marketing Cloud will be “providing marketers with the most advanced and easy-to-use cloud-based solutions for unifying customer data, engaging the right audiences across paid, owned and earned media, and analyzing performance.” The company also says early customers have already seen improvement. Thomson Reuters reported a 175 percent increase in attributable revenue, the Golden State Warriors enlisted 300 percent more Twitter followers, and Zurich NA saw a 10 percent increase in rentetion. Oracle is launching the product at an event in New York. I spoke beforehand to Senior Vice President Reggie Bradford (who was previously founder and CEO at Vitrue, another Oracle acquisition), who told me that the company will also be “really aggressively driving that migration path” away from traditional systems to Oracle’ various cloud applications with a new Customer 2 Cloud program that offers customers financial support for the transition. . |
Payment Innovation Is Not Enough For Retail | Dax Dasilva | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Once a key differentiator, mobile payments are fast becoming a commodity and are widely used by retailers. Yankee Group found that 61 percent of large merchants already use a mobile checkout or plan to in 2014. We are seeing the major payments players recognize this, realizing that they can’t bank on razor-thin profit margins from swiping fees alone. For instance, Square has introduced other payment-related services to both merchants and consumers like Square Cash and Square Market, but it is a bit behind in the game, and as we saw recently might be gunning for a different kind of cash out. Commerce is all about bringing the right product to the right shopper at the right time, but the payment only addresses the close. To differentiate, merchants need to focus on innovating everything else that happens long before we reach the register, such as inventory management, a traditionally unsexy but mission-critical element of all store operations. The payment is a huge part of the customer experience, but all of the opportunity for upsell, cross-sell, and better insights into sales trends lies in the SKU. In comparison to the checkout, the rest of the in-store shopping experience has remained remarkably outdated, leaving shoppers and retailers alike frustrated with the amount of time and manual work required to get to the finish line — the transaction. In many stores, salespeople are still going to the back room to check for other sizes. Things are reordered when a hole appears on a shelf, or a customer requests something and it cannot be found. Looking for stock in other stores often involves multiple phone calls and scavenger hunts. Processing gift cards, returns and exchanges are still a headache. E-commerce being largely siloed from the rest of the retail operation amplifies these issues. E-commerce has the advantage of having all of the SKUs digitized, but most traditional retailers are flying blind. We work with more than 18,000 retailers, and they have told us that one of the main things that keep them up at night is competition from huge online retailers like Amazon. Without finding ways to deliver the convenience and selection found online, independent retailers won’t deliver an experience that makes shoppers want to get off the couch. Without an inventory management system that makes it easy to know what is selling well, what you have in your store, and what you need, retailers simply cannot compete in the “I need it now” economy. We’ve made progress on this front with the availability of inventory-centric point of sale systems, but with many retailers now offering both clicks and bricks, the equation is becoming more complicated. For instance, 42 percent of retailers say a top inhibitor of achieving the omnichannel experience is that inventory and order management are not integrated and accessible across all channels (source: Retail Systems Research). Thanks to the nature of online shopping, data on the virtual customer is always available, allowing e-tailers to easily personalize recommendations, offers and upsells. The magical 25 percent off email that is sent to you from JCrew.com when you left your shopping cart? Not a coincidence. On this front, brick-and-mortar retailers are lagging dramatically behind. The opportunity to level the playing field, however, lies close to the payment. Many payment systems give you data around consumer purchase behavior, and some offer a view into the actual items purchased, but without an inventory management system to link this data to, they won’t pinpoint a lot of actionable insights. If brick-and-mortar stores start digitizing and linking more of their inventory to customer interactions, they can personalize the shopping experience much like their online brethren. This will play out on the shop floor, arming salespeople with data around repeat customer preferences, corresponding stock levels, deep product insight and corresponding items. Finding a way to capture and mine for these insights down to the SKU level can be challenging, especially for smaller retailers with limited manpower and resources. But this data is gold, and can have a huge impact on nearly every aspect of the shopping experience and CRM process. At the end of the day, the payment is the easy part. What retailers really need is all the other stuff — using data to transform the harder aspects of retail management so that it benefits both their business and their customers. Amazon is likely making a play to offer this with its rumored Kindle-based POS system, giving the giant access to all of a retailer’s SKUs. Whether Amazon will use this data for its own benefit, or use it to offer users of its POS data insights on its own customers remains to be seen. But while it is a powerhouse in clicks, this experience cannot easily be translated to bricks. Challenges faced by brick-and-mortar retailers on a daily basis are unique to the physical world. Square already has one foot in the door, but has failed to gain a critical mass for any service other than its payment. It led the market with its payments innovation, but inventory and supply chain management is a much tougher nut to crack. What happens before the transaction and behind the curtains of a store is very complex and cannot be easily automated and packaged up as a utility. Throwing the wealth of available customer, product and purchase data into the mix only complicates the equation further. Owning these processes would not be a simple leap for Square or any company to make; as such, recent rumors imply they might be throwing in the towel on that effort. What is certain is that independent retailers should manage their data with kid gloves and be careful who they let into their stores. |
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Google Will Also Stop Scanning Google Apps Inboxes For Ads | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Earlier this morning, Google that it would to target ads at them. What was somewhat lost in that announcement was that Google will also make similar changes to other account types. Google will also soon stop scanning the accounts of Google Apps customers with , Government and legacy accounts for the free version. As Google confirmed to us earlier today, the company will permanently remove the “enable/disable” toggle for ads in the Google Apps console. This means that, by default, ads in Google Apps services will now be turned off and admins won’t even have the option to turn them on. At the same time, Google will stop collecting and using data in Google Apps services for advertising purposes. It looks like these changes are now rolling out to Google Apps customers, and Google promises to provide an update when the rollout is complete. The change to Google Apps for Education was prompted by and a complaint by students and teachers in the the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Chances are, this also spurred the company’s decision to make these changes to its other Google Apps subscription services. |
Internet.org Lets f8 Developers Test Apps On A Simulated Low-Bandwidth Network | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Until now, Internet.org has been about connecting the world without much to touch. But today at , Facebook and Ericsson gave Internet.org its first physical incarnation with a hands-on demo of its . It lets developers test out their apps on a simulated 2.5G mobile network similar to what’s available in the developing world so they can discover bugs that arise from weak connectivity. between Facebook and six telecom industry giants to connect the remaining 5 billion Earth citizens to the Internet. Through whitepapers and keynotes, Mark Zuckerberg has described how Facebook plans to use , data compression, and more to make the web affordable for everyone. Much of these plans are years away from fruition, though. Then Internet.org at Mobile World Congress in February and today launched its maiden public trial. Soon, it will have a full-time home at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park where outside developers can sign up for testing time. A crowd of developers at f8 test how their apps would perform in countries with weaker conectivity like Nigeria Either today or at the real lab, developers can load their apps onto phones running a special Ericsson-powered Innovation Lab SIM card. They can then stress test their apps under a variety of network connectivity scenarios, like extremely slow data transfers or connections that go in and out. Often times developers find their apps break when they don’t have a stable LTE connection. That’s what happened to several tech giants when they tested their apps at an Internet.org Innovation Lab hackathon at Ericsson’s Bay Area headquarters in January. A Facebook spokesperson told me Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, and Spotify all saw their apps break when on a simulated developing world network. Thankfully, Internet.org isn’t just trying to embarrass developers. The , here at f8 and at 1 Hacker Way, is staffed by Facebook and Ericsson engineers that can help devs fix their broken apps. Connectivity initiatives like Internet.org and Google’s Project Loon are bringing more of the world online. That means developers can’t afford to merely test their apps at home. If the Innovation Lab succeeds, it could make building a globe-ready app require a lot fewer plane tickets. |
Yelp Drops 6% Despite Posting Better-Than-Expected Q1 Revenue Of $76.4M, EPS Of -$0.04 [Update: Now +5%] | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | After the closing of regular trading today, Yelp its first quarter financial performance, including revenue of $76.4 million, and earnings per share of -$0.04. The market had expected the company to lose $0.06 on revenue of $75.06 million. Its first-quarter revenue figure is up 66% year-over-year. In regular trading Yelp bucked an up market, losing just under 1%. In after-hours trading, following its earnings miss, Yelp is down around 6%. Yelp expects to have around $85 million in revenue for the current quarter, in line with expectations. It isn’t immediately clear what is causing Yelp to drop so quickly in after-hours trading. Yelp also raised its full-year revenue guidance to between $363 million and $367 million. In the current quarter, Yelp landed a to provide its data to the latter’s search products. For the quarter, Yelp had a net loss of $2.6 million, and ended the period with just under $400 million in cash and equivalents. In the year-ago period, Yelp lost $4.8 million, or $0.08 per share. The company’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, was predictably enthusiastic regarding the quarter, calling it “a great start to the year.” Regardless of when investors make up their minds, it appears that Yelp did have a solid quarter, with better-than-expected top line, upward guidance, and a narrower-than-expected loss. |
Ambri Raises $35 Million For A New Approach To Grid-Scale Power Storage | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | The use of renewable energy is growing in the U.S., but its adoption has put pressure on old, overtaxed power grids. means that transmission systems need to find a way to store the energy generated from renewables to provide predictable power for grid operators. The latest company to try its hand at solving the problem for utilities is Ambri, which just raised $35 million in new capital from new investors KLP Enterprises, the family office of Karen Pritzker and Michael Vlock, and the Swiss insurance company Building Insurance Bern. Previous investors Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, and the energy company Total also participated in the financing. Cambridge, Mass.-based Ambri is wading . Bankruptcies at Xtreme Power and A123 Energy show that building batteries for the grid can be a tricky business. Despite the risk, investors remain undeterred. Ambri’s financing follows on the heels of a big $55 million investment by Bill Gates and others into , which is also tackling the problem of large-scale energy storage. With its latest financing, Ambri will deliver its first commercial systems to customers, build its initial commercial scale manufacturing plant, and continue technology development. The company has agreements in place to build prototype storage systems in Massachusetts, Hawaii, New York and Alaska, alongside project partners that include First Wind, Hawaiian Electric, Joint Base Cape Cod, Con Edison, Energy Excelerator (Hawaii) and Raytheon, the company says. Previously known as the Liquid Metal Battery Corporation, Ambri is developing its battery technology from research conducted by Dr. Donald Sadoway, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alongside Dr. David Bradwell — Ambri’s chief technology officer and co-founder. Since its launch in 2012 the company has raised over $50 million and holds the only license for the liquid metal battery technology developed by MIT. MIT has long-dominated The research on campus has been supported by the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, Total, the Deshpande Center, and the Chesonis Family Foundation. Ambri has also received grants from the Office of Naval Research and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. “Ambri’s solution is highly distinguished from others in the marketplace on cost and performance –- thanks to a simple manufacturing process, use of cheap and safe materials, and significantly longer lifetime compared to other approaches we’ve seen,” says Andrew Chung, a partner at Khosla Ventures and director on the Ambri board, in a statement. Despite the that the cleantech industry has faced, Khosla has remained consistent in its investment thesis around the promise of renewable energy and energy-efficiency technologies. It is by far the sector that has raised the most money in the Khosla portfolio, according to data from CrunchBase.
And the firm’s interests span everything from energy storage, to efficient building materials, to new emissions reductions technologies. “There are two categories within cleantech that are seeing some good attention,” says Chung. “Companies in the battery industry are still seeing some good attention… and another area we see a lot of excitement around — because the cost curves are moving in the right direction — is in the lighting space and the energy efficiency space.” Indeed, Khosla Ventures’ investment in View Inc. was able to raise $100 million for its novel glass manufacturing technology.
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SV Angel’s David Lee And Brian Pokorny Will School Disrupt NY On What’s Broken In Startup Land | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | There are few venture capital funds as close to the street as SV Angel. That’s why we’re bringing on stage at . I’ll be chatting with them about the biggest issues facing startups, from acquisitions to valuations, company culture to embracing failure. Both Lee and Pokorny worked at Baseline Ventures and Google before SV Angel, and over time have become some of the most prominent and well respected investors in the game. Our talk comes at a pivotal point in our industry. After a year of soaring valuations, huge funding rounds, and strong stock market performance, there are hints that winter may be coming. Social media stocks are dipping and there are rumors of delayed IPOs. We could be on the verge of a valuation correction or deflation of the bubble (if you think there is one). I’ll ask Lee and Pokorny whether good times are about to go into a coma, and what startups can do to prepare for the next financial phase. Meanwhile, the scene has been rocked by scandals. Callous founders, allegations of violence, and an HR scandal at SV Angel’s investment Github have cast a dark shadow on Silicon Valley as of late. I’ll press Lee and Pokorny about what startups can do to maintain a positive company culture, and how to respond if a crisis arises. But as always, there are opportunities to be had. This year alone, SV Angel invested in some of tech’s hottest startups, including Snapchat, Secret, Coinbase, Layer, URX, Patreon, and Sunrise. I’ll grill SV Angel’s leaders about what the important new verticals are, which are ripe for investment, and which might fizzle out. Disrupt NY will take over the Manhattan Center in New York City on May 5-7. Tickets can be purchased , and if you’re interested in being a sponsor, please contact our sponsorship team . |
Facebook’s Stock Picks Up Momentum After Announcing Its Mobile Ad Network | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | On the back of an based on optimism about the future of its ad products, Facebook today picked up around 2.8 percent in the public markets. After starting the day at a deficit, Facebook has picked up momentum as its f8 developer conference announced several new products, including the . Facebook Audience Network is an important product for Facebook, as it allows the social giant to monetize off properties that it doesn’t control. Facebook’s user-data advantage has long been a boon to its mobile ad efforts. Its run from having nearly no mobile ad revenue to generating the preponderance of its advertising top line from mobile usage has been little short of revolutionary for the company. To see Facebook federate that advantage is almost an implicit admission by the company can more quickly grow its revenue by helping others boost their mobile ad incomes than it can by attempting to hoard the edge. Facebook’s user base will grow as much as it does, but the total audience it can now make dollars off of is larger. This implies that Facebook’s revenue growth has legs, something that investors are, naturally, interested in. TechCrunch’s on the product’s future is optimistic: The ad network will let it grow revenue without cluttering its own site and apps with more ads. That’s a more sustainable model that insulates Facebook from competition or a slow down of its own user engagement. If users are lucky, Facebook might earn so much from its Audience Network ads shown elsewhere that it could show fewer on its own apps and sites. Twitter, a company that competes with Facebook for social advertising dollars on both desktop and mobile environments, hasn’t fallen further since Facebook’s announcement. In fact, Twitter has regained a bit of , opening the day down more than 11 percent, it’s now down just under 10 percent. A small piece of that could be that Facebook Audience Network will in fact with Twitter’s MoPub: [I]nstead of competing, the Facebook Audience Network can actually be hooked into the MoPub ad mediation service to let publishers simultaneously run Facebook Audience Network ads along with ones from services like iAd and AdMob. Twitter and Facebook are both maturing companies looking to diversify their revenue streams. Given that they share much DNA in their core product experience, to see them run in parallel here is not surprising. A better question: Who wins? |
Facebook Rolls Out Billing Info “Autofill” For Simpler Checkout To 450K Ecwid E-Commerce Merchants | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 30 | Facebook today announced a partnership with to let its 450,000 merchants easily integrate Autofill With Facebook, a feature that lets customers pull in credit card, billing, and shipping info they’ve stored on Facebook. At its F8 developer conference, the social network also announced a test of an extension to Autofill that lets JackThreads customers to pull in promo codes if a user clicks through from a promo code-filled Facebook ad. Facebook started with JackThreads, a clothes shopping app. In September it announced it was partnering with PayPal, Braintree (now part of PayPal), and Stripe to integrate Autofill with their payment processing backends. Rather than a competitor, Autofill was framed as a personal data layer on top. Today’s rollout to Ecwid’s partners will get a ton more developers testing Autofill. Ecwid’s e-commerce site builder supports 450,000 merchants in 175 countries and it the top store-builder app on Facebook. Its mobile-response sites lets developers quickly build a single interface that can be used by customers across the web and mobile. I asked Facebook during the F8 e-commerce session’s Q&A exactly how the integration works. Facebook’s Mary Ku told me “Ecwid is a platform. They provide a suite of tools…you can turn on and off. What we’ve done with Ecwid is integrate Autofill With Facebook so their customers can easily enable Autofill on their sites.” So along with other widgets, Ecwid merchants will be able to instantly turn on Autofill. Ku also described how the new Autofill promo code feature works with JackThreads. Many Facebook advertisers include promo codes in their ad copy in hopes of enticing users to click through and make a purchase for offering them a discount. But on mobile where you only see one screen at a time, copying and pasting that promo code is a pain. You might forget to copy it before you tap through. The new Autofill feature recognizes when you’ve clicked an ad with a promo code, and auto-populates it in the promo code field during check out. For now, it’s being tested with Facebook, but if it’s popular Facebook might make it available to other e-commerce developers. Since the debut of Autofill, Facebook said it wouldn’t charge a fee for its use. Instead, the strategy is to use its status as a layer to gather data on what Facebook users buy and from where. Facebook can match this data to its ads data to see if a paid promotion in the News Feed eventually led to e-commerce sales. If Facebook can prove its mobile app install ads, engagment ads, and other marketing tools lead directly to increased sales, it could get more e-commerce advertisers buying them. Now, Facebook will start collecting purchase data from Ecwid sites so it can start to demonstrate the ROI of its ads. E-commerce is all about earning more money than your spending, and Autofill will make that equation much easier to solve. |
SparkLabs Korea Presents Third Demo Day, Launches Hardware Accelerator In Seoul | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | , but the Seoul-based accelerator already has a strong track record of finding promising startups. Its third Demo Day today featured companies that develop wearable technology, medical devices, and mobile games. Alumni of SparkLabs Korea include beauty subscription service , which was not only the first startup accepted into Y Combinator, one of the top three companies , and , an adaptive learning platform that . SparkLabs also announced today that it will launch a program this winter dedicated to the Internet of Things, which will seek to connect hardware and software manufacturers to research and engineering resources in Asia. The accelerator already to identify promising early-stage startups around the world, which it announced last October. Here are the companies that appeared at SparkLabs Korea’s Demo Day today: is a cross-platform mobile social gaming studio made up of MIT alumni and former Zynga employees. It debuted a game called “Bingo Cube” today, which features a spinning bingo board shaped like a cube, that will launch this summer. Flow State Media’s titles already include live multiplayer crossword “Letter UP,” which is synchronous for two to four players. It has been played over two million times and claims six times the average revenue per user (ARPU) for Facebook games. A new 10-minute version called “Letter UP Rush” claims to be the fastest Scrabble-like game ever made. The startup, which also makes “Candy Cane Casino,” is currently raising its second round of funding and aspires to be one of the premiere casual gaming studios in the world. customizable product, called QT33, is a non-surgical treatment for snoring and sleep apnea, which can lead to health problems like heart disease, headaches, fatigue, and depression. QT33, which resembles a plastic retainer and spent 10 years in research and development, is meant as a less invasive, cheaper alternative to surgery and NCPAP (nasal continuous positive airway pressure) machines. It stabilizes the lower jaw and secures airflow through the user’s teeth. QT33 claims a 90% success rate from initial users and plans to launch in the U.S. this year. The startup is currently looking for investors and distribution partners. is a wearable tech company that wants to add a “multi-sensory” layer, including non-verbal communication and touch, to the Internet. Its first product is RingU, an interactive ring that is connected to a private social network and can be used to give loved ones a remote hug in real-time. RingU is also planning other apps like interactive concert integration so fans can interact more closely with performers. provides professional quality photos for international media outlets. The startup, which currently has 40 photographers based around the world and will add multi-lingual services at the end of this year, plans to launch a new platform called Incupix (short for “incubating pictures”) which will let amateur photographer share photos and potentially get them picked up by newspapers and other publications. It also provides mentoring and editing services for amateur photographers. Incupix will launch in June 2014. is a Chicago-based startup that provides free printing services to students. “Everyone thinks printing is a dying industry, but any college student knows that printing will never go away,” co-founder Paul Park said during Demo Day, adding that it is targeting a $13 billion market. Freenters, which got 3,000 users in 10 days during a trial at the University of Chicago, monetizes with targeted banner ads and coupons on the bottom margins of required reading, term paper drafts, and whatever else students use the service to print. It currently has 86 advertising partners, including Citibank and Papa John’s. Students can also print ad-free papers by watching a video ad or taking a survey. Freenters has already launched in 10 universities and plans to expand further to campuses in Boston, New York, and other East Coast cities. It is now seeking $500,000 in funding. is a “people-based” network for professionals. The site wants to differentiate from competitors like , , and by grouping connections by the projects they worked on. Unlike LinkedIn, users cannot add connections based on requests. Instead, they can only add people they have worked on specific projects with, which PeopleWare says results in higher-quality networks. It currently has 100 beta users in Korea, as well as 100 in the U.S. and Israel. PeopleWare plans to expand globally by the end of this year. Its team includes the co-founder and former CEO of Cyworld, Korea’s top social networking site. is a Korean music discovery app that recently launched and already has over 64,000 monthly active users on iOS. The service wants to focus on introducing music beyond the tracks and artists that are being heavily promoted by major music companies. For 24 hours, the app plays a song from its artist of the day and displays exclusive background information provided by the performer. Founded by former Apple and Deezer employees, 1Day1Song will produce an Android version this summer and plans to expand to Taiwan and China first. |
Google Seems To Be Considering Doing More With Chromecast’s Home Screen | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | While I’ve been a fan of the Chromecast , I find myself using it more and more lately. During the work day, I end up using it for all of the random videos I want to watch but that I don’t want taking up my laptop’s screen space or taking my full attention. As such, my office TV almost always has Chromecast’s idle screen on it. Right now, that just means it spends much of the day showing a clock and any one of Google’s many pre-selected Chromecast wallpapers. Sometime soon, though, that screen might get a bit smarter. Redditor was poking around and noticed a few breadcrumbs left behind: a bunch of javascript references for fetching the current temperature in a region, and a handful of weather-centric icons. The idea, it seems, is that a quick glance at the Chromecast home screen would tell you what sort of weather to expect (Sweater weather? Tank top weather?) and whether or not you’ll need an umbrella. For people like me who tend to have Chromecast up on a screen more often than not, it’d be a low-bandwidth way to make the idle screen a tad more useful. I poked around a bit more, and found placeholders for current local weather, local weather throughout the day, and local weather predictions for tomorrow. , there’s also code in there that suggests the Chromecast might eventually allow for custom wallpapers (instead of just the ones Google provides). It’s easy to imagine Google going deep on this, especially with their work on stuff like Google Now. It could show upcoming meeting reminders, package delivery trackers — basically, a second-screen dashboard for your life. At a certain point, though (for anything more personal than weather, really) you’d probably want it to be a separate application rather than something that’s on by default. |
iControl Networks Acquires Blacksumac, The Company Behind The Piper Home Monitoring Device | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | Earlier this year, Google ushered in consolidation of the home automation and monitoring space with its of Tony Fadell’s Nest. Today, followed that trend with its , which makes the . iControl historically has sold its products through various channels, including home security companies and cable service providers. Founded about a decade ago, iControl has spent the last several years signing up customers like ADT, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Rogers, and others with white-labeled home-monitoring products. The company has raised about $130 million since being founded, from institutional investors such as Charles River Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, as well as strategic investors that include Intel Capital, Comcast Ventures, Cisco, and others. Blacksumac, meanwhile, is an early upstart in the home monitoring market. The company first came to light with an for its Piper home monitoring device last summer. And, earlier this year it started shipping product. Piper is a Wi-Fi-enabled device that combines a 180-degree fisheye video camera with temperature, humidity, and motion sensors. It can also work as an all-in-one base station with Bluetooth and Z-Wave capabilities for connecting to and controlling other nearby lights and other devices. The acquisition will expand iControl’s addressable market beyond its current channel partner strategy to go direct to consumers. That will add to its existing product line, which includes its iControl Connect product for home security providers, iControl Converge platform for broadband service providers, and iControl Touchstone self-install gateway solution. According to iControl CEO Bob Hagerty, the company plans to sell the Piper device through its own online store, as well as through a wide variety of online and brick-and-mortar distributors in the future. The Piper product could also help iControl expand into other markets, such as Europe and Asia, where its sales presence hasn’t been as strong. That said, it’s a little surprising that a product which showed so much promise in a market as hot as home automation would allow itself to be acquired so quickly. After all, with recent financings like Greylock and Highland’s or the , Blacksumac could have gone a similar route. Ultimately, the team decided it made more sense for Blacksumac to be acquired and work within a company like iControl than to move forward as an independent entity in an increasingly competitive environment. While it will get a good deal of support behind its product, the Piper team will continue to be based in Ottawa, Ontario, and continue to operate as its own division within iControl. Not surprisingly, terms of the deal were not disclosed. |
Founder Stories: For Matt Tucker, A Life’s Work In Building Jive Software | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | Over the arc of Jive’s history, Tucker has assumed roles both as the CTO and Head of Engineering. In this video, we discuss the variance in those technical roles, how he balanced internal-facing duties with external responsibilities, and how they’ve built teams that move offices frequently — as Jive itself is software to help workers collaborate more efficiently. We also discuss some of the nuances technical leaders face in sharing opinions with team members in ways that aren’t taken as gospel, but instead to foster discussion and debate. Interestingly, Tucker was never interested in wearing the CEO hat, and also talks about why that was the case. For any technical founder out there, Tucker’s story will be of interest. Disclaimer: KPCB is an investor in Jive. |
We’re Looking For A Few Good Startups For Disrupt NY 2014 | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | is almost here and we would like to extend the offer for you, some of the best startups in the world, to take part in Startup Alley, our special exhibition hall focused on bringing amazing startups together under one roof. This gets you a table at the event and the chance to show off your product to press, investors, and TC writers and editors. It’s a great way to launch and we’ve had many successful companies come out of the Alley. You can pick up tickets . But be warned: . Disrupt NY kicks off on May 3rd. Startup Alley is jam-packed with early stage companies showing their talent and technology to audience members. Close to 75 companies exhibit each of the three days of Disrupt. Browsing through Startup Alley introduces a range of exciting companies to the marketplace, many of which are launching at Disrupt for the first time and others that have been around for a few years. On the last day of Disrupt, May 7th, Startup Alley focuses solely on hardware startups, turning the pavilion into a sort of science fair-meets-maker-event. Startup Alley companies also get the chance to present on the Disrupt stage in front of our esteemed judges. On Monday and Tuesday, the audience votes for their “Audience Choice Winner”, which receives the last spot to compete on stage as part of that day’s Battlefield contestants. If chosen, that company will be eligible to compete in the Battlefield Finals for the $50,000 grand prize and coveted Disrupt Cup. Startups wanting to participate in Startup Alley must be less than two years old, with less than $2.5 million in funding.
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Riding In Cars With VCs | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | Uber’s promo factory has delivered kittens, Christmas trees and ice cream. But its latest PR concoction has taken the Valley darling to a whole new level: Uber for VC meetings. UberPITCH will give free rides to to anyone with a startup idea, allowing them to pitch investors from the Google Ventures team. Yes, that’s right. If you’ve got a great idea for an anonymous photo sharing app that lets you swipe up to get laid, you’ve got transportation. This is obviously a marketing stunt, and to make it even frothier, Google Ventures is . While we doubt that the GV team will find the next Uber through this, anything possible*. In the end, there really than investors using a portfolio company’s product to let other wannabe founders pitch them. Tomorrow, anyone with a startup pitch or idea can open Uber in Palo Alto, Mountain View or Menlo Park from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. Similar to the way you can choose between UberX, Black Car and SUV, these users will be able to select UberPITCH and request a ride. If connected, they will have seven minutes to pitch and seven minutes for feedback. The UberX or UberSUV car will actually roll up with a GV investor in the backseat, and the ride starts and ends back at their starting point. Rides will be free for users. So who will you be pitching at Google Ventures? GV’s UberPITCH team includes Uber investor David Krane, General Partner; Shanna Tellerman, Partner; Andy Wheeler, General Partner; Dave Munichiello, Partner; and Rick Klau, Product Partner. Former TechCrunch columnist and current Google Ventures partner MG Siegler will not be part of the program. *At least one cab investment turned out to be a good call, as , including the Boomerang scheduling service. |
What Is Heartbleed? The Video | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | You’ve probably . You’ve probably been told that, as far as security vulnerabilities go on the Internet, it’s pretty damned scary. But what Heartbleed? How does it work? Why is it something that you should care about? This Khan Academy-style* video tries to break it all down. Made by Zulfikar Ramzan, MIT Ph.D. and CTO of cloud security firm , this video does a great job of explaining the bug at a pretty high level. Its still got a whole lot of acronyms and jargon thrown into the mix (so don’t expect an Explain-Like-I’m-Five explanation here), but it does a good job of explaining the bug’s ins and outs in a way that more people should be able to grasp. [vimeo 91425662 w=500 h=281] [*That style isn’t a coincidence. Zulfikar has also done videos for Khan Academy. ] |
OpenSSL Heartbleed Bug Leaves Much Of The Internet At Risk | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | A large is . OpenSSL, used by a host of companies and services to encrypt their data, contained a flaw for two years that, if exploited, allowed external parties to extract data from a server’s working memory in 64 kilobyte chunks. That’s not much, but it was a very repeatable exploit, meaning that nefarious parties could hit the 64 kilobyte button again and again. Eventually, presumably, you would get the golden ticket: private encryption keys. With that, you could decrypt sensitive, protected data, and no one would be the wiser. Here’s why this is even worse than you first thought: Even if you patch OpenSSL, you don’t know if your servers were previously compromised. You can throw out the old keys and generate new ones, but that only protects you moving forward. Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher, : “I bet that there will be a lot of vulnerable servers a year from now. This won’t get fixed.” It is rare that things are as bad as people say they are. This is one of those times. Another caveat: If you were storing up pools of encrypted traffic, and then managed to extract the key to that data via the Heartbleed bug, all that past traffic would become exploitable. To Mathias Bynens, another security type: “ಠ_ಠ.” Bynens also points out that data encrypted using Perfect Forward Secrecy would not be at risk, which is a comfort to some. Who has the capability to collect and store such information? The NSA, for one. The organization has become notorious for tapping the core cables of the Internet and even spying on corporate traffic intra-datacenter. Including, you will recall, . Yahoo is one of the parties that was at risk from the exploit. You do the math. Yahoo recently announced that it has in and between its datacenters. In an emailed statement, Yahoo told TechCrunch the following: A vulnerability, called Heartbleed, was recently identified impacting
many platforms that use OpenSSL, including ours. As soon as we became
aware of the issue, we began working to fix it. Our team has successfully
made the appropriate corrections across the main Yahoo properties (Yahoo
Homepage, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo
Food, Yahoo Tech, Flickr and Tumblr) and we are working to implement the
fix across the rest of our sites right now. We¹re focused on providing
the most secure experience possible for our users worldwide and are
continuously working to protect our users data. This is not the only recent encryption debacle. The NSA for RSA to adopt a random number generator that was exploitable. This stuff is serious. If the NSA won’t stop its bulk collection of data, along with similar agencies of other countries, it matters that encryption works. When it doesn’t, no one has privacy. |
Atlassian Shareholders Sell $150M Of Their Equity In A Secondary Sale Valuing The Firm At $3.3B | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | , a company that sells collaboration tools to large enterprises, today announced a sale of $150 million worth of its shares by former and current employees. The sale of equity is designed to provide liquidity to current shareholders. T. Rowe Price is heading the deal, which will, according to Atlassian, be paid for by “funds and accounts” managed by the financial firm. Atlassian is valued at $3.3 billion in the deal, meaning that less than 5 percent of its total value is being exchanged. TechCrunch late last year that in Atlassian’s 2013 fiscal year, it had revenue of $150 million. In an email to TechCrunch, the company stated that it now has a “current run rate exceeding $200 million in annual revenues.” So it’s still growing. In its fiscal 2012, Atlassian had revenue of $110 million. The company likes to state that it has been cash-flow positive for a decade. Why this sale, and why now? Given its numbers, it appears that Atlassian could go public at its whim, but it doesn’t to want to. However, employees that have long held its stock — the company was founded in 2002 — likely would appreciate a little liquidity. Keep in mind that the vast majority of Atlassian stock will remain illiquid for the foreseeable future. But you have to let some shares trade hands if you’re as big as Atlassian. So a structured secondary is a reasonable choice for the firm. |
As Microsoft Support for XP Expires, Antivirus Vendors Pick Up The Slack | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | As you might be aware , which means that the company will stop issuing security patches. Around up until now and you’re still using it. Stubborn bunch, aren’t you? Conventional wisdom suggests that without security patches, business users would be foolish to continue using XP, lest they become victims of viruses and malware that could potentially cripple their businesses. But is that really the case? Probably not. Just because Microsoft has stopped shipping patches doesn’t mean the antivirus vendors have stopped supporting XP. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. McAfee, Symantec and Kaspersky shows have all pledged to continue to support XP — for now. McAfee for XP for as long as it’s technically feasible to do so. Symantec says ” — whatever that means. Kaspersky saying it will continue to support XP through the current version, as well as two future updates. After that, all bets are off. The fact is you need to be thinking about transitioning away from XP no matter how attached to XP you might be. Once your antivirus vendor stops supporting it, you’re playing without a net and you don’t want to be doing that. I realize that companies have years of customizations and links between programs built into XP and I hear you chanting the mantra, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But at some point you have to simply bite the bullet and give in and, at the very least, move to Windows 7. Given the general disdain for Windows 8 and the Metro-style tile interface, it’s understandable why you don’t want to go there. Your users, who probably know what they know and not much else, would very likely not make a smooth transition to an entirely new way of working that the tile interface would entail. It’s going to be difficult and very likely expensive enough on the back end to make sure everything works and you have the latest version of compatible software. You’ll also have to spend a fair amount on training your employees on new ways of working, no matter which version of Windows you choose. You may be able to put off the inevitable for now, but you need to start planning for a future without XP and you need to be doing it soon because two of the antivirus vendors are being vague on the length of their support and one has an end point. You might have been able to get away with ignoring the warnings until now, but if you have even an ounce of common sense, you realize at this point your good luck is about to run out. And if you’re smart, you need to start the transition very soon — before it really is too late and you’re putting your business at serious risk. |
Do Startups Stand A Chance Against Valley Incumbents? | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | A few weeks ago, I was talking with an entrepreneur in the search space who had a simple question: “Can Google ever be beat?” The question is actually quite profound, and is at the heart of everything we do in startups. Is it possible to defeat the incumbent players, even when they are essentially monopolies? I answered with the usual Silicon Valley rhetoric and bravado, arguing that every company will eventually be disrupted – particularly the largest ones – and that you very well could be the startup to make it happen. I used to fervently believe those words, but as I was saying them, they seemed to ring less true than they have in the past. Whether it’s the news about Facebook’s acquisitions of or , the developments at Google X, or just the sheer size and profitability of the leading technology companies, it increasingly seems unthinkable that any of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech companies are going to face disruption anytime soon. This should be obvious to anyone looking at the list of billion-dollar-valuation startups, where the only major tech company I could identify that seems to face a competitive threat is PayPal/eBay, from Square and Stripe. That’s a fundamental change for a region in which creative destruction has been the byword for more than six decades. One theory of Silicon Valley posits that the region has gone through “waves” of innovation, going from vacuum tubes on through microwaves, integrated circuits, semiconductors, computers, and today, the Internet. Few remember the industry leaders of the past, like Shockley Semiconductor or Eitel-McCullough. Even the ones who have survived like HP and Intel have fallen on tougher times. One reason that Big Tech is locked in is that there doesn’t appear to be a new wave of technology that is sweeping through Silicon Valley. , but neither has truly materialized in a significant way beyond a handful of companies. Hardware/software hybrid companies seemed a great bet to make, but with the acquisitions of and Oculus, it seems unlikely that this area will be the next wave. Instead, , as it has for the past three decades, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. The next major companies coming out of Silicon Valley are software companies like Dropbox, Airbnb and Uber. One reason for the staying power of these businesses is simply that software may well be the most profitable business model in technology ever conceived. NYU’s Aswath Damodaran , and his results show that computer software enjoys some of the highest margins outside of financial services. Unlike yesteryear’s semiconductor and computer companies, today’s tech companies have the money to spend on research and product development, allowing them to lock in their leads. And speaking of lock-in, it’s hard not to point out that today’s companies have enviable levels of stickiness built into their business models. Cloud services in particular force consumers to continue to use their products since transitions to upstart competitors are exceedingly difficult. In addition, many of the major tech companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and branding campaigns, giving them incredible built-in advantages in terms of consumer awareness. In many ways, companies like Amazon and Facebook are quite similar to Coca-Cola or Pepsi – blue-chip brands that endure more through recognition than any other property of their products. And if disruption finally arrives, it seems that the Big Tech companies are ready to handle it in a sophisticated manner. popularized the term “Innovator’s Dilemma” through an about his research into the hard disk industry, among others. Technology companies are constantly disrupted by startups that introduce inferior products, but that eventually improve them to compete with the incumbent’s offerings but at a lower cost structure. In order to continue competing, an incumbent has to change its business model to become less profitable, which is nearly impossible in a modern corporation. Christensen’s main recommendation to defend against this tendency is to create a sort of think tank internal to the company that actively tries to disrupt the company’s own product lines. In other words, Google X. Furthermore, Silicon Valley’s major tech companies have also concentrated decision-making power in a very tight number of individuals, mainly company founders. Indeed, one of the benefits of having multiple types of voting shares is that executives can make self-disrupting decisions more easily than if they have to get permission from Wall Street. Given that incumbent players seem quite adept at weathering any disruption, one would hope that startups in new industries would have a chance to succeed. Yet, the news over the past few months has shown that the behemoths are not going to allow that strategy to succeed, either. Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Oculus means that the leading companies in two up-and-coming industries – messaging and virtual reality – have already sold out, albeit at very nice price premiums. We should expect similar news to emerge in industries like drones, bitcoin, and 3D printing. We are witnessing a world that is quickly ossifying around a handful of juggernauts. There seem to be few solutions to the situation, but there is one irony here: The biggest challenger to this status quo may actually be yesterday’s famous behemoth. Microsoft used to be the most powerful software company in the world, and while its revenues have certainly remained high, it has lost its cachet in a mobile world where the company lacks a serious contender in the market. “Simply put, our vision is to deliver the best cloud-connected experience on every device.” Given the company’s position, it very well could act to force open Silicon Valley if it chose a more open approach to its business. The other option, which happens to be Microsoft-related, is whether there needs to be increasing attention paid to antitrust enforcement in Silicon Valley. Particularly , it is clear that there should be more attention paid to the collusion inherent in the tech industry today. While it’s certainly a question that has received its share of air time in the past, I think it is worth looking more closely at whether monopolies or dominant businesses are healthy for innovation. Building a disruptive technology company is not impossible. But competing against the incumbent Silicon Valley companies is increasingly becoming long odds. There are no panaceas here, but some basic rules continue to hold true. Focus on building great products in niches not covered by Big Tech. And if you are serious about joining the elite club, be ready to turn down insane acquisition offers and handle the resulting press glare. If you can decline billions of dollars, then maybe Google can be beat. |
Facebook Admits Users Are Confused About Privacy, Will Show More On-Screen Explanations | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | Facebook today offered reporters a deep dive on how it handles privacy and previewed some upcoming changes. The company revealed it does 80 trillion privacy checks per day on the backend to make sure data isn’t wrongly exposed. It runs 4000 surveys about privacy per day which pushed it to now begin displaying on-screen descriptions of how privacy controls work, including for status update audience selectors and resharing. Facebook used to have every team work on its own privacy functionality, and then would have dedicated teams for privacy sprints around specific privacy changes. But as the company grew, two specific privacy teams evolved. One is the Privacy Product Engineering team that builds the settings that let users control who sees their content. The other is the Privacy Infrastructure Engineering team, which “helps engineers move the fast and build things” while still being confident there will be no privacy breaches, says Privacy Engineeering manager Reylene Yung. For example, the product team built the privacy shortcuts into the home page and the selectors for choosing who sees your status updates. The infrastructure team built a framework that ensures if a piece of data is missing information about who it can be shown to, it’s locked down, which lets engineers be confident they can’t screw up Facebook in ways that will expose private information. Facebook runs 4000 surveys a day in 27 languages about how people are reacting to privacy controls. To make those sentiments feel more urgent and personal, Facebook displays quotes from those surveys on monitors in its privacy teams’ offices. In the past those surveys have led directly to product changes. Yung explained that teenage users were repeatedly writing in asking for the ability to post publicly, as Facebook had barred that functionality to protect kids. But the feedback convinced it to in October 2013 and do a big outreach campaign about what that means. More recently, the surveys identified some big misconceptions and product requests that Facebook is hoping to fix with new explanations product changes: On the left, Facebook’s old web status update privacy selector that didn’t explain who “public” or “friends” posts would be shown to. On the right, a new design Facebook is testing that spells out who those audiences include Facebook’s privacy team manager Mike Nowak admitted that people think Facebook changes its privacy controls too often or that the company has failed to make privacy easy to understand. That’s a bit of an understatement. Facebook has a terrible public perception when it comes to privacy that may be causing an overall chilling effect on sharing. People may choose not to post something because there’s a risk they don’t understand their own controls and could accidentally share it with the wrong people. Facebook has a shaky record on privacy, in particular a big set of unilateral privacy changes in 2009 that pushed users to share things with “everyone”. Combined with its real identity policy, this has created a desire for ways to share more anonymously like new app Secret. Designing privacy controls is a serious challenge. Some users want total control, even if it’s complex, while others want a super simple interface they don’t have to think about. Building controls that satisfy both has been a struggle for Facebook, which gets criticized for either making controls too complicated or not empowering users enough. But that’s no excuse for not finding a solution. The company’s mission and business model depend on privacy. People are scared to share if they don’t know who will see their content, and the less that’s shared, the fewer opportunities Facebook has to display ads. Perhaps a one-size-fits-all approach simply can’t work. Facebook may need to create a dynamic privacy control system that recognizes if users want more granular control or simplicity and serves them an interface to match. For now, more sessions with reporters like this and more on-screen explanations should instill a bit more confidence. |
Ballmer, Not Nadella, Gave The Go-Ahead To Ship Office For iPad, Which Has Racked Up 12M Downloads | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | has seen 12 million downloads to date, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the decision to pull the trigger and release the suite, according to the company. Microsoft’s Office for iPad team today to check in with the mass-market nerdish culture and answer questions. Here’s the group on the critical question of who signed off on the release of Office for iPad: New CEO Satya Nadella is more Ballmer’s amanuensis on Office for iPad than direct progenitor. This is not surprising: Nadella didn’t get a blank slate but rather a company in motion. Also, the above matters for Ballmer’s legacy. To the other question of how popular Office for iPad has been — Excel, Word and PowerPoint are the top three in the United States — Microsoft wanted the world to know the following: Numbers like that are the sort of things that companies will tell you. Bad numbers they won’t, so Microsoft, we can deduce, is proud of the figure. Also, we now know how many downloads you will collect if your apps take over the top slots in iPad App Stores in more than 100 countries for a week. What’s next? How many of those people have converted to paying Office 365 subscribers? I’ve asked. |
NSA Spied On Human Rights Groups, Says Snowden | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed that U.S. government intelligence agencies spied on NGOs and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as part of its dragnet mass surveillance programs. Snowden was giving testimony, via video-link, to the Council of Europe at a taking place in Strasbourg today. “The U.S. National Security Agency has a directorate that has worked to intentionally subvert the privacy laws and constitutional protections of EU member states against mass surveillance,” said Snowden reading a prepared statement to the Council. “The body of public evidence indicates mass surveillances results in societies that are not only less liberal, but less safe.” “I am proud of the fact that despite the dramatic protestations of intelligence chiefs, no evidence has been shown by any government that the revelations of the last year have caused any specific harm,” he added. “My motivation is to improve government, not to bring it down.” The Council had provided Snowden with a series of questions to which he responded to in the testimony. “The reports of intelligence agencies using mass surveillance intelligence agencies to monitor peaceful groups unrelated to any terrorist threat or nation security purpose, such as the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, or spying on American lawyers negotiating trade deals, are in fact accurate,” said Snowden. “The NSA has in fact specifically targeted the communications of either leaders or staff members of purely civilian or human rights organizations… including domestically within the borders of the U.S.,” he added. Snowden was also asked by the Council whether the NSA does data-mining analysis on the data it captures via its dragnet surveillance programs. “Yes. Algorithms are used to determine unknown persons of interest who are not actually suspected of any wrongdoing,” he responded. He went on to describe in detail the workings and capabilities of the NSA’s which he said allows for the creation of electronic “fingerprints” that can be used to track whatever individuals and groups the agencies choose to target. “[Fingerprints] can be used to construct a kind of unique signature for any individual or group’s communications which are often comprised of a collection of ‘selectors’ such as email addresses, phone numbers or user names. This allows state security bureaus to instantly identify the movements and activity of you, your computers or other devices, your personal internet accounts or even keywords or other uncommon strings that indicate an individual or group out of all the communications they intercept in the world, are associated with that particular communication, much like a fingerprint that you would leave on the handle of your door… However… that is the smallest part of the NSA’s fingerprinting capability. “You must first understand that any kind of Internet traffic that passes before these mass surveillance sensors can be analyzed in a protocol-agnostic manner, meta-data and content both, and it can be today, right now, searched not only with very little effort, via a complex regular expression — which is a type of shorthand programming — but also via any algorithm an analyst can implement in popular high level programming,” he said. “This provides a capability for analysts to do things like associate unique identifiers assigned to untargeted individuals via unencrypted commercial advertising networks, through cookies or other trackers, common tracking means used for businesses every day, with personal details such as an individual’s precise identity, their geographical location, their political affiliations, their place of work, their computer operating system and other technical details, their sexual orientation, their personal interests, and so on and so forth.” “There are very few practical limitations to the kind of analysis that can be technically performed in this manner, short of the actual imagination of the analysts themselves, and this kind of complex analysis is in fact performed today using these systems,” he added. Snowden said the use of XKeyscore has “clearly been disproportionate”, describing the technology itself as “extraordinarily invasive”. “The screening of trillions… of private communications for the vaguest indications of association or some other nebulous pre-criminal activity is a violation of the human right to be free from unwarrented interference,” he told the Council. To underscore the scope of XKeyscore’s capabilities he cited examples of potential persons whose tracking could be automated using the technology — such as the people parents choose to share photos of their children with, or every homosexual or Christian in a particular country. And while he said the NSA is not engaged in any “nightmare scenarios” such as compiling lists of those with a particular sexual orientation for the purpose of rounding them up in order to remove them from the general population, he stressed that the technology apparatus capable of doing that has already been created — and that “deeply implicates our human rights”. “We have to recognise that the infrastructure for such activities has been built,” he noted. Fingerprints have already been used to track people who have followed the wrong link on an Internet site, or who have visited an Internet sex forum, or downloaded a particular file, or logged onto a suspect network, or who have just booked a flight, according to Snowden. It is also being used for general law enforcement — even for non-violence offenses — despite there being no warrants or judicial oversight attached to such activity, he said. “These technical capabilities don’t merely exist, they are already in place and are actively being used.” “We have an obligation to develop international standards to protect against the routine and substantial abuse of this technology, abuses that are ongoing today,” he added. “This not just a problem for the US or EU. This is in fact a global problem.” Snowden argued that the use of dragnet surveillance programs by Western governments sets up a “dangerous precedent” that “potentially legitimizes authoritarian governments”. Dragnet surveillance has also been shown to be ineffective for preventing terrorism, he added — stating that the U.S. government has itself conceded this point — and said such programs have no basis in law. “This technology represents… what I would consider the most significant new threat to civil rights in modern times,” he added. Snowden’s testimony to the Council can be viewed in full . |
Facebook’s India User Base Crosses 100M, Set To Become Its Biggest Market | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | India is inching closer to overtake the U.S. as Facebook’s biggest market, at least in terms of the number of active users. With over 100 million users as of March 31, India is now the only country where Facebook can aspire to have 1 billion users, thanks to a growing base of Internet users (currently around 200 million) and increasing proportion of mobile phone subscribers in its over 1.23 billion population. In an , Javier Olivan, vice-president, growth & analytics at Facebook said getting 1 billion users in the country will be altogether a different challenge. As we have been writing, while India was expected to become in terms of number of users later this year, but it’s always going be difficult to translate that into ad dollars for the Palo Alto company anytime soon. Indeed, companies like – their biggest user markets (mostly outside of the U.S.) are not necessarily top revenue sources. For its part, Facebook is . During its fourth quarter earnings announced in January this year, Facebook said its revenue per user increased to $2.14, driven by 33% growth in Europe and 17% rise in Asia. Facebook established its first India office in Hyderabad in 2010 when its user base was less than 10 million. Of over 100 million current users in India, nearly 84 million access the platform on their mobile phones. PHOTO VIA |
Zoove Debuts StarStar myInfo, A Mobile Contact Sharing Service That Doesn’t Require An App | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | , a company offering a registry of unique mobile numbers for brands and consumers ( and , respectively) is now introducing its third product, a contact-sharing service called . Available to U.S. consumers on any of the four major carriers, the idea with the myInfo service is to offer users a way to both share and receive updated contact details from their friends and colleagues without requiring a mobile app. While the company’s brand-facing product has been used by 150 brands and merchants to date, including big names like CBS, Dunkin’ Donuts, Ford, Hyatt, NFL and Verizon Wireless, for over 500 individual campaigns, StarStar’s earlier consumer product (StarStar Me), while clever, is not exactly a household name at this point. That service lets you create custom vanity phone numbers, like **JANE for example, and allow you to (e.g. ring, reply with text, block calls, etc.) as well as share contact info. The service has been adopted by , , Verizon and AT&T here in the U.S. With StarStar myInfo, Zoove is looking to expand its earlier offering with a service designed primarily for contact sharing while allowing users to create different personal and professional profiles. To get started with building a profile, users dial **myInfo (**694636) from their smartphones, which sends them a link via text message. Clicking the link takes you to a website where you can create your separate profiles or sync with LinkedIn to speed up the process. To then share that profile with others, you can just ask them to dial ** plus your phone number. The recipient is then sent a text with the vCard, which they can click to add the contact to their phone. In my tests, the first message I received said “ ” where contact was the person’s name and link was a URL to click. That took me to a webpage confirming the contact details were sent to my phone*. A minute later, I received the vCard. (By default, the sender has to approve the request on their end, so the time to receive will vary). To use the service, you’ll need a smartphone with a decent web browser and a text and data plan. OS support includes iOS 6+, Android 4.0+, Windows Phone 8+, and Blackberry 10+. All four major U.S. carriers are on board at launch, with others on the way. The benefit to sharing the contact info this way is that the sender can fill out their profiles with all the data they choose, including not just their name, number and email – which is what you would generally enter in face-to-face situations when you’re getting someone’s digits – but also things like websites, social media accounts, alternate numbers or emails, addresses, and a photo. After sharing your profile with a friend or colleague, any time you later update your information on the service, those who had already received your vCard previously will automatically be sent an MMS with your updated contact info. The service is a clever workaround for the problem with contact-sharing. Today, it’s easy enough to enter contacts into your phone, but they then become stale over time as your contacts change jobs or get new phone numbers or emails or move to new addresses. A number of startups, like recently acquired or , for example, have attempted to solve this problem with smartphone applications, where you automatically share updated profiles with others, but they’re limited to those users on iOS or Android who are also using the same application. But StarStar myInfo shares its own adoption hurdles – contacts are only automatically updated if the user first connects with a friend by dialing their StarStar number initially. And while none of the steps involved in doing so are overly complicated, there are simply more of them than just typing in someone’s digits into your phone. StarStar myInfo is free to use, but the company will market its paid service (StarStar Me, $3/mo) on its website. More info on StarStar myInfo is . |
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Mobile App Go Dish Brings Dynamic Pricing To The Restaurant World | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | You’ve probably noticed that your favorite restaurant probably has busy periods, which are usually dictated by when people typically get hungry. No surprise, that tends to be around lunch and dinner. But then there are other times when it’s not so busy. The thing is, restaurants have fixed costs that don’t really waver during ups and downs, like rent and employee salaries. To deal with that, a new app called seeks to get more eaters into restaurants during off-peak hours by offering discounts on meals picked up before or after a typical restaurant’s lunch rush. Go Dish works like this: Once a user has signed up, she’ll get a notification every day at around 9:30 alerting her to discounts on meals being offered by nearby restaurants. Those discounts typically range from 20 percent to 35 percent, but can go as high as 50 percent for select dishes each day. But those discounts also depend on users scheduling their lunch plans around the usual 11:30-2:00 lunch rush. Discounts get steeper the earlier someone decides to get lunch before the rush, or the later they’re willing to wait afterward. Go Dish was founded by a couple of veterans from Wynn Hotels, Hotwire.com and Liftopia, where they worked on dynamic pricing for hospitality providers. So why not food? That’s the idea behind the app. Currently Go Dish has about 45 restaurants on board in the Financial District and SOMA in San Francisco, and offers between 10 and 25 dishes per day as part of the apps. It’s looking to expand to more locations and into more neighborhoods to reach even more providers. |
Comcast Makes Its Case To The FCC For Time Warner Cable Acquisition Approval | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | A few months ago, Comcast announced its plans to in one of the biggest acquisitions in the broadband or pay TV market. In a and an today, Comcast made its pitch to government regulators, providing all the reasons that they should approve its latest massive acquisition. The filing goes into great detail of all the consumer benefits that it expects to offer consumers based on its existing investments in broadband technologies, on-demand services, and streaming video, as well as the increased scale that comes from combining the two largest cable providers in the U.S. According to Comcast, Time Warner Cable subscribers will benefit from faster broadband, better TV and streaming video offerings, an extensive on-demand video collection, and a wider selection of apps on a larger number of devices. On the broadband front, Comcast touts faster speeds — the majority of its subscribers pay for 25 Mbps service, compared to 15 Mbps at Time Warner Cable. That’s due in part to its adoption of DOCSIS 3.1, which allows it to offer speeds of up to 505 Mbps. Comcast also noted the wider availability of cable hotspots available in its service areas, with more than a million up and running today, compared to the 29,000 deployed by Time Warner Cable. The company also says has a leg up on Time Warner Cable when it comes to video services — in particular, services that are available through apps on mobile and tablet devices. Comcast’s X1 is one of the more advanced cloud set-top box platforms available to pay TV providers, enabling better search and navigation than the traditional channel grid most subscribers are used to. On the app front, Comcast’s Xfinity TV Go apps provide access to 300,000 on-demand offerings and 50 live streaming channels. It also offers 50,000 on-demand options through the set-top box, compared to the less than 20,000 that Time Warner Cable offers, as well as electronic sell-through options that allow subscribers to purchase movies instead of just renting them. Comcast also says that it will extend the net neutrality protection it agreed to as part of its NBC Universal acquisition to Time Warner Cable subscribers. And it promises to offer its Internet Essentials program into Time Warner Cable markets. All of this is actually a good thing, and most Time Warner Cable subscribers shouldn’t worry about Comcast taking over their service. If the acquisition is approved, the TV offerings, broadband access, and apps they’ll have access to will actually be better than what they have today. One of the big concerns about Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable revolves around the sheer size of the new combined entity, and what that will mean for the competition. Together, the companies will have about 30 million subscribers, which is nearly a third of the U.S. market. Comcast has this to say about that: It’s understandable why any large merger will attract questions about competition and consolidation. But this particular transaction actually raises few competition concerns. Cable operators generally don’t compete against one another — instead, they are siloed into different geographical areas around the country. Whoever Time Warner Cable was competing with in any given market will still be there, so the consolidation doesn’t change market dynamics that much. That said, competition in the pay TV market is fairly weak: DirecTV and Dish together would have a few million more subscribers than the combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable entity. And after investing billions to build out fiber-based video and broadband offerings, Verizon and AT&T have largely given up on the television market. Broadband competition is even worse. Comcast and Time Warner Cable’s high-speed Internet services generally compete with DSL service from the local telco providers, which are generally much slower than the DOCSIS 3.1 technology that Comcast has rolled out. Comcast points to the growing modern DSL market as competitive, since most DSL providers have upgraded networks to offer service that can reach 75 Mbps to 100 Mbps. That is still well below the speeds that Comcast touts in its consumer benefits pitch. Meanwhile, despite some deployments by Google, alternative fiber offerings from other providers or municipalities are expensive and have been slow to roll out. In its appeal to regulators, Comcast actually seeks to expand the competitive market to include Google, as well as companies like Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and even Facebook. In its blog post, Comcast notes that it competes with Google in eight of nine Google Fiber deployments. But it will be years or even decades before real fiber competition could show up, whether that comes from Google or anyone else. While it touted all the reasons why consumers would benefit from the acquisition, while also deflecting questions about the competitive environment, there were a few questions that Comcast didn’t address. Those deal specifically with the leverage that it will have over networks and other content providers, as well as what it could do over-the-top. Comcast’s broadband scale make it a scary competitor to growing online video services like Netflix or Amazon’s Prime offering. The company alleviated some concerns with its commitment to net neutrality through the NBC Universal acquisition. But a recent served as a reminder that there are costs for major content providers that . There’s also the question of Comcast’s own desire to go over-the-top itself. While the Time Warner Cable deal gives Comcast a huge amount of scale to reach tens of millions of broadband and video subscribers, all the work it’s done on the streaming side of things with apps means that it’s well-positioned to deploy its own over-the-top offering, if it ever wanted to. The question is, would it? |
Sketchfab Revamps Its Platform To Become The SoundCloud Of 3D Files | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | just released the second version of its 3D platform. As a reminder, Sketchfab’s ultimate goal has always been to become a sort of SoundCloud for 3D models. On the website, you can upload, browse and embed 3D models from your browser. Yet, until now, the company first has been focused on building the foundation of Sketchfab and the web platform was neglected. “We spent the first two years mostly working on the 3D technology,” co-founder and CEO Alban Denoyel told me. “So with the v2, we evolve from a simple 3D viewer to a true community platform, with a social layer on top of it.” On the new website, you can find all the features that you would expect from a social platform. You can comment on 3D models, you can follow people to curate a newsfeed of 3D models and more. The entire browsing interface was redone as well. Categories, folders and tags are completely new. The upload process is easier. Finally, it’s a responsive website that will work on your phone, tablet or computer. Just like YouTube, you can embed your 3D model on your website. You can see at the bottom of this post how an embed looks like. In addition to today’s update, the company released some numbers. So far, 100,000 3D files have been uploaded to Sketchfab. While it’s tiny compared to YouTube, Flickr or SoundCloud, it’s a lot harder to build a 3D model compared to recording a video. Comparatively, it took four years and a half to get 100,000 files on Makerbot’s . Sketchfab raised $2.5 million to date. Recently, the company with Adobe to build a deep integration into Photoshop. Now, you can upload a 3D model directly from Photoshop without ever having to launch your browser. It will certainly boost Sketchfab’s growth.
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MediaFire Takes Its Desktop Apps Out Of Beta, Removes File Size Restrictions | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | , the popular online file storage and image hosting site, today announced that its for Windows and OS X are now out of beta. The integration looks similar to what Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive do in that they seamlessly integrate themselves into the operating system’s file managers and save dialogs. Using the desktop apps, MediaFire allows desktop uses to quickly upload their images and instantly share them with others. As part of this update, the service now allows users to follow files and track new files shared by users automatically. It also essentially lifted its file upload restrictions and both free and paid users can now upload files up to 20 gigabytes in size. It’s also launching 1 terabyte storage plans. For a limited time, those will cost $2.50 per month or $24.99 per year. That’s significantly cheaper than , but the functionality of MediaFire is obviously also far more limited that of Drive. If you’re just looking for online storage, though, this may be worth a closer look. For developers, the company is announcing a set of that will help them integrate the service with their own applications. In the next few weeks, MediaFire will also launch new native apps for iPad and Android. The company isn’t releasing all that much information about these apps yet, but they will include automatic photo syncing from Android devices. All of this clearly amounts to an attempt by MediaFire to position itself as a more fully-featured online storage service. In general, the service doesn’t quite get the attention that some of its competitors get, but it does have a very large user base. With all of the larger players now making a very aggressive push to compete with Dropbox and similar services, it makes sense for MediaFire to also try to gain a bit more mind share as well. |
Spotify Goes Over To The Dark Side With A New Makeover | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | has just released a serious redesign for its web, desktop, and iPhone apps that will come to other mobile platforms soon. It brings a simple, darker, dramatic look to the streaming music service. Spotify also added contextual playlists and began shifting users from starring songs to saving a library of any and everything they like to hear. The new look is based around a dark background, with a new typography as well. Media is front-and-center in the new layout, with big cover art across Discovery pages, as well as rounded out icons for artist pages. The redesign will reach Android and other operating systems soon, and is meant to highlight content above all else. The team first looked at the redesign with major over-arching principles, namely that content be highlighted, and that the Spotify brand stand out as authentic and simple. “We want your friend, peeking over your shoulder, to recognize Spotify open on your computer,” said director of product development Michelle Kadir. “And that means making sure the brand has a clear identity in the world, and looks and feels the same across any platform.” [gallery ids="981860,981862,981863,981864,981865,981866"] After building out prototypes with this vision in mind, the team went through numerous phases of research including in-person interviews with users, large-scale surveys, and even pushing a beta version of the redesign to a small group of users. All signs pointed to a darker background, “where the content can come forward and everything else can slip away,” said Kadir. “We like to use the metaphor of a movie theater, but it’s true with any type of art,” she said. “The best way to make the art pop is to put it against a dark background.” The team also introduced a couple new features alongside the redesign, including new tools for Your Music, as well as Browsing options. Now, when browsing, you will be able to click “save” next to any album, artist, or song and have that content saved under your account. This way you can go back and add it to a playlist later, rather than building something on the spot. Your Music could help Spotify solve one of its biggest problems: not knowing what to play. Until now, Spotify was focused around a search experience. Each time you opened it you had to think of a specific song, album, artist, or playlist to listen to, or fire up its radio. This decision making was exhausting, and there was no easy way to browse all the music you liked. For those with less music knowledge it was potentially a big hurdle to frequent use. Now Spotify functions more like the familiar iTunes interface, where you have a home base of all your favorite jams. Except instead of keeping a copy of the actual sound files, it’s a cloud-based collection. This is a big step up from the Starred playlist, which was just a rearrangable list of songs that couldn’t be sorted. You can dump whole artist catalogs, albums, or friends’ playlists into Your Music, and then sort it all any way you want. Spotify has also added new browsing functionality, with featured playlists. These are served up to the user based on the time of day and your location, not unlike what Songza does with Concierge, to deliver something that will fit your mood or activity. Overall, the redesign and Your Music feature make Spotify feel simultaneously more stylishly modern while more familiar and functional. Spotify has been making big moves this year. It raised a , and is rumored to be for later this year. To lure in more users, the company launched a , and has even knocked for college students. Most recently, Spotify acquired music intelligence backend The Echo Nest, which was powering recommendations and personalization for many of Spotify’s competitors. The purchase could accelerate Spotify’s platform plans, including SDKs that let users auth into third-party apps so they can . Now equipped with a fresh look, improved functionality, growth mechanics, and a budding app ecosystem, Spotify may have what it takes to take on the independents like Pandora, and platform-owning music juggernauts like Apple’s iTunes and Google Play Music. |
Bye, Bye Bootstrapping — Last-Minute Booking App Hot Hotels Raises $1M | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | In the idiosyncratic world of European startups, being bootstrapped can be both a badge of honour and a mark against your name, especially when you have a heavy-weight Silicon Valley competitor backed to the tune of . Enter , the Madrid-based last-minute hotel booking app and European competitor to HotelTonight, which is announcing its raised $1 million from Axon Partners Group — its first external investment since being founded in January 2012. Officially, the new funds are pegged for expansion into Latin America, for which Axon brings expertise, and to further consolidate what it claims is a leadership position in Europe. However, I’m also hearing that Hot Hotels has a platform play in development, something that would see the company expand beyond just being a consumer app, to also helping other travel apps get in on the last-minute hotel booking action. The move would be from HotelTonight, along with a plethora of other competitors such as . Like HotelTonight, Hot Hotels’ mobile apps offer a selection of last minute deals each day to help fill partner hotels’ inventory, while also passing on savings to customers. These span 43 countries and 257 cities in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Israel. Whereas the HotelTonight model is based on direct relationships with hotels, Hot Hotels operates a hybrid model that also sees it contract hotels via third parties — a model it believes scales better since it ties into existing technology platforms used by the hotel and travel industry, essentially redesigning the experience for mobile, and also enabling it to offer a larger inventory of deals compared to others in the last-minute mobile-only hotel booking space. In a statement, Conor O´Connor, CEO of Hot Hotels, comments: “With this investment by Axon, we now have the firepower to establish clear water between ourselves and our competitors in Europe. With the expertise of Axon’s investment team, as well as its global network of offices, Axon provides a base to accelerate our roll-out in fast growing Latin America.” |
Taiwan Fitness Startup iFit Raises $900K In Seed Funding | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | a Taiwanese fitness startup and online community (not to be confused with the fitness tracking app ), has raised $900,000 in seed funding from Cherubic Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage companies in Taiwan, China, and Silicon Valley. The company plans to use the funding to expand overseas and begin making branded products, including wearable tech devices. iFit’s goal is to become the “leading fitness community in Asia.” The size of iFit’s seed round is unique because there are relatively few early-stage venture capital investments in Taiwan. Its background also stands out because iFit started in 2012 as a . Since then, it has transitioned to a paid site with 500,000 members. More than 20,000 are based in Malaysia, where iFit says it acquired users through viral marketing and plans to set up an office by the end of this year. After Malaysia, the company wants to target Chinese speakers in Indonesia. Last year, iFit says its e-commerce business hit $2 million. Its goal for 2014 is to make $3.5 million in revenue and grow to two million registered members. Its marketing tactics include creating content about exercise and weight loss in the form of illustrated cartoons for members to share on their social networks.
iFit’s future growth strategy include a “multi-screen” experience with content for its site, mobile apps, fitness audio books, bi-monthly magazines, and fitness TV shows. It also plans to gameify its site so members can compete against each other. The company, which is run by married couple Alice Chen and Ming-Yuan Xie, already sells branded home fitness equipment and energy snacks targeted to women. The startup is currently working with fitness companies to create more branded products and seeking a wearable tech partner. In a statement, Chen and Xie said they had received offers from several VC firms: “We feel that Cherubic Ventures can provide us more than just capital, but also strategy and expertise that can steer us in the right direction and help us become a global company.” |
Sookasa Raises $5M Series A Round To Help Companies Safely Use Public Cloud Services | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | wants to help companies use popular cloud services like Dropbox and Gmail while at the same time transparently encrypting sensitive data to ensure that companies don’t run afoul with regulations like HIPAA and FERPA. The company today announced that it has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Accel Partners with participation from existing investors First Round Capital, SV Angel and other angel investors. It’s no secret that many IT organizations struggle with ensuring compliance while at the same time offering their users access to tools like Dropbox, Box and Gmail on multiple devices. Sookasa says it offers businesses “a self-service turnkey encryption and compliance solution that enables their employees to safely use their favorite mobile devices and cloud services.” The service ensures that files are always encrypted, no matter what device they are on and even when they are shared externally. Sookasa was founded in 2012 by . Asaf is now Sookasa’s CEO. The two were concerned that the files they shared were spread among multiple cloud services and devices and that there was no central way to manage them. “Unlike legacy security companies that protect infrastructure like networks or endpoints, Sookasa is laser-focused on protecting the content itself while preserving the user experience,” said Asaf. “Our Cloud Compliance Service is architected to operate across any cloud service, computer or mobile device.” The company’s first product, which is also launching today, is the Sookasa Cloud Compliance Service, which allows companies to control and audit files across cloud services, users and devices and encrypt them transparently. With this new funding round, Sameer Gandhi from Accel Partners joins Sookasa’s board of directors. In addition, Kirk Bowman, who formerly held executive positions at VMware and EqualLogic, joins as an independent board member. |
Bring Your Sexiest Gear To Hardware Alley At Disrupt NY | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Every year I’m given the best job a guy could ever want: planning hardware alley, a one day extravaganza of some of the best hardware I’ve ever seen. This event, which happens on the last day of Disrupt, is a crowd favorite and I’d love to feature your gear. What is Hardware Alley? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything from robotic drones to 3D printers. We try to bring in an eclectic mix of amazing exhibitors and I think you’ll agree that our previous We’d like you to register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get to exhibit on the last day of Disrupt NY, May 7, to show off your goods and get access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. We’d love to have you. All you need to demo is a laptop. TechCrunch provides you with: 30″ round cocktail table, linens, table top sign, inclusion in program agenda and website, exhibitor WiFi, and press list. You can reserve your spot by purchasing a . If you are Kickstarting your project now or bootstrapping, please contact me at john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “HARDWARE ALLEY.” I will do my best to accommodate you. Hope to see you in New York! |
The Armiga Project Aims To Resurrect The Meditating Guru | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WWPOYFEDl3I] If you have a bunch of old Amiga disks lying around, we may have an . Called the Armiga, this is a clever emulator with a 3.5-inch disk drive and Dual Core ARM CPU that runs like an old-timey . The team is looking for $140,000 and they’ve raised $9,600 so far. It has two USB ports and an HDMI port for showing your games on the big screen. The machine costs $199 for a standard unit in beige or black with a license for Kickstart 1.3. The Amiga was a Holy Grail machine for many, and that you can grab one for $199 right now and mess around with it is great. The team has also created an dual-boot Android system for the machine that lets you play modern games and other apps when you’re tired of playing Leander. One interesting thing? “Currently, Armiga does only read and dump unprotected/cracked games. Copy protection was quite an art in the times of the Amiga and it’s difficult to overcome. However, one of our funding goals is focused on this.” That’s right: the ghost of old DRM still haunts your copy of Disney Animation Studio. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kwqqoHLrcOg] |
Google X Product Designer And Video Star Mike LeBeau Joins Facebook As Product Manager | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Facebook might be positioning itself to build new features around voice navigation or voice-activated search into the social network, thanks to the hiring of Google product designer . While at Google and Google X, LeBeau worked as a Staff Software Engineer and Product Designer. LeBeau worked on a number of voice-related technologies, including iPhone Voice Search, the company’s acquisition of GrandCentral and its evolution into Google Voice, Google Maps for Mobile with Voice Search, and 1-800-GOOG-411. He was an early member of the Android team, working on voice search and navigation features for the operating system. And later, at Google X helped build the voice interface for Google Glass. Prior to Google, he worked at Tellme Networks, eBay, and PayPal. But you might best know LeBeau from his acting work in a large number of Google marketing videos, such as and . For all that, he’s . It’s not clear what LeBeau will be focused on at Facebook, but based on his past work it’s probably a safe bet that it will be voice-related. On LinkedIn, LeBeau writes that he is “starting and leading a super exciting new confidential project.” And on Facebook, he posted the following message to his friends last week: Big news! After nearly 8 amazing years at Google, I’m moving on! In a sort of last-minute whirlwind change, an opportunity that’s too good to resist has presented itself for a new project I’m crazy excited to go kick off and build a team as a Product Manager at Facebook in New York. I’ll miss Google so much, but it’s time for the next adventure and I’m super pumped to get started. I can’t even express how grateful I am to all the amazing people I’ve worked with these past 8 years for making my time at Google amazing. I’m bummed to be departing from the Google Creative Lab where I’ve been spending my time the past couple of months, but feel really fortunate to have spent at least a little time among this really special group of people. Please stay in touch! My last day at Google is tomorrow, March 28, and I start at Facebook on Monday. Here we go! For a look at the kind of fun bloopers he made while at Google, check out these 73 seconds of goodness: |
Activists Challenge SF’s Google Bus Program On Environmental Grounds | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | San Francisco city supervisors and affordable housing activists A handful of activist groups say that the new pilot program, which charges tech companies $1 per stop, must undergo environmental review. That would involve a lengthy legal process that could take months or years. The Board of Supervisors voted 8-2 against having the pilot program go under environmental review. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency had previously exempted the pilot program, which was passed back in January, from environmental review. The program is set to charge $1 per stop fee, in part because the city’s transportation agency wasn’t legally allowed to create a revenue-generating program. So the pilot program can only pay for its costs, which are expected to be $1.7 million. Richard Drury, a lawyer for the coalition of activist groups including SEIU 1021, the Housing Rights Committee, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club and The League of Pissed-Off Voters, said, “These are pirate shuttles.” “This is the opposite of school busing,” he added during testimony before the Board of Supervisors at City Hall. “We’re busing wealthy, predominantly white adults into low-income neighborhoods, where they in turns displace low-income people. This is the reverse of affirmative action.” Scott Wiener, a supervisor who represents parts of the Mission and the Castro neighborhoods, challenged Drury. He said that the issue wasn’t even about environmental impacts. The implication is that the suit is abusing California environmental law to halt or slow the process of gentrification happening in neighborhoods like the Mission. “This has to do with a political current, that involves a pretty significant set of assumptions that technology workers aren’t real San Franciscans,” Wiener said. “But as anybody who knows, quite a few of them have lived here for a very long time. Many of them used to drive and now take the shuttles.” found that there were just over 8,000 boardings per day on shuttles from companies including Google, Apple, Facebook, Genentech and Yahoo. That suggests that there are about four thousand tech workers using these shuttles every day. A separate study from a pair of UC Berkeley graduate students “Let’s just assume that for the sake of the argument that that entire percentage leaves SF. That’s about 1,000 of these workers leaving San Francisco and moving to the peninsula. Put that in the context of a population increase of 75,000 people [over the last 10 years],” Wiener said. Drury pointed to some other findings from that city study, that showed that the buses weigh around 60,000 pounds and cost the city more than $1 per mile in damage to road pavement. “We should minimize the impacts on the city, and maximize the benefits by charging the shuttles more than $1 to load 100 people when I have to pay $2 per ride for MUNI,” Drury said.
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Tesla Pays Telefonica Millions To Power In-Car Wireless In UK, Germany, Spain, Holland | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Those with a sharp eye who visited the Geneva motor show or who own a Model S in Europe may have already noticed a connection between Telefonica and Tesla by way of the “ ” signs on the sides of cars, or through the in-car navigation system that . Now the two are making it official: Telefonica says that it will be providing the wireless connectivity for Tesla cars across the UK, Germany, Netherlands and Spain, covering telematics and infotainment services. This is not the first carrier deal for Tesla in Europe; in November 2013 it announced a deal with for the carrier to power in-car systems in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Latvia. But Telefonica tells me it is likely the biggest in terms of geographical footprint and customers: Tesla paid Telefonica “millions” to seal the deal, a spokesperson tells me. It follows another, similar carrier deal Tesla in January of this year. In terms of how it will work for users, it is not unlike Amazon’s Kindle service: users get a wireless connection as part of their purchase of the item (in this case a car), without having to sign a separate contract for that connection. The service is powered by Jasper and will provide the Internet connectivity for various in-car “infotainment” and telematics, including navigation, streamed music, Internet browsing and remote vehicle diagnostics. For Telefonica, a deal with an aspirational brand that epitomizes forward-thinking innovation is a big win at a time when it continues to try to position itself not as a stuffy old carrier, but a forward-thinking technology company in its own right. It comes at a challenging time, about a month after Telefonica scrapped a standalone division called Telefonica Digital, reintegrating those services back into the main company. “As we accelerate our transformation into a digital telco we see lots of opportunities to empower consumers,” Jose Luis Gamo, CEO at Telefonica Multinational Solutions, said in a statement. “Connected cars that provide drivers with more information and a better and safer driving experience is a perfect example of this. Tesla is one of the world’s most forward thinking and exciting businesses. We share their passion for innovation and are thrilled to be working with them to deliver a superb connected in-car experience to Tesla drivers across Europe.” Connected cars are still a relatively small part of the bigger automotive picture — and Tesla even more niche — but their numbers are only growing at the moment. Telefonica estimates that connected cars account for 10 percent of all cars on the market, but that number will grow to 90 percent by 2020. |
WalkMe, A Guidance Platform For Confusing Sites, Raises Another $11M As It Tackles Enterprise | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | , a platform that provides visual cues for website visitors so that users can navigate around them more easily, has raised $11 million in funding to expand its business and building out its customer base among enterprises. The funding was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation also from existing investors Mangrove Capital Partners, Giza Venture Capital and Gemini Israel Ventures. As part of the investment, Rory O’Driscoll, Partner at Scale Venture Partners, will join the Board. has to date raised $17.5 million. When WalkMe — founded in Israel, relocated now to San Francisco — first , and even as it picked up , it was positioned as a service mainly aimed at consumer sites. WalkMe’s CEO Dan Adika says the shift to focusing on business users came somewhat organically. “As we were talking with customers, it became evident that the markets where brings a lot of business value to is with enterprise companies and large organizations, in a wide variety of industries, specifically for training employees, helping business partners through the partner portal, and increasing the ease of adoption of new software or major software upgrades,” he told me. There is also an issue of cost savings. “In a business enterprise environment, even simple applications can be very costly when you factor in errors, training and the productivity loss that is often a result,” he said. The move to enterprise users has also seen WalkMe expand its product offering to fit more of the needs of the new target audience. They include engagement optimization, contextual promotions, advanced cross-selling capabilities, and advanced analytics. So far, the results have been encouraging. In the past 12 months, WalkMe says it has seen a five-fold increase in revenues since starting to target enterprises, with customers including Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Citrix, Stanley Black&Decker, US Foods, Bank of Montreal and Kimberly-Clark. He says that currently, about 60% of WalkMe’s business is larger customer-facing websites (such as banks & financial services, SaaS vendors and Telcos), while 40% are enterprises that use for internal training on business software or operations streamlining. Going forward, I asked Dan if WalkMe might ever look to expand the kinds of services that it offers to guide users on sites — in a world where PCs (and physical keyboards) are becoming less common, would WalkMe ever, for example, integrate voice response? No is the answer for now. “We actually feel that this is less practical because we have to aim at the largest common core of people,” says Adika. “The beauty in our walk through technology is that the idea is to use it while you work. Working in a more public space, or in case you don’t have speakers, or trying to concentrate on a task while a voice is telling you instructions, could actually be disruptive to the work flow.” What we may see more immediately, he says, are more nuanced ways of presenting cues to employees or other site visitors based on individual demands. |
Apple Continues To Flesh Out iWork Apps After Aggressively Culling Features | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Apple has updated its iWork apps for iOS, Mac and iCloud beta with a bunch of improvements and additional sharing options today. There are a bunch of new features but one of the nicer ones is the addition of ‘read-only’ sharing of iWork documents. Today’s update is pretty big, with changes rolling out to iOS, Mac and iCloud beta versions of Apple’s iWork apps in short succession. The additional features are certainly welcome, but there’s something to be gleaned here regarding Apple’s product design and development philosophy that gets lost in the shuffle quite a bit. You may recall that when Apple of iWork for iOS and Mac last year they took a lot of flack for slicing the feature set down dramatically. Shortly after the release, I tried to . Apple felt it needed to reset the clock on iWork in order to build in cross-platform compatibility at a basic level and to get them out the door with the new iOS redesign in mind. I explained that it would then begin to build the features out again and would not abandon those who used iWork for…well…work. That turned out to be accurate, as Apple essentially announced plans to start adding features back just a . Since several updates that add many features, including AppleScript support, back to iWork. Anyhow, you may not like it — and many people really didn’t like iWork getting its minimalist hatchet job — but it’s the way Apple works: small teams shipping what works rather than every feature ever planned and, sometimes, pissing people off in order to build what they will be a better product in the end. Of course, all of these updates come just days after , and Apple’s competing apps are completely free to use. The $99 subscription fee appears to be appealing to many Office users, as the apps have climbed onto the top grossing charts as well as the top free charts. So there has to be some acknowledgement of one-upsmanship by Apple’s iWork team here. Still, whether someone buys an iPad and uses Pages for iPad, or buys an iPad and uses Word for iPad, Apple still sells an iPad — so it’s probably pretty happy either way. Some of the highlights are listed below, but you can see all of the new stuff on Apple’s . |
Thanks To A Grant From Montana, Submittable Has Now Raised $1M+ For Submission Management | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | When Y Combinator-backed startup in 2012, the company said it had raised $450,000 in funding. Submittable has continued raising since then, and with a recent $100,000 grant from the state of Montana, the total is now more than $1 million. Compared to some of the other fundings we cover here at TechCrunch, that might not seem enormously impressive, but keep in mind that Submittable isn’t based in Silicon Valley or New York or Los Angeles. Instead, it was founded and remains headquartered in Missoula, Montana, and according to co-founder Michael FitzGerald, it’s profitable. The source of its most recent funding is unusual, too — FitzGerald said it comes from of money from the coal industry, which is supposed to create tech jobs and keep them in Montana. Submittable’s goal is to make it easy for publications and other businesses to receive, track, and manage submissions. Many of its earliest customers were literary magazines (FitzGerald is ), but the company’s ambitions are broader than that, with new clients including CBS, Simon & Schuster, and the NCAA. (We’ve also used Submittable to manage some of our guest column submissions at TechCrunch.) The company last fall, which (among other things) allowed customers to publish Submittable content directly to their site and to build their own interfaces. And it in January. The ultimate vision, FitzGerald said, is to become “the on-board ramp for all content and media in all organizations.” |
TC Cribs: Chairish HQ, A Former Whiskey Distillery Turned Home Decor Hotspot | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Welcome back to , the TechCrunch TV show that gives you an inside look at the offices of the tech industry’s hottest companies. This time, we visited the San Francisco headquarters of , the online marketplace where people can buy and sell pre-owned home furniture. Chairish has a big focus on design, so it makes sense that the company is located in the art- and design-oriented Jackson Square neighborhood of San Francisco. Walking into Jackson Square always feels like a trip — either back in time, or to the cobblestone streets of Manhattan or Europe. It’s an area with tree-lined streets and little alleys that are full of history and packed with unique shops, design houses, cafes, and restaurants. It turns out that Chairish’s HQ comes with some history of its own. It’s housed in the , a former whiskey distillery that’s famous for being one of the only surviving buildings after a massive earthquake and fire ravaged San Francisco in 1906. Seems to me that’s a spot with some good luck in its bones. Watch the video embedded above to see the charmed space that Chairish calls home. |
Weedmaps Spends Some Of Its $30M To Legalize Pot In NYC | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | To put it bluntly, is no joke. The Yelp of marijuana dispensaries has grown to $30 million in yearly revenue, and now it’s saying “High, NYC” with a Times Square jumbotron campaign to legalize pot. For the next 60 days, an 8-second Weedmaps ad will blaze across the CBS Super Screen pointing New Yorkers to a . *420, advocate it* Weedmaps sprouted back in 2008 to help people find where to buy legal cheeba. Not only does it sniff out what to smoke, but by promoting pricing transparency, it creates competition that burns down the cost per eighth for consumers. Since then it was bought by a public company, which helped it and dispensary point-of-sale system in a series of acquisitions. But after bogarting it for two years, General Cannabis Inc (renamed SearchCore by a bunch of squares) passed Weedmaps back to its original founders.
With nuggets now legal in Colorado and Washington, and chill about enchanted broccoli for medical use, Weedmaps’ business is blossoming. It charges thousands of sinsimilla shops and dank delivery services to list their reviews. MMJmenu supports 900 dispensaries, and ganja Groupon clone Weedmaps Deals is pulling in about $250,000 a month. Soon it plans to pack head shops, hydroponic stores, vaporizers and more into Weedmaps.com Today it’s aiming to bake its name into people’s brains in new markets like New York, where medicinal marijuana is expected to get the green light in 2014 and recreational pot could be legalized in a few years. “The fewer people suffering under marijuana prohibition the better,” co-founder and CEO Justin Hartfield tells me. “We wanted to educate New Yorkers and get our brand out their proactively. This is the first time Weedmaps has marketed to the mainstream.” The ads light the way to resource site , which who oppose it. Like a digitized version of that bloodshot-eyed pot enthusiast you knew in high school, the page also pushes a for pot law reform, a goofy guide to the best local smoke spots and links to educational articles about Reefer Madness. If pot law reform gives you a rush, check out Marijuana Majority, a site aimed at galvanizing . Some worry their friendly neighborhood dealer will see their livelihoods turned to ashes wherever weed becomes legal. That’s not just paranoia, says Hartfield. “It’s going to be corporatized, professionalized, and the amateur players are going to be pushed out.” Still, legalization will keep people out of a criminal justice system that burns taxpayer dollars, create huge new business opportunities, and make weed safer. For example, there’s a new high-tech way to smoke known as “dabs.” Incredibly potent butane hash oil with a much higher THC content than marijuana is dabbed onto a titanium nail heated with a blowtorch to produce smoke. The problem is that making dabs in secret due to prohibition is dangerous. It requires running liquid butane over marijuana to extract the psychoactive elements. Without regulated safety precautions, have occurred. And if butane isn’t fully boiled out of the hash oil before it’s smoked, it can be hazardous. So while Weedmaps has much to gain financially from legalization, it’s also trying to make the world a safer place for stoners.
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Twitter Now Lets You Easily Search For Tweets By Date Range | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Quick! What were people tweeting about April Fool’s day? Up until now, this was actually kind of a hard thing to answer. Even in Twitter’s page, there was no obvious way to limit your search by a specific date range. Now The weird part? You actually do this before. It was just kind of a pain, and not at all user friendly. You had to be quite familiar with the way Twitter search works — enough to know that it supported “since:” and “until:” operators that you could manually add to your search. Given that the #2 thing that Google autosuggests for “search Twitter by…” is “search Twitter by date”, it’s probably safe to say this wasn’t easy enough. This may seem trivial — but next time you’re having trouble finding that one damned tweet you just was posted around Christmas of 2012, you’ll be glad you know this. |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 8 | null |
SoFi Raising New Cash To Help Ease Students’ $1 Trillion Debt Burden | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Student lending service is close to securing a new round of as much as $75 million, according to two investors familiar with the company’s plans. The San Francisco-based company is one of a of and backed by venture investors that are looking to help debtors better manage the almost $1.2 trillion in student loan obligations currently breaking the financial backs of America’s graduates. Social Finance, which does business as SoFi, has already raised $77 million in its last round of venture funding back in 2012 from investors, including the Chinese social networking service , , and . According to the investors, SoFi will close on a new round with commitments totaling somewhere between $50 million and $75 million. The company’s public relations firm did not respond to a request for comment for this article. The company was founded by Mike Cagney, a former head of prop trading at Wells Fargo, and raised its initial financing in 2011 — a $4 million Series A funding with participation from Baseline Ventures and Innovation Endeavors, according to CrunchBase. In addition to its equity haul, SoFi has been an adept borrower in credit markets, which closed in December 2013. The reason why the company is so good at tapping both equity and debt lenders is because of how SoFi vets its borrowers. The company lends to students from schools with low default rates and refinances those students at rates that are more commensurate with their credit risk, . The profile of a typical borrower is a 28-31 year old, with an average annual salary higher of $125,000, and an average FICO of 740. (These kids are basically a lenders’ dream.) It’s no wonder that the company can undercut rates offered by existing student loan programs, because it’s got its pick of a prime pool of borrowers rather than needing to lend to every student in the country. SoFi offers fixed-rate loans at five-year rates of 4.99 percent to 5.99 percent, a 10-year fixed rate loan has a 5.49 percent to 6.375 percent APR, and a 15-year fixed rate loan has a rate of 5,99 percent to 6.74 percent APR. A Federal Direct Stafford loan is at least 6.8 percent and a Direct PLUS loan was around 7.9 percent in 2012, by comparison. SoFi currently has $400 million of loans outstanding, with 4,500 borrowers, published earlier this year, and it’s on track to lend over $1 billion by the end of the year by adding another 10,000 borrowers. A slew of companies, including and , are offering tools to help students get out from under the debt burden, but no one seems to have amassed the capital that SoFi is bringing to the market.
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Apple’s iAd Workbench Now Open To Everyone With An Apple ID, Adds New Features | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Apple is opening the door to its iAd program today, specifically to iAd Workbench, its ad creation and management tool. When the company first last year, it was aimed at developers who wanted to advertise their apps. With today’s changes, the company is hoping to bring on a broader range of advertisers. For one thing, anyone with an Apple ID can now log in, rather than just those who have iOS developer accounts. In addition, instead of just ending the ad by asking users to tap to download the app, advertisers can play a 30-to-60-second video, drive users to their websites, and promote iTunes content. And the ads are no longer purely cost-per-click, but can be priced based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions), as well. In other words, it’s all about serving different kinds of advertisers and use cases. With Workbench, Apple says advertisers can create, price and target their campaigns, which will then go up in 24 to 48 hours. When iAd first launched, it was pitched as a way for big brands to work closely with Apple to advertise on mobile (specifically iOS), but . The Workbench seemed to be a tacit acknowledgment that the initial strategy hadn’t paid off, or at least that iAd was going to have to go broader. Today’s expansion suggests that Apple sees a bigger opportunity in this self-serve approach. Interested advertisers can . |
Tickets Are Now Available For The Disrupt NY 14 Hackathon | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | The Disrupt NY Hackathon is a month away and the first round of tickets . It’s free to register and attend our 24 hour hackathon. Designers and developers are both welcome. It’s a grand time. Space is very limited and the tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. More tickets will be released in coming weeks. As the show draws closer, the APIs and judges will also be announced. But snag a ticket now. This is the best Hackathon in New York City all year. The Manhattan Center will be filled with nerds, caffeinated goodies and plenty of flying darts thanks to Nerf. There are many ways for companies to partner with the Hackathon. At Disrupt NY, we’ve had sponsored API platforms for hackers to develop on, as well as several contests, with companies offering cash and in-kind prizes. To learn how you can provide support for the developer community, please contact sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com. 12:30pm – Registration opens (come fed or bring a brown bag lunch, beverages served)
Dedicated area for people to network to form hack teams 1:30pm – Hacking Kickoff 2:00 – 9:00pm – API workshops scheduled in 30 minute intervals (To Be Announced) 7:00pm – Dinner Midnight – Food and snacks, courtesy of our many sponsors
7:00am – Breakfast served 9:30am – Hacking concludes and hacks submitted to wiki 10:00am – General public welcome to enter to attend hackathon presentations 11:00am – Hackathon presentations begin 2:00pm* – Hackathon will conclude with final awards and recognitions will be provided by the judges. *The final awards may be held earlier or later depending on the duration of hack presentations. Please note, times are subject to change For up-to-the-minute details on Twitter, follow @hackdisrupt For day-of questions or details, stay tuned… |
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