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Watch This 767 Blow A Tire During Takeoff | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_66mlsFwB9I&w=640&h=390] Scary video. Just think if the person had uploaded that and emailed it to a passenger on the plane before it landed. Yeah, that would be scary — and a bit creepy. By the way, where’s our high-speed rail system at already? I’d gladly let Big Sis pat me down prior to boarding a train just so I didn’t have to fly. [via ] |
Heyzap Brings Social Discovery And Check-In For Games To The iPhone | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | , a social discovery platform for mobile and online games, announced today that it’s zapping its way onto the iPhone just in time for , Apple’s developer conference. The startup will be extending its fast-growing Android community (which launched in March) and has been doubling in size every month since. In spite of the success of its partnerships with social game makers like Aeria Games, Game Duell, and TheBroth, to name a few, Heyzap Co-founder and President Jude Gomila that significant deficiencies still exist in today’s online and mobile gaming communities. Chief among them is the lack of an easy and trustworthy method by which to discover new games that target the individual’s specific interests. Gomila saw an absence of viral channels and secure communities for mobile games. To address this issue, the startup’s new iPhone app will detect recent gameplay and lets people check-in to their favorite games. Once checked-in, users can share scores and more on Facebook and Twitter and see what games their friends are playing. Mobile gamers can check-in to all 65K games on iOS and all 10K games on Android. And, what’s more, the , which launched along with the Android app in March, already has 130 game developers integrated. The Heyzap SDK is designed to provide deeper functionality for developers’ users and to quickly increase the virality of a game by allowing users to check-in (and broadcast) to Facebook, Twitter, and the Heyzap graph by way of a simple button. The SDK also enables users to more easily find the games played most recently on the Heyzap app and to check-in both at the end of a game’s level and when gamers unlock achievements. But one of the coolest features of Heyzap’s apps is its ability to detect what games users have been playing, which makes it quick and easy for them to find and share games they’ve played to their gaming graph. It also tracks a user’s checkins to enable them to find niche games and those that aren’t on the app store. Heyzap also uses an algorithm to track trending games so that you can see what games are trending among your friends, specifically, not just the gaming masses. Since a group of teenage boys is likely to be playing different games than a 45-year-old woman, basing the discovery process on your friends (rather than total aggregated users) is something Heyzap thinks is going to be a better way to find games you’re more likely to play — and enjoy. A la Foursquare, Heyzap is also adding a badge, or “mayorship” feature, which allows users to become “The Boss” of a game by checking in with gusto. You can compete with your friends to be the boss of a certain game, so even if you can’t beat them at the game, you can still be the boss of checkins. The Y Combinator alum has raised $3.6 million in capital from Union Square Ventures and other angel investors since its launch in 2008. Heyzap will also be holding a private WWDC party on Wednesday, June 8th for developers in San Francisco. Open bar, prizes, and food will be in store. If you’re a mobile developer and want to get in on the action, email events@heyzap.com with the promo code “TCROCKS”. The first 30 developers will get a free ticket. Check out the game on the app store . |
CrunchDeals: Worms 2 Armageddon On iOS For A Buck | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 |
I’ll keep this short. We reviewed a while back and found it a worthy title in the series, worth the $5 price of admission. And now that you can get it for 99 cents, that recommendation is even easier to give. |
Fly Or Die: Windows 8 Tries To Out-Touch Apple | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | The debate about rages on in this episode of . CrunchGear editor John Biggs, who joins me from Las Vegas where he is attending a watch conference (don’t ask) thinks nothing has really changed because users can always switch back from the touch interface to the old Windows. I appreciate the , but counter that desktop operating systems are also moving towards more of a touch computing UI anyway. So is this a shell, or is Microsoft trying to get ahead of the curve? Watch the video, and tell us what you think. |
When Facebook Captured Beluga, They May Have Harpooned It In The Head | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | When this past March, it was an interesting deal for them. Interesting, because they previously had only . But this deal, they told us, was for both talent assets. In other words, they were also interested in the technology behind . More importantly, the plan was to keep Beluga running. And they have. Sort of. Over the past several weeks, users of Beluga have probably noticed some major reliability issues. These range from the mobile apps missing messages because they’re unable to connect to the service, to the service’s website being totally down. Last night, Beluga was totally down for a few hours. There was no indication why it was down, even after it came back. This has been happening more frequently. Not good. It’s hard not to be reminded of FriendFeed. That service, which , also reminded live post-acquisition. While that was a talent deal, the core FriendFeed team said they were committed to keeping it up indefinitely. The reality has been that while it’s still up, performance issues and lack of continued development have driven away many of the core users (though, odddly, the deal). . A shell of what it used to be. And Beluga appears to be headed in the same direction. When Facebook acquired it, we were just heading into a full-on group messaging app showdown. To me, Beluga was . It had all the essentials I wanted/needed to replace SMS on my phone. And it was fast — really fast. My social circle started getting really into using it all the time. We barely use it anymore. Again, it’s just too unreliable now. I’ve reached out to the Beluga team to see what the deal is. I have yet to hear back, and I may not because Facebook tends to rule with an iron fist about such matters. Officially, the team was assigned to the groups and messaging teams within Facebook. While the new Facebook Messages is finally rolling out to all users, there hasn’t been any major new developments there in months either. There’s certainly no stand-alone Facebook Messages app that some of us had been hoping for — even though Google has been . At the time of the acquisition, both Facebook and Beluga said that they would be providing details about Beluga’s ultimate future “in the coming weeks”. By my count, it has now been about 13 weeks. It’s time to let us know if Beluga will live, be officially harpooned, or if it will be left to drift at sea like FriendFeed. I don’t have a good feeling about that answer. Too bad. |
A TechCrunch Disrupt Proposal | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | Ah, true love. Everyone was surprised — even Michael Arrington was left speechless and said he was “discombobulated” — after was proposed to onstage during her special product announcement at in New York City. Hu, CEO and founder of , was near the end of her presentation when someone called out that she had one more slide left to go over. As she clicked on the last slide, she screamed as her boyfriend came running up onstage to place a ring on her finger. It was the first ever TechCrunch Disrupt proposal and we caught the whole thing on camera. It was sweet, touching, and hilarious. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to watch yet, the proposal and the backstage interview are below. A huge congratulations to Julia and Jeff! |
Hornik on VC's Secondary Mania: "If It's Just Money, We're All Fungible" (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | August Capital was doing very late stage deals when most VCs refused to. And its of Seagate was one of the better returns in the firm’s history. So why is it mostly sitting out this round of late-stage mega-deal mania? In the final segment of our Ask a VC on the road with David Hornik, he explains why the answer to missing out on Facebook early isn’t dumping money in at a $75 billion price tag. The firm has done three $100 million-plus deals of late, but they’re all in companies you haven’t heard of, not the we talk about all the time. It goes back to that belief that VCs aren’t just a checkbook; that they actually add value to the companies they back. A lot of cynical or burned entrepreneurs dispute that claim already, and Hornik argues if VCs act too much like hedge funds, they risk giving those cynics more ammo. |
Why The Groupon IPO Feels Like A Swindle | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | http://twitter.com/#!/erickschonfeld/status/77140061157720064 |
OMG/JK: iCloud, gWallet, and tPhotos | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | In this week’s episode of OMG/JK, Jason and I start off with a preview of what may be coming at Apple’s WWDC event next week in San Francisco. Then we get into what Google unveiled at their NFC event in New York City last week. And finally, we talk about Twitter’s move into the photo space. All three topics have a bit of controversy surrounding them. First of all, WWDC will not feature a new iPhone for the first time in several years. Second, it took PayPal a matter of hours to sue Google after Google Wallet was announced. And third, the Twitter developer ecosystem is up in arms again after Twitter has moved to fill another hole. Well, at least TwitPic is, for sure. Below, find some of the links relevant to the discussions this week.
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Weekend Giveaway: An iPad 2 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 6 | 4 |
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think iPads grew on trees or were on sale at TJ Maxx or something with the number of these things people want to give away. Regardless, we have a 16GB Wi-Fi waiting for you in sunny San Francisco, ready to wing its way to your mailbox in a few days. Want it? Thought so. Here’s how to enter.
Our buddies at want to offer one 16GB Wi-Fi iPad to one lucky winner. They’re asking you to “like” their “ ” or whatever an also comment below about what you think the future of teleconferencing will look like. Holograms? 3D printing in sugar? Nude meetings? You decide. Thanks to , who describe themselves thuswise: Fuze Meeting and Fuze Messenger allow people to communicate, collaborate and share content from any device, across any network, anywhere in the world. Fuze Meeting is a mobile and web-based collaboration service that features integrated audio conferencing as well as high- definition, synchronized video and image sharing. I will pick one random winner on Monday at noon Eastern. Good luck! UPDATE – Congrats to Jerry. |
David Hornik: Why Real Entrepreneurs Aren't in it for the Money (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | We haven’t done Ask a VC for a while thanks to my hectic travel schedule, so I pulled David Hornik out of the hallway at D to catch up on his thoughts on his portfolio and the industry. But first, we chat about the highlights from the All Things Digital conference. Or we started with that and then talked about how the motivation for starting companies is changing in Silicon Valley, given the soaring valuations and ease of raising money. And Hornik explains why he’s not a fan of Peter Thiel’s , although he admits he hasn’t paid off his own law school education. |
Gillmor Gang 6.04.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — shuddered with expectant glee at Apple’s presumed iCloud announcement at next week’s WWDC event. It’s clear from all the leaks, most interestingly from Apple itself, that the record companies are finally healthy enough to move into the new streaming era. With Lady Gaga selling five times as many records as the next entry on the album charts, the numbers have strongly tipped from retail to downloads. Amazon helped by subsidizing over a million copies at $1 a sale (8 bucks to Lady Gaga), but by next time, the market will have moved almost completely online. This gives Apple the leverage to get the TV/cable networks and the movie studios on board, with Netflix playing the Amazon role in stoking demand for streaming. Live events are last, probably following the heavyweight boxing matches of Ali and Tyson via pay-per-view but direct to Apple TV and its competitors, of which there are none. iCloud is the moment when the bits stay where they are, and the checksum becomes the value point. See you Monday for a special Gillmor Gang extra. |
null | John Biggs | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | null |
Hornik on Blippy: "Apparently I Was More Interested in Sharing Credit Card Purchases than the Average Person" (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | Let’s be honest: One of the reasons David Hornik actually agreed to be on camera at All Things D is that he didn’t have a startup about to file to go public . So we talked about some of his more high profile investments that haven’t always lived up to the hype. Hornik explains why reports of have been greatly exaggerated, and why he says the investment still wasn’t a mistake. What’s more he dishes (sort of) of the nine-figure annual revenues of another portfolio company Say Media– the love child of VideoEgg and SixApart. And he tells us about an enterprise software company that’s a budding sleeper hit. More broadly, he argues the immediate-hit-or-it’s-a-failure misses the point of venture investing. (A philosophy Reid Hoffman might agree with after a at LinkedIn.) |
SEC Watch: Tiger Global Bought Massive Amounts Of LinkedIn Stock Pre And Post IPO | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | LinkedIn and investment firm both filed separate yesterday evening indicating that the firm loaded up on LinkedIn stock both before and after the company’s IPO in May. According to the filing, a Tiger’s head Chase Coleman and Tiger fund, PIP V, acquired 2,436,001 shares of preferred and common stock of LinkedIn on secondary markst, from December 21, 2009 to August 10, 2010, for $31,740,600.70. Some of Tiger’s investment during this time was but the filing shows Tiger had a much bigger stake. LinkedIn Holdings, another Tiger/Coleman vehicle, acquired 1,306,927 shares of LinkedIn stock on secondary markets from August 10, 2010 to April 15, 2011, for $29,796,007.50. And post IPO, which Tiger Funds purchased 300,000 Class A Common Shares, for a purchase price of $45.00 per Share or $13,500,000. While we knew Coleman was buying up shares of LinkedIn, we didn’t know it was to the tune of over $75,000,000. And Coleman himself now owns a little over 4 percent of LinkedIn, according to the filing. The filing also states that Coleman has agreed to not offer or sell any shares for a period of 180 days from the offering in May. LinkedIn’s IPO priced at , but started trading at , giving the company a market cap of $7.8 billion. Shares have since dropped to $77.92 per share. Tiger has of investments in large internet companies including , and Yandex, which just . On the public markets, Tiger has in Amaxon, Apple and Netflix. Tiger Global has $1 billion in commitments and is reportedly raising another $1.25 billion for a new fund. We’ve confirmed Tiger’s stock purchases with LinkedIn. |
The Kno Textbook App Hits The iPad | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | Last night, quietly released its first digital for the iPad. It includes its own store of “over 70,000 titles at 30% to 50% off list” price. And the app is a full textbook reader. Kno, whose CEO previously founded textbook-rental service , originally developed its for textbooks. But once the iPad and Android tablets hit the market, the company saw the writing on the touchscreen and last April. At that time, when I spoke to Rashid, he was talking down the iPad because it does not support a stylus, which is the input method the Know software was designed for (although there are styluses that do work with the iPad). Maybe he was just trying to throw me off the trail. The iPad app allows you to organize your digital textbooks and PDFs by dragging and dropping them into “courses.” Once you open a textbook, you can swipe through the pages or navigate via a filmstrip of thumbnails up top. There is also full text search. Pages can be bookmarked and highlighted. You can also add digital sticky notes which pop out from the margins. The highlight feature is a nice touch. You can also launch a Web or Wikipedia search based on a highlighted word. There is also a “WTF” feature, which stands for “Words to Friends,” although it could mean the more common acronym since it’s a nit of a head-scratcher. It allows you to send out little study messages to friends on Facebook or Twitter, but doesn’t link back to the text or even make it easy to cut and paste a quote. WTF, indeed. All in all, though, the Kno textbook app is pretty solid and will compete based on the breadth of its textbook selection and pricing. It certainly beats lugging around a backpack full of books. |
Daily Crunch: Falcon Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 6 | 4 | |
Lady Gaga, Eric Schmidt And Others Invest Over $1M In Backplane | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | What do Lady Gaga and Google Executive Chairman have in common? Well according to a in the by former TechCruncher Evelyn Rusli, they’ve both invested in , a new startup founded by Lady Gaga’s business manager Schmidt’s and Gaga have partnered up to finance Cartier’s still in stealth startup, with Gaga being a 20% shareholder. Tomorrow Ventures is leading the angel round, which is currently at over $1 million. It is not clear yet as to whether the round has closed. The startup, which we hear is in talks with entities like the NFL and other musicians, will blend technology and entertainment and plans to provide a venue for online communities by combining brands’ various social media presences into one platform. Gaga is an advisor as well as an investor, and apparently has incorporated elements from her music videos and tours to add “authenticity” to the site’s design. Omg I can’t wait to see it. Fresh off completing partnerships with Zynga, Google, Gilt and Amazon, it seems natural that Gaga go the and start investing in startups herself. Her manager Carter, who at the first New York TechCrunch Disrupt, is also an investor and has funded companies at the cusp of entertainment and technology like , and in addition to Backplane. Backplane will launch this month and I’m in the middle of tracking down founder Matt Michelsen, so you’ll be hearing more about it here. Promise. In the meantime here’s Lady Gaga’s “Google Chrome” commercial. I have no idea how I missed this. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVbXrubQpa0&w=630] |
Instagram Turns Your Likes Into Photo Albums | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | Social photo app pushed out a new today on the iPhone. The first thing you notice is that uploads are a lot faster. Speed, quite frankly, is one of Instagram’s competitive advantages. But the update also includes some new features, the most important of which is the ability to see all the photos you’ve liked in the past. It sounds pretty basic—and it is—but up until now Instagram has been a fleeting slideshow. Just like a stream of tweets, the Instagram feed is a realtime stream of photos. You had to launch the app to check it out. If you miss some, no biggie, more will keep filling your feed. But there wasn’t even a way to save photos other than your own. You could “like” someone else’s photo or comment on it, but that was it. Now, all of the photos you’ve ever liked are organized for you in their own album. You can find them under “Photos you’ve liked” in your profile, right under “your photos.” Now liking a photo is not just a lazy signal, it is an act of curation, or at least a handy way to save photos. I like that very much. The update has a few other features, such as auto-completing hashtags in comments. This is not something I personally do that much, but maybe I would if there was a way to organize photos by hashtags. Also, profile photos are now saved to your iPhone’s photo library and you can add a link to a website to your bio so that other members can learn more about you. |
Eric Schmidt And Others Invest In Rich Media Display Ad Startup Spongecell | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | a startup that places rich media ads in display advertisements, has raised a new round of financing led by and , Chairman and Managing Director of Raptor Group. Participating in the round are Brian Rooney, Board Member of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and . The amount of the round was not disclosed but we heard from people familiar with the matter that the investment was just under $1 million. Spongecell transforms standard banner ads into rich-media-like interactive ads that can run in display ad formats. SpongeCell’s ads include video, social media, interactive maps, carousels, and downloadable/SMS coupons, and can be created and implemented within a matter of days. The startup’s technology can be integrated with popular ad serving platforms such as DoubleClick or Atlas. Spongecell says its ads improve engagement rates from 2.4% to 11.9%. Interactions within Spongecell ads are anywhere from two times to eight times as frequent in comparison to average display ads. Founded in 2006 by a team of Carnegie Mellon computer science graduates,
Spongecell previously raised capital in 2007 from Halo Venture Partners, The
Pilot Group and SilverHaze Partners. Spongecell actually started out as an Ajax calendar built on the Ruby on Rails platform. CEO says that the team pivoted from this model and started offering ads within widgets, but agencies and marketers didn’t respond with the sort of enthusiasm that could build a lasting business. Kartzman says that the startup decided that display ads would find a resurgence and brought rich media to display ads. And the bet is paying off. Spongecell is working with around eleven large ad agencies to help bring rich media to their client’s display ad campaigns. And Spongecell has gotten a big endorsement in the form of an investment from Schmidt, former CEO and current chairman of Google, which is a Kartzman says that when he sat down Schmidt, he said that the startup’s technology is essentially the future of display, calling Spongcell ‘everything that display advertisement can be’ in the future. Coming from Schmidt, that’s a huge compliment. |
Moshi Monsters, The Social Networking Game For Kids, Passes The 50 Million Users Mark | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | Two years ago, was just another online gaming company. It had some minor success with interactive puzzles and an alternative reality game called , but the future wasn’t exactly bright. As entrepreneurs are wont to do, Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith made one and created a virtual world game for kids called . Though the move may have been a last ditch effort to save a stagnating company at the time, today the move seems a stroke of entrepreneurial genius. On Monday, Mind Candy announced that Moshi Monsters has passed the 50 million registered users mark, with 15 million of those users in North America, and is one of the fastest growing children’s entertainment brands in the world. , Moshi Monsters had racked up 35 million users, so in less than 4 months, the game has added another 15 million. For those unfamiliar, Moshi Monsters is a game that enables kids to adopt one of six virtual pet monsters that they can customize in various ways and add the monster to their own virtual room, which can be outfitted with virtual goods. Kids can then navigate their way around “Monstro City”, and solve puzzles to earn virtual currency, which they can use to personalize their monsters and their personal rooms, or communicate with friends in a social networking environment. Geared towards kids 12-and-under, Acton told my colleague Erick Schonfeld that the idea behind Moshi Monsters was to create not “just another bloody virtual world”, but a safe social network. “Instead of copying Club Penguin,” he said, “we focused more on Facebook and tried to re-imagine that for kids.” As such, there is pin board where friends can leave messages and a news feed, but there are also games, quizzes and virtual world activities. Part of Moshi Monsters exponential growth it seems is its movement into offline products, having launched toys, books, video games, trading cards, and even a “Moshi magazine” within the UK and Australia. Today, Mind Candy is announcing that children’s entertainment company, , has become the startup’s U.S. toy partner and that Moshi Monsters toys will launch in North America this summer via an exclusive partnership with a major retail partner (to be announced soon). Besides the fact that Moshi Monsters books from Scholastic and Topps trading cards are already on shelf in the U.S., the company is also working on music, live tours, TV shows — and even a Moshi Monsters film. It probably wouldn’t be crazy to speculate that Moshi Monsters Happy Meals are on the way, too. From near-bankruptcy in 2008 to 50 million registered users and $100 million in expected gross retail sales in 2011, Mind Candy and its Moshi Monsters have pulled off quite an impressive turnaround. As younger generations continue to become more and more wired, activities thought reserved for older audiences are proving to be equally as appealing and successful among younger audiences. It will be interesting to see if Moshi Monsters can follow in the footsteps of Pokemon and become more than just a passing fad. If its crossover into offline markets flies, it could be that we have the next Barney on our hands. For more on Mind Candy and Moshi Monsters, check out TCTV’s interview with Mind Candy CEO Acton Smith , and Paul Carr’s in depth coverage . |
Is This iOS 5? Dunno, But It's Likely The Right Idea | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | Could it be? Is this it? iOS 5?! I honestly have absolutely no clue. But it certainly seems like it at least have the right idea. Tomorrow morning, Apple is set to preview iOS 5 for the first time during the WWDC keynote. It’s likely that developers will get access to the initial build as well, so they can start working on updating their apps to take advantage of all the new features/functionality. But some select developers are believed to have already seen iOS 5 (notably those who are likely to present on stage tomorrow). And while not a lot has leaked out, we have heard a few things supposedly coming: . The last two are particularly interesting given the image above. Again, no clue if it’s actually real or not, but the idea might be right. Notifications that come down from the top bar could be how Apple ends up doing things in iOS 5. After all, this would mimic already existing functionality — when tethering, a blue strip appears along the top; when on the phone, it’s a green strip. Might notifications (or at least Twitter notifications) produce a gray strip? If so, when clicked on, what happens? Does it launch the Twitter app? Or are you taken to a notifications page to show you all the notifications you’ve missed? Or does it actually copy the Android idea, where you pull down this menu to display all your notifications? This concept isn’t quite as slick as some of the over the past couple of years. Nor is it as slick as some of the jailbroken ones — which actually . But again, it does fit in with the current iOS workflow. That may or may not matter at all. Regardless, this way of doing things would be better than the current pop-up method for Push Notifications. Before you go yelling “fake” on the obvious things, a couple notes. First of all, yes, 11:54 PM is in the future — in the United States. But if the Weather app is to be believed, this is clearly a European version of iOS (note the 23 degrees Celsius in the icon instead of 72 degree Fahrenheit as you would see in the U.S.). Second, the Camera app icon is totally different, and looks a little odd being all-black, but who knows, maybe it’s changing. The icons are in the “correct” default order. Finally, if the talk of deep Twitter integration into iOS 5 is to be believed ( , others have a bit ), it’s entirely possible that these new-style Twitter notifications could be working in iOS 5 right out of the box. But again, who knows — no one outside of a handful of people before tomorrow morning. Well, and the guy below. : At the very least, we’re hearing “right idea”. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAhP-yLJJ9s&w=620&h=349] |
Will Airbnb Ever Be "The Airbnb For X"? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | “If your company is ever used as the subject of the “X for Y” analogy, that’s success. AirBnB used to be the eBay for vacation rental. Now other companies are the Airbnb of things.” — , With Airbnb about to enter the , we’ve seen an influx of “X is Airbnb of Y” headlines. While the trope is extremely common in the notoriously unimaginative realm of tech reporting, the real reason “Airbnb for X” has become a cliche is that it’s a lot easier to write (and read) than “collaborative consumption.” The space, which basically includes almost all marketplace startups that provide accoutrements like payment and reputation platforms for users who want to buy and sell from each other, is SO HOT RIGHT NOW. As Forbes writer Nicole Perlroth , “The Airbnb of !, The Airbnb of ! Airbnb for ! And my personal favorite, Airbnb for !” (Note: I am probably the worst offender on the TC team). Airbnb seems to be the one that got away for many investors, who are now closely watching the roster of startups that are slowly certain sections of Craigslist (and in the case of Airbnb, doing ). With over 60K listings on the site and 50% bookings growth monthly, its no surprise that the pioneering peer to peer accommodations marketplace is 100 million in funding. And its no surprise that collaborative consumption startups like , , , and and others are also generating buzz and cash. Getaround (Airbnb for cars) founder and TC Disrupt winner Jessica Scorpio tells me that the “Airbnb For X” phenomenon rests on the fact that getting used to the idea of one means that you’ll get used to the idea of others, “When users adopt one collaborative consumption service like Airbnb (new way to travel/offset housing cost) other collaborative consumption services are preferred like Getaround (new form of car rental/offset vehicle costs).” And where users go investors follow. Scorpio tells me that she feels that investors are more likely to invest in Getaround because of the success of Airbnb. Investor Fred Wilson a mistake ignoring the model in March: “We couldn’t wrap our heads around air mattresses on the living room floors as the next hotel room and did not chase the deal. Others saw the amazing team that we saw, funded them, and the rest is history. Airbnb is well on its way to building the ‘eBay of spaces.’ I’m pretty sure it will be a billion dollar business in time [Editor’s note: Good call Fred]. We made the classic mistake that all investors make. We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do … The cereal box will remain in our conference room as a warning not to make that mistake again.” Vayable (Airbnb for experiences) founder Jamie Wong explains the rush of investor interest surrounding the space, “It’s interesting that these two side-by-side questions seem to be dominating tech discourse right now: “Are we in a bubble?” and “What’s up with all this collaborative consumption?” I think the latter helps answer the former. Startup entrepreneurs interested in ecommerce and consumer products are gravitating toward collaborative consumption models (or in tech jargon, “The Airbnb for…”) because it provides a sustainable economic model.” According to TaskRabbit (Airbnb for services) founder Leah Busque, “2011 will be dubbed the year of The Sharing Economy. I think we are finally at a place in time where technology has become savvy enough to provide solutions to stale business models. People are getting more and more comfortable with sharing their space (instead of booking hotel rooms), sharing their cars (instead of purchasing their own), and utilizing people sharing their free time and skills (instead of hiring a personal assistant).” And perhaps Airbnb itself will save us the pain of having to use “Airbnb for X” repeatedly in headlines? In Brian Chesky did with Om Malik in February (when the pressure of a $1 billion valuation wasn’t so high) he alludes to his company expanding into other verticals. “I’ve seen the Airbnb for tutoring, I’ve seen the Airbnb for food, the Airbnb for cars. I think that our model can work for a lot of verticals. Very candidly I think that we’ll probably enter some other verticals as well. I don’t think we’re going to get to all these verticals. There wasn’t an eBay for stamps, and eBay for collectibles, and eBay for cars. There was just eBay.” It’s easy to talk about an expanded vision, and hint that your company will enter other categories in 2011, but it remains to be seen whether the practical execution of “entering other verticals” in this case means either acquiring or getting into the markets of other collaborative consumption startups or just limiting your model to lodgings (the company plans on launching sublets soon). Chesky told me in an email, “We think that this new economy of consumption, which Airbnb pioneered, will eventually consolidate into a few marketplaces, rather than having the ‘Airbnb for’ hundreds of categories.” When repeatedly asked the (pretty annoying) ‘Does Airbnb want to become the Airbnb of X?’ question marketing director Chris Lukezic told me that company is currently focused squarely on accommodation and wouldn’t elaborate further. Fair enough. They’ve a hard time enough making sure all those headline writers aren’t spelling it “ ” (true story). In the meantime, please leave your suggestions for alternate ways of writing “The Airbnb Of” in our headlines, in the comments. |
The Power Of Online-To-Offline Is Moving Beyond Local Commerce | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | While the idea of for purchasing is proving to be powerful in the , the trend of linking the physical world to the web is producing a number of startups that are innovating beyond just purchasing from local merchants or finding a product nearby. Many of the most interesting startups that have emerged over the past year or so are making our lives in the real world better; using data, location and curation as their competitive weapons. And although these startups have presences on the web and mobile devices, they are also disrupting services in the physical world. So who are these startups that are taking the ‘online to offline’ trend to a whole new level? Below I discuss five different types of startups taking advantage of this trend: / , , and Take Uber, which a private car from an iPhone app at discounted rates. Basically, Uber allows you to order a black car to come to your location via the mobile app, and then watch it come to you as the app tracks the car via GPS. Payments are handled automatically by charging the card you have on file, and it costs at least 50% more than a taxi. The online to offline connection is obvious, as you order online for a car that picks you up in the physical world. While Uber cars are more expensive, the benefit is that you don’t have to wait for a cab. All cars are town cars, so you’re getting a luxurious ride. Uber tracks all cars, so in case you leave something in the car, you’ll be able to track your car down. The startup has a in San Francisco and has since expanded to New York. And the service will eventually launch in Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and D.C. The ability to pay and book a car online (based on your present location no less) and then use the car to arrive at a physical destination is no doubt the private car and taxi industries. Want custom-designed clothes or a personal shopper to pick your wardrobe? No need to visit a custom tailor in your town or hire a stylist from Saks. J Hilburn and Trunk Club are two startups disrupting the men’s fashion industry and bridging the online to offline worlds. J Hilburn that allows men to buy custom-designed shirts and trousers online. The beauty of the site is that it offers designer-like styles for less. The company also employs a salesforce of 800 “style advisors” across the country, who make appointments to visit customers in their homes and offices. The advisors measure the customers, show them swaths of fabric, and help them select a few options. Revenue is growing fast, and men can find affordable custom made clothes by simple entering their measurements and sizing on the web, and have the clothes delivered to their door. Similarly, Chicago-based Trunk Club offers men personal stylists to pick out clothing, which is delivered to customers’ homes. Men sign up via the website, pick preselected looks, and answer a small questionnaire with questions like “where do you shop right now?,” “what’s your favorite item in your closet,” sizes, price and color preferences and more. A stylist will then call/contact the customers via their preferred method of communication (many choose email). Once the stylist gets an idea of the customer’s style, he or she will send a “trunk,” of clothes and ship out via Fedex a handpicked collection of shoes, pants, shirts, and more. Clients keep the clothes they want and send back the items that don’t fit. You are only charged for the clothes that you keep. Like J Hilburn, The Trunk Club buys clothing at wholesale and sells it at a normal retail markup. There are no sales/discounts on clothes and Trunk Club stocks its own inventory. Customers don’t pay anything extra for them as they would in a fancy department store. Once again, an online experience is disrupting an offline experience in the physical world. In this case, Trunk Club and J Hilburn are making the physical acts of trying on clothes, finding custom made clothing and picking out clothes that match your style much more efficient by adding an online component. Getaround, which just in New York, is a where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share anywhere. While GetAround is still new, the model has a lot of promise. Getaround disrupts car sharing similar to the way Airbnb disrupted the home rental and hotel industries. Both link the ability to monetize sharing of a physical property. As of last week, the company had already for sharing, which is 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s fleet of 8,000 cars. I am a huge fan of Jetsetter (and so is ). The flash sales site for luxury travel has been innovating the hotel industry by allowing consumers to access the best hotels in the world at discounted prices. And the site goes beyond just commerce, even adding an editorial component to accessing information about hotels. The company, which is a subsidiary of flash sales giant Gilt Groupe, has just unveiled a brand new service which essentially brings services of travel agents online. As Sarah Lacy wrote in her review, Jetsetter’s travel planning service is essentially a travel agent 2.0. Jetsetter is leveraging its network of more than 200 travel writers to help members plan itineraries for vacations. The service isn’t cheap. It costs $200 for three hours of consultation and a detailed itinerary, that their specialists will book and arrange for you at no additional cost. If you book a hotel through Jetsetter, you get $100 back. While many people don’t use travel agents anymore because booking is so easy online, many travel booking engines miss the personal curation that that travel agents provide. Airbnb, which has been for over three years now. As you may know, Airbnb lets anyone that owns space fit for accommodating travelers, whether that’s a couch in a small apartment or , post that space as a listing on its website and connect potential renters to its respective owners. The company takes the physical act of renting rooms or spaces in other people’s homes and makes it much easier for users to access this online. The platform in 2010, and is now being . Airbnb is one of the best examples of a company that brought an online component to a real-world action. And Airbnb continues to as well. While there have been in the road, the startup’s success is a testament to the power of the online to offline model. by an impressive list of investors, a that connects buyers and sellers in a localized market place. It’s sort of like a mobile-centric reverse Craigslist service. On the site or via the startup’s mobile apps, you post what you’re looking for (i.e. cupcakes), how much you’re willing to pay for it and how soon you need it. Zaarly will then share your request in the local community through the platform, and also allows you also post your request to Twitter and Facebook. People or businesses nearby can access and see your request and then anonymously message each other to complete the transaction of delivering the cupcakes you want. Sellers bid for the tasks, and the buyer chooses the best one, with Zaarly connecting the two via an anonymous Twilio-powered phone number. You can use cash or Zaarly’s integrated credit card payment system to pay for the transaction. Zaarly just less than a month ago, so it should be interesting to see if it can find the success that Craigslist experienced. These are just a few of the startups which are making improving our lives by linking the offline world online. Of course, the idea of linking the physical world online isn’t a new phenomenon. OpenTable and CraigsList have been doing this for years. But of late, there’s been a proliferation of startups that have adopted the OpenTable or Airbnb model of linking online to offline that have emerged. These startups are continuing to disrupt industries, such as car-sharing, customized travel planning, personal shopping, and more that have not had strong online presences. Essentially these startups make industries in the physical world more efficient, and thus make our lives better. The consumer is empowered with a better experience with the addition of a mobile technology or a web-based platform that saves time and sometimes money as well. There’s no doubt that this trend will certainly continue as more startups bridge online to offline. It’s just a matter of which industry will be disrupted. |
Making Time | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | Why Netflix rocks is the same reason that tomorrow’s iCloud announcements will rock. It’s not about the technology, it’s because of the technology that counts. You can feel it if you make the time to. Making time means what? One evening last week we sat at the bar downstairs at 1 Market after a long workday. John Taschek and several others were extolling the virtues, no, the imperatives of motorcycle ownership. You know, the usual keep the motor running head on down the highway testosterone. The kind of stuff Gary Busey still can’t get out of his head no matter how much he resists wearing a helmet. Gary, you’re fired. But hiding in the camaraderie was a simple truth, that the 15 minute commute into the office on his BMW gives Taschek the time to think. And what we’re going to hear tomorrow is the result of a lot of time to think. And why Microsoft hasn’t figured out how to make that time. iCloud is a state of mind Apple has been working toward for many moons now. Not so much the OK now we get cloud computing kind of mind set, but the OK now we are ready to apply our methodology toward the sweet spot of our competitors kind of value proposition. You hate iTunes and the stupid sync cable? OK, it’s gone. You feel locked in to the Apple restrictions on what you can do when you want to do it? OK now they’re removed. You want a real bit rate, a real screen, a real sense of ownership again? These are big promises to deliver on, but from the look of things, we’re about to get them. If we read this right, for starters we’re going to get full quality streaming of the music of our times. For those of us who grew up not so much listening to music as living it, the biggest inhibitor to downloading music was the lack of full quality, the state of whatever art we are at. The Apple codec is excellent, but you could only get that by buying the CD and ripping it. A good compromise between hard drive consumption and quality, nonetheless it still sucked given the fact that my record store has devolved to Starbucks. The alternative, downloading from iTunes, or worse from Amazon, is capitulation: 128 or whatever pseudo quality iTunes is or Amazon’s MP3. Give me a break with MP3. It’s like putting auto-tune on Aretha. The very thing you can’t quantify is the stuff we’ve been wanting to pay for ever since Napster. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s OK, but trust me, up until maybe tomorrow I’ve only bought the iTunes thing out of necessity. Let’s say for grins that tomorrow iCloud performs a checksum on our files on disk and gives us a stream version at full quality. If we’ve bought the CD for its liner notes, it gives us the liner notes on the iPad, not just the Mac like the Hendrix Anthology. If I’ve bought the latest Neil Young record on iTunes because there are no record stores left on Sunday or any other day, let me pay the iCloud freight to upgrade to the real deal. Let’s say the algorithm is that if I’m willing to give you access to my credit card on a monthly subscription basis, I’m trustable enough to get access to the real product, not the one with the digital condom desensitivity layer. Seems like a minor nit pick to you? Much ado about nothing, this 60’s post yuppie yearning for the good old days. Whatever, when an artist like Lady Gaga or the Black Keys taps into what used to be called show business at a meaningful soulful level, the resultant force has only recently been matched by social media. Just what do you think Twitter is all about? What I had for breakfast? No, the context of our times. We live, we die. What happens in between? This sense of ownership I mentioned, it’s the iceberg just below the water line. The new sense of owning is what the Cloud is all about, the understanding that to the best of our abilities, our access to who and why we are will remain constant. I’ve long since abandoned the notion that because I have something stored on a hard drive or a disk, I own it. In fact, all I own is an object for which the reader has vanished, or the media has corrupted, or the basement has flooded. Netflix is now my basement, cool and safe and shareable. What I really want is something I can count on, and iterate on, and share with my world, and be shared with. I think it’s very possible that what Steve Jobs will show tomorrow has that same goal in mind. He grew up loving Dylan and the Beatles. And he delivered them, or almost. Unlocking the last foot, the bits, that is something really big. If he turns Apple TV into the flagship of the digital revolution, I’ll gladly pay the freight. And for those who say they don’t want an Apple-owned world, this will open the door for Google as it has with Android. Who knows, even Microsoft may be able to get a piece of the action. But for Microsoft to be more than an afterthought, they have to make the time to think. Think about what we want and need to live our lives to the fullest. If that means think about a world without Windows in order to understand what we want, that’s a tough one. The usual logic about Windows, or Office for that matter, is that 97% of the world’s on it so it’s not going away. But if you own an iPad, 100% of Windows and Office has gone away. As I started to write this, Pages pushed an update with the new document button replaced by a + sign which when clicked gave me a bunch of iCloudy-looking choices. IDisk? In the World of iPad, MobileMe is like saying I’ll have a slice of pizza pie. Does that mean two slices? The iPad is MobileMe, and MobileYou too. It’s become for the most part the place where I make time to think. Spare me the Apple fanboy jibes; I’m a fan of big visions that deliver. Besides, something about what’s coming tomorrow makes me think this will turn out well for more than just Apple. It goes back to Netflix and our search for something to watch on a weekend night when the kids are asleep or, in the case of the teenager, taking care not to party too hard. So we’ve seen all the stupid romcoms and learned that theCuban Missile crisis was actually resolved by bands of warring mutant superheroes. Now I’m on Netflix trolling New Releases, deep in the More button view. If you want to truly grok the depths of mediocrity of Hollywood, go there with me. And then salvation In the strange form of the Scottish guy who appears after Letterman, a Craig Ferguson special shorn of the oh la las and innuendo that are required on broadcast television, and replete with all the funky obscenity and drug references of his dissipated youth. In short, the real full quality stand up of a very funny guy. And as we laughed and cringed at his stroll through our not so secret inner sanctum, he reminded me of what is possible when we put our minds to it. Born in the mix of mediocrity and limitations, carrier lock down and conformity masquerading as 50’s sensibility. It may seem like a small thing, a foul-mouthed talk show host breaking free for a moment on a streaming connection. But that’s the stuff from which great things came, the Goon Shows from the halls of the straitlaced BBC, your 19th Nervous Breakdown, Jeff Beck’s A Day in the Life at the Rolling Stone Anniversary Concerts, Scoble’s photo on the Edwards campaign plane, the Dylan outakes, the iCloud. It’s an alternate show business that will inevitably swallow the current version and return us to the epicenter of the creative renaissance we are so lucky in which to be born. |
Domain Dollars: Pay.com Now Up For Sale | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | We just which will auctioned off this week at DOMAINfest Barcelona with an opening bid of a whopping $5 million. The current record holder for the highest sale of a domain is Sex.com, which sold for . And today, we hear a new domain is on the market which could also bring in millions. is now exclusively for sale with . The domain company’s CEO Tessa Holcomb seems optimistic that the domain will command a “multi seven-figure price tag.” The time seems to be right for the domain to bring in big bucks, as the payments wars heat up between players like Google, PayPal and Square. Google just unveiled their mobile payments technology, ; and Square’s disruptive payments platform is continuing to PayPal also has a in the payments space, and is fast approaching 100 million users. It should be interesting to see if a payments or financial company does snap up the domain. What do you think? Will Pay.com pay up more money than Social.com or Sex.com? Photo Credit/Flickr/ |
Spark, Lightbank And Yuri Milner Get In On OnSwipe's $5M 'Series Awesome' | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | Tablet publishing platform is announcing a $5 million round of “Series Awesome” funding today after their one million in seed funding in January. The round will be led by and followed on by , investment badass , , , , , and . And they’re really calling it a Series Awesome; Co-founder Jason Baptiste explained the need to raise even more cash, “We realized what we are building is a larger opportunity than we ever thought while growing at a breakneck speed. In order to own the market we went out and raised a Series Awesome from the best group of investors possible that share our goal of world domination. And yes…the legal docs actually say Series Awesome.” Onswipe most recently with WordPress.com to power the tablet experience of over 18.5 million blogs via the service. Threewords.me cofounder has also just joined the team as a CTO and Baptiste hopes to use the funding to scale his current team of 10 to 20-25 people in the next year, introducing a mix of engineering and business development positions. Baptiste tells me that the service will with “killer” (read: companies you’ve actually heard of) brand partnerships and “myonswipe,” a feature that allows Instapaper-like offline reading, all done in browser and in HTML5. Actual term sheet cover page below. Stay tuned. |
Why Startups Should Raise Money at the Top End of Normal | Mark Suster | 2,011 | 6 | 5 | I have conversations with entrepreneurs and other VCs on a daily basis about fund raising, the prices of deals, how much companies should raise, etc. I’ve stopped talking about this as much publicly because it’s such a heated, emotional topic where the points-of-view are strictly subjective and for which the answers will only be revealed in the future. I’ve decided to take all of my private points-of-view on the topic and make them public in a keynote speech at the in San Francisco on June 15th. I thought I’d post on one of the topics beforehand. It’s the one bit of advice I find myself giving to entrepreneurs most frequently these days, “raise money at the top end of normal.” Huh? Here’s what I mean. There is an inherent value that any company has. On a public stock market that is the value that investors place on of the business discounted to today’s date to account for the . The more mature the company and industry, the easier it is to predict its future. When investors are feeling confident about the future they tend to bid up the value of public companies due to an increased perception that the future cash generated by the company will appreciate. The price of public stocks change instantly in reaction to news that is perceived to affect the future value of that company. Every day shareholders vote on the value of the company by buying or selling shares. There is no price movement without one person agreeing to sell the stock and another agreeing to buy it. Stocks that have a lot of people trading are said to have a lot of , which basically means it’s really easy to get into (buy) or get out of (sell) the stock. Private markets for stocks are the opposite. They are pretty illiquid. If you invested in the first angel round of a startup company it is usually very hard to sell your stock—usually for many years if ever at all. So how exactly are prices determined? There is no great science to it. The earlier you invest the higher the chances the company won’t work out and thus you pay a lower price than later-stage investors. As an investor you’re trying to pay the appropriate price for your perceived risks of the company succeeding and protect yourself in the event that it isn’t quite as valuable as you had hoped. As the risks below get eliminated the higher the valuation investors are prepared to pay. Over time some “norms” have emerged in pricing based on investors risk / return profile. The obvious thing that investors think about is making a financial return on the investment they made in your company. Early-stage investors in technology startups are only looking for growth-oriented companies that can achieve an “exit” someday—either via selling your company to a larger company or via an IPO. The former is much more likely than the latter. So investors have to have some general sense of what companies that are similar to yours ultimately sell for in the private marketplace via an M&A transaction and they have to have some sense of valuations on public stock markets to be able to back into what their potential returns on your investment might be in the event of an IPO. For example: If you were to invest $41 million into a company (and one could assume that you owned between 33-50%) then the company is worth $82-123 million at funding. As an early stage investor you’re often planning around 10x your investment at the time you write your first check so in this case you’d be going into your investment expecting an exit of $800 – $1.2 billion. Then you can do a little bit of research and find out that very few companies ever achieve this valuation in a trade sale so you’re clearly gunning for an IPO. You’re unlikely to want to make this sort of investment with the product or the market not yet validated. The risk wouldn’t be appropriate. Ah, but you say that for a normal-sized angel check or A round check one shouldn’t worry about the ultimate exit because he or she is getting in really early and at a cheap enough price so who cares whether one pays $5 million pre-money or $15 million pre-money—you just have to make sure you back really big companies. Well, obviously if you knew that in advance it would be big, of course that would be true. But the reality is that you’re faced with two problems: 1) the earlier the stage the riskier and thus more write-offs so you need to have enough ownership percentage in your winners to make up for the losers and 2) the earlier stage your check the more likely the company will need many more funding rounds behind you and thus you face dilution. So rounds tend to be “range bound” where prices at the top end of the valuation spectrum often being done in boom markets (i.e. 2007, 2011) and for the hottest of companies test the top end of the range, and in bad markets for fund raising (2003, 2008) test the bottom end of the range. There is no such thing as a uniform price. It is highly dependent upon many factors: experience of the team, type of opportunity (a big biotech or semi-conductor A round is likely to look different from an Internet A round), geography, etc. So the ranges you would expect can be highly imprecise. But to help with the explanation I’d like to put down some markers of typical Internet done in major US markets (San Fran, NY, LA, etc.) while acknowledging that San Fran deals are often higher valuations due to increased competition amongst investors. There is no value judgment in my putting up these numbers nor am I negotiating with anybody. I’m just pointing out my gut feel for approximate ranges of deals that I’ve seen with Silicon Valley having the highest valuations, NY / LA / Boston / Boulder / Seattle having valuations in a slightly lower range but comparable and sometimes significantly lower prices in markets that don’t have a healthy venture market. These are not scientific, just anecdotal and just trying to provide some transparency for entrepreneurs on what I’ve seen in the market. And of course there are always outliers. Prices have definitely gone up in 2011 as depicted in the anecdotal chart below. Again, prices are expressed as pre-money valuations. For me I think that investors have got to accept the new reality in pricing if they want to remain competitive in markets like we’re seeing now. As ever, prices are still determined by: quality of team, quality of product / market and competitiveness of the deal. So when I advise entrepreneurs on fund raising I often say that it’s OK to try and shoot for the “top end of normal” for the market conditions. So in 2011 as a startup company if you can generate lots of demand you can definitely raise an A round of capital (say $3 million) at a $7 or 8 million pre-money valuation or slightly higher whereas just two years ago you would have struggled. That’s fine. That’s the deal you get when you’re raising in a good market for startup financing. What I caution entrepreneurs from doing is raising money at significantly ABOVE market valuations. I’m a VC so I have an obvious bias. But that’s not where this is coming from. I’ve been preaching the “don’t get ahead of your inherent valuation” message for nearly 10 years. I raised my A round at a $31.5 million post-money valuation with no revenue. It was early 2000. That was market. I saw this kind of pricing when I first entered the VC market in 2007. We had companies pitching us that had almost no revenue at all and they were raising $10-15 million in capital at a $40-50 million pre-money valuation. I should also point out that while they had built their products they had limited market traction. We passed on all of these deals and often tried to discuss the possibility of more modest amounts of capital raised and at more realistic prices. It’s hard to stop a train. One company which was raising at $40 million pre-money wrote a comment about me in a public forum saying something along the lines of “Mark worked really hard to understand our business and was very detail-oriented. But he and his firm were just too cheap on valuation.” Fair enough. But he sold within 3 years for not a huge price after having raised more than $20 million. Another firm we saw tried to raise $15 million at a $60 million pre-money with similar metrics. They did an inside round, spent a bunch of money and then went through a fire sale of the business less than 2 years later. Here’s the problem. If you haven’t figured out product / market fit and therefore still have a highly risky business you run great risks for getting too far ahead of yourself on valuation. If you raise at a $40 million pre-money on what would in normal times have been a $15 million valuation you’re fawked if the market corrects and you need another round. To any prospective investor you look like you’ve failed even before your first pitch. Even if you have an interesting story to tell, most investors won’t want to go through the brain damage of doing a “ ,” which creates tension between them and early investors. Finally, even if they could bring themselves to offer you a major down round, the more sophisticated investors know it’s fool’s gold. They get a cheaper price, they wipe out much founder stock value and they reissue you new options. You’ll take the money—what choice do you have? But 6 months later you’re not working past 10pm. 1 year in you stop catching early morning flights. Within 2 years your evenings & weekends are spent planning your next business. And the CEO they would hire to come in and run the business when you go would always be a mercenary. So my advice: go ahead and ask for a valuation that 2 years ago wouldn’t have been likely. Use competition to make sure you get a fair price. Raise a slightly higher round than you would have previously but keep some amount as a strategic reserve. Make sure that when you need to raise your next round of funding that you are able to show an uptick in valuation that is important for new investor confidence and to maintain great relations with your early investors. Increase price. But unless you’re already a well-known technology heavyweight be careful about raising above the range of prices that are normal for a bull market. If you’re hot, don’t raise above normal. Raise at the top end of normal. Other topics I’m going to cover at the Founder Showcase on June 15th: Hope to see you there. |
One More Thing, The Rap Song | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | Apple’s , WWDC, is coming up next week, and what better way to prepare than with a rap song? , the man who brought us featuring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, now has one for Apple. It is called , and I’ve embedded it below. Here is a sample (see what I did there?) of some of the lyrics: Phil Schiller told us
we wouldn’t want to miss this
would have been gold
if there’d been more specifics
so I look to Gruber
discern his predictions
to see if the rumours
will turn into fiction
damn this consumer addiction
to all these gadgets
and the magic within them
all the designs
by jonny ive
so I guess I better check who’s blogging live
can’t wait to download the developer preview Smith is not only a rapper, he is also a mobile developer at music-sharing platform . [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/16378610″] |
Juice In The City Reels In $6 Million To Help Moms Take On Groupon | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | , a site that pairs moms with local businesses and daily deals, announced tonight that it has raked in $6 million in seed funding from and HU Investments. The startup will use the infusion of funding to continue pushing into new markets and to create jobs for moms across the country. Founded in 2010, Juice In The City aims to bring moms big deals on things they really want to do, so the startup features daily deals at locally owned businesses — just like that Groupon thing. Yet, unlike Groupon, Juice In The City’s core team consists of a growing community of mom bloggers, mom groups, local vendors and local sales moms. As you can tell, there are some moms involved. Take that, Groupon. This group of local business consultant mothers identify and write about the deals that are then offered on the site, which means that moms recommend their own favorite local businesses and services, based on personal experience, so that other maternal-type figures (okay, moms) looking for good deals know that they are getting recommendations and deals from sources who have their interest at heart. Juice in the City customers get some pretty good deals thanks to their mom workforce (because who doesn’t love moms?), who in turn earn a percentage of the deal’s revenue. Everyone wins. Especially moms. And seeing as mothers are often the most loyal patrons of local businesses, and, in turn, local businesses know that moms are their quality customer and core consumer, Juice In The City has positioned itself to be of real value as a conduit through which to reach them. It’s also for this very reason that the startup thinks it may have solved the Groupon customer retention problem, as 80 percent of local vendors have indicated they are interested in working with Juice In The City again. The startup joins in this “Groupon for Moms” space, another neat business that marries the Mary Kay sales approach with the daily deals model. Plum District raked in $8.5 million from Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst in January and is scaling its team of sales moms into more than 25 regions. Moms are clearly a force to be reckoned with in the daily deals space. Look out. |
Limited-Run Solar OLED Lamp From Toshiba Distributed In Japan's Quake Zone | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
Toshiba is distributing to quake-stricken areas of Japan. The device is powered by either four AAA batteries or a rechargeable battery pack that can be powered up with solar or USB power. It produces 53 lumens of light at 100% and will last two hours on AAA batteries, twenty if you take the brightness down, and several times that if you use the battery pack. A perfect disaster light, right? Unfortunately, Toshiba is only making of them, and they’re already reserved for disaster victims. They don’t expect to sell them to consumers, I’m guessing because they’d actually be quite expensive. Bright OLED panel, high-capacity battery pack, solar charging? This ain’t your daddy’s desk lamp. Too bad, but good for Toshiba. By the way, if you want to donate, . [via ] |
New Records In Cleantech Offer Hope For More Affordable Solar Power, LED Lights | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | Cleantech companies— especially in solar— love to talk about how they’re breaking records. They issue press releases left and right about the most efficient this, that and the other. Such claims fizzle if they haven’t been verified by a third-party lab. They can also feel like greenwash, or Cola War style . Broken records we love to hear about, though, are like these from cleantech ventures Lighting Science Group and Flisom (in Switzerland). Here’s what they’ve done and why it matters… On May 31, — makers of light emitting diode (LED) bulbs that are Energy Star rated — reported that during the first quarter of 2011, they produced and sold 1 million bulbs. In 2010, Lighting Science produced and sold 1 million bulbs in the second of the year, according to company statements. Bulk production and sales increases like this suggest that LED lights, which are more energy-efficient and durable than flourescent and incandescent bulbs, are becoming mainstream and more affordable. Flexible, thin-film solar cells can now deliver more electricity per square inch than ever before. Scientists from EMPA, Switzerland’s Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Innovation, along with a Swiss startup called broke the energy conversion efficiency record for flexible thin-film CIGS solar cells, last week. They hit 18.7 percent efficiency for their CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) flexible solar cells. A previous record of 15.7 percent was announced by MiaSole in December 2010 (as TechCrunch then). The new record means that electricity generated by thin-film solar will become more affordable, hopefully alleviating reliance on petroleum and coal for power somewhat. The improved efficiency also means that the flexible, lighter-weight solar panels could catch up to rigid, silicon solar panels in terms of performance which would allow more consumer choice and competition in solar. Image: Records, under creative commons via |
Delays? Fragmentation? Advertising? Some Overcast Appears Ahead Of iTunes In iCloud | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | Once far off in the distance, iCloud is now quickly approaching. It will be a new service that Apple will first unveil on Monday during the keynote at WWDC. But the most interesting layer, at least from a consumer perspective initially, is the music one. And the details continue to emerge about what’s likely coming. Today, two reports state that Apple has finalized deals with all four major music labels. that Universal is now on board as are many publishers. this and suggests that the publisher deals could be completed tomorrow. That means the service will be set for a Monday debut. Great, right? Potentially. But there are also some troubling details. First of all, CNet’s report states that while it will first talked about on Monday, the iTunes aspect of iCloud will not launch right away. Instead, it’s expected “soon”. We had that Apple was aiming for a fall launch of the service, but that likely got pushed up once Amazon and Google unveiled their (decidedly limited) cloud music offerings. Second, and more importantly, the report says that the initial version of the service will only offer access to songs that have been . In other words, any songs ripped from a CD, or obtained through other online stores, or obtained through less-than-legal means, will not be included. That’s not good news. It makes sense that the music labels would want such a limitation to ensure that pirates aren’t rewarded. But most of the talk up until now has been that Apple was working hard to ensure that user music would be available in the cloud. This seems vital given users’ desires to work with existing music collections. Now CNet is saying that Apple is aiming to offer this more complete option “sometime in the future”. Again, not good. The LA Times report is a bit more disturbing because it talks about uploading. One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary. Both Amazon’s and Google’s service involve uploading — which is a huge pain in the ass — but that’s only because neither of them have the label (or publisher) deals in place. Apple will have those. So let’s hope LA Times simply misspoke there. And that’s certainly possible. Other aspects of their report don’t make a ton of sense. For example, while CNET says the label/publisher/Apple split for iTunes in iCloud will be 58/12/30, LA Times says that Apple will give a full 70 percent of revenue to the labels and another 12 percent to the publishers, leaving them with only 18 percent. The former split seems more likely given the current status quo, but LA Times went out of their way to update the post with this new split, so perhaps it is correct. The oddest part of the LA Times post though is the talk about iCloud being advertising-supported. This would represent a big break in form for Apple — more along the lines of the Google model. It’s simply hard to imagine Apple doing something like that. Of course, no other details are given, so who knows what that actually means. LA Times also claims that while iTunes in iCloud would be free at first, there would be an annual fee of “about” $25 eventually. Apple is expected to charge for the service, but it may be bundled with other iCloud services, rather than broken out separately. Also, if they are charging the fee, the advertising talk seems even stranger. Given that fairly loose-lipped music industry people (and Hollywood people as well) are involved, we can probably expect more to leak out before Monday. And let’s hope so, the talk right now is ranging from confusing to a bit disappointing. |
This Time It's Sony Pictures Being Hacked: Another Huge Data Breach | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | I guess once it became clear that web infrastructure is , every hacker and scripter out there is looking to get a piece of the glory. The latest to fall to the black hats is Sony Pictures, which was breached by a simple SQL injection. The group responsible for the attack, Lulz Security, summarizes the hack: We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts. Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 “music codes” and 3.5 million “music coupons”. If you’re a member of the Sony Pictures website, be aware that your password, address, and any other data you’ve given over is now in the hands of anyone who wants it. More info as it develops. As before, this post doesn’t mean we support Lulz Security’s actions; responsible hackers break security all the time and donate or sell the vulnerabilities to the affected companies, but this is just an act of data theft. That said, that so much information was being kept in such an insecure fashion is, as before, worrying. |
Apple Attempting To Patent IR Receiver For Device That Could Enable (Or Disable) Features | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
Given that many of the filed by never end up in products and are merely exploratory or the result of internal research, I won’t dwell too long on this one. But it is a bit freaky to think that your phone could see something in the background and go “Whoops, better turn off. I’m not allowed here!” . |
Microsoft's Wireless Desktop 2000 Encrypts Your Keystrokes | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
If you’re concerned about keyjacking attacks, in which a wireless keyboard’s signal is intercepted and information extracted from the stream, this might be of interest to you. has 128-bit AES encryption built right in. Not much help if someone’s looking over your shoulder, but at least they can’t snatch your credentials right out of the air. The keyboard has lots of media and shortcut keys, those irritating non-separated F keys, and a “pillow texture” palm rest. The mouse doesn’t look very interesting, unfortunately, but at $40 for the set, there’s not much to complain about. A good option for the security-conscious business. |
CodeGuard Raises $500K To Monitor And Protect Websites | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | CodeGuard, a startup that last week, has already raised a round of funding. The company has just announced a $500,000 round from . CodeGuard, which was the audience choice winner from Startup Alley, helps protect and monitor websites from attacks and data thefts. The startup provides a virtual version control system and stores site data in the cloud. Backups are stored hourly or daily, allowing users to see what files have changed. If there is a hack or suspicious change in data, webmasters can quickly revert to the last known “clean” version. And hacking can be identified and site owners can be notified before they spread malware, have their links pirated, or act as a parasitic host for spammers. As we wrote in our initial review of CodeGuard, the service is similar to the Time Machine feature built into the Apple OS X software; except CodeGuard backsup data found on a server elsewhere. And the product is designed to allow owners with little technical experience to manage and monitor their websites. You can watch CodeGuard’s demo from TechCrunch Disrupt below: |
Review: Psyko Carbon Surround-Sound Headset | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
: While the technology is interesting and unorthodox, the Carbon seems to miss out on the most important role of a headset: sounding good.
: : : As you might have read over the last couple years (Psyko’s first headset debuted way back in 2009), Psyko set out to revolutionize gaming audio by turning the headset paradigm on its head. Instead of a pair of speakers next to your head simulating surround sound, they’d put the speakers on top and pipe the sound down to your ears in discrete channels, letting it come out where it should: behind, in front of, or beside your ears. Their newest design adds look and feel updates, but the technology is much the same, and no other companies offer anything like it. The Carbon is their high-end version, with better cords, connectors, and construction. So do they work? Based on hours of play with these and other headsets (surround-sound and normal), I’d have to say . They set out to make the best gaming headset out there, and while the Carbon excels in some ways, it simply fails in too many ways for me to recommend them to anyone but novelty seekers. True to Psyko’s promises, the directionality is very good. Once you get your settings right, and assuming your game supports them (not all do; Valve’s games do, for instance doesn’t), you do have an increased sense of where things are coming from. The benefit is, in my opinion, marginal, as stereo placement in good normal headphones covers a large swath of audio territory, and it’s only towards the rear that you have any real failure to communicate direction. The Carbon remedies that (as did its predecessor), and my teammates footsteps in Left 4 Dead 2 did sound very much like they were actually behind me. The primary problem is the of the sound. Maybe it’s just the presence of the long “waveguides” that inspire this comparison, but it sounds like you’re hearing things through a long tube. I tried it on two different sound systems, with various configurations in Windows and in games, and got the same result. It was worse when games didn’t support a stated 5.1/7.1 option, naturally. Different headsets sound differently, obviously, and one may emphasize the high end or low end more, or provide better definition but worse range. The Carbons fell outside of my “reasonable allowance for headset differences” range; as soon as I put on another headset to compare, I found myself thinking “oh yeah, how that gun is supposed to sound.” The amp has a dial that allows you to choose between more bass and better sound placement. It seems odd that I should have to choose between these two important things, but nevertheless I did find a happy medium. Could you get used to it? Maybe. But you’d have to live in these headphones, and that’s not an option for a couple reasons. Music is no good in them, being subject to the same effect. Movies were a mixed bag and I don’t trust the ones I watched or my media player (newly configured) to get it right. But you wouldn’t want to do anything but game in these. Comfort isn’t really an issue; though the headset is extremely bulky, it’s not particularly heavy, being on par with the Logitech and Razer headsets I have here. I wouldn’t call them truly comfortable (at least, not like lightweight pairs like the and ), but they’re definitely wearable for an hour or two. The earcups feel fine and are quite large enough for the biggest ears. I had to extend the earpieces down to their maximum height to fit, though, and I’d like to think I have a reasonably sized head. If you don’t, you might have a problem. Setup is straightforward, though the amp requires power and you may find yourself behind your PC a lot, unplugging these when you want to listen to music and plugging them back in for gaming. Some sort of passthrough option would have been appreciated. Why the power and audio aren’t both sent over USB is beyond me. (Psyko says: USB power isn’t enough for their amps.) Despite the ostensibly improved construction on the Carbon, I found that the multiplicity of interlocking pieces that make these up makes for an unacceptable amount of very audible creak and groan when wearing these. The removable microphone seemed to work just fine, though being removable, I assume it will eventually be lost. While I applaud the unique approach to sound offered by Psyko with this headset, the fact is that it just doesn’t sound as good as others on the market. The directionality is improved, but at great cost — plus, these headphones are limited to use as surround gaming headphones, whereas virtual surround headphones like the G35 are multi-purpose and in my opinion provide an adequate illusion of surround. If Psyko can improve the sound (and simplify the build and setup) they may have something, but until then there are dozens of better choices for the discerning gamer.
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Apple iCloud's Icon Is A…. Cloud! | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
Apple is launching next week. managed to resolve one of the last questions about the service — besides what the hell it actually is. The icon! Somehow they snapped a rather clear image showing what are already confirmed as the three big announcements next week: OS X Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud. And the icon is a cloud! How fun. Alright, that’s it. Move along. |
Groupon's IPO Filing Reveals Incredible Growth And $2.6 Billion Revenue Run-Rate (Charts) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | Groupon finally today and now we can see it’s (click for full financial table). Groupon has been growing at an astounding rate. Last year, it’s revenues grew more than to $713 million. And in the first quarter of 2011 alone, it nearly matched all of its revenue from last year with $644 million in sales, up 13,575 percent from a year ago. If you annualize Groupon’s first-quarter numbers, you get a revenue run rate of $2.6 billion for 2011, and that is not even factoring in any growth in subsequent quarters. So the $3 billion to $4 billion estimates that were thrown out a while ago for 2011 revenue look very achievable. Groupon had 83.1 million subscribers as of March 31, 2011, up from 3.4 million the year before. In the first quarter of this year alone, it added 32.5 million subscribers and it sold 28 million Groupons across all 83.1 million subscribers. But what about profits? Groupon lost $456 million last year, and another $147 million last quarter. And don’t expect those losses to go away anytime soon. CEO Andrew Mason warns future public shareholders, “We aggressively invest in growth.” Groupon spends a lot of money “acquiring new subscribers.” About 54 percent of its operating expenses goes towards marketing. The other 46 percent goes towards sales. Half of its workforce of about are in sales, a number CEO Andrew MAson threw out yesterday during an interview at the D9 conference. As of March 31, 2011, however, according to the filing, there were 7,107 employees and 3,556 sales people. Of those sales people, the majority (2,895) are international. They represent 81 percent of the salesforce, but only 54 percent of Groupon’s total revenues in the first quarter. That is where Groupon is investing for growth—overseas. That is also where Groupon is losing most of its money. The U.S operations lost only $10.4 million last year, whereas the international operations lost $170.6 million. Groupon and its bankers will be pointing to its gross profits instead, which are much healthier. Gross profits were up about 24,600 percent last year to $280 million, from $10.9 million the year before. And gross profits in the first quarter of 2011 came in at $270 million, which nearly matched all of last year’s gross profits. Those were up from $20 million the year before. Investing for growth is fine, but ultimately a company (and its shares) are measured by how much of those profits the company actually keeps. |
All's Well That Ends Well: Kid Whose Code Was Stolen By Ad Firm Releases iPhone App | John Biggs | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | Remember the kid who wrote a little asteroids game that lets you ? And then remember how BBDO in Denmark stole the code and made an M&Ms game? Well, it looks like open source is alive and well because Erick, the creator, is (it basically lets you blow up web pages on the iPhone). Best of all, BBDO, the advertising agency, flew him out to Denmark to meet the team and some of the programmers and learn how the sausage is made. Good for him and them. While I’m all for open sourcing software, a company like BBDO repurposing a cool app to sell M&Ms goes a little above and beyond “free as in freedom.” I’m glad they made this right. |
MeeGo Hacked Onto The Nook Color | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
Getting Android on a isn’t so much hacking anymore. It’s pretty damn easy at this point. But MeeGo, well, MeeGo is a different story. It apparently took one week of work to get the mobile OS onto the Nook Color, but the results are pretty impressive. It looks stable, quick and mighty sexy. Video after the jump. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5xtnP22Fuw&w=640&h=390] [ via ] |
Idea Flight Turns iPads Into Presentation Platform | Scott Merrill | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
Condé Nast has unveiled a new iPad app called that they claim “is a new tool designed to share ideas, presentations, documents and designs easily and effectively.” One iPad user is a the “pilot” for a presentation and up to 15 “passenger” iPads can follow along via WiFi or Bluetooth. Idea Flight isn’t a general purpose presentation app, but it does look to make the iPad a more useful business device. Here’s the marketing video. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22901875 w=400&h=225] from on . Idea Flight looks to do a couple things right, right out of the box. A “passenger list” allows anyone following the presentation to see the names, photos and titles of all other attendees. Attendees can send an invitation to connect for follow-up, and rather than try to create a new professional network experience, Idea Flight used LinkedIn to connect people. Content for presentations can be accessed through , iTunes file sharing, or even email. Business presentations are an obvious use case for Idea Flight, but in our post-PC world there may be more interesting uses for this kind of app. Schools using iPads in the classroom, for example. The app is free, and allows your iPad to be a passenger. If you want to be a pilot, you need to make an in-app purchase of $7.99. |
Startup Canada: FounderFuel Launches Accelerator Program In Montreal | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | Today, another early-stage accelerator program hits Quebec’s largest city, joining and others in an effort to support and grow Canadian entrepreneurship. was created by the team behind , a venture investor that has backed and the recently-launched , a $50 million seed-stage venture fund. Today, Real Ventures announced that it will be contributing over $2 million to FounderFuel’s accelerator program. Ian Jeffrey, who was formerly formerly VP of and subsequently Director of Marketing at will become FounderFuel’s General Manager. Jeffrey told TechCrunch that FounderFuel aims to be the “Y Hibernator” for Montreal-based startups. Though, considering Y Combinator accepted 60-plus startups for its summer program this year, FounderFuel has its work cut out. The program will accept approximately 8 teams into its first batch and will dole out $10K to each team, plus an additional $5K for each founding member. The program is 12-weeks long, beginning August 15th, with a demo day planned for November 7th in Montreal. 85-plus mentors from around the world are joining the board and will lend their knowledge and experience to the selected teams. The program is now open for submissions, with a deadline of July 1st. With relative proximity to both New York and Boston, FounderFuel will be tapping a number of U.S.-based mentors, like of Performable and of Chargify in an effort to provide quality mentorship to the founding teams. “Having spent time in Montreal recently as part of the ‘Do More Faster’ tour, I think I’ve got a read of the place and a good sense of the vibe”, said Foundry Group Partner and TechStars Founder . “And I’ve got to tell you, in terms of the dynamics for Entrepreneurship, it’s a powerful place just to hang out in”. It’s great to see another support system for Canadian entrepreneurs hitting the streets of Montreal. With any luck, FounderFuel will be the Red Bull for innovation in Montreal. |
Sony Announces NGP/Vita Will Be Back-Compatible With All PSP Games | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 2 |
Sony’s NGP, or “Vita” if the leaks are accurate, just went up a notch in my opinion. Although that it’s never going to make the splash that “lighter” game systems will make (an issue the 3DS shares to some extent), they seem to be doing this one right at least. They’ve just announced that the NGP will be . That’s a major value bump. The kicker? It’s all running in software emulation. That confirms further what we already knew, that the NGP is a monster under the hood. There may be some hiccups along the way, as some games will likely have glitches and what not, the usual result of a universal software emulator, but it’ll be easy enough for Sony to roll out patches. Games will be (optionally) upscaled and smoothed, and the dual analog sticks will be implemented, though how they’ll be stored and things like multiplayer will work wasn’t made clear. I have to hand it to Sony, they’re making even a skeptic excited about their new system. : I should have been more clear, all downloadable PSP games are compatible. Obviously the NGP/Vita doesn’t have a UMD slot. |
Note to Self: If the Halls Clear at Conferences, IPOs Are Near | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | In Silicon Valley the terms of venture capital deals, the prices of valuations and the real stories of ousters are routinely dished, whether they always show up in the press or not. Sure it’s all off the record or on background or whispered at a coffee shop, but people who live here love what they do and when companies and valuations grow this quickly, it’s hard to keep the juicy details under wraps. So when they can’t dish, what do they do? Hide. No one wants to mess with the Securities and Exchange Commission. So I should have realized sooner the reason why so many attendees that I usually talk to at conferences seemed to vanish into thin air during the All Things Digital Conference. The Greylock partners– four of them were here– were all conspicuously absent the last few days. LinkedIn founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman was here….supposedly but I never laid eyes on him. Ditto James Slavet. And John Lilly was around opening night, but I didn’t see him again. I saw David Sze at check in, but he only resurfaced again an hour or so ago looking for a lost phone. It was the first time I’ve ever seen him refuse to stop and chat. Moments later, the came out and . I don’t know if he ever found his phone, but fortunately he’ll soon be able to buy about zillion replacements. Andrew Mason was supposed to sit down with us after his fireside chat, then suddenly had to leave . And of course Mark Pincus pulled out of the conference at the last minute altogether, spurring Zynga IPO speculation. This after Hoffman, the Pandora founders and several others politely declined our invitations to speak at New York Disrupt, saying our San Francisco conference was far better timing. (I should note that Marc Andreessen was also nowhere to be seen except on stage last night, but that’s just Andreessen.) It’s tough days to be a tech reporter trolling the halls for news, when the newsmakers vanish. Nearly all of Groupon’s investors, its press people and its CEO were all in the same hotel with the tech press elite and somehow the story didn’t leak. Score one for the SEC and a big fail for the tech press. I’d resign in shame, if every reporter here didn’t fail just as terribly. So who was visible in the hallways this week? Two people of note: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg. Indeed both were quite cordial and easy to find, roaming the halls for several days without handlers. In absence of other news coming out of this event, take that tidbit for whatever it’s worth. |
You said what? Brandwatch brings its social media monitoring search to Seesmic | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | , the UK social media monitoring startup, has released a free search plugin for , the desktop client for companies who want to manage their social media presence. Aimed at users who want to monitor a particular brand or topic across the whole of the Web, not just the services that Seesmic supports out of the box, the Brandwatch plugin adds additional search/monitoring functionality. This is presented in a new column within the app which updates in real-time to display Brandwatch data alongside the user’s Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds. Included in that Brandwarch search is information related to sentiment, volume of mentions of that brand and history for any particular query. As we’ve noted before, brand management in the age of the real-time web can be – it’s a forever moving target where even the most established brands are being caught out. It’s also an area evolving quickly as startups emerge to help brands manage their social media reputation and consumers are increasingly becoming more and more savvy with the likes of Twitter, Facebook and other newer social web tools and are realising their power to damage (and enhance) a company or product’s reputation. |
MyGengo Raises $1 Million To "Own" Translation | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | Translation service has raised one million in seed financing from , and Prior to today’s investment, the platform had raised $750k from . Along with the funding MyGengo is also announcing the hiring of Kenji Yamamoto as Chief Revenue Officer and Jeff Binstock as Chief Operating Officer. MyGengo is like Mechanical Turk for translation supplementing automated techniques with over 2,500 translators in every time zone. Using a combination of machine and human processes, service has translated over 5 million words in the first three months of 2011, more than the past two years combined. In the same online translation space as , and MyGengo translates thousands of texts daily in 14 languages for clients such as ShapeUp, Evernote, Youversion and Producteev. What the startup does differently than its competition is offer a low price point (25% below One Hour Translation) and an API and Rails, WordPress and Django plugins for developers. “MyGengo will *own* translation within the major B2B2C channels that allow merchants and publishers to sell and communicate across borders,” says MyGengo CEO “This is a huuuuuuge market so we will see a LOT of winners in this space — us AND our competitors! ‘Going Global’ is a huge, defining theme for the Web over the next few years, and about as big a market opportunity as there is.” |
Apple's SaaS: Software as a Soul | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a piece entitled . In it, author Steve Lohr looks back at the past 100 years of IBM and points out the keys to their longevity: shifting and adapting to new markets and times. He then lays how three tech powers today — Microsoft, Google, and Apple — may make similar moves to weather the inevitable storms. At a high level, the parallels make some sense for Microsoft, and to a lesser extent, Google. They make no sense for Apple. Microsoft and Google, as Lohr points out, are hugely successful companies right now. But their businesses have potential points of weakness because almost all of their money comes from one or two areas. In Google’s case, the one area is search advertising. In Microsoft’s, it’s Windows and Office (the Server division makes a good amount of money, as Lohr notes, but it’s peanuts compared to the two towers). Lohr says that Microsoft up-and-coming gaming division could eventually be a key to saving them. And for Google, it could be Android. Again, this all makes sense (though is hardly anything new). But when it comes to Apple, Lohr loses it. First of all, Lohr talks about IBM’s near-failure in the 1990s, but completely leaves out the fact that Apple too almost went under in the same time frame. In fact, they were much closer to death. Then Steve Jobs came back and — we all know the story. The key is that Apple, as successful as they are right now, has already had to reinvent themselves. And they did it with stunning success. In fact, their reinvention has been more successful than IBM’s most recent reinvention. It’s just that Apple is not 100 years old. Nor is their metamorphosis something that any other company in the tech world (and perhaps beyond) is likely to be able to replicate anytime soon. And in fact, Apple’s metamorphosis is still ongoing. And that leads to point two. In remarking on the same article earlier today, into Lohr’s assertion that Apple’s hardware business could be easily “mimicked”. Specifically, he questions if Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at MIT that Lohr cites, understands Apple at all when he suggests that Apple in the future will have to shift to software and services to stay alive. “I wonder if the professor thinks companies like, say, Rolex and BMW ought to shift to ‘software and services’ too?,” Gruber writes. He also notes that while Lohr brings up how Macs are still dwarfed in sheer unit sales by Windows PCs, Lohr completely disregards the fact that Apple is now in command in terms of profit share amongst PC-makers. This is something which, comically, is almost always overlooked — . that Lohr and Cusumano completely disregard something else important: innovation. As in, while it’s certainly possible that “Apple’s product designs, however impressive, will eventually be mimicked and come under price pressure,” as Cusumano suggests, that seems to be assuming Apple stands still and stops innovating in the areas of hardware design and manufacturing. That’s ridiculous. I’ve been buying Apple products for just about ten years now (yes, that’s all). In that entire time, I’ve yet to see a product by a competitor that matches the build quality and aesthetic of Apple’s products in their major areas of focus (Macs, iPods, iPhones, and now iPads). Not once. I know that sounds like just about the biggest … well, ever. But am I wrong? Even Apple haters cannot deny the quality of the products. Bitch about price, bitch about control, bitch about the fruit logo — but quality is simply never a compelling argument. Because Apple wins. That hasn’t changed for at least a decade, and some would argue much longer. Why is it going to change all of a sudden? Because the manufacturing and designing processes will get cheaper? Sure. For shit products. Competitors have been trying to mimic the look and feel of Apple’s products for much of this past decade. Guess what happens? They always come up short. We’re left with a ton of products that look like Apple products, but never feel right. They feel like cheap knockoffs. Which is exactly what they are. That’s part of the reason why I think Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung is silly. Is Samsung trying to mimic Apple’s products? Of course they are. Basically everyone is. But I’ve used a handful of the products Apple names in the lawsuit. And, well, comes to mind. “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” If Apple fired their design teams and kicked to the curb, then sure, maybe in a decade competitors would be able to mimic Apple’s current designs and build-quality at a lower price that would threaten Apple. But that’s not going to happen. At least not anytime soon. And to not even bring up that fact is a slap in the face of what Apple has done in terms of manufacturing innovation and industrial design. Believe it or not, these things are an extremely important part of what makes Apple, Apple. And none of that speaks to the astounding success Apple has had managing their supply chains. Again, there are good reasons that competitors aren’t able to copy Apple so easily. Under COO Tim Cook, Apple today is perhaps the most well-oiled machine the tech industry has never seen. And there’s more. In his WWDC keynote a few weeks ago, Steve Jobs said the following. “You know, if the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software in them is their soul.” Obviously, he said this because WWDC this year was entirely about software with the unveilings of OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud. But he also said for a much more important reason: Apple actually believes this. Even though they make the vast majority of their money from selling hardware, without software, their great-looking machines would be absolutely worthless. Sure, you could jerry-rig them to run Windows, but then they would just be really expensive PCs. Apple doesn’t sell only hardware or only software — they sell the entire package. They sell the experience. This is what the vast majority of their competitors do not understand. By outsourcing their “souls”, as it were, to Microsoft for PCs or to Google for phones, they can never do what Apple does. One big exception may be HP. Despite their denials that they’re in the process of transforming their own business to be more like Apple’s, they are well, . With webOS now in place, they control the software (at least outside of PCs for now — but soon those too) and the hardware (not Apple-level yet, but you can be sure they’re working on it). Will that transformation work? Maybe. Maybe not. But give them credit for trying. At the very least, they seem to get it. So when Lohr and Cusumano suggest that Apple may one day survive as a company that relies on software like iCloud to milk money-making opportunities out of things like advertising and marketing, you have to laugh. If anything, more companies are going to attempt to alter their models to be more like Apple’s, instead of the other way around. Apple will remain in a position of power for the foreseeable future because they have nailed that model. And it is not nearly as easily assailable as the NYT piece suggests. At the same time, Apple will continue to innovate, and yes, transform themselves. Most of their revenues now come from phones. Ten years ago, that was unthinkable. In another ten years, most of their revenue could come from tablet computers. Or maybe something else no one is thinking about right now. Apple certainly won’t be becoming a “software and services” company anytime soon. They follow the “SaaS” model — that is, “Software as a Soul”. As in, the software cannot be decoupled from the hardware. They tried that once before. It was a disaster. It led to the near-collapse and subsequently, the complete reinvention that we’re seeing now. They won’t have to “pull an IBM” because they’re already doing it one better. |
Finally, A Solar Powered Netbook Comes To The US | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | It seems like when I’m outside the US, all I see is solar-powered netbooks. Solar powered netbooks here, solar powered netbooks there. Cafes brimming with them, streets littered with them, babies babbling into their solar powered netbooks issued at birth. Okay, maybe not. But this one from Samsung, which has no special specs except for the solar panel on the back, originally not coming to the US. For $399. July 3rd. Word to your solar powered mother. [via ] |
Seedcamp named top European accelerator, with Startupbootcamp closing in | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | , the London-based startup accelerator program which has been operating in Europe for the past four years, has been named the top European startup accelerator by a year-long independent study. However programmes run by in Europe took three of the remaining positions in the top eight named in the study. And three of the eight singled out are based in Ireland. The study was commissioned by the Kauffman Fellows Program in the US. I don’t know about you but I find these results fascinating, and they reveal quite a bit about the European startup scene as it stands today. Seedcamp was singled out for its “Seedcamp Week” jumpstart where A-List mentors swarm over startups in London and described as the European “gold standard” of accelerator programs, with the biggest number of Alumni and three exits to date. But Startupbootcamp (also an affiliate of TechStars Network), which has only got going in the last couple of years, appears to be in Seedcamp’s rear-view mirror with its programmes in Spain, Denmark and Ireland. Additional programs will be run in London and Berlin for 2012. They’ve former TechCrunch France editor Roxanne Varza. The study also found as many as 40 startup incubators in Europe, with 50% of them starting in 2010. Here are the top eight identified by the study: 1. Seedcamp (pan-European) 2. Spain / 3. Startupbootcamp Denmark 4. (UK /Pan European) 5. (Greece / South Eastern Europe) 6. (Ireland) 7. (Ireland) 8. Startupbootcamp Ireland Springboard, a Cambridge-based accelerator, took fourth place for providing seed capital, office space and a network of mentors and other entrepreneurs. Interestingly the Openfund, based out of Greece but focusing on Southern Europe, has significant investment from the Piraeus Bank. NDCR Launchpad is Ireland’s first accelerator program, is based at The Digital Hub in Dublin, runs a three month program and provides up to €20,000 in seed funding. Propeller Venture Accelerator Fund took seventh and is run by Dublin City University’s Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship. And Startupbootcamp Ireland took home eighth place. The study was put together Italy based venture capitalist and Marco Ciccolini in conjunction with Aziz Gilani from DFJ Mercury. It was commissioned by the Kauffman Fellows Program, working in partnership with Tech Cocktail ( ) and the Kellogg School of Management. Dettori reveals more details of his findings at the event in London tomorrow. The report was based on a set of scores, such that incubators scored 25 percentage points if they had had qualified financing events (companies that got funded after completing the program), 50 points for for successful companies coming out of an accelerator and 25 points on program characteristics (seed money levels, equity stake for the accelerator, and the size of the alumni base). The rankings were supplemented by interviews with VC’s, investors and past accelerator participants. But : “Europe’s accelerator systems are just a few years behind those in the U.S. and while the U.S. is one single market, European innovation ecosystems are like islands, loosely connected.” Also, European incubators and accelerators often operate with different variations of the model due to the different environments. That’s fair comment in my opinion. The reports authors say that only a handful of accelerator programs in Europe ended up qualifying. And I must admit I was surprised not to see in this list – which provides a year-long programme – alongside in the UK. The latter has processed 19 teams, with seven funded and £1.2m+ raised by startups, post-programme. In addition Microsoft’s BizSpark (admittedly more of a marketing programme for startups based on MS technologies), Garage48 (Estonia) and The Founder Institute’s European events were not named, presumbly because they didn’t fit the criteria of ‘for profit, closed terms of less than a year and paid in equity’. Also LeCamping in France, a non-profit model, alongside AAlto in Finland and TechGarage in Italy did not meet the standard, as did others which charge startups for their services. Thus this also this excluded Plug&Play in Silicon Valley and Pier38 in San Francisco. The study also found that Accelerator programs are valued by VCs more for the connection to the venture community and educational value to entrepreneurs than for deal flow. Dettori says that after a year of research they found 200 entities between the US and Europe “that were somehow active”. He says they found 40 incubators in Europe and many of them launched in the past twelve months. If you want to know the top US incubators singled out by the study, here they are: 1. TechStars Boulder
2. Y Combinator
3. Excelerate Labs
4. LaunchBox Digital
5. TechStars Boston
6. Kicklabs
7. Techstars Seattle
8. Tech Wildcutter
9. Dreamit Ventures
10. The Brandery |
Those Black MacBook Airs? An Experiment Gone Wrong, Says Apple Source | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | It’s okay to be excited by the idea of a Blackbook Air. It would be nice, right? But as it turns out, the pictures and rumors going around the net are no more than an internal experiment that didn’t turn out so well, according to an Apple employee who : “We tried to powder coat the Air’s (and Pro’s for that matter) in black as a test run… The coating looks good and holds up well, but it also soaks up body oils, making the palm rest look pretty gross.” So much for that! No word on the rumor (solid in my opinion) that the new Airs are being held until they can ship with Lion. |
Onswipe Wants To Make Slate, Forbes And Your Website Feel Like A Native Tablet App | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | [vimeo http://http://vimeo.com/25372812 w=620] , the publishing platform that allows any content site to create an app like experience on the iPad and other tablets, is coming out of beta this week and will be available to the public tomorrow at 3:00pm EST. With the launch Onswipe will also be adding former CNN president John Klein as an advisor. Launching with partners like Hearst’s , , Ziff Davis’ and , Thomson Reuter’s , , , and advertisers American Express and Sprint, Onswipe promises clients touch device optimization in three minutes. All publishers and advertisers need to do to achieve a native app feel is pick and customize a layout, import content and then embed a piece of javascript into their site. With tomorrow’s launch, Onswipe will be unveiling its three pronged approach to tablet content viewing 1) Its publishing platform that lets publishers provide a fluid tablet-like experience to users. 2) An interactive ad platform that lets clients make money off of tablet-specific advertising and the Onswipe ad network. 3) A social platform that allows users to share and save content for later. Says co-founder on the motivation behind the startup’s tablet-centric approach this early on, “The tablet is the TV of this generation, and we’re letting publishers make their content look great on there, but also make money off of it. And lastly we’re saying, ‘Hey, if we have this new network of sites, how can we leverage that?’ Onswipe’s platform will allow publishers and advertisers to not only to add and customize content from article, but also from social media sources like Twitter, YouTube, Quora, Instagram, and Tumblr. In addition the launch will feature the addition of myOnswipe, an Instapaper-like offline reading service for sites in the Onswipe network. Baptiste tells me that Onswipe doesn’t charge companies for its publishing platform, and instead monetizes by taking a share of revenue from its ad platform, “We’ve already let publishers make more on the tablet than they have before. It’s a significant amount,” says Baptiste. Onswipe currently has $6 million in funding from , , , , , , . , and assorted angels. |
Acer's 7" Iconia Tab Appears In Walmart For $349 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | Just because it’s a new doesn’t mean it has to have a big opening gala like the Xoom or Optimus Pad. No, sometimes they just with a price tag and everything. Such is the case with the Acer Iconia A100, the 7″ cousin of the we’ve been seeing around. At $350 (with the stats you see there) it seems like a pretty good buy if you happen to be in the market. Apparently these things are actually sitting on shelves at some Walmarts, so it might be worth checking out… if, you know, you care about yet another Android tablet. |
anaPad iPad Toy Teaches Children To Retreat Socially From Boring Situations | John Biggs | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | Kindness, sociability, affection, appreciation of others: those are the things your child could be learning if we didn’t just slap down an iPad in front of them every time life gets a little crowded and they get a little bored. But what about the smallest of the younglings? What can they do to have a good time while we amuse ourselves into the sweet release of e-toxicity? Why not pick up the with little magnet apps and a little pen for junior to write “MOME PA TENTSHUN TO ME” on. And, after all, don’t they learn these habits from watching us? Don’t they see us tapping away at Blackberries and iPhones and iPads in front of them and don’t they want in on the action? But there is something in the parent’s heart that says “No, don’t do this. Don’t give them Angry Birds. Give them something wholesome, something painted in lead-paint blues and reds, something that resembles something fun from our youth.” And a toy like this is seemingly a good trade-off: it’s not a real device but it’s still close enough that maybe the kid won’t care. But he or she will care. They’ll see that the real device is off limits because Dad says so. And because Mom needs it for work. And because sis is texting her friends. And they’ll see that the only way to communicate with the family is through the keyboard and through the ether and through the Facebook. And slowly, slowly, they’ll sink into the electronic miasma of modern life, brains stuck in sludge as they churn through value-less status updates and vapid media. And then they’ll be just like us. And then they’ll be just like us. The anaPad is $30 on . |
Behind The Scenes At The Impossible Project's Resurrected Polaroid Facility | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmmLGTRAdx0&w=640&h=390]
Although we weep for the of yesteryear, the world of instant film . As we’ve over the last couple years, Dutch company has taken it upon themselves to keep the old Polaroid film factory running — no small task. This little 10-minute documentary shows some of the process and a few of the people involved. It’s not as simple as turning the lights back on and buying the chemicals, though. The Polaroid process wasn’t included with the factory; most likely, it’s the property of whoever bought the company’s IP. So the developer, film, and all the little bits and pieces had to be re-invented, though the Polaroid cartridges could be imitated and manufactured easily enough. So far they have two varieties of film: silver shade and color shade. They’re not the same as the old Polaroids, but they’re working on replicating that as well as doing their own thing. The process isn’t perfect, either, so every cartridge is slightly different. Some like that, some don’t. At any rate, check out the video above if you’re a Polaroid fan at all. [via ] |
Hackers Grab 1.3 Million Logins From SEGA | John Biggs | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlulSyBI2aY&w=640&h=510] Games makers can’t get a break. First had their buttocks offered up to them and now SEGA has lost 1.3 million sets of user data, a fairly large breach for a fairly small company. Names, birthdates, email address, and passwords (encrypted) were lost although no payment data has been compromised. The attack focused on the SEGA Pass service, which has been shut down until the hack can be cleaned up. |
No Native Email On Playbook Due To Blackberry Restrictions And Poor Planning By RIM | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 20 |
The is a study in missed opportunities. The sexy form factor, interesting new UI elements, and distinct, recognizable branding should have set it apart and made it a real player in the tablet game. Instead, it’s a mishmash of consumer and pro features, and missing things that would give any shopper pause. Why would they go to market without even a native email client? Sources say it was in fact a fundamental limitation of the Blackberry system. , but the reasoning behind the exclusion is made clear: “The [Blackberry Email System] email server has the concept of one user = one device” — a deliberate design made for security reasons. But now that support is necessary for multiple devices, RIM faces “a lot of work to change something that’s pretty basic in the software architecture and design.” Indeed! Of course, the question is why didn’t they make these changes two years ago, when the tablet buzz was starting, and the idea of a Blackberry tablet ecosystem must have been discussed? Multiple devices, be they phones, tablets, or some other clients, were an eventuality RIM should have been prepared for. RIM is supposed to , but given the speed of the market, that may already be too late. |
Dropbox Security Bug Made Passwords Optional For Four Hours | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | This morning a post on outlined a serious security issue that was spotted at Dropbox: for a brief period of time, the service allowed users to log into accounts using any password. In other words, you could log into someone’s account simply by typing in their email address. Given that many people entrust Dropbox with important data (one of the service’s selling points is its security), that’s a really big deal. We’ve now confirmed with Dropbox that the service did have this issue yesterday — Dropbox says that it began after a code push at 1:54 PM PDT and was fixed at 5:46 PM PDT (they had the fix live five minutes after they discovered it). So, in total, the bug was live for around four hours. The question now is how many people were affected. The company will be announcing that “much less than 1 percent” of users logged in during this time, and that all sessions have now been logged out as a security precaution. The team is now investigating if any accounts were improperly accessed, and says that anyone who was impacted will be notified. Here’s the company’s , which just went live: Hi Dropboxers, Yesterday we made a code update at 1:54pm Pacific time that introduced a bug affecting our authentication mechanism. We discovered this at 5:41pm and a fix was live at 5:46pm. A very small number of users (much less than 1 percent) logged in during that period, some of whom could have logged into an account without the correct password. As a precaution, we ended all logged in sessions. We’re conducting a thorough investigation of related activity to understand whether any accounts were improperly accessed. If we identify any specific instances of unusual activity, we’ll immediately notify the account owner. If you’re concerned about any activity that has occurred in your account, you can contact us atsecurity@dropbox.com. This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again. -Arash The issue was posted to Pastebin by , who has previously Dropbox for the company’s misleading description of its security practices (Dropbox used to claim that employees at the company had no way of viewing user files, but in reality a small number of them do have administrative privileges). Soghoian didn’t discover the password issue himself — it was relayed to him and he anonymized the email exchange. Security scares are the last thing Dropbox needs. The company has seen very strong growth over the last year and is rumored to have a valuation that may be as high as . But all of this growth is contingent on people trusting the service — the whole point is that you’re mirroring your most important and most frequently-accessed files between multiple computers. If people start worrying that their Excel spreadsheet or banking data or private IMs could be exposed, they’ll turn elsewhere. Most people probably don’t care if Dropbox employees could conceivably access their files (after all, the same is true at Google and Facebook). But an authentication system that’s accepting the wrong password? That’s something that anyone can understand (and get scared about). I love Dropbox and have been using the service for years now, but gaping security holes like this simply aren’t acceptable — especially when there are other services that offer similar functionality. Even if nobody accessed my account (which is probably the case), the fact that this happen is unnerving. Here’s one of the email messages posted to Pastebin that describes the issue: Hi Chris, If you’re still involved in the dropbox investigation, there was an interesting development this afternoon. I found I was able to log into my account using an incorrect password, and on further investigation I found I could log in and access files on any of the three accounts I tested (mine and two friends’) using any password. This is corroborated by the admittedly-thin dropbox tech support thread below. So evidently they fail open when auth is busted, or sometimes they roll dev code, or….? This has me really bummed because I just “fixed” my exposure to website password theft by generating gnarly passwords with keypass and storing them on dropbox. Sigh. And here’s a response that, according to the Pastebin post, came from Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi: Arash Ferdowsi, Jun-19 06:08 pm (PDT): hi XXX,
there was a very brief glitch and this should never happen/be possible again. thanks for the email. |
Canon's T3 Gets A Tiny Bit More Colorful With Red, Brown, Grey Options | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 20 |
In order to extend the news cycle a bit, companies tend to release variants of their gadgets on an extended schedule. Case in point: , and we are supposed to believe they just now achieved the level of technology required to paint them colors other than black! I kid, I kid. But only kind of. Yes, Canon’s entry-level DSLR now comes in three new and surprisingly tasteful colors. Sober grey, espresso brown, and wine red are added to the plain black version, though there are no lenses to match. They cost the same with the kit lens ($600), though right now . You can find it online for less, but it’s worth mentioning. |
Like+1 Turns Facebook Likes Into Google +1s | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | As what exactly the Google +1 Button does continues to , security researcher and former Googler and the mind behind , have decided to kill two buttons with one browser extension, creating . Unlike the , which allowed you to Facebook Like Google search results, Like +1 turns all offsite Like Buttons into hybrid Like+1 Buttons, allowing you to consolidate some of your social button clicking behavior into one click, so you can simultaneously +1 something while you also Like it. In addition to saving you the exertion of clicking two different buttons and letting you view your Facebook Liking behavior on your Google profile, the extension saves all your Like+1 activity locally. So if you ever want to export a Facebook independent record of your Liking, or +1ing you’re good. Like +1, compatible with Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari courtesy of , is great news for people who are suffering from button fatigue. Now you’ll only have to do 50% of the work and actually get to see the fruits of your labor in your Facebook feed. “The web has too many buttons,” Kennish says. Yeah, just look at the top of this post. |
null | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 6 | 2 | null |
Rejoice, For Your Zune Apps Will Come To Windows Phone 7 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | Can’t live without your Goo Splat or Castles and Cannons, those instant classics that appeared on the Zune HD? You’ll be happy to hear that Microsoft is planning on puffing up the WP7 app catalog with ported versions. “The apps that we have built internally for Zune, we’re actually looking at porting those over to Windows Phone,” said Microsoft’s Dave McLauchlan in — though he tempered that, also saying that “Right now, our focus for the app team is, more apps for Zune. Zune owners would like to hear that there’s more stuff coming.” While the addition of a couple dozen apps won’t put WP7’s numbers in line with iOS’s and Android’s, a few more (and fairly entertaining, some of them) won’t hurt anybody. [via and ] |
Even Seesmic Bails On Blackberry. Who's Next? | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | http://twitter.com/#!/loic/status/82918813775048704 might have the Twitter app for Blackberry, but the Blackberry’s appeal isn’t sweet enough. Seesmic is for its Blackberry app on June 30. Research in Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, is going through a right now. But things must be pretty bad if Seesmic bailing. This is , folks! They’ll build an app for any platform, even . The truth is that startups can only support so many mobile platforms. Other mobile developers might be feeling the same pressure to drop Blackberry or never create an app for it in the first place. Seesmic is definitely not alone in its assessment of the platform. Mobile Roadie recently : the Blackberry is too hard to develop for and engagement is low. What are Seesmic Blackberry users to do? On its blog, the company encourages “those effected by this change to try out Seesmic for Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7.” In other words, get a new phone. That actually might not be such bad advice. |
Color Me Badd | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | Come inside, take off your coat
I’ll make you feel at home
Now let’s pour a glass of wine
‘Cause now we’re all alone. The opening lines of Color Me Badd’s seminal “I Wanna Sex You Up” sort of perfectly encapsulates — the company/photo-sharing app, not the band. After one of the in recent memory, it was supposed to be the app that changed proximity-based sharing. Instead, it was an app used to share a lot of drinks, often with yourself or one other person. Unfortunately, also like the song, it was all foreplay. No sex. And now even Color is admitting that. In an interview with over the weekend, Color founder essentially admits defeat — at least with regard to their eponymous first app. This follows our story from last week that co-founder . While we had heard conflicting stories about the exit, Nguyen doesn’t beat around the bush, telling NYT that Pham was fired. Whether Pham was a fall guy or not doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Color has to figure out what the hell they’re doing now. NYT suggests they know: Mr. Nguyen outlined an ambitious plan to compete with Apple, Google and Facebook by tying together group messaging, recommendations and local search, all while making money through advertising. If you thought the initial Color idea was crazy, this must sound absolutely insane. Talk about setting a high bar! Color will apparently release such an app later this summer. The original photo-sharing idea? That has likely been totally scrapped. But the truth is that I’m not sure that a lot of people thought the original Color idea was all that crazy — they just ran head-first into a poor initial experience. And that was compounded by the almost $41 million pre-launch funding round. Fundamentally, there’s still an interesting concept there. Using the location element baked into all of our smartphones to automatically create implicit networks is something that we’re going to keep seeing startups working on. Others, like , are already working in this space as well. I’m still not convinced that if Color had simply launched a couple weeks earlier, at SXSW, it wouldn’t have been a hit (for that week, at least). Certainly, it would have been the perfect environment to showcase the impressive technology being utilized behind the scenes. Instead, the app ran into the problem where early-adopters were often trying it out with no one around them. It often looked like ghost town. And because of that, that’s exactly what it became. Imagine for a second if Foursquare hadn’t launched at SXSW a few years ago. The early-adopters would have booted it up for the first time and not seen any friends checking in around them and would have wondered what the hell the app was good for? Foursquare has since expanded the product to add a lot more value. But remember that at first, there weren’t deals or recommendations — there was just the check-in (and yes, the badges and game element related to it). Further, while this isn’t a popular sentiment, I actually . I completely agree that the initial version had some major UI/UX issues, but the more refined version is actually pretty slick. It’s well-made. It’s fast. It’s not like these guys are a bunch of jackasses who took $41 million and built nothing. So part of me is sad that it’s already time to die. At the same time, there’s no denying that the . But I also thought the company was being because of that. As Nguyen tells the NYT, they took that much money because they could. He’s had success in the past when he’s had a lot of capital to work with. Had the company raised the $14 million they originally intended to, people would have buzzed, but we would not have seen the same level of backlash. I’m just not sure how you can hold that against the entrepreneurs. An insane amount of pre-launch funding is on the investors. For whatever reason, Sequoia wanted to put in $25 million by themselves. Maybe Color shouldn’t have accepted all of it, but again, Nguyen has had success doing just that in the past. Kids don’t turn down candy. It just doesn’t happen. So now we move into the really interesting time for Color. They’re essentially working with a gun against their head. Working on an app, mind you, that’s going to be a Facebook/Apple/Google-killer. Or something. . They’ve still (hopefully) got $35 million+ in the bank, but that won’t save them if they flop in a similar manner. They really need to sex us up this time. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ask_sedxu0o&w=620&h=349] |
Groupon Responds To IPO Backlash With A Cheeky Feline | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | If you’ve been following TechCrunch and the tech press at large in the weeks since Groupon filed its S-1, you’ve probably come across quite a few articles criticizing the company. Groupon may, according to various posts, consumer protection laws, , get in China, and lead to bouts of over the coming months. ! You may have also noticed that Groupon hasn’t done a whole lot to denounce any of these claims (they still haven’t gotten back to me on whether the service causes numbness in the toes). And for good reason: the company is currently in a ‘Quiet Period’ mandated by the SEC, during which there are restrictions on what it can say in public statements. But that doesn’t mean they can’t fight back, just a little. Today in a post on its official blog, Groupon’s spokescat (appropriately named ) has penned a outlining the “hazing ritiuals” companies must go through en route to their IPOs. Some of the main points: |
Verizon HTC Thunderbolt To Get Android v2.3.4 (with Skype, Amazon App Store, gTalk) on June 30th? | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | Start the countdown clock, Verizon Thunderbolt owners: has it on good word that your handsets are just days away from an update to Android v2.3.4. If their tipster’s tips hold true, the update should starting hitting handsets come June 30th. And the internal memo they brought along as proof? If that one’s legit, this build of v2.3.4 comes preloaded with Sense 2.1, some aGPS improvements, the Amazon App Store, and Skype/gChat video chat support. Of course, we’re talking about a software update here. Between last minute bug discoveries and roll-out hangups, the ship dates for these things are generally about as solid as a pudding skyscraper. Until we hear otherwise, though, keep your calendars marked. |
Windows SkyDrive Says Sayonara To Silverlight, Embraces HTML5 | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | We’ve been hearing a lot lately about consumer cloud services. There’s Apple’s recently-announced Amazon’s , Google’s (which is your music in the cloud) and, of course, Microsoft’s . All of these to one extent or another are moving away from simple online lockers, and we see that today with the release of the latest update to SkyDrive. The navigation is less clunky. Groups are now built in. Docs open up in online versions of Word or Excel, and can also be opened in the traditional desktop Office apps with edits syncing back and forth. But the biggest change is SkyDrive’s transition away from Microsoft Silverlight to HTML5 for all but a few remaining features (including a crucial one: uploading files). Photos and videos are all viewed with HTML5, which brings infinite scrolling of thumbnails and a new slide viewer. Videos now use the H.264 format and the video player is HTML5 instead of Silverlight. Microsoft has been for its web products the past few months, opting instead for the cross-platform compatibility of HTML5 and other “modern web” technologies such as CSS3. When you resize your browser, photo thumbnails also resize smoothly thanks to CSS3 transitions. And the original aspect ratios are maintained in the thumbnails, even for panoramic photos. SkyDrive pulls docs, photos, and other files from other Windows Live services and brings them all together in one central location with a UI that is more front-and-center as opposed to being a background storage service for other products. Groups are now integrated and accesible from the left-hand column. The whole service is faster, taking better advantage of caching and hardware acceleration. A new information pane replaces what used to be an ad spot with hints and suggestions to help you dive deeper into the service. For all the improvements, SkyDrive still presents everything as though it is still in a traditional file system. You can view all your files, or broken down by type (docs, photos) or by groups. The file system is a relic of the PC and is something that away from with iCloud. On the other hand, at least it is a familiar metaphor most people can easily grasp. And there is no reason, SkyDrive can’t introduce new organizing principles over time (groups is already a first step). |
The Rib Man's Response To Groupon Bashing | guest series | 2,011 | 6 | 18 | I’ve been reading a on TechCrunch lately coming down hard on Groupon and, like other happy Groupon merchants, wasn’t going to comment because I thought it was a with one author’s thoughts. However, after seeing after trying to pick apart every single piece of Groupon, I felt it necessary to write about my experience. I’m also hoping that I’m the first BBQ restaurant owner who to write for TechCrunch. I had tried almost every other form of advertising in the past with varying degrees of success. Then our Groupon sales rep contacted me. I had heard about similar deals before and had turned down the offers. However, Groupon offered me something different. At the time, there were 86,000 people signed up for Richmond’s Groupon list (many more now). After she explained the details, how everything worked and what to expect, I ran the numbers on the discount and wanted to give it a try. There is no better way to get almost 90,000 unique impressions for so little cost. We ran our first deal in December of 2010 and sold . Let me say this loud and clear—for my business Groupon has worked incredibly well. The first deal I ran was $10 for $20 worth of food and drink. I was told to expect nearly a thousand deals sold and was pleasantly surprised that we sold nearly 1,200. Of those 1,200 customers, we found that 70% of them were new customers, a great average right off the bat. Of those 800+ new customers, we have seen more than half of them return. Also, let’s not forget all the people who came into my restaurant in the weeks following the Groupon deal and told me that they saw my business on Groupon, missed the deal, but still came anyway because they wanted to try out a new restaurant. That kind of exposure for a small business is invaluable! We were seen by tens of thousands of potential customers in our area and that didn’t cost a dime! Now, back to the Groupon customers. We tracked every Groupon redemption on our point of sale (POS) system and found that only a handful (literally five or six), had a ticket total that was under the price of the Groupon ($20). We found that customers, on average, spent at least $12 on top of the price of the Groupon, and that was before they came back and paid full price (most more than once). And this is at a BBQ restaurant! One consistent factor has been that Groupon customers are much more likely to add an appetizer or dessert to their check, since they know the first $20 only cost them $10. This has been a wonderful way to not only up the ticket average on the redemption, but also has given the customers a broader taste of our menu. When they come back without the Groupon, they are more likely to order that extra item again. Also, I found Groupon customers to be better than the average “coupon” customer. These are people that were interested in trying a new restaurant and open to the idea of coming back. There was only a small percentage of guests who were just looking for a bargain. Another number that I track, which many other restaurants do not, is what my employees claimed on tips. It gives me a good idea of the overall traffic in my restaurant and how confident my customers are with the economy. From my experiences over the past 29 years in the industry, when the economy is rough, tips are one of the first things to take a hit. During the first quarter of 2011 my employees claimed over $4,000 more in tips than the same period in 2010. This was during the first three months of our redemption period and was by far the highest volume of Groupons. It is indisputable that Groupon brought the vast majority of these customers to our door. Groupon customers were some of our best tippers and nearly always, almost without fault, tipped on the total bill, not the discounted check. One of the best reasons I found to use Groupon is that it’s trackable. Buying a newspaper ad doesn’t allow you to see who’s coming in as a result. With Groupon, you can see your marketing dollars at work and have the chance to convert Groupon customers to regulars, something we’ve done a lot. My employees were thrilled when we ran the deal because we were always busy and that’s a good thing. Our bottom line has been raised significantly and I owe a lot of that to Groupon. Please don’t dismiss this story as an anomaly. I have recommended Groupon to other small business owners, some of whom have run deals with Groupon and done very well (Havana Connections in Richmond for one). The positive stories are out there in abundance, even though we may not yell as loud or as frequently as others. Will everyone succeed using Groupon? Probably not. As a business owner, I feel like it’s my responsibility to look at this marketing tool and see if it works for my business. There is no question that it has paid for itself better than any other advertising medium we have ever used. The Groupon sales reps have been extremely helpful in telling me what to expect and how to prepare as well. For me, and, I suspect many other small business owners, this is a no brainer. For the money I spent on the discount, not only was I able to get my message out to almost 90,000 separate individuals, but I was easily able to capitalize on this and turn many of the guests into regular customers. Where else can a small business get that kind of marketing access? The simple answer is nowhere. I am now running my second Groupon deal, and launched it on the exact day that the first offer expired. We sold over 2400 Groupons, even more than the first time. |
Mark Suster: Raise Money Now So When The Party's Over You're Sitting Pretty | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 18 | [vimeo http://vimeo.com/25219791 w=620] Earlier this week and VC blogger gave the keynote talk at the Founder’s Showcase on Suster began the keynote with the declarative statement that we’re in a bubble, “We’re in a bubble, you can quote me on that and I generally haven’t been saying that publicly,” he affirmed. Suster went on to refer to the uniqueness of this particular period of exuberance, in that it’s localized, “If you’re in Cleveland, Ohio you don’t particularly feel like there’s a bubble,” but right now the usual 3-5 months it takes to raise capital have been distilled down to 3-5 days for startups in Silicon Valley, New York and L.A. Suster urges these startups to raise money now, so they can survive when the bubble inevitably pops, “When the party’s over the party’s over” he went on, urging entrepreneurs to start raising… “when the Hors d’œuvre tray is passed around take two, and put a third in your pocket,” likening the market froth to a hopping party where everybody is drunk, off of their own Kool Aid in many cases. Having lived through three previous cycles, Suster knows how the party will end (with a hangover for most), and relays his key takeaway which basically amounts to stocking up on supplies for the winter — So you can live to tell the tale: “Go get yourself funded, in whatever way shape or form you have to, at whatever price you feel comfortable with, with people you trust like and respect in whatever amount and go build a company. Really in the end it’s kind of a binary outcome; You raise money and give it your all, you give it your college best and sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don’t. It’s a wonderful experience to go through. I just remember in the last three cycles the companies that didn’t raise money are the ones that weren’t around to tell that story. And I know how this ends, this is my crystal ball; When the party ends everyone goes home and you can’t hire people, you can’t raise money, the Wall Street Journal isn’t writing articles about you any more, no one returns your phone calls. Honestly that’s the most rewarding time to be a startup entrepreneur, provided you have money.” |
New Health-Focused Startup Accelerator Rock Health Debuts Inaugural Batch | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 18 | If the numbers shared by are any indication, Venture funding has stormed back to where it was before the financial collapse in 2008. The amount of capital invested is on the rise, and the current climate is providing an excellent opportunity for startups looking to raise money. at his talk at the Founder Institute this week, in which he urged startups to raise in the current “frothy market” — especially ahead of a potential bubble burst. Though the market is indeed frothy: Venture funding in the Web grew by over $1 billion from the first quarter last year, of all the digital areas in which startups are raising the most money, health and medical-related investment is on the low end — receiving only 3 percent of venture funding over the last year. (Compared to social commerce which led at 22 percent and advertising, sales, and marketing, which came in at 14 percent.) A new seed accelerator that launched earlier this year called , is hoping to break that trend in favor of health-related mobile and web startups. Though health care only continues to advance thanks to technology, human health remains on the decline and related health costs are increasing. In fact, Americans spent $2.4 trillion on health care in 2008, despite having lower patient outcomes than comparable nations. Thus, Rock Health has designed a program, not unlike Y Combinator, Tech Stars, and those before it, that accepts applications from startups during a month-long period, before undergoing evaluation by a panel of health experts and investors. The panel than selects 10 startups to enter into a five-month program that includes a $20K grant, office space in San Francisco, medical, branding, communications, and legal support — as well as mentoring and workshops given by experts in the industry. Rock Health’s mentors include Path CEO and early member of the Facebook team Dave Morin, co-founder and EVP at RedOctane Charles Huang, and former FDA Deputy Commissioner Scott Gottlieb. And the program’s advisors include, among others, Twitter VP of Engineering Michael Abbott, co-founder of 23andMe Linda Avey, and founder and CEO of HealthTap and former founder and CEO of Wellsphere Ron Gutman. Besides an impressive list of advisors and mentors, Rock Health has also partnered with leading hospitals, like the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in an attempt to give its startups a leg up in building their businesses — and a better shot at funding down the road. On June 20, the program’s inaugural batch of ten will begin the program. Below is a brief introduction to the eight of these cool health startups ready for preview. Check ’em out, and please chime in to let us know what you think. helps individuals monitor and learn from their brain activity. Powered by state-of-the-art technology designed by Harvard and MIT trained researchers, BrainBot makes it easy to improve mental performance — from stress management skills, better focused attention, and increased meditation benefits. builds systems for at-home disease diagnosis using smartphone cameras connected to a web platform. The company is piloting a smartphone attachment for at-home diagnosis of pediatric ear infections, which cause 30 million doctor visits annually in the US. seeks to heal the world through personal health collaboration, connecting communities of people solving similar problems. The first product is a platform for crowd-sourced health science, enabling consumers to operate open health studies. By creating the first transparent marketplace for healthcare, is making quality care more affordable and accessible. Patients who pay out-ofpocket medical costs can learn about doctors and dentists based on experience, reputation and procedure prices, and schedule in confidence at pre-negotiated group discount rates. will be among the first to apply the principles of social networking to the legitimate clinical treatment of a disease. Recently spun out of IDEO, we are creating a type 2 diabetes prevention solution that emphasizes community, education, and metrics. Progress will be tracked using novel connected-health technologies that will serve both as motivation for patients and as validation of outcomes. allows doctors to monitor and educate patients throughout the course of their care using smartphones and tablets, helping to improve recovery and outcomes, and identify opportunities for proactive and preventative care. Pipette’s easy-to-read reports automatically identify patterns and outliers that can be critical to improving a patient’s health. powers the mobile health & fitness movement through a platform of fun and interactive applications. Two top free Healthcare & Fitness titles that help motivate people to get and stay active are Workout Trainer (for iPhone/iPad), providing follow along multimedia workouts lead by real & virtual trainers, and GPS Sports Tracker (for iPhone and Android), enabling people to track & share over 45 different activities. is exploring the connection between health data and community. Soon, parents will be able to find relevant resources faster than ever and make better choices for their children’s health, supported by a community of parents who have been there before. |
Is The World Crazy For Bitcoin, Or Has The Bitcoin World Gone Crazy? | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 6 | 18 | I less than a month ago. (If you’re one of the people who admitted in comments “I still don’t get it,” here’s a from .) Since then the value of Bitcoins has —and then . The founder of Sweden’s Pirate Party moved into Bitcoin (which disappoints me; I had hoped they were buried on ) just as US Senator Charles Schumer as “an online form of money laundering.” Malware designed to steal Bitcoin wallets has been seen , and in possibly related news, 25,000 Bitcoins were a few days ago. Meanwhile, the virtual currency’s long-term stability has been … but does it really make any sense to think about any “long term” at all for Bitcoin, given the insane volatility of the last month? Well, sort of. I concede it does look a bit like the lunatics, black-hats, and bubbleheads have conquered the asylum, but there’s nothing inherently crazy or shady about a distributed online currency. What kind of crazy is assuming that the first one that comes along will last and retain its value indefinitely, which is what almost everyone investing in Bitcoin is doing. (The rest are hoping to sell out to a greater fool, a strategy which admittedly made a few people wealthy during the South Seas tulip bubble and the dotcom boom, but—pretty much by definition—was a loser for most.) Does Bitcoin have a long-term future? I strongly doubt it … but I expect that something Bitcoin eventually will. Right now, though, the fools and crazies are muddying the water, and inspiring somewhat-justified contempt like If lotteries are a tax on those who are bad at math, then bitcoin is a tax on those who are bad at economics. — Laurie Voss (@seldo) or even more cynically, Battle of the pyramid schemes: Groupon vs Bitcoin, fight! — Jens Ohlig (@johl) “Pyramid scheme,” though, is unfair (to both.) Bitcoin is a fairly monumental achievement—but it’s a trailblazer, not a destination. It should be viewed as a springboard for future iterations, but most of the community that all its recent publicity has attracted seems unable to look past the present, and is treating it as either a get-rich-quick scheme or a cypherpunk fantasy come to life. The good news is, in the long run, this is ideal—because the crazier the Bitcoin world gets, the more we can learn from the madness, and the better its successor(s) will be. biggertree, . |
Groupon For Nightlife 'Poggled' Expands, Hits Up New York And Denver First | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
, the daily deals service that boasts Groupon investors , and is expanding to other cities today, first on the list being New York and Denver. Poggled is an interesting take on the daily deals model, with 50-70% off “evergreen” services at nightclubs, bars and music venues available every day without daily expiration. Users can search for deals on its iPhone and Android apps by filtering by Nearby, Happening Now or by Day of The Week, Event Type or Neighborhood. Users can also share their deal (and likely alcohol) consumption habits on Facebook and Twitter. In addition to the standard “$125 for bottle service package”, there will be a limited amount of inaugural $1 deals available at New York venues like Sip and Nurse Bettie and Denver venues like The Walnut Room and Quixotes’ True Blue Cafe, in celebration of today’s launch. The startup’s strategy is to launch in one large and mid-sized market at a time, and aims for launching in LA and SF at around the end of summer. Says CEO Joe Matthews on the expansion; “We are psyched to bring our party to New York and Denver.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DElPadsdOU&w=630] |
Want To Play With A TouchPad? Get Thee To Best Buy (Or Wal-Mart) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | HP’s webOS tablet, the , doesn’t officially hit until , but that hasn’t stopped some of the big retailers from for the public to fondle. Sure, you could just watch the , but nothing beats actually seeing something in action. Or seeing someone else see it in action, as in taken at a Kansas Wal-Mart. No sign of that we heard about, though. Anyway, keep your eyes open come July: we’ll have a full review up as soon as we’re reasonably sure we know what to think of the thing. [via ] |
Opera Hits 200 Million Users; Debuts A New Featherweight Look And More In Version 11.5 | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | When you’re in fifth place in the browser races, there’s room to be a little goofy. That’s why it can be a pleasure to read the releases coming from , the quirky Oslo-based company responsible for the eponymous Opera browser — the underdog share of the browser market behind IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Which is clearly why Opera is proud to announce that eye-catching (even if slightly irrelevant) statistics like the 1.2 million “stormtroopers, droids, and janitors” that can fit into an operational Death Star or the 11 million followers Lady Gaga has on Twitter, now have to take a backseat to Opera’s own numbers, as the browser officially acknowledged that it has accumulated over 200 million users across its platforms — a number that will now be tracked on Opera’s . (Along with other humorous stats.) Not only that, but Opera is announcing today that it is releasing a new version of its browser, 11.50 to be exact. It’s been six months since Opera 11 hit the streets, and, as the Norwegian company says in its latest press release, “Our mothers are so proud of us. We worked long and hard to bring you the best Opera browser yet. We even “. But what is it, exactly, that makes Opera mothers so proud? In part, this pride is due to Opera offering a new, streamlined “featherweight” UI, which updates the browser’s visual appearance to look much like the new versions its competitors . This new featherweight design sees Opera shedding buttons and expanding its display space, among other things. According to Jan Standal, VP of Desktop Products, this was because users were reporting that Opera was slower than other browsers, but now with this lightweight iteration, Standal hopes that becomes a thing of the past. Thanks to an overhaul of its core code and software graphics engine, Opera is now touting a 10 to 15 percent upgrade in speed on SVG rendering. What’s more, Opera 11.50 touts updates to the browser’s unique shortcut, called “Speed Dial”. Speed Dial, for those unfamiliar, is designed to make it easier to access your favorite and most-visited sites. Instead of thumbnails and links to these top sites, users can now embed and incorporate extensions into Speed Dial shortcuts to get weather at a glance, for example, just by opening a tab. (A seemingly suped-up version of what it’s like opening a new tab in Chrome.) Users now have unlimited dials and the extension automatically adjusts its layout to fit the browser display screen, but users have the benefit of layout adjusting and a configuration menu with an updated zoom slider. And, interestingly, Read It Later, Webdoc, The Hype Machine, and StockTwits are among the companies and apps whose built-in extensions Opera is touting as part of its newest release. Extension Product Manager Arnstein Teigene explains Speed Dial’s added functionality by way of example: “Take for example StockTwits.com, which now serve their users updates on trending stocks, live as they happen, directly into speed dial. Or the Reddit extension a fan made. It gives you instant notifications from your Reddit account on speed dial. As if Reddit wasn’t addictive enough.” Amen. Most of us are already in Reddit Rehab. Other updates featured in the 10.50 release are new password synchronization, in which users can use Opera Link to synchronize your website passwords with other Opera browsers. As Opera says, “it’s perfect for checking Facebook quickly when you’re supposed to be working”. Opera’s release also claims that its team has “fixed thousands of bugs and upgraded to our newest core rendering engine”, including tweaks to software graphics engine, like faster CSS and SVG rendering. And for developers intrigued by all this new HTML5 watchamacallit, Opera’s new version “adds Session History and Navigation, the W3C File API, classlist and the element” to its HTML5 support. So, I guess that’s why Opera’s mothers are proud. Clearly, there are some much-needed updates to the underdog browser herein, but the question remains: Will be proud of the new Opera? Let us know. [youtube=http://youtu.be/BjYQRru46-I] |
Daily Crunch: Moon Phase Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 6 | 18 | |
Google Quietly Rolls Out WDYL.com: A Range Of Google Product Results On One Page | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | This morning, we got tipped to check out wdyl.com. The tipster noted that it was apparently a new Google site attempting to “create a unified UI to search in multiple channels”. Sure enough, visiting the URL brought up a Google page — but it was a 404 page. Turns out it needs the “ ” in order to work. Yes, wdyl.com is not quite ready for prime-time. But it is out there, live! The new service, which Google apparently did launch this morning, is called (hence, wdyl.com). While it seems to be more of a cute gimmick at this time, the idea is to return users a single page of relevant results across many of Google’s products for whatever query is typed into the wdyl search box. The “search” button is even a heart. Cute. The best queries are for vague, broad terms like “ “, for example. On the results page you’ll find pictures of love, patents about love, love on Google Trends, videos about love, how to say love in different languages, books about love, etc. It can be interesting. But the results showcasing Gmail, Calendar, Chrome, and a few others again show that this is meant to be more of a promotional tool for Google products rather than anything hugely useful. A button at the bottom of each widget takes you directly to the Google product showcased. The most striking thing about the new site is that it seems pretty well designed — not always a given with Google. : According to a source, wdyl.com quietly rolled out several days ago and the formal launch was set for yesterday, but engineering issues have been holding it back. At least they’ve finally fixed the “www” issue. |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 6 | 20 | null |
Frenzapp Takes On SoundTracking With A Social Music Discovery App For iOS | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | Last winter, Singapore-based launched a new app into the marketplace called that enables users to share their favorite iPhone apps with friends, joining a taking on Apple’s Genius in the attempt to make app recommendations even better. Frenzapp approached this by cutting out manual search for apps, automatic discovery of apps you already are using, and by becoming friend-powered — integrating with Facebook, Twitter, Apple Game Center and offering native address book integration. It also offered a bunch of different ways to discover new apps, lists that aggregate what’s trending, most popular, recently added, on sale, and so on. Yet, with a competition from other app-recommendation startups, like Chomp, Appsfire, Discovr, Zwapp, Explor, and more, Bitsmedia made a smart strategic decision and decided to diversify by bringing Frenzapp to music with a new app called, you guessed it, Frenzapp Music. After all, as a Genius extension, expanding its discovery model into the music space is part of a seemingly natural progression. For starters, , which recently went live on iTunes, attacks the social aspect of music discovery by enabling its users to share their favorite music on Facebook and Twitter. Users can post status updates to social networks or scroll through a realtime feed of the music their friends are liking, listening to, and listing as “favorites”. Frenzapp Music also offers easy iTunes integration in which you can search the store’s full catalog of some 14 million songs, view top charts, and play 30-second clips of songs you’re interested in checking out. The app complements its social functionality with location-based features as well, in which the app takes advantage of the iPhone’s location to enable users to scan your immediate vicinity to see what songs people in your hood are liking and listening to. Whether a user is viewing a song based on location, or directly in iTunes, or from a friend’s music stream, they have the option to take advantage of the 30-second preview feature. Then you can blast out your song choice on Facebook and Twitter, or go buy the song in iTunes. What’s more, Frenzapp Music gives users access to their library of songs stored on any iOS device, with the ability to use playback controls, and use Frenzapp Music as the default music player. The app also supports AirPlay so that users can stream music to Apple TV or any other AirPlay compatible device. Bitsmedia and Frenzapp are the brainchild of founder and app developer Erwan Macé, who was formerly the CTO of , one of the pioneers in legal digital music platforms back in 2000 that was acquired by Motorola back in 2008. Mace was also a technical consultant for , which specializes in the delivery of digital media (including operating some of the infrastructure behind iTunes), as well as the CTO of Vivendi Mobile
Entertainment. Through these connections, Mace has led Bitsmedia to become one of the developers of iPhone applications for Universal Music in Europe and Australia. Yet, as Mace recently told TechCrunch, some savvy readers may recognize that Frenzapp Music sounds an awful lot like the popular iOS app, . While the similarities are apparent, Mace said that he hopes the ability to preview music from friend and location streams, directly from the app, access to the entire iTunes catalog, AirPlay functionality, and the ability to use it as your default music player, will give Frenzapp Music a compelling example over its competitor. (Though it would be nice to see some Foursquare integration, which is available on SoundTracking.) As a crowdsourcing app, Frenzapp’s usability and success rely on user adoption to make the experience more robust. And though the app has its work cut out for it with the traction of SoundTracking, if it can stay a nose ahead, I think it has potential to become a part of your stable of apps — and maybe even a viable third-party competitor to . Though I may be getting a bit ahead of myself on that one. Frenzapp Music is definitely worth checking out, which you can do , and please jump into the comment section to let us know what you think. |
On-Ramp's Super-High-Range WiFi Could Go 40 Miles – At 50 Bytes Per Second | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
When you think of wireless networks, you generally think either of a personal wi-fi network like that at your house or a cafe, or the cellular networks that power our phones. Both these are consumer networks, intended for delivering things like media and instantaneous communication. But not every network has the same needs. intends to empower a new kind of network, one that covers thousands of square miles with just a few dozen nodes. The trade-off? Bandwidth. The reason for the project is a need on energy grids to constantly monitor the state of distant grid nodes. Wired communications aren’t always practical, and the noisy, high-speed cellular networks are too crowded. On-Ramp decided to use wi-fi frequencies, but at such low power that it’s impossible to tell what’s being transmitted… without their proprietary chip. They’ve set up a test network around San Diego over the last couple years since their launch, covering 4000 square miles with just 35 transmission points. The limit of the devices on the network is about 50 bytes per second. That doesn’t sound like much — and it isn’t. But for transmitting a few numbers and identifiers it’s more than adequate. They call it “Ultra-Link Processing,” and while it’s not the only “smart grid” communication tech out there, its range, low power requirements, and fresh design make it an attractive option — worthy of a $2.1 million grant from the Department of Energy, anyway. |
Sony Officializes Its New Z Series Laptops, With Quasi-Light Peak-USB Port | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
Last month saw the introduction of a new Sandy Bridge-enabled from Sony, and now we see their more powerful, full-on Z series get a boost. The new Zs have a standard (not low-voltage) Core i7, 256GB SSD, and a 13.1″ screen at 1600×900 (interesting resolution!). They tip the scale at just over 2.6 pounds and are 16.65mm thick, with a “full-flat” body, though the significance of that term isn’t really explained. Perhaps most interesting is the combination Light Peak and USB port on the side there. , but it didn’t show on the S series, so we weren’t sure what to expect. Sony isn’t exactly clear about it, as it’s only referred to obliquely (instead of the flagship feature it should be) while introducing the Power Media Dock2 accessory: The performance of VAIO Z Series is taken to new extremes by the unique Power Media Dock2, a monolithic expansion module that links with VAIO via an optical cable. The proprietary port can also be used to attach regular USB devices to VAIO when it’s not docked. So yes, it’s both USB and Light Peak. But is it , or is it some extra-proprietary thing? Sony refers to it as “an optical cable” and not Thunderbolt, which may in fact be a and patented Apple interpretation of the Light Peak interface. So what’s this exactly? It’s not entirely clear. The port isn’t even labeled.
Apparently the Dock (or Dock2, rather) VGA, HDMI, an optical drive of one type or another, and some USB ports — in addition to being an external Radeon 6650M 1GB GPU. But nowhere is direct Light Peak accessory connectivity mentioned — so my guess is that the Z is only using Light Peak as a way to connect to this dock, and not (or not yet, anyway) as a standalone device interface. The laptops look sexy with their angular design and carbon fiber build, and their cool “sheet battery” is also an option. No pricing, and USA availability isn’t confirmed, but we should hear more later this summer. Here’s the full press release from Sony Europe: On-the-go usability is enhanced further by the backlit keyboard with extra-wide palm rest and ergonomic new ‘button-less’ touchpad. With a resolution of 1600×900, the 33.2cm (13.1”) VAIO Display Premium features an anti-reflective coating that cuts glare from direct light sources and ensures crisp colour reproduction. Performance is everything you’d expect from the most sophisticated VAIO notebook yet. Latest-generation standard voltage Intel® Core™ i7 processors are teamed with speedy DDR3 SDRAM and up to 256GB SSD RAID storage to blaze through the toughest workload with ease. As an extra refinement, Quick Boot saves precious time when you’re in a hurry, loading Genuine Windows® 7 Professional up to 50% quicker than conventional notebooks. Embedded VAIO ‘everywair’ 3G WWAN on selected models connects via your mobile broadband operator. Power Media Dock™ The performance of VAIO Z Series is taken to new extremes by the unique Power Media Dock2, a monolithic expansion module that links with VAIO via an optical cable. The proprietary port can also be used to attach regular USB devices to VAIO when it’s not docked. Featuring high-speed I/O data transfer based on the architecture codenamed ‘Light Peak’, Power Media Dock boosts graphics performance while adding numerous extra connectivity options. It includes an optical drive for even greater business productivity and satisfying HD entertainment. The module comes supplied with a stylish design-matched stand. With Power Media Dock added, VAIO Z can manage up to four displays (including the notebook screen) via HDMI™ and/or VGA output ports. In this configuration, VAIO Z makes a compelling choice for design, finance and science professionals who need to work across several screens simultaneously. New-generation AMD Radeon HD graphics with 1GB VRAM effortlessly handle demanding graphics tasks, from 3D CAD to gaming. When docked, connectivity options are boosted by additional USB ports plus VGA and HDMI outputs. Power Media Dock also sports an optical drive bay that can be specified with a Blu-ray Disc™ or SuperMulti combo drive. Games and movies on DVD or Blu-ray Disc sound as good as they look with latest Dolby® Home Theater® v4. Sheet battery VAIO Z features the innovative ‘sheet battery’ already showcased on this year’s VAIO S Series. The notebook’s internal lithium polymer battery provides power for up to 7 hours1 on-the-go computing. It’s partnered by a second thin, flat optional lithium polymer sheet battery that can be charged separately from the PC and added without removing the internal battery. The sheet battery attaches without having to switch off the PC, boosting stamina to up to 14 hours1 for day-and-night working, even if you’re far from mains power. VAIO Z delivers a richer communication experience if you’re staying in touch with colleagues via video conference or web chat. The HD web camera powered by Exmor™ technology ensures detailed-packed video even in low light. There’s a full range of official accessories from Sony, style-matched to complement the looks and performance of your VAIO. Many more configuration options �� including a Full HD (1920 x 1080) LCD – are available exclusively to online shoppers at Sony Store. The new 2011 VAIO Z Series of ultra-portable performance notebook PCs is available from the end of July 2011 (actual date of availability varies by country). 1 As measured by MobileMark® battery test 2 Power Media Dock available with selected models or as an optional accessory [via ] |
T-Mobile: MyTouch Slide 4G Has “Most Advanced Camera Of Any Smartphone”, Coming In July | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | We knew that the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide was on the way — or, at least, we had a pretty darn good reason . Sure enough, it’s the real deal: ol’ Magenta has just painted it up with a proper press release, announcing that it’ll it the stores sometime in July for an as-of-yet-undisclosed price. T-Mobile’s decided to take a somewhat rarely taken route with the marketing behind this one. Rather than playing up the 1.2 Ghz processor, the “4G” connectivity (with “4G” in quotes, of course, because T-Mobile’s 4G is arguably not actual 4G), or the 3.7″ WVGA (800×480) SuperLCD display, they’re pointing all of their hype machine’s energy at a different component: the camera. Based on megapixels alone (which, really, is a terrible metric anyway) the camera doesn’t seem like anything special: at 8 megapixels, it’s not exactly alone in its space. And yet, T-Mobile claims the Slide 4G has the “most advanced camera of any smartphone”. The tricks, says T-Mobile, are all in the software. To snag straight from their press release: · An 8-megapixel camera sensor with for improved low light performance · Zero Shutter lag: The myTouch 4G Slide is the only cameraphone on the market with . When a customer opens the camera application, the camera begins recording in the background in a memory buffer. When you snap the camera button, rather than waiting for a mechanical shutter, it looks at the timestamp of when you pressed the button and pulls the photo from the cache. Thus, there is no delay between pressing that button and grabbing that perfect shot. · The camera also has a very advanced lens with an f-number value of . This allows users to take photos with greater depth of field. This means photographs taken with a low f-number will tend to have subjects at one distance in focus, with the rest of the image (nearer and farther elements) out of focus. Other high end smartphones (i.e. iPhone 4GS) have an f-stop value of f/2.8. · Digital camera features, including: o SweepShot™: Used to capture ultra-wide panoramic shots so that you can sweep across an entire scene in a single shot o ClearShot™ HDR: Used to capture objects in high contrast settings so that photos details are not lost o BurstShot™: Used to capture multiple photos in a quick burst so that you don’t miss the perfect photo Backside illumination? That’s pretty great. An value of f/2.2, as opposed to the mostly-standard f/2.8? Not really too big of a deal when we’re dealing with itty-bitty smartphone camera sensors, but a nice touch. The myriad SweepShot/ClearShot/BurstShot and what-not features? Sounds fun. The most intriguing bit, though, is that “Zero Shutter lag” concept. As they put it, it’s constantly “recording” photos in the background by storing them to temporary memory. Once you push the shutter button they take the time stamp, pull the time-relative picture from memory, and bam: you’ve got a photo without having to wait for the shutter. While it’s a clever idea, we’ll definitely have to see how it works in practice before we judge. The way it stands, it sounds like they’re essentially recording a movie then pulling a specific frame from it — which, as anyone who’s ever paused an action movie can tell you, can result in a nasty, blurry mess. Look for this one to ship with Android 2.3 sometime in July (We’ll update you if we hear anything more specific, promise!) in two color options: black and … khaki? Really? Khaki? Of all the cool ways they could have described that color — sand, toasted marshmallow… hell, even good ol’ would have worked — they’d rather conjure up images of semi-casual work pants? Shut up, we’re calling it sand. LOOK FOR IT IN BLACK OR SAND. T-Mobile has now disclosed the price. Just like its predecessor the myTouch Slide 3G, the Slide 4G will go for $199.99 on a 2-year contract |
Smartfish Pouchpad For The Traveling Mouse Lover | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
So it looks like a pita pocket. So what? If you’ve got a nice little wireless for on-the-go gaming or productivity and don’t want it clattering around your bag, this thing sounds great. And it turns into a tiny mousepad! How can you say no? How, I ask you? . Get one, even though it looks like robot food. |
DIY All-Terrain Roomba | John Biggs | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNgpl1TL4xg&w=640&h=390] The isn’t brand new but recent updates have made it a formidable opponent to stairs, lumps of dirt, and other obstacles that stand between you and a completely clean Martian surface. The DIY kit uses a modded Roomba and unique chassis to offer stability and impressive speed to this little robot.
The robot uses a Seeduino board and the Roomba’s built-in sensors to handle collision detection and navigation. It’s a great little hack. |
Nikon Displays Mysterious Prototypes At French Exhibition | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
These concept cameras, or whatever they are, probably aren’t indicative of any future Nikon products, but it’s always fun to see what imaging companies have cooking deep in the labs. caught a few at Paris’s Cité des Sciences et Industrie over the weekend. There sure as hell isn’t a lot of info, but I like the modular idea of that first one. [via ] |
Anonymous Declares War On The City Of Orlando | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | The hacktivist group Anonymous may be setting its sights on the city of Orlando, Florida next, if an anonymous press release which has landed in our inbox is to be believed (see below). The group is threatening to take down a different city-related website every day, starting with , which doesn’t even appear to be owned by the city of Orlando (it is to an organization called Utopia, administered by a man named Steven Ridenour). So any random website extolling the virtues of Orlando could be targeted. The DDOS attacks are justified in the press release as retaliation for the repeated of members of a non-profit group called , which feeds homeless people in a park without a permit. The leader of the group, Keith McHenry, was also . “This is a declaration of war,” writes Anonymous in its press release describing “Operation Orlando.” It warns the entire city that “Anonymous will now begin a massive campaign against you and your city web assets. Everyday we will launch a new DDoS attack on a different Target.” Its first target will be Orlando Florida Guide, which it threatens to take down between 10 AM and 6 PM tomorrow. No reason is given as to what the site or its owner did to incur the wrath of Anonymous, other than its local boosterism. It’s not even the ‘s official website. : As of this time, the site is still up. Maybe Anonymous is sleeping late. And now it’s sporadically up and down. : As far as I could tell, the Orlando Florida Guide site was up most of the day, if a little slow to load, which kind of makes you winder if this really was Anonymous or some other group hijacking their name. http://twitter.com/#!/OpOrlando2011/status/85506918105358336
Anonymous Press Release – Operation Orlando June 27, 2011 The City of Orlando has ignored our warnings, and our generous offer of a cease fire. On Wednesday last you not only arrested two more people for feeding but you arrested the worldwide President of Food Not Bombs Keith Mchenry. This is a declaration of war. Henceforth there will be no more cease fires, no more attempts to get you to resolve this issue with human decency. We will now treat you like the human rights abusers that you are. Anonymous will now begin a massive campaign against you and your city web assets. Everyday we will launch a new DDoS attack on a different Target. We will continue to E-Mail millions of people in 50 countries with the Boycott Orlando campiagn [sic] message. In our experience a government that acts this way is also corrupt. We therefore call on any government or police employee who has evidence of any kind of wrongdoing to consider disclosing it to an organization that specializes in dealing with local disclosures. We have said what we have to say. The media has many press releases and communiques from us. From now on we will DO not talk. Journalists should follow the Twitter for that days targeted take down or other un-planned assaults. Tomorrow morning at exactly 10:00 AM ET Anonymous will remove from the world wide web www.orlandofloridaguide.com and it shall remain down until 6:00 PM ET. We will also E-Mail Bomb and Black Fax the owners of this site, identified as one Utopia, Inc. We Are Anonymous – We Are Everywhere – We Are Legion – We Never Forget – We Never Forgive FREE Keith McHenry EXPECT US — Anonymous |
Acer's Chromebook Arrives This Month – 3G Version Soon | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
While Samsung’s sexy little Series 5 is , a lot of people (“the people” meaning “people interested in Chrome OS,” which probably isn’t many people right now) are probably waiting for the cheaper AC700 from Acer. You can pre-order one now, of course, but shipping date was pretty much a mystery… until now.
Actually, it’s still kind of a mystery. But Acer has released a new press… release, saying how it should be available “this month.” Not a lot of days left in June, so they may as well have said “this week.” Here’s the info: New Acer AC700 Runs Google’s Chrome OS; Delivers Speed, Simplicity, Security to Connected Customers SAN JOSE, Calif., June 27, 2011 — Acer America today debuts the Acer AC700 its first Chromebook in the United States and its first product running Google’s Chrome-based operating system. The Acer AC700 ultraportable delivers blazing boot times and instant access to the Internet. The first in a planned line of products that will utilize Google’s Chrome operating system, the Acer AC700 Chromebook is ideal for savvy mobile consumers, educational institutions, and business people that spend most of their time on the Internet for cloud computing such as using web-based email, uploading photos to sites like Flickr and Picasa, and keeping up-to-date on the latest news and events. The new Acer AC700 provides WiFi connectivity, a sleek thin and light form factor, long battery life and excellent HD playback. “We are pleased to be one of Google’s leading launch partners delivering a new experience in cloud computing for customers of our new Acer AC700 Chromebook,” said Arif Maskatia, CTO, Acer. “As a leader in the mobile computing space, we strive to offer customers the widest range of mobile computing devices to support the many ways our customers connect to their world. The Acer AC700 represents the future of computing as it shows how they can access the cloud to vastly improve the simplicity, security and speed of their online experience.” “Acer’s expertise in technology and hardware make them an ideal partner to bring one of the first Chromebooks to market,” said Caesar Sengupta, Director of Chrome OS, Google. “The Acer AC700 Chromebooks are built for people who want a fast, simple and secure web-based computing experience.” Chrome is Speedy, Secure – Boots in 10 Seconds, Defends Against Threats
The Acer AC700 tackles every task with incredible speed. It boots in less than 10 seconds and resumes almost instantly, so users immediately start enjoying their always-on Internet connection. The Acer AC700 running the Chrome operating system is designed to defend against the ongoing threat of malware and viruses by employing the principle of “defense in depth” to provide multiple layers of protection, including sandboxing, data encryption, and verified boot. Sharing and collaborating on the Acer AC700 is easy. With online applications such as Google Docs and Calendar, customers can share media, collaborate on documents and projects, and share their work and personal calendars. Plus, because customers save their documents, files, photos, video and more in the cloud, they are protected from data loss if an Acer AC700 is physically damaged, lost or stolen. Connectivity for the Web-Based Lifestyle
The Acer AC700 is a portable powerhouse truly optimized for the growing number of customers who use their computer to spend most of their time online. Acer InviLink Nplify 802.11b/g/n Wifi Certified will keep customers connected to the Internet. To support this always-on connection, the Acer AC700 provides excellent battery life of up to six hours with its 6-cell battery.(1) Incredible Mobility, Easy to Use and Enjoy
Designed for ultimate mobility, the Acer AC700 is portable and sleek. It weighs only 2.95 pounds and measures a mere one inch thin, so it can be easily taken anywhere as it fits into a backpack, briefcase or purse. The combination of a simple and intuitive Chrome operating system and full-sized keyboard makes the Acer AC700 incredibly easy to use and navigate. The oversized fully-clickable touchpad allows customers to conveniently click anywhere on it as they navigate the Internet. Ready for On-the-Go Entertainment
The Acer AC700 is ready for instant fun and entertainment. The Acer AC700’s integrated HD 1.3MP webcam w/ LED indicator is great for video chatting and conferencing, as well as capturing video and photos for sharing online. It supports the latest web standards and Adobe Flash 10.1 video. Everything looks incredibly crisp and clear on the Chromebook’s 11.6-inch HD Widescreen CineCrystalTM LED-backlit LCD. Plus, the Acer AC700’s HDMI output lets customers stream video from the cloud to high-definition TVs and displays. Many Benefits for Travelers, Business, Education
Business and education customers will appreciate the simplicity and manageability of the Acer AC700, since files can be shared or edited from one device, saved to the cloud, and then accessed from another Chromebook or any device with a web browser. In addition, Chromebooks are great for accessing web-based tools, applications behind the firewall, and virtualized desktops. This eliminates the need for a large hard drive and helps protect against data loss since everything is stored remotely. IT managers will value the security and simplicity benefits that the Acer AC700 provides. Also, customizing and managing a fleet of Acer AC700s can be done from one web-based console in an efficient, timely manner. Acer AC700 Built for Performance
The Intel Atom N570 dual-core processor and 2GB of DDR3 memory provide the performance to speed through the web, access files, enjoy video and more. It has a 16GB SSD for storing files as well as the millions of Chrome apps and games from the Chrome Web Store. The Acer AC700 also has two USB 2.0 ports and a 4-in-1 card reader that accepts popular flash storage, so customers can play music and video directly from the card, or upload photos, video and music to their favorite sites. Software, Pricing and Availability
The Acer AC700 Chromebook is available this month in the United States at Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Prices starting at $349.99. A model with 3G broadband wireless capabilities will be coming this summer. Limited Warranty
The new Acer AC700 comes with a standard one-year parts and labor warranty, which can be extended to three years with the Acer Advantage service. All Acer Chromebooks are backed by toll-free service and support. |
Super Talent's RC8: Thumbdrive Looks, SSD Power | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
If you’ve ever wondered why they can’t take these tiny SSD units and just pack ’em into a thumbdrive case, this one’s for you. The new is in every way a real SSD, except perhaps that it’s not sitting in your PC’s case with a SATA connection. This one’s USB 3.0 and it appears to really cruise. We’re looking at over 200MB/s reads and writes. Here are the test results from their : Looks mighty speedy! The aluminum casing hides a full SSD architecture, with 8 flash channels and a real live Sandforce controller. It’ll come in 25, 50, and 100GB flavors. Prices aren’t set yet, but Super Talent said it’s going to be more like SSD than USB drive prices. says the 50GB version will cost $110, which actually seems a bit low to me. We’ll let you know when this |
The HP TouchPad Will Come With Its Own Facebook Tablet App (Leaked Pics) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | The world has been waiting for an official Facebook tablet app, and , and . But that app may not appear on the iPad first (although Facebook is working on an ). Instead, Facebook’s first tablet app will appear on the HP TouchPad, which and runs the WebOS it . Unless the iPad app also launches this week, the TouchPad will become the first tablet with an official Facebook app. Given the between Apple and Facebook, a concurrent launch on the iPad seems unlikely. How do I know? I got my hands on some screenshots of the Facebook app for the TouchPad. You can see them here. But what I wonder is if this is also what the app will look like on the iPad. All I can say for sure is that these pics are from Facebook’s tablet app running on WebOS. A few features stick out. Along the left rail, which pops in and out, you’ve got your main navigation: Newsfeed, Messages, Events, Places, Friends, and Photos. The Newsfeed can be viewed in both a stream view or a more tablet-friendly tile view. The tiles make better use of typography and images. Also notice the addition of Places and Photos to the left rail navigation. Places opens up a map with nearby activity and the ability to check in. Photos displays your Facebook photos in a tiled album view. Profiles also highlight people’s photos. You can toggle between their wall, info, and photos. Judging from these images and others I’ve seen, the app really takes advantage of the extra screen real estate to good effect. Photos and Places especially shine. I really hope the iPad app looks similar. |
Myspace Expected To Lay Off At Least 150 Employees On Wednesday | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | We’ve confirmed the with our own inside source; From what I’m hearing the company expects to lay off at least 150 of its around 400 employees tomorrow (37.5% of its staff). According to the source, another group of around 150 employees will be put on a transition plan, where they will still be laid off but can work with pay for a few weeks while they search for another job. Myspace cut around 47% of its staff back in January and these new layoffs come as Myspace is preparing itself for a sale, which we’re hearing will be signed tomorrow and announced on Friday. While there are multiple rumors circling regarding who exactly will be buying the beleaguered social network, the names being include a bidding group fronted by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, Buzzmedia, and even LivingSocial. In any case this is turning out to be a banner week for Myspace, which closes its fiscal year on Wednesday. I’ve emailed Myspace PR for comment, and will update this post when they get back to me. |
Check your skin for a melanoma? Yes, there's an app for that too | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | How would you feel about an iPhone app that claimed to be able to tell if that mole on your arm was not looking too healthy? That’s the claim of , an iPhone medical app available now on the Apple App Store. The startups has secured €50,000 Euro in seed funding from . Either Skin Scan is going to get people to see a doctor earlier, thus potentially saving lives. Or it’s going to make hypochondriacs of us all. I can’t decide which. Suffice it to say this appears to be one clever app. Because it also asks for your location, Skin Scan is also producing a live map of how our moles are looking around the globe. The implication for the app are very interesting – Skin Scan could end up mapping skin cancer rate across the planet, if it gets this right. The app takes a picture of a mole on the skin, then uses a proprietary algorithm to look at the fractal-like shapes which exist in human skin (have a look up close, you can see little triangles in normal skin, honest). It then calculates if the shape of the mole means it is is developing normally, or abnormally thus in a into a potential cancerous melanoma. Skin scan is claiming the plaudits of a handful of doctors on its site, but let’s not go over-board here. At the very least the app simply claims to tell a users when to look for a professional medical investigation – something which may be helpful in its own right – although as usual, consult your doctor first… Whether an iPhone camera is capable of this is hard to say. But I tried the app out on myself and – after a couple of tries – found it fairly convincing. At least the team has experience. It has about a dozen members composed of two dermatology doctors, two mathematicians working on the algorithm. Technical implementation is coordinated by Mihai Mafteianu of in Romania. It’s headed up by CEO Victor Anastasiu, co-founder of Romanian seed fund SeedMoney. So far it looks like there aren’t any similar apps making the same claims. There is an app called which organises photos, but doesn’t provide any assessments and which requires additional hardware. Skin Scan handles the analysis via the iPhone camera only. And judging from the map, so far it looks like the world is safer than we thought. |
A Massive Solar Flare Of Activity Pushes Tumblr To 400 Million Pageviews A Day | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | Last month, founder that was now seeing over 250 million pageviews a day. , that was incredible since as recently as July of 2009, they were seeing 250 million pageviews for the . But it turns out that the numbers are much more incredible than they first appeared. I noticed this when Tumblr President earlier today that Tumblr was now doing north of 8.4 billion monthly pageviews. That number was around 7 billion just a month ago, and when I drilled down into Tumblr’s on Quantcast, I noticed a massive surge in pageviews in the last few weeks. So massive, in fact, that the data looks more like a solar flare. So what happened? It turns out, there was a bit of a bug in Tumblr’s data previously — one that led Quantcast to pageview data. “Last week we noticed a growing discrepancy between our Google Analytics and Quantcast numbers. It turns out that we broke our Quantcast tracking code a few weeks ago and were no longer reporting any impressions past page one of the Dashboard. We fixed it and quickly saw the Quantcast data jump up to near symmetry with GA,” Karp tells us. So what does that mean for Tumblr’s numbers? Well, throw that 250 million pageviews a day out the windows. Last Thursday, Tumblr hit for the day, Karp tells us. It’s close to 5,000 pageviews a second, he notes. Karp credits international growth and faster response times to Tumblr’s amazing trajectory. Maloney is more specific. “Tumblr’s growth the last few months has been remarkable, overshadowing everything in the past. It’s coming from all over the globe and across all demos, in particular teenagers,” he says. Both men are also quick to credit the Tumblr engineering team which has been handling the load after downtime problems earlier in the year. With the new data, Tumblr is now one of in the U.S. according to the data Quancast tracks. |
IBM "Buildings Whisperer" Dave Bartlett On The Dumb Ways We Waste Energy | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 6 | 27 | IBM’s Smarter Planet division released a new solution recently that can make buildings energy efficient— even if they are huge and 100 years old like the company itself. Vice president of the Smarter Buildings division at IBM, Dave Bartlett, visited TechCrunch TV to talk about the stupid ways that people waste energy in medium to large buildings, and how the company’s new Intelligent Building Management solution can change that. According to an IBM press statement: “Buildings consume 42 percent of all energy worldwide; energy costs represent about 30 percent of a building’s total operating cost— up to 50 percent of energy and water are often wasted. By 2025, buildings will be the number one consumer of energy in the world. IDC Energy Insights estimates that the global Smart Building market was $3.1 billion for 2010 and is expected to grow to $10.2 billion by 2015.”
To address this rampant power consumption, IBM’s new “Intelligent Building Management” solution with all the data from smart devices that have proliferated through the years. Sensor makers like Honeywell, Siemens, Eaton and Johnson Controls have made everything from refrigerators and water heaters, to computer labs and gymnasiums “smart,” Bartlett pointed out, so now it’s time to give people using them an easy way to read and act on the data they transmit. Known as “the buildings whisperer” in retrofit and construction circles, Bartlett further explained: “We’ve packaged up some recommended rule sets and technology [that can] essentially read a building, and say ‘if this is happening, do that.’ Customers can add their own rules, but we are taking what we’ve learned from working with partners and at our own campus [in Rochester] to be able to share general best practices, and make them easy to follow.”
One problem that IBM’s new solution diagnoses and eliminates in buildings is called “concurrent heating and cooling.” That’s where occupants have the heat on in one part of the building, but the air conditioning on somewhere else. It’s more common than you’d think, Bartlett reported, and it’s generally a big un-necessary waste of power. IBM’s solution is being used to control energy consumption and costs at the Cloisters museum in New York City, at Boston University, and (image, right). The company is reaching out to everyone from neighborhood residents, to building owners and local power providers to figure out where the most energy goes in such buildings, where it can be safely reduced, and which systems maintenance tasks can be automated, leaving building owners and operators to focus their time and money on more critical repairs and upgrades. Previously, IBM used its own industrial and commercial buildings as a test lab of sorts. According to the company’s new, , the Intelligent Building Management solution saved IBM’s Rochester campus— which consists of three million square feet inside of 35 interconnected buildings— 8 percent on energy used, year over year. IBM’s move into smarter buildings technology could prove a challenge for growing startups like EcoFactor, Retroficiency and Hara. Then again, IBM could become one of the top buyers of their services, or possibly an acquirer of these type of tech ventures. Photo: Richardson Building at Tulane, via |
Sweet-Looking Bike Tool Roll Made From My Favorite Material, Waxed Canvas | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 27 |
Fellow Seattlite and Etsy seller Erica Hanson has put together a great little tool bag for discerning bikers: . It’s waxed canvas and consists of ten of little pockets for you to put your patch kits, hex wrenches, spare tube, and all that jazz. Then roll it up and strap it to your frame. Hell of a good-looking thing, and the simple, rugged construction seems like it should last quite a few years. I’d hide snacks in it too, I think. At $38 (plus $6 for shipping), I’d say it’s a pretty good deal. : Oops, someone bought it. [via and ] |
Checking Out The New Diablo Gear And 7XB Headset From SteelSeries | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 11 |
We ran into Kim Rom from at E3 and he gave us a little tour of their newest gear. I’m pretty pumped about the headset, which we’ll be reviewing soon — I travel with a headset a lot, and the flexibility and breakdownability make it an attractive option. I also get a surprise from a lady in red right at the beginning there. Why didn’t I follow up on that? What’s wrong with me?! |
Fight Mike Arrington, Bing Gordon And More With GraFighters | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 11 | [vimeo 24841889 w=620] The tale of is one of a Kickstarter project that and then went oh so right. Last fall founders Eric Cleckner and Dave Chenell tried to raise $20K on Kickstarter for the “first online fighting game for your sketches,” but barely raised $3K. Luckily for them, a German investor poking around Kickstarter for projects stumbled across the project and called Chenell to invest. The pair ended up , 10x their original Kickstarter ask. GraFighters is a browser-based game that lets you upload your own sketches and customize them for battle with other users’ sketches. If you don’t have any drawings you’d particularly like to see duel lying around your computer you can always use the games pre-existing characters, which include my beloved boss , gaming legend and VC , the infamous or the myriad of previously uploaded made up characters like “Barnaby Bear” and “Floppysaurus.” As you can see in the demo video above (created at Union Square Ventures per request) the whole endeavor is tons of fun. And while the game is still in private beta as the two co-founders iron out the bugs, TechCrunch readers can include something about TechCrunch in the “Why do you want to graFight?” and get in earlier — When graFighters is ready to handle more beta testers. The game opens to the public in September.
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New Nook Hacked Further, Gets Launcher, Bluetooth, And… Kindle | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 11 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4dMZvff9qg&w=640&h=390]
Just last week we posted a video of the new (which we just ) . Not exactly the best match for an e-paper display, but it does show that the underlying Android install is sound and functional. Further proof comes this weekend, with installing the home screen and even the app on it. Sure, the animation is busted, but it could still be super useful. Oh, and by the way, . That wasn’t in the specs, but is probably part of the chipset they used. Was Barnes & Noble going to announce this? Doesn’t matter much, we know now! Looks like the “Nook Touch” is going to be about as popular a hacking platform as the Nook Color. I wonder if the similarly-specced will get a similar treatment? |
Review: L.A. Noire (And Giveaway) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 11 |
: An original, immersive, and fully-realized crime adventure that suffers from a few control and technical issues, and (perhaps purposefully) vague interrogation segments. The accomplishment and authenticity of the city and your work in it, however, is beyond a doubt worth the price of admission.
The world of LA Noire is meticulously detailed, period-accurate, and absolutely immersive. The Los Angeles of the 1940s is successfully presented in all its glory, which is an achievement in itself. While your interaction with the city on a micro scale is necessarily limited (thousands of houses and buildings are sealed to entry), that’s rarely a concern, as the curated tour of LA provided by your various cases gives you just enough slack to make you you’re exploring freely. There are dozens of cars to unlock, as well as landmarks worth checking out while on or off the case. Homes and businesses are filled with details and false clues for you to discover, and the overall “feel” of the city is very effective. As you’ve no doubt read, the biggest technical advance in the game is the expression system, specifically the movement of faces, and I would say that it’s absolutely as good as they have said. Some characters are rendered more convincingly than others, but with a few I found myself shaking my head at how amazingly lifelike they were. In particular, an old lady at a bowling alley, directing me to a person of interest, and one of the many bartenders I met while investigating, both struck me as so much like real people that they escaped uncanny valley. Surprisingly, your own character is one of the least memorable, perhaps because his face is rather unremarkable to begin with (apologies to Aaron Staton). It’s also easy to begin to like some people and dislike others — the friendly coroner, for example, was always a welcome face. It helps that the sound design is impeccable, with authentic music, great-sounding cars, and excellent voice acting. With a few minor exceptions, every character in the game sounds distinct and real, and there’s enough variation in the writing that they don’t seem like generic NPCs numbers one through five hundred. That said, the generic NPCs could have used a little more sprucing up. They suffer from line repetition syndrome, even in the police station where you start your case. How many times did I hear the same guy yell “I say we bust in there and get the goddamn evidence” as I exited the briefing room? With so many lines of spoken dialogue, it would not have been amiss to record a few more atmospheric ones. The writing and cases are solid, and while there are a few tropes resorted to here and there (the boozing, religious captain at Central comes to mind), LA Noire consistently bats above the gaming average on dialogue, plotting, and so on. You’ll be doing a lot of driving in this game, and while you can opt to have your partner drive (effectively warping to the location), it’s nice to actually get to know the city a bit and admire the world that Bondi Studios has so lovingly created. But the drivers of 1940s Los Angeles are apparently all psychotic, blind, and drunk. They seem to like nothing more than stopping short, ignoring signals, failing to pull over when you have your siren on, or merging into your lane with no warning. Most vehicles handle tolerably well and you can avoid these human land mines if you’re wary, but it begins to feel like a chore when you have to cross town a few times and you’re worried more about dodging traffic than solving the case. Pedestrians scare easily, but generally are car-savvy and don’t throw themselves in front of you, as they often do in city-based sandbox games. Investigation is a mixed bag, though overall it’s so compelling and original that I feel bad criticizing it. Finding clues is effected by looking over the scene and picking up suspicious objects after being alerted by a piano cue and vibrating controller. Most of the time it works, but sometimes it feels hokey. The vaunted interrogation scenes don’t fare so well. When interviewing a subject on a clue, you have three responses: “Truth,” “Doubt,” and “Lie.” Where the line is between these things, I simply can’t tell. The “correct” response to statements seems at times to be completely arbitrary: an old lady might require aggressive badgering to reveal information, though by all appearances she is being truthful and forthcoming. You can redo action sequences, but not interrogations, though you can use “intuition” to make things easier and reduce your response choices. Ostensibly you can observe the subject and make your decision on that, but despite the lifelike faces, there seemed to me to be no consistent link between the telltale signs of lying and the actual need to call them out — or signs of truthfulness and the need to coax. Again and again I heard the minor chord of an interrogation failure and had absolutely no idea how I could be wrong. Sure, mistakes are part of the game (and police work), but it was rarely clear the mistake was a mistake. Action sequences, a definite minority in terms of gameplay time spent, are competent but occasionally clumsy. Autoaim is your friend, but in confined spaces the camera is sluggish and often poorly positioned. The running-perp sequences are fun, however “on rails” they are, and the car chases are thrilling, if somewhat contrived. Hand-to-hand fighting is fun, though. The game runs well and looks fantastic indoors, but outside you’ll find lots of texture pop and filter lines, as well as an occasional stuttering framerate. The 360 is obviously working hard, though, and most failings can be attributed to technical limitations. While the gameplay would benefit from a little clarification in the interrogations, and action suffers from the usual third-person-actioner shortcomings, LA Noire is a huge accomplishment. Artistically and technically it excels, and gameplay is not only original but compelling as well. The single-player campaign isn’t conducive to repeat playthroughs, but you’re getting your money’s worth with the 30-40 hours of story and many optional “street crimes” and unlockables. Here is another powerful argument in the “games as art” debate, and a strong early contender for game of the year. I’ve got a PS3 version of LA Noire (and a sweet shirt) to give away to a lucky reader. , whether it’s NARC, GTA 4, or whatever. I’ll pick one randomly on Monday to win. : it’s over! The winner has been notified. Thanks for entering. |
A Look At The Three Startups That Wowed The Judges At Plug And Play’s Summer EXPO | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 6 | 11 | Like , is a startup accelerator located in the heart of Silicon Valley, although you may not have heard quite as much about Plug and Play as you have its counterpart. Nothwithstanding, the five-year-old business accelerator has built a community of over 280 tech startups, across a number of verticals, including Web 2.0, cloud services, systems, semiconductor and telecomms. Since its inception, the tech center has helped its startups raise over $750 million in venture funding. Not unlike Y Combinator and other accelerators of its ilk, Plug and Play hosts a 10-week summer program designed to immerse young startups and entrepreneurs into the Silicon Valley environment. , as its known, provides startups with a curriculum of workshops, speaker series, mentor sessions, as well as offering extensive coaching to help entrepreneurs cement business models, prototypes, and so on. This summer camp for startups runs through August 18th, at which point there will be an EXPO to showcase the accelerator’s latest batch. Plug and Play also organizes 4 EXPOs (unrelated to Startup Camp) at the end of each quarter, as well as 2 University EXPOs, in which a host of startups present their businesses to as many as 100 VCs and investors. Those esteemed judges vote on the top three companies, which then presumably go on to fame and fortune — or at least have a good shot at raising a bit of funding. The latest EXPO in the Plug and Play series took place Thursday, and below you will find a brief introduction to the three nifty startups that tallied the most votes and impressed the judges. Definitely worth checking out. is an in-store retail navigation app for mobile consumers. The startup is building a mobile shopping platform that allows consumers to search, map and navigate to products in retail stores down to the very part of the aisle in which the product is located. With billions of pre-planned digital shopping lists, is set to allow digital publishers to integrate the startup’s in-store solutions with digital lists, recipes, and mobile coupons. aisle411’s ad network has early brand buy-in from Coca Cola, General Mills, as well as several other retail partnerships and is already live in 1500 locations. Over 70 percent of shoppers use a list prior to shopping, and as smartphone saturation grows, the majority of shopping lists and products searches will be executed in-store on a mobile device. As Google Wallet, Paypal and Square look to deploy mobile payments, aisle411 offers highly targeted, high margin offers delivered seconds prior to the purchase. The startup is also offering an API that includes a proprietary in-store ad engine that can target messaging to specific user based on their current and historical shopping lists, as specific as branded products within specific aisles. Pretty cool. is an online video production platform designed to enable users to collaboratively produce, share and store user-generated video. By combining the power of cloud-based computing and broadcast-quality HD, with a user-focused experience, Creaza’s platform is attempting to make video truly social. social video platform enables users to shoot, edit, share and store their self-generated videos. Content can be shot with any video-enabled decice and easily syncs with the user’s private Creaza media library — all in the cloud. Users can edit their video clips with professional-looking titles, transitions, effects, animation, music and narration. The startup’s cloud-based architecture enables easy and secure video project collaboration and co-creation among friends, colleagues and others. Final videos can be shared in an online workspace: downloaded to a favorite device or stored with Creaza. Everything happens in the cloud. No installs, no upgrade, ad no file conversions. The startup says that it’s trying to transform the video industry. I like the sound of that, but you be the judge. is developing a series of low cost sensors that can be used to determine the precise location of objects, and use gestures to control devices without touching them. (Kind of like what .) The startup claims that its technology can replace competitors’ sensors at a fraction of the cost with better performance. Advanced sensing arrays are three times less expensive than the competition and overcome limitations such as blind spots and outdoor operation, allowing for mass adaption for touchless and gesture control of displayes, tablets, and mobile devices. XYZ’s tech is adding depth, touchless control to your devices to help make them smarter, ranging from enabling simple presence, distance and gesture measurement in mobile and consumer electronics devices — to complex 6DOF 3D (six degrees of freedom in three dimensions) absolute position information as required un augmented reality environments, sport simulations, home and industrial automation, retail sales conversion, novel interactive toy and display controllers, and hospital environments. With granted, pending, and provisional patents, XYZ Interactive provides the technology for sensors and systems to precisely, and very inexpensively, locate objects in 3D to within millimeters of accuracy at meters of range. Awesome stuff. |
The Music Runs Through Our Veins | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 6 | 11 | Guest author is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter Many years ago, as an avid fan, I would use a handheld cassette recorder to record the audio portion of the show so I could hear it on road trips. Pretty bizarre, yes, but we didn’t have a VCR. I’d do the same when a popular new song came on the radio, waiting patiently to hit “record” and write the music to cassette tape. Over time, this turned into copying CDs, downloading music, burning CDs, uploading .wav files into iTunes, swapping hard drives. Only until recently, music was tied to the medium, but along the way, one impulse has not only persisted, but grown in strength: As social animals, we want to discover and share music, and external forces are working in concert to all types of media. These forces helped produce services like and , new incarnations of the subscription model, where users pay monthly fees to access catalogs and additional fees to carry that music with them. In parallel, services like and help us identify music we hear, and , , and help us create new playlists and keep track of what we listen to over time. In 2011, these primal urges have to life, producing a flurry of services aimed at helping us discover, share, and network around music experiences. A few have built on the “following/follower” model, such as , which allows users to capture and share a variety of sounds (not limited to music), and , which allows users to broadcast the songs they’re currently listening to. A new service, , adds a recommendation layer on top of iTunes accounts, built on the intuition that we don’t discover music we like via the wisdom of the crowd, but rather through a small group of influential friends we admire. All of these companies are interesting in the sense that they create a dedicated channel for us to discover, share, and build relationships around music online. Then there’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room: Facebook. The current is that the largest social network will shortly launch a new offering integrated with Spotify that gives users access to a massive song catalog, with the added sweetener that Facebook already has captured information around what musicians we “like,” giving it an opportunity to provide targeted add-on services alongside our favorite tracks. With Sean Parker advising Spotify, it seems as if his presence alone will make this happen on a massive scale. It’s fitting that all of this activity is bubbling up the year is set to IPO. Back in 2000, I first heard about the in Berkeley, which eventually turned into Pandora Media. Over the next decade, Pandora survived a battery of legal disputes and tricky fundraising rounds to eventually emerge as the dominant Internet radio station and become a household name. Pandora also pioneered many of the trends fueling new startups today, many that we may take for granted, such as discovering new music (“serendipity”), listening on the go (“mobility”), and getting information that we like (“personalization”). Every new service that launches today, in all categories, not just music, touts these principles, so we should take a moment and commend Pandora for blazing that trail. In the surge of new music services, I believe one is fundamentally different, brilliantly designed, potentially groundbreaking, and could lead to entirely new trends in social music: (and I am ). Users on this new site bounce around different “rooms” in the Turntable building, each room hosted by different DJs who select what tracks will play next (the “curators”) and the audience, which can vote if they like the song or not (the “crowd”) and chat with others in the room. It’s only a matter of time before a company hires a new intern or finds an investor through Turntable. The service is also noteworthy because of the manner in which it launched, metering access only through Facebook friend connections, which gives them a viral loop and theoretically helps manage growth, though there’s been so much demand for Turntable.fm, especially during peak hours, that their servers are working to catch up. Finally, there are two aspects to the site that warrant attention. First, the mobile app possibilities are intriguing, such as listening to streams of certain rooms while on the go (or in the car), or using the curator-vote model in concert settings or clubs, to let the crowd vote on what records to spin. Second, the concept of moving in and out of “spaces” within the Turntable.fm building is fascinating, a digitization of real life, where the possibilities are literally infinite. While Pandora rests in the background of many browsers around the world, it’s possible that Turntable’s features bring online music-sharing more to the foreground, and it seems it is already starting to do just that. In the evolution to help users discover and share music online, pistons are firing on all cylinders, and I believe we’ll continue to see new concepts emerge. While it’s essential for many of us to listen to music while we’re plugged in at our desks, what about the offline world of small shows, concert halls, and music festivals? Isn’t music essentially best experienced live, in the moment, with friends, loved ones, and complete strangers? While musicians can leverage these new channels to increase their reach, they’ll need ticket sales for live events and a bit of merchandising to make real money. Much in the same way that Groupon is trying to solve a very valuable online-to-offline problem, there’s a similar opportunity in the music and entertainment space. We may all discover new music or reconnect with an old favorite by using SoundTracking, Turntable.fm, or Pandora, and we may even pay for the right to carry those particular tunes with us on the go, but what will drive us into the bars and concert halls to actually see something live, to connect us to the real world? A few services are trying, though it’s full of incumbent landmines: launched their mobile app this week, which crawls your song library for artists and helps you figure out where and when they are performing live, allows users to follow their favorite artists and be notified of upcoming gigs, and helps aggregate events from various networks to help drive concert discovery. Both services are doing something admirable: trying to push us offline, away from our desks, and out the door so that we actually experience music in-person, with other real people, disconnected from routines of everyday life for a few hours. However, as hardened concert-going fans know all to well, the logistics and add-ons associated with consuming live music are often costly and just plain annoying. That’s because venue owners, artists, and ticket brokers have a stranglehold on the content and distribution, and once they have the consumer’s dollars in hand, their incentives to make sure they earn those dollars falls dramatically. For many, live music events can be religious experiences, but they’re often watered down by “convenience” fees, crowded venues, jacked-up concession prices, questionable set lists, and poor acoustics. The audience deserves more, and they may now have the tools to demand better. This is the way it is today, but it doesn’t need to remain this way. Perhaps on the back of all of our social data and tastes for music, as well as all of these new tools, we’re finally at a point where the online music world can converge with the offline. The future of concerts and musician-audience interactions could change in radical ways, and it could be the surge of new online music-sharing services today that will help shape how we experience music in the real, offline world. Imagine that. |
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