Qwilt, the provider of network video-infrastructure technology, is debuting its video delivery solution, which aims to give carriers control over Internet-video traffic in their networks.
For background, Qwilt helps Internet-service providers more efficiently and cost-effectively deliver high-quality video to their customers. That means more consumers can see video from sources like Netflix, YouTube and Hulu in the highest possible quality, when they want.
Qwilt’s video-technology company solves a pretty big problem related to the recent explosion of video being delivered over the Internet (through Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc.), on multiple screens. Video now represents about 40% of all Internet traffic, and is projected to quadruple by 2015, when video is expected to make up more than two-thirds of all online activity. Streaming videos from the Netflix service alone make up 30% of Internet traffic during peak evening hours today. There is an enormous strain all this new content is putting on Internet providers.
The startup’s technology can be used by carriers to identify, monitor, store and deliver Internet video and allows carriers to create a universal video delivery layer that works transparently, without interruption or changes to content provider or network infrastructures.
Qwilt's technology uses patented, video-content classification and analysis technology to detect video content in an operator's Internet-traffic stream. Then, it adds optimized storage and delivery capabilities to create a more unified appliance offering carrier-grade performance, scalability and reliability. And the startup says that its product is a plug-and-play device that can be dropped easily into existing networks without requiring any infrastructure changes.
The new product, which has been in stealth for the past two years, reportedly has seen a performance gain of at least five times over competing products. And Qwilt is announcing that the Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan is using its product.
Qwilt recently raised $24 million in funding from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and others.
HP.com is a mess. It has been for years. But I just received word via an internal HP memo that the company plans on launching new U.S. Home & Home Office consumer store at the end of March. As the memo stats, this project, code-named “Atlas”, will be “the foundation of a new HP.com experience with more visual content, more product information and better navigation.” Anything would be better than Hewlett-Packard’s current website.
We’re still trying to dig up screenshots. The leaked memo — reprinted after the jump — links employees to a special purchasing program site for a special price on a Folio 13. However, the link is to just a landing page and not a preview of its swanky new website that the company so desperately needs.
I could harp on HP.com all day. The homepage is fine but when you click into the meat of the site you’re greeted with an explosion of links, tabs and general chaos. But a major website redesign hints that perhaps Meg Whitman is actually righting the massive HP vessel.
Shortly after Whitman took over in the fall of 2011, the company decided retain the Personal Systems Group rather than spinning it out to become its own company. Since then, HP debuted several memorable consumer products, cut its loses with the Touchpad and then released webOS to the open source community. The bean counters are still using red pens but up until the beginning of February, the stock price was slowly climbing back up.
A new website won’t stop HP’s downward spiral, but it’s a sign Meg & Co. are trying everything. Besides, sometimes in life, a fresh coat of paint can go a long ways.
U.S. HP Employees,
Thanks to the efforts of our colleagues in IT, Operations and the HP Shopping Team, the new U.S. Home & Home Office consumer store is launching. The Employee Purchase Program site is now live and the official launch for general customers will happen later in March.
Code-named "Atlas," it is the foundation of a new HP.com experience with more visual content, more product information and better navigation. The new platform will enable our HP.com teams to bring products to market faster and make it easier to buy from HP.com.
To celebrate our big new HP.com platform we have a special offer for you.
Now through March 14, HP employees in the U.S. can visit the store's remodeled EPP area and purchase the HP Folio 13t-1000 Notebook PC starting at $749.99 (taxes and upgrades not included) through a combination of the normal employee discount and a special coupon. Add the Folio 13t-1000 to your cart—limit of 1 per employee—hit the checkout button and then enter coupon code xxxxx when prompted.
If you already have an EPP account, those credentials will give you access to the new system. Otherwise, you'll need to sign up. Then once you're logged in, type Folio in the search field and select the third and last option from the search results. Remember that the price won't reflect the coupon yet because you still need to apply the code.
On behalf of everyone at HP, we thank the Atlas Team whose long hours and diligent work are about to start paying some big dividends.
Sincerely,
Stephen
[editors note: I removed the coupon code. This deal is for HP employees. If you're reading this email here, then you're not an HP employee and therefore should not get the special price. Sorry, kids. I'm not going to help you game the system.]
Storage startup Space Monkey just took the prize for best new startup at this week’s Launch conference in San Francisco. It’s no surprise, since this is one of the companies that everyone I’ve spoken to here has raved about.
The company is challenging cloud storage services like Dropbox — which seems to be doing pretty damn well, having raised money at a reported $4 billion valuation and also winning the best overall startup award at the most recent Crunchies. However, Space Monkey’s Clint Gordon-Carrol and Alen Peacock (their business cards say “Product Guy” and “Captain Science”, respectively) argue that the cloud approach has its flaws. With people storing more and more videos and images and other multimedia, it becomes increasingly expensive to keep that data in someone else’s cloud, and increasingly slow to push those files through your Internet connection.
Space Monkey, on the other hand, wants to combine the benefits of local storage and the cloud. Customers get a 1 terabyte hard drive, which means you can always access your files without dealing with your Internet connection. At the same time, the drive is connected to a peer-to-peer network, and copies of your files are also distributed in chunks to other devices. (They’re encrypted for security purposes.) The network allows you to access your files remotely, and also provides a backup in case your local storage fails — the company says more than half the network would have to go down before files are lost.
The company plans to start shipping devices this summer. It will charge a subscription fee of $10 a month (no extra charge to rent the hard drive). It’s also accepting pre-orders from 1,000 customers who want to pay for two years upfront — those early adopters get to keep the hard drive outright.
Even before launch, Space Monkey raised a $750,000 seed round of funding, which it didn’t announce until today. Investors include Polaris Ventures, Morado Ventures, Benjamin Ling, Venture51, and B-Squared. As one of the conference’s winners, Space Monkey is also being offered hundreds of thousands more in funding — I’ll update this post when I find out whether they’re taking it
Over the last couple of years, online forum Topix has become increasingly focused on politics. Today at the Launch conference, the site took the next step in that direction — accompanied by a patriotic marching band, CEO Chris Tolles announced a new service called Politix.
There’s no shortage of political websites, but CEO Chris Tolles says there’s “no place for your political profile online.” Sure, you might read a political article on The Huffington Post and even leave a comment, but there’s no centralized location for all that activity. And you might occasionally share those articles on your social network of choice, but “you don’t want to be that guy on Facebook” who’s constantly annoying his friends with political commentary.
With Politix, Tolles has hired a small editorial staff to curate a stream of news articles. You can comment on each article or share it with your friends (including those on Facebook and Twitter). There are issue-based polls such as, “Would same-sex marriage undermine traditional marriage?” And Tolles is recruiting academics, analysts, journalists, and others to create “verified profiles” — you can follow these big names and endorse statements than they make (which is easier than coming up with an insightful comment of your own). Then, when someone looks at your Politix profile, they see all of your activity.
Tolles says he also wanted to create a site that has a different tone than Topix (where commenters can be anonymous, and where the tone can get pretty toxic) — one that’s “less personal and more about the issues.” With this year’s election, there’s a lot more interest in national politics, and more political ad dollars that can be spent on a site like Politix.
The current version of Politix is designed for the mobile web. Tolles says he’ll be launching a desktop version soon, followed by a mobile app. The mobile-centric approach may seem like an odd fit for Topix’s core audience, which is largely suburban/exurban, but Tolles points out that iPhone usage isn’t exactly limited to big cities like San Francisco.
“When it comes down to it, we think that when people interact with media, they want to do it on mobile,” he says.
Editor’s note:Ari Mir is the co-founder and CEO of virtual currency platform Pocket Change. He also co-founded GumGum.com, the world's largest in-image ad-network. This week, Mir is attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
My youth was spent jumping turtles, killing 16-bit Nazis, connecting kickflips with manuals and nube tubing. Haaaaadouken! Like most boys and young men during the ’80s and early ’90s, I loved video games. Our passion for games and our willingness to pay $49.99 to purchase the latest Zelda or Mortal Kombat fueled the industry's growth.
For two decades, selling hard and soft copies of games proved to be a very lucrative business. However, this model is ultimately flawed because the revenue potential per player is capped. In 1998, a game studio by the name of Iron Realms Entertainment became the first to sell virtual goods in their games. A decade later everyone is building virtual economies into their games. Zynga, which recently went public and has a market value of around $10 billion, makes the majority of their revenue by selling items like virtual strawberries.
Virtual goods are purchased with virtual currency, a digital medium of exchange similar to dollars and cents. Virtual currency is in a very nascent stage. Most people think of Scamville, but really that was a misguided start to what will ultimately become one of the more powerful platforms we've seen. Similar to the offline world, virtual currency will be the underlying glue, allowing for a tremendous amount of value creation. Facebook knows this and is doubling down on its FB Credits system. Imagine a day when there are billions of casual gamers looking to buy a virtual good or to unlock a feature. They will need virtual currency and thus have an incentive to interact with a myriad of options placed in front of them to earn that currency. This will become even more prevalent in countries where there are fewer payment methods. Virtual currency will be a very unique platform—one with a built-in incentive mechanism and a large captive user base.
The advertising industry has already seized the opportunity. Currently, if you're playing poker on your iPhone you can earn virtual currency to use in the game by installing an advertiser's mobile app. Advertisers have also begun rewarding consumers with virtual currency if they're willing to watch a video advertisement. In the future advertisers will be able to create any action however simple or sophisticated and tie it to a virtual currency reward. The action could be as passive as watching a BMW commercial or as active as filling out a fashion survey sponsored by Banana Republic. Incentivized advertising will become the dominant form of mobile advertising (excluding search). It drives higher engagement rates than display advertising and is a much better user experience because it's opt-in.
Engaging with advertisers won't be the only way to earn virtual currency. Similar to the real world, gamers will perform jobs to earn currency. Think Mechanical Turk. Someone may want text translated or images of cars identified and they're willing to pay for the task to be completed. Not a novel concept but if built using virtual currency the marketplace becomes a lot more fluid. Tasks can easily be distributed to millions of users via an interface for earning currency. Also, it is a lot more meaningful to a gamer to reward them with 20 denominations of virtual currency versus twenty cents. This is because virtual currency is primarily used for micro-transactions where the gamer wants to buy a machine gun or unlock a level.
As millions of users begin to build liquidity in a system such as FB Credits or other virtual currency providers it becomes possible to disrupt the trillion dollar mobile payments space. Everyone from Apple to Google is running around trying to get more credit cards on file so they can be your "universal wallet." Tomorrow's universal wallet will have credit cards and virtual currency as payment options. Virtual currency offers additional benefits to the wallet provider and the end merchant because there are no inherent fees like credit cards. Consumers will pull out their iPhone or Android one day and buy coffee from Starbucks using virtual currency.
Virtual currency as a mass consumer product may sound far off. But the surge in smartphone use is broadening the player base and everyone from your little sister to your grandfather has a powerful gaming device within reach of them at all times.
As more casual gamers join, gaming becomes less taboo and when this happens the industry will turn into a tsunami. Virtual currency will affect everything from commerce to advertising.
It used to cost a lot of money to license a solid Facebook marketing platform, but One Public thinks even small businesses should be able to afford these tools. So today with TechCrunch it launches PageCentrex, a free platform for self-serve management of Pages, ads, Insights, ecommerce, and social CRM from a single interface. For businesses with more money to spend, it offers an enterprise managed service with custom app development.
This disruptive shift to free has been a long time coming. It’s not just deep pocketed brands getting doing Facebook marketing anymore. The long-tail of local business, SMBs, and fledgling brands have arrived.
Facebook’s marketing capabilities are getting more powerful but also more complicated. With last week’s launch of Timelime for Pages brands need to be thinking about which posts to pin and feature. Sponsored Stories can now appear in the news feed on web and mobile, and businesses need to know which posts they should pay to amplify. Real-time analytics, offsite Facebook integrations, ecommerce — there’s too much to handle effectively without tools. One Public’s PageCentrex might not be perfect, but it will probably be sufficient for many.
Enterprises meanwhile need to stand out. For them, platforms can produce somewhat cookie-cutter apps. One Public’s custom app development can help a brand create experiences unique to their business that can work as a supplement to a top tier social marketing platform.
I admire the zeal of One Public’s founder Fahad Khan. It takes guts to try and release such a range of products through a bootstrapped company with just 15 stateside employees and 50 in Lahore, Pakistan.
I’m a bit skeptical he can pull it off, and I typically advise a “niche to win” strategy. However, One Public has worked with some huge clients including Chrysler, Samsung, NBC, and Digitas. We’ll have to wait and see if the enterprise sales can support the free products. But in the meantime, smaller businesses can use PageCentrex to get serious about social without spending much.
Interest-based social networking has always been around, but with the improvement in technology and the tools by which to network, the space has definitely accelerated over the last year. It makes sense: People want an easy way to connect with people who share similar interests. It makes it easier to connect with someone you don’t know when you already share common ground. Plus, it’s a great way to discover activities you’d enjoy, as the movement to connect our online communities with our real lives offline heats up.
Tribesports, a young, London-based startup, is attacking perhaps the most rabid of all those interest-based subgroups: Sports enthusiasts. The startup launched last year with the goal of motivating sports buffs to connect online to improve in their sport of choice offline.
To back up its beta launch, Tribesports raised $400K in June of last year. Today, the company is following up on its seed round with a $2.8 million series A round, led by a strategic investor as well as a group of international angels. The new financing brings the startup’s total to just over $3 million.
The round will be used to focus on core product development, user-growth and global expansion, as the startup is already seeing 30 percent of its network hailing from outside the U.K. The 14-person startup is headquartered in Silicon Roundabout, London’s tech center, and is focused on building the global sports social networking site of record — to harness the sports graph — to get people active and connecting offline.
Tribesports CEO & Co-founder Steve Reid says that the company is seeing some encouraging engagement from its community of users, with power users visiting the site over 200 times each month and spending as much as three full days each month using the service. Activation rates, he said, are also up 300 percent month-over-month in February, and Reid attributes the growing engagement to the fact that this is a vertical that has traditionally been underserved on the Web.
Like Facebook Groups, the platform’s users can join "Tribes" based on their favorite sports, location, playing position, and ability level, and either seeking advice and guidance from more seasoned athletes or connecting with people at their current level. Users can also take “Challenges” in personal fitness, organize events, or donate to the Challenges of others to incentivize their progress through JustGiving integration, tracking progress as they go.
Tribesports also has a product-side to its platform, part database, part aggregated shopping solution that allows users to search through over 1.5 million sports products from over 250 retailers to add the equipment they use to their personal profiles, or write reviews of the products, or place it on their wish list. The startup then takes a commission on all products sold through its website, supplementing commerce commissions by offering companies targeted sponsorship and advertising packages.
Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang sat down with investor Marc Andreessen today on Bloomberg West. When Chang asked Andreessen on whether he has any regrets about any of Andreessen Horowitz’s investments or what companies he wished he invested in, his one answer was mobile payments company Square.
He tells Chang in the video clip (towards the end): “The biggest one that we’re still kicking ourselves over is probably Square. I think Jack Dorsey is one of the most phenomenal founder-CEO’s in the industry and we probably made a huge mistake on that one when he first came in. We overthought the deal and we probably just should have said Jack Dorsey, check. And write the check. That’s probably the big one.”
Square has raised $168 million in funding from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Visa and a host of angel investors.
Andreessen also commented on all those Yahoo rumors (which he sort of shed light on back in December as well).
He told Chang: “We were invited along with Silver Lake…Silver Lake and my firm Andreessen Horowitz partnered on a proposal to Yahoo, we were invited in after Carol Bartz was fired by the board, to make a proposal on becoming involved as a private equity investor and as potential board members. We had a series of discussions with them but ultimately the company decide not to pursue that path. So, at least as of right now, there is no chance of that happening.”
We’ve embedded the interview below. It’s worth a watch.
In addition to partnering with large retailers, it looks like PayPal is going to be launching a set of payments offering for small businesses as well. We just received an invitation for an event PayPal is hosting next week, which will unveil what the payments company has in store for a solution for small businesses.
We’ve heard that similar to PayPal’s recently introduced in-store payments technology for big box retailers, the company is going to be launching a in-store payments system focused on smaller merchants. It’s unclear what this technology will look like, but we’ll find out more next Thursday.
It’s not surprising that PayPal is going after small businesses with an in-store solution. There’s a huge market in providing a payments platform for merchants, as evidenced by the growth and success of Square.
It should be interesting to see how similar PayPal’s small business solution is to its in-store platform designed for Home Depot, which is being rolled out nationally. With the Home Depot system, PayPal users are able to pay for items via their PayPal account at Home Depot's point of sale systems. They can either use a pin code via their mobile phone or a specialized PayPal credit card that can be swiped, the payment amount will be deducted from their PayPal account.
PayPal previously tried a test of using the online payments platform at small businesses back in 2009. The company launched a new version of its popular iPhone app that allowed users to find businesses near their immediate location that accept PayPal as a form of payment. The feature rolled out in San Francisco initially, but the initiative never really took off.
We’ll keep you updated on what PayPal has up its sleeve next week.
Instagram, the photo touch-up and sharing app, doesn’t make a penny in revenue from consumers, but it’s picking up users faster than you can click on a point-and-shoot camera, and the app is, well, just kind of great. Now, Instagram is poised to pick up another round of funding worth about $40 million, which will value the startup at $500 million, according to sources.
The WSJ, which was the first to report that the company was raising a new round of financing, says the new valuation is about 20 times what the company was worth a year ago, when it raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital, Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Instagram itself has not confirmed the new financing.
Instagram, a free app for the iPhone that lets users share their photos via Facebook, Twitter, email and various other networks — as well as its own Instagram network — has picked up 15 million users in two years.
And despite the fact there are other photo apps with filters, and that it is only available for the iPhone (and camera-equipped iPod Touch devices), it has become one of the more coveted of apps by users of other devices.
(More than once, I’ve heard people lament that one of the major setbacks of Windows Phone was that it lacked Instagram. It has similar apps, of course, but they’re not Instagram.)
For the record, Instagram says it is working on “making the iPhone experience as solid as possible” before moving on to Android, BlackBerry and all the rest.
That “experience” has varied quite a lot over the last year, with one update raising particular ire among users who felt that the new filters and new versions of old filters were worse than what Instagram had originally built (this was my favorite dissection). Over time, the app has added more functionality, and even in some cases reversed changes, and has continued to boom in the process.
While companies like Facebook have planned out pretty specific ideas of how they will make money in the future, if Instagram has a similar strategy, its founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have kept those cards pretty close to their chests. And that, according to the WSJ, has even made the new fundraising problematic, with some investors backing off because of the “immaturity” of the business model.
While paid services, in the form of filters, seems like one obvious direction for Instagram, another area might be around offering marketing services using the photosharing as part of bigger brand campaigns. That’s already being done on an informal basis by some brands that have their own Instagram accounts. But as the WSJ points out, other services like display advertising, daily deals or other location-based services may be more awkward fits.
The front page of the Internet, also known as the social news community reddit had seen its fair share of ups and downs over the years, but in September of last year, many in its community saw a silver lining when its owner, Conde Nast, spun it out as a standalone site, and recruited co-founder Alexis Ohanian to sit on its new board of directors.
As it so happens, when reddit became a (somewhat more) independent entity in September, it also launched a search for a CEO to lead the site to infinity and beyond. Today, reddit is finally announcing the hiring of (what I believe) is its first CEO, Yishan Wong. In a blog post to the reddit community today, Wong said of hearing of the hunt for a CEO:
I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t immediately cross my mind to imagine what it would be like to do that job. I’d left my previous company (Facebook) over a year ago and been doing random startup consulting ever since … So imagine my surprise when two days later, I was contacted asking if I was interested in talking about the position … At first, I didn’t really quite believe I was a serious candidate. It didn’t seem real, and I knew that I didn’t match the profile of what you might consider (or so I thought) a CEO candidate. I don’t have the polish and the poise and the schmoozing, and I don’t play golf.
The new CEO’s Facebook profile officially lists his name as Yishan “Sparklepants” Wong, so there’s little doubt that, in spite of his lacking proficiency at golf, he’ll fit right in at reddit. And while Wong may not have experience as a chief executive, Wong was formerly the Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he worked as an early employee from 2005 to 2010, helping to build Facebook’s engineering staff into the army it is today.
As was first reported by Kim-Mai Cutler on Inside Facebook (soon to be a TechCruncher), he was also an early employee at PayPal, starting at the company in 2001, prior to its acquisition by eBay, through 2005, when he joined Facebook. After leaving Facebook, as he says in his address to redditors, he has “been doing random startup consulting ever since.” Wong, as indicated in the headline is also an avid user of Quora, where he is known for offering some terrific, irreverent answers to the questions of the day.
As part of his new role as CEO, Wong reiterated that reddit has established a new board, including Ohanian, along with revamping its capital structure to allow the company “to manage its own finances and operations, including the ability to provide competitive equity compensation to its employees, which [it hasn't] been able to do in the past.”
Wong says that these moves were made so that the company can gain further flexibility and get full control over its resources, as it works to meet the demands of its growing user base. That being said, the new CEO is not looking to make sweeping changes to the community itself:
I’m not looking to step in and make “big, bold changes” – I think reddit is great, and the team has a lot of good features already in the pipeline to improve functionality for users and mods, help with subreddit discovery, improve the API, and help bring reddit to more people – so the primary goal for my first few months is to listen and try to learn as much as I can about the details of the product and the community.
Because of the way Apple structures its major announcements — iPad in the first quarter, WWDC and iPhone in the summer though perhaps with the iPhone, now it’s fall — the iPad event is a little weird, because it’s really only half an event. The first half is what happened yesterday — the unveiling of the new iPad. And the new stuff is mostly about hardware features. The Retina Display. The A5X. The new iSight. LTE. The Retina Display makes it purchase worthy alone, but the other specs Apple bragged about? Just specs. Moore’s Law at play. Talking about them always seem somewhat embarrassing for Apple, a holdover from the days when they used to talk about megahertz and were trying to convince consumers that Pentium chips sucked.
Even the software Apple showed is a little weird, conceptually. iPhoto certainly demoed impressively — but it’s also available on the iPad 2 and certainly doesn’t require you spending $500 on the new iPad. And if its release cycle is any indication, next year’s new new iPad will be a spit and polish update, like the iPad 2 was with the iPad 1.
But there’s a second half to the event, and it’s way more exciting than the first.
It happens in June at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
WWDC.
If past history is any guide, that’s when we’ll see the release of iOS 6.0. And, again, if past history is any guide, it’s going to be so much more important than the Retina Display or the A5X or any other hardware feature we can probably imagine.
2008 — iPhone OS 2.0: The introduction of the App Store. In 5 years, Apple would distribute billions of dollars to developers and help create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. They would change the way software is packaged, delivered and developed. The App Store is arguably the single most important part of the iOS concept, the keystone that locks everything Apple now does together.
2009 — iOS 3.0: The refinement year. Copy and paste. Turn-by-turn navigation. MMS. HTML5 support for Safari. It’s clear now that it was also the year that Apple was spending on getting the OS together for the iPad release in 2010.
2010 — iOS 4.0: Multitasking and third-party Backgrounding. It’s still too early to tell what’s going to happen with many of these, but Background Support is made it possible for the creation of buzzy new startups like Highlight and Glassmap. Persistent social networks like Highlight are just one example of how Backgrounding is leading to new types of businesses and apps. AirPlay, which was released later with iOS 4.2, is still not a fully baked idea yet. But it’s shaping up to be — along with the AppleTV and iCloud — Apple’s attempt at reinventing content in the living room.
2011 — iOS 5.0: iCloud. Another biggie. The one that Apple is betting its future on and is going to change the way millions of people deal with things that have been around forever, like file systems. “Apple has its feet firmly planted in the post-PC future,” Tim Cook said yesterday, and that’s only possible because of iCloud. Oh, and they also introduced iMessage, which is causing the carriers a bit of agita over the prospect of losing the usurious fees they’ve charged for texting. Oh, and there’s Newsstand, which could help save print journalism. Oh, and that’s when Apple granted Twitter Most Favored Nation status, which probably sent some shivers among the hoodied at everyone’s favorite social network.
2012 — iOS 6.0: Let the guessing begin.
There’s no real equivalent to snuck-out panel displays feverishly studied under a microscope looking for extra pixels that we can turn to for iOS leaks. But there were was one bread crumb that may lead somewhere: Apple’s no longer using Google Maps data in their iPhoto app. Does that mean that Google Maps data is no longer going to be driving iOS’s Maps app? It seems increasingly likely and that Phil Schiller used Vimeo to demo LTE instead of YouTube was just another tweak in the Plex’s nose.
But my money is that the bulk of iOS 6.0 is going to be on tightening and refining iCloud. A 2009 year. We’ve seen some of that already with the Mountain Lion preview. That Apple is moving OS X to the same yearly release schedule as iOS is further proof of that. iCloud is still far from being finished but it’s the glue that is going to hold everything Apple now does together.
The disappointment people feel about the new iPad is not surprising. It’s even understandable. That rumored haptic feedback system did sound pretty cool. Of course we want to be amazed every year. But the revolution already happened. It femented during the years before the iPad was released. That was when Apple tinkered with the screen size, the OS, the very concept of what a post-PC device is. The first shot was fired when Steve Jobs sat down on Le Corbusier chair, crossed his legs and slid-to-unlock. And we didn’t know it then, but it succeeded on April 3, 2010 when the original iPad went on sale.
Now, we see Apple trying to perfect the iPad. It’s not even close to the Platonic ideal they imagined it to be. And the stuff that’s going to shake the ground, like the App Store and iCloud? That’s got nothing to do with how the iPad looks or how many CPU cores it has.
It’s not that specs aren’t important. With all consumer devices, the sum is more than the whole of their parts. But specs are tactical decisions in order to execute a larger strategy. Let me ask you this: what were the specs of your computer when you first fired up a web browser? What was ultimately important about that experience?
“We’re talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center of the digital world, but is just another device.” Cook again. And we’re going to get important details about how that world is going to be built in three short months.
Because of the way Apple structures their major announcements — iPad in the first quarter, WWDC and iPhone in the summer though perhaps with the iPhone, now it’s fall — the iPad event is a little weird, because it’s really only half an event. The first half is what happened yesterday — the unveiling of the new iPad. And the new stuff is mostly about hardware features. The Retina Display. The A5X. The new iSight. LTE. The Retina Display makes it purchase worthy alone, but the other specs Apple bragged about? Just specs. Moore’s Law at play. Talking about them always seem somewhat embarrassing for Apple, a holdover from the days when they used to talk about megahertz and were trying to convince consumers that Pentium chips sucked.
Even the software they showed is a little weird, conceptually. iPhoto certainly demoed impressively — but it’s also available on the iPad 2 and certainly doesn’t require you spending $500 on the new iPad. And if their release cycle is any indication, next year’s new new iPad will be a spit and polish update, like the iPad 2 was with the iPad 1.
But there’s a second half to the event, and it’s way more exciting than the first.
It happens in June at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
WWDC.
If past history is any guide, that’s when we’ll see the release of iOS 6.0. And, again, if past history is any guide, it’s going to be so much more important than the Retina Display or the A5X or any other hardware feature we can probably imagine.
2008 — iPhone OS 2.0: The introduction of the App Store. In 5 years, Apple would distribute billions of dollars to developers and help create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. They would change the way software is packaged, delivered and developed. The App Store is arguably the single most important part of the iOS concept, the keystone that locks everything Apple now does together.
2009 — iOS 3.0: The refinement year. Copy and paste. Turn-by-turn navigation. MMS. HTML5 support for Safari. It’s clear now that it was also the year that Apple was spending on getting the OS together for the iPad release in 2010.
2010 — iOS 4.0: Multitasking and third-party Backgrounding. It’s still too early to tell what’s going to happen with many of these, but Background Support is made it possible for the creation of buzzy new startups like Highlight and Glassmap. Persistent social networks like Highlight are just one example of how Backgrounding is leading to new types of businesses and apps. AirPlay, which was released later with iOS 4.2, is still not a fully baked idea yet. But it’s shaping up to be — along with the AppleTV and iCloud — Apple’s attempt at reinventing content in the living room.
2011 — iOS 5.0: iCloud. Another biggie. The one that Apple is betting its future on and is going to change the way millions of people deal with things that have been around forever, like file systems. “Apple has its feet firmly planted in the post-PC future,” Tim Cook said yesterday, and that’s only possible because of iCloud. Oh, and they also introduced iMessage, which is causing the carriers a bit of agita over the prospect of losing the usurious fees they’ve charged for texting. Oh, and there’s Newsstand, which could help save print journalism. Oh, and that’s when Apple granted Twitter Most Favored Nation status, which probably sent some shivers among the hoodied at everyone’s favorite social network.
2012 — iOS 6.0: Let the guessing begin.
There’s not any real equivalent to snuck-out panel displays feverishly studied under a microscope looking for extra pixels that we can turn to for iOS leaks. But there were was one bread crumb that may lead somewhere: Apple’s no longer using Google Maps data in their iPhoto app. Does that mean that Google Maps data is no longer going to be driving iOS’s Maps app? It seems increasingly likely and that Phil Schiller used Vimeo to demo LTE instead of YouTube was just another tweak in the Plex’s nose.
But my money is that the bulk of iOS 6.0 is going to be on tightening and refining iCloud. A 2009 year. We’ve seen some of that already with the Mountain Lion preview. That Apple is moving OS X to the same yearly release schedule as iOS is further proof of that. iCloud is still far from being finished but it’s the glue that is going to hold everything Apple now does together.
The disappointment people feel about the new iPad is not surprising. It’s even understandable. That rumored haptic feedback system did sound pretty cool. Of course we want to be amazed every year. But the revolution already happened. It femented during the years before the iPad was released. That was when Apple tinkered with the screen size, the OS, the very concept of what a post-PC device is. The first shot was fired when Steve Jobs sat down on Le Corbusier chair, crossed his legs and slid-to-unlock. And we didn’t know it then, but it succeeded on April 3, 2010 when the original iPad went on sale.
Now, we see Apple trying to perfect the iPad. It’s not even close to the Platonic ideal they imagined it to be. And the stuff that’s going to shake the ground, like the App Store and iCloud? That’s got nothing to do with how the iPad looks or how many CPU cores it has.
It’s not that specs aren’t important. With all consumer devices, the sum is more than the whole of their parts. But specs are tactical decisions in order to execute a larger strategy. Let me ask you this: what were the specs of your computer when you first fired up a web browser? What was ultimately important about that experience?
“We’re talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center of the digital world, but is just another device.” Cook again. And we’re going to get important details about how that world is going to be built in three short months.
Yet another talent acquisition by Facebook: the social network is taking on the team behind GazeHawk, a two-year-old Y Combinator startup that uses a computer’s webcam to track eye movements and then plot them on a heatmap.
But unlike past occasions when Facebook has bought companies for the people and shut down the services they built up (one notable recent case being Gowalla), in this case the product and technology built up by the team is being left behind.
“GazeHawk has developed a best-of-class technology that does not exist anywhere else, and is committed to seeing it continue to provide benefits to others. The team welcomes suggestions and thoughts on potential options at team@gazehawk.com,” the two founders, Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, write in a post announcing the Facebook deal.
The news raises questions of what, exactly, Facebook might do with that know-how. It might not be exactly the eye-tracking techniques pioneered at GazeHawk, but given that Facebook is effectively rethinking what is being done on the web with advertising and marketing — how it is measured, delivered and consumed — the idea of putting in a team working at the the cutting edge of how to track the third of these makes perfect sense.
The two note in their post that Facebook had been “impressed with our ability to build out a powerful technology and platform,”
Yet another talent acquisition by Facebook: the social network is taking on the team behind GazeHawk, a two-year-old Y Combinator startup that uses a computer’s webcam to track eye movements and then plot them on a heatmap.
But unlike past occasions when Facebook has bought companies for the people behind them and subsequently shut down the services they built up (a notable recent case being Gowalla), in this case the product and technology are being left behind.
“GazeHawk has developed a best-of-class technology that does not exist anywhere else, and is committed to seeing it continue to provide benefits to others. The team welcomes suggestions and thoughts on potential options at team@gazehawk.com,” the two founders, Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, write in a post announcing the Facebook deal.
That technology is the kind of thing sold on to web designers and potentially could be very useful not only in figuring out the best way of laying out a page of information, but for more commercial ends, to track how ads and other units are taken in by users.
The deal raises questions of what, exactly, Facebook might do with Krausz’s, Gershenson’s and the rest of their small team’s know-how. The two do not really elaborate on this, writing only in their post that Facebook had been “impressed with our ability to build out a powerful technology and platform.”
So it might not be exactly the eye-tracking techniques pioneered at GazeHawk that we will see appear at Facebook, but given that the company is effectively rethinking what is being done on the web with advertising and marketing — how it is measured, delivered and consumed — the idea of putting in a team working at the the cutting edge of how to track the third of these makes perfect sense.
Las Vegas-based startup Tracky has spent the last year, heads-down, building a social collaboration platform that aims to bridge the gap between your personal and professional networks. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from a few Canadian super angels, Vortaloptics, and family and friends.
The startup will be debuting in private beta at SXSW, where it will be showing off a product that is part Dropbox, part BaseCamp, Wonderlist and Chater. In other words, Tracky is offering a platform that offers collaboration between groups, people and project discovery, secure online chat, group task management, and quick access to cloud-based documents.
From that description, the startup will no doubt have its work cut out for it with no shortage of enterprising startups looking to tackle the same space. What Tracky does have going for it is the ability to help both individuals and companies organize their to-do’s, work projects, and social connections in a single dashboard.
The startup is obviously trying to offer the same kind of all-in-one solution that Producteev has become known for — one that both works for busy freelancers who want to organize their lives, or startups managing their teams — and picks and chooses from the most popular tools in the productivity and collaboration space, like to-dos, shared calendars, live chat, task management, file sharing, community building, etc.
The basis of Tracky, as one might assume, are “Tracks,” which the team describes as “tweets for do-ers,” or in other words short blurbs of information that others can comment or act upon. Users can store anything in a Track, whether it’s a quote they want to share with friends or co-workers, or a task that needs to get done. These Tracks live in a livestream, where users can click on any track icon to get details on deadlines, attachments, with individual tracks being color-coded by priority. Sounds a lot like Yammer doesn’t it?
Users can also specify which team members they want to allow to view tracks or projects, giving them as much or as little visibility as the occasion demands. On top of that, Tracky throws in drag-and-drop calendar, a point system that keeps track of task completions (for an element of gamification), milestone tracking, cloud storage and syncing, along with the ability to search for old tracks by group name, keyword, tag, date, etc.
Tracky is also tomorrow releasing an app for iOS that allows users to access, creae, and check off tracks while on the go, access groups, people you’re following, leave messages, and find local groups.
To the startup’s credit, they’ve packed a lot into their platform, and there’s a lot here that will be familiar to users of enterprise collaboration and productivity tools — too many to name. Wonderlist, Asana, Do.com, and Basecamp all come to mind as potential competitors, but Tracky Founder and CEO David Gosse says that he thinks the startup’s ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, along with being able to work privately but post information publicly will be a leg-up for the service, allowing it to become a marketing and communication tool when you want it to be.
Public tracks enable people to come in an actually engage with the content creators, while private tracks remain unseen. While others in the space use the term “social collaboration” to describe their products, the CEO says, they really only allow users to communicate with the other people in their company. Tracky wants to facilitate more open collaboration so that users can brak out an communicate with anyone on the platform, whether for business, project management, or to plan a road trip.
That all being said, obviously in this game it’s all about being cross-platform and offering a UI that is simple, user-friendly, mixed with those collaboration and task management features that just work. No easy feat, and although the startup looks like they’re off to a great start, and with its unlimited plan pricing at $5 and a free iOS app there’s not much of an expense barrier. The startup certainly has a long road ahead, with plenty of competition to boot, but there’s plenty of room if they can do groups and public/private right.
For readers interested in checking out Tracky in action, the startup is providing 50 free beta invite codes, which you can redeem by using “TCROCKS” on its homepage.
You can find Tracky at home here. What do you think, readers, do you like what they’re cooking?
Digital couponing startup SavingStar has been on a roll. The company launched in beta in August 2010 behind $2.3 million in financing from Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital, and Founder Collective, with participation from angel investors like Ron Conway.
The investment led to a name change (SaveWave to SavingStar), which was followed up with an official launch in April of last year, backed by a $7 million series B round from its existing investors, before adding Buddy Media Founder and CEO Michael Lazerow to its Board of Directors in June.
Then, in December, SavingStar crossed another milestone, announcing that it has surpassed 1 million active users in exactly 230 days, an achievement which its founders were quick to note that it accomplished faster than bigs like Groupon, Twitter (over 2 years), or Foursquare (just over a year). It now has over 1.5 million active users. Why? Well, because the startup is really the only national, fully digital grocery savings service, with its service in more than than 110 grocery store and pharmacy chains across the country. Plus, since launching, over 150 brands (like Tropicana, Huggies, Cambell's etc.) have been offering deals on SavingStar, with savings up to 50 percent off.
Today, the funding continues for SavingStar, as it announced that it has raised $9 million in series C financing. The round was led by venture capital firm, DCM, with contributions from previous investors Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital, IA Ventures, Michael Lazerow, founder of Loyalty Management Group Sir Keith Mills.
The new infusion of capital brings the startup’s total investment to just under $19 million, and the team says that it will be using its latest financing to grow its user base, bring new retailers into the network, and chase down more brands.
In its effort to rid the world of paper coupons, SavingStar enables shoppers to save money on groceries by linking special offers found on SavingStar.com, or its iPhone and Android apps, to their grocery and drug store loyalty cards. For consumers, SavingStar is free, all they need to do is register their loyalty cards, so that when items are purchased using their cards, the value of each is deposited as savings on their SavingStar account. Once users accumulate more than $5 in savings, they can cash out, deposit the money into PayPal or their bank account, receive an Amazon gift card, or make a donation to charity.
For brands, SavingStar gives them access to its 1.5 million users, allowing them to promote their products for free, only charging them when one of their items is actually purchased. Brands can also get universal product code data from retailers in the startup’s network.
SavingStar is also announcing a new promotional service called “One or Many” that enables brands to serve shoppers with rewards for multiple purchases of their products over one (or many) grocery runs. Brands like Pepsi, Quaker, Kellogg’s have launched “One or Many” campaigns on their Facebook pages to let shoppers get cash back for purchasing multiple items.
NationBuilder, a SaaS platform that allows political candidates and organizations to build a sleek website in minutes that supports fundraising efforts, a blog, volunteer outreach, payment processing, calendars and more; has raised $6.25 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Sean Parker, Chris Hughes, Dave Morin, Dustin Moskovitz, Scott Marlette, Pejman Nozad, Mike Volpi, SV Angel, Sam Lessin, Justin Shaffer, Kevin Colleran, Greg Waldorf, and Nihal Mehta participating in the round. NationBuilder also announced that Co-founder Joe Green has taken on the role of President and that Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Horowitz and Parker have joined its Board of Directors.
NationBuilder allows non-techies to create a branded website, blog as well as import contact lists and send email blasts directly from the site. In terms of social media, NationBuilder allows you to integrate multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and Tweet and Facebook Message from these accounts. Even the ability to send mass text messages is fully baked into the platform.
The platform also includes a finances dashboard that will track the number of donors, average donation per supporter, amount raised in the day, the month, the year, the primary to the entire election cycle. Users can set a goal for the amount of money to raise or number of donors and a prominent thermometer displays the progress to your supporters. And NationBuilder hooks directly into Authorize.net, PayFlow Pro, and other payment processors.
Other features include event management with ticketing, volunteer organization, maps, calendars and uch more. It is essentially a one stop shop for creating a website for a political campaign. Pricing ranges from $19 per month. Email and text blasts are extra and the startup allows users to try out the platform for free for two weeks.
The startup has gained significant traction since its launch last year. NationBuilder has helped over 1800 leaders organize more than 500 nations with 2 million supporters, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Newt Gingrich's New Hampshire primary campaign used NationBuilder for grassroots organization earlier this year.
And it’s not just political campaigns that are flocking to the site. People have used the platform to rally support around films, mobilize volunteers for education reform and more. For example, political consultant Brian McGuigan used the platform to create a nation for School Choice Week, which organizes hundreds of events across the country to encourage choice for educational environments (public school, charter, magnet, virtual, etc.).
NationBuilder was founded by Jim Gilliam, a documentary film producer who also has significant web experience. He helped launch Business.com as its Chief Technology Officer, and worked at Lycos back in the day. Gilliam founded NationBuilder as a passion project and quickly realized the need for an inexpensive, easy to use platform to help political candidates (and nonprofits) build a presence on the web. Designing a service that is specifically meant to organize people is still a complicated process and requires a tech team and thousands of dollars. Gilliam wanted to democratize this.
As mentioned above, Joe Green, co-founder of Causes, a popular Facebook application, and one of largest online and social platforms for activism, is joining as co-founder and president (check out this video of Green from last year’s f8). Gilliam is remaining as co-founder and CEO of he company. As Green explains to us, NationBuilder is already making major changes in community organization and local politics.
"Grassroots organizing tends to be most available to big campaigns, but it's actually most useful to small ones," Green says. "You can't win a presidential campaign without going on TV, but you can win a local election simply by organizing your community. NationBuilder levels the playing field."
“NationBuilder is that rarest of products that not only has the potential to change its market, but to change the world,” said Ben Horowitz, general partner and co-founder at Andreessen Horowitz. “Jim Gilliam is the perfect CEO to make that happen.” Read more about NationBuilder on Ben's blog today.
I spoke with Horowitz about why the firm invested and he said that the Gilliam’s expertise and vision for community organizing made him an ideal entrepreneur to invest in. “He understands the problem politicians and organizations face better than anyone in the world and is also a great computer scientist,” says Horowitz.
He added that when the firm did reference checks on how the software was performing, they saw that people were actually winning elections because of NationBuilder. And he believes that the platform can expand across many verticals for community organization. In the end, he says that NationBuilder exemplified one of the core theses for AH’s newest fund, Fund III, which is software that is transforming industries.
The new funding will be used for marketing and sales as well a for hiring organizers to contact local candidates and organizations to use NationBuilder.
The timing for NationBuilder to ramp out marketing is right. As campaign season heats up, NationBuilder will undoubtedly help serve organizations and local politicians manage everything from fundraising to community outreach. But after speaking to Green and Gilliam, it’s clear that the startup has a broader gal of helping anyone and everyone manage community outreach and grassroots communication. Clearly investors are betting on this as well.
Ten years ago, I worked with TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare on a real-time video conferencing startup called Santa Cruz Networks. Like all the other real-time video startups back then, Santa Cruz Networks failed because the market wasn’t ready for live online video communications. But ten years is equivalent to several centuries in web history, and today, real-time video communications is not only becoming increasingly ubiquitous, but might also be offering startup entrepreneurs tremendous new business opportunities.
One entrepreneur that Keith and I worked with back in 2001 was the longtime Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur Bernard Moon. And the impressively persistent Moon is back now with another stab at the lucrative real-time video market. His new company, Vidquik - a self-funded ($500,000), six-person startup that plans to go live sometime in Q2 – offers a web conferencing and sales solution platform for online businesses. It’s a way for people to better engage with their clients, Moon explained to me when he came into our San Francisco studio, before adding that 80% of people now prefer video to textual online interaction.
So is Moon right – are video solutions like Vidquik about to become the new norm for online customer service?
The online kids clothing exchange thredUP is shutting down its clothes swapping service. But wait! Don’t panic, moms! (And dads, too, if you’re all 50/50 about the child-rearing duties. Haven’t met one of those yet, but I hear they exist). The good news is that thredUP itself is not shutting down, it’s just focusing on the more successful area of its business: its newly launched kids consignment platform.
For those unfamiliar with thredUP, the site was founded back in 2009 with the goal of making it easier for parents to clean out the unwanted, outgrown clothes from their kids’ closets. In mid-2010, the company raised $1.4 million in funding for the platform, which involved having parents exchange boxes of used clothes directly with each other – transactions which were facilitated through thredUP’s service.
Since then, the company has been steadily growing, with 500+ new customers per day joining the site. To date, 2 million items have been exchanged, the company tells us.
But thredUP thought it could do better. So last month, it launched two new, resale-style services, a like-new kids clothing store and a kids clothing recycling service. During this pre-launch period, 40,000 items were "cleaned out" and 2,000 store items were purchased the first week the services were live. 6,000 items were purchased within the first month.
Based on this early engagement data, thredUP decide to shift its time and resources into these new areas, and is today launching a new version of thredUP and a revamped website.
There are two key services being provided now: the concierge (clean out kids clothes service) and the online shop. With concierge, thredUP actually mails you a courtesy bag which you can fill with outgrown clothes and then ship back, free of charge. ThredUP will pay you 20%-30% of the clothes’ value. You can take the payments in the form of cash (via PayPal), or, as thredUP hopes, you’ll choose to use it in the online shop.
The store features like-new clothes starting at $2.49 (with free shipping at $30+). The company photographs the clothes so you know what you’re getting, and vets them for quality.
In my own personal tests with thredUP, my complaints were few. You can really stuff that bag, and if you have a nice enough mail carrier, you don’t even have to worry with dropping it at UPS. Some of the clothes I sent in were rejected for stains and wear-and-tear, and they were some of the cleanest I had. So I believe them when they say they’re pretty serious about the quality of their clothes. However, it unfortunate then, that there isn’t a way to now get rid of these lesser-quality clothes, especially since there are age ranges and brands that thredUP rejects.
I wouldn’t even mind paying cheaper prices for a grab bag of those “rejected” hand-me-downs given that’s what most of my kid’s clothes already are – hand-me-downs. But I guess there’s always Goodwill for that. ThredUP is classier now.
The journey to SXSW continues. Yesterday, we watched as a busload of entrepreneurs began a multi-city roadtrip to the South by Southwest Interactive conference where they will debut the startups they form on this four-day excursion. The StartupBus left its San Francisco/Silicon Valley base at 6 am on Tuesday, heading south as the entrepreneurs got to know each other.
On Day 2 of the trip, the teams are hard at work on their products. Ideas brewing as the bus rolls along include: Cerealize, a service that lets you create and customize your own healthy cereals and boxes, Expensiev, a receipt-management system that brings paper receipts into the cloud, and Jeli.co, a location-based plotting tool for storytelling within communities.
Of course, all work and no play would make for dull entrepreneurs, so wait for the end of the video to see the “buspreneurs” letting loose a bit, and taking a break from the bus at Gangplank, a collaborative workspace in Chandler, Ariz.
This leg of the journey covers Las Cruces, New Mexico to San Antonio, Texas. The next stop will be at Rackspace, and TechCrunchTV will have more updates on the StartupBus teams until they make it to Austin on Friday. Keep watching!
The journey to SXSW continues. Yesterday, we watched as a busload of entrepreneurs began a multi-city roadtrip to the South by Southwest Interactive conference where they will debut the startups they form on this four-day excursion. The StartupBus left its San Francisco/Silicon Valley base at 6 am on Tuesday, heading south as the entrepreneurs got to know each other.
On Day 2 of the trip, the teams are hard at work on their products. Ideas brewing as the bus rolls along include: Cerealize, a service that lets you create and customize your own healthy cereals and boxes, Expensiev, a receipt-management system that brings paper receipts into the cloud, and Jeli.co, a location-based plotting tool for storytelling within communities.
Of course, all work and no play would make for dull entrepreneurs, so wait for the end of the video to see the “buspreneurs” letting loose a bit, and taking a break from the bus at Gangplank, a collaborative workspace in Chandler, Ariz.
This leg of the journey covers Indio, California to Las Cruces, New Mexico. The next stop will be at Rackspace in San Antonio, and TechCrunchTV will have more updates on the StartupBus teams until they make it to Austin on Friday. Keep watching!
Android users finally have a way to show up their iPhone-toting, Siri-using counterparts. With Sonalight Text by Voice, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, you can perform entirely hands-free texting. And by hands-free, I mean you don’t have to push a button, tap the screen, or perform any other actions that would require you to take your hands off the wheel. Yes, that’s right – Sonalight is perfect for texting while driving.
The app originally made its debut back in October, but through the course of the YC program, the team made a lot of improvements to the technology on the back-end. The lastest version (ver. 3), introduced in February, brings several enhancements, making it worth another look, had you used it before with mixed results.
“Our product has come along way…it used to not work very well at all,” Sonalight co-founder Spenser Skates admits. “We’ve improved our product tremendously, along both the voice recognition backend and the user interface,” he says.
While the focus for now is making texting-by-voice easier, the company’s goal is to really re-think how we can use speech to better interact with our devices.
“Touch interfaces before Apple came out with the iPhone were not very good to use,” says Skates, who founded the company alongside Curtis Liu. “It’s like people had taken point-and-click interfaces and moved them over to tablets and other things. We see speech the same way,” he says. “It’s not very natural for people to use.”
For example, the state-of-the-art text by voice system in the Android OS today involves a number of steps: unlocking the phone, launching the messaging app, choosing the contact, tapping in the text field and then tapping the voice icon. Only then does voice come into play.
Siri, while a bit better, still involves picking the phone up and pressing a button.
Sonalight, on the other hand, works completely hands-free. The app does have to be launched initially, but then it just runs in the background, ready for activation. The keyword trigger to kick it into action is “text by voice.”
Amazingly, the trick even works when the phone is just sitting there, its screen black, and sleeping. Say “text by voice” and it wakes up, asking “who do you want to text?” Give it a name, and it prompts you through the rest of the task, no tapping or touching involved.
The app also allows you to set an autoresponder for texts and will automatically read texts received to you, so you can respond by voice.
In tests, the voice recognition aspects were fairly good, at least on par with Siri, if not better. (Siri never gets me. Your mileage may vary.) The app uses a combination of Google’s built-in speech recognition libraries and open source technology, and only seemed to stumble with proper names within texts, like “Jill” for “Joel,” for example. Overall, though, a good experience. And good enough to make this iPhone user just a little jealous.
There is a trade-off, however. Apps running in the background can drain battery life, and this is an area where Sonalight is attempting to make improvements now. But further down the road, the plan is to move the technology into other verticals.
“We wanted to nail [texting] first,” says Skates. “Once we make the experience good there, we’ll move into other things like email, navigation, maps, and looking up stuff in Yelp, or whatever.” Sounds a bit Siri-like?
Perhaps, but those move will have to wait for a bit. The company wants to focus on doing one thing right first: texting.
“We see a lot of people doing voice apps. They try to do everything, but they end up doing a very poor job,” Skates explains.
Sonalight, which has been used to send over 350,000 text message to date and has over 40,000 downloads on Android, is now available for free from the Android Market…err…Google Play here.
A new study by online sharing tool Shareaholic has found that Pinterest now drives more referral traffic than Twitter. Again, when it comes to referral traffic, Pinterest > Twitter.
The data is based on analytics from 200,000 publishers which reach approximately 270 million unique visitors a month.
Now, it was big news back in February when Pinterest surpassed Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined in referral traffic, but Twitter has made a name for itself as the de facto sharing network with URL shorteners abounding and real-time, concise flow of information.
Still, Pinterest closed the gap within the last month going from a .85 percent share of referral traffic visits to 1.05 percent from January to February. The social pinboard site is now trailing behind Facebook and StumbleUpon. And remember, Pinterest is still invite only.
Eager to put their privacy issues behind them, Path CEO Dave Morin has just pulled back the curtains on their new Path 2.1 update at an event in San Francisco, and it's already shaping up to be a doozy.
Morin notes that photographs make up the lion's share of 100 million+ moments shared through Path, and to make them more memorable, the 2.1 update includes enhanced focus/exposure controls, a new Pow! Lens to imbue your shots with some comic book flair, and tweaks to their existing set of lenses. Sorry Android fans, most of these camera updates are iOS-only for now.
Music Match functionality is also onboard, which gives users the Shazam-esque ability to recognize and share exactly what tunes they're listening to. To make this happen, Path has teamed up with GraceNote in order to provide music recognition functionality directly within the app.
Fitness buffs may also appreciate the fact that Path 2.1 plays nice with the Nike+ fitness platform. Runs logged in the Nike+ GPS app can be shared with Path followers (if you're brave enough — no one needs to see my pathetic runs) who can cheer people on from within Path itself. The 2.1 update also packs support for the newly-released Fuelband fitness tracking gizmo, though how exactly it interprets metrics like Nike’s FuelPoints is still unclear. Android users really can’t catch a break, as this too is iOS-only functionality.
Of course, for Nike to pull off such fitness-friendly sharing wizardry requires a little help from Path, and to that end Morin has announced that an official API that they're currently being very selective with. So far, Nike is the only other company with access to it, and Morin hopes to keep things rather restrained for right now — access to the API will be tightly controlled right now, though it will eventually be made available to the public.
Nike strikes me as a thoughtful choice for a first partner though — Sarah at PandoDaily points out that CEO Morin and head Jawboner Hosain Rahman are apparently buddies, but Nike brings some hefty brand power to the table and could give Path some extra staying power.
The 2.1 update is already live in the App Store, but I have a feeling the ceaseless sharers among you have already pulled the trigger.
Since its launch in 2007, DocStoc has been primarily known for being the place to go to find and share professional documents. Yet, earlier this month, Docstoc went beyond just providing bundles of premium pro documents to producing its very own articles and videos on how to build and run a successful business. In doing so, it launched four iPad apps, Sales Techniques and Training Secrets, Adwords and SEO Secrets, HR & Employment Management Advice, etc. While those may not exactly light your hair on fire, all essential parts of running a small business.
And today it seems that Docstoc is further committed to becoming a resource for small businesses, as it’s launching License123, a research service that aims to help both existing and new businesses discover the permits and licenses they need to be compliant with local, state, and federal law.
As any business owner knows, your business isn’t getting far from inception without the proper licenses and permits — all collectively critical for the majority of businesses, regardless of jurisdiction. Some businesses may require as few as one or two licenses and registrations, but most require three to five permits and licenses to legally operate (and you do want to legally operate, don’t you?), state selling permits or business tax registrations are pretty much always required, and on and on.
And thus Docstoc brings License123 into the world, as it looks to provide small business owners and entrepreneurs with reports that identify their required licenses, along with which licenses are optional, and what the fees are that will be associated with said applications and licenses. Docstoc wants to provide users with all the information they will need to complete and file their applications to stay fully compliant.
Because there’s no central database that lists all the applicable forms that SMBs will need to operate, most waste way too much time dealing with government agencies and tracing down the right permits. The average business spends $1,000 in penalties and could lose tens of thousands in revenues for failing to have the proper licenses, says Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar.
With entrepreneurs and business owners struggling to find the right licensing and permit information due to an infrastructure that’s pretty much broken, License123 purports to be the first resource of its kind that aims to save SMBs time and money with customized reports that help them get on top of all those pesky mandatory and optional federal, state, county, and city permits and licenses.
In many jurisdictions, Nazar said, even simple home-based businesses require permits for operation, and businesses like contractors, eldercare services, food-related businesses, commercial and personal transportation, financial and auto repair businesses all have hefty license and permit requirements. Thus, License123 provides a certainly niche but important service for enterpreneurs and small business owners to allow them to become compliant on their own, rather than having to call on the help of attorneys or accountants to get it done.
Today Zaarly is launching version 2.0 of its “reverse Craigslist,” where people can ask for everything from a beer to help with data entry. The biggest change is that the buying and selling process is no longer anonymous. Instead, users can now create profiles on the site, and they decide when to expose them — either when they first post a request or when the transaction is about to take place. Users can now also review and recommend each other.
Co-founder and CEO Bo Fishback says the reputation system was developed after looking at what works and doesn’t work on dating sites like OKCupid. He admits that this is pretty much an about-face compared to Zaarly’s initial approach to identity. However, he says the company decided to listen to its service providers, who kept telling Zaarly that they want the buyers to know who they are.
“I was actually a really really staunch believer in anonymity in marketplaces,” Fishback says. “Technically, that’s right, it’s the correct way to work. Emotionally, it’s wrong” — people just want to know who they’re doing business with.
Zaarly also has a new recommendation engine, which actually suggests tasks that you can ask for. After all, what I want probably changes depending on where I am, and what service providers can offer will probably change, too. The recommendation engine can take advantage of events in real-time, too — so if you’re at South by Southwest and it starts to rain, Zaarly could recommend that you ask someone to bring you an umbrella.
I also asked Fishback about how Zaarly’s approach differs from one of the other hot startups right now — namely, TaskRabbit. He points out that Zaarly isn’t just about tasks, but also includes goods and experiences, and that 85 percent of its usage is mobile.
Since its “real” launch in May, Zaarly was pushing constant updates to its app — until last fall, when Fishback realized that the team had enough big ideas to save them up for a big launch for its first birthday. So happy birthday, Zaarly.
Many of us have been confused over the past 24 hours about what exactly is happening with the new iPad data plans. First AT&T said it would offer 2GB for $30 instead of 3GB, and one of Verizon’s plans was missing altogether from the site. It was kind of a mess.
But we’ve finally got things nailed down for you so this is the deal:
AT&T is offering three plans: 250MB for $14.99, 3GB for $30, and 5GB for $50. On the 250MB plan, you’ll be charged an additional $15 for each 250MB allotment you go over. On the two bigger plans, it’s a $10 overage fee per each additional 1GB of data.
Verizon is offering four different plans: 1GB for $20, 2GB for $30, 5GB for $50, and 10GB for $80. Their overage fees are a little more straightforward — it’s an extra $10 for each 1GB over.
It was also unclear what was happening on the tethering front but it looks like AT&T and Verizon have both offered up some answers. While Verizon will be offering iPad tethering at no additional cost, AT&T has issued the following statement: “We are working with Apple to enable this feature in the future, but we currently do not offer it.”
Editor’s Note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil
This week’s "In the Studio" installment welcomes a guest who has spent time as a video game development tester, a communications engineer at one of the world’s foremost design firms, and a builder who has noodled on scores of projects up until abou a year ago, when he and his colleagues have created a product that may just have the lift to breakthrough.
You may have called it “IFTTT” or “If This Then That.” As I recently learned, it’s simply “ifttt” (pronounced “iffed” and in all lowercase letters).
Linden Tibbets, the founder of ifttt, opened the company’s beta back in December 2010 after coming up with the idea for the service. Since that launch, ifttt has picked up steam among users, engendering a surprising amount of excitement for what on the surface appears to be such a dead-simple an nerdy product. Tibbets, who genuinely seems blown away by the positive response, goes to lengths to explain that today’s version of the product is still far from complete — that this is just the beginning. Their overarching goal is to continue to push for more simplicity in their design and to make users experience the power in being able to control the connection between things or services. Tibbets will go so far as to say he wants ifttt to be as useful and straightforward as the Google search page is.
Back in December 2011, I wrote a short piece in TechCrunch about the service and was amazed by the response. Search for “ifttt” on twitter and you’ll see tons of tweets about people sharing new “recipes” and recommending the service to their followers. Since then, the company has raised a round of seed funding and has added engineers and designers to keep up with all the requests for new triggers, channels, and tasks.
In this short video, Tibbets offers fascinating insights into the product, going into detail about how his time at IDEO provided the knowledge base for the idea, as well as his own thinking around how humans innately create hacks in real life to make things easier, things that are so simple we may never notice them ourselves. Something as simple as using a cell phone as a paperweight during a windy day, for instance. The result of all of his project noodling and education is ifttt, and as he explains, seems to empower the user with the sense that they can control the web a little bit. Tibbets also explains the thinking behind the product’s playful vernacular, including my favorite “recipes,” though he warns that he wants the flexibility to change them as the product evolves. (My hope is that the language stays!)
For now, ifttt has made some difficult or mundane tasks a lot of fun, and now with the wind behind them, the next challenge is to create even more simple interfaces to get more people to use the service. In my own use of ifttt, I’ve found that it does in fact help me control the information around me, as well as automating a bunch of small tasks that save time and ensure that I don’t miss important things. When you hear Tibbets talk about it, you can see that this product is actually part of an evolution of thinking about human problems. Additionally, like many other builders who seem to stumble upon a hit, Tibbets has actually been building products and hacks for a really long time. ifttt isn’t just a random occurrence; it’s the cumulative effect of what Tibbets has been focusing on for years.
What a long, strange trip it’s been. As Microsoft throws their considerable weight behind the Windows Phone platform, they’re running out of love for their still-kicking Windows Mobile OS, and today they’ve driven another nail into its coffin. According to a new email being circulated to users as I write this, the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace will officially shut down on May 9.
The move to kill the Windows Mobile Marketplace has been in the works for a while now — it began back in June 2011, when Microsoft announced that Windows Mobile users would no longer be able to download apps from the Marketplace website.
Fortunately, apps could still be downloaded directly to a user’s device though that functionality will soon go dark. Microsoft advises WinMo users (all 9 of you, really) to make sure to snag whatever updates you can, because you’ll be out of luck before long. It’s worth mentioning though that while Microsoft is pulling the plug on the Marketplace, there’s still no shortage of communities dedicated to pushing out new (and dare I say cool) apps to the aging OS.
I doubt that the news will break many hearts today, but Windows Mobile was an important stepping stone in the evolution of the mobile operating system. It tried (perhaps too hard) to bring translate the standard PC experience to a different kind of device, and while Microsoft ultimately tried to revamp it with Windows Mobile 6.5, the dual onslaught of iOS and Android meant it was already fighting a losing battle at that point.
Of course, Windows Mobile isn’t completely dead and buried yet. You’ll probably find more than a few WinMo-devices support your local big box store’s stock system, and a nifty mod lets you run Windows Mobile within Windows Phone — a bit of Winception, if you will.
Here’s the full email, just in case you want to save it for posterity:
Oblong Industries just announced a Series B funding round led by The Foundry Group. Together with Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners and Energy Technology Ventures (a GE-NRG Energy-ConocoPhillips venture) Oblong Industries is looking to further the development of its groundbreaking computing systems. That’s not hyperbole either. MG spent some time with the company last summer and walked away very impressed.
The Foundry Group, already an Oblong investor, led the new funding round with the two new partners. Financial details of the round were not released. When MG last reported on Oblong last summer, it already had positive cash flow for a year thanks to partnerships with companies for its boardroom collaboration platform, Mezzanine. They hadn’t raised money since a Series A back in 2007 and still developed what is, quite possibly, one of the most impressive forms of computing to date.
"We founded Oblong because we want to make computers better, smarter, and easier to use. We’re proud of the multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device spatial operating environment we’re supplying to partners like Boeing, SAP, and GE Digital Energy. And we look forward to taking that platform to broader markets in 2012." indicated Kwindla Hultman Kramer, Oblong's Chief Executive Officer, in a statement today.
The new funding will be used partially to help with product development and commercialization. The company notes in the announcement that GE Digital Energy recently licensed Oblong’s technology for use in its Smart Grid analytics software. The funding will be used in part to help properly scale existing products to meet such demands.
Oblong Industries’ Chief Science Officer is the man who advised the filmmakers behind Steven Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Report. MG notes in his hands-on with Mezzanine that “it just works” and indicated that Mezzanine’s remote is like a Wiimote but “much more accurate and insanely more functional.” Hand gesture recognition is developed but is still too expensive to implement — but soon you could be flying through a computer UI like Tom Cruise.
Here’s the video MG shot last summer. Welcome to the future.
Oblong Industries just announced a series B funding round led by The Foundry Group. Together with Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners and Energy Technology Ventures (a GE-NRG Energy-ConocoPhillips venture) Oblong Industries is looking to further the development of its groundbreaking computing systems. That’s not a hyperbole either. MG spent sometime with the company last summer and walked away very impressed.
The Foundry Group, already an Oblong investor, led the new funding round with the two new partners. Financial details of the round were not released. When MG last reported on Oblong lost summer, it already had positive cash flow for a year thanks to partnerships with companies for its boardroom collaboration platform, Mezzanine. They hadn’t raised money since a Series A back in 2007 and still developed what is, quiet possibly, one of the most impressive forms of computing to date.
"We founded Oblong because we want to make computers better, smarter, and easier to use. We’re proud of the multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device spatial operating environment we’re supplying to partners like Boeing, SAP, and GE Digital Energy. And we look forward to taking that platform to broader markets in 2012." indicated Kwindla Hultman Kramer, Oblong's Chief Executive Officer, in a statement today.
The new funding will be used partially to help with product development and commercialization. The company notes in the announcement that GE Digital Energy recently licensed Oblong’s technology for use in its Smart Grid analytics software. The funding will be used in part to help properly scale existing products to meet such demands.
Oblong Industries’ Chief Science Officer is the man who advised the filmmakers behind Steve Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Report. MG notes in his hands-on with Mezzanine that “it just works” and indicated that Mezzanie’s remote is like a Wiimote but “much more accurate and insanely more functional.” Hand gesture recognition is developed but is still too expensive to implement — but soon you could potentially be flying through a computer UI like Tom Cruise.
Here’s the video MG shot last summer. Welcome to the future.
I often wonder what it’s like to be a customer service representative on Twitter. Lots of companies have them, especially the ones we cover here on TechCrunch which happen to be a bit more tech-savvy than your good ol’ brick-and-mortar small businesses, but it seems like a pretty rough gig. People become shockingly more bold, and angry, via Twitter and it takes a full-time worker to field all complaints and questions that flow in.
Luckily, TweetAngel is here to fix that problem. It’s a Twitter monitoring service that helps small businesses, particularly brick-and-mortar shops, better navigate the overwhelming world of Twitter. Here’s how it works:
Whenever a Tweeter posts something negative about a business covered by TweetAngel, a TweetAngel representative calls up the business owner. Yep, a real phone call. Then, depending on which TweetAngel plan the business has chosen, the business owner can respond to the Tweet directly or dictate a response to a TweetAngel rep, who will then respond to the disgruntled tweet using the business’s Twitter account.
Obviously there are plenty of different social CRM offerings out on the market, but TweetAngel aims to serve those who don’t have the skills, time, or resources to monitor a social media account. That said, getting set up on TweetAngel is pretty straight forward.
Simply sign-up here, and you’re ready to go. Pricing is as follows: Basic service (monitoring without response) costs $19.95 per month. Complete service (monitoring and responses) costs $29.95 per month.
Disclosure: Roi Carthy, a TechCrunch Contributor for the past 4 years, is an investor in TweetAngel via Initial Capital, where he's a Managing Partner.
Stealthy startup Newvem is debuting today with new SaaS based service for Amazon/AWS customers that aims to help businesses spend less money and gain more value from Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Basically, the free app is built for Business Managers, IT Managers and Dev Ops to "get to know" their clouds, so they can better see what resources are being used and not used.
Cloud spending can be expensive and Newvem wants to help users pinpoint where to optimize their resource usage and budget consumption. Integrated with AWS, Newvem tracks down-to-the-minute resource usage, learns the behavior of every resource, and identifies service level variations and life-cycle events.
In the futuure, Newvem will continuously and automatically gathers numerous streams of cloud operational data, analyzes and learns the usage patterns, automatically detecting potential problems, pinpointing anomalies, and identifying trends in cloud deployment. Basically, the startup analyzes all of this data from a multitude of sources and recommends where you can allocate or not allocate resources to optimize spending. Nevvem calls their approach “analytics-driven cloud management.”
The simplified app launching today, in private beta, will scan a user's AWS account, and show you idle instances. Newvem will analyze and determine whether a user's environment is working to expectation from a cost, availability and security perspective and detect and notify where and where it is not up to par. You can apply to use the app here.
Newvem was founded by Zev Laderman, who has sold two IT companies, including Aduva to Sun Mocrosystems and Tradeum to VerticalNet; and Ilan Naslavsky; a former Lead Engineer at Sun.
Public broadcasters are the latest group to get in on funding promising tech startups in their earliest stages: today sees the launch of the Public Media Accelerator, an incubator that’s looking for startups focused on innovation in public media, with $2.5 million in funding from the Public Radio Exchange and the Knight Foundation.
To kick things off, the group picked a key person to help: its new director is Corey Ford (pictured), who will be leaving his role leading Runway, the incubator division of Eric Schmidt’s early investment group, Innovation Ventures.
And in a sense, this is a return to public media roots for Ford: one of his past roles before joining Schmidt’s outfit was as a producer for the PBS show Frontline.
Jake Shapiro, the executive director of the Public Radio Exchange, tells TechCrunch that Ford already doing the rounds with him this week at SXSW, but he will formally be starting in his role in April. It is not clear who will be replacing him at the Runway project that he was heading up but Ford is ensuring a “smooth transition.”
Shapiro says that the new fund will typically be awarding seed grants with the amounts ranging along the lines of those at other accelerators — so with funds in the region of $20,000-$50,000, with mentoring included. The new fund models itself, it says, on other public service early-stage investment efforts like Code for America for government startups and RockHealth for health care startups.
The first recipients are to be announced this summer, with funding decisions led by Ford, with probable input also from the Public Radio Exchange and the Knight Foundation. He says the Public Media Accelerator itself will be run “like a lean startup.”
So what are they looking for? Although the Public Radio Exchange is one of the chief backers, Shapiro says that this doesn’t mean that the innovation has to be focused on that field, or even broadcast more generally: it’s much more about startups that are doing things that might lend themselves to the kinds of services that public media organizations are investing in already.
“It's focused around public service media and the idea of mission-driven output,” he says, although he also acknowledges that “users don’t really make a distinction between public media and private media content,” so in effect that could mean the funding is open to anyone with a good new media idea.
The public media sector in the U.S. is regularly under the threat of budget cuts — some times more than others — and that is probably one of the main fires driving the creation of this fund — for more potential self-sufficiency.
But on the other hand public media has actually been pretty good at trying to keep up with the times, whether that has been in the form of launching apps to access radio services or exploring ways of watching PBS content digitally. This latest project hopes to take that to a new level.
This may be the first time that the Public Radio Exchange has waded into the world of startup funding, but the Knight Foundation has been launching other investment programs, too. At the end of February, it launched the first stage of its News Challenge project — offering startups investments from a $5 million pot for good ideas that innovate on the idea news. They’re leaving it intentionally vague as to what that could mean and are asking for people to apply via a Tumblr page.
It seems like everyone and their mother are looking to roll out their own LTE networks these days: Verizon and AT&T continue to build theirs out, Sprint is busy laying the groundwork (possibly without LightSquared's help), and MetroPCS and U.S. Cellular are offering LTE on a more local scale.
Now an even smaller operator is looking to join the fray — C Spire Wireless (formerly known as Cellular South) aims to light up LTE service in September 2012. The only catch is that you'll have to be in Mississippi to use it.
C Spire seems to be taking things nice and easy for right now, as their LTE network is expected to go live in 20 markets throughout Mississippi, though there's no word yet on their plans beyond the Magnolia State. As the eighth-largest wireless provider in the country, their wireless purview only includes Mississippi, Alabama, and parts of Tennessee and Florida, so here's hoping for a quick and painless process for their customers.
I'll admit, it may seem a bit weird for such a small company to sink money into an LTE buildout, but I doubt that customers will have much room to complain. A quick look at Verizon and AT&T’s coverage maps proves that there’s no other LTE to be had in the state, save for a small pocket of Verizon high speed data in Mississippi’s northeast corner.
Even less is known about what kind of hardware C Spire customers will have access to, though I don't feel particularly bad for them: they're the only ones who can score an iPhone 4S on contract for $150.
After buying Zvents, StubHub has acquiredPeekspy, a technology company that produces 3D technology that allows users to drill down to the seat level when choosing their seat for an event. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Peekspy's site, Fanvenues, gives users a 3d view into sports and concert venues to make a more informed purchase about tickets. You can hover over a ticket group within a venue to highlight the section on the map and display a 3D view, which users can actually see their vantage point of the stage, court etc from.
Peepsky's team will be moving from Singapore to San Francisco. eBay acquired StubHub back in 2007 for $310 million.
After buying Zvents, StubHub has acquiredPeekspy, a technology company that produces 3D technology that allow users to drill down to the seat level when choosing their seat for an event. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Peekspy's site, Fanvenues, gives users a 3d view into sports and concert venues to make a more informed purchase about tickets. You can hover over a ticket group within a venue to highlight the section on the map and display a 3d view. Users can actually see their view of the stage, court etc. from the view.
Peepsky's team will be moving from Singapore to San Francisco. eBay acquired StubHub back in 2007 for $310 million.
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — turned what @dannysullivan called a minor upgrade into a major landmark event. Not that Danny agreed with him, but @scobleizer thinks the new iPad will soon make flying an exercise in screen jealousy as millions upgrade when they land. @jtaschek was too busy signing me up for a new one to disagree. I call it iPad as a Service.
The new iPad comes with two peripherals — a new cover and Apple TV 1080P. Hard to tell what else has changed in the hardware, but the stealth news is that Netflix is now an Apple partner. That means the realignment around AirPlay as the hub of the Apple information bus is now in full swing. From Garageband to iPhoto to iMovie, the new wave of iOS apps will now be back ported to the Mac, not the other way around.
Appealing to power users and Twitter loyalists, Facebook today lets users start creating and subscribing to “Interest Lists”. You can view updates from these collections of Pages and public figures in a dedicated news feed. They’ll be discoverable through suggestions of popular list and those created by friends.
Rolling out over the next few weeks, Interest Lists could give users enough curation ability to follow friends, brands, and thought leaders in the same interface. The release continues Facebook’s battle to usurp Twitter’s control of the interest graph. The feature combined with Subscribe could be good enough to jeopardize Twitter’s long term growth.
Accessed through the home page’s left navigation sidebar, Interest Lists can be clicked to switch to a view entirely comprised of stories from a list’s members — Pages and public updates from users with Subscribe enabled. Only the creator can edit a list, and they can select to make it private, or set it as public so it will appear in Facebook’s list recommendations to others.
For example, there’s general lists created by Facebook such as business, sports, and style, but also specific lists the NFL Teams of teams, athletes, and sports news outlets, and 2012 Presidential Candidates of campaign Pages, candidate profiles, and political news.
When creating new lists, a wizard helps users pick from their Liked Pages, subscriptions, friends, and members of categories like Art, Entertainment, and Games.
Unfortunately, you’ll also see the most popular stories from lists you’ve subscribed in your primary news feed, which you can click through as portal to your lists. However, this will prevent users from adding lists they might only want to check occasionally without polluting their main news feed. I find it very useful to be able subscribe to a niche Twitter list without effecting my feed, and Facebook should considering switching to this functionality or making it an option.
Facebook calls the feature “a new way to keep up with the stuff you care about and tidy up your experience…Interest Lists can help you turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper.” So in addition to targeting Twitter users, the feature could also be aimed at pulling share away from Flipboard, and news aggregators like News.me.
While it may be late to the game, Facebook’s enormous user base gives it an advantage over Twitter in the war for the Interest Graph. Many Facebook users who might have one day been convinced to join Twitter could find that Subscribe and Interest Lists are sufficient.
The entire Yobongo team, including co-founders Caleb Elston and David Kasper, will be moving to Mixbook’s new Palo Alto office, where they’ll be spearheading the efforts to build a mobile app for the photobook- and calendar-printing service. The companies aren’t disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but Elston tells me that it was a mix of cash and stock, and that Yobongo’s investors (who include Mitch Kapor, Dave Morin, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Karl Jacob, Bill Roux, Shervin Pishevar, Freestyle Capital, and True Ventures) are now investors in Mixbook.
Elston makes it sound like he, his team, and his investors are all pretty happy with the deal, but there’s a downside — the Yobongo app itself will be disappearing. It will be pulled from the App Store today, and it will shut down completely in a month or two. Elston admits that he’s “very sad” to be abandoning a product he’s been working on for more than a year, but he says he wanted the team to be working a project where they have “the most leverage possible.”
“The landscape’s changed dramatically,” Elston says. “Every one of the South by Southwest darlings last year has beenacquired. For us to be an independent player in a group messaging space where you have to be everywhere is a steeper curve than we anticipated.”
Elston (who was also the vice president of product at Justin.tv) and some of his team members have an existing connection to Mixbook — they used to work at Scrapblog, which the larger company acquired.
And while you may not have heard about Mixbook (after all, its core audience isn’t serious techies and early adopters), Elston says he was impressed by the company’s numbers. For one thing, it has shipped 10 million Mixbook products. He’s also excited about the possibility of reinventing that experience for mobile devices. The goal, he says, is to create an app that makes it easier than ever to transform your photos into a book — and also into a high-quality digital viewing experience, so it can reach a broader group of friends and family.
“Mixbook’s customers are not geeks — they’re moms, they’re sisters, they’re daughters, they’re husbands who are building things for their families,” Elston says. “They don’t care about the technology at all, and I love that. We can just make the experience be what it should be.”
Songkick – which allows users to follow music artists, their live music events and book tickets – has raised a $10 million B round of financing from Sequoia Capital. This is Sequoia's first ever investment in a UK headquartered start-up. The round takes Songkick’s total funding to date to around the $17 million mark. Previous backers include YCombinator, SoftTech, The Accelerator Group and Index Ventures. Sequoia’s Greg McAdoo joins the board.
The news is interesting because it’s evidence of a general drift of US firms to look abroad for more capital efficient companies outside of the increasingly high costs of Silicon Valley. Sequoia and General Atlantic have both invested in Klarna out of Sweden. Union Square and Kleiner Perkins have invested in Soundcloud, based in Berlin.
Songkick has five million unique users on its site every month month, and is now the second largest concert site after Ticketmaster. They’ve also signed distribution partnerships with a great roster, including Yahoo, YouTube, Foursquare, Spotify, Vevo, MTV and Soundcloud. An integration with Spotify is no doubt turning out very well, and the rumour is they are about to announce amazing new numbers on that front.
It’s also an important moment for the scrappy startup which was founded in an attic in 2007 by Ian Hogarth, Michelle You and Pete Smith as an early YCombinator company. It became one of the original anchor startups in London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ area, in the East of the city, which is now being promoted externally as “Tech City” by the UK government. They’ve also done wonders for the area, promoting Silicon Milkroundabout, but are now expanding with a San Francisco office.
Songkick lists over 100,000 upcoming concerts, has indexed well over 2 million gigs with reviews, set lists, videos and photographs. “When someone starts using Songkick, they go to almost twice as many gigs the year after,” says Ian Hogarth.
Initially funded by the Y Combinator seed fund Last year it raised another $2 million and launched an iPhone app which got 100,000 downloads in its first two weeks. It’s also been hiring out of Google.
Something tells me there’ll be a few drinks sunk in Bar Music Hall tonight.
Crowdsourced news platform NewsiT.net just announced that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding. And, timed to match the beginning of South by Southwest, it’s also launching its iPhone app.
The company was founded by longtime journalist Melinda Wittstock, who has worked for the Times of London, BBC Television, the Guardian, the Observer, ABC News, National Public Radio, and MSNBC/CNBC. Wittstock says she wanted to reinvent the newsgathering and publishing model after attending “too many conferences with a lot of moaning and not a lot of solutions.”
This is hardly the first experiment with crowdsourced journalism. (Here’s a story that combines two examples — last fall, Spot.us, which uses crowdfunding to support investigative journalism, was acquired by American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, which helps newsrooms collect crowdsourced data.) But Wittstock says NewsiT was built around an important insight: “Every other user-generated content type play that we’ve seen over time expects regular folks to be journalists — and we don’t.”
So the startup doesn’t expect any of its members to create a complete news report on their own. Instead, it breaks a story up into manageable tasks, then assigns multiple members to each task. Members are rewarded with points and badges for both contributing and reading.
For example, the site is currently working on a story about the effect of digital media on politics. To participate, members can answer some basic questions, like whether they trust mainstream media or friends and social networks more as a source of political information. Or they can get more involved, by actually interviewing a panelist at SXSW about their opinions.
Eventually, someone from the NewsiT editorial team will take on those contributions and combine them into a polished article. Wittstock says NewsiT is also developing algorithms to help it find the patterns in user submissions, identifying answers that might be inaccurate — or perhaps a big scoop.
Naturally, the iPhone app creates new opportunities for gathering news while users are away from their desks. As the example above suggests, NewsiT will be taking advantage of its new mobility by creating a number SXSW-specific tasks.
And while Wittstock is looking into licensing the company’s technology to others, she doesn’t just want to be a technology provider to other organizations. NewsiT is a site for news gathering and news consumption, and it offers rewards for both. (That applies to the app, too.)
Investors include Sandra D. Kresch, president of PSD International and managing director of Golden Seeds, and P. Chrisman Iribe, CFO of Scaleform Corporation and former president and COO of PG&E.
Apple was surely riding high after the announcement of their new iPad yesterday, but that doesn’t mean that everything is OK in CA if a Wall Street Journal report holds true.
According to "people familiar with the matter," Apple along with HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan are on the verge of being slapped with a Department of Justice lawsuit that alleges them of colluding to raise e-book prices.
At the heart of the DoJ's beef with these publishers is their adoption of Apple's agency book-selling model, under which publishers can set e-book prices on their own, but surrender a 30% cut from each sale to Apple. It's no wonder then that these publishers would jump onboard — a presence in the iBookstore means they've got access to a ridiculous number of iOS devices, and can charge as much as they like in an effort to offset their payouts to Apple.
The industry’s talking heads have been more than a little outspoken about the pricing model shift. According to American Bookseller Association CEO Oren Teicher "the agency model is in the best interest of not only the book industry, but the consuming public as well.” I beg to differ Mr. Teicher — I can see how the book industry would love being able to charge whatever they want for their books, but I don’t see how you can frame higher costs for e-books as a boon for customers.
Anyway.
Rivals like Amazon have been feeling the heat for over a year because of the agency model adoption. Given their long life as a book retailer, Amazon sticks to a wholesale pricing model, under which they can purchase the rights to sell an e-book and determine their own selling price. While this choice (and the ensuing slate of $9.99 bestsellers) generated love among consumers, it has caused them to scuffle with publishers who think their digital editions are undervalued.
The five publishers reportedly involved in the suit are big players in the book industry, but at least one major publisher seems to have dodged the bullet here. Random House announced their intentions to switch to the agency model for their e-books at the end of February, but I wonder if that decision will stick now that the model faces legal scrutiny.
So what's the end-game scenario here? If the Department of Justice gets their way, then cheaper e-books for you and me are on the horizon, though how exactly that sort of pricing shift could happen is still up in the air. The publishers in question are scrambling to come up with a solution that allows them to dodge legal heat while still raking in revenue. Among the ideas currently being floated is the possibility of sticking to the agency model but allowing certain retailers to offer discounts. Negotiations have apparently been going on for a while, and we’ll keep you posted if anything actually comes of them.
Stamped, the NYC-based startup founded by ex-Googlers, is rolling out an update to its social recommendations app today with a focus on improving local discovery. Specifically, Stamped has overhauled the app’s map interface with the addition of a search box and slider for switching between views.
The company has also teamed up with The Austin Chronicle for SXSW, whose branded account will “stamp” their favorite restaurants around Austin.
The mobile app, for those unfamiliar, launched back in November, to help simplify the ratings and reviews process by making it super simple to recommend anything – a restaurant, bar, nightclub, etc., or even real-life items like a book, album, movie or app. Instead of using 5-star ratings, you just “stamp” something if you like it. Adding notes and photos are completely optional.
With today’s update (ver. 1.1), the app’s map feature has been refreshed, and now includes a slider at the bottom. Here, you can slide between views that show just your stamps, stamps from you and your friends, stamps from friends of friends, and the most popular stamps for the area.
Also added is a much needed search box that lets you filter the types of stamps you’re seeing. So, for example, you could type in “pizza” to narrow down the selections.
While the map update is the big news, Stamped co-founder Robby Stein tells us that there are a few other minor enhancements being shipped today, too, including an improvement to the suggested users’ feature. Now, Stamped will be able to recommend people you should follow based on your stamps. The app will tell you why it’s making these recommendations, too.
The suggestions will indicate which friends you have in common and which tastes you share, for example.
In addition, SXSW goers will now see recommended restaurants around Austin, courtesy of The Austin Chronicle. This isn’t the only brand partnership for Stamped, we should note. The company previously established partnerships with New York Magazine as well as with notable individuals like Mario Batali, Michael Kors, Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, and others. And they’re close to adding more partnerships with other brands and public figures, Stein says.
Although the company is too young to feel comfortable talking metrics, they are announcing they’ve reached 100,000 stamps across their worldwide audience, with the majority of ratings, surprisingly, found outside of location-based venues (restaurants, bars, etc.). A lot of the activity in the app has been on rating movies and TV shows, apparently.
The updated iPhone app should be out in the iTunes App Store today. (If not now, then very shortly after this post.) You can grab a copy of Stamped from here.
When it comes to daily deals and loyalty programs, local merchants are constantly bombarded with new options. Groupon has leapt ahead in daily deals, and there quite a few players in the loyalty program space, all trying various approaches to mobile, to rewarding influencers, to encouraging social engagement, gamification, and more.
Generally speaking, local merchants, whether they be restaurants or retailers, want to keep it simple: If they choose to offer discounts or deals, they want to be able to set the terms, upsell, encourage repeat visitors, and track the ROI of their campaigns — doing so in a way that results in as little friction as possible for customers.
New York-based Social Passport is taking a different approach to the problem by creating a social loyalty tool that leverages both NFC and QR codes to allow customers to interact with their favorite businesses in realtime and receive discounts, and, in turn, gives businesses access to a wider audience of potential customers through their users’ social media channels.
Launching in October of last year — and shortly thereafter winning the “best startup” award at Web 2.0 in New York City — Social Passport allows businesses to easily post NFC tags or QR codes in their store, which users can then interact with to unlock rewards, deals, and discounts. For example, a customer might enter a store in which a merchant has posted a QR code; the user scans the code with Social Passport, which then displays a range of prompts being offered by the merchant. Those might ask the user to check in to the app on Foursquare, post their location to Facebook, or follow or tweet their reaction on Twitter.
After doing so, the user would unlock a reward pre-established by the business under their own terms, whether that be a 30 percent discount on burritos or a buy one, get one free deal for socks. On the other side, business owners get their own dashboard through Social Passport, through which they can set their deals, and view analytics, like how many scans they performed, how many people they reached on social media spaces, or how many people clicked on a respective message, for example.
And today, Social Passport is launching a feature called “More Friends, More Savings,” which enables businesses to reward their customers proportionally, meaning that they can offer greater savings to those users who have substantially larger social media footprints. For example, a user who has 50 followers on Twitter or 75 friends on Facebook could would receive a 20 percent discount, while someone with 700 on each might receive a 35 percent discount.
The big attraction here for merchants is that they’re able to add that extra layer of security, giving themselves an added layer of protection against customers who might, say, create social media accounts just to check-in (in other words, people who are trying to game the system).
Social Passport has already been deployed by 115 businesses in New York City (the service will be expanding to other cities later this year), with in additional 50 businesses having signed up. With the startup’s new feature in place, users can now simply download the startup’s iPhone or Android app and instantly begin “liking,” following, and checking-in at their favorite businesses, receiving deals tailored to them based on their interaction with the business on social media in accordance with their social footprint. Meanwhile, businesses are able to take advantage of the viral potential of a few positive words from influential users and reward them accordingly.
Even if a user doesn’t have a NFC-enabled device, they can use both QR codes and Reverse QR, the latter of which allows users to display their own and have merchants scan them, with both enabling customers to perform the same social media functions — while scoring a few deals.
Social Passport founder and CEO David Merel says that he thinks merchants are tired of the solutions that simply reward people who are already in the store, and instead want more efficient ways of driving new customers into their stores, while taking advantage of social media influence. Thus, the team has designed a platform that is flexible and provides a big value-add for these businesses, offering businesses their own QR and NFC stickers, complimentary signs to advertise to users in store windows, and its own punchcard feature, which Merel says is similar to that of PunchTab.
The startup has raised $400K in seed financing from private and angel investors, and Merel says that the team plans to begin rolling out its API in the near future.
Curious how Rovio planned on dealing with physics in the forthcoming Angry Birds Space? I have been, too. If we presume that Rovio is playing by the physical laws of space, a lack of gravity fundamentally changes the game. But apparently, that’s the point.
Rovio took us to the international space station, courtesy of the video below of course, to show us a little bit about how the new version of the game will work. An astronaut, Don Pettit, did a little demo flinging a plush red bird in a zero gravity environment. It should go without saying, but that little red bird flew straighter than an arrow through the space station.
“We’re seeing all of this in a weightless environment, which is what Angry Birds Space will look like, with gravitational fields from planetary bodies,” said Pettit.
But then we got to the really cool part: the first time any of us have seen Angry Birds Space in action. And boy, does it look awesome. Those planetary bodies he mentioned pull the bird in, and change the course of the trajectory. And if you’re paying close enough attention you’ll notice that some of our favorite birds, Big Red and Yellow, have changed outfits. Big Red is now Big Green, and Yellow is now swathed in a lovely shade of purple.
It’s worth considering the meaning behind Angry Birds switching things up so drastically. All three versions of the game — Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Angry Birds Seasons — have gone on to be monstrously successful. But are people getting bored?
Angry Birds Space will be significantly more challenging than previous versions of the game, and after years of success not fixing what isn’t broken, I think we can all agree a refresh is in order.
Eric Schmidt-backed receipt tracking service Slice is bringing its handy, organizational platform to Android devices.
Slice offers Yahoo Mail, Gmail and iPhone apps that help you organize your online shopping by analyzing your inbox. It's sort of like what TripIt does for your itineraries, except Slice tracks receipts, notices and purchases.
Once you sign up, the app automatically aggregates and pulls information from the electronic receipts in your email and organizes it in one place. The startup says that receipts and purchases often gets lost in your inbox and the app consolidates your shopping history in one place so you don't have to log into multiple websites, dig through receipts or manually file emails. Slice for the iPhone gives you access to all this information on the go.
With the launch of the Android app, users will also be able to view and organize purchases made using Google Wallet. The app will track all your in-progress shipments on a single map as they make their way to your front door, with detailed information about the contents of the package and where it is coming from. Push notifications let you know when a purchase has shipped and when it gets delivered.
Slice will also give you historical purchase details beyond what's provided in your credit card statement, showing you exactly what you bought down to the individual item, not just where you bought it.
Since launching in May of 2010, Slice has processed more than 10 million purchases. Slice faces competition from Lemon.
There are a few use cases for hot background location app Highlight, cofounder Paul Davison explains to me when showing off the latest update. You just met someone and you want them to find out more about you. You want to note that someone is particularly interesting for future reference. And, you want to see which friends are nearby, or have recently left.
The app is getting upgrades today that should make it more useful in all of these situations.
The first is a particularly smart new addition, also called, er, Highlight. Click on any user profile, and you simply click the button and you’ll add the person to a saved list of contacts. It’s asymmetrical. They don’t have to Highlight you back. But, while any user can see who you’ve Highlighted, this isn’t a numbers game like Twitter follower counts. It’s more like a public poke, or a bookmark — a way for your friends to see that you’ve noted that someone is interesting.
Saved Highlights appear in a new left-hand navigation menu, so you can check their profiles (but not their locations) later on. Davison also says that the system will look at who you Highlight to find other similar people who are nearby.
The second addition builds on the first, by using existing social relationships to turn Highlighted people into long-term connections. You can now follow a link from users’ Highlight profiles to see the original version back on Facebook. There, you can friend or subscribe to them. If the user is on Twitter, they can also now update their Highlight profile to include their handle, and you can take a link to follow them on the microblogging service, too.
I recently speculated about the ability for Highlight to help users share contact info via an address book sync of some sort, but this is a more elegant solution.
For the third use case, the app has subtly changed how it displays location times. If someone is currently nearby, the time-stamp will just say “now.” Otherwise, it will say how many minutes ago they left the vicinity, and they’ll drop down into the history list of formerly nearby folks. This should further help connections between proximate users.
Users will also notice lots more spit and polish. The left-hand navigation bar also includes a button to pause Highlight in case you’re getting too many notifications or want to conserve battery life. The main interface includes a search feature where you can comb through your entire location history to find people who have at some point been nearby.
The overall sense you get is of an app that’s incrementally moving towards a big strategic goal. A lot of the other background location apps feel like they’re still trying to find a market fit, and adding and subtracting features in the hope that they’ll somehow get it right. Instead, Highlight is on the second iteration of becoming the way you discover friends and new people around you, layered on top of the real world connections you already have.
There are a few use cases for using hot background location app Highlight, cofounder Paul Davison explains to me. You just met someone and you want them to find out more about you. You want to note that someone is particularly interesting for future reference. And, you want to see which friends are nearby, or have recently left.
The app is getting a set of updates today that should make it more useful in all of these situations.
The first is a particularly smart new addition, also called, er, Highlight. Click on any user profile, and you simply click the button and you’ll add the person to a saved list of contacts. It’s asymmetrical. They don’t have to Highlight you back. But, while any user can see who you’ve Highlighted, this isn’t a numbers game like Twitter follower counts. It’s more like a public poke, or a bookmark — a way for your friends to see that you’ve noted that someone is interesting.
Saved Highlights appear in a new left-hand navigation menu, so you can check their profiles (but not their locations) later on. Davison also says that the system will look at who you Highlight to find other similar people who are nearby.
The second addition builds on the first, by using existing social relationships to turn Highlighted people into long-term connections. You can now follow a link from users’ Highlight profiles to see the original version back on Facebook. There, you can friend or subscribe to them. If the user is on Twitter, they can also now update their Highlight profile to include their handle, and you can take a link to follow them on the microblogging service, too.
I recently speculated about the ability for Highlight to help users share contact info via an address book sync of some sort, but this is a more elegant solution.
For the third use case, the app has subtly changed how it displays location times. If someone is currently nearby, the time-stamp will just say “now.” Otherwise, it will say how many minutes ago they left the vicinity, and they’ll drop down into the history list of formerly nearby folks. This should further help connections between proximate users.
Users will also notice lots more spit and polish. The left-hand navigation bar also includes a button to pause Highlight in case you’re getting too many notifications or want to conserve battery life. The main interface includes a search feature where you can comb through your entire location history to find people who have at some point been nearby.
The overall sense you get is of an app that’s incrementally moving towards a big strategic goal. A lot of the other background location apps feel like they’re still trying to find a market fit, and adding and subtracting features in the hope that they’ll somehow get it right. Instead, Highlight is on the second iteration of becoming the way you discover friends and new people around you, layered on top of the real world connections you already have.
