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Quest.li: If Life Is A Game, This Is How You Play It | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the audience winner was . It’s a mobile application that turns real life goals into a game. Founder Danil Kozyatnikov traveled from Siberia to present. In the game you create different goals that earn you points. For example, Kozyatnikov said that he created a game to make it to TechCrunch Disrupt. Along the way, he had different goals to get Quest.li ready that he had to hit. He did, and that’s why he’s here. Users create their own tasks, but Kozyatnikov says that eventually he envisions others paying to opt-in to other quests. The winner would take some money in return. He said that when people compare Quest.li to Foursquare, he doesn’t really understand it. They’re different. They want to apply gaming mechanics to the everyday world, but it hasn’t been done in the right way at all, he said. “I wanted to build a company that would change the world,” Kozyatnikov continued. He has a team of five back in Russia creating the game. They’ve raised $225,000 so far.
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YC-Backed B2Brev Aims To Be The Yelp For B2B Services | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | Y Combinator startup wants to help small to medium sized businesses figure out which products and services to use, by serving as a venue for aggregated reviews. Starting out by dipping its toe into the daily deals vertical, B2Brev has aggregated over 2500 merchant reviews for daily deals sites, with 2000 from Groupon and LivingSocial alone. In the same space as ChoiceVendor (which was acquired by LinkedIn) and , co-founders and liken B2Brev to workplace review site Glassdoor, where small businesses submit reviews of services in order to gain access to other reviews. Using this model, B2Brev managed to accumulate 160K words worth of reviews with their daily deals initiative. B2Brev tells me that they eventually want to expand to other verticals like reservation systems. “I don’t think there’s any single site where small businesses can find information about any of the products or services that they’ve used,” says co-founder Moon. “There’s been an uptick in entrepreneurship not just in the tech worlds… but in many other industries, and we just want to make it easier for them to do their business. ” In its initial survey of merchants who had used a daily deal, B2Brev has unearthed valuable data about Groupon and LivingSocial’s return. Despite a run of negative press pre-IPO, survey results for Groupon and LivingSocial are optimistic, showing that 3 out of 4 merchants are willing to try another daily deal after running one initially. Co-founders Chu and Moon also discovered that the percentages of businesses who would return to a daily deals model varied between different types of businesses, with health and entertainment services like personal trainers experiencing the best results from Daily Deals sites and food and drinks merchants restaurants experiencing the lowest numbers of people saying they’d like to re-run a deal. B2Brev eventually plans on monetizing from lead generation, i.e. taking an affiliate fee for connecting businesses who want products and services with other businesses who provide products and services. For the time being they are selling research reports at $10K apiece, starting with the 70+ page “Daily Deals: The Merchant Perspective” (table of contents, below). [scribd id=64700723 key=key-w67vksmil6e6vo4rj7d mode=list] |
Idle Games Wants To Be The Pixar Of Social Gaming; In Their First Game, You Play God | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | If you were into PC gaming in the early 2000s, you know what is. Peter Molyneux’s 2001 classic published by EA gave every gamer the role they wanted: God. A new startup is aiming to bring that style of game into the social space. And more broadly, they aim to be the “Pixar of casual games”. is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt. Their first title is Idle Worship, a Black & White-esque game for Facebook. You play the role of a god, controlling villagers on an island to do certain tasks for you. While that may sound ominous, you can choose to be either good or bad in your actions. And overall, the game is light-hearted and fun. We’ve been playing with a beta version of the game for a few weeks; it’s solid. This first title by Idle Games, a startup founded by (a co-founder of Playdom) and , aims to disrupt the casual gaming market by being an “anti-Zynga” of sorts. They believe social gaming is more about entertainment, interaction, and quality — not just button-mashing or mindless clicking. In many ways, they’re also going after the MMO market too. While the games will start on Facebook, you can imagine that they could quickly spread to other platforms as well. Like other casual games and MMOs, the emphasis for the business will be on virtual goods. But again, the Idle Games team is determined to create goods of the utmost quality so that users feel compelled to buy them and happy when they do. In this regard, Idle Games’ mission sounds a bit similar to that of Tiny Speck, makers of the . The Idle Games team also has a number of pending patents surrounding their particular style of social gameplay, they note. One key is their use of synchronous gameplay (as opposed to other games which typically are asynchronous). You can play alongside other “Gods” in the game, visit their islands, etc. Inside Social Games did back in April. “The game must be your wingman and break the ice for you,” Hyman said on stage today, explaining why Idle Worship creates better gaming connections than other endeavors out there. All told, Idle Worship took the team of about 50 around two years to build. Again, the focus is on quality. They’ve raised roughly $9 million in funding so far. JL: Why this game? There are a ton out there. A: We think it’s like the entertainment industry. It is a hits-driven business, we’re putting the emphasis on quality. It’s a bit like capturing lightning in a bottle, but we’re leveraging the social graph in unique ways. We think this is the first true social game on Facbeook. MM: Is this launched? A: In a few countries so far. MM: What about use engagement? A: The initial metrics are blowing away the norms. Over 50 percent are returning after week one. JF: Can you compare this to Zynga? A: Absolutely. I don’t know if you read last Friday’s WSJ, but it says on the front page, Zynga is an analytics company masking as a game company. We’re an entertainment and games company. Zynga is a black and white television. Everyone wants it until the color television comes out. That’s us. We care about the entertainment experience. AU: Your game looks engaging I want to play it. Tell me about the patents. A: We’ve invest two solid years of engineering to do the tech here. We have five patents filed for this stuff. Rendering engine, etc.
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“Google’s Auto Correct Killed The Launch Of Our Android App” | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | We’ve all dealt with the frustrations of auto-correct, from unintentionally declaring that you’re to having your bitter, angry diatribe suddenly mutate into something involving a lot of “ducking”. Fortunately, these unwanted auto-corrections are generally little more than inconveniences. You laugh a little, backpedal as fast as possible ( ), and move on. For one Dallas start-up, though, a rather sneaky autocorrect issue is the cause of all of the ultimate discoverability issue: no one can find their new app. A few weeks back, Locai launched an iPhone app. Intended as something along the lines of Foursquare with a heavier focus on conversations, it found a reasonable amount of success — at least, enough that they were encouraged to launch an Android port. And that’s where things got sticky. Locai launched their Android app… but even days later, it was no where to be found in the Android Market. After some investigation, Locai found the issue: somewhere on the backend, Google’s Android Market is autocorrecting all searches for “Locai” to “Local” without alerting the user. As a result, would-be Android users just can’t seem to find the app. “Since everyone downloads apps by searching for them first this is a huge blow to us,” said Taylor Cavanah Locai’s founder. “We have brands and businesses lined up for a whole series of partnerships, events and promotions over the next several months. Now we’re facing losing a ton of users and investment as people are converted to download the app, but can’t find it.” If you’ve got an Android device, you can run the search for yourself; even 500 items deep, Locai is no where to be found in a search for their own name. No Android device handy? You can test the search on the web-based Android market . Of course, there are tricks to force the Android Market to search for verbatim terms (searching for “Locai” [in quotes] or +Locai, for example) — but is this something that most users would ever even think to try? Now, a week after launch and with downloads flatlined, Locai is stuck in a bit of a corner: do they change their name (thereby abandoning whatever progress with the brand they’ve made so far), or do they just sit back and hope Google is willing to implement a fix (like prioritizing exact matches before showing autocorrect results)? Meanwhile, anyone who actually looking for Locai for Android |
Amen Aims To Find The Best Of Everything With A Smart Interface | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | It’s been a long time since we were delighted and even slightly bemused by the utterly stripped down simplicity of Twitter. And let’s face it, there have been many pretenders to that simplistic interface crown since then. But Amen appears to have come up with a mellifluous new take on a mobile service which is tantalisingly simple, but designed to create masses amounts of data about things people like. Put simply, Amen is about finding the best of everything, often via arguments over the worst. To get the app go to in your Safari on the iPhone, sign up and download it OverTheAir. There are about 2,000 sign ups for Techcrunch Disrupt. Here’s how it works. You fire up the app on the iPhone or web browser and say a person, place or thing is “the best” or “the worst” ever, like like, the Best Dubstep track ever. Or perhaps, as actress (a beta user) , “After Sex is the Best State For Amening Ever.” Hubbie Ashton Kutcher – an investor – “Led Zeppelin is the best rock band ever.” You can agree with this statement with an “Amen”. But with a “Hell no” you have to suggest an alternative answer. It’s a rigid structure, but you can post whatever you want. Leaving aside reading between the lines of Demi’s post (as tempting as it is) the creation of the simple “Amen” or “Hell No” mechanic means Amen can create lots of definitive data about something. For instance, right now Amen says “The Best Place for Mexican Food in . Of course, you might disagree… The location of any Amen statement is also built into the app, meaning Amen will start to tell you the best things around you. But more interesting than that, it generates a feed from users who see lots of potentially divisive statements from their friends. This is when the gaming element kicks in because you can weigh in and vehemently disagree with a person. This not just a Dilike button – you can only disagree, typing “hell no” – by suggesting a replacement to the post. That means Amen gets continually more finessed data each time. Crucially, each statement is a data point. So where as Twitter and its thousands of third party developers have had to apply tortuous natural language algorithms to the firehose in order to work out what the hell is going on, Amen has all this data and structure pre-built in to its system. It’s like one big brawl to find the best stuff, but this time with rules so simple you don’ even notice them. So the whole system is built from the ground up to bubble-up the best of everything in the world. Founderr Felix says users of the closed beta have been posting about TV shows, of coffee houses, The worst airline, the best position for sex. Literally everything. In addition people use it to create a kind of status update which their friends can agree or disagree with, e.g. “This bar is the best place for meeting Mike.” Then again it might be something more nuanced, such as… Or more inside baseball: Or more gamed: The startup has been in closed private beta for the last month and now has 3,500 users, generating quite a lot of engagement. In one month those users created 30,000 statements, created 15,500 score cards and clicked the Amen button 80,000 times. An unintended use is using is as a Q&A platform, and then finding the thing you were after, like asking “Who is the best Dentist in Berlin” and people disputing that and entering their suggestion. People have also been talking about everything from brand to what the best jokes are, to the best playlists. Of course, it’s the brands element to this that has a lot of potential. Brands can get feedback on what people are saying about them, definitely, in realtime and to a high level of accuracy because it’s all structured data. This is much harder in Twitter because there is no structured data to mine, just people random words. Plus, Amen is de-duping all the words and lists, so there is no duplication, no fat in the system. And because its starts suggesting things to you, it can start to predict what you are planning to type. The same goes for location where the Amen iPhone might already know you are in a particular bar. Lists don’t just generate one answer – there is a long tail of answers after the top result. So they get the head and the long tail of results. Even an answer with only two votes will still appear in the system. Yes, the best movie ever made bay end up (it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Amen’s game plan is engagement first, and get big. Then to enable discovery and utility. Monetisation comes afterwards and could consist of ad buys within the lists, like AdWords. The startup has raised a Seed funding from Index Ventures and Kutcher. The team itself is sterling. CEO and Founder Felix Petersen formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. There is also Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared), and Florian Weber, engineer ). But finally, here is a problem. In theory Amen could be copyable, assuming someone can think out how to structure this data. It’s barrier to entry might therefore be lower. But then, how many startups already have Demi Moore as a private – poised to be public – beta user?
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Take YouTube, Add The Gong Show, Get YouNow | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | There is a lot of junk on YouTube. But there are also a ton of undiscovered gems. Imagine if you could have a hand in surfacing the best stuff. And imagine how much more exciting that would be if you could do it live. That’s the basic premise of , a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt. An easier way to think about it may be as YouTube/Justin.tv mixed with The Gong Show. Or if you’re under 30, maybe think of it as Turntable.fm for live video. Participants go live with either a musical performance or a talk and they’re voted on in realtime. Thumbs-up votes buys the person more time, thumbs-down means they’ll soon be shoved off the stage. The YouNow team calls this social television. It’s certainly not television quality, but in many ways it’s more interesting. It’s a living, breathing form of entertainment in which the whole world can vote on what to watch. Using it for just a few minutes, I’ve already found two people I would consider to be genuinely talented, and three people who are clearly crazy. Fun times. Of course, they’ll have to worry about the “Chatroulette” issue — that is, people exposing their genitals or being otherwise inappropriate. But the good news is that the voting scheme will quickly get rid of those types of users. The cool thing about YouNow is that it will get much better as it grows. Imagine hundreds of thousands or even millions of people watching a performance and voting. It could be a realtime American Idol on the web. Better, scale will allowed talented performers to get paid — there’s a tipping mechanism built into YouNow. And performances can be streamed live from the web a mobile device. So users can really play the game anywhere they go. The mobile apps should be ready in a couple of weeks. The service has raised $1 million so far from Union Square Ventures and Founders Collective.
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HouseFix: Bringing Social Recommendations & Accountability To Home Improvement | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | If you’re planning to get work done on your house in the near future, you’ll probably be interested in , one of the latest companies to launch this afternoon at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield. The goal of the service is to the take offline social recommendations — in other words, the advice friends and neighbors often give each other about improving their houses — and bring them online. It’s also looking to become a comprehensive directory of contractors, complete with reviews and profiles of each. And, finally, it wants to help contractors keep track of their own projects and create an online presence. After logging into the site, you’ll be able to see which of your neighbors are also users, and the contractors they’ve recently used on their own projects. To help you choose one, the site generates a score for each contractor — the idea is to help users compare contractors using a single score (the company says it’s analogous to the credit score used by banks, in that multiple factors a boiled down to a single number). On the contractor-facing portion of the site, professionals can manage their jobs, viewing which ones are on time and within the quoted budget. They can also store their notes and before and after photos. The site also addresses another issue that commonly faces contractors: in this era of Googling for everything, it’s essential for these professionals to have online presences. HouseFix helps them build one very quickly. The site is currently available for free, with plans to offer a freemium model down the line. [youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBx5fT2vUI’] Brad Garlinghouse: How do you charge?
A: We envision a subscription revenue model, we’re currently free. Wendy Lea: How is this different from Service Magic? A: ServiceMagic helps contractors, it charges contractors for the leads it brings them. There’s very little contexual info to learn from — you get 3 phone numbers. When I’m getting work done on my house I want to find a contractor who has worked on a home that’s similar to mine, in my neighborhood. Context is important. Also, contractors we spoke to as part of building the product told us they weren’t getting their needs met — and oftentimes homeowners wind up getting 10 phone calls from contractors, to the point they stop picking up the phone. Stephen Messer: It’s a huge, fragmented market with no accountability.If you can bring both listing and accountability, and allow them to create value, I think you’ve hit on a big market. A: Frankly we didn’t originally intend to start a company, we bought a house and were frustrated by the whole experience. Something like this should have existed already.
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Openbucks: Buy Digital Goods Online With Subway Giftcards (And More) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | It’s sort of ridiculous how huge gift card programs are — Americans spend some $100 billion on them each year, and they’re now offered by myriad physical stores and online companies (like Zynga) alike. One reason why they’re so popular is that they give people who can’t get credit cards — like, say, millions of teenagers — a way to purchase goods online. Thing is, gift cards tend to be pretty restrictive, as they generally can only be used at one chain. , a startup that’s launching at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, is looking to change this: they’re creating what they’re calling a ‘universal payment network’, that lets you use gift cards to buy goods and services online — in other words, you could use your Subway gift card to rent a movie, or buy some virtual goods. To do this, the company is partnering with brands — they have six to start, including Subway, CVS, Circle K, Sports Authority, Hess and CITGO. If you buy one of these gift cards and head online to a supported site, you can use the card to purchase digital goods. You can spend whatever value was stored on the card — there’s no exchange rate that depends on where you bought it. You enter the number on your gift card, hit submit, and you’ll get a receipt for the transaction, just like if you had used a credit card. The difference, of course, is that it isn’t a credit card — it’s a gift card that any one can buy with cash at one of the supported retailers. Retailers benefit because of increased foot traffic (teens will head over to Subway or CVS to buy gift cards so that they can buy things online), and online services will boost the number of users they’re receiving money from. Right now a variety of gaming companies, like Mochi, Gaia Online, and BigPoint, are accepting these cards as payment, and the company plans to extend this to more digital goods in near future. [youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U0EMWy105E’] TC: Not sure I get the why. Why do I use my Subway card, why would I get one to pay for games online?
A: Vast majority of US teenagers can’t buy online easily. They have to ask permission, and we want to bring freedom by offering a card that isn’t issued by a bank — anyone can walk into a store and pick a card. BG: Two huge thumbs up, I would invest.
SM: There’s something so simple and genius about it. An anonymous way to pay for whatever they want. I worry about hard goods, might have threft or fraud.
A: These cards are like cash, there isn’t a risk of fraud
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Shaker Aims To Turn Facebook Into A Night On The Town — Complete With (Virtual) Drinks | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | Facebook is the social network. But it’s still not really all that social. Yes, you chat here and “like” things there. But it’s not the same as going out to a bar with a group of friends. , a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, aims to turn Facebook into that bar. The easiest way to think about it is as a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar. Your pictures are placed on an actual (well, virtual) wall. You can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear. And you interact with other Facebook users as avatars. You can even buy people drinks. Shaker is a fun, interesting way to socialize on Facebook without feeling confined to the more static and flat elements of the service. Shaker’s idea is that if you can make Facebook itself more like a bar, real social interaction will happen more naturally. It’s one thing to chat with your friends on Facebook, but it’s extremely hard to try to meet new people. That’s what Shaker is hoping to enable. They do this by using color codes to show you not only your connections on Facebook, but also friends of friends. These are people you may not know, but you have at least one thing in common with — a mutual friend. Shaker also looks at profile information to show what else you may have in common with seemingly random people in the room. For example, you may have the same birthday as someone. Or you may both like the same band. Etc. Another elements include proximity based chat, a Tweet wall, and a “smart phone” social discovery tool to look up information about people in the room. The team has been alpha testing a version of the Shaker app in their homebase of Tel Aviv, Israel. The response has been extremely viral so far, the team says. So much so, that they had to shut it down to stop word from getting out too much before Disrupt. As a part of the Disrupt launch, they’ve created a special TC Disrupt-themed room for attendees to hang out in . Shaker has raised about $3 million in funding so far. AU: There are some interesting concepts here, to make social more fun and richer. But users only have so much time. What are you competing with for time? A: The time we’re competing with is the time you spend anyway on Facebook. That time is huge — almost 2 hours a day for young people. We’ll make it more fun and casual. JF: Love the demo. But synchronous model is hard. Asynchronous as well? A: We did bet on synchronous. It’s a big bet, but it’s one we’re making. JF: What’s ratio of registered users to simulataneous? A: We had to block the invitations, it was going viral. We were at 80,000 MAUs after blocking invitations. People complaining that the bars are too crowded. JL: It reminds me of casual Second Life. But it doesn’t have the gaining users problem. And it gives them something to do. MM: I like what you’re doing to figure out what you have in common with other users. But what are you doing more than making it about inviting other people? A: The location system isn’t yet built-in. But we’re using algorithms to bring together people who will be relevant to you.
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Everpix: All Your Photos, Automatically Organized And Accessible From Anywhere | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | TechCrunch Disrupt finalist is a new service that automatically organizes and combines all your photo libraries into an elegant interface, whether they’re stored on the desktop or in the cloud. It supports traditional desktop software programs, like Adobe Lightroom, Aperture and iPhoto, for example, as well as online services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram. It will soon be able to automatically upload photos from all your mobile devices, too. And it even supports integration with Gmail. Everpix runs as a little utility on your computer (Mac-only for now), fetching the photos from online services and local galleries. You can configure which folders it should monitor, so it won’t import all the photos on your hard drive, and the online services you use. With the Gmail integration, Everpix discovers the photos sent you via email and organizes them along with the others. In a later release, IMAP support will be added to support other email programs. After the photos are imported, uses a feature called “assistive curating” to create attractively laid-out album groupings called “Moments.” These are similar to iPhoto’s “Events,” but are built for you automatically, which saves you from the hassle of album creation and organization. Not surprisingly, you can see an Apple-like design aesthetic here, given that two of Everpix’s Co-founders, and , each spent several years with the company. Meanwhile, the third Co-founder, , was previously at . The service can also detect bad photos, like those that are blurry, out of focus, or under or overexposed. These photos are automatically hidden from view, but you can choose to unhide them, if desired. By default, all photos on Web interface are private, but you can make a collection public with just one click, or you can simply click which photos in a collection you want to share. Everpix includes a social component, too, allowing you to connect with other users, like family members for example, so you can immediately see their new photos without any need for them to first organize them, email them, or upload them to a service like Facebook. The best part about , however, may be it’s “set it and forget it” nature. After the one-time installation and configuration, there’s nothing else you have to do. You can continue to work with your photos as you would normally, saving them to your same folders, uploading the ones you want to share to the services you prefer, etc. But when you want to refer back to your photo collection, Everpix is there, with every photo you ever took in one central interface, available on the Web or, soon, on mobile. Everpix will launch first for Mac and iOS, with support for online services limited to Facebook and Gmail initially. Windows and Android versions are in the works. The company’s business model will be freemium, but the pricing structure has not yet been determined. The company, which was founded under the name “ ,” is currently in the process of raising seed funding from and other unnamed angel investors. You can sign up to participate in the private alpha on . 100 people, chosen at random, will be invited to join the early tests. Expert Judges: (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), (Asana), (MPi Capital), (Jig) DM: Looks beautiful, but rubbed the wrong way by name “Everpix.” Also, I’m Path investor. Not entirely original. What’s the longer term vision? A: We want to build something where you get a bunch of photos and we extract the best ones. JS: It’s 2011, but there’s yet to be a photo-sharing service with returns investors would look for. How to be something we need? Do people care about long-term photo storage? A: So many people use email for photo-sharing. But we grab photos from all your devices too. You don’t have to change your behavior – if you email photos, that’s fine. They’re all in Everpix’s cloud. AL: Who is initial target market? A: Everyone who doesn’t want to hassle with photos. MP: Business model? Infinite storage? A: Freemium, we don’t know limit yet.
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With Bitcasa, The Entire Cloud Is Your Hard Drive For Only $10 Per Month | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | The cloud is now your hard drive. And not just a few dozen Gigabytes, Terabytes or even Petabytes, but of it – infinite storage – for only $10 per month. This is the incredible promise of the new TechCrunch Disrupt finalist . The company is launching a new cloud storage, syncing and sharing service that blows away its competitors, including hard drive manufacturers and online services like DropBox and SkyDrive, with ease. In fact, beyond the pricing and limitless storage, the most disruptive thing about the service is its complete integration with your device. You don’t see it, it’s not an icon on your desktop, you don’t drag-and-drop files or folders into it. Instead, you write to the cloud when you save a file on your computer. The cloud your hard drive, and your actual hard drive is just the cache. The idea of using the cloud to store files or sync files between devices is not new. Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Docs, Amazon and countless others have been offering online storage for some time. Plus, companies like Mozy, Carbonite and Backblaze use the cloud to back up your files. Other services, like Megaupload or YouSendIt revolve around sharing files through the cloud. But is not like any of those services. It doesn’t move files around. It doesn’t files. It deals in bits and bytes, the 1’s and 0’s of digital data. When you save a file, Bitcasa writes those 1’s and 0’s to its server-side infrastructure in the cloud. It doesn’t know anything about the file itself, really. It doesn’t see the file’s title or know its contents. It doesn’t know who wrote the file. And because the data is encrypted on the client side, Bitcasa doesn’t even know what it’s storing. So if you want to cloud-enable your 80 GB collection of MP3’s or a terabyte of movies (acquired mainly through torrenting, naughty you!), go ahead. Even if the RIAA and MPAA came knocking on Bitcasa’s doors, subpoenas in hand, all Bitcasa would have is a collection of encrypted bits with no means to decrypt them. If you’re still having a hard time wrapping your head around this idea, think of it like this: instead of relying on the fallible and limited hard drive in your computer (or soon, your phone), your data is stored on an array of thousands of hard drives and streamed to you on demand. And in order to deal with the “offline” problem, the files you use the most are intelligently cached on your computer, allowing you to work when the cloud goes down, which is rare, as well as when you don’t have an Internet connection, which is more common. Sharing files via Bitcasa is simple too: just copy and paste a file’s or folder’s link (a URL, available on right-click) and send to someone via email, IM or some other service. They click the link to have the file delivered directly to their desktop. And the pricing! How on earth is it so cheap? That’s the easy part, actually. Explains Bitcasa CEO Tony Gauda, $10/month still gives the company large margins. The fact is, 60% of your data is duplicate. If you have an MP3 file, someone else probably has the same one, for example. Each person only tends to have around 25 GB of unique, personal data, he says. Using patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques and encryption, Bitcasa keeps costs down which is what makes it so affordable. Bitcasa also explained that a freemium model is on its way with less-than-unlimited storage for free. This service sounds almost too good to be true, leaving us with questions that need still need to be answered. Does it really work? Does it slow down your computer? Can it scale? The company is positive it’s ready, but we need to see it to believe it. Bitcasa currently has 20 patents for its technology and plans to add more in the future. It will also offer mobile applications that run in the background to do on mobile what it does on the desktop today. And it will work on other features, like real-time video transcoding, so your movies can stream to any device, without any manual effort on your part. There are even more things in the works, too, but those are being kept tightly under wraps for now. The Bitcasa founders include CEO , and , whose combined work experience includes time spent at MasterCard, VeriSign, Classmates.com, Mozy and more. In total, Bitcasa has raised $1.3 million from from Andreeson Horowitz, First Round Capital and Pelion Venture Partners. Bitcasa will be free while in limited beta trials. You can sign up for access . Expert Judges: (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), (Asana), (MPi Capital), (Jig) MP: Sounds terrific. What’s the secret sauce? A: We have 20 patents. Most interesting, predictive capability – knows what you need before you need it. Users don’t have to do anything differently. DM: Market research on who needs this? (People already using online services) A: Really about managing your data. You don’t have to worry about managing your data anymore. AL: How to compete with Apple, Amazon, Google? A: We’re only focused on storage. We’re cross-platform. Apple’s product would only work with Apple products, for example. JS: Can you stream movies not cached? A: If you have bandwidth to support it. But our cache is very intelligent. Plus, people over estimate the size of data they have. MP: Limits to use? Each user has own account, and can share a link (file, folder) with other users. But can’t share a file to entire Internet. |
Pressly Turns Websites Into Tablet-Friendly HTML5 Web Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | Pressly’s platform includes five customizable templates as a starting point, each designed with the needs of different publishers in mind. One template is more text-driven, while others are better for browsing through photos or videos. Like native apps, navigating a Pressly-built site uses intuitive gestures, like a 2-finger swipe up or down to reveal quick navigation and a pinch to close articles. The templating engine can pull in a variety of data feeds, too, like JSON, XML, RSS or Twitter and WordPress content. Despite the end product’s similarities to today’s popular tablet magazines, isn’t designed to be an alternative to building a native app for the iPad or another tablet. In fact, the company isn’t even a big proponent of saving URLs as homescreen icons. Instead, Pressly wants to leverage the popularity of tablets’ most popular application, the browser, to immediately deliver tablet-optimized experiences to those surfing the Web. In addition, because these sites are just HTML pages, publishers can integrate all the common functions found in a traditional website, including analytics, advertising, payment processing, store finders and more. And Pressly includes its own ad platform which lets publishers and advertisers insert rich media ads into the tablet-friendly site. These ads can include videos, photos, links, hot spots, social sharing buttons, detailed tracking mechanisms and they can even be displayed as 360-degree immersive views. Pressly is currently working with Canadian Living Magazine, Transcontinental Media Group and The Toronto Star (Canada’s largest daily) as well as with the The Economist’s digital team in New York on a new, yet-to-be-announced product prototype. If you’re on a tablet computer, you can see a demo of in action . The company’s founders include CEO Jeff Brenner, CTO Peter Kieltyka, Marketing and Media Lead Tobin Dalrymple and Business Development Lead Chi Chen. Brenner and Kieltyka previously founded a consulting business called , which built over 17 successful Web and iOS projects including the popular sports app for theScore, as well as social photo sharing startup , winner of the 2009 Twitter Chirp conference. NuLayer has a minority partner in theScore, but Pressly itself has no direct funding. Pricing for the platform has yet to be determined. Judges Q&A Expert Judges: (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), (Asana), (MPi Capital), (Jig) AL: Really beautiful. Need to focus on certain verticals. A: We feel publishers need this. This isn’t competing with Flipboard directly. DM: I’m Flipboard investor, not sure your product is there yet. A: Flipboard is iPad. Pressly is a Web tech (HTML5). Also, publishers can control content better. There’s room for us. Flipboard does content discovery on iPad, Pressly uses Safari or a Web browser to deliver tablet-friendly site. MP: From user perspective, looks great. Biz model question about revenue share. A: No upfront costs on revenue share with publishers – a win-win situation for both. If consumers love and is engaging, publishers can increase CPM’s. Can start bringing ad inventory to publishers. JS: I like the ads. Worry is people with dev shops can build whatever they want, leaving you with newspapers, those without tools to build this. A: Built platform where publishers can build on top of. Publishers are good at telling stories, not great at innovating like this.
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Verious Launches First Marketplace For Mobile App Components | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | Today, TechCrunch Disrupt finalist is launching the world’s first marketplace for mobile application components – that is, the libraries, the SDKs (software development kits), the add-ons, the open source code and other third-party services which specifically cater to mobile app developers. Until now, there hasn’t been a centralized repository of these resources. But Verious isn’t just organizing mobile app components on its site, it’s also offering a way for developers to sell their components to others through a copy-protected licensing system. According to , the market for mobile application development services is expected to reach $100 billion by 2015, as many independent developers are now working on a combination of consumer-facing apps alongside mobile app component development. That no one has thought to launch a service like this until now is actually somewhat surprising. With , the goal is to help developers speed their time to market by offering the components they need, but don’t have either the time or resources to build themselves. For example, there’s a 3D globe which consists of 20,000 lines of code, built over the course of 5 months with $50,000 worth of labor. It’s listed on the site for less than $1,000 to license. Pre-launch, Verious’ founders talked to thousands of developers and have compiled a list of 1,000 components along with $100,000 worth of component requests. The size of this initial catalog demonstrates the need for such a service’s existence in the first place – there are a lot of mobile app components for developers to keep up with! In addition to organizing the components on the site for easy discovery, mobile app developers are allowed to test out the components in a 30-day free trial. They can also post and “follow” component feature requests, so sellers know which ones to prioritize in their development to meet market demands. In the future, the ability to rate, review and comment on components will be added, too. The site’s patent-pending License Manager lets sellers enforce different types of licensing models, including annual fees, perpetual fees, volume-based tiered pricing, source code buyout and more. Verious will charge a 20-40% commission on components (20% for charter developers), a referral fee for premier partners listings SDKs, and revenue share for server-side partners. At launch, supports iOS and Android, but will expand to other platforms as the market demands. Verious’ management team is composed of industry veterans with CEO , VP Marketing and Web Strategy/Ops head . Their combined work experience includes time spent at VeriSign, American Express, DataSphere, VMWare, Samsung, Openwave and TRUSTe. The company, founded in 2011, is backed by seed and angel investors including Charles River Ventures, X-G Ventures, Mark Britto, Iggy Fanlo, Gil Penchina, Krishna Vedati and others. Judges Q&A Expert Judges: (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), (Asana), (MPi Capital), (Jig) AL: Estimation of addressable market? A: 1) App services market – $100 B by 2015, plus app tools market – $30 B by 2015, according to analysts. DM: Dev tools companies have failed to make business of it. Who is doing it well? A: Plenty of companies doing marketplace models out there. MP: Quality control? Rating system? A: Developers have to produce a sample app with the code, or have an app on the App Store. Yes, ratings, reviews, community are coming. JS: How to be first stop for developers? A: Every day, companies are launching SDKs. Companies are working with Verious now to get their libraries listed. They want to be on site to grow their install base.
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Spool Is Instapaper On Steroids | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | is a new service aimed at addressing the problem created by the multi-device, multi-screen environment we now live in, where the content consumption experience can vary widely from platform to platform. On iOS devices, for example, you can’t watch Flash videos without serious workarounds. On an iPod Touch or other standalone media player, you need a Wi-Fi signal in order to browse the Web. But with , you don’t have to think about these sorts of things. Any Internet content, including audio, video and text, can be made available for immediate, offline viewing on mobile, simply by using the Spool app, browser add-on or bookmarklet. And because Spool is intelligent, it knows what part of a webpage to save, and what part to discard. Simply put, Spool works like an evolved version of , the popular service that saves long-form Web articles for later reading either on your computer, iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Like Instapaper, there’s also this idea that what works on the Web isn’t necessarily what works well on mobile. But where Instapaper cleans up and reformats text for easier reading, Spool works with any media type, whether it be text, audio or video. It can even parse multi-page content for you, saving the entire article or forum thread, for example, not just the first page. The service uses artificial intelligence and a computer vision engine to read the webpage the way a human would and extract the relevant parts, while discarding the rest (like the ads, the header, the footer, etc.). Most importantly, perhaps, it converts video into mobile-friendly, HTML5-based formats that play within any modern smartphone or tablet browser. The videos and other content are also cached to the device, for offline access. In the short-term, solves the problem of content incompatibly that arises, for the most part, from Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its mobile devices and publishers’ delays in moving to the iOS-friendly Web standard HTML5. It also provides a viable workaround for the still-present “offline” problem that results from poor cellular coverage and dead spots. Spool’s founders, and , admit that the Flash problem is slowly going away, but they believe that the connectivity issues will remain for some time. For now, lets you take snapshots of a page using its mobile app, Firefox or Chrome extension, or browser bookmarklet. These saved pages and related media can be viewed within the app or online, and favorited for easy access or archived when you’re finished viewing. The storage space Spool uses can also be adjusted in Settings, and for Android users, storing content to the SD card is supported. In the future, Spool will focus on adding deep linking (automatically pulling down the content for the links within an article you saved), plus intelligent “spooling” of your favorite sites without an explicit request on your part. The app is free for now ( ), while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models. Spool is currently addressing some real-world problems, but arguably not those that will be around forever. Spool’s technology, on the other hand, may have a longer shelf life than Spool’s apps. The company expects five patents to come of its artificial intelligence, computer vision, video extraction, video transcoding and browser emulation infrastructure. The amount of funding Spool received is currently undisclosed. Q&A Judges:Expert Judges: (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), (Asana), (MPi Capital), (Jig) AL: How to grow business? A: People are already doing this behavior. Big fans of Dropbox, Evernote – sites that have solve pain points for big parts of online population. DM: What about when network connections are better? A: Network infrastructure can’t keep up with number of users. Even if it does, that means Spool gets faster pipes, loads pages faster on phones. MP: Love it, can’t wait to try it. How does it compare to competition? A: A lot competitors focused on article content (Instapaper). This is about different types of content, too. (Videos, audio, etc.) JS: Do people really return to read stuff they archive to read later? A: We can also intelligently fetch things for you in advance, at some point in the future. But yes, it’s not an immediately mainstream product.
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NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Talking Chipset Alliance Against Qualcomm | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | Qualcomm is one of biggest players (if not the biggest) in the mobile chipset space, and their dominance of the market is forcing other manufacturers to seek alternative strategies. While Qualcomm’s huge presence has helped shape the market, a group of Asian companies are looking to form an alliance that will reduce their reliance on Qualcomm’s products and instead develop and rely on their own. NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Fujitsu, NEC, and Panasonic Mobile Communications are currently negotiating the possibility of a joint venture that could start operations as early as next year, . At the heart of their alliance is their need for baseband chipsets. It’s one of the most important components in a phone, as it allows the device to connect and transmit signals to network towers. Qualcomm owns nearly 80% of the baseband market, and this hegemonic hold is exactly what the alliance hopes to break free from. If their alliance is formalized, NTT DoCoMo will own the majority stake, and the companies will jointly develop their own basebands to be used in each company’s forthcoming smartphones. The development costs will be split up between each company making the burden easier to bear, and should they decide to sell the chipsets to other companies, they all share in the rewards. While most of the companies are based in Japan and are unlikely to release phones using that baseband in the U.S., it’s very possible that the fruits of their labor may soon appear in a Samsung smartphone near you. At first glance, it looks like a David(s) versus Goliath scenario, but the move seems more about self-sufficiency than to strike at Qualcomm. Who knows though? With enough gumption and their pooled engineering know-how, NTT SamFuNePan may someday give Qualcomm a run for their money. |
Cake Health, The ‘Mint For Health Insurance,’ Launches To The Public | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | No matter how healthy you are, health insurance still has the uncanny ability to give you a headache. First there are the bills, which always seem way steeper than you were expecting. Then there are the non-bills that look a whole lot like bills, which may lead you to assume those envelopes that hold bills are non-bills, too (cue creepy phone calls from credit collectors). Oh, and good luck checking those bills to make sure your insurance is actually paying for everything it’s supposed to — and that the doctor is charging the correct rate. It doesn’t have to be this way. At least, I really hope it doesn’t. And a startup called might be the answer. The startup, which I first wrote about back in May, is hoping to become the ‘ ‘. At the time it was in a limited private beta, and now, at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, Cake is opening to the public. Oh, and the TC Disrupt Judges love it. To get started on the service, users are first prompted to enter the credentials for their health insurance account — the company says it supports the top healthcare providers, covering some 150 million Americans. After entering your login, the service will pull in all of the key data: how much you’ve paid out-of-pocket this year, how much your insurance has covered, how much of your deductible is paid, and so on. [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spP5IAxsu5o”] It’ll also look at the benefits your plan offers, giving you reminders to use any benefits that you might forget about (like a yearly eye exam, or dental checkups, for example). Oh, and the site also has a feature that addresses the bill headaches mentioned earlier. Namely, it’ll let you take a snapshot of your bills, and your ‘non-bills’, to compare what you’re being billed, and what your insurance is paying. It’ll even tell you if you should negotiate with your doctor/hospital over how much you’ve been charged (the company has told me that there are actually a surprising number of errors when it comes to these bills, as they are typically created manually). Finally, the service is also offering health insurance recommendations, drawing from 13,000 plans to recommend the ones best suited to your needs and price rnage (it’s like Mint and BillShrink in this regard). As I wrote when I first saw the service, the biggest obstacles facing Cake Health are the fragmented healthcare industry, and earning users’ trust. Cofounder Andy Brett (who, disclosure, was formerly an engineer at TechCrunch), says that the company has developed scraping techniques that help it quickly process information from many providers, even if they don’t have a structured API. As for the latter issue, there will likely be some people who are averse to handing over their data to a startup (I’d argue that healthcare information is even more sensitive than financial data). But there are also plenty of people (probably a large majority) who won’t be especially worried, and the company says it’s taking security seriously. BG: I think this is Mint for this space. I love it. Best presentation so far. TC: I love this, it’s brilliant and needed. How difficult is it to upload all my information. This model sems to work well if I invest a lot of energy into the inputs. A: We work hard to reduce the amount of friction that a user would have signing up. We’ve built the technology on the backend to pull in the data no matter what format you find it in. TC: I think you need workarounds, I don’t know my login information. SM: I wonder how you’re going to scale; how do you get people beyond early adopter? A: First answer is how do you get beyond early adopters… anyone’s documents, HR summary, your EOBs, can be sent to docs@cakehealth.com. If you’re not tech savvy, you get online. To scale, getting the word out.. employers are helping with distribution. Everyone loves it.
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Report: Android Market Nearing 6 Billion Downloads; Weather Apps Are Makin’ It Rain | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | The Android Market continues to explode. Recent statistics published by research firm Ovum predict that app downloads in Android’s marketplace could reach 8.1 billion this year, compared to 6 billion for iOS, . Today, mobile research firm is releasing a report that gives a detailed look into the Android marketplace’s current escalating growth, what’s trending, and what categories of apps are making the most money. Traditionally, free, ad-supported apps have gobbled up most of the share in the Android Market. But what about those paid apps, how much are they making, and are they worth it? The research firm found that, in August, cumulative revenue from each category varied from $300 to $21,000, with the average Android app having generated $2,500 since publishing. While this isn’t a mind-boggling average, it’s not so bad either. What’s more the research firm said that, just by “choosing the less competitive and more price intensive category, developers can increase their potential revenue by 900 percent”. In terms of categories, unsurprisingly, nearly a quarter of all apps downloaded on the Android Market are games, as this has long been the largest and fastest growing category on the app store, preferred by developers across the board. However, it seems the intense competition in the gaming space has led to diminishing revenue as monetization potential slipped over the last few months. On the other hand, what may be a bit more surprising is the most lucrative category of apps in the market: On average, apps have generated the highest total revenue from paid downloads. Part of the reason for this is that the selection is limited, and it’s really a must-have app for every smartphone user — we want to know whether we’re about to walk into a tornado or not. Of course, the use case is very specific, and most are loathe to use (or develop) yet another weather app. There are only so many possibilities. The research firm, instead, advised developers to consider innovating on business tools — users are not as opposed to paying a price for a good business app that helps improve efficiency, for example, and the space, the firm said, is far less crowded than the rest. But how about the app store’s growth? According to the report, the Android Market remains ahead of Apple’s App Store in terms of additions of content. During August, the store grew by more than 20,000 apps, during which time Apple added another 15K apps to its iPhone App Store. As of the beginning of this month, the total number of apps in Android Market was 277,252, and the share of paid apps remains at 35 percent, with the average selling price of those paid apps being $3.13. Android Market is nearing 6 billion total downloads, which should be reached by the middle of September, the report said, and every week nearly 1,500 new publishers join the store. For more, . |
Facebook Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz Talks About Facebook’s Early Days, And What’s Wrong With Google+ | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | Erick also asked Moskovitz for his thoughts on Google+. And in case you’re wondering, no, he doesn’t use it. To begin, Erick asked Moskovitz to talk about what Facebook was really like back in the early days. Unlike the movie, “The Social Network,” it wasn’t all parties, explained Moskovitz – in fact, there were only 2 to 3 parties in the first year. What the early founders of Facebook were doing was putting in a lot of hours, he said. “We worked 14 to 16 hours days that year.” Building Facebook took a lot of time and effort. The work was necessary, though, because the founders knew that had created something really big as soon as it launched. “Facebook was founded on February 4th, 2004, and around February 5th, we were feeling pretty confident it would be bigger,” said Moskovitz. Right after its launch, Facebook saw that a large portion of the student body was registering for the site, and then using it for 3 to 4 hours. “We would see Facebook on every single laptop in class,” Moskovitz said. “We knew there was a bigger story here.” Facebook was fortunate in that it was able to use colleges as sort of its own private beta, adding more colleges to the network as fast as it could. But the decision to ramp up this way was less about executing on a company vision, and more about dealing with its scaling problem. “The first 12 months were characterized by adding capacity quick as possible,” said Moskovitz, “as soon as the site was running quicker, people would use it more.” What this meant for Facebook was that, even in the early days, it didn’t have the luxury of trading on vanity metrics. Facebook needed to know exactly how many users were on the site, and for how long. During this initial period, Facebook was tracking metrics like user retention, specifically how many users were returning within 7 days or 30 days. They knew, for example, that people were sitting on practically dead MySpace accounts, said Moskovitz, so simply counting registered users wasn’t enough. In addition, there was this idea of total minutes spent on a site, an idea popularized by metrics-tracking services like ComScore. But while on the one hand, it was a good metric to know, on the other hand, it could mean that the site wasn’t as efficient as possible. Now Moskovitz is a part of a group casually known as the “ ,” a collection of early (now ex-) employees building new services, like he is with enterprise collaboration company Asana. Did any sort of Facebook ethos follow him and others into the founding of these companies, Erick wanted to know? “They’re really built to last, they’re adding massive impact to the world, and they really want to change the world for better,” said Moskovitz. In other words, they’re completely against the idea of building a company just to flip it back to Google. As for Moskovitz’s thoughts on the newest pretender to the Facebook throne, Google’s new social network, Google+, he surprisingly had some nice things to say. “It’s great to see a really well executed product in this space. There have been a lot of competitors, but Google+ is one of the best.” But do you use it?, Erick asked. “No.” Moskovitz says that if he had to fix Google+, he would add more symmetry to the relationships. There’s value in both one-way connections and two-way connections, he said, referring to the following model that Google+ uses, versus the friending model on Facebook. But Facebook does have a one-way model with its Pages, he added. And apparently, he believes that’s the model to beat. However, it was Moskovitz’s closing thoughts about how things in the Valley have changed over the years since Facebook’s launch that was, perhaps, the most profound. There’s been a fundamental shift in the culture here, he said. There are so many developers. There’s an idolization of entrepreneurship – something which “Mark and I played no small part in creating,” Moskovitz admits. There are even some developers who are raising money based on their reputation alone, he added. But when Facebook first arrived, there were only a handful of companies, so it was able to attract top engineers. “Now it feels like there are many smaller ideas being funded…companies with 3 to 10 people,” said Moskovitz. Would Facebook, if it started today, be able to find the talent it needed to execute on its ideas? That question, ironically posed at a conference that celebrates entrepreneurship and the very early stage startups which could draw the talent away from the so-called “big” ideas, was left unanswered. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 9 | 15 | null |
Farmigo: Tapping Into The Power Of The Web To Bring You Fresh Veggies | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | It’s no secret that fresh produce straight from the farm can often beat the potato skins off of its supermarket counterpart — and why farmer’s markets are becoming increasingly popular. But unless you set aside that chunk of time every weekend to pick up your veggies from local growers, you’re probably stopping by your supermarket anyway. The solution to this has been the emergence of Community Supported Agriculture programs, where members of the community agree with farmers to purchase a certain amount of produce, and then pick that food up at local dropoff points at regular intervals. But, while they’ve been around for decades, these programs aren’t necessarily easy to find or use. If only we could use technology to make things a bit more efficient… Today, a service called is launching as part of the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, and it’s looking to make these CSAs more accessible, more popular, and more efficient — disrupting the way you set about buying your produce. The site is essentially a platform for discovering, signing up for, and sharing CSAs. You can browse local dropoff points, viewing which foods each food producer is delivering. After choosing your producer and the items you want, you sign up for a regular subscription, which allows the producer to plan ahead. You can see an example dropoff listing (it’s for Google’s office, which three producers use as drop-off points). Farmigo is also using a ‘tipping point’ model (as popularized by Groupon), where you need a minimum number of participants before you’re able to create a new CSA in your area (if you don’t have enough people, it isn’t worth the farmers’ while). The company believes this fact will help the service spread virally — just like Groupon, users have an incentive to get their friends to sign up. And, aside from getting fresh food and supporting local growers, the site also says that you’ll typically save 20% to 30% off supermarket prices. Farmigo makes money by charging a 2% transaction fee for each order/subscription. As a special offer, Farmigo says that the first 100 TechCrunch readers to create a dropoff point (and get enough friends to join so that it passes the tipping point) will get their produce free for a year. To get in ont eh deal, sign up, then put ‘TechCrunch’ in the comments section. Note that you have to a dropoff point, not just join one.
Tony Conrad: Margins in grocers is small, how do you get scale?
A: We’re seeing 40,000 families receiving produce today. Multiplying 4x each year. Farmers are getting much more money for their goods when they sell this way… We take a transaction fee of what’s coming through the system. Wendy Lee: I agreed with the OpenTable analogy.
Brad Garlinghouse: Very impressed by the website. Thing that gives me pause, for so many people habitual behavior is that grocery store is not as good, but pretty good. I come away thinking this is pretty cool, not convinced it’s 10x improvement.
A: Airbnb, you could have said the same thing. Stephen Messer: CSAs are complex. If I’m signing up have to find where it is, what’s going to be where. A: You as the user find one location, for that location you can see exactly what the pricing is and what you’re going to be getting. [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy7ig2OsdIY”]
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HP Offers TouchPad Refund Program To European Customers | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | So, you bought an HP TouchPad. No, not the £89 TouchPad — the £399 TouchPad. Understandably, you’re pissed. Well, everything’s going to be okay. HP’s “way of saying thank you for choosing HP webOS” is to compensate customers who paid full price for the TouchPad before August 23. If you haven’t already noticed from the “Europe” in the headline or the “£” symbol all over the place, this compensation program is only available for our friends across the pond (Germany, France, and the UK). HP rolled out this refund program pretty quietly, but details can be found on the . That includes refund information on all three flavors of TouchPad and the Pre 3, reports . Just after HP decided to , the company issued a for its not-so-popular tablet. Once the TouchPad started selling for about a quarter of its original price, it kind of became a hot product. Obviously, this upset early owners who were watching their friends save money. Luckily, HP’s made things right — at least in Europe. No word yet on whether or not the U.S. will get the same love. |
CardFlick Hopes You’ll Never Use Paper Business Cards Again | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | Today’s audience choice winner was digital business card sharing app , a iPhone app that allows you to trade contact info either with other people who have downloaded the app or via email. Founder tells me that what sets the app apart from competitor Bump is that it goes beyond data exchange, “We’re about personal brands, we’re democratizing design. Plus Bump doesn’t work very often.” With CardFlick you login in with Facebook and the app will manually import your contact information, morphing it into its various designer digital card themes which you can then share with people nearby via the Flick tab on the app or via email. Once you’re in proximity, CardFlick will send a request to the user you share your card with, and that user can either accept or reject your card, which functions as a CardFlick friend request. Any contacts collection on CardFlick is cloud-sync’d, so even if you delete the app and reinstall your contacts remain unscathed. The app has been in private beta but went live as a 99 cent paid app in the App Store this Wednesday clocking in over 1,000 downloads in its first couple of days. After the app was set to free on Sunday, it’s seen over 7,000 downloads. As evidence of its virality, Anjaria reveals that the top users in the beta have each invited about 30 people to CardFlick and that when an email is sent out (because a user doesn’t have a CardFlick app) it has an impressive average click-through rate of about 60%. Anjaria wants to eventually provide analytics for CardFlick users, i.e. letting you know how many times the information on your card was clicked. He hopes to monetize the app by offering by offering in-app purchases for different themes and a subscription model for companies buying in bulk. In the immediate future, Anjaria will be releasing CardFlick for Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry, partnering up with conferences and fixing the Facebook Connect problem that has ailed the iPhone app for the better part of tonight. Oh and killing off print business cards, “It’s 2011 why are people still using business cards,” he laments. Okay I like it, it has a good chance of being viral. It’s simple, easy to understand, “You create a business card the way you want to present yourself.” I like it, only problem is the other person has to have an iPhone. User acquisition is crucial. The design looks awesome. I don’t think this one idea is a huge company. You look at Bump, and they’re now pivoting into being a social network. If you finally get people Flicking, think about the second act. What’s the second act for Flick? Theme market place, clients for Android, Windows Mobile, giving companies the option to buy subscription packages. Default experience is that it should know whether a user has the app or not. We’re working on it it. We launched as a paid app switched to free on Sunday, had 7,000 downloads afterwards. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAkiQoxQoj4 |
Banned From The App Store: An Anti-iPhone Game Complete With Foxconn Suicide Mini-Game | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | In the video game world, little can do more to send your sales soaring than being banned in one way or another. Be it because a country’s government got upset over how their people were depicted (a la Modern Warfare in Saudi Arabia) or because the developers slipped in a naughty little easter egg thereby triggering a recall (like Grand Theft Auto San Andreas’ infamous Hot Coffee scene), that little bit of taboo can be all it takes to rule the charts for weeks. That is, unless you’re selling your game exclusively on the iOS App Store, in which case you’re totally boned… unless your goal was to spread a message, in which case it’s back to being the best thing you could have hoped for. Such is the case for , a blatantly anti-iPhone game that managed to wiggle its way into the App Store for a whole before someone pulled the plug. Why, you ask? Amongst other things, making a mini-game out of the Foxconn factory suicides. The game was made by Italy’s . Their tag line pretty much sums up their mindset: “ ” Molleindustria seems to have four main qualms with Apple and the iPhone, with each given its own mini-game: To be clear, the game was pulled before I got a chance to nab it (though a few people seemingly , dampening my worries that this was just a clever hoax), so my descriptions of the mini-games are from screenshots and what I’ve managed to piece together. If anyone has video of the game, please let us know.
Apple managed to find four App Store terms to cite in the banishment of the game, at least two of which are arguably a stretch: Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS
The last two are those that seem a bit questionable — while Molleindustria promise to donate their cut of the App Store revenue to “organizations that are fighting corporate abuses”, the company says there was no mechanism for making donations built into the actual app. But really, Apple probably could have said “Er, yeah, you made a mini-game out of people killing themselves” and few would have earnestly questioned its banishment. Of course, Molleindustria’s mission was almost certainly not to make a pile of money, be it for themselves or any charitable organization. Their mission was to spread their message. Mission accomplished. |
Rentlord Launches A Socially Connected Market To Let Landlords And Tenants Manage Their Rent | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | You know what’s not that fun? Apartment searches. Also landlords. Luckily, launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt is , a social platform that allows landlords and lessees to painlessly create and manage their rent, leases, contracts, and much more. Rentlord boasts a socially-connected market that lets users find homes and apartments based on a trust gradient enabled by integration with your social graph. Rentlord allows users to find a home or tenant, then start a contract online, as well as connecting members of the home with one another and allowing landlords to manage the property in tandem with their tenant(s). How does it work? Once users sign up for Rentlord, they can list their apartment or house once, including images, details, a description, at which point Rentlord automatically geotags the listing, blasts it out over social channels, and cross-posts across UK rental portals — free of charge. Users can send messages to each other to meet in person, close deals in minutes, using Rentlord’s customizable contracting utility — all from the comfort of a single platform. The startup has been working with lawyers in Europe to draw up a contract form so that landlords and lessees can do everything online, keep track of their leases, and complete every part of the renting process on one platform. Those contracts are stored on Rentlord permanently, so you can always refer back to the contract, and never have to worry about devious landlords switching up the terms of the lease. As part of creating an all-in-one portal for renters and landlords, Rentlord also offers users the ability to pay their rent through the platform, split bills with housemates, and receive reminders when its time to pay the rent or pay utilities. And for those on the apartment or house search, the startup’s platform enables you to locate restaurants and points of interest that are close to the location of the place you’re interested in to help you decide if its the right neighborhood for you. And for those already renting, the platform enables you to call in a local plumber, report a leak to your landlord, and organize your domestic life. As to how they’re making money, for all those transactions taking place on Rentlord, the platform takes a commission on those transactions, though Founder Colin Tan tells me that the commission is low enough that users won’t be scared away. Rentlord is currently available in the U.K., but it will be rolling out functionality in the U.S. over the next month. The startup also announced today that it is backed by Seedcamp ( ), the european micro seed fund for internet technology companies based in London, as well as Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. . Cool startup. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEm_2AWZiOM
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Sony’s Playstation Vita To Hit Japan On December 17 | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | Sony is currently a press conference in Tokyo where the company said that the Playstation , its new handheld console, will hit stores in Japan on December 17, just in time for the holidays (this decision was last month actually). For the 3G connection, Sony partnered up with Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo and laid out 3G pricing plans for the first time, too. Japanese Vita owners going for the 3G model will be charged 980 yen (US$13) for 20 hours of pre-paid or 4,980 yen (US$65). In the US, AT&T will be for the Vita. Unfortunately, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan President Hiroshi Kawano didn’t go into details about the Vita’s launch outside Japan, so we’re still stuck with “sometime in 2012”. |
Mobile Roadie Brings Self Service Mobile App Development Platform To China | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | which allows anyone develop and create sleek, rich media and apps, is launching today in China. Mobile Roadie offers a self-serve app development platform that integrates with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. Users can build both iOS and Android apps and the company already has a presence in the UK, France, Spain, Australia, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Turkey and Japan. Mobile Roadie feels that this launch is particularly important because of the opportunity presented by tapping into China’s massive mobile userbase. The startup says that a DIY app creation platform has tremendous potential because of this growth. Mobile Roadie is partnering with FabriQate, a Chinese mobile agency that will help provide a localized version of the Mobile Roadie platform to the Chinese market. The company says China is the largest mobile market they’ve launched in to date For example, fans of Madonna can now download her official app designed for the Chinese market. In her app, Chinese fans can listen to tracks, view photos and videos, engage with other fans on the fan wall, and share their activity on Chinese social networks Weibo and Renren. To date, the company has seen 10 million downloads of its apps. Clients include Madonna, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, The Dallas Mavericks, The Miami Dolphins, The World Economic Forum, Harvard Law School, and Wynn Las Vegas. Mobile Roadie also the official iPhone app for , struck a deal to power iPhone apps for authors, and to develop mobile apps for the music label’s network of artists. |
PlaySay Uses Facebook To Help You Learn A Language | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, is a Facebook app that takes advantage of the social graph and the fact that most of us spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook in order to help people learn a language. PlaySay uses images to represent the fundamental components of language learning, allowing basic language learners to build or deconstruct Facebook status updates word by word and image by image. The theory is that users will be more enthusiastic about learning languages with their friends in an environment they are already comfortable with. “Your Facebook friends are your new classmates. Check ins, status updates and pictures are your course materials,” founder Ryan Meinzer tells me about the app. Indeed, seeing an update in Spanish on your friend’s profile page does pique your curiosity as to what that status update says. One click on the status and you are transported to PlaySay, which offers you the option to decode that status through images, even if you don’t speak a word of Spanish. PlaySay plans on monetizing by offering the users ability to cash in Facebook Credits to in order unlock premium PlaySay features like private messaging and levels and offering a subscription option for those that want to delve deeper into the content. Product placement within the language learning flow is also an avenue the company is exploring. While currently only available in Spanish, Meinzer plans on making it available in every language through content partnerships like the one it recently closed with publisher McGraw Hill. Meinzer tells me that he came up with the idea for PlaySay when he was living in Japan and was inspired to learn Japanese after the first time he was exposed to it. “We hope to convert people to learning foreign languages,” he says “If you’re using Google Translate, you’re not learning anything.” PlaySay has over $570K in funding. How do you attract users? Partnership deals, Facebook is the best place to launch this platform. It’s too complicated. When you take it to the normals I don’t think they’ll be convinced. There’s a huge play in UI, by making it super simple we’re able to get it to the people. With A/B testing we’ll get to a perfect UI. How long have you worked on this product? Three years. Suster, they spent years on this and you don’t encourage them. Mark’s right it needs to be simplified dramtically. Why did you take this problem on? My friends couldn’t sustain learning a language because they didn’t have a need. The idea here is to break down language in a visual sense. I think this could be well used as an augmentation to an existing language course. It doesn’t have enough structure to take me through learning a language. We’re a supplement not a course.
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GoInstant Is Browser Sharing With No Downloads | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | Innovative browser collaboration technology launches in private beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt, for the first time allowing people to surf the web with each other without having to download an extra plugin or software. Whether you are on a Mac, PC, mobile device like iOS, Android, Blackberry or any other web browsing device, Go Instant lets users who want to collaborate with each other on a given URL share a link and initiate a co-browsing session. Co-founders Uhma and Jevon MacDonald are technology veterans MacDonald coming off a stint as senior partner at Dachis Group and Uhma is former CTO of social gaming startup Slightly Social. Using Node.js, Socket.io and Redis, the fact that the Go Instant doesn’t necessitate a download or any special software is significant. Co-founder Gavin Uhma tells me that the consumer use case for the app is in software as a service, easy and automatic co-browsing could be very useful in company wide presentations and customer support, “Rather than explaining your product to someone, you sign up, login and you can show them how to use it,” Uhma says. Uhma considers his competitors to be screensharing and collaboration tools like WebEx, join.me, Glance, GoToMeeting but holds that what differentiates GoInstant is that it was built for the web not for a PC; its technology works rapidly and in full web page resolution by design. GoInstant plans on monetizing by charging companies a set fee per user per month. The company just raised a hefty round of seed funding which they are also announcing today, at $1.7 million from Freestyle Capital, Baseline Ventures, Greylock Partners, Social Leverage, Chamath Palihapitya, Ed Sim and Yuri Milner. I think the biggest thing for you is figuring out how your go to market strategy will work We’ve considered that. I’m excited about this, it’s about identifying who wants to use it. I hate Web Ex. Every VC says the same thing regarding Web Ex. Can you talk about the interface? We really wanted to keep this as simple as we could . Am I able to block to the technology so other people can’t join? Are you Canadian? You can manage the session with privacy controls, etc. And yes, I am Canadian.
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ReadMill’s Disrupt Encounter Makes Them Launch Early | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | , a young Berlin-based startup subjected themselves to a withering interrogation by YCombinator founder Paul Graham at yesterday’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference ni an on-sage Office Hours session. They haven’t launched yet, and Graham repeatedly told them should launch now – “Why wait?” he said. Indeed, why wait. So today ReadMill has taken that advice to heart and is opening up to the world. You can . It’s also announcing it’s had seed investment from Index Seed, Passion Capital to the tune of €280,000. |
Team Arrington | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | I guess I have a more nuanced view of ArringtonGate, but by the look of the media coverage there seems to be a different understanding of what Mike does. We all know the persona, the power, the influence, the trendsetter, the dog lover. But what is it that drives the man, the source of his rapid rise to the covers of what remains of the mass media. Maybe it’s just personal, the interactions between us. I’ve watched Mike suck every last bit of information out of unsuspecting victims, painlessly draining them of scoops they didn’t know they had or validation for previous interrogations. It’s the reverse of waterboarding, a friendly, humor-dotted “conversation” you have with him which, when replayed in your mind, seems oddly devoid of any information coming back at you other than suggestions that what good is our friendship if you can’t just tell me what’s really going on. Mike’s world view is pragmatic, but not chipped in the stone of his right-center political perspective. You may not see him changing his mind, because that would violate the rules of his interrogation style. But the key is to not listen to any of the details of what he says at the time, but rather what he actually writes. Even then, you have to extract the real takeaway from the apparent one. For starters, Mike doesn’t care in the least about startups or VC dynamics or whatever. He does care about the bits of humanity that fly off the wheel as he spins through the Valley and its impact on our lives. He’s a standup comedian looking for what we are hiding, or think we’re projecting, a kind of techno-Seinfeld extracting the underlying cotton ball-edness of the thing we call the industry. Fact: this is what’s funny to him, and he lives for funny. He’s all about the opposite of whatever he’s saying, or you’re saying, or what’s trending as being said. If you are talking with him about music, he’s telling you it will all go to free. When he says that, I hear: it’s all going pay. That’s because my game is to argue with him and overstate the opposite of what he’s saying, because I’m actually trying to out-Arrington him in reverse. That’s because I know it’s a loser to try and deflect him, so might as well learn from him and try it out on the one guy who will appreciate it because he invented it. It usually doesn’t work but losing that way is more fun. As a standup comedian, he falls into the dynamics few have escaped. Robin Williams could wrench himself out of the repetition through the use of various mood enhancers, but at some point it became easier to be a movie star than constantly troll for the irony of the human condition. There was also the shutdown of vital organs to contend with. Staying “on” around the clock is tricky business, especially because nobody asked you to. The fallback is to submarine, hide where you’re not required to be either onstage or preparing for it. This is where dogs come in: they like all your material, even when you don’t have any. Whoever invented dogs had a really good sense of humor, so it must by definition be God. It has been observed relentlessly that dog is the inverse of God, but I swear I’ve seen little other direct evidence of some guiding force in the universe. As a lover of dogs and all they do, Mike gets an automatic free pass on all things conflicted. This is hard for many of us to understand, but looked at from a dog’s loving angle, nothing has changed between editor Mike and MikeFund. Come to think of it, what has changed? Does Mike do anything different now than he did previously? After all, the history of TechCrunch itself is one of doing what he did and looking up one day to realize he was actually editor of something. I can’t tell you what Mike thinks he does, but as an editor, Mike has come as close to perfection for me. I’ve worked with a great number and variety of editors, almost all extremely talented at what they did. But in all cases my goal is to handle every last bit of editing to the point that all they could say is nothing. Mike has this down better than anyone. He never says anything. This is perfection for me. From a dog’s POV, fantastic material. With some TechCrunch writers, this works even better. MG Siegler seems to have a bottomless well of pro-Apple verbiage, the net result of which is that Mike can go weeks on end saying absolutely nothing while at the same time providing incredible analytic value by virtue of his silence. He needs to fill that time with boating and dog-playing until Google finally produces something useful, but notice he hasn’t really said anything one way or the other about Google+. What he does say is understood by watching his feet. If he shows up, it’s because he’s needed. In all the noise about ArringtonGate the one thing that actually resonates is the constant yearning for his presence. That’s an easy call: do we remember what it was like before him? Interesting, sure. Important, probably. Educational, entertaining, rewarding, showboating, cable news, social media, traditional standup comedy. The labels devolve to irrelevance. What remains is the awareness of something that appears to come from a consistent place. Some may not agree with Mike’s methods, but just because the ethics he projects may violate other people’s theories doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I can understand the positions of those talented journalists and respect their work while doing the same for Mike, Paul Carr, MG, and all the other members of the TechCrunch team. Two rights don’t make a wrong either. Which brings me to my bottom line. I hope and trust ArringtonGate will come and go with the same mixture of hysteria and adventure as it materialized yet again. No amount of posturing or definitive statements will detract from the very real purpose that’s being explored here. From this dog’s perspective, nothing has changed. Could Mike be removed as co-editor of TechCrunch? Sure, by Mike Arrington. If he decides to remove himself from the game, retire, run for President, whatever, I’ll still look to him for the same things. The confidence to say nothing most of the time, do what he does and have fun with it, succeed without really trying, and make life more interesting for his presence. A friend of ours emailed today with a problem, on the border between personal and professional. But what stood out was the quality of her voice. She’d recently lost her husband and had disappeared for a while to regain some strength. But here she was sounding engaged and not a little bit pissed off. Indeed, she said, nothing like this kind of stupidity to get her back in the game. Thanks, Mike and Team. And by Team you know who I mean. |
Meexo: Bringing Game-ified Dating To Your Smartphone | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it one thousand times. Online dating has grown into big business, but it’s still pretty creepy. There are a lot of startups out there trying to do it better, trying to innovate and iterate, but given the very nature of the beast, it’s a tough obstacle to tackle. , a startup launching this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt is trying to offer a new spin on the dating model by becoming a truly mobile dating site. So what’s it like interacting with this mobile-centric dating app? Meexo is like Pandora for dating, as you interact with the application, it learns about you, and becomes more relevant as you go. If you use Foursquare and Facebook, Meexo pulls in that data to learn more about who you are and what you like. Yet, as many dating site veterans know, dating platforms can be creepy — and sometimes even dangerous, so Meexo wants to help you manage your privacy. It does this by allowing users to send text messages using the app without actually revealing your phone number. Right, because there’s nothing less creepy than a “private number”. Meexo does also help the creep factor by only allowing one profile per smartphone, so you can’t go crazy creating those fake, stalker profiles. A great feature, though, considering the alternative, is that Meexo enables users to block direct connections on social networks, so that none of your friends can see your Meexo profile. The founders said that, in doing their due diligence, they found that many people refuse to join dating sites for fear of exposing dating profiles to people they already know. Thus, Meexo’s solution for this is the reverse social graph, which means that none of your direct connections on social networks can see your Meexo profile. You know you’re in a safe environment, transforming Meexo into an app that truly connects you with people you actually don’t know, not more people you do. What’s more, users have access to calendars, to which they can add events and plan dates; if you’re running late for a meetup, for example, you can message right from the app. Meexo is also looking to become your personal concierge (or assistant), remembering that both you and your girlfriend love sushi, and her birthday happens to be coming up, so the app will alert you and help you set up a date at a great sushi restaurant. (A partnerships with OpenTable, for instance, would be a huge leg up here.) Lastly, Meexo is distinguishing itself from the pack by game-ifying dating. When a user joins Meexo, they receive virtual currency, which users pay out when they message other people, forcing daters to be more discerning in their selections. Obviously, in this way, Meexo is attempting to avoid the spamming that has become so endemic to dating sites. Meexo will be available on the app store soon, and the earlier you sign up, the more virtual currency you get, . The future of the online industry is mobile, but as it stands, most mobile dating feels like an extension of desktop websites plus location. As this is the case, Meexo is offering a bunch of cool features to set itself apart, though game-ifying dating does seem like it has the potential to be a bit creepy. Will be interesting to see how the startup moves forward from here.
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Vocre Lets You Instantly Converse In Foreign Languages | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | It’s almost magical how works; Speak into the app while your iPhone is vertical, flip the phone horizontal and the phone’s accelerometer cues the app to translate and speak what you’ve said into the language of the people you’re speaking with, they then can respond, rinse, repeat. To use Vocre, select the language and the gender of the person you’re going to be talking to, and Vocre does the rest. Vocre views its competitive landscape as Google Translate and JibbGo, holding that what it does differently is focus on in-person dialogue and novel User Experience. Vocre co-founder Andrew Lauder says that his ultimate aim is to make it fun and easy to speak a foreign language via a phone, “Our focus is on conversation, Google’s focus is translating web pages, but if you actually want to have a conversation it’s lacking.” Vocre uses Nuance to convert speech to text and its own crowd-sourced machine learning technology to go beyond to the pitfalls of Google Translate to make that text intelligible. Then iSpeech re-converts the translated text back into audio. Vocre aims to make interaction between users who speak different languages seem somewhat natural. The app monetizes through subscriptions and every new download comes with 10 free translations. Afterwards users can get another 10 translations for an extra 99 cents. myLanguage, the company behind Vocre, plans on utilizing the in-house translation technology in order to add phone call and text features in the near future. Vocre currently is available in the US App Store in 9 dialects including English (US, GB, AU), Spanish (Spain), French (France), German (Germany), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan) and Chinese (Mandarin/China). While right now phones need to be set to American English in order to use the app, Vocre plans on adding support for around 40 or so more languages over the next year, Lauder tells me. Vocre currently has $50K in seed funding. How about intelligibility? It won’t pick up fake accents. What’s the turnaround time? It’s quick, but we’re actually doing a three step process to translate so you’d think it would take longer. *Speaks in a foreign language.* If this really works, it’s great. You have to work hard to keep the middle part differentiated since the first part is controlled by Nuance and the second part is controlled by iSpeech. The thing with language is that idioms don’t translate that well. The situation where this comes in handy is a cab driver giving directions. How does this work when you don’t have a data plan? Without a data plan this doesn’t exist. It doesn’t use a ton of data, but it’s there when you need it.
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JiffPad Creates Personalized Medical Diagrams Via iPad | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | Attempting to “reinvent healthcare communication,” Jiffpad is an app that lets doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical professionals communicate with patients via the iPad. Allowing users to select from already provided medical diagrams or upload pictures of their own, the app creates a “JiffTalk,” digitizing the communication between a doctor and a patient and creating a digital record of medical instruction that patients can then email home or share with their families. Consisting of mix-and-match visual components in categories like cataracts or angioplasty, the JiffPad is applicable across most medical practices. Because it is visual by nature, the app isn’t limited to one specific language. “Conversations that take place with wall posters or with anatomical models don’t turn into souvenirs of your visit,” JiffPad CEO Phil Carter says, holding that the app competes primarily with old school medical diagrams, paper and pencils as well as simple patient communication tools like phone calls and faxes. Carter says that the advantage of JiffPad over other tools for medical diagramming is that it is patient specific and infinitely portable, allowing doctors to create playlists of diagrams that they often use, for example. Carter plans on monetizing JiffPad by selling licenses to the app and giving medical professionals extra storage space while keeping it free for patients. He is also considering the possibility of sponsored content. When asked if he would consider expanding the colorful mix and match diagrams to other verticals he told me, “There’s plenty to do in medicine.” JiffPad has $1 million in funding from Aberdare Ventures. How big is the market? You’ve got a diverse group of doctors, Obama had to bribe people to use EMR? Why would doctors use this? No doctor that we’ve met yet hasn’t liked JiffPad, and the EMR folks can’t say the same thing about their own products. I’d love to see someone tackling this market. It’s nice to see people tackle harder problems than restaurant check-ins, what is your sales model. Doctors can buy licenses for themselves, but most likely hospitals will be buying them for them. We’ve only been in alpha for three weeks. Go the Square route [big], with marketing. How long does it take the doctor to prepare such a document? Do you prepare or does a doctor prepare? How long did you work? Both. Two years. Why did you chose this problem specifically? The doctor and patient communication was the hardest problem. We didn’t chose this application, this application chose this company. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hrwAB_pMRg
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BetterWorks Brings Big Company Perks To Bay Area Startups — Coming Soon: The Gamification Of Working | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | What’s better: an employer giving you $500 or an employer giving you an iPad? At first, you may think it’s better to get the cash. But often, that money is used on things such as paying bills — important, but not lasting. The iPad will last. Every time that person uses it, they’ll remember who gave it to them. “Employees value the non-cash rewards three times over the cash value,” co-founder and CEO notes. But doing perks can be tricky for a small company to manage. It’s often easier simply to hand out cash. That’s where BetterWorks comes in. The service, which has been in testing in the Los Angeles area for several months, in now launching in the San Francisco Bay Area to coincide with TechCrunch Disrupt. BetterWorks focuses on working with companies with anywhere from 2 to 1,500 employees. In other words, small businesses. And what better place to offer this than the Bay Area, startup haven. BetterWorks gives small companies an easy way to reward and incentivize employees. They give these small businesses access to corporate rates on things like gyms and salons, which those businesses can then offer to their employees as perks. Gym memberships and the like are standard for large companies like Google, but startups don’t have the time or resources to deal with such things. And such things can be great incentives and key for startups trying to hire. That’s why companies like Chegg, Dailybooth, Formspring, Get Satisfaction, Klout, Plancast, Twilio, and others have already signed up. They also work with larger companies like Hulu and ICM. This system also benefits vendors because it brings them customers. And assuming the startups stay in the program, it will be a steady stream of new customers. If you’ve heard of BetterWorks, it may have been because it was also , . Yes, that Farmville. Why is he doing a employee perk startup? Because there will also be gaming elements to it. While BetterWorks hasn’t yet moved into the intangible world, eventually there will be ways for employers to encourage certain types of behavior (such as getting work done in a timely manner, responding to email, etc) with perks. The gamification of working. But that’s down the road. First, BetterWorks is focused on their core mission of giving small businesses access to big business perks for employees. At first they’ll be in closed beta testing here in the Bay Area, and then they’ll more broadly open up. Then the next step is rolling out to 20 other key U.S. markets, Craig says. The Santa Monica-based company earlier this year. |
Walmart Acquires Mobile And Social Ad Targeting Startup OneRiot | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | Walmart has , a mobile and social ad targeting startup. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and OneRiot will be joining Walmart Labs. As we’ve in the past, recently its business model; shutting down its realtime search portal and focusing exclusively on monetizing via its realtime advertising network. The startup then moved into providing a social targeting service for mobile ads within apps. By way of history, OneRiot first the advertising world in 2009 with an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their OneRiot also a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, and rolled out realtime trending ads and a self-service Now, OneRiot to reach targeted audience segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot’s audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e. Twitter). It’s this data mining that attracted Walmart to OneRiot and its technology. From : Walmart has been making some interesting plays in the social, mobile and targeting space. The company social media startup Kosmix earlier this year. Kosmix joined Walmart Labs, and has been into Walmart’s online and mobile offerings, including its e-commerce website, Facebook pages and more. |
Farmville For Real Farming: Grow The Planet Launches Social Network To Teach You To Grow Your Own Food | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | The number of vegetable gardens is skyrocketing, and organic food and healthy eating are also on the rise. There are more than 70 million gardens in the U.S., which is generating a potential multibillion dollar market. A new startup launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, called is hoping to take advantage of this opportunity by making a Farmville for the real world. Grow The Planet wants to be a social network for hobby farmers –- and a resource that can teach anyone to grow their own vegetables and herbs. The startup’s site aggregates information on plants and vegetables, offers growing skills and techniques, hints and tips for needed activities to become a personal farming resource. Through the site’s social functionality, users can share opinions or growing advice, connecting to each other and even exchanging produce. Grow The Planet is also location-enabled, allowing users to view a map to see what users are close, what they’re growing, and pops down (instead of pins) tomatoes and other veggies so you can see what produce is available around you. And, hey, even offer a neighbor a snack of cucumbers. However, the core of the platform lies in the possiblity for each user to design their own vegetable garden, on their balcony or indoors, and receive tips on what is needed to grow vegetables according to the season, climate zone, weather, etc. The startup brings in extensive research on growth statistics and the integration with climate data and user input to add breadth to the platform. While the startup offers peer-to-peer functionality, users can also keep their own garden journal to keep track of their progress on their way to veggie victory, schedule and keep track of activities, to-do’s and the overall state of their garden (and of course share that progress with the internal community as well as over other social networks). So many people would love to be able to grow their own garden, but don’t know where to start. Foodies are are already rabid about their farming, and there really seems to be a lot of potential here to foster a passionate user base. Am I right green thumbs? Because of national laws, people can’t sell their own crops, but through this sort of exchange network, Grow The Planet has found a really smart workaround. As to how the startup will make money? The founders said that, in the long run, they want to become an online gardening store; but for now, Grow The Planet is offering premium memberships that offer a fuller array of recommendations, tools, the ability to integrate with hardware censors, and extended knowledge and support. Grow The Planet is really hitting on an incredible idea here, and it’s so nice to see a startup that’s not simply trying to be the “Airbnb of — some other space”. It’s creative, and we won’t be surprised if these guys are attracting the attention of investors.
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YC-Funded AeroFS: It’s Like Dropbox, But It Runs Inside Your Firewall | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | I’ve been a fan of Dropbox for a long time. It’s convenient, it ‘just works’, and 2GB of free storage can go a long way. But it isn’t perfect — if you’re dealing with very large amounts of data, like movie footage, then you’ll quickly find yourself in the service’s most expensive tiers. And some businesses and professionals dealing with sensitive data simply aren’t permitted to store it on third-party servers for security reasons. If any of these concerns sound familiar to you, you’ll likely be very interested in a Y Combinator-backed company called . The pitch is straightforward: it’s basically Dropbox, but instead of using servers controlled by a third party to store and sync your data, you transfer the data directly between your own devices. If you’ve used Dropbox, you’ll feel right at home with AeroFS. After installing small clients on your computer (the service supports Windows, Mac, and Linux), you drag and drop the files you’d like to sync between machines into a special folder, called a Library. Add a file to that folder, and it’ll automatically sync to your other devices, which send the data to each other through peer-to-peer connections rather than through a third-party server. This setup a few benefits. For one, it means that your data is never stored on AeroFS’s servers, which makes it appealing for the aforementioned companies that can’t use cloud services like Dropbox. Second, it means you can sync as much data as you’d like without having to pay for additional server-side storage, making it appealing to people who deal with large amounts of data. Of course, this peer-to-peer system has one downside. Unlike Dropbox, which lets you access and sync your data any time you have an Internet connection, with AeroFS there’s an additional requirement: you can only access a file that’s stored on a different machine if that machine is turned on. Say, for example, you edited an important document on your desktop machine at home, then jumped on a flight and attempted to access it a few hours later from your laptop. If you forgot to leave your desktop machine turned on, you’d probably be out of luck. AeroFS founder Yuri Sagalov acknowledges this could potentially be an issue, but says that in many cases it isn’t really a big deal. One reason why, he explains, is that many offices already have servers and computers running all the time anyway; they can just install AeroFS on these machines and use them as their main datastores. And AeroFS gives you another option for those mission-critical files: you can opt to selectively backup certain folders to AeroFS’s servers, which means you can access the files at any time. This feature is essentially a clone of Dropbox, and you lose the security benefits of a purely peer-to-peer sync. But it makes sense — you probably have some files that you’re fine storing in the cloud, and others that you’d rather keep inside your firewall. AeroFS gives you the flexibility to have it both ways. The company says there’s a big market for this, particularly among healthcare providers, lawyers, finance firms, movie professionals (who can use it to securely share content between machines), and other companies who have data that can’t leave their internal firewall. AeroFS also has an impressive list of backers. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham says that company is one of the most important from any of the firm’s batches. Other investors include Ron Conway, Ashton Kutcher, Andreessen-Horowitz, Ash Patel, Jerry Yang, Naval Ravikant, Chris Sacca, Ace & Company, Geoff Ralston, Paul Buchheit, and Maynard Webb. |
null | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 12 | null |
LocalHero Helps You Wade Through The Noise Of Social Networks, Turn Your Friends Into Heroes | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | With the proliferation of social networks today, we are by no means at a loss when it comes to connecting with our friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. However, in today’s highly networked world, we’re finding that there’s a lot of noise; it has become increasingly difficult to share stories, images, and links (or ask questions and seek assistance) from a targeted group of people. Those that can really help. A startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, called , has developed a mobile networking app that aims to help you make these targeted connections (and turn your friends into heroes). But what does this mean IRL? Let’s say you’ve just joined a local softball league and you’re looking for a new mitt, but you don’t know what brand to buy or where you should go to shop. It just so happens that some of your friends are avid softballers, and you know that they would be the perfect group to ask for advice. LocalHero wants to be an easy way for you to connect with those people so that they can either lend you their mitt, or help you find the right place to go to buy one. How does LocalHero facilitate this? No, not by magic. The startup pulls information from your go-to social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, mixes that with location-enabled functionality, to create a data profile of your friends that are nearby and have the right skills (or interests) that would be relevant to your search. While social networking apps have connected us in unthinkable ways, and we’re sharing our friends, our photos, and our location, there still aren’t many options for people looking to tap a specific group of friends without broadcasting to the entire network or creating specialized lists. LocalHero Co-founder and CEO Ana Baltodano said that she and her team want to create a smart way for friends to take action to become saviors to their friends in need. The co-founder said that LocalHero was created to be useful in a range of requests, from finding friends interested in joining a shared activity, to utilizing the knowledge of particular acquaintances to solve a problem, to more personal requests that you don’t want to share with strangers. In this sense, LocalHero is a bit Zaarly, a bit Katango, and a bit Yahoo Answers. Or a smart Craigslist for friends, if you will. For LocalHero’s mobile app, users post requests for goods or requests, which users view in a stream that includes both general LocalHero users as well as one’s friends. Users can add photos and enrich the question, or request, with tags, and the app automatically notifies these people of your request — you can then scroll through the tags your friends and users have. From the tech side, the LocalHero team wanted to bring in the social graph and interest graph, and cross reference those against each other, pulling from a possible set of thousands of users to provide the user with just a few possible heroes (the “thousands” of users come from the entire LocalHero network, which currently stands at about 15,000). In terms of monetization, LocalHero is still considering different monetization strategies, with the leading contender being targeted local advertising both on the web and mobile app. The smart backend tech makes it easy to find local experts, but the startup also envisions commercial applications as well, and, specifically, LocalHero is in talks with both potential automotive and travel sites. For more, check out the video below: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x–AgdQWAOg]
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Trippy: Bringing Your Friends And Social Recommendations To Travel Planning | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | There are hundreds of travel sites out there that will help you plan your trip, but often these guides come in the form of game-ified networks or consist mainly of questionable crowdsourced content from local experts — in other words, strangers. More often than not, these people are incentivized to write reviews, making the information questionable at best. Granted, there are some cool startups, like and out there, but sites and apps like the former are taking an algorithmic approach to travel recommendations — no real people in sight. , a startup launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is of the mindset that recommendations are always better when they come from people you trust and that know you well — your friends. Thus, iterating on the age old crowdsourcing model, Trippy is designed to be a so-called “friendsourced” travel solution, tying your social networks, like Facebook, into its platform to let you find out which of your friends have been to the destinations you’re considering — whether it be that they’ve checked-in, lived, worked, or studied there. (Much like Spotify’s model for music.) Trippy believes that tapping into the travel experiences of your friend (people you implicitly trust) is far more valuable than receiving advice from strangers. Hard to disagree with them there, unless that stranger happens to be a wizard. Through one-click recommendations and Facebook-style commenting, Trippy lets your friends literally and figuratively chime in to tell you what hotels, restaurants, and destinations would be right for you. The startup offers an easy autocomplete tool to quickly pull up what you’re looking for — from a complete database of locations. Users can then add places they’re considering so that friends can comment on the itinerary, offering feedback in Facebook-style comment feeds. This hits on one of Trippy’s coolest features: The startup allows users to take advantage of a “friendsourced” itinerary made for the trip they’re planning in realtime, by picking suggestions for destinations you’ll like the most (based on those social recommendations). Trippy then automatically converts those recommendations into an itinerary and plots the trip on the user’s travel map. When the Tripper is ready to check rates or book the trip, they can do that right from Trippy’s platform. And this is how Trippy plans to make money, by taking a share of the revenues earned by hotels and third-party services when the user makes a purchase. The startup’s mobile app allows users to follow along through seeing your pictures in realtime as you roll through the recommendations they provided on your itinerary. The interface is clean and smooth, and if your friends are the traveling kind, Trippy may very well have some legs.
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Postmates Aims To Be The Uber Of Packages — And More | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | Couriers have been around forever. You’ve probably seen them on bikes, with messenger bags in tow. For a world teeming with innovative technologies, it seems somewhat surprising that the courier industry remains lacking in disruption. Especially if you consider that the courier industry in the U.S. represents a multi-billion dollar market. At the top of the food chain, there are the bigs like FedEx and UPS operating under some semblance of technological advancement, but then there are the thousands of smaller businesses lugging around antique devices, dispatching via two-way radios, text messaging, and voice calls. Receiving targeted pick-up and delivery times (that are then lived up to) is practically hopeless — it’s almost worse than planning a house call with the cable company. Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, a new startup is launching that is aiming to bring some disruption to the courier space once and for all. is hoping to transform this niche industry in the same way that Uber is disrupting elite limo services and medallion taxicabs with an on demand delivery service that connects local couriers and bike messengers to anyone who needs to ship anything — from birthday cards to grand pianos. Not only does the startup intend to disrupt how people send packages to each other in the same city, Postmates Founder Bastian Lehmann (who readers may know from his last startup, Curated.by) said that the service will also offer a same-day shipping API for brick-and-mortar retailers. For less than $20, any retailer will be able to offer local customers the ability to order goods online — and have them delivered the same day. (Lehmann said on stage today that the startup has already facilitated 300+ deliveries.) Thus, Postmates is looking to offer couriers and bike messengers the opportunity to take advantage of technology only available to the behemoths like FedEx and UPS via their mobile device. As to how it works? From Postmates’ mobile app, one can enter both a starting and a destination address, at which point the app will tell consumers how much it will cost to ship their wares, along with couriers that are currently available in the area (all via an interactive map). Users can then choose item details, entering a description of what’s being shipped, attach a photo, etc. in an effort to help the courier know what’s being shipped — then enter the recipient’s name and contact number, and submit. The app then pings available couriers that are close to the user’s location and notifies them once the courier accepts the delivery, and then updates the user throughout the delivery process, even sending an email with a tracking link to the recipient. This model has, in the big picture, been tried . But it’s nice to see a startup attempting to disrupt a fragmented, real-world business and bring it online. And the app in action features a smooth UI and looks great; however, the startup will have to face the problem of ensuring (and perhaps insuring) users against the risk of stolen merchandise and other risks (especially considering the barrier for entry into the space is so low). In a way, Postmates is like Kosmo 2.0 for the mobile world, but Kosmo was also notorious for having couriers that trafficked in illicit substances. Posmates, in comparison, has a lot going on and the idea definitely has legs. It also helps that the startup has raised $875,000 from Naval Ravikant, Jeff Clavier, Matrix Partners, Russel Simmons (of Yelp), David Wu, Thomas Korte (of Google and AngelPad), and Russell Cook, among others. The value proposition of Postmates is clearly that it aims to unlock a huge market of local commerce within a city, and the team hopes that we can imagine a day when hundreds of local brick-and-mortar businesses in a way that only flower shops have seemingly managed to do today. The service will first be available in San Francisco (with more cities to come) and the founders said on stage today that they’ve already signed up 50+ retail stores in San Fran, bringing the app both to businesses and individuals as well. Pretty cool. We’re looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.
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Elon Musk: Starting A Company Is Like Staring Into The Face Of Death | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | , co-founder of and founder of and (SpaceX), sat down with Erick Schonfeld tonight just before TechCrunch Disrupt’s closing ceremony. During the brief conversation, Musk provided insight into how entrepreneurs can get started disrupting major industries like energy, transportation and space. It’s not an easy route to success, he warns. Musk described starting a company like “staring into the face of death.” “If that sounds appealing, go ahead.” The concept was appealing to him, however, because he wanted to have a significant impact on the future of the world. It wasn’t just about making money. It’s about the important problems that have to be solved for humanity to have a bright future, Musk said. Had it been only about money, that would have ruled out space exploration and electric cars. For entrepreneurs who feel the same sort of passion and drive to tackle the world’s most pressing problems, Musk recommends beginning an Internet company. “It would have been impossible for me to do electric cars and rockets right from the start,” he said. Unless you have a lot of capital, it’s difficult to convince VC’s to give you the amount of funding you would need for the bigger ideas. Higher capital means higher barriers to entry. It’s why there’s not more innovation in space exploration, a business mainly funded by governments. For entrepreneurs, a better way to get into these sorts of industries is to have a successful, but smaller-scale, company first, then apply the success of the first company to a second one (and so on). Musk, of course, would know about how difficult it is to have successful companies. He currently runs more than one, having founded both Tesla Motors and SpaceX. How does that work, Erick wanted to know? “I do it with great difficulty, it’s quite hard,” Musk said. “I don’t recommend it.” Because Musk is considered a tech visionary, Erick (and the audience, through Q&A’s) asked for his thoughts on the future. On energy side, by the mid-point of century, Musk said that solar power will be the single largest source of energy, if not the majority of energy. In 20 years, the majority of new cars manufactured will be electric, and 20 years after that, the vast majority of the cars on the road will be electric. (The “install base” for cars turns over around every 20 years, he explained). Musk also shared his vision for the future of education, painting a picture of a future where teachers don’t lecture in front of the classroom, like a “boring vaudeville act,” but where education itself is “more like an interactive game.” Teachers’ role should be to help you when you get stuck, he said. As for Musk’s own companies, they’re doing well. Although Tesla was hit hard by the economic downturn, he now feels positive about its future. And SpaceX will begin docking with space stations in the next three to six months, delivering cargo and bringing experiments back to Earth. In three years, it will be carrying astronauts. Is he worried about that? No. “It’s just biological cargo.” |
Qraft: The Airbnb For Planes, Trains, And Automobiles (And By Trains, I Mean Boats.) | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 13 | When you’re just a wee babe, the idea of a new toy is the most exciting thing ever. Then you grow up, and “toys” become ridiculously expensive. You want a Chevy Corvette C6 Z06? That’ll be $70,000, please. You’re interested in picking up a 2011 Roehr 1250sc motorcycle? $40,000. Though I’m sure plenty of our utterly successful readers have no problem throwing out cash like that, the vast majority of us just can’t cough it up. That’s where comes in — think of it as the for grown-up toys. You can spend a day with that Z06 for $950. And the 2011 Roehr 1250sc? $600/day. Past motorcycles and cars, Qraft also offers up a way for people to rent boats, helicopters, planes, RVs and other random gear (like a super expensive camping backpack) from their peers. So if you have a super cool boat that isn’t getting much use, or your RV will be sitting in the garage all season, you can just post it up on Qraft and make a little cash. Qraft lets you rent by day, week, and month, and each user chooses their own price. Search begins by establishing location, but it looks like Qraft hasn’t quite expanded to all corners of the States. New York isn’t supported, for example, while San Fran is. The service is free to join. The service offers insurance on the items you rent so if someone decides to roll your car into a ditch, it won’t cost you very much. Qraft also offers a feedback system for renters and owners and they also have a system for confirming driver’s license information through scans. They’re trying to avoid the tough lessons learned by Airbnb . Obviously these guys aren’t dealing with real estate so there’s little chance of meth-making in the bathtub but I would be totally pissed if someone flipped my Tesla (assuming I had a Tesla.) |
The Ultimate Guide To TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco has just wrapped. In the feverish air of anticipation we carefully cultivate during the Disrupt season, you may have missed some of the talks, panels, launches, or startups that have taken place here at this incomparable conference. Don’t worry. We’ve collected all the content by our writing and video teams here in this handy omnibus post. If you only share one item today, Almost everything that happened on stage was captured by the unblinking eye of TechCrunch TV, so there is video at the bottom of most posts and many even have crowdsourced transcriptions. More video can be found here at the for the event. Literally thousands of photos from our capable photographer can be found , including most of the companies in the startup alley, and my photos (which appeared in the posts) are free to download from the . And of course, all news relating to this and other Disrupt conference can always be found at . Read on for links to the rest of our coverage.
: a tablet-based sheet music program that listens and adjusts as you play
: community-based growing and selling of fresh local produce
: tracks home repairs and enriches relationships with home contractors and services
: cashless and bankless payment using major gift card providers
: sophisticated but user-friendly tracking of insurance costs, claims, etc. : saves full webpages for mobile consumption later using an intelligent content scraper
: a marketplace for mobile app middleware
: HTML5-based, tablet-friendly, quick-deployment web apps for online content
: infinite cloud-based storage for all your data with predictive syncing and caching
: collects all your photos online and offline into a single online meta-album : a social, network-agnostic mingling environment
: crowd-rated live web broadcasting
: an opinion-rating engine of sorts (simple to grasp, difficult to explain)
: developing next-generation games for social networks
: gamifying everyday life (startup alley audience pick)
: contacting local businesses for appointments, feedback, etc. via text message
: lets companies do group purchasing by leveraging the social graph
: provides rich local metrics for small businesses to help them grow
: a universal workflow and task management platform
: processes security footage to produce powerful analytic information on physical spaces : a sort of ad-hoc courier network for excess bike messenger capacity
: friend-sourced travel planning and trip sharing
: finds people around you who can help with things you need now
: a sort of real life Farmville that helps you grow your own vegetables
: gamifies online dating and tries to solve some of the persistent problems in that space Increasing understanding : a platform for facilitating useful communication between doctors and patients
: mobile app that provides near-instant translations of spoken speech
: a language-learning platform using Facebook that has you translate status updates and comments
: simple, instant browser sharing between two or many people
: suite of (very useful) tools and rich data tracking for landlords and tenants
: rich, clickable “cards” on mobile phones that can be traded by flicking them (startup alley pick)
Our hundreds of applicants were reduced to 29 battlefield companies (plus two selected day-of by the audience) then to the last six, who were given an extended period in which to re-pitch their companies to . After an hour’s retirement and consideration, they returned, with the news that . Prism Sky Labs, the runners up, received a gilded shoe. Congratulations to the winners! We would also like to extend our thanks to everyone who applied, attended, sponsored, or supported Disrupt this year. We look forward to seeing you all again here in San Francisco next year, or earlier, in New York or even Beijing. On another note, this summary wouldn’t be complete without an acknowledgement of Mike Arrington and his contributions to tech journalism. For years TechCrunch has grown bigger and better under his leadership. I’d like to extend a personal thanks to Mike, but I think the standing ovation prompted by Ron Conway’s closing comments is more eloquent: |
Barry Diller Skewers AOL For Firing Michael Arrington From TechCrunch | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Earlier today at The Paley Center for Media’s International Council, IAC Chairman and Senior Executive took the stage for a keynote conversation with , CEO of reDEF Group. Among the topics discussed: AOL’s recent announcement that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington had . Diller has extensive experience and strong opinions about media — IAC has a 50% stake in The Daily Beast/Newsweek — and he didn’t mince words. In short, he thinks AOL has committed an incomprehensible blunder. Here’s a transcript of the exchange, which begins at 31:50 in . : There’s a lot of talk about news, and journalism, and information in the last couple of weeks — I’m sure you’ve watched your buddy Mike Arrington get skewered in the press for not being a journalist… what do you think? You live in a world of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and are also going up against The Huffington Post and TechCrunch and lots of different sites. What is journalism to you and should a guy like Mike Arrington be called out for something he never called himself? : Backwards.. no. I’m amazed at it. Here you buy a company for whatever they paid for it — : $30 million. : And you buy it because it is absolutely the voice of a single person primarily, with some other people working for him — but it’s Michael Arrington’s voice, you know when you buy it, that that voice is biased and mean and capable of saying anything, and is playing a hundred different games. And you know that. And that’s why you buy it — because it’s a good voice, and you like it. This is, to me, the definition of that rocket going up and then getting underneath… And then somebody calls you up and says, “I’m the Editor in Chief, and you can’t let him do that, because he’s now in a conflict of interest.” Instead of saying, “Shut up and go back to your room”… and it’s not because you don’t respect journalism, it’s because this has nothing to do with that. To apply that standard to something where the guy says, “I’m filled with conflicts. You don’t have to listen, you don’t have to read me. Take the stuff for whatever it’s worth.” It’s not a journalistic enterprise, TechCrunch. And so to have treated it as such is to destroy it. So now, he’s gone, and now they own this thing, which has no voice. Congratulations. What a good piece of business. ” : I agree wholeheartedly. … : Daily Beast journalism; we would not do that, we do not have a VC fund that is alongside The Beast, investing in different enterprises of any kind. It is the correct application for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, which are absolutely quite clear. I don’t agree with everything Diller said — TechCrunch still has some opinionated and strong voices, and we strive to commit acts of journalism as often as possible. But he’s right about a lot of things. AOL knew what it was getting. TechCrunch won’t be the same. |
TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield Semifinals: The Judges React | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | The semifinals started off in an unorthodox way, with moderator Paul Carr bringing on TechCrunch co-founder Mike Arrington to join tech celebrity judges Ron Conway, Hadi Partovi, Marissa Mayer, Roelof Botha and Matthew Cohler onstage. While we wait for the final winners to be announced, you can parse through my notes on all of the fun, below. Unlike Dropbox which syncs your file to the cloud, Bitcasa allows you to write to a cloud, using your computer the same way you would normally, but the utility is writing the file to the cloud. Bitcasa intelligently determines what files you would access, and caches them on your hard drive. It’s significant because it gives you infinite storage in the cloud, subverting the typical model of writing files to your hard drive and then having to move them when you store. In beta it’s a free, freemium model, $10 a month for infinite storage. Mike Arrington tweeted out last night that, “Bitcasa is a game changer unless they screw up.” Referring to the fact that there might be three Dropbox investors onstage, “How will you grow your user base considering Dropbox is out there?” Bitcasa answered that their value proposition is fundamentally different from Dropbox, “We’re about the new hard drive,” not about file sharing, “You still need to have space on your hard drive for Dropbox. Judge Marissa Mayer also expressed concern that Dropbox was a competitor and wondered about the sharing process, “When you’re sharing with a mobile device, are you storing things on the client, or is it purely streamed?” The answer is that the device will stream it from the cloud in realtime, over the network.” Botha brought up the cost factor of streaming all that data, which Bitcasa addressed by saying that they use a caching model, which reduces costs. Matt Cohler wanted to know what was the most important problem the startup solved for consumers, to which the startup responded that they never want you have to pull out another USB stick or hard drive again, whereas with Dropbox you still need the space. Ron Conway brought up the fact that it’s basically going to be a marketing battle between Bitcasa, Dropbox and Boxee and the startup really needs to focus on what differentiates it. “Dual video caught my eye, that seems to be proof you’re different. Beef up the marketing, because this will be mad.” After a Partovi question about security, Cohler brought up that he saw much of this core functionality with GDrive. “Why are you going to be successful?” To that the startup said, “My mother could use this and she’s not a computer person. It’s the Apple model, we just want it to work.” Shaker is a social environment that allows you to use your Facebook profile to interact with people around you, “like a Second Life, except you’re yourself.” The platform is for social experiences, which allows you to visit virtual places like bars or offices, incorporating the Facebook API in order to include stuff like a Like wall where you can see what you have in common with the other people in the room. Shaker has had almost 10K users since its beta launch. Ron Conway began the feedback by asking how similar the app was to Second Life, and what happens when the app morphs into a dating site. The Shaker founder talked about how it used your real identity and how it was more meaningful than Second Life, “They’re creating meaningful relationships. Yes, if you build a bar, expect to see a dating or a flirting scene,” he said, but referred to the fact that the app wasn’t just about dating. Matt Cohler asked about the app’s peak concurrent user number, and the Shaker founder said that he’s only opened it in Israel without any PR and they had to shut down invites to 540 people. At peak hours the app has 5% to 6% of usership, “Shaker is live and vivid 24/7.” Botha likened the app to Snow Crash, a Neil Stephenson science fiction book that refers to virtual worlds, “It gives you a sense of what is coming. I like it for stuff beyond dating, like listening to music.” “What has surprised you about the usage?,” he then asked. “When we tested different graphic environments, we got completely different interaction,” the Shaker founder said. “Even with the same communities, no one’s dancing on the bar during morning.” “It’s cool to try to change interaction,” Marissa Mayer said. “One concern I have is the number of people. My question is around how you decide to move in the space… If it just is dance mode then it’s just glorified chat.” The Shaker founder said that with regards to movement he considers the figure in shakers more like profile carriers and not avatars, “They carry your profile. You really communicate with the profile.” Hadi Partovi asked whether they’ve ever split up Shaker into two rooms, “How do you decide who goes in which room?” The Shaker founder said that they had actually opened it up for testing in one room, and kept adding rooms, “That’s not the strategy moving forward, we have a system which allows for infinite number of rooms.” “I’m a big fan, I’m an investor,” said TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington “I’m continually surprised by the breadth and depth of startups out of Israel … If I was Marissa I would say we’re buying this today, immediately make it Google + related.” CakeHealth wants to be the Mint of heath, allowing you instant insight, bill reconciliation and personalized recommendations for various healthcare programs. Marissa Mayer: There were a lot of things I really liked, recommendation engine key is a core piece of tech, can double in your insurance. Google health didn’t work out very well because of data restrictions. Insurance data isn’t accurate. An insurance company would say that you had Cancer when you didn’t have Cancer. CakeHealth responded that 80% of bills have errors but they had built-in alerts for errors, “There are common things we can look for by tapping into databases; we started out with insurance claims. As we move up the chain we can see even more detailed information.” (Yes, Mike Arrington did take a pee break) Roelof Botha: This would be great if it lives up to the promise of solving problems, every time I’ve had an issue with a health care company it’s because they’ve made an error. CakeHealth: Machine learning is too strong a word, but we’re creating rules for what can and cannot happen. Hadi Partovi: I can’t imagine taking out a bill, and taking a picture of it with my iPhone. I’d rather just tell my doctor to send it to CakeHealth. CakeHealth: Taking a pic of the bill is temporary. We’re looking at other models that are not quite in place yet. We are still dealing with a very paper-intensive process by taking a picture and then transitioning into those other models as they become viable. We’re looking at the Netflix model, envelope to house. Matt Cohler: Distribution, market? CakeHealth: It’s consumer oriented, employers are great marketers because it will streamline process, reduce amount of inquiries. Ron Conway: How does this monetize? CakeHealth: It’s a Referral model: sign people up for plans and savings accounts. bigger opportunity foundation, action oriented negotiating transaction fee. TalkTo allows you to text any local business for information as easily as you text your friends. It looks just like SMS, nothing new you have to learn. If a business is not on TalkTo, it reroutes the request to a call center which calls the business and texts you back your answer. Ron Conway: This reminds me of Yext. How are you communicating with businesses, customers that are texting you to TalkTo? “We’re going through a call center,” the startup said. “If you sign up for the premium plan we’ll keep making the calls.” Marissa Mayer: I like this business a lot, we actually bought one of your competitors Talkbin. I’m worried about non-responsivenes. What kinds of guarantees of responsiveness do you have? Matt Cohler: I would encourage you guys to think about not charging the consumer at all. Roelof Botha: One of the things that I worry about is the consumer expectation around direct messaging. It will take a very long time. Most of the time you’re going to end up with a “can’t get ahold of them response.” Hadi Partovi: You should give an email address to every business. Mike Arrington: I’m worried about the cost getting ahead of this business, but it’s a huge win. I honestly think Marissa should buy this, and Shaker and Bitcasa. It sure would be nice as a consumer. Marissa Mayer: We do think the space is interesting which is why we acquired Talkbin. Prism Skylabs uses its video intelligence technology to fuse images together into realtime story boards showcasing a space. It aims to change the way businesses deal with and highlight customer flow. Roelof Botha: There’s a lot there. What’s the crisp online hook? Prism Sky Labs: Video is a huge problem for SMBs. We could probably build a whole business just doing video for businesses, but we want to get into the social media aspects. We really want people who are out there to see great views of what is going on. Marissa Mayer: Obviously, this is related to what we do. Business owners are very particular about the state of their ship. People want to put their best foot forward. People want the privacy silhouettes to be perfect. Prism Sky Labs: A lot of the things we’re dealing with go away as we accumulate more images. Background, we’re learning what the background of the place looks like over time. We have all that data. We can give businesses merchandising tools. Hadi Partovi: I want Mike to say Marissa should buy this. Mike Arrington: Marissa should buy this. Ron has created a lot of value out there. He could start a lemonade stand and I’d invest. Hadi Partovi: In terms of trying to solve hard problems technically you’re actually doing that. I would try to figure out which of the 10 things you could do and pick the most exciting one. Ron Conway: The use case for this product is going to morph a lot. This could turn into a huge company. Do you have a unique IP that enhances clarity? Prism Sky Labs: We’re registered 20 inventions, provisional patents, since July 1st. Farmigo is an online local food subscription service that aims to bring people fresher, tastier, healthier, cheaper and more convenient food by connecting consumers directly to farmers. Mike Arrington to Hadi Partovi (who is an investor): “Why do you think company should win? ” Hadi Partovi: The food industry is 10% of the GDP. It’s a trillion $ industry, not billion, and disrupting it is good for our health. Marissa Mayer: Groceries are a low margin business, but full disclosure: I don’t cook. There’s a lot of overhead managing behavior as a consumer. What happens when you sign up with too many vendors? Farmigo: There shouldn’t be a concern about the activation goals, as we’re exceeding them. Once it’s hit exceed goal in a week, it’s not going to dip back down. Food subscription is a change in the way people buy their food. Roelof Botha: I’m concerned about adoption from producers. Also it might suffer from a Netflix subscription problem, how people never watch things in their queue. I can’t anticipate if I want peaches next week, what if I want apricots? Farmigo: We’re focusing on UX, so each grower could use it easily. From the producer’s side it’s usually an admin using the system which means they’ll have comp literacy. Ron Conway: Awesome example of a concept I was trying to explain to Mike, Collaborative Consumption. I’m selling my Safeway stock. Trello is simple collaborative software that lives in the cloud. Since it’s launch yesterday, it’s amassed 26K users. Ron Conway: Who do you compete with? Trello: Salesforce, Findbugs, Microsoft Project construction teams. But we’re vastly simplified, our way of doing it is different. Roelof Botha: This would cut away half the email I receive. But what if you’re in a group of 10 and two don’t adopt? How do you draw people in? Trello: The way I use this product: make the board, and update it with what I think he’s working on. He starts to get value out of looking at what I think he’s working on. Marissa Mayer: I think it’s impressive. I worry that Salesforce is a lot more customizable. What happens when there are 1000 requests? Can it scale? Trello: I probably wouldn’t use this if I had 1000 requests, there is an inventory of feature ideas that I wouldn’t implement. Nobody’s going to use Excel to do their taxes. The vertical applications will be better in some cases, Salesforce for your sales pipeline, Bug Tracker for bug tracking, Hadi Partovi: One of the hardest challenges is explaining to people what it will be used for. How do you say that in one sentence? Trello: Organize everything together. You kind of have to rely on people’s imaginations. Paul Carr: Mike you have the last word. Mike Arrington: Now you’re giving me performance anxiety. I think this pretty good. |
And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt Is…Shaker | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Three days and 31 startup pitches later, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2011 has been determined. Out of the 29 startups and two audience choice winners, we whittled the list down to which included , , , , , , and . The winner from this group receives the Disrupt Cup and $50,000, taking over possession from Disrupt New York winner Without further ado, the runner-up is And the winner is…Shaker! TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in Prism Skylabs and is a pending investor in Shaker. Israeli startup Shaker essentially aims to turn Facebook into a bar via a social game. As we of the startup, Shaker is a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar, your pictures are placed on an virtual wall, you can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear and you can even buy people drinks. Shaker takes basic social gaming a step further by allowing users to meet new people (as opposed to playing the game with existing friends), which replicates the experience of being in an actual bar. Shaker looks at profile information to show what else you may have in common with seemingly random people in the room. For example, you may have the same birthday as someone. Or you may both like the same movie or band. Other elements include proximity based chat, a Tweet wall, and a “smart phone” social discovery tool to look up information about people in the room. The startup, which has raised $3 million in funding, is already seeing pretty good traction. The game received 80,000 MAUs in a matter of weeks, and had to block invitations. People were complaining that the bars are too crowded, and users were spending impressive amounts of time within the app. Without any PR, the game was able to attract attention and the startup had to shut down invites to 540 people. Runner-up Prism Skylabs is a cloud-based service thats allow business owners to bring video feeds online, capture images from these feeds and share this data with consumers and the public. The startup allows a business to download a free software that detects cameras or video on a network, showcases a number of images of the space to the business. Similar to the way you can pull images from videos using a video editing software, Prism Skylabs pulls relevant images of your establishment and builds insightful visualizations from these photos, while protecting customer privacy. The company is backed by SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Eric Schmidt, Aaron Patzer, Brad Garlinghouse, the CrunchFund and others. Winners Presentation
The audience choice winner, which is presented by NEA partner Patrick Chung, is , which is a translation app. Vocre allows you to speak into the app while your iPhone is vertical, flip the phone horizontal and the phone’s accelerometer cues the app to translate and speak what you’ve said into the language of the people you’re speaking with, and they then can respond, rinse, and repeat. Peter Relan, chairman of , presented an award for best mobile game to Fortune Planet, a project created at the Hackathon a few days ago. distributed two awards: The best mobile app went to Vocre and best use of social data went to Wondershake. |
A Year After “AngelGate”, More Angelic Angels Descend Upon Disrupt | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | A year ago, a huge controversy erupted before TechCrunch Disrupt (sound familiar?). Michael Arrington in San Francisco, Bin 38, and walked out feeling dirty. It was in Bin 38 that he overheard a group of angel investors talking about a range of things — many of which didn’t seem very entrepreneur-friendly. Anyway, the situation was bad enough that Mike had to write a post declaring: . And it mostly wasn’t. . Fast forward to today. Mike was back on stage with another group of angels. The situation has changed significantly as Mike is now an investor himself, with several angel round deals in the bag. Meanwhile, the angel scene as a whole has exploded even further as we’re in forthy investing times. To kick things off, they briefly revisited AngelGate. You may recall that SV Angel’s was over what went down at Bin 38. was 500 Startups who was at Bin 38 (Conway was not) that night. Both were on last year’s panel, and both were on this year’s as well. “The benefit was that everyone realized that we should focus on helping entrepreneurs,” Conway said today to applause from the audience. And that was pretty much it. After that, the conversation moved on to what’s happening in the angel community now. Mike wondered if the move toward uncapped notes (essentially a funding round where the actual price is determined investors commit) is a bad thing for investors. Specifically, he asked if Conway’s commitment to invest in all Y Combinator startups with Yuri Milner was hurting the other angels? Everyone seemed to agree that the uncapped situation started long before that. In fact, that’s the way things were for a while until angels started to gain popularity and were able to push back to capped notes, McClure noted. Only McClure and Conway were the ones on the panel who were open to doing uncapped notes at all. SoftTech’s , Freestyle’s , and Felicis’ all are generally against the concept. McClure’s thought is that you should be “open to great companies” not matter what the terms are. Meanwhile, Conway believes that entrepreneurs with great track records have the leverage to do uncapped notes, and believes that’s their right to take advantage of that. Felser believes that uncapped notes hurt early investors which are often friends or family members. They take the most risk, and commit early, then they can get screwed without caps. But Conway believes uncapped is part of the beauty of free enterprise. He noted that while he invested in Google at $75 million pre and at the time, that would have been considered an uncapped note. He also pointed to Jim Breyer getting into Facebook at $85 million as the same idea. After some back and forth about the topic, Conway interjected. “None of this matters,” he said. What really matters are the products and the entrepreneurs, he declared. So Mike turned the topic to angels versus VCs. He noted that McClure once said something along the lines of “fuck VCs” — which McClure said was out of context. McClure said VCs are great downstream partners for funding the companies he backs, but the motivations of the two are different (he didn’t elaborate). Senkut said whether it’s an angel or VC, all that matter is who you’re doing the deal with. Felser agreed — “we like to find good partners (at VC firms)”. Clavier and Conway agreed that traditional VCs are vital to take companies to the next level. When Mike asked the panel if they thought he’d be good at being a VC, Clavier joked that they’d talk about it at Bin 38. Conway said it was all about how much value he adds. “It will be yours to fuck up,” Felser said frankly. “Everyone wants a piece of you.” In terms of whether deal flow or instincts about startups matters more, most agreed it’s both. And it’s about knowing when to do follow-ons too. Conway said it’s all about the “D’s” — “deal flow” and “due diligence”. McClure said he thought due diligence was a myth. At one point, Conway started to rattle off some names of who he thought the top tier VCs were. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner, Sequoia, Benchmark, Greylock, Accel — Mike urged him to keep going as to why those are the best, but Conway said those are just the ones off the top of his head. At that point, the panel started taking questions from the audience. McClure gave his five “million dollar points” he uses towards determining valuation. Clavier advised someone that fund-raising is a huge waste of time (it detracts from focusing on the product). Felser said that entrepreneurs should never give up — he was rejected 100 times before a VC finally said yes to an idea of his. Conway then noted the size of the line seeking to ask questions and asked his SV Angel team to go meet with the entrepreneurs in line. As the panel ended, the angels themselves descended to talk to the crowd. This year was definitely different than last year. |
Going Crazy With A Camera In Startup Alley | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | This year’s Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF was the biggest ever, with 200 companies exhibiting throughout the conference. Perhaps as a result it’s attracted many more international companies and the variety of startups is still pretty amazing to see. We decided to do a lot of running around with a camera (quite literally), and do some quick fire interviews with the startups – the videos are below. As with previous years there were plenty of Israeli startups at TechCrunch Disrupt, but this year they took out an entire “pavilion”, which amounted to a long line of tables. This clustering of companies from one location proved a great idea – perhaps we’ll see more countries follow suit next year. Amongst the startups we chatted to included Mingle, where you can chat with people around a location but where you don’t have to reveal your actual identity. The lack of a map may be a drawback in my opinion, unlike . was a social network with customisable avatars. was a kind of journaling application combined with a diary app, with a nice interface. Reminicent of , although Diary has not emphasised the journal as much. was a startup allowing people to poll / survey users, largely via Twitter. We then ran into Christopher Maire, a serial VC investor in Berlin and had a quick chat about the Berlin tech scene. , a pretty amazing app which lets you track analytics around you phone use. I’m looking forward to its launch. is an interesting app which is a little like a private check-in on Foursquare for scheduling meet ups with friends or colleagues. You share you future location with someone privately. is a startup which brings small business data together in one ‘stream’. is a social app for book readers where users follow eachother and make lists of their favourites, a little like on Twitter. Coming out of Poland. is a startup based in Berlin which is also socialising books via an iPad app and online. . is a web tool to create ePublications and enhanced iBooks – something which authors and publishers could use. is about social shopping, and getting your friends to chat with you about products as you are online shopping. is a new way to talk to experts. is tackling making cities more useable by pedestrians. SkyYou is a new social games app startup. is about fixing online reviews and making them more relevant. VisualScript is creating an animation tool for HTML 5. Veat is a SAAS solution for dealers for after-sales marketing campaigns. is a location based socal network which allows people to create a temporary network with pictures. It’s like Color – but it works… is a thank-you platform – like an upgraded Like for people. creates 3D visualisations of locations using an iPad app – great for travellers. isa social shopping app, built in Facebook, where you can sell and buy. is ‘Twitter hunting in real life’ – you bet real money on tasks you follow via a mobile app. Monday Part 1 Monday Part 2 Tuesday Part 1 Tuesday Part 2 Tuesday Part 3 |
PayPal To Unveil New Payments Platform For Merchants, Will Include Location-Based Offers And More | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | PayPal held an event today in Los Angeles for merchants to get a early look into the eBay owned payments giant’s new technologies. As CEO Scott Thompson says in a , The company says it will be rolling out a one-stop shop for merchants, both online and local businesses, to manage payments from customers. Details are sparse but PayPal says that new features will include location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device and offering more payments flexibility to customers after they’ve checked out. So in the video included in this post, you can see that PayPal will allow local businesses to accept PayPal payments from customers via their mobile device using scanning technology, and QR codes. eBay CEO John Donahoe earlier this year. You’ll also be able to use PayPal in physical payments gateways at stores as well (where you would normally complete the credit card swiping process). And users will be able to access realtime store inventory, receive in-store offers, and real-time location-base advertising from stores. Sam Shrauger, VP of Global Product and Experience for PayPal, tells us that this new platform is not just about payments. These services will allows merchants and consumers to better connect, from the search process to the post-purchase time period. He explains that nation and international merchants are already integrated this platform, and 20 merchants will be live with this by next year. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7q1jx8mYi8&w=560&h=345] |
Reminder: The TC Gadgets/Mobile Meet-Up Is Tomorrow In San Francisco | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | To recap: on September 15 at 6:30pm TechCrunch Mobile and Gadgets will host our first meet-up at in sunny SF. Sponsored by Samsung, this meet-up will be the first chance for our readers to get ahold of some of Samsung’s latest products including the just-announced Galaxy S II. It is an event not to be missed. We’ll have some finger food, a little dancing, maybe some networking and an open bar (It’s 21 and over, obviously). We invite you to meet the entire TCG/M team and chill with some of Samsung’s newest gear and the chance to win a new Samsung Infuse 4G – we’re giving one out ever half hour!
Date: Thursday, 9/15/11
Time: 6:30-9:30pm
Location: Tickets are sold out but if you RSVPed, be sure to show. Special thanks to Samsung for the sponsorship and we hope to see you in SF on September 15. Samsung Telecommunications America, LLC, a Dallas-based subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., researches, develops and markets wireless handsets, wireless infrastructure and other telecommunications products throughout North America. For more information, please visit . |
Marissa Mayer Teaches Us How To Pronounce “Zagat” | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the closing talk was between Michael Arrington and Google’s . As Mike noted, the two of them have been on stage together more than any other interview duo at TechCrunch events, so it’s fitting that Mike’s final interview as a TechCrunch employee is with Mayer. He focused on one thing: Zagat. Mayer led of the review site by Google. It’s going to be a key part of Search, Maps, Google+, etc, going forward. And that has some competitors worried. But let’s forget all of that — here’s what really matters: how do you pronounce “Zagat”? “It’s like the ‘cat’ — ZaGAT,” Mayer noted. She shared a story from founder Tim Zagat who said a customer once called him for a guide and mispronounced it. When he tried to correct the customer, the customer refused the correction. This is something Mayer can relate to. Even though her name is spelled “MAYer”, it’s pronounced like “Meyer”. Mayer noted her excitement about the deal. “They really were one of the first forms of user-generated content,” she said. Incredibly, Zagat has been in business for 32 years, and it started out as Tim and Nina Zagat asking friends for restaurant recommendation and those two turning around and printing those recommendations out and sending them other others. Now the business operates in over 100 markets and spans 13 different categories. When Mike asked what the deals means for Yelp and other competitors, Mayer made it clear that those competitors would continue to be a big part of Google Places. Google will aggregate anything they think is good content and link to it. At the same time, they’ll now have deeper access to the Zagat data to surface it in a more appealing way. As for OpenTable, there was some controversy because the stock plummeted after the Zagat acquisition announcement. But Mayer notes that Zagat has a partnership with OpenTable and that will remain in place after the Google deal closes. When Mike asked how they kept the deal totally secret, Mayer seemed quite proud of that. She noted that she’s been talking to them informally for years, but this past spring they started talking about a deal. But it was held very closely. Most in the company didn’t know about the deal until it was announced — that’s how you keep a major deal a secret. Who would have thought? |
From Over 130 Hacks Came The Ultimate Six: The Hackathon Winners Take To The Stage | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Over the weekend, over 400 hackers gathered for 24 hours of hacking, Red Bull, and networking. From these late night toils, over 130 hacks emerged from the . On Sunday afternoon, five expert judges, which included Salesforce’s VP of Open Cloud Standards Kevin Marks, Google’s Rohit Khare, Betfair’s Vice President of Mobile Engineering Raj Vemulapalli, OneTrueFan founder Eric Marcoullier and Ask.com’s Director of Engineering, Mobile and Platforms Vishal Shah were tasked with choosing the top six hacks from the plethora of presentations. The judges chose , , , , , and , which today had the opportunity to present their fledgling startups and products to the crowd at Disrupt. For videos of each of the startups on stage, . And for some TC’s staff favorites from the hack-filled weekend of hacks and hackers, Last but not least, for some hacker style and flavor, . : A “Hipmunk for movies,” FlickMunk’s app looks for local theateres around you, helping you to plan your trip to the movie, see how far you are from the theater and whether not you’ll be able to make it in time — as well as helping you rate and track those movies once you’ve taken a gander. : Shopify shoppers take note. Gainify is a nifty plugin that lets you turn any store into a daily deals site. : Google Calendar plugin that allows you to check the weather of a planned event in advance. : An HTML5 3D color matching game. : For a novel take on the dating model, Ex-Rated brings Yelp to dating by creating a system that allows users to rate their exes. : This hack is aimed at those who cannot afford to pay for healthcare. U4Them is a way to connect people who need help with healthcare payments with people who have the ability to donate cash. Every listing is initiated and approved by social services wing of hospitals, and allows users to ask friends and family to accept payments via PayPal. |
Miso Media Raises Another $2.4 Million To Help You Learn Guitar | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | One of the companies taking the stage this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt is , a startup that’s looking to help you learn how to play guitar with the help of your smartphone or tablet. In addition to a product update, the company had some significant news: it’s about to raise $2.4 million in a round led by Mind Fund (based in Hong Kong), with participation from Aria Ventures, Detroit Ventures Partners. This is the company’s second round of funding, after a $600K in December. For those that haven’t used it, Miso Media makes an iPad application called that can display guitar tabs and ‘listen’ to you as you play, scrolling the tablature forward as you progress through the song. It also lets you purchase additional tabs through an integrated store. Founder Aviv Grill took the stage to discuss some of the recent improvements to the product. Back when it first launched, the app had fewer than two dozen songs available for download; it’s now up to over 400, and will have over 1000 songs by the end of the month (the company has partnered with several music labels to secure the rights to these songs). And while it’s currently focused on the guitar, Miso Media is also planning to expand into sheet music — which means it’s a direct competitor with , a finalist in this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield (you can see our full post on Tonara ). |
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Qwiki Embraces HTML5 And Takes The Next Content Step With The Qwiki Editor | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, , , took the stage to give an update on their business. that they may be the future of information consumption. But that information was largely pre-packaged at the time. Today, they’ve starting to give people the power to make their own Qwikis. CEO Doug Imbruce announced the Qwiki Editor today. With it, publishers will be able to create their own Qwikis. For example, Imbruce showed off a Qwiki made for this TechCrunch Disrupt. This turns the roughly 3 million reference topics that are on Qwiki now into a possibly limitless experience. Qwiki is going to start testing this WYSIWYG editor with a limited number of partners. (Imbruce notes that they’ve been pinged by hundreds of publishers). But eventually, the plan is to open it up so anyone can make their own Qwikis. The tool offers a simple drag-and-drop experience. Imbruce also announced that Qwiki has a new HTML5-based experience on the web. Previously, the experience on the web was Flash-based only. This gives Qwiki even more potential reach in terms of devices. They’re on the web fully now with iOS and Android as well. |
Fly Or Die: Premature Opinions On Windows 8? We Got ‘Em Here! | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Erick and I did a quick Fly or Die on the Windows 8 pre-release tablet they sent along with us from Build this year and we were split right down blue (screen of death) state/grey (screen of death) lines. I found the pre-release to be lacking and buggy (I’m ) but I . Like it or not, this is the next Windows 8 and, as I noted, this is a “PC” operating system, not a tablet, laptop, touchscreen, or mobile OS. It’s Windows. Erick, on the other hand, wasn’t much impressed but I’m sure he’ll come around once he realizes that the interactive panels are actually pretty cool and that the goofy Windows/Metro transition will be less of an issue once more apps support the full-screen UI. I agree that this build is quite odd and needs considerable work, but this is Microsoft’s big push and they have to make it incredible. I’m willing to give them a little more time, but I’m not sure how much longer they can futz around in the slate market before Android and iOS sew them up. |
Remind101 Is A Private Twitter For Teachers | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Ten companies from the incubator in Palo Alto pitched their wares onstage this morning at . In order to participate in the three-month Imagine K12 program, which runs out of the AOL offices, a startup has to have an education bent but otherwise can focus on any product. When I asked Imagine K12 participant Brett Kopf why start an incubator focused solely on education he responded,”There are a lot of problems in education, so there’s a lot of room to be solving problems.” Fair enough. Kopf’s startup, is a private “Twitter for teachers,” providing educators with a “safe” way to broadcast messages like test reminders (hence the name) and notes of encouragement to their students; With remind101 no participant has any access to any other participant’s personal and sensitive contact info like social networking profiles, phone numbers or email addresses. “It’s not that we don’t trust teachers. It’s that teachers don’t have a good way to communicate because there are potential assumptions people can make,” says Kopf. In three weeks since the service’s launch, the product has been used by 1,500 teachers, 15,000 students and parents; cumulatively sending over 130K messages. |
Sonar Adds LinkedIn Support, Gets A Shiny New Interface | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | This afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, announced that they’d added in what is likely their userbase’s most requested feature: LinkedIn support. Launched just months ago at Disrupt NY, Sonar taps into your existing social network accounts and your current location to find potential connections between you and those around you. Up until now, Sonar supported only Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, inherently lending it more of a social, friend-making vibe. With this newest addition, Sonar is moving to become more of the professional network-building tool that people expect it to be. Sonar also debuted a new interface for their app, and disclosed details for the gift package they’re planning to give all new hires. Spoiler alert: the package is absolutely ridiculous. The new interface is primarily aimed at addressing the feedback they’ve seen thus far. They’ve prettied it up considerably (adding splashes of color throughout), streamlined the signup process, and have built-in a fancy new carousel that lets you peruse connections from each supported social network with just a quick swipe separating them. In what will undoubtedly serve as wonderful fuel in the “Are We In A Bubble?” flamewars, Sonar also announced a of stuff they plan to give all new hires. The package includes: To be clear, they’re not asking new hires to pick one or two things they want — they confirmed with me multiple times that all new hires (they plan to make a few) will get of the stuff above. Ridiculous. So, why the heck would they do this? “We’d rather spend the money on this stuff then on recruiters”, says founder Brett Martin. I wondered if this was a cleverly obfuscated way of getting new talent without offering equity, but Brett assured me that this in no way takes equity negotiations off the table. |
Clearwire, China Mobile Partner Up To Expand LTE | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | It’s no secret that Clearwire is looking at rolling out an here in the States, but a recently announced partnership could bring them some big support from overseas. The 4G internet provider has inked a deal with state-owned China Mobile to collaborate on the . TD-LTE is a network standard that China Mobile has been working to implement during the past few years. China Mobile’s forthcoming TD-LTE network runs on the 2.5 GHz frequency, which (what a coincidence!) matches up rather nicely with Clearwire’s own LTE licenses. Their partnership hinges on the development of multi-mode devices that could see use in either market. For a company that’s rumored to be , this partnership could be exactly what they need to stave off an acquisition. What Clearwire is really after is here is access: by helping to develop and expand the TD-LTE standard, they not only make it easier for OEMs to start working on devices usable by both companies, they also get in on the ground floor for potentially lucrative roaming agreements. Of course, this all supposes that Clearwire can get the $600 million in funding necessary to start building out their TD-LTE network. Neither company has made mention of it, but if China Mobile were to pitch in a few bucks, it could generate some more state-side influence for China’s biggest wireless carrier. |
McClure’s Five “Million Dollar Points” For Startup Valuaton | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Today during TechCrunch Disrupt, Michael Arrington led a discussion between a panel of angel investors. There was a ton of good content, but one thing that sticks out as particularly interesting is the way 500 Startups’ thinks about valuations. He has what he calls “million dollar points” — and there are five of them. McClure brought them up when a question from the audience asked how the investors set valuations for early stage startups. Other panelists had less concrete answers, and Mike himself said worrying about valuation is not something that’s good to hear from an entrepreneur’s mouth. But McClure is practical, and realizes there needs to be a concrete way to think about valuations at any stage. Here are his five key points: 1. Market 2. Product 3. Team 4. Customers 5. Revenue Each of those is worth around a million dollars in McClure’s mind in early stage investing — assuming each of them are nailed, of course. This will undoubtedly be a somewhat controversial way of thinking. Though there’s no question that it’s better than the alternative Mike suggested: “pulling a number out of your ass”. |
Apple Looks To Postpone Motorola Patent Suits Courtesy Of Googorola Deal | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | Along with , Apple has a lot on its plate. The company has been since April in one of the most widespread patent wars ever, but many forget that Apple and Motorola Mobility have been duking it out for the past year. Motorola , and then with some multitouch patents, and the back-and-forth never ends. The point? Apple has asked to postpone two of the ongoing cases in the U.S. — one in the Southern District of Florida and the other in the Western District of Wisconsin arguing that Moto has lost its “standing.” This has everything to do with . When Google announced its proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Motorola effectively lost a great deal of control over its patents, reports . That means litigating or settling in these patent suits is kind of out of the question. Apple’s official statement: To further its pending acquisition by Google, Motorola has surrendered critical rights in the patents-in-suit, such that Motorola no longer has prudential standing to pursue this action. According to the publicly-filed Merger Agreement, Motorola has ceded control of the most basic rights regarding the patents-in-suit. Absent Google’s consent, Motorola cannot: (1) sue for infringement of its patents in any new action; (2) settle pending litigation (including this case) that would require a license to any of its patents; (3) license or sublicense its patents except in limited circumstances relating to the sale of Motorola’s products; (4) assign its rights in its patents; and/or (5) grant a covenant not to sue for infringement of its patents. In other words, Motorola can’t really continue on in its suits with Apple. And if it could, Apple would be at an unfair advantage, says Apple. Let’s say Motorola wins. Then Apple would not only spend a huge amount of money litigating against a party with no standing, but the company would also face an injunction brought upon it by a party with (again) no standing. Let’s say Apple wins. In that case Apple lawyers say, “[Apple] risks an attack on its victory on appeal by a third party, whether Google or another Android smartphone manufacturer, contending that the judgment should be overturned due to a lack of prudential standing,” It’s hard to tell whether Apple’s request to postpone will be granted, but responses from Motorola are expected shortly. |
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek On How The New Facebook Music Integration Will Work | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | Before I lost my voice earlier today (yes, that’s me up there asking all those questions, NOT Marge Simpson), I sat down with CEO at F8. Ek and I spoke about today’s “launch” of Facebook Music, which wasn’t a music console built on top of Facebook like some had conceived, but rather a partnership built around a dozen music apps — like and — through Facebook’s now extended Open Graph. In addition to sharing their own and seeing their friends’ music listening activity in the new Facebook News Ticker, users will eventually see and share all music-related activity in a Music Dashboard in the left hand corner of their Facebook profiles, if they or their friends are using a partner app like Spotify. Users can access the “Listen with a friend” feature we through either feed by hitting the Play button on their friend’s update. Responding graciously to my pressing about the rumor I heard that Spotify was to power Facebook’s universal music player, an , Ek went on to reveal that, because of the new Facebook integration, Spotify its invite-only barrier — In addition to giving non-paying users six months of unlimited music listening. Okay great, but what if you don’t want your embarrassing musical taste to be broadcast to all your friends via Facebook? Hit up Applications > Spotify (or Rdio or whatever) > App Privacy > Only Me. Because only you need to know that you’ve been listening to that one Kid Cudi song basically on repeat since March. |
Mertado Raises $2.3 Million; Launches TV Platform To Bring Home Shopping To The Social Web | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | , the social shopping startup that allows users to find and buy products on Facebook, today launched “Mertado TV”, a new product that will combine lifestyle video content with product selection on the social web. What does that mean? Mertado TV will deliver syndicated content from networks like the Food Network, Fine Living, and Better TV and feature products found in Mertado’s catalog — all via the comfort of Facebook. According to Mertado Founder and CEO Vijay Chittoor, beta testing of the Mertado TV platform saw shoppers increasing their repeat purchase activity by 250 percent after viewing the integrated video content. As in revenue by 2015, the CEO said that the integration of the startup’s product catalog with top lifestyle programming should situate them well in a space poised to see hockey stick-type growth. Attached here you can see a couple examples of Mertado users who interacted with its new TV platform and actually bought something. For privacy, we’ve smudged out the names of the users. It also helps that the startup is today announcing that it has closed a $2.3 million series A round of financing, led by Rustic Canyon Partners, which was joined by current investors Blumberg Capital and Redpoint Ventures. “Our mission is to expose a selection of high quality, unique, lifestyle-oriented products for
the home to consumers wherever they spend their time,” said Vijay Chittoor, Founder and
CEO of Mertado. “Combining our product catalogue with leading lifestyle programming on the
leading online community was the logical next step in truly creating a rewarding social shopping
experience—and the numbers prove that it’s a hit.” Booz & Company estimates that social commerce revenue will reach $30 billion in 2015. To fuel
Mertado’s expansion with Mertado TV, the company also announced that it has closed a $2.3M
Series A funding round. joined previous investors and
. Bruce Taragin, Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, will be joining the Mertado board of directors as part of the round. An alumni of the YC spring class of 2010, the startup’s series A funding brings total investment to $3.3 million. Mertado TV is currently available on , with availability on further destinations rolling out soon, including a launch on Press Enterprise’s network next month. The launch of Mertado TV on their social games, by rolling out a virtual storefront that creators can integrate into their apps. As Jason wrote in his coverage of Mertado’s virtual storefront, “When a user activates the Mertado storefront, they’ll see a widget overlaid on top of the game they’re playing. The whole shopping process, from selecting an item to checking out with a credit card, is done from this widget, so the user never gets kicked off to another page (which is good news for developers, who want them to stay engaged with their game)”. For more on Mertado TV, . |
Basis Reveals An Awesome New Affordable Heart And Health Tracker You Can Wear On Your Wrist | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | After raising $9 million in venture funding from and earlier this year, has been able to continue their year-long research and design development of a new affordable heart and health monitor that can be worn all the live-long day right on your wrist. In anticipation of its showcase at , the startup is today revealing the design and features of its so-called “B1 Basis Band” that will launch in the market later this year. While there are a number of health-tracking devices on the market today, the Basis Band seems poised to be a disruptive product in the health space. Priced at $199, the Band is on the expensive side but not unreasonable considering the heart and health tracker boasts multiple sensors that measure heart rate continuously, along with calories burned, sleep patterns, and other physiological metrics. What’s more, the device boasts an LCD touchscreen interface that allows for easy navigation and displays the date and time — potentially making it a pretty great replacement for your measly old wrist watch. Of course, what makes this new health product so cool is that it is connected to a (free) web-based personal dashboard that allows users to view comprehensive data pulled from the device’s monitoring of your heart rate, sleep, and more. The dashboard then helps you further keep track of your overall health and wellness by offering push notifications, suggestions, and a game-ified experience that encourages you to set goals and monitor your progress, or blast health dates to friend and family over social networks. The data that Basis aggregates is also easily exportable, so that you’ll be able to send your health information to your personal trainer or your physician. Obviously, with the state of the health as it is today, along with the rising costs of healthcare, many people are looking to maintain a more active and healthy lifestyle to avoid those high medical bills and trips to the doctor’s office. As most health devices on the market today attempt to calculate heart rate through footsteps or by using a smartphone’s accelerometer or GPS, said Basis CEO Jef Holove, the Basis Band offers an evolved alternative, as it uses a series of monitors to decipher health data directly from your wrist and the bloodflow underneath. This optical engine tracks heart rate by directing light into the skin to “see” the user’s blood flow and is complemented by several other sensors, including a heat sensor that tracks skin and ambient temperature changes, a 3-axis accelerometer that records movement and activity, and galvanic skin response sensors. The device then uses a series of algorithms to cut through the noise and make a number of calculations that result in a precise picture of how many calories you’ve burned, the total amount of physical exertion, sleep patterns, and so on. That data is then served to Basis’ cloud infrastructure and presented to the user in that easy-to-navigate web interface. Pretty cool. What’s more, as the Basis Band has multiple-day battery life and is composed of polycarbonate (and is water-resistant), it’s lightweight, doesn’t get in the way, and can be worn day and night without any maintenance. It’s also modular, which means that you can change straps, both in color and style, to meet your award-winning sense of fashion. All in all, this makes for a welcome change from cumbersome chest-strap EKGs, or arm-band monitors that only offer basic functionality and that you can really only wear while running. Basis is also announcing today that it is appointing an advisory board that includes some medical, social, and gaming big whigs to help oversee the impending launch of the Basis Band. The new advisory team will boast long-time Facebook executive (and early employee) Kevin Colleran, along with Charles and Kai Huang, the co-founders of RedOctane and creators of Guitar Hero, as well as Patrick McGill, Daniel Kraft, a Stanford and Harvard trained physician, and Jeff Rosenthal, who will be bringing his co-founders of the Summit Series along for the ride. Chris Verplaetse, who is being added as vice president of device development, was most recently at Cisco Systems, where he was a key engineer in the development of Flip Video. The addition of these experts to its advisory team is a big strategic win both for Basis and the health industry, and is a sign that these smart, integrated devices like the Basis Band are attracting attention from experts across the board. With a sizable team in place and a sharp new product ready for launch, Basis could just be at the front of a game-changing shift in consumer health products. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Check out . |
Video: Causes Founder Joe Green On The Impact Of f8 | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 22 |
As you may have heard, today Facebook held its fourth , showcasing an array of new features that represent what Facebook says are the biggest changes to its Platform since it launched in 2007. The changes include a completely and a new Open Graph API that gives third-party applications and sites more flexibility (and eyeballs) than they’ve had before. Shortly after the keynote ended, I did a brief interview with founder , who outlined which of the features are a big deal for developers, and why they’re so important. Green has extensive experience with Platform — Causes was one of the first developers on Facebook Platform when it first launched, and it was a launch partner for today’s features. Green has also written a pair of guest posts this week that go into more detail about Facebook’s major changes — including one on and one on the new . Note that we did the video via Skype, and while the video feed was a little iffy at times, the audio remains strong throughout. |
Fly Or Die: G+ Or Facebook? Who Flew Higher? | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | is afoot and it looks like Facebook . But what about G+ and, most important, the new features added to head Facebook off at the pass. Erick and I discussed the pros and cons of both services, the various improvements, and, while I got a kick out of G+’s collaboration features, especially as a way to get work done, Erick was more impressed by timeline. Both services are wildly impressive – but only one can fly higher than the other. It’s too early to say who will win the social race or if it’s anyone’s race to win, but it’s an interesting exercise follow these guys as they try to grab the social graphs of millions of people. |
Piictu Launches, Grabs Seed Funding To Grow Its Game-ified Photo Sharing App | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | Last week, another photo sharing app hit the scene. But before you commence with groaning, is more than just another photo sharing app, it’s “a fun and simple way to talk and play with pics”. Still groaning? Hold on just a second. In a crowded space, Piictu’s value proposition is that it is offering a new kind of visual network where interactions take place through direct “picture conversations” — not just your average, run-of-the-mill photo sharing. Piictu Founder Jonathan Slimak says that photos are traditionally static objects of memory, so with his new photo sharing app, he wanted to transform pictures into a conversation medium, and objects of interaction. But what does this mean exactly? In terms of the daily Piictu experience, for starters, a user uploads a picture, gives it a caption, and immediately receives picture-based responses from other Piictu users, which forms — yup — a picture stream. Where this differs from the pack is that Piictu’s streams are set up in such a ways as they can then be made in the form of a sequential game or center around a question like, “who’s your favorite Ninja Turtle?” As to the former, Slimak cited the example of a number game that focuses on picture-based replies that continue the sequence in a game. For instance, I upload a picture of a vanity license plate that reads “Number 1” and you might respond with a picture of a two dollar bill, and so on. Slimak says that the idea came from his experience watching the World Series on TV. His friends were posting pictures of themselves in their favorite teams’ jerseys to a group MMS app. The problem is that most of these images would never be seen again, lost in the pile, but still had great future value for ongoing conversations. So, Slimak created Piictu as an optimization of MMS group chat, with an obvious nod to Instagram. “Instagram does photo sharing perfectly”, he said, but there’s still room for photos to become the source of rich conversations and game-ified interactions. If you’re one that thinks one picture is really worth a thousand words, then Piictu is the app for you. What’s more, if you were a Photovine user, look no further. The experience of Piictu is remarkably similar to Google’s app, which was retired last month when the Googles shut down Slide. Giving the TechStars startup a further boost, we’ve learned, is a recent infusion of $750,000 in seed funding, led by , , and . The round also included angels like Jon Steinberg from Buzzfeed, Josh Guttman from Outbrain, as well as others. Picture streams have been increasing in popularity in tandem with the rise of microblogging. Just as Twitter recently added image galleries to each user’s profile, so are many platforms looking to take advantage of the rise in pictorial conversation (thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and their cameras). Each photo sharing app has to find its niche, and Piictu has already gained some early adoption as a result of its bet that picture streams will only continue to play an increasingly important role in how we interact and converse in our daily life. And, as is the trend today, it doesn’t hurt to open the platform up to game-ified use cases. Slimak said that, going forward the team plans to add leaderboards to each new photo stream, with the number of “likes”, shares, and views likely determining its ranking. As to how Piictu plans to monetize its free app? The founder said that he sees Piictu as a great venue by which brands can engage visually with their customers and encourage them to submit original, user-generated content — though it remains to be seen how that will manifest. But my hunch is that the team just might be onto something with their focus on conversational photo streams. Stay tuned for more. . |
Social TV Just Got Real With Hulu On Facebook | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | Hulu does TV shows better than just about everyone. In fact, other than YouTube, of any web video platform (with the average web viewer watching an average of 3.2 hours a month). That being said, Hulu has never done social particularly well. Sure, users interact on Hulu discussion boards, tweet clips to friends, and share shows on Facebook, but the platform has long been in need of a better way to find and share TV shows and movies. So, today at F8, Hulu announced the launch of , which endeavors to make the Hulu experience social. How exactly? For Hulu users this means getting to watch the video platform’s content directly within Facebook. Now you no longer have to leave Facebook to watch Hulu. And judging by all the news out of F8 today, soon you’ll never have to leave Facebook, period. The videos you watch on Hulu are automatically shared with friends (approval is needed, thankfully). What’s more, , the Facehulu app will give you a comprehensive glimpse into what your friends are watching, in realtime, and allow viewers to spark conversations with each other about what shows they’re watching and how bad the new season of House is. The coolest part? As you’re watching Hulu content, be it a full show, clip, or film, you can leave comments on particular moments within the video. Oh yes. SoundCloud-style. And, naturally, once you leave a comment on a particular moment, you can then blast it out to friends to let them know how clever you are — on both Hulu and Facebook. And for those zealous Hulu Plussers out there, you will be happy to know that the new Facebook app will give you access to your entire H+ library on Facebook, and discuss, comment and share in the same way the unwashed regular Hulu subscribers do. And, for all Hulu users, an important thing to remember: You can change your share settings at any time by clicking on the “share to feed” icon and selecting “Hulu and Facebook” or “No One. Do not share what I watch.” (Or you can go to Facebook or Hulu’s privacy settings.) We welcome you, Hulubook. Facebulu. <a href=" “>Check it out for yourself here. |
EA CEO Riccitiello: We’re Taking Dead Aim At Zynga | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | The last ten years have been kind to game publishers. The mainstreamification of console gaming has led to enormous sales numbers, budgets rivaling Hollywood’s, and an arms race between the majors to create the next big game. But while EA and its ilk were buying up development houses, expanding like crazy, and having franchise-measuring contests with each other, an unperceived menace was growing in the dark bosom of Facebook. As millions flocked to the new platform, EA continued churning out sequel after sequel until they almost sequeled themselves into a death spiral. Now the gaming giant says it has learned its lesson, and is ready to take on the new kid in town: Zynga. EA’s CEO has gone on the record saying they hope to hit $3 billion in digital revenue in the next two or three years. Big talk, but is it in EA’s DNA? One former EA executive , which is pulling in nearly a billion a year and is expected to announce an IPO soon. If Mahoney had been able to steer EA in that direction, I’m sure he would have, but chances are the suits were too pleased with the growing income from the console business and didn’t want to go chasing butterflies like casual gaming. EA CEO John Riccitiello is today, and prefaced his talk by mentioning some big wins by the company in the social space. Their game has over 53 million users, and their total user base is approaching 100 million. Sure, that’s less than half of Zynga’s, but considering how poor EA was doing in this market just a year ago, it’s definitely worth celebrating. Tripling your user base over a quarter? You better believe there was champagne involved. Their goal, naturally, is to surpass Zynga in users, and Riccitiello has set a $3 billion goal for online revenue. They have a head start on Zynga there, as the move to further monetize their major franchises through subscriptions and DLC is only just starting to really take hold. They are already making over a billion a year in online sales, but the ways in which EA and Zynga earn that money are totally different. Whether EA will imitate Zynga or take its own path isn’t easy to foresee, but it seems to me that the hard part is yet to come. Repackaging for a social setting was a cakewalk. Successfully repackaging and their sports franchises is another task altogether. At least . At all events, it’s better than of sticking their heads in the sand. |
Brighton's Silicon Beach tech cluster finally breaks shore | Monty Munford | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | London’s nearest coastal city of has probably the worst beach in the world. Full of rocks, the only sand visible is a small patch remaining from a beach volleyball event when sand had to be trucked in. But what it lacks in sand, it has always wanted to make up for in Silicon, joining most of the Western World in trying to brand itself a Silicon Something. Thus the term ‘Silicon Beach’ was coined more than a decade ago as local quango attempted to tempt companies down to the South Coast of England to create a cluster of companies that would reinvigorate what was then a town. This noble venture largely failed at the time. Brighton and Hove lost out to other places such as Montreal that offered huge subsidies for companies to relocate. Moreover, the wages on offer were always terrible, even for the non-lazy (there are a LOT of lazy people in Brighton) while the lure of nearby London – and the better pay – was a tough competitor. But recently the proverbial tipping point has happened and things have changed. Some would say this began when it was awarded Millennium City status in 2000… I prefer to think it was when those young people with tattoos and piercings outnumbered those who didn’t, and a high proportion started working on the new wave of web technologies, around the middle of last decade. For whatever reason, in 2011 Brighton is on fire and there isn’t a subsidised quango in sight. Older companies are expanding rapidly and new companies are popping up all over the city and even extending to other towns such as Worthing and Lewes. Wages are up, the city has a new football stadium (with a half-decent team) and people are even commuting into Brighton from London – it was usually the reverse. It’s a lifestyle choice for those who prefer (stony) beaches and walks in National Parks to more worldly delights in London. The Falmer campus just outside Brighton also disgorges a stream of talented and innovative people every year. From disruptive start-ups to digital agencies to social media and back again to animation and design, the buzz in the sea air can be defined by this month’s . The festival puts on 30 events over 30 days with exhibitions, conferences, workshops and meet-ups, which the organiser describes as the ‘biggest gathering of digital leaders outside SXSW’. Influential conferences such as and an augmented reality show Improving Reality would make both San Francisco and Vancouver proud. But what of the companies themselves? is one of Brighton’s pioneering companies that has been going since 1985 and now works with iPads after starting with floppy disks, and serves clients in the museums, culture, media, sports, charity, government and commercial sectors. The company’s staff has more than 200 years’ experience and is regarded by many as Brighton’s digital grand-daddy. Another company that has traded in the city for a decade is social monitoring analyst . Perched in a spacious office high above Brighton’s station the company raised significant funding this year and is becoming a magnet for talent. With an office in Germany and a new one just opened in New York, Brandwatch hopes to emulate this year’s exit of its rival Radian6 that was sold for $260 million. And now for something completely different… (nice name) is a start-up that is successfully disrupting the staid world of accountancy. It offers software accountancy for freelancers, contractors and small businesses for a monthly fee that takes the pain out of those who want to set up a company. With trained accountants available at the end of the phone to take potential clients through the process, the company is expanding exponentially. Away from accountancy, start-up is an interesting ‘story-based digital content for emerging platforms’ company that boast clients such as BBC, Disney, Nickelodeon and MTV. The company’s turnover has quadrupled in the past three years and now runs a team of 15 people from its Brighton office. No city is complete without a search agency and is one of Brighton’s most successful digital companies. Originally called Spannerworks, the company has been acquired twice, first by US digital agency iCrossing and then by the legendary Hearst Corporation in 2010. While the company has subsequently lost some direction, its original owner Arjo Ghosh has served as a great example for other entrepreneurs wishing to emulate the company’s exit strategy. The emergence of Brighton and Hove as a digital city has had an effect on other towns. Down the coast, in Worthing prides itself on its ‘digital intelligence’ while over in Lewes ten miles in the South Downs countryside, is a social PR agency run by the colourful Roger Warner. The company delivers analytics, branded content, engagement and community management to a growing roster of clients. So, Brighton and Hove is booming, but it may have to watch its step. One one lunchtime I wandered down to that beach and saw a (brave) young woman coming out of the sea with not a tattoo in sight. A coastal, digital city with a citizen without a tattoo, that will not do, that will not do at all. – Digital broadcasting – User experience and design – Digital creative agency – Communications and PR – Mobile and wireless PR – Digital marketing – Brand language analytics – Online games – Recruitment software – Social media agency – Travel/fashion search agency – Interface innovation for mobile devices – Video, animation and graphics – Stories across digital |
Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | After last year’s f8 keynote, my initial thought was pretty straightforward: . Between the Like Button, the Open Graph, and the Open Graph API, I felt like we were shifting from Google being the fabric of the web, to Facebook taking over. A few days later, a now unpaid blogger declared it: . Both of these declarations pissed a lot of people off. Facebook is the new AOL! Walled garden! The end of open! Blah. Blah. Blah. While everyone else has been busy — including plenty of competitors — Facebook has been kicking ass and taking names. And today is proof of that. For the past year, Facebook has been working on the , which they call “ “. I just got it enabled on my account. Going back in time and seeing the past several years of my life displayed in this way is nothing short of profound. Facebook has used software to make something meaningful. Something emotionally powerful. Because of this impact, some people will undoubtedly hate it. But more will love it. It’s incredible: Facebook has become a tool that’s a reflection of who we are. Just in case it wasn’t painfully obvious already, they’re far more than just another web startup that will flame out in a few years. They are the real deal. And they just made their competition look rather foolish. All we’ve heard about in the blogosphere the past few months is how Google+ could take down Facebook. How Google actually did something halfway decent in the social space — watch out Facebook! And look — now Facebook is even copying them! Please. I have no doubt that some of Facebook’s little moves over the past few months have been in reaction to Google+. But focusing on that is silly. Those are tiny features compared to what Facebook just unveiled today. They weren’t even worthy of being on stage at f8. While Google was busy rushing to get a social network that could compete with Facebook out the door, Facebook was thinking about the next phase of social networking. They were building the next Facebook! Google+ does compete with Facebook — the old Facebook. It does not compete with what Facebook launched today. In that regard, Facebook pulled an Apple. Apple releases something, and everyone in their space rushes to do the same thing. But they never realize that it’s a losing position. They’re skating to where the puck has been. Apple skates to . Facebook is skating to where the puck is going to be. Also reminiscent of Apple: when Facebook unveiled the Like button last year, they were hardly the first to do a button. But they were the first to do a button in the correct way. One click. Done. Suddenly, everyone needed this one-click button. But while all the competitors were busy , Facebook was busy making the button obsolete. Today’s Open Graph changes represent a world where the button isn’t needed. Sure, it will continue to exist for certain types of content. . With the new Open Graph, you’re sharing stuff as you do it. You don’t have to think about it. You’re listening to music on Spotify and it’s being shared with your friends automatically in the Facebook Ticker. The only button you hit is “play”. Obviously, that’s not ideal for all content. But for some of the best content, it’s beyond ideal. The idea of hitting a share button to push your favorite song to Facebook is stupid. Enjoy the music, don’t worry about having to remember to share it. That’s how this should work. There’s one massive problem in the social space: everyone is competing for the same user time. But most services compete by piling on features that erode that time even quicker. They’re offering up services that if I use, it means I’ll have even less time to actually enjoy life. That’s not a sustainable model. Being “social” online has become far too much work. Facebook has clearly been thinking about this problem. And now they have a way to tap the power of social without thinking about it. That’s the future of the space. It’s not about needing a share button. It’s about needing a share button. |
Online Video Ads Now Reach 50 Percent Of The U.S. Population | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | ComScore’s August web video rankings are in, and this is for sure: Americans watch an enormous amount of online video content, with most of that taking place on — you guessed it — YouTube. Of course, last month, Facebook, already the largest photo site on the Web, in terms of unique viewers. Which I find interesting since I can count the total number of times I’ve watched video on Facebook on two hands. Yet, comScore’s rankings find Facebook retaining third position in August, with 51.6 million unique viewers, trailing VEVO in second (with 62 million) and Google Sites (i.e. YouTube) at 162 million. Viacom Digital lept into fourth place, while Microsoft dropped into fifth, as Yahoo and Aol remained in sixth and seventh, with their unique views on the rise. In terms of the big picture stats, total viewing sessions tallied yet another all-time high in August with 6.9 billion sessions (with YouTube qua Google Sites) generating just over half of those. The average web video viewer watched 18 hours of content over the course of August, with YouTube and Hulu unsurprisingly attracting the highest engagement at 5.7 hours and 3.2 hours, respectively. What’s more, 85.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. However, the interesting part of this report, at least for me, comes in the form of a snapshot of the current proliferation of video advertising in the U.S. Americans had more than 5.6 billion video ads put in front of their peepers in August. That’s nearly one ad per person for 80 percent of the entire population of the planet. What’s more video advertising reached 50 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 37.6 times during August, with the total time spend watching video ads totaling more than 2.5 billion minutes last month, according to comScore. If my calculations are correct, that is the equivalent of serving nearly 2,000 years worth of videos. Also of note for online video ads: According to comScore, video ads accounted for 13.4 percent of all videos viewed and 1.3 percent of all minutes spent viewing videos online. While this is likely to make the heart weep for those who hate viewing ads in video content, for advertisers digital video has become a truly remarkable (and nearly guaranteed) method by which to reach a wide audience. Especially considering sites like Hulu won’t let you skip over videos. And speaking of Hulu’s love affair with video ads, the video site generated the highest number of video ad impressions, serving 996 million in August, with Tremor Video in second at 764 million, and Adap.tv in third at 720 million. ComScore has also struck a deal with YouTube for a full comparison of viewership across thousands of YouTube partners and their channels. . Excerpt image . |
Is Meg Whitman The Right Person To Lead HP? (TCTV) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | Meg Whitman is back in the corner office. Earlier today, she was officially , taking over from Leo Apotheker, who lasted less than a year. In the video interview above, I talk to Forrester analyst about whether Whitman is the best person for the job or the best one available on short notice. Gillett and I get into HP’s recent strategy twists, including Apotheker’s decision to get out of the PC business and bail on the Palm acquisition. We discuss whether Whitman, who signed off on that strategy as a member of HP’s board, should or go back to square one? Personally, I thought they should have , who now works for Larry Ellison. (Hey, if the stock keeps tanking, maybe Oracle can buy HP and Hurd can make a comeback). |
FakeGirlfriend.co Lets You Text With Your Made-up Canadian Model Girlfriend | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | “Whatever, man. I’ve got 10 girlfriends. And they’re supermodels! You just don’t know them, because they live in Canada.” “Oh, okay. Call one of them and prove it.” Well, — now what? Enter , a clever little service that lets you text your maybe-not-so-real girlfriend in a pinch, get a text back, have her “call you back” a few minutes later. Because that’s totally not a weird thing to do, right? Of course, this thing probably won’t fool anyone over the age of 10, if only because your digital-girlfriend’s prerecorded message has a tendency to talk through any and all interruptions and doesn’t respond to anything directly. And if it does work, still know that you’re kind of weird. If anyone asks, just remember: like a bag of sand. ( ) |
Coming Soon: Facebook’s Automatic “Read” Button | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | A few days ago, leading up to f8, we noted that we heard from a source that Facebook would soon be beyond the Like button. Specifically, we heard that “Read” “Listen” and “Watch” buttons were coming. But today during the f8 keynote, Facebook didn’t have anything to say about those. But that doesn’t mean they’re not coming. Actually, they are. I had the chance to sit down with Facebook CTO after the keynote and he told me that a new “Read” button would be coming within the next couple of weeks. But it works a bit differently than you might imagine. Unlike the Like button which gives you a way to explicitly share individual pieces of content, this Read plug-in (and presumably, Watch, Listen, etc, plugins) would allow third-parties to add a single button to their site to enable some of the automatic actions Facebook unveiled today. For example, if we add the Read plugin on TechCrunch, there will be a button on the page that when clicked by a user, allows them to automatically let their social graph know when they’re reading TechCrunch. In the new Ticker area of Facebook, it would says “MG is reading TechCrunch” when I visited TechCrunch. To be clear, this button will be totally opt-in for users. And the button will also have “pause” and “undo” capabilities if a user decides they actually don’t want to share their activity automatically, Taylor said. And the regular old Like button will continue to exist for users who still want to share specific pieces of content to Facebook. |
null | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 14 | null |
In First Company-Wide Email, Meg Whitman Says HP Must Focus On Their Mission | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | Meg Whitman as HP’s CEO and President hours ago and she, along with the new executive chairman of the board, Ray Lane, didn’t waste anytime reaching out to their more than 300,000 employees. In the email embedded further down in the post, they reaffirm the statement released earlier today that Meg Whitman has “enormous respect for HP” and indicates that HP matters not only to Silicon Valley, but to California and the United States. The company has a “deep-rooted legacy” and is something they want to maintain and build upon. They state the obvious in that HP needs to refocused on their mission (although she doesn’t define said mission) and the company is filled with the “industry’s brightest and most talented people.” No mention of bringing back the $99 TouchPad, though. Meg and Ray have a large task. Leo didn’t exactly handle HP with care. In his attempt to morph HP into a different sort of company, HP’s stock price plummeted and its market cap crashed. Meg Whitman makes HP’s seventh CEO in the last 12 years. Wish her luck. She’s going to need it. |
Fampus Launches Social Events Site For Universities | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | Good startups often emerge from situations where the founder is attempting to solve a problem they themselves have. That was certainly the case with collegiate events site , created by 22-year old Brittany Brody, now a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a new arrival to the university in 2008, Brody wanted to get involved on campus, but was frustrated by the lack of a dedicated site that listed both on-campus and nearby community events. So she created Fampus. There are, of course, plenty of events sites already out there. Behemoths like Facebook and Meetup.com, for example, compete in this space, as do event search, listings, and ticketing focused sites like , , , and dozens of others. There are also local competitors, like , for example. Even is in on the event-listing action. What Brody wanted, though, was site that showed her all of University of Wisconsin-Madison events right down to the Chess Club meetings and Greek mixers, alongside popular community events. To get Fampus started, Brittany sought help from entrepreneur (and dad) Brad Brody, who now serves as President within the organization. Over the next couple of years, and with the help of a growing staff that now includes 12 full-time , Fampus was engineered, designed and, as of last month, quietly launched. Today, Fampus has 7 colleges on board, each aided by on-campus interns who help promote the site, find partnering opportunities and offer local feedback. Current schools include Grand View University, Drake University, Simpson College, Iowa State University, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska at Lincoln and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Fampus aims to triple that number over the course of 2012. And it has identified a total of 300 target schools it wants to reach. In order to join Fampus, students, as well as administration and faculty, need to have a .edu email address. (Yes, just like Facebook required back in the day.) Featured events appear on the Fampus homepage, and students can click if they’re attending, “keep me in the loop” to bookmark them or “thumbs up/thumbs down” to aid in Fampus’ event recommendations. Surprisingly, there’s no calendar integration yet, but this was not at the top of students’ requests, the company says. For now, users can track their planned events and history on their profile page. Event attendees can comment and upload photos, the latter which can be optionally posted to Facebook, too. Twitter integration is also present. Fampus supports itself through a combination of locally focused advertising (banner and sidebar ads) as well as some sponsored event listings. The site aims to keep sponsorships to a minimum, though, because event curation is its key selling point. To that end, there is no process for listing an event of your own on Fampus. Instead, it’s primarily a database-driven site where events come in through through partnerships with event promoters, venues and its own on-campus ties. Users can “suggest an event” through a new Fampus feature, however. A mobile app (available next week) for iPhone and Android offers close to 75% of the site’s main functionality. It also includes event check-in and, interestingly, an event feature. (Something more location-based social networks should have). As to whether Fampus will one day “pull a Facebook” and open up to a broader audience…well, , but for now, the company’s goal is to remain a university-closed system. Funding for Fampus is from an undisclosed sole angel investor as of this moment, but the company may pursue VC dollars starting early next year. |
Spotify Will No Longer Be Invite Only In The US, And Users Get Their First Six Months Of Service Free | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | I’m sitting here at Facebook’s with Spotify CEO and he’s just told me that Spotify will no longer be invite-only in the US, and that the service will have no limitations (essentially be free) for an unpaid user’s first six months using the service — the clock will start ticking, and be retroactive, after a user signs up. This six months leeway will be available both internationally and in the US. The service is slowly rolling out the new features, so it might take a little time for invites to drop completely says Spotify community manager Andres Sehr. Users will need Facebook to bypass the invite system. “For music to be inherently social it needs to be an open model, and that’s why we decided to do it today,” says Spotify representative Angela Watts. After the allotted six months have passed, music you encounter on Facebook will count towards your monthly Spotify limit, as you have to go through the Spotify app to listen to it. Spotify’s tiered plans include a free version, which allows you to listen to up to ten hours free monthly, a $4.99 unlimited version which drops ads and $9.99 premium version which gives you unlimited mobile access in offline mode. “Paid users will continue to enjoy the service they have,” says Sehr. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjAr5nGzjV8 |
It’s Official At HP: Apotheker Is Out, Meg Whitman Named President And CEO | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | Leo Apotheker was made the president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard on September 30, 2010. Today, just shy of a year later, he has stepped down from his post and HP’s board of directors appointed Meg Whitman as his replacement. Big surprise, right? Under the leadership of Apotheker, HP’s stock lost nearly half of its value, basically squandered Mark Hurds’ $1.2 billion investment in Palm and announced that the company was considering cancelling or spinning off its consumer PC business. In short, HP lost its way within the last 357 days. This move is hardly unexpected as it was rumored extensively over the last week. Meg Whitman was previously the head of ebay and joined HP’s board of directors in January 2011. She also sits on the boards of Procter & Gamble, Zipcar and Teach for America. In a statement , Whitman stated, ” “I am honored and excited to lead HP. I believe HP matters – it matters to Silicon Valley, California, the country and the world.” Sounds good to us, Meg. Do Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard a solid though and don’t abandon their original mission. Keep the PC business and promote a start-up feel throughout the massive HP machine. Don’t forget the company you now lead was founded in a Palo Alto garage. |
Netflix Takes A Swipe At HBO With DreamWorks Deal | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 9 | 25 | Netflix has taken a few hits lately with the reaction to its its streaming and DVD business, but now it is punching back. The company signed a which will give it access to its movies and Tv shows for streaming over the Internet during the pay-TV window. Netflix won the deal over HBO, which currently is first in line among TV networks to show DreamWorks movies. That’s right, Netflix outbid HBO. Estimates put the Netflix deal at $30 million per DreamWorks movie, versus the $20 million per movie that HBO is currently paying. This is exactly the kind move Netflix needs to be doing right now to bring streaming up to par with cable TV. Netflix will have to cut many more deals like this with other studios to make that happen, but this suggests it will be more aggressive in the future. Normally, Netflix purchases streaming rights for later time windows, usually after premium cable channels get to show the movies. The deal doesn’t go into effect until 2013, however. And in the meantime, by early 2012, Netflix will lose the right to stream Disney and Sony movies as a result of its negotiations with . Sony and Disney are much bigger studios which pump out many more films every year than DreamWorks. Netflix must win more streaming deals from the larger Hollywood studios as well if it wants to be considered a serious alternative to regular TV. |
How To Enable Facebook Timeline Right This Second | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | [ : Facebook Timeline is now available to all Facebook users. Learn more about the , as well as , . To enable Timeline for your profile, visit ] This morning , a crazy (and kind of creepy) omnibus look at everything that has happened in your Facebook lifespan. It’s like a story book of your life — or at least the online, documented parts. Facebook said that Timeline would be on the way for everyone sometime in the coming weeks… which is great and all, for everyone else. You’re the type of person who reads TechCrunch, and are thus likely the type of person who likes their new and shiny things . That’s okay. We can make it happen. Fortunately, enabling Timeline a bit early isn’t difficult — but it’s not at all straight forward, either. You see, Facebook is enabling Timeline early for open graph developers. You, too, can be an open graph developer — even if you’re just looking to dabble.
– You probably don’t want to do this unless you’re actually a developer. Expect bugs.
– Only you will see your timeline at first (unless you decide otherwise), but it will automatically go public after a few days. My timeline was automatically hard-set to go public on September 29th.
– It seems that if you login into Facebook on another machine, Timeline gets disabled automatically on all of your machines. With that said, it seems you can get back to your timeline (but ONLY after following the steps below) by navigating to http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAMEHERE?sk=timeline
– You’ll need to have a “verified” account for one of the steps, which means you need a credit card or phone number attached to the account. Log into Facebook Enable developer mode, if you haven’t already. To do this, type “developer” into the Facebook search box, click the first result (it should be an app made by Facebook with a few hundred thousand users), and add the app. Jump into (if Facebook doesn’t put you there automatically, it should be in your left-hand tool bar) Create a new app (don’t worry — you wont actually be submitting this for anyone else to see/use). Give your shiny new app any display name and namespace you see fit. Read through and agree to the Platform Privacy agreement. This is the step you need to be verified for. Ensure you’re in your new app’s main settings screen. You should see your app’s name near the top of the page Look for the “Open Graph” header, and click the “Get Started using open graph” link. Create a test action for your app, like “read” a “book”, or “eat” a “sandwich”
This should drop you into an action type configuration page. Change a few of the default settings (I changed the past tense of “read” to “redd” — again, only you can see this unless you try and submit your application to the public directory), and click through all three pages of settings Wait 2-3 minutes Go back to your Facebook homescreen. An invite to try Timeline should be waiting at the top of the page And you’re done! We’ve seen this work quite a few times now, so it should work without a hitch for just about anyone. |
This Is What Winning Feels Like, Shaker Edition | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 25 | After the screaming ended, the Israel-based ditched Burning Man plans for TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 rehearsals in San Francisco, devising a plan that would buy them some time (asking if they could have all 13 founders on stage) and having that plan backfire (we said “Yes.”). After living through Erick telling them that theirs was one of the “most boring presentations I’ve ever heard” and digesting his impassioned plea, “Take me with you to Shaker, make me feel like I am at the bar! Instead of listing 25 added features, give me one good experience,” the team spent a sleepless night practicing their presentation before being thrown onstage. “The rest of the story is ,” Yonatan says “The music that didn’t work, the computer that froze just as we went on stage, the team in Israel participating inside Shaker dancing on the bar, releasing red hearts to the audience, and of course Mike’s – full of tact – announcement.” It’s no wonder that instead of attending the after-party as , the Shaker team just crashed in their hotel room (photo above). Says Yonatan,”The guy in the picture is obviously Andy, our head of finance… He is the one holding back every dollar in our company – he couldn’t let go of the cardboard check until he literally went to bed with it.” |
PayPal Now Processing $315 Million In Payments Per Day | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 25 | Wow. PayPal released some new public numbers recently that show the payments platform is processing a massive number of payments per day. PayPal says that it saw $3,650 in Total Payment Volume every second in Q2 2011. By our calculations, that means PayPal is processing around $315.3 million in payments per day. On average, the payments platform is seeing upwards of over 5 million transactions a day. PayPal has unequivocally been the in parent eBay’s family of businesses. This past quarter, PayPal revenue quarter. Total net total payment volume (TPV) grew 34% compared to the same period of last year. And PayPal is actually closing in on eBay’s marketplaces segment in terms of revenue (which posted $1.6 billion in revenue in Q2). Another area where PayPal is growing fast is mobile. The company said earlier this year that is in mobile transactions per day, and expects more than $3 billion in mobile TPV this year, compared to $750 million in 2010. To put the $315 million number in perspective, fast growing startup Square (which of course offers an in-store payments product) is seeing in payments per day. PayPal wants to also and will be debuting several retail partnerships for this technology this year. And Facebook is generating a fair amount of as well. It should be interesting to see what have up their sleeves in a few weeks. PayPal’s Total Payment Volume in 2010 represented nearly 18 percent of global e-commerce. With the way that the payments platform is growing, this number should increase in 2011. |
Clinging To Friction: Some Thoughts On Facebook’s f8 | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 25 | It’s been over 72 hours since Facebook first a series of groundbreaking new features at f8, which is all the time I need to predict the company’s long-term outlook, the way it will reinvent the web, and the pricing of its inevitable IPO. Okay, maybe not. But it’s given me some time to try the features out, as opposed to basing my impressions off of Facebook’s well-crafted keynote presentations. And while many of these obviously have a lot of potential, in practice I’m finding them to be a mixed (or, in some cases, a downright irritating) bag. One of the big announcements at f8 was something called frictionless sharing. Here’s the gist: Facebook will let third-party sites and apps integrate what’s effectively a sharing firehose. Turn it on, and everything you do in the app gets shared with your Facebook friends. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained during his keynote, the idea is that a lot of people aren’t sharing as often as they could be, because there’s friction involved with clicking all those ‘Share’ dialogs. Hence the term frictionless sharing: you visit a site or app, activate sharing once, and you’re done. Everything you do from that app gets automatically shared, and you can always turn it off if you decide you want to keep your activity private. Pretty nifty, right? My concern with this new, frictionless sharing, is that it doesn’t actually get rid of the friction at all — it just moves it. Where before I’d have to exert some effort (albeit a minimal amount) to explicitly share a piece of content, with this new effortless sharing I’m going to deal with a nagging feeling in the back of my head wondering if I want the article I just clicked on to be shared with friends. I think the word for that is stress, or maybe anxiety. Which qualify as forms of friction in my book. Put another way, with old-school sharing, the only real potential downside is that I’ll forget to share something that my friends might find interesting. Big whoop. With this new, lubricated sharing, a mental lapse could wind up with my sharing something with my friends. Which, depending on who your Facebook ‘friends’ are and your profession, could actually matter. Granted, there are going to be applications and sites that people are willing to freely share from without any hesitation — you’d be hard-pressed to find many stories over at The Economist that you’d be embarrassed about sharing (why yes, I spend the afternoon reading about Argentinian trade restrictions). But there are plenty of mainstream sites that run news on topics that you might not want syndicated to your boss or family members. Things like drug legalization. Or sex (ack!). Or Jersey Shore. Which means another privacy backlash might be around the corner. I know, I know — the press (including me) has cried foul over Facebook’s privacy-stripping features many times before, and the vast majority of its users have shown time and time again that they just don’t care. But I attribute that more to them being ambivalent than I do to Facebook knowing what its users find socially acceptable. Maybe this is the time they’ve crossed the line, maybe it isn’t — either way, we’re going to see a lot of news articles about frictionless sharing and probably some letters from Congress. If nothing else, I bet the warning signs on the ‘Accept’ dialog for this feature get a lot more prominent in the next few months. Check out the box below — they’re not exactly going out of their way to point out that this is sharing article you read through the app, are they? And, privacy and friction aside, there’s another big question: does anyone even want to see these auto-shared items in the first place? One of the big features launched by Facebook this month, and the one that facilities this frictionless sharing, is the Ticker. It’s that real-time stream on the homepage’s right sidebar, and it’ll follow you throughout the site if you open your browser on a wide enough screen. Unlike the News Feed, which uses a bunch of algorithms to try to surface interesting content, the Ticker is supposed to be a real-time stream of all of your friends do (or at least, it uses far less selective algorithms). And because all of this content is constantly flowing past, you don’t have to feel bad for filling it with these auto-shared posts, since your friends will only see them for a few seconds. That’s the idea, anyway. The first day the Ticker showed up for me, I thought it was nifty. Finally, Facebook was giving me a constantly-updated stream of content to scan, in much the same way Twitter does. I like to waste time as much as anyone, so this was a welcome addition. But I’m increasingly coming to believe that Ticker, at least in its current form, falls short. For the last few years I’ve played a little game with myself as I scan through my various social feeds. It’s called “Don’t Give a Shit”. Every time I read a post on Twitter and the voice in the back of my head says the aforementioned phrase, I add a number to my mental tally. If that number reaches a certain threshold, I cuss a few times and swear off Twitter for the rest of the day. I’d like to think it’s cathartic. I should note that only a minority of the posts I’m disinterested in warrants such a visceral reaction — I really don’t mind, say, a link my friend genuinely thought was neat but didn’t resonate with me. Rather, it’s the updates that I wish were never shared in the first place. Syndicated Foursquare check-ins often fall under this category, as do multi-tweet rants and ‘live tweeting’ of panels that are being both live streamed and live blogged (and aren’t particularly interesting to begin with). Facebook’s News Feed has generally fared well in this game. Sure, it has plenty of misses, but it’s rare for me to see a piece of content in my Feed that evokes real annoyance — which is why I’ve been reading my News Feed every day for, what, five years now. Which brings me back to Facebook’s Ticker. It is losing at my game, and badly. I do not care that a ‘friend’ I haven’t talked to since high school comments on the status of a person I don’t know. I don’t care if one of my coworkers is listening to a Lady Gaga song that came out two years ago. And when one of my Facebook friends goes on a ‘Liking’ marathon as they browse through their friends’ wall posts, I don’t need to see four separate updates telling me about each one. These irrelevant updates wouldn’t bother me if they were the exception to the rule — but they make up the majority of the updates showing up in my Ticker feed. And the Ticker updates in near real-time, so it keeps moving and drawing my eyes toward it. What’s worse, even the Ticker updates from my real friends are rarely very compelling. The minutiae of my friends’ online habits just don’t interest me very much. Take Facebook’s recently-launched music integration, for example. Right now as I stare at my Ticker, I’m seeing a stream of songs that my friends are listening to. Sometimes I’ve never heard of the song. Sometimes I have. Sometimes I really like the song. And, almost always, my immediate impulse is neither to ‘Like’ their update nor to start listening to that song myself. I usually just shrug my shoulders. The fundamental issue is that there’s no context or emphasis around any of these posts. I see song after song scroll by, and I don’t know which ones are actually important to my friends. I don’t know which are the tracks they love — and which are the tracks they left playing as they stepped away to grab lunch. And, as more applications and sites begin syndicating into the Ticker, I’m going to run into the same problem. I won’t know which news articles my friends have endorsed, and which ones they just happened to click on because they saw a link in Twitter. And there’s just . Of course, you can still explicitly share the content you really enjoy (the Like and Share buttons make that easy). But these posts will be shared in News Feed, as before, and if they’re appearing in Ticker they’re going to be competing with a lot of noise. All of that said, the feature is hardly doomed. Right now, Facebook employees are poring over all of the initial data from the existing frictionless apps, and they’ll doubtless be making plenty of tweaks to ensure that you’re seeing a lot of content that you’re at least somewhat interested in. But at this point, my eyes are already becoming numb to the Ticker. Facebook launched other major features at f8. And, despite my gripes above, I really like some of them. First up we have Facebook , which is an overhauled profile that gives a visual recap of your history on the site (and, if you take the time to add additional content from your pre-Facebook days, your entire life). I think it’s nifty. Yes, the first time you scroll though it can be jarring — and, depending on the life hurdles you’ve faced over the years, can be quite sad. But the same could be said of a dusty shoebox full of photos or love letters, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of work to remove the things you don’t want to see from your Timeline (my fix for people who don’t want to revisit their past at all: Facebook could offer an option to simply begin the timeline at a more recent date). Some people have written that Timeline is , because it lets people get such a comprehensive snapshot of your past so quickly. I understand that sentiment, but I don’t think it’s as creepy as, say, the automatic sharing discussed earlier. For one, I suspect that many people habitually look through friends’ photos anyway (even going years back), and if someone wants to look into your past, clicking the ‘More’ button on your Wall a bunch of times never posed much of a barrier. Another way of looking at it: just because you rarely venture back through your Facebook history doesn’t mean your potential employers, significant others, or bored friends won’t. So maybe you should clean things up anyway. The Timeline is also where some of the more compelling parts of the new Open Graph API come into play. Developers will now be able to craft widgets that appear in users’ Timelines, and they can update these widgets depending on what users do in their apps. So, for example, if you had a recipe app on your iPad with Facebook integration, you could have a section in your Timeline featuring the recent recipes you’d made (and maybe even photos of each). Facebook offered similar third-party widgets years ago, but removed them because of clutter. The Timeline fixes this by presenting everything in a sort of sleek chaos that’s flexible without being overly messy, and there’s a lot of potential here for users and developers alike. And, despite my gripes about music sharing earlier, I’m actually really liking the , which presents the trends Facebook has garnered from your friends’ listening habits — things like top albums and artists. This dashboard, and the structured News Feed stories that show similar trends, seem like the right way to surface this auto-shared data. I might not care about the song my friend is listening to right now, but if two of my friends listened to the same album today, then hey, maybe I’ll check it out. To close, I want to take a step back and look at , which was referenced during the f8 keynotes. The law goes something like, “the amount of information you share online doubles every year”. And, given the features Facebook just launched, this seems like it will certainly be the case (or perhaps even an understatement). Thing is, I’m not sure Facebook or its users are ready for that surge in sharing. Between Twitter and Facebook, I think I’m approaching my limit for how much shared content I can consume on a daily basis. Hell, sometimes I find myself getting annoyed at certain friends for sharing too much. Which means Facebook needs to get much better at identifying the content that I’ll find interesting. The site’s increased emphasis on friend lists will help with that, because it’s easy to hone in on the content that’s been shared by your closest friends. But even then, do you really care about your good friends so much that you want to read about each song they listened to, or article they read, or game they played? At some point, you’re going to get sick of them. All of that said, this is hardly a new revelation for Facebook. They’ve been trying to surface interesting content since the origins of News Feed, and their most recently recommendation-related feature, , are actually scary smart sometimes. Let’s just hope that those algorithms can keep pace with the wave of content that f8 is about to unleash. |
Startup Japan: A Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Visits Onlab, A Young Japanese Incubator | Brenden Mulligan | 2,011 | 9 | 25 | Before coming to Japan, we asked everyone we knew for advice on how to connect with the startup community in Tokyo. Every recommendation pointed at the exact same place: Open Network Lab. (“Onlab”) is a Japanese startup incubator in the same vein as Y Combinator or TechStars. The incubator provides startups with mentorship, office space, and a small amount of cash in exchange for a piece of equity. This model is popular in the United States, and leading Japanese internet company (investors in Twitter, Path, and more) wanted to try it in Japan. Onlab is currently in its second year of operation has incubated three batches of startups. Even though it’s a young program, they are already making an noticeable impact on the Japanese startup community. We spent our first hour talking with , the guy in charge of overseeing the incubator’s operations. Hiro grew up in Japan and attended an international school before going on to study computer science at Bucknell University. After college, he launched a startup of his own, and several years later was asked to return to Japan to help build and run Onlab as a way to move the Japanese entrepreneurial community forward. But developing that community has its cultural challenges. Hiro told us. This has led to a ton of interest in Onlab from both entrepreneurs and the general public. This interest doesn’t come without its hurdles, however. Even though the community is willing to take risks, Hiro says it’s just not quite ready to be as transparent as entrepreneurs in other parts of the world. he said. In more mature startup communities like Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs share their war stories on a regular basis. And they don’t hide their failures, but instead embrace them and try to help others avoid it. Hiro knows this, and is fostering the same type of communication with his startups: Hiro also requires his startups to get together at least once a week to discuss ideas that have worked, tasks that they found challenging, and points in they’re development where they’re getting stuck. Although it doesn’t necessarily come naturally, it’s working. Hiro says these sessions are getting better and better and the entrepreneurs are seeing the value in openness and transparency. And Japan is taking notice. When we were there, national network Tokyo TV was spending the day filming the lab and talking to the startups. When they found out some people from Silicon Valley were visiting too, they asked us to sit down for an interview. Most of the questions were around whether or not Japan had the ability to compete with Silicon Valley and whether Onlab could work. Overall, my responses were that it was already working. People are learning about this community all over the world and Onlab has started to put the Japanese entrepreneurial community on the map. We also spent a few hours talking to and mentoring the startups (listed below). Overall, the companies were on par with the types of startups you see in the Bay Area’s incubators. There was an impressive focus on design and user experience and most had well-fleshed out business models and quality prototypes. As a taste of what Onlab has been producing, here is a quick look at a few of the incubator’s current startups:
Giftee has built a platform that allows people to send each other gift certificates for physical goods. They’re responding to the gifting trend, and already have deals in place with some major brands in Japan, including Muji.
FindJPN is the AirBnB for Japanese experiences. They focus on providing a marketplace for some of the best excisions, experiences, and events that tourists to Japan can easily purchase via their website.
ABCLoop is building a language learning community that enables people help each other learn a foreign language in very short, direct interactions. The site gathers the lessons in Loops, which are conversations around a particular topic.
Pirka has built a mobile app that inspires people to help pick up litter around them, by giving users a social network to post photos of what they’ve picked up. They’ve already recorded over 20,000 pieces of trash picked up in 20 countries.
Dressful is building a social shopping network for working woman, where they are recommended new items by Dressful according to their taste profile and also by their friends through a mobile app.
Mieple is building a new way to meet people through your social connections. Think about it as LinkedIn Introductions for the entire web. Pay attention to what Onlab is doing and expect to see it develop and inspire a new generation of Japanese entrepreneurs. |
Google And Monopoly Theater | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 9 | 25 | As I the last Wednesday, with its gotcha moments and Senators pontificating about the dangers Google poses to society, it struck me that what I was watching was theater. And not just any theater, but monopoly theater. I am borrowing from the concept of : “a term that describes security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.” In the same way, talking about Google’s monopoly power and what the government should do about it provides the feeling of improving competition while doing little or nothing to actually improve it. The hearing touched upon many serious concerns about Google’s market power, but in the end it was just monopoly theater. Nothing antitrust regulators do to Google will actually improve competition. With 65 percent to 70 percent search market share in the U.S., 75 percent share of search advertising, and 95 percent share of mobile search (according to numbers thrown out during the hearing), it is not too difficult to make the case that Google does wield monopoly power in search. However, being a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal. The government would have to prove that Google is abusing that monopoly power in an anticompetitive way in order to take action, and that is where things get tricky. Google in many ways is a . It benefits from its own unique economies of scale. The more people who do searches, the more data it gathers to pour back into its algorithms to produce even better, more accurate results. The more people who use Google, the more valuable it becomes to the search advertisers trying to reach them. So there are subtle network effects on both the consumer search and advertising sides of the equation. Since Google offers most of its products to consumers for free, it is difficult to argue that consumers are being harmed, as in a post on GigaOm. But direct consumer harm is not the only test for anticompetitive behavior. Taking actions which drive competitors out of the market can be considered anticompetitive because it reduces consumer choice. The main question the Senate hearing was trying to address was whether Google increasingly is using its dominance in search to favor its own products over those of competitors. Does Google Places hurt Yelp, or does Google Product Search hurt NextTag? It certainly does. In Yelp’s case, Google used snippets from Yelp reviews to help build Google Places (more recently, it ). Yelp protested, but was told if they didn’t like it, they could block Yelp results from showing up anywhere on Google, including in natural results. This was a false choice because of Yelp’s traffic comes from Google in one way or another. “Not being in Google is equivalent to not existing on the Internet,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman during the hearing. Another example that kept coming up during the hearing was Google Finance results which appear summarized at the top of Google when you search for a stock symbol, much in the same way that Google Places results take up a lot of real estate when you do a search for a local business. Google has been presenting these results since 2007. If it can give searchers the answer they are looking for right in the results, like a small stock chart, it will. Responding to a Senator’s question, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said, “In this case we don’t list anyone first. We show a summary, then the results. I disagree with the characterization that we were somehow discriminating against the others.” He pointed out that the first natural result underneath for a stock quote is usually Yahoo Finance, and that Google provides links to competing finance sites in the universal result itself. While this is all true, the first three links in the universal result for a stock quote generally go directly to Google Finance. If you click on the ticker symbol or the chart itself, those go to the Google Finance page, and Google Finance is listed first before Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, Daily Finance, CNN Money, or Reuters just underneath the ticker (see image below). All of this seems like pretty damning stuff, right? With examples like these, it is possible to show that Google does use its dominant position in search to drive consumers to its other products. Shouldn’t Google Finance, Google Places, and all of Google’s other non-search products succeed or fail on their own merits? It is a common practice for companies to introduce new products to its existing customers, but again, different rules apply to monopolies. And Google might be wise to curtail some of these practices on its own before the government does it for them. But even if Google is hurting specific competitors, that does not mean it is hurting the market as a whole. After all, Google changes its algorithm all the time, with some sites rising and other sites falling in natural results. Trying to prove whether Yelp or Google Places provides the better results is very subjective. As long as Google can honestly argue it is trying to provide the best results to consumers, it will be difficult for an antitrust court or the government to punish them for that. Even if Google is abusing its monopoly powers, then what? Any remedies imposed on Google could be worse for consumers than the uncertain consequences of keeping Google unchecked. If Google had to pass every change to its search engine through an antitrust filter that could really screw up search, something which most of us depend on every single day. The Senators seemed aware of this possibility, asking repeatedly what Google itself would propose for a remedy if an antitrust court ruled against it. Senator Al Franken suggested the possibility of a voluntary technical committee to provide oversight, to which Google’s outside lawyer Susan Creighton responded (quite correctly): “Google already changes its algorithm 500 times a year. I think a technical committee would be too slow to keep up with changes in the market.” The hearing was monopoly theater. It was also farcical at times. The Senators kept trying to define Google and search in 2004 terms of ten blue links that take consumers away from Google. But search is very different today. Increasingly, Google is trying to give you the right answer in the results themselves. And you know who else does exactly the same thing? Bing. Telling Google that it needs to go back to the 2004 version of itself while Bing and others can keep experimenting with new ways to deliver information to consumers would just hamper innovation in search. The government and antitrust lawyers can only look backwards. Technology changes so fast that any remedies they impose would be the wrong ones. Look at what happened to Microsoft. It’s monopoly power was eroded by the Internet and Google and (more recently) mobile computing, all unforeseen forces during its own antitrust trials in the 1990s. The same will be true for Google. Search could be displaced by social as the primary way people discover information on the Internet, or maybe some entirely new technology will take hold that nobody is even talking about yet. Monopolies on the Internet simply aren’t as enduring as they used to be. |
He Took On The Video Star, Now Kutiman Takes On Democracy | Roi Carthy | 2,011 | 9 | 25 | What can I say, I just dig . I the work of the Israeli-born artist back in 2009 with the release of ‘ ,’ a seven-track music project created by splicing and dicing YouTube clips. It was back in March when I covered the release of a new, jazzier sounding tune of his called, ‘ ‘. Well, he’s back with another one of those block rockin’ beats… This time Kutiman unleashes his splice-and-dice style upon democracy. Enjoy: |
FYI Google, Facebook’s Former CTO Says It Would Take Two Years For ~250 People To Build A Clone | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | As the fruits of Google’s rush to build a social network are now , someone has asked a pretty apropos question on Quora, Former Facebook CTO and Quora founder provides an informed answer, arguing that if we were just talking about the software and systems and not the company’s user acquisition (which Google granted has a way easier time with), that the entire process would take two years, if undertaken by 175-250 people. D’Angelo arrives this number by calculating which years exactly were relevant in building the current Facebook and adding up the engineers employed during those years to come up 1000 man years as total time. D’ Angelo then eliminates about half of those man years for churn (or trial and error) figuring out that it would take 250 people two years to build a comparable social clone. While “Clone Facebook In Two Years” makes for a great headline (trust me I was tempted), D’Angelo doesn’t raise the burning question of why it couldn’t just as easily be 500 engineers working for one year, 1000 engineers for half a year or 2000 engineers for a quarter of a year. Also, there are for why bringing on more engineers might slow down a project. That aside, the best part about the answer is D’Angelo’s caveats (of course): “It’s impossible to suddenly get 250 people working on something. Most people wouldn’t want to work on this because they could just work at Facebook instead. “ “This doesn’t matter too much, because over the course of the next two years, Facebook (hopefully) will be far advanced over the current state of the product, and so if this clone ever launched it would have to compete against that.” “You can’t just build the software for a site like this and then let it run – you need a whole company with processes and support around the product to have it function.” If it walks like a Google and talks like a Google … Ex-Facebook Intern Yan supports D’Angelo’s estimates in the thread and implies that, because of how much Facebook open sources, the actual number of engineers needed to make a functional clone is less than 250 (to which D’Angelo replies correctly, yes, but Facebook doesn’t really spend that much time open-sourcing). “There is a lot of work that went into building Facebook that Google can avoid redoing,” Yan states matter of fact. Emerald Sea, the project that eventually became Google+, started development in June 2010. Many hold that it is a combative measure, as Facebook’s potential to use rich social data in order undermine Google’s search business continues to loom. It’s been little over a year since the project began, let’s hope Google+ has got at least 500 engineers onboard before mass launch. |
Have Swedish Treasure Hunters Just Discovered The Millennium Falcon On The Sea Floor? | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Some readers may be upset by the content herein, as this doesn’t exactly involve APIs, Android, or SDKs, but it was just too good not to share. The international media has been abuzz today with some unusual news from Sweden. The , a Swedish expedition plumbing the Baltic Sea for underwater treasure, has discovered what looks to be the on the seafloor between Finland and Sweden. Now, clearly it was only a matter of time before Han Solo misunderstood his co-pilot’s roars and growls and took a wrong turn right into the ocean. But, based on the sonar imaging conducted by the Swedish research crew, it really does look like they’ve found something right out of George Lucas’ imagination. In reality, based on the somewhat blurry images, no one is quite sure what exactly the object is; its mysterious dimensions have already caused quite a bit of speculation, and of course UFO enthusiasts are already preparing their “I told ya so” stories. Whatever it may be, its seemingly circular shape is somewhat of an anomaly for the sea floor. Peter Lindberg, the leader of these expeditions said, , that he had “never seen anything like it in his hundreds of hours watching sonar images of the sea floor”. And while the treasure hunter was not willing to say that it was extraterrestrial in origin, he did venture that it might be something like a “new Stonehenge”. In conference with local Swedish media, the submerged mystery object looks to be about 60 meters across — about of the Millennium Falcon. Striations in the ocean floor around the object appear to suggest that the spaceship (or “object”) skidded to its current resting place. Though the more likely explanation is that the object is actually the turret of a sunken battleship or the ring of an underwater volcano. The Swedish team had originally planned to let mystery reign, as budgetary restraints did not make room for a deep dive, but donations have come flooding in and the team is now planning a second voyage to investigate, . Of course, it is true that, in spite of the mind-blowing technology we use and dream up every day, we’ve only , so in reality we have no idea what the hell is out there. After all, have you seen some of these ? We’ve already discovered living down there, so maybe a UFO isn’t outlandish. If you squint your eyes enough. So, maybe, there’s an outside chance that, when Lindberg’s Swedish submersible arrives at the ocean floor, it will find Chewy and Han arguing over directions like an old married couple. Or maybe it’s just a giant hamburger, hard to be sure. Either way, we leave it up to technology to solve these heady mysteries. |
HTC Explains Android Bootloader Unlock Process, Warranty-Voiding Tool Coming Later This Month | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | It’s been a few months now since HTC CEO Peter Chou announced that the company will no longer be locking bootloaders on their devices, and enthusiasts have had nothing to show for it. Many of HTC’s recent devices are still locked up tight, prompting many to wonder when they would deliver on their promise. and a well-timed tweet, though, we now have the answers we’ve been waiting for. The process will begin with a web tool (due out later this month) through which you register an account and waive all liability in the event things go horribly wrong. That’s right folks, since unlocking the bootloader gives you a much greater level of control over how the device operates, you can kiss parts (or all) of your warranty goodbye. Once that’s done, you connect the Android device in question to computer with the SDK installed, and you’ll receive a “device identifier token” which gets plugged into the web tool to generate a unique unlock code. Sounds simple enough, right? The first devices that are set to benefit from the unlocking treatment are the global version of the HTC Sensation, followed buy T-Mobile’s version of the device and the Sprint Evo 3D. Since unlocking the bootloader is one the of the first steps to running a custom ROM and really having some fun with your Android device, it’s heartening to see them focus on getting newer hardware opened up. Hopefully the floodgates will soon open, and we can start messing with our HTC toys with reckless abandon. |
Google Threw A Punch, Microsoft Fires Back With A Missile | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Earlier today, . Seemingly sick of being continuously slapped in the face by the patent issue, Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, calling out several of Google’s rivals for attempting to use “bogus patents” to destroy Android. Chief among the rivals called out was Microsoft. Drummond noted that the software giant had been getting in bed with other rivals to hurt Google. Among the accusations was that Microsoft teamed up with Apple to buy Novell’s old patents, implying that they did so in order to keep them away from Google. Microsoft didn’t take too kindly to that remark. “Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no,” Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel out in response. Damn. Shit just got real. Just in case that wasn’t enough, Frank Shaw, Microsoft Head of Communications, followed up with the real heat-seeker. “Free advice for David Drummond – next time check with Kent Walker before you blog. :),” Shaw , referring to another Google SVP and General Counsel. Attached to that tweet was the picture of an email Walker apparently sent to Smith on October 28, 2010. It reads as follows: Brad — Sorry for the delay in getting back to you — I came down with a 24-hour bug on the way back from San Antonio. After talking with people here, it sounds as though for various reasons a joint bid wouldn’t be advisable for us on this one. But I appreciate your flagging it, and we’re open to discussing other similar opportunities in the future. I hope the rest of your travels go well, and I look forward to seeing you again soon. — Kent While it’s only one instance, this really does undercut Google’s entire argument. Google was attempting to set up a pattern of Microsoft teaming up with other Google rivals to damage them. But the first instance listed was actually the result of Google turning Microsoft down, as the email shows. That does not look good for Google. Does that mean Google’s totally wrong and Microsoft is totally right? Of course not. But it sure makes Google look pretty stupid. And it reinforces something that many observers think about Google’s position here: that they simply until recently, and now they’re all up in arms about it. God I love it when Google and Microsoft . https://twitter.com/#!/BradSmi/status/98902130412355585 https://twitter.com/#!/fxshaw/status/98932077327691776 : : : |
Why Pay For A Lion Boot Disk? Use This App To Make Your Own | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | When Lion was released, we to a page detailing how to create your own bootable Lion drive. But if you absolutely must have a GUI and don’t want to go mucking around in the app package, you might find useful. Lion Diskmaker is a simple app that extracts the necessary items from an embryonic Lion install (i.e. the package you downloaded from the Mac App Store) and writes them to a USB drive or DVD. That’s it! A single-serving app I’m sure many will find helpful. All you need is a four-gig removable volume (SD card, thumbdrive, DVD) and a ready-to-install copy of Lion. Don’t forget to thank the author by donating or at least . [via ] |
The Beautiful Internet | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | If there is one thing I could say about most websites, it is that they are ugly. I mean really. Just atrocious. There are generally so many things going wrong that we have all had to completely reconfigure our expectations just to exist in this noisy, cluttered, pixelated world. It’s difficult to stretch one’s mind far enough to even imagine what the web would look like with the clarity and dynamic layouts of our favorite print magazines. It’s as if we’ve lived on gruel so long that the idea of a fine steak is no longer real to us. But the days of the ugly internet might be coming to an end. Because of a few factors, some technical, some more cultural, you might actually be able to look at a website in two or three years and think “yes, that looks good — by standards.” The web long ago became “mainstream,” but people have always sandboxed it, so to speak, not classing it among traditionally reliable news sources or judging it by the standards of traditionally well-made media. And so, for good reason, it has been neither expected nor pressured to meet the journalistic standards of a national newspaper or the layout standards of a print magazine. Instead, it has been a place where you can find everything that doesn’t go into those media institutions, and the price you paid was in the deliberation of its execution. Good design was collateral damage directly attributable to the quickness of the draw – regrettable, but well within acceptable limits, considering the benefits of instant access, commenting, and so on. Many people, especially among those under 30, use the internet as their sole news and media source, and as early adopters, they considered the sacrifices worthwhile. The grit of a newspaper or the creative layout of a product spread in a fashion rag have been considered luxuries over and above the content itself. People happily browse the web through a tiny, inadequate window like an iPhone (pathetically, the best mobile browsing experience) showing a single paragraph at a time, or one figure, or a photo so small that none but the coarsest features can be discerned. But that perspective is shrinking in importance as traditional media come to terms with big-boy internet distribution. Now that the New Yorker and the like are coming to tablets and the web in something other than rushed, truncated form, people are demanding that they be as good or better than their print brethren. Uptake and distribution is approaching the point where people will no longer be okay with a long single column of text, flanked by increasingly disruptive and desperate ads or voids where they once were. There is also the huge uptick in e-book sales, and although there have been some initial efforts to match electronic editions with print, improve readability, and so on, there’s still an enormous amount of room for improvement. And the reading of e-books on LCD screens is only tolerated because the alternative is buying a second device. Or a . So, the consumers are ready to want this. Are the content providers ready to make it happen? Yes. This section will be short. There has been a lot of cross-pollination from the print world over the last couple years, spurred perhaps by the early e-readers, for which, it was promised in 2007, we would shortly have a grand selection of fully-realized newspapers and magazines. It seems that task was a bit more than the media companies were capable of. Tablets have proven an effective cage-rattler as well, since the growing desire for natural, print-like interaction has grown beyond the media companies’ ability to provide it. They’re catching up now, gradually cordoning off staff and sequestering cash for the sole purpose of making their stuff look good. There’s a race on to be the first newspaper or magazine with a million subscriptions or some such, and a big part of that is effectively transferring the experience of the magazine to the web or an app. Early entrants with tablet-native interfaces, like Project and The Daily, are having mixed success, but the New Yorker seems to be thriving (admittedly, its sparse layout requires much less in the way of adaptation, which has allowed it to migrate quickly and intact) and AOL is as well. Dreams of international distribution at microscopic cost (compared to, say, a major newspaper’s global army of printers, drivers, billing agents, etc.) are making these initial millions seem like down payments on money trees. The media companies are ready to move beyond the same layouts, fonts, and embeds they’ve used for the last ten or fifteen years. Is the technology there to let them do it? There’s something to be said for modifying your own reading or viewing environment, but I believe that there is almost no chance right now of someone creating something for web consumption that will be seen by the consumer the same way it was seen by the creator. Fortunately, we are leaving the era when this is necessarily true, a confusing transitional era with a jumble of conflicting standards: which color space? which non-serif? which filtering method? We’re not to the next phase, but there are two heralds of this approaching golden age (please, please be approaching). The first is resolution. With screen size more or less a matter of taste (there are options for practically every single diagonal measure from three to thirty inches), what matters is quality, and in particular for design: resolution. I very nearly switched to the iPhone 4 solely because of the screen. The benefits of increased resolution (and, eventually, resolution independence) are too obvious to list, but there’s one in particular I want to call attention to: text rendering. Look at the text on your screen. Now look at a printed page. Sadly, this text doesn’t look like the text on the printed page. But if this screen had quadruple the resolution it does, it could vastly improve clarity by minimizing aliasing and mooting questionably effective sub-pixel font smoothing (a blown-up example is at the head of this article). I had an angry moment with Firefox a little while back when I found it used some awful font rendering technique that made every sentence look like a tiny parade of hairy, misty spiders. Some readjustment later and it is much better, but out of curiosity I checked a few other people’s versions of the same page, and found they all looked different from mine. The native smoothing, browser, magnification, and ClearType settings rendered every letter different on every screen. The visual idiosyncrasies so endearing in letter press are not so welcome here. Even the best sites and content creators out there are afflicted by this, because it’s not really something they can control. As resolution goes up, clarity goes up. The need for font smoothing is eliminated because the letters are clear and bright, with sharp edges and no grey or multicolored falloff. The need for precise, controlled layout and visual supervision also becomes greater. Which is why good editors, and good standards, are so important. The second thing that makes this possible is agreement on those standards. HTML5 is a nice, big step in this direction, with geometric, flexible rendering of many items, every pixel accounted for and affected systematically. It’s not a magic bullet, obviously, but once we’ve weaned the great unwashed from their IE6 (or Netscape Communicator 4, in my dad’s case (until last year!)) and moved on to modern browsers on processors that can handle on-the-fly rendering of visual effects and so on (which would otherwise have to be displayed as video, Flash, etc.), the doors fly wide open.
What matters most is the ability of a content creator to control the end user’s experience. It’s nice to be able to adjust that experience yourself, but good design doesn’t want or need adjustment, and is in fact harmed by it. If a designer can be confident that is how something will look when presented to the consumer, they can design it well. Today, they are unable to know that with anything near the certainty with which, say, the layout designer of Vogue does, holding as he or she does despotic sway over every element, typeface, flourish, margin, DPI, and hue. Within two or three years web designers will be able to say it with total certainty — with the normal exceptions common to print and outlier “hardware” (i.e. vision) such as large type versions, legacy devices, and so on. Even the most fastidious typesetter can’t guarantee that readers will have their glasses. The ability to securely and reliably provide fonts, video, rich interactive elements, naturally flowing text, and other aspects of advanced layouts means that more traditionally-trained layout artists and designers, who have been stymied by poor adherence to standards in the past, will soon be able to craft to their hearts’ content. And at that point, I think, we as conscientious consumers will be able to better judge a book by its cover, knowing that the means available to web and content designers are far less restrictive than they once were, and “if a Muse cannot run when she is unfetter’d, ‘tis a sign she has but little speed,” as Dryden has it. Now that consumers want to buy it, creators want to make it, and technology wants to accommodate it, beautifully-designed content will begin to actually bubble its way to the top. The more nicely-designed site may win in a rivalry these days — despite the fact that services these days are so simple that practically every menu and button is superfluous — but there aren’t many sites I would say are an actual to read, as I find many printed magazines are, or a pleasure to use, as a well-turned device is. I’m sure there are plenty of examples of standout design, but standing out from crowd is a dubious honor. Our own redesign, for instance (which went live somewhat after I drafted this article) is a good example of a striking, web-oriented design — and as much as I like it (I do), I’d be lying if I said it was beautiful the way, say, this page is beautiful: It’s going to take time, of course, and money. The time will be to bring readers up to date with technological standards they tend to ignore. The money will be because this increase in quality won’t be due to improved processor or transfer speeds (like, say, the increase in quality of streaming movies and music), it will be due to much hard work done by designers and editors. Just as movies have gotten more expensive and labor-intensive as their production values have gone up, so will websites and services require more than lip service to good design. Subtlety and taste haven’t been a priority on the web partially because of the novelty and mercuriality of the the medium. With a new set of standards that comprise the necessary tools for good design, companies that are willing to invest the time and effort required, and a consumer base that might just be able to see the difference, that could be changing. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 22 | null |
Harvesting Energy From Radio Signals: Two New Devices From Japan (Video) | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Gleaning electricity from radio signals isn’t super-efficient (or a new concept), but it’s possible technically. Two companies from Japan have recently come up with new devices that can do just that: one is harvesting energy from cell phone signals, the other uses a rectifying antenna ( ) to produce energy. First, a [JP] recently announced by can pick up radio signals from cell phones in the 800MHz band and convert them into electricity (800MHz is the frequency used in handsets in Japan). The company says that users can expect to get up to 2.5 milliamperes of charge (stored in a small lithium-ion battery). The device collects signals from other wireless gadgets, too, and it can provide a few more minutes of run time when built into tablets and notebooks (which is better than nothing). Tokyo Electron markets it as “green” product and cooperated with US company in its development. We don’t have media for that device but a professional video shot of the next one, a newly developed Rectenna coming from Tokyo-based . The device (pictured above) itself has two main selling points: it’s thin (12mm for collecting Wi-Fi signals and 30mm for digital terrestrial broadcast waves) and needs just 50µW of power to start. Nihon Dengyo says that their rectenna can glean power in the micro-watt range from Wi-Fi signals at a distance of around 10cm, enough to power sensors, for example. The device can be used both inside and outside of buildings. Here’s a video (shot by in Tokyo, in English) that provides more insight:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dXUWytchhk&w=560&h=349] |
Zynga Sues Google Over Vostu Dispute, Brazilian Judge Grants Injunction | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Two big pieces of news today in the Zynga/Vostu lawsuit (details on lawsuit and ). In addition to that first lawsuit filed in California, Zynga also quietly sued Vostu on its home turf in Brazil (lawsuit embedded below, but it’s in Portugese). Zynga dragged Google into that lawsuit, apparently because Orkut, popular in Brazil, is hosting the Vostu games that Zynga says are ripoffs. , must be thrilled. …And a judge in Brazil has sided with Zynga for now and has granted a preliminary injunction against Vostu. Vostu And Orkut must remove four games – MegaCity, Café Mania, Pet Mania and Vostu Poker – within 48 hours, or pay a daily fine of R20,000 (about $13,000). Zynga’s press statement: Zynga Inc has filed a lawsuit in Brazil against Vostu for copyright infringement and unfair competition based on Vostu’s copying of four of Zynga’s games. Zynga is pleased that the Court has reviewed the evidence and found good cause to issue an injunction order requiring Vostu and Google Orkut to cease distribution of four Vostu games – MegaCity, Café Mania, Pet Mania and Vostu Poker – or be subject to fine by the Court. The Court’s action reflects the seriousness of this matter and the irreparable harm Zynga is suffering due to Vostu’s copying. It also takes into account the need to protect Brazilian consumers from acts of infringement and unfair competition. Professor Bruno Feijó, from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and Chief of Vision Lab, analyzed the games and concluded that: “the four games from Vostu characterize a clear case of copying Zynga’s games in both visual interface and gameplay.” Additionally, Professor João Bernardes Junior, from the University of São Paulo (USP), affirmed: “Vostu’s games are copies of Zynga’s games when compared on gameplay and player interface.” Zynga welcomes Vostu into the arena of social games, but will not tolerate blatant infringement of its creative works as its business strategy. “It is one thing to be inspired by Zynga games, but it is another to copy our key product features and intellectual property in violation of the law.” — Reggie Davis, General Counsel for Zynga Inc. And a Zynga-supplied translation of the decision: “I received the retro brief as an amendment of the brief. Before the elements attached to the case records, there is likelihood in the plaintiff’s claims, which can be inferred by the case’s record documents, by the similarity of the games as well as being present the periculum in mora, I grant the preliminary injunction, determining that the defendants stop the use, exhibition, edition, reproduction, distribution, sale, offer for sale, broadcast or distribution, assignment or transference of the videogames Vostu Mega City, Vostu Café Mania, Vostu Pet Mania and Vostu Poke, within 48 hours, under penalty of daily fine of R$20,000.00. Under the terms of article 835, of the CPC, I determine to the plaintiff the provision of bond on the value of 20% the value assigned to the matter, within 48 hours, under the penalty of repeal of the preliminary injunction.” — Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo, 10ª Vara Cível (10th Civil Court) One question I have for Zynga is, why didn’t they sue Facebook, too? These games are available on that platform as well, and have plenty of users. Vostu’s statement: Vostu will vigorously appeal this ruling, which we firmly believe has no merit. This is a desperate and misguided legal tactic by Zynga, a foreign company with no real Brazilian roots — a company that has failed to secure a foothold in the local marketplace and failed to win consumers who have clearly shown they prefer the superior games created by Vostu’s Brazilian team. We are confident the Court of Appeals will reverse the injunction, when presented with Vostu’s position and its full story. In less than two years, Vostu has become the clear leader in social gaming in Brazil and has grown to 35 million registered users who enjoy our high quality games, which are specifically developed for the Brazilian audience. We employ more than 50 highly-skilled employees in Brazil and over 500 employees in the region, each of whom contributes to the Brazilian economy. Vostu has been deeply entrenched with the Brazilian economy by heavily investing in local marketing, helping brands such as Guarana advertise, doing creative deals with Brazil’s most popular star, Ivete Sangalo, and conducting in-depth market research analyses with Brazilian consumers. We remain confident that Vostu will continue to maintain its dominance in the industry by offering the best gaming entertainment to Brazil and to employ the best and brightest Brazilians in the gaming industry. We are proud to be the first and most prominent gaming company in Brazil and being able to entertain our users with highly localized and relevant entertainment. [scribd id=61562253 key=key-1p2iknetzkemx4mj1ys4 mode=list]
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Zuck’s Sis Quits On Him | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Facebook has confirmed to us that Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi Zuckerberg will be leaving Facebook to start her own social media consulting company . The other Zuckerberg had spent six years at Facebook, becoming Director of Marketing in 2009 and leading the company’s Facebook Live programs among other social media-ey initiatives. ATD has her addressed to Sheryl Sandberg and I’m assuming PR VP Elliot Schrage. Meanwhile, I haven’t yet persuaded anyone at Facebook to give me a heads up on whom might replace her as Marketing honcho (I’m hearing it will be an external hire) so I’m just going to post this video of RaZu singing “Valley Freude” in 2005 — before she was a star — and also that of her hugging Mike at The Crunchies in 2009. Both these moments represent the blithe irreverence that I love about our industry (And “Valley Freude” is surprisingly still relevant). Here’s her Facebook status update about the job change. I’ll update this post if I stumble across any more info. |
goCarShare launches car sharing iPhone app for music festival goers | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | , a car-sharing website that helps passengers find drivers who are travelling to similar locations and vice versa, has . Aimed a Summer festival goers, the app maps your current location and displays a list of nearby people to share a car with. Let’s hope they’re all friendly. goCarShare now has deals with 50 of Europe’s Summer festivals. In fact one, Secret Garden Party, even introduced a £2.50 empty car seats tax for drivers coming to the festival, which appeared to drive adoption of goCarShare. The V Festival is also linking goCarShare’s app to their mobile app to increase the take up of car sharing for 2011 and Reading and Leeds festivals are offering festival-goers the chance to be upgraded to VIP tickets if they car share. |
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