[ { "id": 1, "authors": "Drew Olanoff", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "OK, I’m old. You’re probably feeling old. Let’s get that out of the way. Done.\nThe NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) turns 30 today, as it was officially launched in North American on October 18th, 1985 to a limited portion of the US. I mean, where do we start on how amazing the NES was, and still is? I’ve got one in my closet complete with the Duck Hunt gun.\n\nThe most memorable game is Super Mario Bros. It changed everything. I used to have friends over and we’d play for hours trying to beat it. We weren’t competing, we were in it together. It wasn’t about the graphics or the people who made the game, it was all about the gameplay. It was as immersive an experience as I’ve ever had, even to this day. Forget VR, forget AR, the original Nintendo’s gameplay just…grabbed you:\n\nI can beat the first level with my eyes closed, that’s how many times I’ve played it. At this point, it’s embedded in my brain and I can pull it off like a well-choreographed ballet.\nI used to stand in line at my local Erol’s (which turned into Blockbuster) to rent Double Dragon. I’m not sure why we didn’t just buy it, because I rented it so much I could have gotten 10 copies instead. It didn’t matter, though. The excitement of grabbing it and literally running home to play it is a memory that I’ll never forget.\nAlso, when I think about the NES, the unique, but kinda the same, opening screens stuck with me. I can remember so many of them, but here’s one that might give you the feels:\n\nPlus, all of the quirks that came along with the aging system didn’t matter. I didn’t care how many times I had to slam the top of the NES, blow in the game cartridge or quick-flicker it on and off to actually work.\n\n\nThe NES was, and is, ours as a generation. Happy Birthday, NES…I can’t wait to show you off to my kids. Even Xbox superfan Major Nelson loves you dearly:\nI’m sure you have plenty of your own NES memories, so fire them at us on Twitter or Facebook.", "date": "10/18/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2817906964_0a6c40d805_b.jpg?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "video-games,nintendo,nes,mario-bros", "title": "The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Turns 30", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/18/denim-denim-denim/" }, { "id": 2, "authors": "Jonathan Shieber", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Commercializing a new tool to bring the basic eye exam into the palm of a doctor’s hand could save the eyesight of nearly 1 billion people worldwide.\nThat’s the goal that Zhou Yaopeng and Marc Albanese, two former photonics researchers who met at Boston University nearly a decade ago, have set for themselves and for their two-year-old startup, Smart Vision Labs.\nThe company has just raised $6.1 million in its first major round of institutional funding from a group of investors led by Techstars Ventures. Other investors in the round included Heritage Group, Connectivity Capital, and Red Sea Ventures.\nSmart Vision’s device, the SVOne, is based on initial research that Zhou and Albanese conducted while at BU. It’s a piece of hardware that attaches to an iPhone to provide mobile vision exams. Traditional devices, which measure what’s called wavefront aberrometry, can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000. Smart Vision Labs’ co-founders say they’ve managed to drive the cost down to $3,950.\nBeyond the fact that Smart Vision is working to solve a problem that can improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world, the technology is impressive in that it opens up yet more avenues for mobile devices.\nEveryone talks about the phenomenal computing power available in mobile devices, but Smart Vision’s tech is one of the few that harnesses mobile computing in a novel way that make the device a new technology platform for healthcare.\n\nIt’s been two years since Albanese and Zhou first concocted the idea that would become Smart Vision Labs. The two former colleagues reconnected at NYU where Zhou was studying business at Albanese’s alma mater. The idea won NYU’s Entrepreneur Challenge , and would go on to receive a $1 million Powerful Answers Award, from Verizon (the new owner of Aol, which is the parent company of TechCrunch. Hi bosses!).\n“This is a product that is solving a lot of problems for everyone,” says Zhou. “That really had a lot of appeal to us.”\nIndeed, in the US alone less than half of the 200 million people who wear corrective eyewear visit the eye doctor as often as they should. Smart Vision Labs wants to make the process of the eye exam as easy as possible.\nNational Vision Inc., one of the largest eyecare chains in the country is a seed investor and a partner with the company, and Smart Vision is already generating revenue selling its devices.\n“The money is really going to be used to scale out our operating team and engineering team and getting ready to figure out how to really use this technology,” says Zhou.\nWhile applications in emerging markets are enormous, and the company has already tested the device in Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti, the initial focus for Smart Vision will be entirely on the US market.\nThe potential size of the market was enough for Techstars to lead the investment round in Smart Vision — a first for the firm’s latest $150 million early stage investment fund.\n“This is the first one where we are the sole lead,” says Ari Newman, a partner at Techstars Ventures and a director on the Smart Vision board. “We have a very strong conviction about this one.”\nFor Newman, the team, the tech, and the target market all aligned to make the deal persuasive. “ODs [doctors of optometry], and doctors get to put something in the palm of their hand that used to be a 40 pound machine,” says Newman. “Down the road, the number of applications for this technology is much bigger.”\n", "date": "6/22/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads//2015/06/jillsm.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "Bringing Eye Exams To The Palm Of A Doctor’s Hand, Smart Vision Raises $6.1 Million", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/22/bringing-eye-exams-to-the-palm-of-a-doctors-hand-smart-vision-raises-6-1-million/" }, { "id": 3, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "WonderVoice, a Tel Aviv-based startup I first ran into at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley, is today launching its brand-new iOS application which allows you to listen to content from Facebook while on the go. Yes, it’s another audio-based virtual assistant of sorts, joining an ecosystem that’s been booming since the debut of Apple’s Siri. And like most of these voice-activated alternatives, WonderVoice is zeroing in on a particular niche – in its case, social networking.\nThe startup’s intelligent voice platform lets you interact with Facebook and more, offering to read your News Feed, your messages, and your Events calendar, as well as allowing you to update your status, see who’s online, who’s nearby, and more. Thanks to integration with 8Tracks and Spotify, you can also command the app to play your friends’ music from those services.\nThe use case for something like WonderVoice, like most virtual assistants, is limited – after all, when are you going to talk to Facebook via an app, except when driving? (Or jogging, I suppose). When I tested the app at home, for example, my husband shot me evil looks before finally pausing the DVR with an exasperated sigh. “Fine, I’ll just wait until you’re done there,” he said, getting up to leave the room.\nThat being said, the hands-free use case for drivers is a decent selling point – and one which other virtual assistant apps have already been taking advantage of, though generally on Android where deeper OS integration is permitted. And while it still feels a bit odd to talk to your phone, that’s mainly because the phone is still kind of bad at understanding your words and intentions. In time, that will change. And on this front, as well as on the “reading comprehension” side, WonderVoice has made progress.\nWonderVoice’s patent-pending technology leverages “big data” to overcome the problems that face other voice engines today, especially when working with real-world content. (Just listen to feeds read through apps like BuzzVoice and the like to see what I mean. For example, BuzzVoice even pronounces “Google” as “Goo-gall.” We’ve a long road ahead of us here.) With WonderVoice, however, the system has been trained to recognize acronyms and smiley face emoticons and even nearby venues, so it won’t stumble over slang like “ppl” (people) when reading through your News Feed.\nWhile there are other apps that will read to you from Facebook, WonderVoice’s founder Gal Melamed stresses that none enable this type of bi-directional communication, and all the competitors just read what’s on the page in front of them without much if any intelligence.\nAnd when WonderVoice listens, it doesn’t require that you craft your questions using particular keywords, either. “We are crunching a lot of data in order to create a voice interface which is optimized for a specific domain – and by domain I mean like Facebook, Foursquare, etc.,” explains Melamed. “By combining that information with personal information and location information, we’re trying to build you a new type of voice interface where you basically have uniqueness.”\nThe company, currently a bootstrapped team with just two full timers, is working on an Android version of the app, and plans to rapidly add support for more social networks and services to WonderVoice. “Our vision is to enable a true hands-free experience,” says Melamed. “We want to be the hub for all social networks and communication.” He specifically mentioned Twitter and Foursquare as being on the radar.\nThe app is available as a paid ($1.99) download in the iTunes App Store here, but monetization efforts in the future may allow the app itself to become free further down the road.", "date": "10/17/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wondervoice-app-icon.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "virtual-assistant,wondervoice", "title": "Move Over Siri: WonderVoice’s New Virtual Assistant Lets You Speak To Interact With Facebook While On The Go", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/move-over-siri-wondervoices-new-virtual-assistant-lets-you-speak-to-interact-with-facebook-while-on-the-go/" }, { "id": 4, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Apps", "content": "Your friends may not be the best photographers, so Instagram today launched a second “People” Explore tab that highlights great Instagrammers and three of their recent pics. Instagram also now lets you edit old captions in case you had a typo or want to be more poetic.\nWhile photos from people you know are inherently the most interesting, YouTube, Vine, Snapchat, and other content platforms have developed vibrant communities of semi-professional creators that sustain loyal fan bases. By highting these creators and helping them build a following, Instagram could piggyback on people’s desire to come back again and again to see the latest shot from their favorite star photographer.\nInstagram tells me that the People tab “is personalized.” Accounts are selected to appear based on “a variety of factors, including who you follow, who you’re connected to, and what you like on Instagram. Also, some editorial suggestions.” Everyone won’t be seeing the same accounts, so specific users won’t suddenly rocket to stardom like in the early days of Twitter’s Suggested User List. Instead, Instagram is using algorithms to spread the suggestions around rather than playing favorites.\nOne issue with People discovery on Instagram is that since you only have one feed, snap-happy creators could drown out friends who only share occasionally. Still, there’s soo much Instagram could do with its Explore tab. If feels like the product is moving at frozen molasses speed. Two years ago I proposed a Nearby tab to show photos taken around you, but that’s still nowhere to be found.\n\nWhen you tap the Explore icon at the bottom of the screen, now a magnifying glass, you’ll get the same tab of popular photos you’re used to, but you can tap over to see the People tab instead. The caption editing interface is available from the three-dot More button beneath your photos.\nFor years, Facebook didn’t allow editing of posts because it feared people would bait-and-switch each other, putting up one set of text, then changing it to mean something different that could offend or embarass the people who Liked the old version. Eventually it realized this didn’t actually happen that often, and the community would properly shame anyone who did it, so in late 2013 it began offering post and comment editing. Now Instagram has been deemed mature enough to handle caption editing. What’s different is that you can edit in stealth because unlike Facebook, you can’t tap the “Edited” tag on Instagram to reveal the history of edits someone’s made.\nIf Instagram can pull off strong recommendations with the People tab, it could mint Instagram celebrities that keep users loyal to their app through a cult of personality. This not only makes the app stickier to existing Instagrammers, but could create instances of mass culture — photos or videos people publicly discuss — that content strictly from friends can’t. That could be the key to the next echelon of Instagram’s ascendance.", "date": "11/10/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/screen-shot-2014-11-10-at-12-09-52-pm.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "creators", "title": "Instagram Launches A People Discovery Tab To Fill Your Feed With Fresh Creators", "topics": "facebook,instagram", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/instagram-discover-people/" }, { "id": 5, "authors": "Scott Merrill", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Marten Mickos is working on a joke. He has the opening line — “An app guy, an ops guy, and a VMware sales guy walk into a bar…” — but he hasn’t figured out what the punchline is, yet. Mickos is the former CEO of MySQL AB. Today he’s the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, developers of private infrastructure as a service solutions, and he thinks about “The Cloud” a lot.\nEucalyptus Systems is releasing version 3.1 of their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) product today, with a number of new features, improved installation options, and a renewed commitment to open source. According to Mickos, the cloud itself should be the product. It should be wholly integrated with existing technologies, and as easily upgraded as any other product. It is, in short, a whole new way of thinking about computing.\nThere is no shortage of IaaS solutions available today. Each of them is trying to do basically two things: 1) attract your attention, and 2) be fully compatible with Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus has a leg up on the competition for item 2 with Amazon’s recent blessing of their product as the IaaS to use when you want a private cloud.\nThis partnership has yielded two specific things for Eucalyptus, according to Mickos: Amazon reviews Eucalyptus’s work to ensure API compatibility (a benefit not available to any other IaaS product), and Amazon and Eucalyptus approach customers together to sell “The Cloud”. For those customers that need public and private cloud solutions, this tag team approach is a huge win. And for everyone else, it secures in their minds that Eucalyptus is the product to choose whenever they do decide to implement a private cloud.\n“At MySQL, we were the disruptors of the old. At Eucalyptus, we’re the innovators of the new,” Mickos told me. He pointed out a number of features of the new Eucalyptus release to underscore this point: service and platform level high availability, FastStart templates to speed proof of concept deployments, and a more holistic approach to documentation and user interface.\nWhereas many IaaS solutions are trying to be one-size-fits-all solutions for both public and private cloud configurations, Eucalyptus is focusing strictly on private cloud. They focus on API compatibility with Amazon, and, according to Mickos, have worked tirelessly to ensure that upgrades are effortless. They conduct nearly half a million unit tests internally, and their euTester product allows their customers to build their own test cases.\n“We have a huge lead over others for hybrid cloud,” Mickos said. I’ve long been skeptical of the promise of hybrid clouds — the notion that you can easily move workloads from some private cloud to Amazon Web Services and back again — so I asked Mickos how many of their customers were actually using Eucalyptus for that feature. He admitted that currently it’s a very small number, but almost all of their customers demand the feature. According to Mickos, most customers aren’t ready to dabble with hybrid clouds just yet, but they want to know that they have a solution in place for that purpose when the time comes.\nI asked Mickos who he considered to be their primary competitors. He quickly rattled off VMware vCloud Director and Cloud Stack, but left out any mention of OpenStack. This caught my attention, since every Linux distribution is working to bundle OpenStack-powered cloud solutions into their product catalog. Mickos’s opinion is that OpenStack is shaping up to be a great public cloud platform, but he’s not seeing a lot of private cloud traction from it.\nLike OpenStack, though, Eucalyptus is free software. You can grab it from GitHub and use it today, without paying a dime to Eucalyptus Systems. Mickos is no stranger to open source business models, though; and Eucalyptus Systems has raised $55 million in funding.\nAs for his unfinished joke, Mickos says traditional “ops” people approach “The Cloud” the same way they do every problem: they identify a number of packages to combine into a menu to provide to their customers. Mickos suggests that this group is largely focused on the hardware they use, rather then benefits of “The Cloud”.\nThe VMware camp, says Mickos, looks to put “The Cloud” on top of their existing product portfolio. This is largely a marketing effort, rather than an engineering effort. Despite VMware’s recent dabblings with open source (see Cloud Foundry and Serengeti as examples), VMware’s primary interest is in selling VMware solutions.\nObviously, Eucalyptus is what Mickos considers the “app guy” in his joke. Hopefully Mickos can find a good punchline soon.", "date": "6/19/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/eucalyptus_logo.jpg?w=300", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "amazon,iaas,cloud,eucalyptus", "title": "Eucalyptus Systems Aims For Private Cloud Dominance", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/19/eucalyptus-systems-aims-for-private-cloud-dominance/" }, { "id": 6, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "eCommerce", "content": "Amid the rush of attention that online education is getting from the tech world, universities, students and investors, a startup that focuses on content for brick-and-mortar classrooms has picked up more funding. Flashnotes — a Boston-based marketplace for college pupils to buy and sell study notes and other online help for specific courses — has raised a Series A of $3.6 million. It will be using the funds to expand its service across the U.S. to some 300 institutions in the next year; as well as to increase penetration in the schools where Flashnotes is already active.\nThe round was led by Stage 1 Ventures, with participation also from new investor Runa Capital, and existing investors SoftBank Capital and Atlas Ventures. For now, this is mainly a strategic investment, Mike Matousek, founder and CEO, tells me: there are no immediate plans to roll out Flashnotes either to Japan or with any of SoftBank’s other properties, or in Russia for that matter.\nSome might scoff at how Flashnotes turns learning into a profiteering activity. Tapping into the fact that students are often looking for ways of making a little extra cash, Flashnotes promises users they can keep 70% of any purchase amounts (it keeps the other 30% for itself).\nTypical prices are around $9 for a 20-page study guide, with the range between $1.99 and $63. The latter was a bundle of notes from a course, a final study guide in effect, for a marketing class at Ohio State University.\nSince launching, the company has enabled WebRTC on its platform, which has opened Flashnotes up to including multimedia alongside notes, with video tutorials and more now also being added to the marketplace. And it has added integration to facilitate easier notes uploading — for example in an integration with Evernote. Matousek tells me that handwritten notes in PDF form remain the platform’s most popular kind of content.\nFlashnotes encourages a sense of competition among those contributing content to the platform by publishing a leaderboard. (Current leader: “Tony2050” from Florida State University, who has earned $11,953.72 on Flashnotes.)\nBut there is a higher aim here, too, Matousek tells me. While the promise of a lot of online learning is to use the internet to help bridge the digital divide — online classes and textbooks being more economical than the physical experience — a lot of that industry is far from being mass-market, he believes.\n“I’m a big fan of the concept of MOOCs, but we are talking about a wide shift being still decades away,” he says. “It’s amazing what they are doing to help immerse students, but I think it will ultimately be a hybrid approach between online and offline because students still need something tangible.”\nMeanwhile, in the world of brick-and-mortar higher education dropout rates are at around 40%, Matousek says. Flashnotes believes that by offering students a way of getting extra help for particular classes, it will keep those students engaged in the work and keep from falling too far behind and then leaving completely.\nFlashnotes has a limit to how it will let its platform be used, and also insists that it’s best used in combination with actually just turning up. “We have a zero tolerance for allowing exams to get posted, and for those who are simply buying notes and skipping class, you wouldn’t be getting much out of it anyway,” he explains. “This is a supplemental thing. That’s how we position it.”\nThere is, of course, competition for Flashnotes. Chegg, the online textbook rental company that went public in November 2013, has over the years gobbled up Cramster, another online platform designed for students to help each other with work, and P2P marketplace Student of Fortune. (Combined, the two now form Chegg Homework Help.) This seems to concentrate less on notes from specific classes and more on general expertise tutorials — possibly a more scalable concept but less directly relevant to specific classes.\nMatousek, believes that what Flashnotes is providing is something that is more core to the experience of taking a specific class. “It’s not just a feature in a bigger platform, but a standalone opportunity,” he says. “There is a real need to improve the core learning experience.”\nPhoto: Flickr", "date": "2/3/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lecture-hall.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "crowdsourcing,p2p,flashnotes", "title": "Flashnotes, A Peer-To-Peer Marketplace For College Study Materials, Picks Up Another $3.6M", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/03/flashnotes-a-peer-to-peer-marketplace-for-college-study-materials-picks-up-another-3-6m/" }, { "id": 7, "authors": "Mike Butcher", "category": "Europe", "content": "It was only in March that one of Russia’s hottest startups — hotels booking service Ostrovok.ru – raised $25 million in a Series B round led by billionaire investor Yuri Milner. We said at the time that this market is very capital-intensive, especially in a market like Russia.\nBut today we learn just how difficult this might be in the mid-term. Today the company has announced on its blog that it is letting go of a third of its staff. Staff will be compensated with three months’ full salary and bonus, and their options will also vest. To Ostrovok’s credit they are making the news public so that their staff can find new positions: “If you need great people, write to Kate (katya@ostrovok.ru)”.\nThe reason, writes cofounder Serge Faguet in the blog post, is that they want to “take the company to break even” something they said they’d wanted to do last year. However, it’s clearly not happening as fast as they predicted, hence the layoffs.\nUnfortunately, the hotel booking space is a crowded one in Russia, and despite there being a rising middle class in Russia, the cost of travel can take out a hefty chunk from people’s expendable income.\nAnd while Ostrovok probably needed cash to scale up, the margins in travel booking are well known to be thin, requiring a lot of scale to make sense. It’s the age-old problem of burning cash to get to that scale – or cutting costs to make the numbers work better.\nFaguet, however is understandably trying to be upbeat about this move, noting that brand recognition is up “20%”, and he says they have hit 100,000 bookings and “are growing more than 50%” in the last quarter.\nFaguet told us via email: “The story is pretty simple… We’ve taken on too many people and projects simultaneously and, after raising our Series B, decided to pull back and work in a more focused way (and make ourselves more attractive for future fundraising). We still have over 130 people at the company.”\nHe goes on to say on the blog: “Our strategy remains exactly the same as before, and the quality of customer service will not change.”\nSo it seems it’s more of a case of a startup cutting lots of side projects and focusing on what it does best.", "date": "6/17/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/focus1-margo-conner.jpg?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "ostrovok", "title": "Post $25M Funding, Russian Startup Ostrovok Slashes Staff To Aim For Break-Even", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/post-25m-funding-russian-startup-ostrovok-slashes-staff-to-aim-for-break-even/" }, { "id": 8, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Apps", "content": "Holiday attractions booking startup, GetYourGuide, which raised a $14 million Series A at the start of this year from Spark Capital and Highland Capital Partners Europe to internationalise its content and zero in on mobile, has made good on the latter portion of its plan — with the launch of its first mobile apps (available on iOS now, and landing on Google Play for Android users tomorrow).\n“Our mobile traffic is growing at more than twice the rate than our web traffic is growing,” GYG CEO, Johannes Reck, tells TechCrunch. “We have the strong ambition to grow our mobile traffic to more than 50% of the total traffic in the next 12-18 months.”\nThe startup, which was founded back in 2009 as a student project, does not break out user numbers yet. But Reck confirms it’s continuing on a growth trajectory: “We are more than doubling revenue and traffic every year.”\nGYG’s new apps pull in info on more than 23,000 tours & activities — such as museum visits, sightseeing trips & historical tours, mixed in with some more practical tourist requirements like airport transfers — from 2,200 global destinations, presenting them initially as a stack of thumbnails that can easily be thumbed through (offering more info as users drill down).\nAs well as repurposing its content for speedy mobile delivery, there’s the added mobile bonus of being able to detect the user’s location to make relevant suggestions. Users can browse activities for the current day, the next day or the weekend; read reviews and make bookings. Tours can be filtered by price, deals, duration, languages and more. The app creates a mobile voucher (such as the one below, right) for bookings, so there’s no need to print tickets. Payment is by credit card, with the option to save card details to speed up future bookings.\n\nBack in January Reck told TechCrunch GetYourGuide was “going to bet the house on mobile”. Since then it has acquired deadpooled rival Gidsy — which had also been gearing up for a mobile push. GYG absorbed Gidsy’s team of 12, bolstering its apps push with relevant experience.\nAt the time of that acquisition, Edial Dekker, CEO and co-founder of Gidsy, told TechCrunch: “We’ve also been working a lot on mobile in the last months, but we did not launch it yet. We’ll have a huge opportunity to work on the same problems we tried solving in the first place: bringing people together around activities.”\nDiscussing the timing of its apps launch, Reck said previously, in the continental European markets where it is “particularly strong”, use of apps by travellers to get holiday suggestions has been retarded by factors such as mobile roaming charges. “With our increasing presence in the U.K. & U.S. and an exploding number of consumers taking the phone with them while traveling, now is the right time,” he tells TechCrunch.\n“The European Commission announced that roaming will be significantly regulated within the next two years,” he adds. “We are seeing better price plans every year and the telecom operators are very interested in striking deals with travel companies to provide better consumer service. Again, I think the time has come for mobile travel applications to become mainstream. It makes so much sense.”\nGetYourGuide’s app feels slick and relatively quick — with a cute bounding dog animation to keep you entertained while it harvests relevant tour data. However that content isn’t going to excite more discerning travellers, with a strong focus on more typical touristy fare.\nFor instance, when I queried the app for London attractions, it fired forth a barrage of tourist trap fodder, from Madame Tussauds to Hard Rock Cafe via a smorgasbord of Harry Potter tours. (And, bizarrely, several day trips to Stone Henge. Which isn’t exactly close to London — but is apparently a mainstream draw for U.K. visitors.)\nThis sort of content suggests GYG is gunning for the ‘road-well travelled’ tourist — which is, after all, likely the largest market. But that does mean it’s leaving room for alternative travel startups serving a more indie traveller category, such as U.S.-based AnyRoad.\n", "date": "10/9/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/homepage_en_getyourguide.png?w=400", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "mobile-coupons,travel,apps,getyourguide", "title": "After Raising $14M In January, Travel Startup GetYourGuide Launches Its First Mobile Apps ", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/09/getyourguide-first-apps/" }, { "id": 9, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Social", "content": "Google announced a suite of tools this morning for business owners, offering them a one-stop shop to update their business information, add photos, read reviews and, of course, use Google+. The service, called “Google My Business,” seems to be aimed at those who have yet to figure out how to “get on Google” so to speak; in fact, there’s a button that even uses that same expression.\nHowever, somewhat buried in today’s announcement is news that this is now going to be the default experience for others who were already using Google’s other business-focused services, including Places for Business and the prior version of the Google+ dashboard. These users will now be upgraded to Google My Business, the company notes.\nAfter signing up and filling in the requisite information, Google My Business will add the business information to Google Search, Google Maps and Google+, allowing customers to find the business no matter what device or service they happen to be using at the time. Companies are also invited to add photos and virtual tours, read and respond to their Google reviews, as well as add or correct business information like address, phone, store hours and more.\nIn addition, the service makes it easier for businesses to share on Google+, Google’s rival to the Facebook page. From the new service, owners can post news, events, photos and other updates they want shared with customers.\n\nThe service also pulls in custom insights and integrations with AdWords Express, which will help business owners better understand how people are finding their business on Google, what they’re clicking on, where they’re coming from when clicking on directions, and other trends over time. The insights, meanwhile, are designed to give businesses, as well as brands and other organizations, more information about their Google+ audience and content, including visibility, engagement metrics, and demographic data. (More on that here.)\nA Google My Business mobile application is being made available, too, the company says, which will let you do all of this on the go from either a phone or tablet. The Android app is out first (later today; UPDATE: live now on Google Play), with an iOS version to follow.\n", "date": "6/11/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/devices.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "google,google-my-business", "title": "Google Introduces “Google My Business,” A New One-Stop Shop To Help Business Get Found Online", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/11/google-introduces-google-my-business-a-new-one-stop-shop-to-help-business-get-found-online/" }, { "id": 10, "authors": "Rip Empson", "category": "Fundings & Exits", "content": "Tandem Capital, which claims to be Silicon Valley’s first startup accelerator to focus exclusively on early-stage mobile businesses, is announcing today that it has raised $32 million for its second fund, Tandem Fund II.\nThe capital comes from a host of executives, entrepreneurs, and organizations, including notable industry veterans (and LPs) like Verifone CEO Doug Bergeron, former Apple and Oracle general counsel Dan Cooperman, Google founding board member Ram Shriram, Playdom founder Rick Thompson, NetApp Board Chairman Dan Warmenhoven, and Amazon SVP of Consumer Business Jeff Wilke — to name a few.\nTandem Co-founder Doug Renert tells us that the fund’s investors were chosen not by the amount of money they were willing to invest, but as strategic investors that would be able to add direct value to its accelerator. “With Tandem II, we chose people that we knew would bring something to the table beyond money,” Renert said, “those who are in the game not just for the return, but to actually work with and help entrepreneurs, are looking to partner, and really become part of the equation.”\nThat may sound like spin, but Tandem is serious about taking a creative, hands-on approach to working with its mobile startups. Even though Tandem is a capital fund (that’s invested in and advised startups like Juice In The City, Playhaven, and ZumoDrive), a startup accelerator, and a team of advisors, the founders refuse to be labelled as such. “Tandem is not a VC firm or a group of angels or advisors who simply lob ideas or suggestions from afar,” their site proclaims.\nSo, startups, if you’re not comfortable with a hands-on approach, you might want to send your applications elsewhere. That being said, the capital fund/accelerator has a lot to offer. Literally. It will spend one-third of its new fund on providing its chosen startups with $200K in seed funding (with the remaining two-thirds reserved for follow-on rounds), free workspace, and daily meetings and hair-braiding (just kidding) with mentors and advisors in areas like business development, product design, marketing, user acquisition, etc.\nTandem is making a concerted effort to steer away from the large-scale approach pioneered by Y Combinator, designing an accelerator program that takes place twice a year, for a six-month duration, and generally includes six startups. Renert said that they’d tried 3-months but that was too short and a year, which saw companies relying too much on the accelerator for, well, everything. It’s all about finding a balance.\nA six-month program, relatively small class sizes, and the fact that there’s no demo day or set graduation date (teams can hang out at Tandem as long as they want) all work towards setting it apart from accelerators like YC and 500 Startups — well, that and the fact that it focuses exclusively on mobile companies.\nBut, so far, its alternative model has been working out. According to the Renert, the accelerator has seen a 90 percent success rate with its portfolio companies thus far, including ZumoDrive being acquired by Motorola in 2010 and YouSendIt’s acquisition of Attassa last year. Localyte and FlightCaster were also both acquired in 2010, with the remainder of Tandem’s nine investments having gone on to raise second rounds.\nThere also appear to be some success stories brewing in its current batch as well, like BitRhymes, for example, which makes social (and casino) games for a female audience. The startup’s flagship title, Bingo Bash, has nearly three million monthly active users, is one of the top 30 grossing apps on the App Store, and is the number one casino game on the iPad.\nEach of the four startups from its current batch have closed — or will soon close — follow-on rounds. This success, the co-founder says, has come from an improvement in how the Tandem team is identifying (or selecting) its startups. Today, he says, the team really hones in on good product teams that have proven they can build, even if they have zero market traction. If they can build a great product, we want to help bring them to market and raise capital, the co-founder said.\nThe deadline for the accelerator’s next program is on July 1st. Entrepreneurs interested in applying can go here. ", "date": "6/14/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tandem_logo_large.jpeg?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "accelerator,startups,tandem-capital,tandem", "title": "Mobile Incubator Tandem Raises $32M Fund From Verifone CEO, Playdom Founder & More", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/14/tandem-raises-second-fund/" }, { "id": 11, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "Azimo, the UK-based social money transfer service aiming to disrupt an industry dominated by legacy players Western Union and Moneygram, is rolling out integration with Facebook to make it easy for users of the uber-social network to send money to one another. A first for the remittance industry, claims the company, with perhaps PayPal-to-PayPal transfers coming closest.\nUsing Azimo to send money via Facebook works as follows: The sender invites their intended recipient to sign up to Azimo via an automatically sent Facebook message. The recipient then logs into Azimo’s Facebook app and fills out their details, including where they want the money sent to, which could be one of the 150,000 payout desks in the 125 countries supported, a mobile phone ‘top up’, or a bank account. And since the recipient fills out that crucial information, those details are kept hidden from the sender, while the company claims that less mistakes are likely, too.\nIn addition, in order to reduce the likelihood of fraud, Azimo says that it analyses “key pieces of information about individual Facebook profiles to verify that they are genuine”. These include the length of time a Facebook profile has existed, how active it is, how many friends the account has and whether it’s linked to a genuine email address bearing the same name as the person who owns the account. That makes sense and serves as another reminder of how our social media data can be minded by companies, particularly in the financial sector, and Azimo certainly isn’t the first to do so.\nJoining Azimo’s existing apps for iOS and Android, the decision to build a Facebook app was based on surveying its UK customers who regularly send money home or to friends and family. “[We] found nearly three quarters regularly use Facebook – and of those, over 60% were in touch with the person they wanted to send money to”, says Michael Kent, founder of Azimo, in a statement. It therefore made sense to piggyback the social graph and the way users already stay in touch — and gives a further shot in the arm to the company’s battle with Western Union et. al., who it says charge much higher fees than are needed.\n“Azimo’s aim is to charge only what is fair – between 1-2% of the transaction – and to make it quick and easy for anyone to transfer their money overseas,” says Kent. In contrast, Western Union and MoneyGram levy “double-digit charges for a service that amounts to little more than a few clicks of a computer mouse”, claims the company.\nThat’s a sentiment echoed by another European money transfer startup, TransferWise, which is often seen as a direct competitor to Azimo, when in actual fact the latter is more about consumer transfers via collection points akin to Western Union, while TransferWise largely targets bank transfers, particularly by businesses, not least startups.\nFounded in 2012, Azimo launched its social money transfer platform in August 2012. In January 2013, it secured angel investment totalling £300,000.", "date": "2/12/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/create-new-contact.png?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "azimo", "title": "Social Money Transfer Service Azimo Adds Facebook Integration To Squeeze Western Union", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/azimo/" }, { "id": 12, "authors": "Darrell Etherington,Kyle Russell", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "This week you get TWO AppleCast episodes, because that’s just how much Apple news we had thanks to Apple’s special event on Monday. We’ve had a few days now to reflect on the big event, as well as our hands-on experience with both the new MacBook and Apple Watch. In some ways, the intervening time has raised more questions than answers, but Apple’s latest products are no less exciting for that.\nWe also talk about how polarizing a lot of the response to the new MacBook (which has only a single data port) has been, and how there has also been a lot of apparent rancor for Apple’s top-tier Apple Watch Edition collection, which starts at $10,000. A lot of people seem to be responding as if Apple were eliminating all other product lines and offering only these options, as my former colleague Tom Reestman nicely summarizes in the tweet below.\nNext week, we’ll have more in the way of impressions of Apple’s new products, including first-hand accounts of how the Force Touch trackpad on the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro (along with its other hardware upgrades) perform. As always, let us know if there’s something you’d specifically like us to cover.\nDirect download available here, or find us on iTunes and SoundCloud.", "date": "3/13/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/tc-applecast16-9.png?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "", "title": "TC AppleCast 9: New MacBook And Apple Watch First Impressions", "topics": "apple-watch", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/13/tc-applecast-9-new-macbook-and-apple-watch-first-impressions/" }, { "id": 13, "authors": "Robin Wauters", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Intel Capital, the chip maker’s investment arm, this morning provided some details about a recently made investment in Insyde Software, a publicly listed Taiwan company that specializes in system firmware based on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as well as customized Android distributions for OEM and ODM customers.\nIntel Capital injected NT$300 million, or roughly $10 million, into the company out of its recently announced $100 million AppUp fund.\nIntel and Insyde have long been working together, although we should note the software company also counts AMD, NVIDA and Microsoft among its technology partners.\nNew is that there will be additional collaboration between Intel and Insyde Software on UEFI BIOS firmware and customized Android distributions for tablets, ultrabooks and other portable devices.\nThe news comes after an announcement, made on September 13, 2011, that Intel had formed an alliance with Google for Android-based smartphones and tablets to be optimized for Intel’s chips going forward (read: early 2012).\nThe investment by Intel Capital is the fourth since Insyde’s founding in 1998. The company supplies to OEM and ODM customers – including some of the world’s largest computer systems designers and manufacturers – that are deploying Windows and Android on Intel-based platforms.\nIn addition to UEFI BIOS, working in collaboration with Intel’s Software and Services Group and its Netbook and Tablet Group, Insyde says it will provide “Android optimization, customization, and deployment services” for such partners worldwide.\nRelated: Intel Capital Launches $300M Ultrabook Fund To Invest In Tablet Technologies", "date": "11/22/2011", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/insyde.png?w=220", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "", "title": "Intel Capital Invests $10M In Customized Android Distributions, Firmware Maker Insyde", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/intel-capital-invests-10m-in-customized-android-distributions-firmware-maker-insyde/" }, { "id": 14, "authors": "Eric Eldon", "category": "Apps", "content": "Facebook launched a new set of social channels for apps to reach mobile users last month, that includes notifications, search, news feed stories and bookmarks in its mobile web and iPhone apps. We haven’t heard too much about the results from developers so far.\nBut here’s a little bit of interesting new data from Snap Interactive, a publicly-traded company that has a popular cross-platform app called Are You Interested. After Facebook rolled out the new features in mid-October, the company said its mobile traffic to that app got a significant boost (although it’s not providing specific numbers).\nThe number of average daily logins on its AreYouInterested iPhone app (here) increased by 70 percent between the 30 days before the October 10th Facebook integration and the 30 days after.\nThat resulted in the app rising from the #10 to #5 position in the iTunes App Store top grossing social networking apps chart. Yes, the category is not particularly large, but dating apps like Snap’s can monetize quite well by charging users for things like sending flirty messages to objects of their affections.\nTake a look at the directionally interesting graph, below, provided by the company:\n\nBeyond iOS, Snap tells me that its traffic on its mobile web app have gone up 50%. Mobile now makes up 10% of its total revenues.\nOverall, Are You Interested has 7.3 million monthly active users and 610,000 daily active users on Facebook, according to Inside Network’s AppData app tracking service. These numbers include any mobile traffic that’s based on users’ Facebook accounts, but not traffic from outside of Facebook. Also, note that the app’s MAU has been going up lately, while DAU appears to have seen a bit of a decline — apparently in spite of the mobile integration.\nYou can find more details on Snap’s company blog, here.", "date": "11/29/2011", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/snap_logo_thumb1.png?w=280", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Snap Interactive Says Facebook’s New Mobile Channels Are Boosting Its Traffic And Revenue", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/29/snapinteractivefacebookmobile/" }, { "id": 15, "authors": "Frederic Lardinois", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Huawei is getting into the productivity game. The company, which recently made a splash in the U.S. with the launch of the Nexus 6p, announced a Surface Pro-like 12-inch Windows 10 tablet with a keyboard cover and an optional pressure-sensitive stylus and dock during its MWC keynote today.\nPricing for the MateBook, which will be available with both Windows 10 Home and Professional, will start at $699/€799 for the most basic configuration with an m3 processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. The keyboard will click in at $129 and then stylus and dock at $69 and $99, respectively.\nThe company says the device will go on sale in Asia, Europe, and North America in the coming month, but we weren’t able to pin down an exact date.\n\nWe had a chance to spend some hands-on time with Huawei’s first attempt at a Windows hybrid earlier this weekend. As Huawei told me, the company aimed to take everything it learned from building tablets and phones over the last few years and put it into this new product — and that definitely shows. The tablet, which comes in both gray and golden, is lighter than it looks (at 640 grams), very slim and features a very nice 2160×1440 screen with only a very slim bezel around it. The unibody design definitely gives it a premium feel.\n\nOne nifty little feature on the side of the tablet is a built-in fingerprint reader. For this, Huawei repurposed the technology it developed for its phones and brought it to Windows 10, so you can now unlock the tablet by simply putting your finger on it.\nWindows 10 as a tablet operating system may not be everybody’s cup of tea and there aren’t all that many apps out there that make good use of the Windows 10 tablet mode, but you can’t fault Huawei for that. We did a bit of light surfing on the tablet and everything felt fast and smooth, though how well the Intel Core M-based system performs once we throw heavier tasks at it still remains to be seen.\nAccording to Huawei, the MateBook’s 33.7Wh high-density Lithium battery should allow for about 10 hours for standard productivity work (text editing, email, Excel, surfing the web, etc.). Just like you would expect from a modern device, charging happens over a USB-C cable and the tablet also features a fast-charging mode that promises to give you a 60 percent charge in about two hours.\nUnlike some of its competitors, the MateBook only features one camera, though — and at its 5MP resolution, it probably won’t be a great camera for taking pictures, but it should work just fine for your Skype calls.\n\nWhile I enjoyed playing with the tablet, though, the spill-resistant keyboard cover takes some getting used to. Microsoft’s Type Cover for the Surface still sets the benchmark for how to build a cover with a good keyboard. The fake leather cover looks nice enough and Huawei argues that it’s sturdy enough to protect the tablet from some falls.\nThe chiclet keys themselves also feel good enough and have a nice amount of travel, but the case itself simply has a bit too much give. I probably need to spend a bit more time with it, but the keyboard definitely takes some getting used to. It’s worth noting, though, that the trackpad feels very precise.\nThe keyboard — which is backlit — is powered directly from the tablet, so thankfully you don’t have to worry about charging it. It will come in four colors: black, brown, orange and beige.\n\nThe pressure-sensitive stylus, which offers 2048 levels of sensitivity, works pretty much as expected. It connects over Bluetooth and Huawei says its battery should last a good month. The pen features both a button that turns the pen into an eraser and one that can function as a clicker for your PowerPoint presentations. As an extra gimmick, it also features a laser pointer (which may actually be quite useful when you use it to give a presentation).\nFor giving those presentations — and for working at your desk — Huawei will also offer a small USB-C dock that includes two standard USB ports, an Ethernet plug, and VGA and HDMI outputs.", "date": "2/21/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/huawei-05034.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "tablet,matebook,mwc16,huawei", "title": "Huawei Launches The $699 MateBook Windows 10 Tablet With Keyboard Case And Stylus", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/21/huawei-launches-the-699-matebook-windows-10-tablet-with-keyboard-case-and-stylus/" }, { "id": 16, "authors": "Matt Burns", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Waterproof phones have been around for ages. But to be waterproof, there are little flappy covers on the ports. Like the MicroUSB card port. And these covers always break off. Always.\nBut now there’s the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, an Android smartphone that’s waterproof without those annoying caps. The microUSB port is naked but, sadly, there is still a cover on the SD Card slot.\nThe rest of the phone is on par with other mid-range phones. There are 13MP/5MP cameras and an octa-core 64-bit Snapdragon 615 powers the Lollipop device. Sony notes that the phone has a two-day battery life.\nSony says the phone is waterproof under a few conditions. First, it cannot be submerged past 1.5 meters. So you’re out of luck if you throw it in the deep end. Next, salt water is not advised and the phone should only occasionally be in chlorinated water, and it needs to be rinsed off afterward. And of course, before the phone is recharged, the USB port needs to be dry.\nThe M4 Aqua will have a starting price of 299 EUR and will be available in 80 countries, but not the U.S. Sony tells us that the company is focusing on its flagship offering in the States.\nThe M4 Aqua is only waterproof to a point. Yet that point is distinctly farther under the water than any other major cell phone maker. I wouldn’t take the M4 Aqua swimming, but I wouldn’t have any issue reading a Kindle book on the phone while taking my nightly bath.", "date": "3/2/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/xperia_m4_aq_water_lying.png?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "", "title": "Sony’s Just Released A Worthwhile Waterproof Phone", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/02/sonys-just-released-a-worthwhile-waterproof-phone/" }, { "id": 17, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "The best tech for 2014 is getting its just desserts at the 8th Annual Crunchies right now, and Best Technology Achievement is one of the categories that reflects true excellence in a field where it’s easy to identify standouts. This year’s winner is Stella, whose four-seat, solar-powered car won the World Solar Challenge and is designed to be a functional family vehicle instead of a tech demo or high-speed racer.\nStella’s car uses a roof-mounted solar panel that can provide enough power to move the car 500 miles on a full charge of the battery, which is considerably more than the max mileage of a Tesla Model S. Stella is the product of a team-up between the Eindhoven University of Technology and NXP Semiconductors, and it actually manages to produce twice the energy it consumes through its photovoltaic energy system.\nNot only was Stella a showcase for clean energy, it was also a means to demonstrate new vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems that could eventually allow cars to work together to determine the best speeds to drive in order to keep traffic moving efficiently.\nStella’s crowning achievement in 2014 was making the trek up Highway 1 between L.A. and San Francisco, producing zero emissions along the way.\nRunner-up this year was Apple Pay, a very different technological achievement but one that’s no less likely to become truly disruptive. Apple’s mobile payments play debuted this year with a software update released in October for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It quickly became one of the most-used electronic payment methods on the market, with new financial institutions and retail partners coming on board all the time.", "date": "2/5/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/stella.jpg?w=640", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "", "title": "Stella’s Solar Car Wins The Crunchie For Best Technology Achievement", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/05/stellas-solar-car-wins-the-crunchie-for-best-technology-achievement/" }, { "id": 18, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Asia", "content": "A new report about the state of iOS usage in China from mobile analytics firm Mixpanel reveals a lot of interesting info about how one of Apple’s most important international markets is adopting its mobile OS. The good news is that iOS usage overall is rising quickly, especially over the past year – but that increase in usage isn’t necessarily coming from the sale of brand new hardware.\nThe iPhone 5s and 5c launched in China in September last year, for the first time simultaneous with the North American launch. Mixpanel saw a considerable uptick in iOS usage in the country begin at that time, but the most growth came from the iPhone 5, not the newer devices. This is likely because the 5 became a lot cheaper as soon as new hardware was made official, which is backed up by the fact that once again, when China Mobile unveiled its iPhone 5s and 5c launch in January of this year, there was a growth spike attributable mostly to the iPhone 5.\nMixpanel says the takeaway is that Apple manages to increase interest in its platform overall with launches in China, and not necessarily to the device(s) which are actually new to the launch itself. But it could also suggest that price sensitivity in these markets is a very real concern, and one that might result in a lot of new device sales if Apple actually ventured into the lower cost device market (the iPhone 5c, while spun by some as that, actually didn’t drive Apple’s usual pricing down compared to past launches).\nThe traffic- and engagement-tracking startup also analyzed usage distribution in China, and found that iOS devices were used over a large portion of the country, with over 40 percent of its data coming from 783 cities. Major metropolitan areas understandably generated the most usage, which Mixpanel says is due to network coverage as well as average income.\n\nWhat’s interesting is that high GDP isn’t strictly tied to greater usage – Tianjin has the highest GDP in the region, but only sends 2.5 percent of China’s iOS data through Mixpanel’s product, for instance. Nor does population tie directly to higher use; Shanghai and Beijing are neck and neck in population and iOS usage, but Guangdong (which has three times the population and houses Shenzen) has almost the same iOS usage, pointing once again to income as a moderating factor.\nFor more about this unique look behind the curtain at iOS activity in China, check out Mixpanel’s full blog post detailing the report.", "date": "3/20/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2014-03-20-15-22-01-694637-iosdevice.jpg?w=620", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "china,iphone,ios", "title": "China’s iOS Usage Spiked With New iPhones, But Increase Driven By Older Models, Mixpanel Finds", "topics": "apple", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/20/chinas-ios-usage-spiked-with-new-iphones-but-increase-driven-by-older-models-mixpanel-finds/" }, { "id": 19, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Apps", "content": "Amino, a TechStars-incubated startup that’s building mobile communities around topics like anime and Doctor Who, is announcing that it has raised $1.65 million in seed funding led by Union Square Ventures.\nCo-founder and CEO Ben Anderson told me that his engagement with “passionate niche interests” goes back to when he was a teenager and excited about robots, but not sure how to find others who were similarly excited. Certainly, there are plenty of online communities and forums, but Anderson said they remain “a little bit old fashioned” and not particularly well-suited for smartphones.\nIn fact, when Amino is ready to launch a new community, not only does it ask existing users for input, Anderson said it also looks for areas where there’s already “an active forum ripe for disruption.”\nThere are currently 15 communities listed on the Amino website, including ones for K-pop, Minecraft, video games and art. Anderson suggested that the number could eventually reach the hundreds, creating an “app constellation” where users just register once and can then join a number of communities. Apparently 40 percent of existing users have already joined more than one community, though Anderson noted that their identities are separate on each one.\n“We found that humans in general are more complicated than just one identity,” he said. “It’s actually really freeing from a self-expression standpoint to have an account for just this one slice of your life.”\nAnd while it might be faster to turn Amino into a self-serve platform where anyone can create a community, Anderson said the plan is to continue building the apps with his team, leading to “a very curated selection of communities — we want to keep the quality of the communities really high for now.”\nI downloaded the Doctor Who Amino app today. It has an appealing simplicity — it’s easy to jump in and start browsing or commenting. There’s a newsfeed of popular content posted by other users, a forum for more in-depth discussions and, coolest of all, a map view that shows (in a general way) where other users are located.\nIn a blog post about the investment, Union Square’s Andy Weissman noted that Amino’s apps have been downloaded a total of 500,000 times. He wrote:\nAmino apps are only available on iOS right now, but Anderson said there are also plans for Android.\nOther investors in the seed round include Google Ventures, SV Angel, Box Group, Scott Belsky, Slow Ventures, Paul English (Co-founder of Kayak), Kal Vepuri, Launch Angels and David Chang.", "date": "7/8/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/amino.jpg?w=680", "section": "startups/", "tags": "amino", "title": "Amino Raises $1.65M To Replace Old-School Forums With Mobile Communities", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/08/amino-seed-funding/" }, { "id": 20, "authors": "Fitz Tepper", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "If you watch a lot of Facebook Live broadcasts, get ready to see some ads.\nThe company is now testing short video ads that will play during breaks in Facebook Live broadcasts, they confirmed to Adage.\nThe move shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone who follows Facebook and their various video products. Video ads are lucrative for Facebook and a Live product devoid of ads would cause the company to miss out on tons of potential ad revenue.\nSo how will they work? That’s a little less clear. For now, the company is just letting “a small group of publishers” insert a short ad break in their Live videos. The ads can appear anywhere after five minutes into a live stream, and can last up to a maximum of 15 seconds.\nFacebook reportedly told advertisers that during the beta all ads shown during Live broadcasts will be taken from other promoted video campaigns already running on Facebook, but it’s safe to assume if the test is successful advertisers may soon have the ability to create custom ads designated to be shown during Live broadcasts.\nSo what control will video publishers have? Adage reports that publishers can control what category of advertiser can show video during their stream, as well as turn it off if a Live feed isn’t appropriately themed to contain an ad (like a sensitive breaking news story).\nAnd in terms of revenue – during the test period publishers aren’t able to receive a portion of the revenue generated from ads during their Live broadcasts, but could in the future depending on how Facebook decides to structure their Live ad product.\nIt’s also not clear yet if publishers will be able to set a designated “commercial break” where all viewers see an ad at once, or if Facebook will randomly commandeer a Live stream with a 15 second ad. If it’s the former and publishers can initiate a designated commercial break (and potentially generate revenue), it could actually be an ad product that publishers and content creators ends up liking.\n ", "date": "8/1/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/gettyimages-200067997-001.jpg?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "facebook-live,ads,marketing", "title": "Facebook is testing video ads during Live broadcasts", "topics": "facebook", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/01/facebook-is-testing-video-ads-during-live-broadcasts/" }, { "id": 21, "authors": "Robin Wauters", "category": "Social", "content": "Exclusive – Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm Point Nine Capital has become the first European investor in CouchSurfing, a site that helps travelers connect with locals worldwide to share accommodation, experiences and whatnot.\nThe investment is in fact an extension of the $7.6 million Series A round raised from Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network in August 2011.\nRead more at TechCrunch Europe.", "date": "1/24/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/couch.png?w=191", "section": "social/", "tags": "couchsurfing", "title": "CouchSurfing Gets More Cash As Point Nine Capital Becomes Its First European Investor", "topics": "", "url": "http://eu.techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/couchsurfing-gets-more-cash-as-point-nine-capital-becomes-its-first-european-investor/" }, { "id": 23, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "While we saw a few awesome surprises (HBO Now and the new MacBook) at Apple’s Spring Forward event, much of it was a recap of things that we already knew about the Apple Watch. Except the price. Today Apple has revealed that the Apple Watch (the upper-midrange model with stainless steel casing and sapphire display) will cost between $549 – $1,049 for the 38mm smaller model and $599 – $1,099 for the larger 42mm version.\nThe Apple Watch is the version most akin to the iPhone 6 in terms of pricing, while the Apple Watch Sport will start at $349 for the smaller 38mm version and $399 for the 42mm model. It will function as the entry-level model, much like the iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c.\nThis pricing is determined not only by the size of the watch but by the original band you choose, as Apple offers a wide variety of bands for each model.\nThen there’s the Watch Edition, Apple’s high-end model equipped with a special reinforced 18k gold chassis, which will start at $10,000 in select retail stores and only be available in limited quantities. The Watch Edition will top out at $17,000.\nUnlike some of Apple’s other product lines, the Apple Watch is entering the market at a number of different price points. In the past, Apple has introduced new product categories and then slowly broken them into different models that reach varying price points and fit different needs for the consumer. We started with a single iPhone, and now there are four available on the market at any given time. The same story played out with the iPad.\nBut the Apple Watch must enter the market with variation as it is a very different type of product.\nAs opposed to a phone or a tablet, where what’s inside matters most, the Apple Watch is invariably a fashion product just as much as it is a computing tool. While the iconic and uniform look of the watch face itself will act as a status symbol in its own right, no one wants to wear the exact same thing as everyone else. A watch is inherently an accessory, and accessories are made to set us apart.\nBut this is only a good thing for Apple, which has spent years developing this technology and poaching all the right talent to merge the worlds of technology and fashion in a way that is enticing to consumers. And with that patience comes a far-reaching product that offers the same breadth as Apple’s most popular product, the iPhone.\nIn fact, Apple has positioned itself to make even more money off of the diversity of this product. Due to the special band connector developed by Apple, swapping out a leather strap for a Sport strap or any one of Apple’s many color/material options should be a generally recurring activity, much like we treat iPhone cases.\n", "date": "3/9/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/apple-watch-event0379.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "watchlaunch", "title": "The Apple Watch Will Cost Between $349 And $10K+, Pre-Orders Start April 10", "topics": "apple-watch", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/09/the-apple-watch-will-cost-between-549-and-1099-depending-on-size-and-style/" }, { "id": 24, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Looker, a business intelligence startup co-founded by early lead engineer from Netscape and LiveOps Lloyd Tabb, has raised another $30 million in Series B funding, money that co-founder and CEO Frank Bien says will be used to invest in growing the company’s technology organically — not by acquisition.\n“We’re a tech company and will continue to lead with technology,” he said. “We’re improving the product across the board, including building on our ability to embed Looker in other web applications, generally improve our business-user experience, and increase the power of working ‘in database’ across the data infrastructure landscape. We do not have any acquisitions planned at this time.”\nIt is hiring, however: the company currently has 110 employees and projects 200 by the end of this year.\nThe news comes after a year in which the company’s revenues grew 400%. 250 customers now use Looker to parse their data troves to make business decisions, including biggies like Yahoo!, Warby Parker, Asana, Instacart, Docker, Venmo, Upworthy and Gilt.\nThe round was led by new investor Meritech Capital Partners, which has backed of other notable SaaS businesses like Tableau (which Looker competes with), Cloudera and Greenplum. Sapphire Ventures — formerly known as the strategic investment arm of SAP — and existing investors Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital, PivotNorth also participated. This brings the total raised by Looker to nearly $48 million (following a $2 million seed round and a $16 million Series A). As part of this round Meritech MD Rob Ward is joining the board.\nLooker is not disclosing its valuation in this round.\nOne of Looker’s unique selling points has been that it has created a new language for database queries, an easier-to-use approach to SQL called LookML.\nIn an interview, Frank Bien, Looker’s CEO, said that introducing a new language has not been a hurdle. “LookML is based on SQL, so data people are fluent in LookML almost immediately,” he said. “The key for the analyst is the reusability and modularity of LookML.” He claims that “it’s the difference between writing 50 lines of LookML and 1,000 lines of SQL.”\nIn addition to newer platforms like Tableau and Qlik, Looker competes with the traditional BI vendors such as IBM/Cognos and Microstrategy and this is an area where LookML has helped it stand out.\n“Legacy tools have become outdated and were built for a different generation of databases in which data needed to be ETL’d into highly manicured silos before being exposed to the end user for exploration,” he said. “With the evolution of powerful databases and the transition to web-based over client-server, there is an opportunity to support the exploration of complex data in a modern and completely new way.”\nTableau is a competitor but also potentially a funnel for more Looker use, since data visualization will often raise more questions that Looker can help answer.\n“There is a clear need for business to expect more from BI, and for business users and business analysts to facilitate a cycle of innovation, and vendors like Looker can fill in that more,” he said.\nThis is also what interested Ward at Meritech. “Meritech is excited about Looker because we see the next evolution in the data analytics space will be in data transparency and the democratization of data across an organization,” he said in a statement to TechCrunch.\nThat has helped the company win business, but also, at a time when many new services see quick uptake but then fast attrition of usage, continued engagement.\n“One of the keys to success for Looker has been its forward-deploy model, through which the company has a 70 percent trial to win rate, as compared to an 11 percent average for SaaS companies,” Bien said. He claims that Looker customers experience as much as 80-90 percent user adoption across an employee base, compared to traditional BI deployments.\nThe platform, which is sold as either an on-premise or hosted offering — is based either on monthly recurring license fees on annual or multi-annual commitments.", "date": "3/11/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/binary_data.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "lookml,meritech-capital-partners,business-intelligence,looker", "title": "Looker Raises Another $30M For Its New Approach To Business Intelligence", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/11/looker-raises-another-30m-for-its-new-approach-to-business-intelligence/" }, { "id": 25, "authors": "Rip Empson", "category": "Apps", "content": "Last summer, after graduating from AngelPad, San Francisco-based Crittercism announced that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures.\nToday, the startup has received further validation for its diagnostic and management tools for mobile developers, as Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google Ventures have all re-upped, investing $5.5 million in the startup’s series A financing. Not, in fact, $7.2 million as the company’s SEC filing stated this morning. Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy tells us that the filing included the convertible note from the startup’s seed funding.\nFor those unfamiliar, Crittercism began as a platform that enabled mobile developers to diagnose and analyze app crashes as well as provide quick, easy customer support to their users. The startup has since expanded its focus and today officially announced its app performance management solution, which captures and processes realtime app performance data — not only offering crash reports and diagnostics, but realtime views for app loads, system logs, handled exceptions and transaction tracing.\nLevy tells us that the solution works for both small, indie developers and enterprise alike, saving companies from having to throw all their engineering resources at the latest crash, and, in turn, let developers focus on the most important issues, like analyzing user behavior and tracking specific attributes so they can optimize app performance.\nThe idea, Levy says, is to help developers increase their user retention, ratings and revenue, and companies like Netflix, AT&T, Eventbrite, and NPR are already on board. The startup’s solution allows for realtime app diagnostics and performance analytics on both iOS and Android — in other words, over 125 million unique devices and 3 billion app downloads. It’s currently beta testing its HTML5 SDK along with BlackBerry and Windows Phone integrations as well.\nRight now, similar to other infrastructure plays, for indie developers, Crittercism charges based on volume and for enterprise charges a small flat rate per month based on the number of active monthly users using their apps. The company plans to release further pricing info in the next two weeks.\nAs it’s now tracking over 125 million unique devices, the startup has scaled quickly over the last year, which Levy sees as being one of its key value props to big and small companies alike. At scale, he says, Crittercism collects data that other solutions don’t touch and can thus offer a greater degree of insight, both by normalizing their data and by giving them a peek into the performance of each successive release of an app. Did v2.1 actually attract more downloads, fix the bugs that were a part a part of v2.0? That kind of stuff is critical to mobile developers that want to get the best performance out of apps — especially considering that attention spans are decreasing, and there are plenty of options to overwhelm the consumer on app stores. There’s not as much room for error as there was even a year ago.\nFor more on Crittercism, check them out at home here.\n", "date": "6/1/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/screen-shot-2012-06-01-at-2-56-13-pm.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "mobile,enterprise,apps,crittercism", "title": "With $5.5M From Google Ventures, Opus, Crittercism Launches An App Performance Management Solution", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/01/crittercism-series-a/" }, { "id": 26, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Paytm, the Indian mobile commerce company backed by Alibaba, announced today that it has acquired Shifu, a personal assistant app for smartphones. The value of the deal was not disclosed, but Paytm senior vice president Kiran Vasireddy confirmed that it is close to the $8 million reported by new outlets like the Times of India.\nShifu will shut down so its 20-member team—including founders Prashant Singh, Deepansh Jain, and Michael Massey—can join different departments at Paytm and work on integrating the app’s technology into products like Paytm’s mobile wallet and online marketplace. Launched in 2013, Shifu billed itself as “your smartphone sidekick” and analyzed how people used their devices so it could make personalized to-do list suggestions and reminders.\nFor example, if you told Shifu you had a certain amount of free time, it suggested a task from your task list you could complete. Other nifty features include sensing when you are commuting, so it could recommend a voice call or other task you could complete while driving, or sending alerts of discussion topics when you contacted someone, like a doctor, from your address book.\nVasireddy said it’s still too early to announce exactly what new features users will see in Paytm’s products, but Shifu’s technology will help the company analyze customer behavior and improve product and service recommendations. Paytm is best known for its mobile wallet, but also runs online marketplaces for products and local services.\nPaytm has recently made several acquisitions and investments. In the second half of 2015, it purchased local services platform Near.in and put money into transportation app Jugnoo and Little, a platform that helps users find deals at nearby businesses.\nShifu is a departure from Paytm’s spending spree in e-commerce startups, but Vasireddy says artificial intelligence is an important focus for Paytm and other online commerce and financial technology startups. For example, Alibaba, one of Paytm’s key investors, uses artificial intelligence to improve its products, reduce fraud, and quickly approve users for new accounts and services.", "date": "1/4/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/shutterstock_312372566.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "paytm", "title": "Paytm Acquires Personal Assistant App Shifu To Improve Its Artificial Intelligence Tech", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/04/paytm-shifu/" }, { "id": 27, "authors": "Sarah Buhr", "category": "Finance", "content": "Digital commerce company PayPal is moving to establish itself as “more than just a button” to a global payments platform as it readies a split from parent company eBay later this year.\n“We’re coming into the market at a time when the financial services industry is going through some fundamental shifts,” new PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said at PayPal’s Commerce: Rewind event today. “We’re really thinking how do we re-imagine PayPal almost as a service. PayPal as a SaaS platform.”\nA big part of that shift is how consumers are starting to use mobile technology to make purchases.\n“The difference between online and offline commerce is basically blurring and disappearing,” Schulman said. PayPal has 165 million active consumers globally. One in three transactions through PayPal is now through a mobile device, according to Shulman.\nSchulman believes PayPal can be a leader during this transition with mobile payments. “I can see us having more mobile transactions than we do through desktop,” he said.\n\nMuch of this is driven by a global mass adoption of mobile. More than 2 billion people around the world are expected to have a smartphone by 2016, according to the latest figures from eMarketer.\nThe event is a move to establish PayPal as more than a payments platform powered by eBay. PayPal announced last week that it would go public on the Nasdaq as “PYPL,” its original ticker symbol before eBay acquired it. The company plans to spin off from parent company eBay later this year and will go public after that.\n\nPayPal now wants to further its brand as an all-encompassing platform across the web. The company made several announcements today to further establish themselves here, including the ability to link One Touch mobile web to mobile apps. One Touch on mobile has led to as much as 50 percent or greater improvement in conversion rates, according to PayPal.\n“You’ll continue to see a lot of innovation from us around that,” PayPal SVP Bill Ready added.\nReady also announced a PayPal partnership with Bigcommerce, an e-commerce software platform for retailers. PayPal has integrated with the platform so that those on Bigcommerce will be able to use PayPal and Braintree within the platform.\nPayPal announced several other initiatives today such as the expansion of PayPal Credit products with the offering of Easy Payments, “giving shoppers greater visibility into their finances and helping them better manage their budgets.”\nPayPal also announced the beginning of China Connect. PayPal says about a quarter of its payments come from outside the U.S. and that 79 percent of shoppers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Brazil, China and Australia prefer PayPal as their method of global payment. China is a rapidly expanding market, and China Connect will help further PayPal’s cross-border trade initiatives there.\nThe company also said it would be powering major retailer apps’ in-store purchases with Paydiant. PayPal bought Paydiant, the mobile payments gateway, earlier this year to establish itself among physical merchants as an alternative to other smartphone payments systems offered by other payment hopefuls Google and Apple.\n“What we aspire to be is a true customer champion for consumers and merchants. We have a lot to do to get there. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are very excited about the path forward,” Schulman said.", "date": "5/21/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/paypal-commerce-rewired.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "payments,ebay", "title": "PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, “We Have A Lot Of Work Ahead Of Us”", "topics": "paypal", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/21/paypal-ceo-dan-schulman-we-have-a-lot-of-work-ahead-of-us/" }, { "id": 28, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Apps", "content": "Fresco News has raised $1.2 million in seed funding.\nI first wrote about the startup back in June, when founder and CEO John Meyer (pictured above) explained that the company was working an app where users could both browse breaking news content and also accept assignments to contribute photos and videos to professional news organizations.\nAfter all, local newspapers and or broadcasts may not have the resources to send a reporter to every event, particularly when they need to reach a remote location quickly, for example if there’s a fire. So instead, they could create an assignment and alert any nearby users that they’re looking for photos from the fire — contributors receive compensation and credit.\n\nInvestors in the seed funding include CNN co-founder Reese Schonfeld, MediaBistro founder Laurel Touby, former Yahoo executive Ross Levinsohn, former NewsCorp/AOL exec Jonathan Miller, Science Inc. founder Michael Jones, Fresco Capital, 1517 Fund, Social Starts and Wavemaker Partners.\nNext steps include bringing more newsrooms into the system — Meyer said there’s already a significant waitlist.", "date": "9/8/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/john-meyer.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "fresco-news", "title": "Fresco News Raises $1.2M For Crowdsourced Journalism", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/08/fresco-news-seed-funding/" }, { "id": 29, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "In response to being sued by Yahoo for patent infringement last month, Facebook today filed counter-claims against Yahoo for infringing 10 of its own patents. Facebook says the following Yahoo features and properties violate its intellectual property: Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (“C.O.R.E.”), the Yahoo Flickr photo sharing service, and advertisements displayed throughout Yahoo. Facebook also denied the original claims against it from Yahoo, seeks damages for Yahoo’s infringement, and requests a trial by jury.\nThe two lawsuits could effectively end up causing a stalemate between the companies that could prevent Facebook from having to pay exorbitant patent licensing fees to Yahoo or having to shut down some of its services. Facebook’s legal response and full counter-claim can be seen here and below.\n[Read my follow-up: “How Facebook’s Winning The War Against Yahoo: Patent By Patent” to learn about each patent in the countersuit and how they give Facebook the advantage]\nFacebook shared a statement from its General Counsel Ted Ullyot explaining, “From the outset, we said we would defend ourselves vigorously against Yahoo’s lawsuit, and today we filed our answer as well as counter-claims against Yahoo for infringing ten of Facebook’s patents.  While we are asserting patent claims of our own, we do so in response to Yahoo’s short-sighted decision to attack one of its partners and prioritize litigation over innovation.”\nFacebook’s response asks that Yahoo’s suit against it be dismissed with prejudice, claims it does not infringe on Yahoo’s patents, says Yahoo’s claims are invalid and/or unenforceable, says Yahoo has infringed on Facebook’s patents, asks damages be awarded for this infringement, asks that Yahoo pay for all costs of the lawsuits, and that Yahoo be prevented from suing over the same patents in the future.\nYahoo’s response to the New York Times Dealbook regarding Facebook’s counter-claims was “A Yahoo representative said in a statement: “We have only just received Facebook’s answer and counterclaims, but on their face we believe they are without merit and nothing more than a cynical attempt to distract from the weakness of its defense.”\nSo here’s the story so far. On February 27th, Yahoo announced claims that Facebook was infringing on 10 of its patents. On March 13th, Yahoo formally began suing Facebook, leading many in the tech industry to criticize Yahoo for patent trolling rather than innovating. The move was especially dastardly considering Facebook’s viral channels have led to huge referral traffic boosts for Yahoo’s news properties over the last few months.\nMany of the patents Yahoo is suing Facebook for are vague, and could be interpreted to cover social technology found in wide variety of popular websites (though one patent for unified messaging was more specific and possibly more enforceable). Facebook purchased 750 patents from IBM on March 22nd, seemingly to defend itself. However, most and possibly all of the patents from Facebook’s countersuit come from its own employees or elsewhere, not IBM. Facebook filed an amendment to its S-1 to IPO to note the threat of Yahoo’s suit to its business.\nNow the legal teams of the two companies will have to analyze each other’s claims and consider whether to negotiate and settle the dispute or let it go to trial.\nHere’s the list of patents Facebook is suing Yahoo for infringing:\nFacebook’s Answer and Counter-Claims\n\n\nFacebook’s Exhibits Of Its Patents\n\n", "date": "4/3/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/facebook-vs-yahoo-done.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Facebook Fights Back, Countersues Yahoo For Patent Infringement", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-countersues-yahoo/" }, { "id": 30, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Some enterprise IT consolidation afoot, and a sign of the business crunch that the enterprise market has witnessed in the last year. CGI Corporation, an IT services firm based in Canada, has made an all-cash offer of $2.6 billion (£1.7 billion) to buy UK rival Logica, a deal that would create one more IT services powerhouse to rival the likes of IBM, Accenture and KPMG.\nThe offer represents a premium of 60 percent on Logica’s closing share price yesterday. Logica, one of Europe’s biggest IT services firms, has hit the rocks in the last year, with profit shrinking to £32.7 million ($50.6m) from £192.9 million ($299m) the year before on the back of IT cuts in the public sector, a key vertical for the company. It also laid off some 1,300 people in 2011. And margins for IT services — a challenge for all IT services companies — shrank to 2.2 percent from over eight percent in Logica’s main UK business.\nOn the news of the deal this morning, Logica’s website crashed. It appears to be live again now although working very slowly.\nLogica’s chief executive is Andy Green, who joined the company in 2007 after heading up BT Global Services, the enterprise IT services division of the UK’s incumbent telecoms operator. Update: Although he presided over some of Logica’s biggest problems, and has admitted that he underestimated the scale of the downturn and the effect it would have on Logica’s business, the Telegraph reports that he could be in line for £1 million as a result of the sale, based on vested shares that would be cashed in after the acquisition.\nCGI says it has around 31,000 employees, and a spokesperson for the company says that about 40 percent of its business is in public sector/government deals (with clients including the U.S. Deptartment of State and Department of Homeland Security), with a further 25 percent in financial services; 13 percent in telecoms/utilities; 12 percent in manufacturing/retail distribution and 10 percent in heath.\nIn that sense, the deal looks like a good fit: Logica has a client base mainly focused on large enterprises, public sector groups and utilities. (Customers include energy giant Shell and the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency.) But by focusing on large business that also means when something goes awry that can hit Logica hard: Logica says that its top 50 clients last year made up 44 percent of its revenues.\nIn its decades of operation, Logica has had a history of running a number of groundbreaking technology services, including creating and running a lot of the clearing for UK and European mobile text messaging, banking transfers and the automated ticketing system for the London Underground.\nBut it’s also been through several rocky patches over the last 10 years, including profit warnings, and it has divested of several operations — including the sale of its telecoms assets in 2007 for $525 million to Atlantic Bridge Ventures. That business is now called Acision.\nLogica’s statement to the market is here.", "date": "5/31/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/logica-logo.png?w=153", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "it-services", "title": "IT Services Consolidation: CGI To Buy Logica For $2.6B (And Crashes Logica’s Site In Process)", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/31/it-services-consolidation-cgi-to-buy-logica-for-2-6b-and-crashes-logicas-site-in-process/" }, { "id": 31, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Apps", "content": "Apple’s umbrella of cloud services dubbed iCloud will soon receive a major upgrade. SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi just introduced the new feature at WWDC. Basically, the company just copied Dropbox, Microsoft’s OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and every other cloud storage service out there. In OS X Yosemite, you’ll find a new magic folder called iCloud Drive and that acts exactly as you expect.\nWhenever you put a file in iCloud Drive, it will sync this file with Apple’s servers. Of course, you can access your files on your other devices, including your iPhone and iPad. But that’s not all, iCloud Drive will also be available on Windows and the web.\nThe most interesting aspect of the new feature is that iCloud Drive uses the traditional folder interface. Apple has tried for years to make the file system disappear in iOS and later in OS X. It looks like the company is backing down on this strategy. Previously, you had to open the Pages app to find your Pages documents that were stored in iCloud.\nAnother new feature related to iCloud is Mail Drop. In OS X’s mail app, you will be able to send a 5GB encrypted attachment with your email. The attachment won’t exactly be linked to your mail. You will receive a link to download your file.\nThere is no word on how much space you will get. OS X Yosemite will be available in the Fall for free. Developers will receive a preview version of the OS today.\nInterestingly, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie is currently sitting in the front row of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. While Box is mostly targeted toward enterprise users, Apple is clearly getting serious about cloud storage with today’s presentation. It’s unclear whether Levie clapped after Federighi announced iCloud Drive on stage.\nUpdate: Box sent us the following statement.", "date": "6/2/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/img_0037.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "wwdc,icloud,apple", "title": "Apple Announces Box Competitor As Aaron Levie Watches From The VIP Row", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/02/apple-announces-box-competitor-as-aaron-levie-watches-from-the-vip-row/" }, { "id": 32, "authors": "Eliza Brooke", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Watching GoPro footage makes it clear that there is basically nothing cooler than first-person action sport shots. And for those who are spending the day at the skate park, one Kickstarter project is hoping to take that genre of filming to the next level.\nSTABiLGO is a handheld, motorized GoPro stabilizer that keeps the camera level and steady as you turn down a half-pipe or mountain. Creators Michael Boczon and Christine Reilly have raised $33,885 of their $100K goal so far with 12 days left.\nIf you’re wondering how this product didn’t exist already — produced by someone like GoPro or one of its die-hard fans, for instance — don’t ask Boczon. He doesn’t know either. A technical producer and video editor at MTV, he said others had advanced directly to creating aerial rigs and somehow bypassed handheld stabilizers. But Boczon and Reilly have clearly caught a technology wave that others are riding, too. The day after they had been rewinding motors for the STABiLGO, a pre-made motor became available for purchase online.\nAfter playing catch-up with the development of the individual components, STABiLGO seems to have broken ahead of the pack. After STABiLGO went up on Kickstarter, six different groups reached out to say that Boczon had beaten them to the punch by only a few weeks.\nThe aim is to move STABiLGO into retail production in China, which Boczon said he intends to do with or without the Kickstarter money. The prototype costs about $450 in parts to produce, and Boczon said they would likely set the retail price between $600-$700.\n“In the end, our goal was to use it when we go snowboarding,” he said. “Come this season, I will have my unit.”\n", "date": "7/4/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/8522a35996cad3f42e35dcde16bae1c2_large.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "gopro,kickstarter", "title": "STABiLGO Kickstarter Hopes To Take Its Action Sport Video Stabilizer To Market", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/04/stabilgo-kickstarter-hopes-to-take-action-sport-video-stabilizer-to-market/" }, { "id": 33, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Pencil, the iPad stylus from app-maker turned hardware builder FiftyThree, is getting an update that allows it to change the character of lines drawn in its Paper app based on how you apply the unique tip of the pen to the iPad’s surface. It can do this thanks to iOS 8’s introduction of variable touch sizing, which lets developers specify a range of touch point sizes, from a pinpoint to a wider circle.\nThe Pencil seems almost to have been designed with the feature in mind (which is crazy of course, since Apple keeps the details of upcoming operating system features secret, right?), with its wide, angled tip which is coated in capacitive material. Most existing stylus designs feature just a single touch-capable nub at the end of the device, instead of the pyramid featured on the writing end of the Pencil, and the wide rectangle that graces the back of the stylus.\nSo why is this cool? It means that just like when you use a piece of charcoal or a pencil with thick lead on paper, you can angle the Pencil on the iPad to achieve different line widths – using just the very tip will produce thin lines for detail work, and using the sides will allow you to draw wide, soft strokes for shading. Twisting from one to the other will allow you to create a marker line that moves smoothly from thin to thick for top-notch inking and digital painting, too. It adds extra precision to the erase function, too, depending on how you angle the eraser on the drawing service.\n\nFiftyThree admits that the tip of Pencil was designed with additional modes of creative use in mind, and the changes to iOS 8 merely facilitate their original dreams for the accessory. You’ll likely see other stylus makers move to take advantage of the same changes with competing devices, but FiftyThree will be the first to offer it, and it could change the way digital artists use their iPads, combined with the existing palm rejection and blending features the company already offers on their drawing software and stylus combo.", "date": "6/17/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/surface-pressure-ipad.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "ios-8,paper,fiftythree,pencil", "title": "Pencil By FiftyThree Gets Surface Pressure In A Free Update Coming For iOS 8", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/17/pencil-by-fiftythree-gets-surface-pressure-in-a-free-update-coming-for-ios-8/" }, { "id": 34, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "Refinery29, a media company catering to a younger, female demographic, has today launched its first-ever mobile application, called Refinery29 This AM. The idea with the new application is to deliver a round-up of curated news stories to readers, meant to be viewed first thing in the morning. Says the company, these stories will be presented on eight different cards in the app, and will focus on topics including world events, celebrity news, politics and fashion.\nThe pared-down selection in the app, versus the breadth of content available on Refinery29’s website, gives Refinery29 This AM more focus, and better positions it to become a part of users’ daily routines, the company believes.\nThat is, the app’s content is able to be digested fairly quickly. Users can choose to go in-depth if they want to by clicking a link to view the longer article, but they can also just use Refinery29 This AM to flip through cards that feature a headline and summary of that same linked content.\nThat makes the app seem more competitive with something like NowThis News, for example, which similarly tries to deliver top headlines and summaries to readers across platforms and social media.\nAnd while the Refinery29 This AM app may sound, at first blush, like something that would also compete with the company’s presence in Snapchat Discover, the type of content provided by the app is notably different from what’s directed at the Snapchat audience.\nFor instance, today’s Snapchat content includes stories about new nail polish trends, makeup tips, Netflix recommendations, and more, set to jazzy, upbeat music. Meanwhile, the AM app presents a selection that includes “real” news – like Boko Haram’s burning of homes in Nigeria and the spread of the Zika virus in Colombia, alongside pop culture stories like one involving last night’s “Grease” Live” and Netflix’s “Gilmore Girls” reunion.\nThe company tells us that the app will refresh with new stories every day at 6:00 AM ET, Monday through Friday, but the weekend edition will remain the same on both Saturday and Sunday.\nContent that refreshes on a schedule has been tried before, with mixed results. Today, Yahoo’s News Digest app updates in the morning and evening with new stories, but the app is floundering in the 70’s and 80’s in iOS’s News category. It does a little better on Android – ranked in the 50’s through 70’s, generally, in the News & Magazines category.\nMeanwhile, an earlier experiment – News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper The Daily did something similar, but ended up shutting down.\nOther news summary services have been doing better. For example, the daily newsletter theSkimm reported reaching 1.5 million subscribers as of August.\nThe challenge for Refinery29 is that it has to get users to actually make launching the app a part of their daily routine. This is prompted by way of push notifications, which can tend to get annoying. While they can be disabled, doing so could have users forgetting about the app entirely.\nIn Refinery29’s favor, however, is that the app is built out of  the company’s popular web franchise, “8 Things To Know This AM,” which already has a readership familiar with its headline round-ups. The company says that transforming the series into a standalone app was a natural way to meet its mobile audience’s needs.\n“Mobile content consumption has been a strong area of growth for Refinery29 and we are always testing new ways to reach and engage our audience. The app is an opportunity to take one of our most successful content series, 8 Things to Know This AM, and package it into a format that our audience is demanding as they are spending less and less time on desktop.\nPlans to invest more in distribution via mobile were also a part of the company’s goals following its 2015 Series D raise of $50 million from Scripps Networks and WPP.\nToday, Refinery29 claims over 100 million monthly viewers across platforms, 25 percent of which are from desktop. However, the company also tells us that its mobile footprint is already quite strong: 63 percent of users come to the site via mobile, and 2 in 3 only accessed the site on mobile instead of desktop in December.\n“Mobile content consumption has been a strong area of growth for Refinery29 and we are always testing new ways to reach and engage our audience. The ‘app is an opportunity to take one of our most successful content series, “8 Things to Know This AM,” and package it into a format that our audience is demanding as they are spending less and less time on desktop,” a spokesperson explained of the new release\nThe app was created in-house using React Native, and content is sponsored by an advertiser. BelVita is the launch sponsor, but Refinery29 declined to detail how sponsorships would work or be priced.\nRefinery29 This AM is a free download on iTunes.", "date": "2/1/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/screen-shot-2016-02-01-at-11-00-03-am.png?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "apps,news-app,mobile,refinery29", "title": "Refinery29 Debuts Its First App, A Morning News Round-Up Called “Refinery29 This AM”", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/refinery29-debuts-its-first-app-a-morning-news-round-up-called-refinery29-am/" }, { "id": 35, "authors": "", "category": "Europe", "content": "Editor’s Note: This post is by our regular contributor Natasha Starkell, the CEO of GoalEurope, the outsourcing advisory firm and a publication about outsourcing, innovation and startups in Central and Eastern Europe. Twitter @NatashaStarkell. Gplus.to/natashastarkell.\nSlovak startup Piano Media, which has challenged the online media industry with an aggregated paywall concept, has raised €2 million  from 3TS, one of the leading private equity funds in Central and Eastern Europe.\nPiano Media, launched in May 2011, enables online publications to offer their readers premium content on a subscription basis. In July 2011 it raised €300,000 from MONOGRAM Ventures, Etarget and NextBig.\nIn the two test markets, Slovakia and Slovenia, readers pay monthly subscription of €3.90 (Slovakia) and €4.89 Euros (Slovenia), which enables access to the premium content of all participating online media, a total of 60 websites and 20 publishers.\nThe publishers receive a share of the revenue based on the traffic generated, while Piano Media keeps a commission. In the first month of the launch in Slovenia, a Central European country with a population of only 2 million people, Piano generated €26,000 for the participating publishers.\nThe new round of funding will be used to fuel international expansion and improve software, according to Tomas Bella, the company’s founder and CEO.\nOne of the earlier high profile investments of 3TS in Central and Eastern Europe is Hungarian LogMeIn, a cloud-based, remote-connectivity and collaboration tool that went public on NASDAQ and generated over $100 million in 2009.", "date": "4/17/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/screen-shot-2012-04-17-at-11-11-18.png?w=179", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "Shared Online Paywall Service Piano Media Secures 2 Million Euros From 3TS", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/17/shared-online-paywall-service-piano-media-secures-euro-2-million-from-3ts/" }, { "id": 36, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "We’ve seen more personal e-vehicles sprout up in the last year than I care to remember, but today yet another joins the fray.\nMeet the JiveBike.\nUnlike one category of e-bikes that look and feel just like a regular bike, the JiveBike’s appearance is a bit different. It has a low center bar, which holds the batteries and the Raspberry PI CPU that’s running the show. But, at the same time, the JiveBike doesn’t look so different from a traditional bike that you will turn into some spectacle on the road.\nOh, and it folds.\nWe’ve seen e-vehicles that fold down to compactness before — the Urb-E, in particular, comes to mind — but not very many e-bikes maintain the appearance of a real bike and still fold down to something more manageable.\n\nThe JiveBike can last 20 miles on a two-hour charge, with a maximum speed of around 15 miles per hour.\nYou can choose between three driving modes: electric, manual or assisted pedaling.\nPlus, it also comes with a mount for your smartphone, and Bluetooth connectivity so you can pair with the JiveBike app, letting you see how many miles are left on the bike and charging status. And if that weren’t enough, you can plug in your route on maps and have easy-to-read directions while riding around.\nThere’s just one caveat. The price on this bad boy is sky high. You can pre-order a JiveBike now by paying half of the full price, which is just north of $2,000, and then pay the second half of the pre-order after receiving your JiveBike and testing it out.\nPre-orders are available here.", "date": "3/24/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jive.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "e-bikes,jivebike", "title": "The JiveBike Is A Fold-Up Electric Bike With Style", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/the-jivebike-is-a-fold-up-electric-bike-with-style/" }, { "id": 37, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "A mobile application called WeMesh wants to make watching videos more of a real-time social experience by allowing you and your friends to watch videos together in perfect sync, while also texting and voice chatting. Today, the app aggregates videos from YouTube, but the plan is to soon expand that selection to include videos from your Facebook News Feed, then other video services like Vimeo and Dailymotion, as well your own videos from your phone’s photo album.\nThe goal is to expand WeMesh’s social video viewing to premium video services, too.\nThe idea for WeMesh comes from an unlikely pair: founders Michael Pazaratz and Saeed Darvish-Kazem weren’t programmers or app developers by day, but were medical doctors trained in Canada. Pazaratz was studying nuclear medicine, while Darvish-Kazem trained in cardiology. However, the two had learned to code in high school, they said, and are self-described “technology enthusiasts.” Plus, Pazaratz notes that nuclear medicine is a fairly technical field, and required him to have a strong physics background.\nBut the two initially didn’t think to build an app – they just went in search of something like it on the App Store.\n“We thought this app must exist,” explains Pazaratz. “We shared videos with each other constantly…and, eventually, we felt like, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could watch these things together?’ There must be an app for that,” he says. “As an outsider to the tech industry, you think there must be an app for everything, because it seems like there is,” he adds.\nAfter searching through the App Store, though, it appeared that there wasn’t an app like the one they wanted available for download. So the two decided to build it themselves.\nOf course, Google Hangouts has offered an option for viewing synced YouTube videos for years, but WeMesh’s advantage is that it’s a third-party solution with plans to extend itself beyond YouTube in the near future. That could make it a fun tool for watching videos from places like Facebook, or even videos you’ve recorded yourself, but haven’t shared on social media.\nToday, WeMesh allows for video playback and synchronization across devices, down to under a millisecond. The app itself was coded by a team of ex-BlackBerry engineers based in Waterloo, which is where WeMesh is based. The bootstrapped startup is also participating in the Google for Entrepreneurs program there.\nWhile testing the app with a friend over our cellular connections while sitting together at dinner, the app performed as advertised, though it lagged a bit when navigating through the content due to the connection speeds available through our respective mobile carriers.\nHowever, after she would join a video I invited her to, the app would quickly catch her up right to the part I was viewing on my phone. We were effectively watching the exact same thing at the same time. We could also text and voice chat right from the app’s interface.\nWeMesh today offers a variety of categories from its homescreen, like music videos or those trending on Reddit for example, and you can make your “meshes” (as these social viewing sessions are called) private to you and your friends, semi-public (shared with those nearby), or public. Plus, when one video completes, viewers vote on which one to watch next.\nThe ability to keep watching together has led WeMesh to see long engagement times during its early days – the founders say that its thousands of users are spending 20 minutes in the app on average.\nThe app has actually been live on the App Store since earlier in the year, but was still under development – it didn’t include all the features described above when it first launched.\nWeMesh is a free download here.", "date": "6/19/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/techcrunch-5.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "social-video", "title": "WeMesh For iOS Lets You Watch Videos With Friends In Real Time", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/19/wemesh-for-ios-lets-you-watch-videos-with-friends-in-real-time/" }, { "id": 38, "authors": "Semil Shah", "category": "Apps", "content": "Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.\nLate in 2013, I stumbled upon two bootstrapped entrepreneurs with deep backgrounds in mobile development — Timothy Lee and Nathan Esquenazi — who were on very focused, technical, educational mission: To take some of the best web developers and train them to develop for mobile platforms. Everyone knows it’s impossible to find good mobile engineers across iOS and Android, and with talent either locked up in big companies or fragmented across so many startups, their startup was born: CodePath, an intense, live, workshop-style bootcamp for engineers to work on mobile development projects. For this weekly mobile column, I invited the CodePath founders share their vision, as well as to explain the program to engineers and companies who may be interested.\nHow was CodePath formed, and what’s your mission?\nOur mission is to empower software developers, free of charge, to continuously expand their skillsets across new specializations and platforms. To start, we have designed an accelerated program that effectively ramps up engineers in iOS and Android development. The programs we offer are supported by paid training and sponsorship from mobile startups.\nCodePath was formed largely out of our shared passion for teaching and curriculum development. About a year ago after our startup was acquired, we had the opportunity to design and develop a project-based mobile curriculum for Yahoo. We ran hundreds of engineers there through this program and saw the opportunity to bring this unique format and structure to the startup community at large.\nFortunately, there are a wealth of great programs and low cost curriculums that already exist for junior or aspiring developers. However, not many companies are addressing the needs of the professional developer community. We find that there are many inefficiencies in the way that developers today ramp up on the latest technology stacks. In addition, seasoned developers often find transitioning out of their existing specialties to be quite difficult. While we strive to keep our curriculum as open as possible to everyone today, there’s an incredible value in initially focusing our programs towards the professional audience.\nThere is definitely an almost overwhelming amount of online resources and we certainly don’t miss developing in a pre-Stack Overflow era. However, there are many advantages to learning within a structured, accelerated program with an emphasis on best practices and standards. We think the programs are valuable in part for the same reason people find value from a personal trainer at the gym or for the same reasons an athlete has a coach. We think the weekly code reviews, well-designed curriculum and peer collaboration on real projects can make the learning process considerably more fun and effective.\nThe courses are more similar than they are different. First and foremost our programs are about creating an effective learning environment and connecting talented engineers together so they can build interesting products. Both courses give engineers a chance to ramp up on the respective platforms, adopt the best practices surrounding mobile development, and explore how to design enjoyable user experiences. The iOS course is focused around the latest iOS 7 technologies and techniques. The Android course is focused on introducing the world of modern Android development with KitKat. In that sense, the development environments, tools, and platforms are what separate the two courses while the spirit and the format remain the same.\nAbsolutely, we think part of the strength of Android in particular is the proliferation of Android-based devices that extend far beyond the phone. Automobiles, eyewear, tablets and even military helmets are quickly becoming a part of the Android ecosystem and we are interested in actively encouraging exploration of those platforms as they are adopted.\nWe are currently exploring the various ways our programs can provide value to companies. We think increasing the pool of talented iOS and Android engineers is in the best interest of many local companies. We have been working with companies like Yahoo, Hulu, Zendesk, MyFitnessPal, and Riviera Partners to sponsor our past CodePath programs. For companies that need mobile training for their engineers, we allow them to reserve paid seats in our San Francisco courses. Any company interested in getting involved as a sponsor or inquiring about mobile training should contact us at dev@thecodepath.com to learn more.\nRight now we are very focused on providing the best programs that we can within San Francisco but we are committed to expanding these programs in time to other cities. Here are a few of our key stats:\nAs an experienced engineer, learning the nooks and crannies of any new framework takes a significant time investment. One difference in web and mobile is there is not really a distinction between a front-end mobile developer and a back-end mobile developer. A successful mobile developer must be full stack and must consider user interaction as much as technical implementation. As part of our program, we emphasize the level of visual detail required to create polished mobile experiences, which is often a new challenge for web developers that are currently focused on scalability and infrastructure. One other challenge is the difference in architecting, testing and deploying for embedded devices as opposed to applications in the cloud.\nRight now we rely on people to spread the word about our mobile courses to friends and colleagues. If you know any engineers interested in learning iOS or Android, have them sign up for the next program starting in March. If you know of companies that have mobile training needs or would be interested in sponsoring our initiatives, we’d love to meet them. If you are a mobile engineer interested in mentoring or teaching, we definitely want to talk with you. Feel free to reach out to us for any reason at dev@thecodepath.com.", "date": "2/9/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/codepath.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "How CodePath Trains Developers To Build In A Mobile World", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/09/how-codepath-trains-developers-to-build-in-a-mobile-world/" }, { "id": 39, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Earnings", "content": "Groupon, the daily deals platform that has been making an effort to widen its business into local commerce and more mobile services, appears to be turning is ship around. Today, the company posted Q4 earnings with a 20% rise in Q4 revenues to $925.4 million on non-GAAP EPS of $0.06 and GAAP EPS of $0.01 — results that handily beat analyst estimates.\nAnalysts were expecting revenues of $908.38 million non-GAAP earnings of $0.03 per share. It also beat Groupon’s own Q4 guidance, which was between $875 million and $925 million for revenues on non-GAAP EPS of between $0.02 and $0.04.\nStill, the market has been punishing the company after hours, with the stock down around 2% in after-hour trading on the back of a weak outlook for the quarter coming up. In Q1, Groupon has given an EPS range of break-even to $0.02, on revenues of $790 million – $840 million. Analysts had been expecting $0.02 and sales of $856.5 million.\n“2014 was a transformational year for Groupon, as we made significant progress in our strategy to become the world’s leading local commerce destination,” said Eric Lefkofsky, CEO of Groupon, in a statemennt. “Global billings hit their highest level ever in the quarter, growing more than 30%, driven in part by our reignited North America Local business. We now turn our attention to further building out our marketplace to ensure that our more than 260 million subscribers have an amazing experience every time they use Groupon.”\nAnother milestone is that Groupon said that global units — vouchers and products sold before cancellations an refunds — exceeded 100 million for the first quarter ever, up 81% year-over-year to 101 million in total.\nLast quarter, Groupon also beat revenue and earnings estimates on sales of $757.1 million and EPS of $0.03.\nGroupon has been slowly building up its business in mobile and local commerce to diversify away from daily deals. That’s led the company to a range of acquisitions and product launches that move it deeper into payments and verticals like travel.\nMany of Groupon’s newest developments have been launched in the U.S., its core market. Internationally, the company is supposedly looking at selling a majority stake in is Ticket Monster business in South Korea. Groupon acquired the stake in 2013 for $260 million.\nWhile Groupon didn’t have any news on a sale of a stake in the company, right now Ticket Monster is an engine for growing the company’s growth internationally. Groupon today noted that while sales of global units were up 11% in North America and 20% in EMEA, they were up by a whopping 340% on the back of Ticket Monster sales.\nHowever, it’s also a drag on the company’s earnings, with an operating loss of $16.2 million in the quarter, with $13.1 million from that related directly to Ticket Monster.\n“The company announced last quarter that it is exploring a range of financing and strategic alternatives for its Asian businesses, including Ticket Monster. As part of that process, multiple parties have expressed preliminary interest in Ticket Monster, although it is too early to comment on structure, pricing or the likelihood of a transaction, as the process is still underway,” the company noted in its earnings. Excluding Ticket Monster, Rest of World was near break even in the quarter, it said, compared with a $14.7 million segment operating loss a year ago.\nBut Groupon doesn’t seem to be interested right now in selling the whole business. “We believe investment in Korea is essential for our company,” Lefkofsky said during the earnings call.\nThe international contraction comes at the same time that LivingSocial has sold its last non-English-language holding, Let’s Bonus, which operated a daily deals service in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Chile.\nDrilling down into how the business performed, numbers were up across the board.\nGroupon said that active deals were at 370,000 globally at the end of Q4 (versus 300,000 the previous quarter). Active customers were up 23% over last year to 53.9 million. Active customers are those who have purchased a voucher or produc within the last 12 months. More than half of its active customers — 24.1 million — are in North America, with 15.2 million in EMEA and 14.6 in the Rest of the World.\nThe company added another 10 million mobile downloads in the quarter, taking it to 110 million, and monthly unique visitors — including both mobile and web visits to Groupon — was over 160 million globally at the end of the fourth quarter 2014: the proportion between active users and visitors remains low.\nCustomer spend was up to $155, compared to $149 last quarter.\nIn terms of how users are coming to Groupon sites, the company (like its competitor LivingSocial) has been hit with a strong fatigue around getting those daily email shots and so it’s been trying to find other ways of luring people to its deals. Today Groupon said that 26% of its transactions came out of searches — up from 19% a year ago. Lefkofsky said that there are now 800,000 Business Pages created that are indexed to Google to drive search based on actual deals. This strategy was initiated in October last year and the plan is for there to be millions of these pages longer term.\nWe’re listening now to the call and will update this post with any more interesting details that we pick up.", "date": "2/12/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/groupon-earnings.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "daily-deals,earnings,groupon", "title": "Groupon Q4 Beats Street On Sales Of $925.4M, EPS Of $0.06, But Posts Weaker Outlook For Q1", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/12/groupon-q4/" }, { "id": 40, "authors": "Jon Russell", "category": "Asia", "content": "So, you’re in charge of one of Asia’s (nay, the world’s) top viral/comedy communities. The new year is here. What’s your focus for 2015? How about game publishing?\nThat’s not the most obvious answer, but it is a new experiment that 9GAG, the popular online forum run out of Hong Kong, is embarking on. The goal is to provide a richer experience for readers using different kinds of media.\n9GAG claims 80 million unique users visit its pages each month. The company has taken an interesting and very different path to many other online publishing companies. Founded in 2008, it passed through 500 Startups’ accelerator in 2011, and Y-Combinator in 2012, going on to raise $2.8 million from investors.\nIt made its name as a place to find amusing images, and now it is diversifying its business to increase engagement and value for users, while enabling some of Asia’s hidden gems to shine through its platform at the same time.\nThat’s the message from CEO and co-founder Ray Chan, who recently spoke to TechCrunch following the launch of Redhead Redemption, 9GAG’s first mobile game. Initially available on Android (an iOS version is due soon), it is a freemium title developed by Indonesia-based Touchten.\n\nEarly traction has been impressive, and initial promotion efforts generated 100,000 downloads within two days of its launch on Christmas Eve. Current Google Play store metrics show it has less than half a million downloads thus far, and an impressive 4.6 rating from over 60,000 reviewers.\nThat engagement came without any ad spend, just organic traffic. 9gag.com has a banner at the top of its site that links to the Google Play store page (we are now noticing some banners too), and the game was also shared via its well-followed social media accounts.\n\nAs a community-driven site, Chan and the 9GAG team want to serve its users by surfacing the kind of content that they’ll enjoy and engage with. Beyond images and comedy skits, that could include different kinds of media too.\nChan said the team has always been keen on games, but didn’t take the leap yet because “we didn’t know anything about making them.”\n“We play games, our users play game, but making them is another story,” he added.\nWhen Chan met Touchten founder and CEO Anton Soeharyo at an industry event in Singapore in October last year, the duo got talking about their respective startups. The idea of collaborating was floated and, within two months, 9GAG published its first game.\n“It’s an experiment for us,” Chan explained.\n“As a community, we always want to create value for our users. On the other hand we always have to make money, and we always think it is better to get money from the users directly if possible.”\nChan declined to go into the specifics of the partnership, but he did confirm that revenue generated from the title — via in-app purchases — will be split between both startups.\nHe believes that today’s app crunch and general consumer reluctance to downloads lots of apps make a curated and trusted pick of apps valuable to all parties. Though this is just 9GAG’s first game, Chan claimed the site’s audience trusts it implicitly to serve up apps and games that are top quality.\nBeyond that, there is also a vast opportunity for game studios and developers to stand out in crowded app stores.\n“There are tonnes of gaming companies in Asia, many build pretty good games but the cost per install gets high due to competition. That makes it harder for small studios. We think it would be interesting if we could work with studios, and help them to publish. If we can curate good games then it’s win-win-win for them, us and our users,” Chan said.\n\nIn this specific case, Chan is a big fan of Touchten which he said “doesn’t get the exposure that they deserve” for many of their games.\nBeyond just the potential to drive downloads and revenue from games, Chan said 9GAG can showcase companies, helping them build a reputation in their own right and enabling them to get valuable feedback from the 9GAG community.\nTouchten has notched over 10 million downloads for the 20 games it has published to date. Soeharyo told TechCrunch that he hoped its partnership with 9GAG could raise the five-year-old startup’s profile and “put Indonesia on the map as a country that also produces games.”\nStressing that the strategy is still experimental at this point, Chan said 9GAG would seek out small game studios, 10-20 person operations who can be “reputable partners,” if and when it extends gaming push.\nThe likes of Reddit and Digg aren’t likely to venture into game publishing anytime soon, but that isn’t the only strategy that 9GAG differs on. Its approach to social media is centered on building its brand, not generating traffic, according to Chan.\n9GAG has nearly 23 million fans on its Facebook Page and over 3.7 million Twitter followers, but Instagram is a particular success story.\nThere it has over 9.4 million followers, which ranks it inside the top five brands using the service, ahead of H&M, NBA, Adidas and many other household names.\nNo doubt the photo-centric nature of 9GAG’s content helps it, but that’s still an incredible achievement. Chan said the company “doesn’t really care if posts drive traffic” or not, and that’s why it focuses on the actual content that it posts to social sites rather than ‘calls to action,’ click bait and other factors.\n\nThat’s a pretty fascinating approach, and watching how its content is shared and interacted with on social media has also helped 9GAG introduce new verticals. 8fact was launched for shareable facts, as the name suggests, while 8crap similarly does exactly what you’d expect.\nThose two don’t have their dedicated sites though, they exist on social media and app form only. It’s an experimental approach that might one day see them given their own URLs or domains.\nBeyond the social media followings and vast website traffic numbers, 9GAG also has an impressive mobile app readership. Mobile represents a fairly regular 30 percent of all visits, but 9GAG’s dedicated mobile apps drive three million daily active users. That figure jumps to 5-6 million for monthly users, and is another impressive feat from this Asia-based publisher which is quietly plugging away.\nAs for other plans in 2015, Chan is keen to dabble in other media experiments that can benefit the 9GAG community. He’s also looking to localize more of the humor on its pages for the varying different nationalities that visit. (The U.S. drives most visitors, while Germany — a country often teased for a lack of sense of humor — ranks a surprise second.)\nBut the chatty Chan is less interested in talking about the financials of 9GAG’s business — including profit, loss and revenue — such is his focus on the consumer side of its work.\nThe startup last raised funding in July 2012, taking in $2.8 million, and he said its financial situation is good and there are no imminent plans to raise again. With less than 30 staff on its books and an office in Asia, he added that 9GAG “stays lean,” which helps its money go further.", "date": "1/12/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/redhead-redemption.jpg?w=738", "section": "asia/", "tags": "hong-kong,9gag", "title": "9GAG, The Asia-Based Social Site With 80M Monthly Visitors, Steps Into Mobile Games", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/12/9gag-steps-into-gaming/" }, { "id": 41, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, says that it’s easy enough for consumers to opt out of tailored ads on Twitter, but he does not know how many actually go through the process of doing so. “You can opt out of tailored ads and content,” he told an audience today. But asked how many percentage-wise have done so, he would not say: “I do not know how many people have opted out of tailored ads.”\nThe comments were made on the keynote stage at CES in Las Vegas, where Costolo spoke alongside Maurice Levy, CEO of ad giant and Twitter business partner Publicis, on the subject of advertising in the age of social media.\nWhile the words may simply be a measure of an exec caught off guard, or just not wanting to reveal specifics, they are interesting in light of Twitter’s falling share price on the back of stock downgrades (the most recent one today), because analysts believe the company was too overvalued when it first started trading publicly in November.\nTwitter’s main source of revenue these days, and therefore a key source of hope and valuation from investors, comes from advertising on its platform. And a good part of that has to do with inventory served to the most relevant users.\nOn the day of the CES appearance, Twitter’s stock closed down about 3.5% to $59.29 per share.\nIn any case, Levy came to Costolo’s support with a stat from Europe, where even though users have had the ability to opt of ads, hardly any have done so.\n“What we are seeing in France and Europe is that the opt-out rate is below 5%,” Levy said. He says that’s because advertisers are more cautious of what they present to users in the first place because of the stronger data protection rules.\n“You have to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer,” he said. “They don’t want to miss the relationship with the brand or an offer, but they don’t want to be overloaded with a lot of information or the wrong messages.”\n(For readers’ information, you can opt out on Twitter in Settings->Security and Privacy->Privacy-> and then unticking the bottom two boxes. This won’t mean you don’t get ads or other content promoted to you, but they won’t be based on your activity on the site.)\nLevy, whose company in April inked a deal with Twitter, was strong on the role of privacy in advertising in the age of Edward Snowden, the computer specialist who went rogue and revealed the extent to which the government — specifically the U.S. National Security Agency — has been monitoring internet users. The process of data collection has now been laid bare for consumers to see just how much third parties are tracking what they do online, which had already been a sensitive issue where advertising is concerned even before Snowden.\n“Privacy is a serious issue and we should not take it lightly,” he said in a conversation with MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan and Costolo. “We should think about the consequence of using private data to universalize a product. We have to be extremely cautious and take it very seriously.\n“The problem is that today the issue is more complicated thanks to Mr Snowden. People have discoverd the NSA and the access they have. People understand the security aspect and are extremely mindful of information flowing.”\nHe said that Europe, and his native France in particular, have taken a leadership position when it comes to how how data is used. France created its data protection agency CNIL back in 1978. One of the key enforcement positions, he says, has been providing ways for consumers to opt-out of data services.\n“This is to avoid tons of information floating around. All of this is working extremely well and there is no issues,” he said — partly because the regulator remains very proactive. In fact, just today it fined Google over a privacy violation.\nThe French system has been adopted in Europe, and “we do hope that we find consensus between Europe and the U.S.,” Levy said. “Otherwise [consumers] will get frustrated with spam,” he said. Costolo agreed that clear policies that let people opt out, and systems to give users more relevant information, were the way forward.\nThe two also provided a few (but really only a few) more details about the deal between them — which was never formally announced by either although confirmed by both and reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars and covering “multiple” years.\nSo what did we find out? It sounds a bit like they are still trying to work out the full extent of what they will do together. “This may sound cliche but I couldn’t mean it more sincerely,” said Costolo. “It’s about really trying to develop a partnership rather than a transactional relationship. To do that you have to start thinking about how you work together. How customers understand everyday moments.”\nIn more practical terms, it likely involves Publicis division Starcom Mediavest ushering its key clients onto the Twitter platform, and creating ways of being able to analyse and use Twitter’s firehose and corresponding metadata, via partners like DataSift, to provide more context to make sure ads are as effective as they can possibly be.\nLevy, meanwhile, got a bit existential.\n“Everything is blank,” he said of how Publicis views the best strategy for advertising in the future (it sounds much better in a French accent). “We cannot say we can build a platform for advertisers on only one platform. It’s a complex system that requires much more information and knowledge….that is where we and the ad agencies are in our way of thinking.” It’s “important not to work in silos,” he noted too.", "date": "1/8/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/photo-22.jpg?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "publicis,maurice-levy,dick-costolo,twitter", "title": "Twitter CEO Says He Has No Idea How Many Users Opt Out Of Ads", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/08/twitter-ceo-says-he-has-no-idea-how-many-users-opt-out-of-ads/" }, { "id": 42, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Fundings & Exits", "content": "Android users are rolling their eyes over the newly introduced customization capabilities released in Apple’s iOS 7 like “dynamic” (live) wallpapers and backgrounds with the parallax effect. You can already do these things on Android and have been able to for some time. In fact, you can fully personalize your smartphone, from the homescreen widgets to the default apps, icon sets and more.\nA new company looking to build a business around smartphone personalization is MyColorScreen, which last week released its theming app, Themer, into private beta. Though not yet available to the public, already 250,000 users have signed up requesting an invite, and so far, around 140,000 have installed the app after being let in.\nThough to some extent the app is competing with the numerous other Android “launchers” on the market today, Themer is something of a different beast. Instead of either taking over every aspect of your phone, like Facebook Home did, or offering a launcher app as the base plus a suite of widgets you have to seek out and download separately, Themer is designed to allow for one-click installations, with backgrounds, icons, widgets and more all bundled together in each theme.\nTo use the app, you simply browse for a theme you like, push a button, and your Android phone is customized. The themes are high-quality, too. They’re purchased from the designers who haunt the MyColorScreen website, a social service where users can share and comment on photos of Android customizations. You can think of it as something of a Dribbble.com for Android homescreen designers.\nMyColorScreen has an interesting history. The company co-founders, Ashvin Dhingra (CEO), Joshua Solan, and Brandon Miniman, didn’t create MyColorScreen.com themselves – they acquired it.\nSolan, who owns a popular mobile software development community called XDA Developers, and Dhingra have backgrounds in finance. After school, they worked on hedge funds in San Diego together before relocating to New York. But all the while, they had entrepreneurial side projects on the side. (Solan bought XDA Developers a while ago, but he’s now more involved with MyColorScreen today.)\n“We were always amazed at the large user base of XDA,” explains Dhingra. “We would look at it, and think ‘what are the big things people are talking about on XDA? What is it that people want to do with Android?’ And what we noticed is that a lot of people are talking about customization, and making their device different,” he says.\n\nThat gave them an idea. Android customization, though powerful, was still not as accessible to the mainstream as it could be. Developers would talk about rooting their phones and installing ROMs, which is something everyday users don’t really do. Meanwhile, designers would use advanced but complex widgets like UCCW to build unique and personalized homescreens. The team realized that building a launcher that could bring this level of deeper customization to a broader audience could be something very attractive and worth building.\nBefore building the Themer app itself, they bought the MyColorScreen domain from its Thailand-based owner, Pete Rojwongsuriya, for five figures, as it was one of the larger Android community sites on the web at the time. That allows them to dig into a wide network of designers who are willing to sell their creations to MyColorScreen for use in the app. The designs are purchased for around $50 each, but are then customized and optimized for the most common Android screen ratios, so they’ll work on a large number of different devices.\nThere are fifty themes now and more are added all the time. There’s also a good handful of widgets, like a dialer, news widget, calendar, music player, etc.\nWork on the Themer app itself began earlier this year, after CTO Rohit Talati’s hiring. Now MyColorScreen has an office in Irvine, where four full-time employees work alongside Dhingra. The company had been self-funding their efforts and acquisitions initially, then raised a seed round of about half a million in funding in July from Larry Braitman and other angels.\nThe app is free during beta, and will remain free to users, as will its themes even after public launch. Instead, the plan is to generate revenue through things like branded homescreens (a theme has a homescreen for everything from Amazon, for example) and branded widgets (e.g. offer a well-built widget for a company that doesn’t have one, like Yelp), but in ways that wouldn’t compromise the user experience.\nAnother idea is to introduce an app discovery element to Themer. That is, some themes would include app folders for things like “Shopping” or “Games” which would automatically organize the apps you own, but also include links to the Play Store as suggestions for those you might like to try.\nThe company is currently seeing around 20,000 to 30,000 sign-ups per day, and roughly the same number of installs. Later this afternoon, they’ll be increasing the pace of the rollout, Dhingra says.\nThe app is now in beta on Google Play, where you need an invite code to use it after install. There are 500 invites for TechCrunch readers here: http://themerapp.com/techcrunch.\nCorrection: We were mistakenly informed that Miniman also owned XDA. He is involved, but not an owner. This article has been updated to reflect that. ", "date": "10/9/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/themer-1.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "android,mycolorscreen", "title": "Themer App Grabs Half A Million To Bring Android Customization To Mainstream Users", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/09/themer-app-grabs-half-a-million-to-bring-android-customization-to-the-mainstream/" }, { "id": 43, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "If you’re big on YouTube or Vine or whatever, a startup called FanBread aims to help you make money — specifically by building and monetizing a website of your very own.\nThe company is only emerging from stealth mode today, but founder and CEO Karl House told me he’s done something similar before, when he served as head of sales and business development at YouTube network Kin Community. At Kin, he worked with the popular YouTube comedy duo Smosh to build its site and “evolve them into a media brand.”\nAt FanBread, House said he’s turning the successful strategies he saw at Smosh into an “influence accelerator” product.\n“We look at influencers very much as a publisher,” he said. “They’ve done the hard work of building a social footprint, but the vast majority of them don’t have an owned-and-operated property.”\nBut if someone has hundreds of thousands of followers on a social network, is it really that important to drag the audience on their own site? Maybe not, if they just like being popular. But if they want to make money, or even if they’re just aiming to build “a deeper bond with their fans,” then House argued creating a standalone website starts to make sense.\nSo FanBread offers its own website builder, which House demoed for me. Setting up a site looks pretty straightforward, as does adding your own merchandise, videos (embedded via YouTube), and so on.\nBut as House himself acknowledged, there are other site builders out there. More interesting is what FanBread offers on top of that, including a content marketplace where you can find blog posts created by the FanBread team to run on your own site.\n“What we’re not trying to do is dupe the fans into thinking all of a sudden, I’m a blogger,” House said, noting that each post comes with proper attribution.\nSo what’s the point? Well, it gives visitors something to read, something you can use to start a conversation, and something you can post on social networks to increase your engagement. (On the other hand, duplicate content could hurt your Google ranking, which is why these stories are tagged to avoid being crawled by search engines.)\nFanBread can also help these influencers make money through native, mobile and video advertising, merchandise sales and affiliate links. Asked about Niche (recently acquired by Twitter) and other social media ad companies, House suggested he aims to build something that’s “truly a platform,” allowing advertisers to work with many more creators and publishers, rather than just a few big names.\nSites already built using FanBread include My Cupcake Addiction, BroScienceLife and GeeksterInk.", "date": "4/9/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/fanbread.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "ceo,social-network", "title": "FanBread Says It Can Help Online Celebs Make Money By Creating Their Own Websites", "topics": "youtube", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/09/fanbread-says-it-can-help-online-celebs-make-money-by-creating-their-own-websites/" }, { "id": 44, "authors": "Megan Rose Dickey", "category": "Startups", "content": "Chariot, the commuter shuttle company that can transport up to 14 people at a time, just launched a new service for people who work in San Francisco’s residential neighborhoods and may need to get back to a BART stop or Caltrain station at night.\n“Now, we’re going to be able to serve a whole new swath of customers,” Chariot CEO Ali Vahabzadeh told me, like firefighters in the Presidio, school teachers in Pacific Heights, hospitality workers, workers at the Jewish Community Center, people who work in the Mission district.\nChariot, which costs about $4 per trip, has 6,000 monthly riders and does about 4,000 rides a day across its 13 original commuter routes. Up until now, Chariot had been driving in the mornings from residential districts to downtown, and returning from downtown to residential neighborhoods empty.\n“In transit speak, that’s called dead-heading,” Vahabzadeh told me. “Obviously, it’s a different demand profile. It’s a different customer who is coming from downtown all the way back upstream. So, we’ve taken our time in figuring out what that product looks like.”\n\nWhile the current offering includes fixed routes with fixed stops downtown, Chariot’s “dead-head” product lets you get dropped off in a white or yellow loading zone located as close to your final destination as possible.\nChariot Direct is restricted to four drop-offs per trip, which the service determines based on the specific end points riders input. To be clear, the fixed pickup spots for Chariot Direct are the same as the ones in the standard service. I wondered if Chariot Direct might mean that people waiting for a Chariot downtown after work would have to wait longer to get picked up, but Vahabzadeh said that it shouldn’t be a problem.\n“As popularity of Chariot Direct goes up,” Vahabzadeh said, “it may take a little longer to get the loop back because now we’re picking up and dropping off customers, so we just add Chariots to the route to equalize it or improve it.”\nChariot positions itself as a flexible mass transit service that falls somewhere in between public transportation and Uber/Lyft. The service is currently only live in San Francisco, but plans to launch in a second city this September and a third city later this year. Chariot is also in early talks with the city of San Francisco to officially supplement public mass transit with Chariot’s flexible mass transit.\n“That could be anything like helping serve the hospitality industry Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights,” Vahabzadeh said. “It’s very difficult for San Franciscans working in night life and hospitality to get a ride home at one in the morning, so that’s an area of mutual cooperation. Obviously, our Chariot’s are idle at midnight and it probably doesn’t make sense for MUNI to run these huge busses to carry 10 people at a time. Chariot can do that much more efficiently.”", "date": "8/1/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/rsz_dsc_5569.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "chariot", "title": "Chariot launches service for people who don’t work downtown", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/01/chariot-direct/" }, { "id": 45, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "Have we reached peak gig economy yet? Probably not, but when a startup calling itself Gig launches, we are definitely making headway. The London-based company offers a platform targeting millennials who want to pick up shift work in the hospitality and retail sectors.\nAs well as enabling you to find and book work through the app, Gig’s headline feature is that once a shift is completed, workers automatically get paid within 24 hours.\nIf the so-called gig economy is fueling an array of services that let consumers purchase things “on-demand,” here Gig is punting employment itself as available on-demand.\n“Millennials want instant gratification, they want and get it with travel (Uber), takeaway (Deliveroo) and retail (Amazon same day delivery), but they are yet to get it with work,” says Gig co-founder Antony Woodcock.\n“Employment is traditionally the embodiment of all things contrary to the above. It’s structured, you work set shifts or set days, which are planned a week or more in advance and you don’t get paid until the end of the week or month. There isn’t anything instant about that.”\nIn contrast, there’s no obligation to work a minimum number of days or a minimum number of hours when you sign up to Gig. You simply apply for the shifts that work for you, presuming they are available. “Gig provides instant gratification by paying advances to its users 24 hours after the completion of their shift,” explains Woodcock.\nHe and his brother Daniel came up with the idea for Gig after they found it difficult to efficiently staff Maki, the sushi restaurant chain they opened last year.\n“The traditional set eight-hour shift didn’t fall at the right time for us; our peak hours are lunchtime and around 6pm, therefore, if we had people in for a normal shift then they wouldn’t really have anything to do between the hours of 2pm to 5pm,” he says.\nLikewise, it didn’t always work for Maki’s employees who wanted more flexibility. “Many of them were students so they either wanted time off to study or they wanted the shift to be planned around their social lives,” claims Woodcock.\nHence, Gig was born.\nTo fund its London launch, the startup has raised £1 million. Backers are mostly unnamed private investors, but includes Riaz Ladha, Chairman of Omni Group, a “traditional” recruitment agency and facilities management company operating in the hospitality industry.\nIn a classic case of semantic hijacking, Ladha says in a statement: “Gone are the days when people want security and longevity. It’s now all about flexibility and immediacy, and Gig serves both on a plate.”\nThe presumption being, of course, that job security and longevity are one and the same, and that you can’t ditch one without the other.\nAll hail the gig economy.", "date": "10/5/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/screen-shot-2016-10-05-at-10-07-44.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "gig-economy", "title": "Gig wants to make it easier for millennials to pick up casual work in catering and hospitality", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/gig/" }, { "id": 46, "authors": "Ron Miller", "category": "Cloud", "content": "Every startup needs a steady diet of funding to keep it strong and growing. Datadog, a monitoring service that helps customers bring together data from across a variety of infrastructure and software is no exception.\nToday it announced a massive $94.5 million Series D Round. The company would not discuss valuation.\nThe round was led by ICONIQ Capital. Existing investors Index Ventures, OpenView Ventures, Amplify Partners, Contour Ventures and other unnamed equity holders also participated. The funding comes almost exactly a year after the company announced a $31 million round and brings the total investment to just under $148 million.\nAs you might expect from a company that has scored $125.5 million in one year, it seems to be doing quite well for itself. In fact, CEO Olivier Pomel reports the company has been tripling its revenue over the last four years and more than tripled it in 2015, but he says 90 percent of the business is in the U.S.\nHe intends to use part of this money to try and change that. In the coming year, Pomel hopes to carve out markets in Europe, Asia and South America to expand beyond the several thousand customers the company already has. Naturally, that will involve adding new employees.\nOver the last year, it has grown from around 75 employees at the time of the last funding announcement to 180 today. Pomel says that number should double again this year. The bulk of Datadog’s engineering team is based in New York City, but it also has a Research and Development office in Paris and plans to open sales offices in the EU as well as other international locations in the coming year.\nAlthough Datadog’s service might sound like applications performance monitoring, Pomel says it tends to be at the center of an overall monitoring solution and is much broader. For instance, it might collect data from various systems including information from an applications performance monitoring tool like New Relic or AppDynamics and a log analysis tool like Splunk, then pull it all together into a single dashboard view for IT personnel to see the overall health of the IT systems. This can allow them to pinpoint problems and glitches across systems.\nPomel reports his company tends to compete with larger legacy vendors such as IBM, HP, BMC and CA, but he reports that the strongest competition tends to be open source solutions or companies trying to build something themselves.\nWhile there are also startups out there trying to solve similar issues, Pomel says one of the big differences between his company and the rest of the analytics field is his company’s emphasis on the needs of IT, as opposed to a more business-centric focus.\nDatadog Customers include Salesforce, Google, Zendesk, Airbnb and Samsung. Surprisingly Datadog also lists HP as a customer, despite selling its own monitoring tools.", "date": "1/12/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/shutterstock_191437382.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "iconiq-capital,funding,monitoring,datadog", "title": "Investors Feed Datadog A Hefty $94.5 Million Round", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/12/investors-feed-datadog-a-hefty-94-5-million-round/" }, { "id": 47, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Apps", "content": "Norwegian startup Soundrop first made its name as an app on Spotify, tapping into the streaming platform’s catalog to create real-time group listening rooms that were popular places for Spotify users to congregate for more social listening experiences. But as Spotify has become a more social platform by default, Soundrop is expanding what it does, and where it does it. Today, it is announcing a $3.4 million round of funding led by none other than Spotify’s lead investor, Northzone. The company wants to use the funding to turn up the volume on its growth to more platforms beyond Spotify and into more areas beyond simple listening rooms.\nIn addition to Northzone, Norwegian-government-back Investinor also participated. Northzone also led the previous $3 million round in the company last year.\nThe news comes at the same time that another listening-room service, Turntable.fm, is also expanding its focus; in this case from listening rooms into shared live music experiences online.\nInge Sandvik, the CEO and co-founder of Soundrop, tells me that while Spotify is currently the only music platform where Soundrop has an app, in the coming weeks this is due to grow. As for where Soundrop apps might appear in future, think about other music-streaming platforms such as Deezer that also offer app stores as one likely port of call. Another could be other kinds of streaming services that may operate more around video rather than audio; Soundrop already offers an integration with YouTube on its standalone service for its web app at play.soundrop.fm, its Facebook integrations and its standalone apps for iOS and Android.\nWhile it makes sense that Soundrop will expand to be used in more places as a way of capturing more users, on the other this is quite a change for a company that started out at first working very closely with just one: not only was Spotify its first platform, but the two share an investor, and for a while Soundrop was actually working out of Spotify’s offices.\nAs Soundrop looks to expand its scope to more platforms, so too is the focus of the app changing somewhat. “We are quite tired of talking about ‘music discovery,'” Sandvik told me. “That is a crowded space and everyone wants to solve music discovery.”\nSo Soundrop is gravitating to where it has seen not just a lot of interest from users, but from labels on the business side, too — specifically in the creation of rooms dedicated to specific artists. Those who have created rooms on Soundrop include Imagine Dragons, Robin Thicke, Zedd, Owl City and some 130 others. The most successful of these are not trivial: Universal Music’s DJs Sebastian Ingrosso & Alesso picked up 28 million OTS users (a traffic metric standing for “opportunities to see”) after heavy marketing from both Universal and Spotify.\n“Labels see us as a promotional platform,” Sandvik told me, noting that this is also where the company is generating the most revenues today. “We have seen that our artist events have been growing a lot. We are doing artist events almost every day now and several per day and we think we can scale this up quite a lot. This will again drive up their market share where music has been licensed and their revenue will grow.”\nThat is not to say that larger user-generated listening rooms are disappearing but they will increasingly be complemented by these artist-specific or label-specific rooms. “Music discovery and engaging a crowd is living in symbioses,” he said. “We think we are very well positioned to help out in both areas, but we think we need to focus on what tools we can give artists to amplify themselves when they are aiming to create a engaging relationship with listeners.”\nAt a time when Spotify is still looking for the magic formula to turn its popularity with consumers into a profitable enterprise, it’s interesting to see Soundrop making a sharp turn to services that, while popular, are also squarely aimed at revenue generation effectively as a music marketing platform. This is one of the reasons that Northzone re-invested.\n“In the year since Northzone invested in Soundrop, the company has had a focus on product development and tight integration with Spotify,” noted Torleif Ahlsand, General Partner in Northzone and Chairman of Soundrop’s Board of Directors. “Now that the product has reached a new level of maturity, the company is ready to take its next steps. It feels so very right to bring Investinor in to provide additional rocket fuel. With the product well-established, Soundrop is now in pole position to drive revenue and growth in 2014.”", "date": "9/30/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/screen-shot-2013-09-30-at-21-40-06.png?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "streaming-music,music,spotify,soundrop", "title": "To Put Its Listening Rooms On More Platforms, Soundrop Picks Up $3.4M Led By Spotify Investor Northzone", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/30/to-integrate-its-listening-rooms-on-more-music-platforms-soundrop-picks-up-another-3-4m-led-by-spotify-investor-northzone-and-investinor/" }, { "id": 48, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Government", "content": "YC-backed Transitmix, which is in the middle of the three-month accelerator program, is building a business out of helping city planners make smarter choices when configuring bus routes. The fix? An online mapping tool to speed up the process of devising and comparing bus routes.\nIt’s a simple sounding problem with some complex implications — given the various socio-economic factors in play. So anything that makes it easier for route planners to weigh and weight different considerations — such as the cost of operation; how many people a bus route might serve; and how many jobs are in the commuter vicinity — has axiomatic utility.\nFrankly it’s hard to believe that something like this doesn’t exist already. But, says Transitmix co-founder Sam Hashemi, the tool’s ‘competition’ is mostly paper-based maps and spreadsheets “containing hundreds of tabs”, coupled with manual cross-referencing of Google Earth. In short: a legacy process nightmare desperately in need of data-rich digital optimization.\nThe four-strong founding team behind Transitmix does not have a background in transit planning itself, but Hashemi explains the idea for building the web tool started out as a side project when they met during a year of service at local government focused nonprofit, Code for America, last year.\n“We were paired up in different cities. And just as a side project we got really intrigued by public transit. And we made this very early version of the product, that basically just had a map and let you draw out the bus routes on it. It was just for fun… and we put it on the Internet — not expecting much. And suddenly all these transit planners started reaching out to us saying I’ve been waiting for a tool like this, how did you know?” he says.\n“So we kept talking to a lot of these transit folks, building it out and trying to figure out what the space is all about… It got to the point today where it’s a tool that actually works for professionals, and they’re actually using it to plan out their bus systems.”\nThe team has raised a small seed round so far, with both YC and Code for America investing. The first prototype was launched last January, which was followed up by a beta version in June. “We got a huge response to the beta; something like 50,000 transit maps were created inside of it, and from there we kept growing it and launched a professional version last month,” adds Hashemi.\nAs well as being designed to take the strain out of route planning, Transimix’s planning tool also aims to support earlier and more frequent analysis of potential route changes — ultimately leading to better decisions, which can be reached faster. So it should be a win for bus users too.\nPoint being: If planners have to run a manual analysis of hundreds of spreadsheet tabs to weigh up every new bus route then cities are not going to be doing that so often. And routes will be left as is for longer, and may be less useful for the community than they could be.\nBut with a tool that simplifies mapping out possible new routes, by crunching cost and demographic data automatically — and also letting easily planners share a possible route with others — well, cities are probably going to be doing a lot more bus route analysis. And bus routes are able to change more often to better adapt to the needs of changing communities.\n\n(You can play around with Transitmix’s tool for yourself, using San Francisco data, by clicking the ‘try Transitmix Pro’ green button here.)\nHaving a web tool that simplifies the sharing and visualization of possible new bus routes also means planners can more easily loop the surrounding community into planning consultations — and that “changes the conversation”, argues Hashemi.\n“One of the most powerful things we’ve seen is it changes the conversation when the public and transit planners get into the same room because it becomes less abstract. It changes the conversation from ‘why is the bus not coming to my house’ to ‘what parts of the community are we serving when we drag this line over?'” he tells TechCrunch. “You can see very immediately those trade offs.”\nTransitmix gets its data from various public sources including U.S. census data (and the LEHD jobs data), according to Hashemi. “From that we can get a lot of different pieces of information; how many people live around a bus stop, which can give you a good idea of how many people might ride it, especially was you look at certain demographic indicators, and this will depend a lot on the specific area that you’re in, but we give you access to look through those different factors.\n“So things like income range, car availability, languages spoken, a bunch of different things that are very useful in starting to understand who a bus route helps. And right now are very difficult to answer.”\nSo, as with a lot of publicly held data, the issue is not that the information itself does not exist — it’s just that it’s not very accessible or easily visualizable. Transitmix aims to fix that — starting with bus routing, but potentially widening to encompass multi-modal municipal transport planning down the line.\n“I guess part of the problem is you could get these answers, if you know how to use Arc.js, and knew how to parse the U.S. census data and had a bunch of time on your hands. Which is a very small sub-set of the folks who actually plan out the bus routes. Our goal is to make it so that anyone, without .js or census experience, can go in and basically answer those key questions,” Hashemi adds.\nThe initial market focus for the team has been the U.S., and it has signed up several transit authorities here so far, including in Oregon and Washington. But it sees international potential too (maps have so far been made in 3,600 cities) — and has also signed up transit agencies and consultancies elsewhere, including in New Zealand and Egypt.\nThe priority for the team now is getting the word out to transit planners still stuck in Excel hell that a better, digital tool exists. And continuing to tweak its features to serve their users. Features wise, the plan is also to add more custom layers so cities can expand the factors they wish to weigh up, says Hashemi — perhaps including things like environmental considerations. Or toilets.\nYes, public toilets are a key consideration when transit route planning, given that drivers have places to stop off to answer the call of nature. “We’ve been looking for a good toilet data-set. So if you know of one let us know,” he adds.", "date": "2/18/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/screen-shot-2015-02-18-at-8-37-35-am.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "transitmix", "title": "YC-Backed Transitmix Cuts The Paper Out Of Bus Route Planning", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/transitmix/" }, { "id": 49, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Reviews", "content": "It’s speedy, and for a streaming music service like Spotify making the jump from desktop software to the browser, that’s of the utmost importance. This is just an early beta of what will rollout next year, so I’ll forgive the missing features and say I was impressed with the feel. But discovery still has a long way to go to unlock the potential of near infinite music.\nTo set the stage, in September I broke the news that multiple industry sources had confirmed Spotify was building a browser version. Yesterday, the company supposedly closed a massive $100 million+ round of funding valuing it at over $3 billion. And today, The Verge revealed that a test of the browser version’s beta is now available to some users. Spotify has confirmed with us that it will be rolling out the beta over the next few weeks and months, and it will have more news in Q1 of next year.\nThe browser version could be a big boon to Spotify because it means you can listen to your playlists or nearly any song no matter what computer you’re on. That includes work or public computers you can’t install software on, or the ability to play form your ad-free subscription while on friend’s laptop at their house. If Spotify is going to convince people to pay $5 or $10 a month, they’re going to want access from anywhere. That’s what the browser version delivers.\n\nSo what’s it like? I wrangled an invite link to try it out. This link play.spotify.com is currently giving some people access too, so give it a shot. But here’s what I think about Spotify for the browser.\nIt performs a lot like the desktop software, which is good news. My biggest worry was that the time it took to search the world’s catalogue of music or start playing a song would be annoyingly slower than on the downloadable version. That’s not what I found. It’s built on Flash, and with a decent wi-fi connection I saw tracks starting to play in less than a second. The only delay is a few seconds when you first open it up.\nAs for the design, it’s got cascading navigation similar to Spotify’s iPad app. That means if a band catches your eye off the homepage and you click, their artist page will slide out on top. If you don’t dig them, the edge of your previous screen is still visible, which makes it quick to jump back there.\nNavigating to Search, What’s News, Radio, and Playlists is much easier than on the desktop, as the little iTunes-style links have been replaced with bigger buttons. The permanently visible “Now Playing” section is bigger and easier to control too. You won’t have to squint to find the pause button. A nice little bonus is the song name and track time appear in the browser tab.\nOddly, there seems to be no way to view album art full-screen. Also, why don’t music services have a “laid back mode designed to help you DJ without sitting down at your computer. I’d love a view with huge cover art, controls, and play queue, but with search and navigation minimized.\nOne noticeable absence is the Play Queue section, which lets see what you’ve got coming next and as well as your listening history. Another is the Spotify third-party app platform. You won’t find Pitchfork’s curated playlists or Last.fm’s personalized recommendations. However, I’d imagine the app platform may be ported to the browser version eventually.\nUnfortunately, those apps were a solution to Spotify’s biggest problem: discovery. When you have most of the world’s catalogue of music at your fingertips, it can induce decision paralysis. “If I could listen to anything, what would I listen to? Ummmm.” Spotify’s browser version is sadly not as helpful as it should be.\n\nHere you get all the same What’s New suggestions from the desktop, including new recommended albums, trending playlists near you, new releases, and 5 top tracks near you and in your country.\nA nice addition to the What’s New section is top tracks in the world. There you’ll find your favorite horse dancer PSY’s “Gangnam Style” to contrast with America’s love of country music. The browser version currently lacks the Top Lists section, though. This let you go past the top 5 tracks and explore the top 100 songs or albums in any country or the world.\nWhat most disappointed me is that there’s no truly innovative new discovery options which I’d heard were in the works. There’s not even ones stolen from Rdio’s game-changing Heavy Rotation section, which shows what you’ve been bumping lately. A core joy of on-demand music services is getting your fix of that song you can’t get out of your head. Without an option to view your listening history, you’re forced to add those earworms to a playlist or search for them every time you log on.\n\nThere’s also no improved way to follow influencers. I see celebrities, artists, and music experts becoming asynchronous DJs for the masses through on-demand services. Instead of tuning into a radio station, you’ll subscribe to one of these people’s playlists and check out whatever new tracks they add. The 555,000 people who follow Sean Parker’s playlist “Hipster International” shows there’s clearly demand for this. Finding people like Sean is not any easier on the browser version. You know what would be lovely? Recommendations of who to follow based on my listening habits.\nI wrote this review after playing with Spotify’s browser app for a few hours, but remember this is a beta — not something you’d typically review. And while I’m judging it against the desktop software, Spotify doesn’t necessarily do the same. A little box in the corners tells me to “Install Spotify on your Mac for the full Spotify experience”.  Apparently this is Spotify Lite.\nStill, with any luck there’s a reason we’re not seeing play queue, listening history, apps, better music discovery, and simpler influencer following. Spotify is hopefully in the process of overhauling these features so when they debut, this won’t just be an incomplete port of the desktop software. Instead it could be a portal that expands our musical consciousness. Our ancestors could only dream of exploring the greatest sounds from the corners of the earth at a moment’s notice. It’s time for Spotify to make that dream come true.", "date": "11/15/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/spotify-browser.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "spotify", "title": "Hands On With Spotify For The Browser: Speed Sizzles, But Discovery Fizzles", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/spotify-browser-review/" }, { "id": 50, "authors": "Andrew Keen", "category": "Startups", "content": "\n\nToday, I’m interviewing Cary Sherman, the CEO of the RIAA, about the future of music industry and this two-part interview will run tomorrow and Wednesday. But before I broadcasted my conversation with Sherman, I wanted to run my last two interviews from SFMusicTech. Both of these interviews – with the co-founder of Moontoast, Marcus Whitney and with the Chief Marketing Officer of MobileBackstage.com David Hazan – deal with the dramatic changes in the relationship between artist and audience. Moontoast and MobileBackstage.com are both similarly small sized, early stage start-ups and both are offering promising digital solutions to rebuilding the once fractured relationship between musical artists and musical fans.\nWhen I asked Marcus Whitney why his company was named Moontoast, he explained that the founders realized that they were either going to go to the moon or become toast. The same can be said for the many other innovative start-ups that are now rebuilding the music business. I’ve been in the digital music business since the mid-nineties, and I’ve never been more optimistic about the innovation going on in the industry now. Rather than becoming toast, I suspect that today’s digital music business, by reinventing the relationship between artist and fan, now really is on its way to the moon.", "date": "2/27/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/screen-shot-2012-02-25-at-2-57-55-pm.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "david-hazan,marcus-whitney,keen-on", "title": "Keen On… Audience: Why Fans Are The Real Future Of The Music Business (TCTV)", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/27/keen-on-audience-why-fans-are-the-real-future-of-the-music-business-tctv/" }, { "id": 51, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Apps", "content": "Whitney Wolfe, an early employee at Tinder who sued the company for sexual harassment and workplace discrimination, has joined up with two other early Tinder employees, Chris Gulczynski and his parnter Sarah Mick (cofounders of YayNext), to launch a direct competitor to Tinder called Bumble, sources tell TechCrunch.\nAccording to the app’s Facebook page, Bumble is a social discovery app that “promotes a safe and respectful community” where “you’ll never get unwanted messages” and your suggestions will be more relevant than the “dead-end matches” you find on “other, more shallow apps.” You can check out the full description here.\nYesterday, Bumbleapp had a public Instagram account that showed a preview video of the app, which seems to look a lot like Tinder. It shows a user making a match and chatting. The account has since gone private, which might have to do with us looking into the company pre-launch.\nThe app website also shows photos of the app, which seems to use more detailed information than Tinder, including job position, company, college, and the year you graduated.\n\nThe Facebook page for the app shows a photo of the making of the app’s launch video, showing a helicopter and a boat being used during production. “Boats n’ bees,” read the caption. There are also photos on the founders’ Instagram accounts of video shoots to promote the app at Ham Yard Hotel in London.\nThe app is slated to launch on December 1, according to social media, and thus far that’s all we know about the actual product.\nWhile Gulzcynski and Mick are repping Bumble hard on their social media, Wolfe has seemingly kept a low profile, not posting anything about the stealthy startup. However, sources tell us that Wolfe is at the helm alongside Mick and Gulzcynski. You can see in this photo from a month ago, posted by Mick, that Wolfe is sitting at what appears to be a startup office in front of a computer. The caption reads “working late.”\nUpdate: The photo links to many of these images no longer work, so I’m including screenshots.\n\nThe company, which is officially called Moxco Limited, lists its place of business in London, according to the privacy policy. But you can see from the Instagram accounts of Gulczynski and Mick that the team has been traveling quite a bit. There was a trip to Greece on a private plane, where they stayed in a villa, and then to Paris. Not to mention multiple trips to and from London and Los Angeles.\n\nIt’s unclear just how much the company has raised, but one source told TechCrunch that it’s in the millions. We’ve also heard about a number of different sources for the funding, including social dating service Badoo and Michael Herd, the multi-millionaire heir to an oil fortune. This summer, during the time of the lawsuit, sources told TechCrunch that Wolfe and Herd had been in a relationship. It’s unclear if the romantic relationship continues.\nHowever, we’re told that the private jet ferrying the team to and from London belongs to Herd. In this photo from three months ago, you can see both Herd and Wolfe on the plane, and here you can see all four of them (Herd, Wolfe, Gulzcynski, and Mick) in London a couple of months ago.\n\n\nThe fact that Wolfe, Gulczynski and Mick are launching a direct competitor to Tinder brings up a number of interesting points. Of course, the most obvious one is that they’ll have inside knowledge of their biggest competitor, quite a bit of experience building an app like this, and they have enough public visibility to spread awareness quickly. Beyond that, the app seems squarely countered against a ‘shallow’ Tinder experience where you receive ‘unwanted messages’, all with the subtext that the founder of Bumble actually received unwanted messages from the co-founders of Tinder.\nWhether or not Bumble will make a dent in Tinder’s near ubiquitous adoption is yet to be determined, but we’re bound to find out soon enough.\nWe’ve reached out to the Bumble team but have yet to hear back. Same goes for Tinder. We’ll be sure to update you if we do.", "date": "11/23/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/screenshot-2014-11-23-17-00-22.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "whitney-wolfe,bumble", "title": "Whitney Wolfe, Other Former Tinder Employees To Launch Direct Competitor Called Bumble", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/23/whitney-wolfe-other-former-tinder-employees-to-launch-direct-competitor-called-bumble/" }, { "id": 52, "authors": "Ron Miller", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "How hot is Docker? So hot it’s getting money from VCs it doesn’t even really need right now. The company announced $40M in funding today, but CEO Ben Golub says they won’t actually start spending the new funds until at least late next year.\nIn fact, the company runs so lean, it is only just now dipping into the $15M it got at the beginning of this year, but when funders offer you that kind of dough you don’t turn it down. Golub said the money helps show the market that the company has stability and is in it for the long haul.\n“We won’t be touching it until late next year or early the following year. Knowing we have it, we can scale appropriately this year and it sends a message to the market we’re not just trying to build quickly and sell it,” he explained. He said they were in it for the long term.\n“Every real entrepreneur wants to build a company that can go all the way. We have so much support from the community and investors and employees, we want this thing to reach full potential,” he said. He added, “Investors aren’t looking for a quick exit. They are looking to build something meaningful.”\nOne of the reasons the company can afford to spend so wisely, is that it runs so lean. It relies on partners to act as its sales and marketing organization, and whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working–it relies on a community that has grown to 600 contributors to help with development. In addition, there are 35,000 apps built on top of Docker in its app store, and these tools help fill in gaps in the core product.\nWhile Golub admits he loses some control by working this way, he says overall the trade-offs are well worth it, and it’s hard to argue with the results to this point. “To some extent we have to lead by example and create the right kind of structure for the partner sales and community development to succeed. If you are open source, you have to be comfortable with the idea you don’t control everything but the momentum and diversity compensates for the fact you aren’t totally in control,” he explained.\nIn reality, Docker has a great deal of control over the project, producing about 80 percent of the code and acting as chief maintainers of the project, but Golub says the community adds a high level of value and acts as a reality check for the company’s core developers, while pointing them in directions they might not have gone on their own.\nConversely, he says, if the company is trying to move in a certain direction and the community is fighting them, there’s a good chance they’re moving in the wrong direction. He says the community also drives edge cases they couldn’t deal with because there are so few of engineers right now in-house and they test the product at a scale that would be impossible for them to do in-house.\nThis funding round is Series C and is led by Sequoia Capital along with Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang. It brings the total to date for the company as Docker, Inc. to $65M. Before that they were known dotCloud, which the company sold to cloudControl in August.\nDocker builds a delivery container for the modern app. As Golub pointed out, five years ago most applications used to exist a long time, were monolithic and lived on a single server. All that has changed today. Applications tend to be made up multiple components often spread across many servers that change all the time. Docker containers (as they are called because they hold the contents of the application) are designed to help developers build, run and ship these kinds of distributed applications.\nGolub says the product was built for developers by developers and this approach has paid off so far. Judging from the results to this point , it’s hard to argue.", "date": "9/16/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/9243884327_e3d773aa7f_k.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "open-source,funding,docker", "title": "Docker’s So Hot It Just Got $40M It Won’t Start Spending Until Next Year", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/dockers-so-hot-it-just-got-40m-it-wont-start-spending-until-next-year/" }, { "id": 53, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Cloud", "content": "Service-level agreements (SLAs) are key when it comes to choosing a service that is going to play an important part for your own service. Cloud hosting services have an SLA, software-as-a-service products have an SLA, even airlines have SLAs. Software-as-a-service startup Algolia just revamped its SLA, and it’s interesting to see how the company is wording its policy.\nSLAs are simple: if a service goes down, the provider agrees to pay you back to compensate for the inconvenience. But some services make SLAs hard to understand, and you don’t really know what you’re getting if a service goes down. For something critical, you want to make sure that a service is willing to pay a lot of money if it goes down — it’s the best way to know that it is serious about staying up nearly 100 percent of the time.\nAnd yet, downtimes happen. Even big companies suffer from downtime. So 100 percent of service availability is just wishful thinking. You want a company’s word that it is going to do everything possible to fight downtime.\nAlgolia is a critical real-time search API that powers many of the services that you use and love. If Algolia goes down, you won’t be able to search for stuff on Medium, Twitch, Periscope or CrunchBase.\nThose big clients want to make sure that Algolia is making everything possible to stay up. Otherwise, it becomes a trust issue and you’re going to look for another search provider.\nUsually, services check every minute if everything is running smoothly. And yet, 59 seconds of downtime in a month means that you can theoretically only claim 99.9977 percent of uptime. Algolia wanted to go further.\nSo the company threw away all the usual monitoring services and built its own monitoring network that checks if everything is running fine every 30 seconds. This way, the company can provide a premium SLA.\nIf you’re a premium customer, “we replicate your search on at least three different machines hosted by three different providers in three different data centers with three autonomous systems using at least two different Tier1 upstream providers,” Adam Surak says. And the company promises 99.999 percent of uptime thanks to its monitoring network.\nAnd instead of boring, complicated terms of services that tell you “for every minute of downtime, you’re eligible to blah blah blah,” Algolia has three charts that make it easy to understand what happens if the service goes down for 2 minutes, 20 minutes or 2 hours:\nAll of this information will sound useless if you aren’t using Algolia. But I feel like this is the kind of transparency that you should expect from your software-as-a-service provider. And I hope more companies will create this kind of charts to illustrate their SLAs.", "date": "8/10/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/servers.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "sla,algolia", "title": "Algolia wants to bring transparency to service-level agreements", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/10/algolia-wants-to-bring-transparency-to-service-level-agreements/" }, { "id": 54, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Facebook is calling on Indian users to send an email to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), asking the government agency to support its Free Basics program. The campaign, which shows up when users sign onto the social media platform and includes a pre-filled form so they don’t even have to write an email, has already proven controversial, with opponents saying its message undermines net neutrality in India.\nFree Basics, which became available throughout India last month, is a program by Facebook initiative Internet.org to provide basic Internet services, like search, Wikipedia, health information, and weather updates, for free to all users. While it sounds altruistic, Free Basics has the potential to drive reams of traffic to sites from certain providers (including Facebook) at the expense of others, which violates the principles of net neutrality. The TRAI plans to hold a public hearing on net neutrality next month.\nIndia is currently Facebook’s second-biggest market after the U.S., with 130 million users, and many net neutrality advocates believe that its campaign is another example of how the company is misusing its size and influence to form the opinions of Internet users in emerging economies.\nThe form, which shows up automatically for many users in India, is titled “Act Now To Save Free Basics In India,” includes a message that reads:\nIn a pre-filled box, which sends an email to TRAI as soon as users hit a button, Facebook wrote:\nMany people took issue with both the content and tone of Facebook’s message. For example, Trak.in, a tech blog, called the campaign “entirely false and misleading,” while newspaper The Times of India (which is run by net neutrality supporter The Times Group), stated in an editorial that “Facebook is just trying to play on the fact that most of us click the like button on its platform without reading or understanding the complete picture.”\nWhen asked about the controversy, Facebook reiterated in a statement that it believes Free Basics will help people get full Internet access more quickly:", "date": "12/17/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/shutterstock_140953558.jpg?w=738", "section": "asia/", "tags": "", "title": "Facebook’s “Save Free Basics In India” Campaign Provokes Controversy", "topics": "facebook", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/17/save-free-basics/" }, { "id": 55, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Startups", "content": "Another week, another episode of TechCrunch Radio on Sirius XM, and this week is no different.\nWe’ll be bringing on the illustrious Anthony Ha from TechCrunch as a co-host while John Biggs is away, as well as guest appearances by Bumble cofounder Whitney Wolfe and a surprise guest judge.\nJudge for what, you ask?\nI’m glad you brought it up. For the last half of every TechCrunch Radio show, we hold a live call-in pitch-off, where five pre-selected companies have exactly 60 seconds to pitch their product.\nWe deliberate live and eventually crown a winner at the end of the show. Winners are then written up in TechCrunch. But in order to be a part of any of it, you need to apply to be in the Pitch-Off.\nHere are the details:\nRules:\n1. You must have a product that is available to general users. No sign-up pages or pre-orders with a TBD ship date. There must be a link we can give to listeners/readers where they can access your product, service, what have you.\n2. You must be an early stage company. If you have raised a Series A or later, you are disqualified. Bootstrapped or seed stage startups are welcome.\n3. You must be able to pitch your product with your words only.\n4. You must be able to operate a telephone.\nApply:Apply here.\nIt’s going to be a hoot!\nEach week, TechCrunch Radio will air Tuesdays at 6:00 pm ET with a replay at 6:00 pm PT, drive time for both coasts, on Insight, channel 121, and through the SiriusXM Internet Radio App on smartphones and other connected devices, as well as online at siriusxm.com. Subscribers will also be able to listen via SiriusXM On Demand through the SiriusXM Internet Radio App for smartphones and other mobile devices and online at siriusxm.com. ", "date": "4/20/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/techcrunch-radio1.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "techcrunch-radio", "title": "Pitch Your Startup In The TechCrunch Radio Pitch-Off On Sirius XM", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/20/pitch-your-startup-in-the-techcrunch-radio-pitch-off-on-sirius-xm-4/" }, { "id": 56, "authors": "Jon Russell", "category": "Asia", "content": "Uber surprised China watchers this month when it said it is processing one million rides per day in the country. That impressive number, which leaked out via a letter to investors, is now dwarfed by arch rival Didi Kuaidi’s claim that it is seeing three times as much demand in the country.\nThe Wall Street Journal reports that in Yet Another Leaked Memo To Investors, Didi Kuaidi’s chief executive Cheng Wei revealed that the company — formed by a merger between China’s top two ride hailing firms this year — now handles three million trips each day. That, Cheng claimed, is triple the volume that it saw as recently as May.\nSuch quick growth may see Didi Kuaidi, which is raising money right now to battle Uber, increase its newest fundraising efforts from $1.5 billion to $2 billion. That’s at an apparent valuation of $15 billion, the Journal claimed.\nThese ride per day figures are, of course, company issued facts, so it remains to be seen just how accurate they are. Didi Kuaidi claims to own 80 percent of China’s taxi app market, while Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in his letter to investors — UberChina is raising $1 billion — that his firm has 50 percent marketshare but dominates China’s nascent peer-to-peer taxi space.\nThey both can’t be right, and there is clearly some fuzzy maths going on somewhere, or perhaps in both places.\nUber, Didi Kuaidi and other taxi apps are seemingly more prone to fake drivers and passengers in China than other parts of the world, but it’s hard to know exactly what proportion of rides are not genuine. A recent report speculated that “millions” of Uber rides are bogus — ‘drivers’ and ‘passenger’ partner up to fake rides without even stepping into a vehicle, taking advantage of lucrative subsidies — but that report conflicted since it was published by Tencent Tech, a service run by Tencent… which is a Didi Kuaidi investor.\nIt could well be that the new war on subsidies is encouraging Chinese drivers and passengers to increase forged rides and thus producing these impressive growth figures, or perhaps the Didi Kuaidi merger coupled with Uber’s investment from Chinese search giant Baidu — not to mention the ongoing legal skirmishes — is raising awareness with consumers who are using these services more frequently. The real answer is likely a combination of all factors, but it’s hard to know for sure at this point.", "date": "6/29/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/traffic-in-china.jpg?w=738", "section": "asia/", "tags": "china,didi-kuaidi", "title": "Uber’s Biggest Rival In China Claims It Handles 3 Million Rides Per Day", "topics": "uber", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/didi-kuaidi-three-million-rides-per-day/" }, { "id": 57, "authors": "Drew Olanoff", "category": "Entertainment", "content": "\nTo go along with the new experience, 10,000 customized Cardboard viewers are being handed out to fans at Gillette Stadium. This is yet another Cardboard giveaway meant to bring virtual reality front and center to the types of folks who could eventually be converted into VR believers. Think the New York Times giveaway.\nHere’s the 360 degree video experience, you can use your mouse to manipulate the video to see what’s happening in all directions…or grab a Google Cardboard to view it (the new Samsung Gear VR browser will show it off quite nicely, too):\n\nYou’re taken into the training facility, onto the field and into the locker room with this experience. It was built on the STRIVR VR training platform. While the 360 degree video isn’t “true VR” it is that taste of a moment that can grab you for hours and make you forget where you are that I’ve been talking about. These moments will pile up and soon people are going to have a thirst for this type of content all of the time.\nThe brands dipping their toes in VR make it seem a little “faddish” but until enough people experience some type of immersive experience, virtual reality is destined to be a thing for gamers. It’s not. Every single person that I’ve watched try VR immediately wants more.\n\nIf you’re at the Patriots game today in which they plan on destroying my sad, crappy Philadelphia Eagles, you can grab a custom limited edition Google Cardboard viewer at the Patriots FanZone pregame or during the game.", "date": "12/6/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/screen-shot-2015-12-06-at-8-22-06-am.png?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "visa,bank-of-america,google-cardboard", "title": "Patriots Practice In VR, 10K Google Cardboard Viewers Being Given Away At Gillette Stadium", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/06/patriots-practice-in-vr-10000-google-cardboards-being-given-away-at-gillette-stadium/" }, { "id": 58, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Social", "content": "Friends Reunited — which once laid claim to being the UK’s first social network before falling far behind the Facebook juggernaut — is relaunching this week as a “digital scrapbook” where users can collect their own pictures along with copyrighted photos, through a series of deals with image libraries.\nThe first two libraries to sign up, the Press Association and photographic archive company the Francis Frith Collection, collectively will contribute some 350,000 photos into the service, and a spokesperson says that there will be “more images and deals with more libraries added in the next few months.” Altogether the site will offer users 10 million “memories” in the form of 6 million photos, 2 million events and 2 million places to tag alongside their own content.\nThe idea, says the company, will be to collect images to share with friends and family around “remember when” moments: giving some wider context to pictures created by users themselves.\nThe company does not detail how it intends to make money from the service beyond the usual advertising element we see on other social networks like Facebook. But it does make a point of saying that privacy will be front and center in the service, and pretty simple by the looks of it: users will be given the option of sharing either with their contacts only, or publicly.\nIt’s crazy to think that in Facebook’s early days, Friends Reunited rivaled it for mindshare and audience in the UK. These days the site only has 7 million active users across the UK, of which 1.5 million visit every month. These days, Facebook is accessed by around half of the UK’s population, so closer to about 30 million users.\nWhile it’s anyone’s guess whether this new venture for Friends Reunited will gather momentum with users, it does touch on two important areas that seem to be very current at the moment: social networks that are more focused and private, and a lot of big questions coming up around the use of licensed content and images in these social networks. (Specifically, Pinterest has been seeing some issues around this as its users have crossposted copyrighted images.) A site that can navigate the latter, while promising something compelling in the former, might just have a shot at something.\nThe pivot is the brainchild of Friends Reunited’s owner brightsolid, which bought the site from broadcaster ITV for £25 million in 2009 (that had been one of the more disastrous investments made by ITV as it tried to ride the wave of digital and social media). Brightsolid — itself a part of publisher DC Thomson — also owns a number of other online assets around the family/geneology space, including Genes Reunited and Findmypast sites in the UK, Australia and Ireland.\nBrightsolid has been inking deals with other content libraries, and it looks like they too will eventually also fit into the Friends Reunited service. Last November, the company signed a deal with the British Newspaper Archive and the British Library to contribute millions of pages from that archive, going back as far as the 18th century and up to more recent editions covering some 200 newspaper titles. These will be added “in the future” to Friends Reunited, the company says.", "date": "3/26/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/screen-shot-2012-03-26-at-11-20-44.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "friends-reunited,social-networking,facebook", "title": "Night Of The Living Social Network: Friends Reunited Relaunches Tomorrow As A Digital Scrapbook", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/night-of-the-living-social-network-friends-reunited-relaunches-tomorrow-as-a-digital-scrapbook/" }, { "id": 59, "authors": "Ron Miller", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "We are told to follow the data and the truth will be revealed, but data tells many tales and it depends on the data and how you interpret it. It makes me wonder if anything is definitive if you can present two similar sets of data and draw wildly different conclusions, depending on your emphasis. That’s because data is a tool in the hands of humans and we can interpret it as we choose. And to be clear, this isn’t because we choose to be deliberately deceptive either, although that’s probably true sometimes. It’s because being human, we can bring unintended biases to the data.\nIt’s a huge conundrum in the age of big data. How do you find definitive answers when you can look at different data points on the same topic and come to different interpretations?\nDATA SCIENTISTS MATTER\nPam Baker who is author of the book Data Divination: Big Data Strategies, looks at it from a data science perspective, but she still acknowledges you have to ask the right questions to get good answers.\n“Data is pulled according to its relevancy to the precise question being asked of the data. Algorithms are written to include several inputs as identified as necessary to answering the question,” Baker explained to me in an email.\nShe says data scientists have a number of tools at their disposal to do this work, but mistakes are always possible. “There is always room for error, of course, but data science and statistics have hammered out many of these issues long before big data came to be. But it is true that if the wrong data points are used in the algorithm or the data is flawed in some way, the algorithm output (answer) will be wrong or flawed too.”\nThat’s useful as far as it goes, but we know there is a shortage of data scientists. I’ve heard there is one or none at the vast majority of companies, so there is all this data, but companies are lacking the expertise to help them understand it –and data can be manipulated to give you the answers you want.\nI listened to a speaker earlier this week at the Gilbane Conference in Boston give a bunch of statistics that suggested people didn’t use that many apps and most had fewer than 10. He also suggested 90 percent of users didn’t mind receiving spam SMS messages. Not coincidentally he worked for a company that offered an SMS advertising solution. He shared a bunch of data that suggested you would be foolish to build an app if you wanted to get a customer’s attention.\nThe speaker who followed, displayed a data point that indicated we download 154,000 apps a minute. So which is it? How can you have fewer than 10 apps and at the same time be downloading apps at that pace? When you have clearly conflicting data like this, it makes it hard to answer questions definitively, suggesting once again the old axiom of ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’ could be truer than we imagine.\nLINES OF BUSINESS FACE A DATA CHALLENGE\nAnd when we put data into the hands of people other than the data scientists as Baker recommended, it could get even dicier, especially when those folks are in marketing and trying to use data to put their products and services in the best possible light. It could get even worse if they try to draw conclusions about their markets based on bad information.\nScott Liewehr, who is president at consulting firm Digital Clarity Group says, this is a very real danger. He told me that marketers have to be willing to put in the hard work to build valid studies, or they could be using bad data to make bad decisions about where to direct company resources. “Everybody can use data to tell whatever story you want to tell and it’s a big challenge for marketers,” Liewehr told me. “If they don’t know how to run studies, they can make a lot of bad decisions.”\nBaker agrees, but she says folks in the line of business can also add value because they know their markets better than the data experts and putting the two together could produce better results. “Sometimes marketing and sales people understand better than data scientists what to ask — which is why it’s important to have a diverse data team,” she said.\nBut she cautions, lay people don’t always have all the right information. “Other times, business users can flounder and come to the wrong conclusion because they don’t understand statistical methods and other necessary methods involved in correctly doing this work.”\nDATA ISN’T ALWAYS CLEAR, EVEN WHEN YOU’RE CAREFUL\nLast week I ran a story about looking at the most popular enterprise sync and share tools based on a study run by 451 Research. Now, this is a highly reputable firm, which ran not one, but two, studies several months apart before publishing this research. That’s clearly careful methodology and I’m not casting aspersions here, but in that article I wondered if they had asked the right questions or the right people. Instead of looking at usage generically, if they had asked specifically about enterprise licenses versus consumer licenses, would they have seen a different picture? It’s not as easy to figure out as you would imagine as I learned in researching this article.\nFirst of all, the 451 Research data found that more than 40 percent of respondents reported using Dropbox, giving them a commanding lead in the enterprise, a finding that I reported I found surprising. Box, which has been the cloud poster child for the enterprise market was listed as fourth with around 15 percent responding they used Box, but that data does not necessarily tell the whole story.\nConsumer licenses are the ones all of us can buy. Each service offers a certain amount of storage for free, and more if you’re willing to pay for it. For example, I have a one terabyte Dropbox account for $99 per year. This is in contrast to the business or enterprise license which comes with a variety of tools to help IT manage all of the licenses in an organization and provides access to the product’s APIs to build solutions on top of the base product that tie into other enterprise software (a feature Dropbox released just this week).\nIlya Fushman, head of product at Dropbox for Business told me last week that Dropbox recently passed 100,000 business customers (some of which are very small businesses and some of which are larger), a number that’s fairly impressive when you consider it launched the product in April, 2013. Interestingly, by comparison, Box tells me it has 39,000 business customers, but the numbers don’t tell the whole story because Box has some pretty big customers.\nFor instance, Box counts Eli Lilly, Toyota, Dreamworks, Comcast, MD Andersen and GlaxoSmithKline among its clients and recently sold 300,000 enterprise licenses in its deal with General Electric. If you add in Schneider Electric with 65,000  licenses and another 44,000 from Procter and Gamble, you could begin to come to different conclusions than the 451 Research study about enterprise usage, even with the difference in the total number of customers.\nFor the record, it’s hard to know just how many customers Dropbox has because it won’t share seat numbers, but their large reference customers include large name brands such as Hearst, Hyatt, MIT and News Corp and they list a number of smaller customers on their Dropbox for Business site.\nAlan Pelz-Sharpe, a 451 Research analyst who helped author the study, says they are still working on the methodology, and the data they reported on is just the start of a long process of analyzing this market.\n“The October survey data I think revealed a number of things – firstly Dropbox has a huge footprint in companies (no surprise to anyone – particularly its competitors). That the market is very immature, but growing at a clip, and that many enterprises are reluctant to embrace public cloud options. Those are all trends that will become more interesting over time – and as this is the first release of a new survey that information is what is really going to be of value – what changes over time.  Added to this is the fact that we are doing some detailed market and revenue modeling for this space and new dimensions will emerge,” he wrote me in an email.\nData does have great value, of course, but even when you’re careful, it’s possible to come to ambiguous interpretations or have trouble nailing down an answer. That’s because even with all of the data we have, sometimes we still have gaps. Obviously, you have to be sure the data you have is based on solid questions that produced accurate information and follows best data gathering practices –but even then it’s possible to produce unexpected outcomes, proving just following the data isn’t always as simple as it sounds.", "date": "12/6/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/canstockphoto21392987.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "cloud,big-data", "title": "Lies, Damn Lies And The Myth Of Following The Data", "topics": "dropbox-inc,box", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/06/lies-damn-lies-and-the-myth-of-following-the-data/" }, { "id": 60, "authors": "Erick Schonfeld", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Amazon just added a new cloud computing service to its suite of Amazon Web Services, a distributed database called DynamoDB. Web applications can spike suddenly in demand or grow so big that they tax traditional databases, or even clusters of traditional databases, which are hard to maintain, especially for smaller companies. With DynamoDB, Amazon offers and on-demand web-scale distrubted database to the tens of thousands of customers who already use other cloud computing services from Amazon.\nDynamoDB is a “a fully managed NoSQL database” that can be scaled up or down according to demand. Amazon takes care of all the provisioning and management of the database. The whole service takes advantage of solid-state drives, greatly speeding up the transfer of data from the database (which is often a bottleneck).\nThree years ago, Amazon Web Services launched a much simpler database, SimpleDB. With DynamoDB, Amazon is moving up the stack and competing more directly with traditional databases from Oracle and IBM.\nHere is a video explaining the basic concept:\n", "date": "1/18/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb.jpg?w=400", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "dynamodb,nosql,database", "title": "Amazon Web Services Introduces Web-Scale Database, DynamoDB", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/18/amazon-database-dynamodb/" }, { "id": 61, "authors": "Dmitry Slepov", "category": "Asia", "content": "\n\nMicromanufacturing. As soon as I finish typing the word, my Grammarly spell checker promptly underscores it in red and suggests a replacement: “micro-manufacturing.” But this new spelling is about to go mainstream.\nWhen I say micromanufacturing, I don’t mean making tiny (micro-scale) components. There’s another definition: “Micromanufacturing is the manufacturing of products in small quantities using small manufacturing facilities.”\nI’m talking about “tiny factories.”\nHow tiny is tiny? Well, right now, everything-fits-in-one-small-room tiny. Several years down the road, the size of an office copy machine will become the standard of “tiny” in micromanufacturing.\nMany of us grew up in an era of giant factories. In the beginning, they were in our backyards, then they moved to China and became even giant-er. Some factory floors for making electronic boards and products are now so large you have to drive around them! So, why the heck am I talking about tiny factories? Is this even attainable or practical?\nI always thought those large manufacturing facilities dotting the landscape of China and other industrialized nations were like computer mainframes of yesteryear. Built with huge capital investment, these facilities are shared between users, each one utilizing only a portion of the available capacity.\nNow, what happened to mainframes? The era of these computing monsters was followed by an explosion in personal computing. PCs took something enormously expensive that was previously shared by many and placed it in the hands of individuals.\nThe same is going to happen in manufacturing in general, and the manufacturing of electronics in particular. Here are four reasons for why I think we are going to see an explosion in “personal manufacturing.”\nThe first reason is that the equipment needed to produce electronic devices is getting smaller and cheaper. Machines for producing electronic boards are not all that sophisticated. Your laser printer has more parts in it than an SMT “chip shooter” does.\nThe chief reason these machines are so expensive is because they only sell in tiny volumes. As more and more people start to buy or lease their manufacturing equipment, prices will go down — as they always do when sales increase. In a perfect positive feedback loop that invariably forms around emerging technologies, SMT machines, reflow ovens and other necessary components of electronic board production will become smaller and cheaper, then cheaper still as they get even smaller.\nNaturally, these compact machines will have relatively modest performance, but that’s okay. Office laser printers are very slow compared to professional printing equipment, but we rarely see this as a limitation. In any case, the laser printer in your office isn’t there to print a large volume of documents. It is there to print on demand, when you need it, without waiting and scheduling.\nThe same deal applies to micromanufacturing.\nThe second reason is Digikey. For electronic components, Digikey is like Amazon and Wikipedia rolled into one. I say Amazon because Digikey is a vast store of virtually anything and everything that goes on printed circuit boards, from humble resistors to mighty CPUs. And I say Wikipedia because Digikey also provides technical data and marketing materials for everything they offer.\nWhen I first started working in Taiwan back in 1996, our company had a large purchasing department staffed by employees who were handling the procurement of electronic parts. A typical BOM (bill of materials) -– the list of parts needed to build a product – often runs into hundreds of entries.\nMost of these parts come from different suppliers, and it was the task of our purchasing department to source the components, negotiate the price and set the delivery schedule. Sourcing is an arduous, monotonous job that requires manpower and concentration: Even a single mistake can derail your production. For this kind of work, doing it 99 percent right just doesn’t cut it. Only 100 percent suffices.\nLarge factories in Asia still have sizeable purchasing departments. Negotiating directly with suppliers allows these factories to get the best prices, and build relationships. For specialized players, the task of sourcing parts for small production runs is a major drag on productivity. Fortunately, we have Digikey now. These days, our purchasing department is very small. For many BOMs, we just punch the list straight into Digikey.\nWould we get better prices had we dealt with vendors directly? Sure, but this would come with strings attached: We would be asked to order “MOQ” (minimum order quantity), and MOQs can be relatively high. Digikey rarely demands “MOQs.” You can buy most parts in “QTY1” (quantity of one). This is more expensive, but you don’t bloat your inventory.\nUnderstanding where things are going with micromanufacturing, Digikey has quietly started doing two things. First, most components can now be ordered in reels, even if the order quantity is very small. These reels go straight onto SMT machines, thus decreasing the time needed for production setup.\nThe second innovation pursued by Digikey, as well as Avnet and other players, is the scheduling service. The idea is to allow manufacturers to create parts delivery schedules and thus achieve that coveted just-in-time production.\nExtrapolating into the future, I see a world where compact SMT machines automatically order electronic parts from Digikey. If HP’s inkjet printers can now order cartridges without your intervention, why won’t your future SMT machine do the same?\nYou see where I’m going with this? Cheaper machines, coupled with reduced labor and complexity of getting parts. This is a revolutionary combination, and I’m just halfway through my list of reasons of why micromanufacturing will take off.\nThe third reason is politics. The era of globalization is over. That is a bold statement, but if you look for the signs, they are everywhere. The second half of the twentieth century saw an unprecedented removal of trade barriers, cheered on by the Chief Globalization Cheerleader — the United States.\nGlobal trade treaties ensured unprecedented access for American corporations. They also have led to the demise of American and European manufacturing, so much so that some types of factories are now entirely extinct there, and workers of certain professions have ceased to exist.\nThese days, the tide seems to be turning. Even the Chief Globalization Cheerleader is now trying to bring the jobs back home. Look no further than the election platform of Donald Trump. Mr. Trump makes it clear where he thinks American goods should be made — in America. He is far from being alone in touting this message. “Made in America” has once more become a favored marketing line.\nWhenever there is a new business or societal trend, America is always quick to come up with a flashy title, a phrase or a word that tries to capture the very essence of that trend. Well, there is a new word for bringing the factories home, and the word is “reshore.” Reshoring is the opposite of “offshoring” — the term that was hot two decades ago when everyone was shifting their production to China.\nIf language is the herald of things to come, the new term sends an unequivocal message. Manncorp, a well-established supplier of SMT equipment, has recently run a banner on their website. It read: “Helping American businesses to reshore.” There also is reshorenow.org, with its Reshoring Initiative, and hundreds of other outfits that are promoting the idea.\nThis budding movement to bring the manufacturing back home is not restricted to America alone. Across the globe in Russia, the government has started to eliminate tariffs on electronic components and simultaneously created significant barriers to using imported goods in government projects. The trend is clear, and countries big and small are beginning to follow suit.\nNow, what kinds of factories have a chance to come home? Donald Trump seems to think that just about anything can be reshored, even the production of iPhones. I doubt that, and so do industry experts. Bringing iPhone factories home would require an enormous expense and effort of automating the manufacturing process with robots, and this is not feasible just yet (see my article titled The real cost of robotics). So, let’s leave the dream of bringing all production home to politicians and their election-year politics.\nWhat’s suitable for domestic manufacturing today is the production of niche, specialized products. America and Europe have a lot of those, and gigantic Chinese factories are not a good fit for manufacturing them anyway. Compact, agile production facilities are much more suitable. This is where politics will meet the practical demands of business.\nPolitics aside, many countries now have a small but influential and quickly growing group of people referred to as “makers.” These guys just want to build cool things. They want to make stuff, and they want to do that personally, not outsource to faraway places like China the process of making.\nAided by immensely popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these young entrepreneurs have already figured out how to collect the funds for their projects. Now they are figuring out how to build their products locally. They don’t need large factories. Instead, they require compact, personal manufacturing facilities tailored to small, flexible production runs. For many makers, micromanufacturing will be the key to their commercial success.\nReason number four is this: Many folks are tired of dealing with China.\nI will argue that many companies relocated their production to China for reasons far removed from the hard economic necessity. There was a romantic component: “I’m a globe-trotting entrepreneur.” There was a bragging component: “Look, I’m so international that my office is in L.A. and my manufacturing is in China.” There was the usual herd mentality: “Everyone is going to China. I must go, too.”\nThat was then. These days, many are tired of the long intercontinental flights. It’s not fun, and not exactly romantic after you do it a couple of times.\nThen there is China’s rampant disregard for intellectual property. As one of my Swiss customers says: “We don’t just see copies of our products. We see copies of copies.”\nThen there are quality issues. The only way to get good quality in China is through constant inspections and monitoring. It is costly and tiresome, and the moment you stop looking is the moment you get quality issues.\nThen, there are “night runs.” These are unauthorized production runs that produce the same goods, then sell these goods through illegal channels. The problem is enormous. Countless major brands are affected by it. Last week, I was presented with a Salvatore Ferragamo scarf. I was assured that the scarf was “100% real.” “OEM” smirked the guy who gave it to me, OEM being a polite, tongue-in-cheek code for the “night run” production items.\nSeveral other factors add to the overseas customers’ pains. The standard of living and wages have improved dramatically in China. This spells all kinds of positive changes in the Chinese society, but also drives up manufacturing costs. The government there has gotten much better at accessing and collecting taxes, and instituted some new ones as well. Foreign companies that were once lured to massive manufacturing parks and zones with low costs and rebates now feel at a disadvantage compared to local manufacturers who seem to be increasingly favored by the government.\nFinally, consider the generational factor. The generation of entrepreneurs who went to “open” China in the 1980s is now getting old. Many of these guys are itching to come home. For a lot of them, micromanufacturing and automation offer a real hope of reshoring.\nThere you have it, my four reasons for why micromanufacturing is about to take off in a big way. Think anyone here in Asia gets it? Absolutely not! It took me two years to put my own micromanufacturing facility together. There are thousands of machinery suppliers, but very few had anything remotely useful for my mini-factory project. I had to combine things in unexpected ways and invent my own gear where none was readily available. Two years on, my mini factory is alive and working well, but the effort turned out to be much larger than I anticipated.\nOne day I was on the elevator in our office building in Taipei. The guy standing next to me was a rep from a stencil maker (solder paste stencils are used in the production of electronic boards). This guy just delivered new stencils to my office. Suddenly he laughed and said: “I just saw your factory. It is soooooooooooooo tiny! Before coming here I went to my other customer, he has an assembly line that runs the entire block”! He opened his arms as wide as the elevator walls allowed and looked at me with unbridled curiosity. To him, I was a grown-up playing with toys.\nWell, I’m wondering if he will still be laughing in, say, 10-15 years. By then, SMT “chip shooters” will shrink to the size of a large office copy machine. They will come with sophisticated management software that will automatically order parts from global distributors. Ovens and other necessary equipment will be available in vertical form factors to save floor space. Affordable robots will be summoned to insert large components, tighten screws and do all that other stuff SMT machines cannot do.\nYes, that micromanufacturing future I’m imagining is still far off, but the revolution has already begun. Compact SMT machines are almost affordable now, and we are only at the very beginning of a powerful cycle.\nThis cycle has repeated countless times before. Once you bought a car, you were much less likely to take a bus. As soon as you had a laser printer in your office, you were almost entirely gone as the print shop’s customer. Once you purchased your micromanufacturing equipment… I leave finishing this thought to you.", "date": "4/3/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/shutterstock_5651812.jpg?w=738", "section": "asia/", "tags": "china,reshoring,micromanufacturing,makers", "title": "Micromanufacturing the future", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/03/micromanufacturing-the-future/" }, { "id": 62, "authors": "Kim-Mai Cutler", "category": "", "content": "Although it still seems opaque, the top mobile game companies have honed the art of spending millions of dollars per month to bring in new users through ad networks and dozens of other channels over the past few years.\nNow a couple of veterans in this space are launching a platform that should make it easy for any app maker — brands and game developers alike — to acquire users. Co-founded by Zynga’s former head of mobile marketing A.J. Yeakel, Storm8’s former head of business development Brendan Lyall and Ming-Lei Xu, who sold Wild Needle to Zynga, Grow Mobile is a dashboard that incorporates about 75 different marketing channels from ad networks to cross-promotion networks and other exchanges.\nIt makes it easy for app makers to see which ones perform the best.\n“This would have been amazing if both of us had this at our respective companies before,” Lyall said. “We each put in our own personal touches in what we wanted in the product.”\nThere’s a media planner that helps developers choose the best ways to get traffic based on their historical performance, a campaign wizard that makes it easier to syndicate campaigns without a lot of hands-on involvement and user retention and monetization reporting that shows where the most highly engaged users come from. Then there’s lifetime value reporting, which tells a developer how profitable users might be as long as they use an app.\nThere are basic app-rankings reports for how an app does on the charts in Google Play or the Apple App Store, basic analytics on where users come from geographically and what types of devices and OSes they use. Then there’s cohort ROI reporting, which tells a developer how much they’ve spent versus how well a group of users who joined at a certain time did in engagement and spending.\nLyall says that while there are similar tools for web-based performance marketing from companies like Adobe and Marin Software, the mobile ecosystem is way more fragmented.\n“Your average mobile advertiser has a budget that is spread across north of 30 different sources,” Lyall said.\nThe company, which has raised a $1 million seed round from Signia Venture Partners and Bessemer, had about 16 companies in its beta. They included bigger buyers like GREE, Zynga and K-Lab. Lyall said one publicly traded company managed its entire budget on the Grow Mobile platform.\nThe 11-person startup takes a small percentage of spend every month. That percentage declines as the spending volume increases. Grow Mobile declined to share its rate card.\n“Once you scale into the multiple millions of dollars per month, we go down to a single-digit percentage of spend,” Lyall said. “What we’re trying to do is to make it so easy that it’s like a no-brainer. If a company likes our solution, they would just allocate more of their spend through us instead of hiring a larger team.”", "date": "6/25/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/screen-shot-2013-06-25-at-6-32-44-pm.png?w=332", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "Veteran Mobile App Marketers Launch Grow Mobile, A Way To Systematically Get Users", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/25/grow-mobile/" }, { "id": 63, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "Bright*Sun is a U.K. fintech startup that’s making a business out of helping VCs decide which startups to invest in. That means it inevitably has to tread a fine line when it comes to sourcing external investment in itself — to avoid potential conflicts of interest — which may be part of the reason why it’s steered clear of external funding up to now.\nSince starting the technical work to underpin its startup business, back in 2011, Bright*Sun has been privately funded by its three co-founders, who have a background in hedge fund management and quantitative finance (quitting their city day jobs to jump into the startup world). But it’s now taken in $200,000 in Angel funding from the team of investors at London Venture Partners that invested seed funding in gaming startup Supercell (which went on to pull in $1.53 billion from Softbank).\nThe LVP investors in question, Paul Heydon, David Gardner and David Lau-Kee, are investing in Bright*Sun in a personal capacity, i.e. as Angel investors, rather than the firm itself investing; fintech not being an area LVP generally invests in.\nBright*Sun’s three co-founders have developed a proprietary algorithm that’s powering its investments recommendations service for VCs which is fed by a variety of data sources — including industry news, databases of company funding such as CrunchBase and AngelList, hiring indicators, app store and Alexa rankings, and social media sites, to name some of the chatter Bright*Sun is listening to to ultimately distil valuable investment suggestions for its clients.\nIt’s playing in a space with the likes of startups such as MatterMark, another data-signalling platform for VCs, as well as contending with doubters who question the value of an algorithmic deal-sourcing investment approach at all, when it comes to sifting useful investment signals from so much noise.\n“Fundamentally we collect lots of data from different places. We collect news, we have hundreds of different news feeds that we scrape for interesting information about companies, stuff on LinkedIn, on CrunchBase, on AngelList, jobs information, so who’s hiring what specific positions and in what geographies, Alexa, iTunes, Android, and then we use that and we derive signals from that and put them together to drive algorithmic recommendations for different funds,” says co-founder and CEO Stephen Piron.\nTo tailor its recommendations to a particular client, Bright*Sun also uses data provided by its investor customers to zero in on the sectors and startups they are most interested in.\n“What a fund provides to us is a list of companies they are currently tracking, and that informs what specific recommendations that fund would get,” says Piron. “Funds all have slightly different methodologies but they’re pretty close so they’ll have a priority list of interesting investments — like hot investments that they might want to sign a term sheet with, medium/warm investments, and then cool ones they just want to watch and see what happens.\n“That’s important input for us — and the recommendations [we provide to our clients] are, broadly speaking, two sorts: ones that are like things that they are already tracking, and that’s easy to validate because it’s things that may have slipped through the cracks. So they might be looking at Scandinavian games companies and we might have spotted two more that for whatever reason they just didn’t see. And then companies that might be at an earlier stage than some of the hot companies that they are already tracking. Which are the more interesting ones but harder to verify.”\nBright*Sun kicked off a beta version of its deal-sourcing service around February last year, launching a full paid offering at the start of July. Since then it’s managed to acquire around a dozen VC customers, from the U.K. and the U.S., according to Piron.\nIn terms of quantifying the potency of  Bright*Sun’s algorithm and the value of its investment recommendations, well that’s always going to be tricky. Especially as even large VC firms don’t make that many investments per year — so there’s not a lot of hard data-driven decisions to go on.\n“It’s hard to point to one clear example,” concedes Piron, when asked what evidence he can point to to support the value of Bright*Sun’s algorithmic approach.\n“The success is that people are using it and buying it, and some of the big firms are using it every day. And it’s an important part of their deal flow,” he adds. “We get feedback that they have seen something that was a recommendation, and then they learn a couple of weeks or maybe a week later that somebody else has invested in it. And they’re like ‘well this is good, we just got there too slowly’.”\nPiron does stress that he does not see algorithmically powered investment decisions ever entirely replacing the human VC. The point of Bright*Sun is thus not to compete/replace VCs, but to sell them a useful supplementary service that can do wide-scale market monitoring to underpin and support human investor decisions.\n“There are certain things an algorithm can’t replace,” he tells TechCrunch. “We can never really look into someone’s eyes and assess if they’re a person you trust, right? But it does make their job easier, I hope. Some VCs are more responsive than others… it’s a delicate conversation to have.”\nAnd while some VC firms are trying to do more data-powered algorithmic deal-sourcing in-house, a trend Piron describes as hottest in Silicon Valley (vs Europe), he does not see that as undermining the specialist service Bright*Sun can offer — because “this is all we do”.\n“A lot of the bigger VCs have tried this internally, and they’ve been frustrated by how difficult a problem it is. And fundamentally they are not software houses, they are not scientists or data scientists; they’re VCs, and their frustration comes from the under-estimation of how difficult a problem it is,” he says.\nDifficult, or perhaps impossible — depending on your view of the signal to noise debate. But then value and the perception of value are inextricably linked, so even if Bright*Sun’s algorithm can’t distil intrinsic value, if it can at least sift sentiment from the big data static it is probably creating something of value anyway. (Plus, if Bright*Sun’s VC customers think its service is valuable to them, even without hard data to back up that gut-feeling, then it has a value.)\n“If people think something is important, it tends to become important — even though it’s not intrinsically important,” adds Piron. “The background that we all have is that we worked in the quantitative finance world. So I’ve worked at a big hedge fund where the job was figuring out the signal from the noise — it was for the capital markets, the futures markets, and quant trading and effects trading. Which is different but there’s a lot of similarities in that there’s a lot of noise and you’re trying to figure out where is the fundamental signal in that noise?\n“Stocks, by the way, also have all of these weird feedback loops. If people think a stock is going up then it tends to go up just because people think it goes up.”\nOne signal Piron says Bright*Sun can (sometimes) distinguish is when a startup is faking it — be it by buying social media followers, or manipulating app store rankings to artificially inflate the popularity of their app, for example.\n“We can kind of figure out — to some extent, and not perfectly — legitimate traction on these metrics vs artificial metrics. So you can see sometimes there’s very steady rises [in usage/adoption],” he says. “Some of these social media things you can see that they’re buying them, or that they’re not authentic. Even in the iTunes Store, actually. We can do some of that, although that’s also a very difficult problem. No one can do it perfectly.”\nBright*Sun will be using this first external cash injection from the trio of LVP Angels to expand its three-man-strong team (with a “handful” more hires, as Piron puts it), and also to carry on building out its technology. When you’re trying to pull signals for noise, that’s inevitably an ongoing tech challenge.\nUltimately, he says he sees a future for Bright*Sun beyond just targeting technology VCs — even if that is where it’s squarely focusing its efforts for now. “For now the early adopters are technology VCs but we do have aggressive plans to expand out into a larger private equity world, and different kind of less techie verticals — or not only just focusing on tech verticals. So things like pharmacy and more of these finance and private equity firms,” he adds.", "date": "1/13/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/brightsun-recommendations.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "deal-sourcing,brightsun", "title": "U.K. Fintech Startup, Bright*Sun, Gets $200k For Its Algorithmic VC Deal-Sourcing Tech", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/brightsun-angel-round/" }, { "id": 64, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "Yet another sign of backside phone innovation*, if I can put it that way.\n(*tl:dr there’s precious little space to do cool innovative hardware on the front of phones nowadays since most handsets are almost entirely monopolised by huge touchscreens.\nYet as phones get bigger, to accommodate larger fronts, there’s increasing amounts of under-utilized space on the back. Ergo some exciting stuff is going on round the back.)\nThe latest to contemplate all that unused rear space and see dollar signs is London-based hardware startup Cliq Cases. It’s taken to Kickstarter to crowdfund a range of touch-sensitive smartphone cases for Android devices whose flagship feature is three hardware buttons on the back.\nThat’s right, they’re adding buttons back so users can cook up their own custom shortcuts. Specifically, pressure-sensitive keys (to help minimize accidental presses). The NFC-powered keys will be customised via a companion app, supporting both short and long presses, to extend the possible shortcut permutations. So you can have six shortcuts in all if you desire.\nWhat can the buttons be programmed to do? Plenty of stuff on the native side — from switching on the phone’s LED light to shortcutting to the torch function, to calling up a predefined contact or sending a pre-written SMS, to acting as a dedicated camera key.\nThey also note Cliq will be open and reprogrammable so it can be used with Tasker, Automateit and other IFTTT-style apps. So while the keys aren’t initially going to support specific apps, in-app functions will be programmable using Tasker, et al. (And Cliq’s makers say they hope to add app support if there’s enough demand for it in future.)\nIt’s worth noting that for Cliq to function it needs the Cliq app to be running in the background — although if the app has been closed, pressing one of the buttons will fire it back up again (but there could presumably be a micro lag between pressing Cliq and executing your shortcut in that instance).\nCliq is much like Pressy but with more discrete buttons on tap (three not one). Cliq also incorporates its keys into a smartphone case, so the whole thing doubles up on the utility front by protecting your phone’s rear from pavement scuffs should you drop it.\nIt’s also making use of NFC rather than the headphone jack to extend the Android hardware. One of the main advances Cliq’s makers are claiming is making a small enough NFC module to fit the unit in a slender case.\nSo, as well as standard rear-protecting Cliq cases, they are able to offer very thin skins for those that prefer a barely-there case.\n\nInitially they’re making a limited range of cases. First off Cliq requires handsets with NFC that are running Android 4.0 or above to function. But, being as it’s also a case, it’s initially for a small sub-set of Android phones — specifically the Samsung Galaxy S5, S4, Note 3, Motorola’s Moto X, the Nexus 5 and LG G2.\nBad luck, HTC. Cliq’s running a survey to ask for requests on additional models to support.\nCliq’s Carson Brown said the idea for Cliq came out of the ashes of another hardware project — a Bluetooth trackable wallet — that they were working on. NFC had been incorporated into that mix for loyalty cards and, when the project was scrapped, the team realised they could use the same NFC module for Cliq.\n“We thought the Pressy project was great because it gave validation to what we were working on, but using one button to launch a variety of actions ultimately leads to Morse code,” he said when asked how Cliq moves things on from that earlier Android hardware button-making endeavor.\n“We thought three buttons which could launch six different tasks (short click/long click) would be easier to use and cover 90 percent of users’ scenarios.”\nCliq has a ways to go to make its crowdfunding target. The team is after $40,000 to fund minimum component orders to be viable, and, at the time of writing, has raised just over $6k so far with 30 days left of their campaign to run.\nHow much will a Cliq cost? Early Kickstarter backers can bag one for $20 or $25. It’ll be $30 thereafter. The team is aiming to ship to backers in August — assuming they don’t get bedeviled by the delays that end up derailing the timelines of many a Kickstarter project.", "date": "5/19/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/screen-shot-2014-05-19-at-4-46-04-pm.png?w=620", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "cliq", "title": "Cliq’s NFC Case Puts Buttons Back On Your Smartphone", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/19/cliq/" }, { "id": 65, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Europe", "content": "Accel is on a roll. Shortly after announcing a $500 million seed fund and a $1.5 billion growth fund for U.S.-focused investments, the venture firm has yet another fund. This time, Accel raised $500 million for Accel London V, a fund focused on Series A and B investments in Europe and Israel.\nThe firm announced Accel London IV three years ago — it was a $475 million fund. Despite an increasingly uncertain economy, it looks like Accel has no issue raising new funds. Raising a new fund every two or three years is a healthy cycle for VC firms doing well.\nRecent European investments include Deliveroo, Funding Circle, BlaBlaCar and ForgeRock — so the fund can invest in anything from marketplaces to fintech startups and enterprise software solutions as long as the startup is based in Europe or Israel.\nWhen it comes to exits, Supercell has been sold to SoftBank and was a spectacular exit for Accel. More recently, Showroomprive went public in France. In total, Accel’s London team has generated $15 billion in exit market value in 2015 and taken a cut of this big cake — not too shabby.\nMaybe you’re an entrepreneur and you’re thinking that today is your lucky day! Accel now has plenty of money in its bank account, and here’s what the team is looking for. The firm wants to focus more on marketplaces, software-as-a-service business models and infrastructure projects.\nAccel already has a well-established reputation in Europe. And you may already know that the firm tends to shy away from seed rounds and start investing in Series A rounds. The firm doesn’t plan on changing any of that with the new fund.\nI’ve asked Accel partner Harry Nelis a few questions about Accel’s strategy in Europe.\nTechCrunch: Are you going to focus on Series A rounds like with the Accel London IV fund?\nHarry Nelis: Yes, we’re going to continue to focus on Series A investments. Early stage is our sweet spot and where most of our investments are made — we typically invest in Series A and Series B rounds. Although, sometimes we go in a bit earlier when we meet an exceptional entrepreneur with a great idea or we’ll write larger checks when there’s a strategic opportunity to do so.\nTC: What are going to be the average checks of this fund compared to the previous fund?\nHN: We typically make Series A and Series B investments, which are between $5 million and $10 million for the first round, and ultimately invest about $15 million per company over time.\nTC: What do you think of the current cooldown in the U.S.? Is it going to affect Europe and Israel as well or is it an opportunity for the European tech scene?\nHN: In certain areas, private market valuations are out of kilter, and there will be an adjustment. This is particularly pronounced in the U.S. However, a private market valuation is really a glimpse into the future. Any meaningful valuation takes hard work, and Europe’s entrepreneurs are working hard to build sustainable businesses.\nTC: Any strategic change worth mentioning about Accel’s strategy in Europe or is this fund a way to keep doing what Accel has been doing over the past few years?\nHN: From the start, our strategy has been to partner with the most extraordinary entrepreneurs and companies from their earliest stages through their growth. This has served us well, leading to investments in some of Europe’s most successful enterprise and consumer technology companies, including Avito and Showroomprive, Supercell and Qliktech.", "date": "4/11/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/accel-groups-107.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "vc,accel-london-v,accel", "title": "Venture firm Accel just raised a new $500 million European fund", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/venture-firm-accel-just-raised-a-new-500-million-european-fund/" }, { "id": 66, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Asia", "content": "Google is ramping up its Android One affordable smartphone program with a push into Africa. The first Android One smartphone for the region is being made by OEM Infinix, and is launching in Nigeria today, with Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya and Morocco getting the device “over the next few weeks”.\nThe handset, called the Infinix HOT 2 (pictured below), runs Android 5.1 (Lollipop) at launch, but Google says it will be getting the new Android Marshmallow flavor once that’s released. Users will also get free updates via local mobile service provider MTN — as Google works to simplify (and squeeze) regional data plans to make the device more attractive to its target. The device has an RRP of N17,500 (~$88).\n\nSpecs wise, there’s a quad-core MediaTek processor with 1GB of RAM, and models with up to 2GB of memory. There’s also support for dual SIM, and a range of colors: black, white, red, blue, and gold. Yes, gold. Android One is not skimping on the bling.\nAs part of the program, Google works to reduce smartphone hardware costs by identifying components that will be used and pre-qualifying suppliers for the parts. On the software side it gives OEMs access to its Play Store to help them add locally relevant apps to the devices, as well as automating software updates as it does with Nexus devices.\nThe wider push here is of course a landgrab by Google for the next wave of mobile Internet users — those much discussed “next billions”, who may live in areas with patchy connectivity or be priced out of unlimited mobile data plans. Hence the need to squeeze costs to lower the barrier to entry. (Facebook has a similar and parallel push around spreading access to connectivity with its Internet.org initiative — albeit that’s come under fire for limiting the services users can access).\nIn a blog post announcing its Android One Africa push, Google VP of product management, Caesar Sengupta, said:\nGoogle launched the Android One affordability push last summer, targeting OEMs specifically making phones for emerging markets — and targeting the “next five billion” smartphone users in a bid to continue expanding Android’s marketshare (which generally hovers around 80 per cent marketshare globally).\nThe first Android One smartphone launched in India in September 2014, with three more Asian markets (Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka) offering devices by December. OEMs making Android One devices there include Micromax, Karbonn and Spice.\nFor its Africa Android One push, Google says it will also be extending YouTube offline to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Egypt “in the coming months”. The feature lets users store videos within the YouTube app for up to 48 hours so they can watch them later when they don’t have a connection, or when the network they can access is too slow to stream.\nGoogle also announced it’s rolling out a streamlined version of Google Search, tweaked for a faster experience on low RAM phones — such as those with 512MB — claiming the feature can reduce data usage on the results page by up to 90 per cent, and cutting load times by up to a third.\nOther mobile players chasing emerging markets include China’s Android OEM Xiaomi, which does use Google services outside China, and is currently a little more focused on the mid tier and higher tier smartphone segments, although pricing its handsets very competitively.\nThere’s also the wildcard of Finland’s Jolla, which is now fully focused on a licensing business for its alternative mobile platform, Sailfish, an OS which is compatible with Android apps. This summer the company announced it had secured its first licensing deal with Indian OEM Intex. The forthcoming Sailfish-powered handset, the Intex Aqua Fish, is being priced at less than Rs 10,000 ($150).", "date": "8/18/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-18-at-11-57-29-am.png?w=555", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "android-one,africa", "title": "Google Pushes Android One To Africa", "topics": "google", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/18/google-pushes-android-one-to-africa/" }, { "id": 67, "authors": "Matthew Lynley", "category": "Apps", "content": "DoorDash started off as a restaurant delivery company — but, like many on-demand delivery companies, its ambitions are certainly much higher than that. And it’s taking one step beyond food delivery today by adding the ability to purchase alcohol through DoorDash.\nWhile DoorDash may have already delivered food from breweries or restaurants that offer paired food, it still wasn’t able to deliver alcohol. It’s now running a pilot service for the delivery in southern California and hopes to expand that delivery service soon after to its existing markets. You could think of something like this being useful in the case of ordering food from a restaurant that might go well with beer or wine, or ordering it en masse for an event.\n“As we started talking to our merchants about it, they loved this idea of pairing their most popular dishes with specific types of alcohol,” DoorDash head of business development Prahar Shah said “Merchants got really excited, and we at DoorDash have always said we’re more than a food delivery company — it just happens to be the first vertical to focus on. This felt very natural.”\nThis isn’t the first time DoorDash has made a step outside its typical restaurant delivery focus. In September last year, the company partnered with 7-Eleven to deliver products to its users from those stores. These are all more or less dipping toes into new markets, but each represents a potentially significant new source of business. There wasn’t one particular segment of DoorDash’s user base that was specifically asking for alcohol delivery, with interest in it ranging across a wider demographic — which might speak to the opportunity a new addition like this has.\nOne of the obvious challenges for launching alcohol delivery was making sure everything would run smoothly and legally. To do that, DoorDash first ensures that its delivery personnel are over 21, and then also tries to ensure that the people ordering are also over 21. But there’s another element that went into the development as well: DoorDash had to build a whole new payment flow, ensuring the company it’s working with is the merchant of record for the transaction.\nThere’s another requirement here that the team acknowledges: selection. It’s important to make sure that each user has the option to choose the kind of beer, wine or hard liquor they like, or it might turn them off from the experience and make them drift toward other services that have a wider array of drinks to choose from. That was also part of the initial feedback that sparked the work on alcohol delivery, with people using both DoorDash and an accompanying app for the alcohol delivery, Shah said.\nIf all goes well, DoorDash will be going up against several other on-demand alcohol delivery startups like Saucey, which raised $4.5 million in September, and Thirstie. The trick will be to continue expanding into its existing new markets and getting ahead of that competition by both selling it as part of the DoorDash experience and leaning on its existing delivery infrastructure.\n“DoorDash is known for food delivery,” he said. “We wanted to extend that core functionality and augment that core experience that pairs really well with food. We don’t think socks and shoes pair as well with food as well as alcohol does.”", "date": "6/29/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/pub-pretzel-2.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "doordash,tony-xu", "title": "DoorDash, going beyond food delivery, will soon bring you alcohol", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/29/doordash-going-beyond-food-delivery-will-soon-bring-you-alcohol/" }, { "id": 68, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "", "content": "Last August, Affectiva, developer of a new way to track facial responses to online content, raised $12 million from KPCB, Horizon and others to take its tech to a wider market. Today comes one of the fruits of that effort: the company is announcing a deal with the Ebuzzing Social video advertising platform for the company to integrate Affectiva’s Affdex facial coding software into the Ebuzzing Social platform.\nFinancial terms of the licensing deal were not disclosed.\nThe agreement will cover content in Ebuzzing Social’s ad network — Ebuzzing says that network includes some 40,000 blogs, social games, mobile apps and Facebook in UK, US, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Luxembourg. Ebuzzing works with companies like Toyota, Acer, Kia, Adidas, and their media agencies including Havas, Mediacom, Starcom Mediavest, Group M and Zenith Optimedia. “There has been a lot of excitement generated around the new tech and we will certainly be offering this to our current clients,” said Rebecca Mahony, VP of global marketing for Ebuzzing Social.\nConsumers who come across one of the Affectiva-enabled ads get a pop-up window, before the ad runs, asking users to turn on their webcams to measure their response to the ad and see how it compares against others. An example of that pop-up is illustrated here.\nThe deal will mean that companies like Heineken and Red Bull will be able to track in real time how users are responding to their advertisements in the wild. That will not only mean taking away the need to run special market research sessions on limited groups of users, but potentially introduces new ways of measuring how effective a video has been, moving away from more traditional online ad metrics like page views and dwell time.\nWe wrote about Affectiva and Affdex back in August but here is a little refresher: the technology, first developed at MIT’s Media Lab, uses webcams or user-facing cameras on mobile devices to track head gestures and facial expressions. It runs these through an algorithm that links into a larger database of some 300 million face frames, compiled by Affectiva, to produce an analysis on how engaged a user is by a particular video, and what sort of emotion he/she is feeling. Mahony notes that using Affectiva’s technology will mean that its customers “will have a deeper visibility into the statistical correlations of human emotions and video interactions.”\nOne of Affectiva’s early investors, WPP, has been among those using and providing feedback for the technology. Now, working this into Ebuzzing Social’s platform allows the brands to track other metrics like interactions, shares, click-through rates and the rest; the thinking is that the Affdex measurement will give Ebuzzing’s platform a more “human” aspect.\nNick Langeveld, VP of business development for Affectiva, says that among the brands already using the service are Coca-Cola and Unilever, although this is the company’s first partnership in the social video ad space, integrating the tech with other social media monitoring tools. It’s part of Affectiva’s wider business strategy to partner with third parties “in whatever framework makes sense to their users and clients.”", "date": "2/18/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ebuzzing-social-pop-up.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "facial-recognition,ebuzzing,affectiva,social-advertising", "title": "Affectiva Inks Deal With Ebuzzing Social To Integrate Face Tracking And Emotional Response Into Online Video Ad Analytics", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/affectiva-inks-deal-with-ebuzzing-social-to-integrate-face-tracking-and-emotional-response-into-online-video-ad-analytics/" }, { "id": 69, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Apps", "content": "Even the most casual sports fan has likely cheered, booed, clapped (or cursed) at their TV during a particularly compelling game. Sport is an emotional business, after all. But, as it stands, there arguably exists a disconnect between fans watching at home or in the many sports bars around the world, and those who are actually at the stadium during a game — as I was yesterday for the Community Shield football, as a guest of Fanmode, a newly launched startup that has set out to solve this ‘problem’.\nLaunching first as an iOS and Android app, Fanmode’s flagship feature — and one that gives a glimpse of where the London-based startup is heading — is its gesture-based input that enables fans to express their emotions during a live sporting event, intended for when they aren’t actually at the match but are watching on television. Swipe up to cheer. Swipe down to boo. And, once you’ve accumulated enough points, swipe right for a ‘super cheer’. You can also tap to clap, and wave your phone around in the air as if it’s a flag.\nIf this all sounds a tad gimmicky, perhaps it is. But, as the Managing Director of Wembley Stadium, Roger Maslin, told me during the closing minutes of yesterday afternoon’s game, there’s definitely something in the idea.\nThat’s because all of this fan sentiment data is aggregated in real-time, with the plan being to feed it back live into the stadium and in places that can be seen by the players themselves, such as in the dressing room or tunnel, via screens running Fanmode’s ‘Vibeboard’ dashboard, creating a feedback loop that connects fans closer to the action, no matter where they are watching.\n\nAs Fanmode CEO and co-founder Neven Murugan noted when he first conceived of the idea, you can be the biggest fan in the world, but if you only watch at home or in a sports bar, the team you support might not even know you exist.\nThe business case is arguably clearer: Major sporting events — and, specifically, major football clubs — have long seen their future growth in expanding and nurturing a global fan base. Once you’ve saturated the domestic market, an overseas fan base is where the action (and profit) is at. Just witness, for example, the number of leading UK Premiership football clubs that recently toured the U.S. pre-season.\n\nAnother angle and potential reason for something like Fanmode existing, is that so-called ‘big data’ around fan sentiment could be a draw for major brands. One example cited by Fanmode co-founder and Commercial Director Christian Jochnick is that buying decisions (and frequency) can be tied to fan sentiment. If your team loses, you are far less likely to be in a buying mood. Conversely, a win can be correlated with an increase in purchases. That kind of highly targeted ’emotional’ data might be leveraged to ensure a brand is only advertising at the most optimum time. Or so the theory goes.\nOne of the limitations of the Fanmode app (aside from being slightly gimmicky) is the requirement to change your behaviour from the way you would normally express your emotions during a sporting event, even if the app’s gestures attempt to ape those real life actions. It’s here where wearable devices, or something like the Xbox Kinect, might offer a better interface for recording fan sentiment.\nFanmode has already developed an app for Sony’s smart watch and Samsung’s Galaxy Gear 2, while it’s also exploring the idea of a dedicated Fanmode wristband and shirt, too. The idea is to enable emotions to be recorded and fed into Fanmode’s aggregated sentiment data via sensors on wearable devices in a way that is passive and doesn’t require a user to change their match behaviour in any way what so ever.\nIt’s early days on this front, however, along with the commercial relationships required to close the feedback loop that will see Fanmode data placed in stadiums and potentially on broadcast television.\nBut, with $2.4 million of freshly closed funding in the bank, announced last week, the startup has bought itself a little more time to figure out how to get there.\n", "date": "8/11/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/photo-102.jpeg?w=738", "section": "europe/", "tags": "fanmode", "title": "Fanmode Lets Sports Fans Share Their Emotions From The Couch To The Stadium", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/11/fanmode/" }, { "id": 70, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Apps", "content": "Drizly, the East Coast-based Uber for liquor, has today closed a $2.5 million seed round of funding to expand into new markets and build out the team. The round was led by Continental Investors of Chicago, with participation from Gary Vaynerchuk through Vayner RSE ventures and Suffolk Equity, which will fold into an existing $2.3 million seed round.\nThe company has raised a total of $4.8 million.\nDrizly, as a company, is pretty straightforward.\nThe app recommends liquors and alcohols you’ll enjoy, lets you buy with one click, and promises cash-free delivery between 20 and 40 minutes from ordering. Rather than take a transaction fee away from vendors, Drizly simply sets up a licensing fee based on the quality of the store, the area they’re delivering, etc.\n“The point is to make sure that the retailers are making money, too, and not just that we’re making money,” said co-founder and CEO Nick Reilas.\nBut obviously, Drizly faces some competition. Lots of companies are focused on liquor delivery, including Swill, and other on-demand services (like WunWun) have the opportunity to win here, too. But Drizly is more concerned with bigger retailers like Amazon who have the opportunity to flip the switch on liquor delivery.\nStill, Drizly offers a competitive product by promising delivery in under 40 minutes, and the app also offers delivery tracking so you can see when your booze is en route.\nDrizly launched two years ago in Boston, and has since expanded into New York, with Los Angeles next on the list for expansion.\nTo learn more about Drizly, head over here and check it out.", "date": "5/21/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bar.jpg?w=635", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "drizly", "title": "Drizly Booze Delivery Service Drinks Up $2.5M In Seed Funding", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/21/drizly-booze-delivery-service-drinks-up-2-5m-in-seed-funding/" }, { "id": 71, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "Just in time for SXSW Music, Facebook has updated its Events interface. Admins can now create an event with less details, set privacy to friends-only, receive suggestions of who to invite and notifications when invitees confirm, and a more advanced wall lets invitees ask questions and more discretely decline invitations. The revamp could help persuade users to create an event rather than just inviting friends to a get-together via group messaging, further increasing the role of the feature at the annual music event.\nFacebook Events engineer Bob Baldwin says the new invite features will make the experience “feel more similar to inviting someone via SMS/email and getting back their response”. With the rise of rapid feedback via group messaging, Facebook Events looked slow by comparison. This update will speed them back up.\nCreating an event no longer requires a location. Admins can just add a name, date, and privacy setting to get started, and can fill in time and location later. Baldwin says “I think this works really well when you’re trying to plan something but aren’t sure of the location/time (ex “I want to see a movie with friends on Saturday”). So Events aren’t just for promoting, they’re a planning tool too.\n\nSimilar to when you build Groups or friend lists, Facebook now analyzes who you’ve already invited and other factors (possibly location) to suggest who else you might want to include. These suggestions can be added with a single click. This will help prevent you from forgetting one friend from a close-knit set of buddies.\nMultiple friends can now send you event invites so you know just how badly people want you there. Inviters receive notifications when their invitees confirm or decline, and admins can filter declined RSVPs out of the wall to make their soirees seem like the place everyone wants to be.\nEvent walls now function more like the Groups feed, so they show when someone joins, and comments on posts bump them to the top. You can ask questions and follow posts to get notifications, so when you ask what refreshments to bring you’ll know when the host replies ‘whiskey’. In a move that will help those with busy schedules, notifications can be turned off.\n[Update: The small team behind Facebook Events still hasn’t created an official payment or ticketing system. This could be bolstering usage of EventBrite, which permits sales. If Facebook did one day create a ticket payment system or platform it would have to figure out how to do so without incentivizing event spam or unfairly favoring one payment service.]\nFacebook Events have become standard for medium-sized private functions like birthday parties, but Facebook wants the feature to be flexible enough to handle ad hoc get-togethers and thousand-attendee productions alike. By making small events easier to set up, large events easier to manage, and the whole product less noisy, Facebook could widen the spectrum of what Events are used for. By getting more people out of house, the Events update could quiet the claims that Facebook isolates us from live human interaction.", "date": "3/14/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/facebook-events-suggested-events1.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Facebook Speeds Up Event Creation and Offers New Invite Suggestions", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/facebook-events/" }, { "id": 72, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Lendingkart, a New Delhi-based platform for small businesses loans, has raised a Series A of $10 million from Saama Capital, Mayfield Fund, Shailesh Mehta, and Ashvin Chadha.\nSince launching a year ago, Lendingkart has processed loans from 50 cities and 17 states across India. It will use its new capital to expand into all towns and cities in India, improve its credit scoring technology, and hire more employees.\nThe startup is similar to LendingClub in that it allows businesses to apply for loans online, bypassing banks and other traditional finance institutions. Co-founder and chief executive officer Harshvardhan Lunia explains that Lendingkart’s algorithms use 1,500 data points to score credit application. The site claims that its application process takes just 15 minutes, with most loans approved in a few hours and disbursed within three working days.\nThe site taps into India’s e-commerce boom by working with marketplaces like Flipkart and Snapdeal to provide capital loans to online sellers, who only have to supply bank statements and VAT returns. Lendingkart then supplements that with information from their stores and other sites.\n“Lendingkart has enough data available to determine a customer’s intent to pay back a loan, the quality of his product or service, the financial health of his business, and ability to survive with competition,” says Lunia. “We don’t ask the customer to fill out large forms. We scrape this data from public and private sources and APIs.”\nHe adds that India currently has about 30 million SMBs. While 1.6 million have received loans from financial institutions and 600,000 get capital from sources like friends, family, and money lenders, the vast majority of small businesses–or 92.77 percent–have no outside financing.\nLendingkart believes that India’s e-commerce market, which is expected to be worth $50 billion by 2020, continues to boom, more entrepreneurs will seek working capital, and they will want to get it quickly without filling out multiple forms.\nLendingkart competes with firms like Capital Float, NeoGrowth, and SMEcorner, but sets itself apart by focusing on lenders who need relatively small amounts of money and plans to add a peer-to-peer platform similar to LendingClub.\nIn addition to e-commerce, Lendingkart also plans to service companies that supply goods to large corporations, online app and game developers, and offline retailers and service providers.\n“We will be targeting all the niches in the country where secondary verified data is available to us from third-party sources,” says Lunia. “So rather than bothering the borrower for document submission and evaluation, we will extract data from his ecosystem and evaluate him.”", "date": "7/8/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shutterstock_163988237.jpg?w=738", "section": "asia/", "tags": "lendingkart", "title": "With $10M In New Funding, Lendingkart Helps Small Businesses In India Get Loans", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/08/with-10m-in-new-funding-lendingkart-helps-small-businesses-in-india-get-loans/" }, { "id": 73, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Apps", "content": "Hardware add-ons for smartphones continue to crop up, letting mobile users extend the powers of their devices in new and interesting ways. Here’s the latest: LazeeEye is a prototype add-on, currently seeking crowdfunds via Kickstarter, that wants to augment your existing handset with laser-powered 3D mapping capabilities — and do so for very little extra money.\nIt’s designed to work in conjunction with the on-board horsepower of your handset, to do the necessary 3D processing, and a stereo vision app — to visualise and play around with the 3D scenes being captured. The ultimate aim is to power a new generation of 3D photo apps and services — that could, for instance, help you visualise what that new couch might look like in your front room. Or view a photograph from multiple angles.\nLazeeEye is just a concept, for now. And the current prototype really does look like it’s held together with bits of string. But the idea itself is interesting, and if LazeeEye’s makers can polish and shrink their hardware, optimise their algorithms and software, and deliver on their price pledge, they could put 3D mapping tech within reach of a lot more people — assuming they hit their rather ambitious Kickstarter goal and pull in the funding needed to pull all that off. So yeah, plenty of ifs. But a cool idea, nonetheless.\nGoogle unveiled its own 3D-focused Project Tango prototype smartphone back in February: an Android powered handset with built-in depth sensors so the phone user can map and visualise interior space.\nThat project remains experimental. It’s coming out of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects hardware skunkworks, with no signs Mountain View is hurrying to push it into consumer hardware. The initial focus for Google seems to be on finding out what sort of apps developers build with such a device at their fingertips.\nBut even if Google does end up shipping a Nexus handset with built in 3D sensors that would require people to buy a new phone just to acquire the 3D mapping powers. LazeeEye’s vision is a hardware add-on that plugs straight into your existing handset to extend its abilities.\nAside from Project Tango, the LazeeEye is also lining up to compete with Occipital’s Structure 3D sensor for iOS devices.\nBut it’s aiming to undercut Occipital on price — the latter’s 3D sensor costs circa $350. While LazeeEye has a $50 DIY kit for people who are happy to assemble the hardware themselves, or $75 for the assembled version. There are also some more expensive pledge levels, $125 or $150, for lasers with different nanometer wavelengths.\nLazeeEye’s Massachusetts-based makers, Heuristic Labs, are seeking to raise a rather hefty $250,000 via Kickstarter to make the project fly. If they hit that goal — they have a long way to go, but have given themselves around two months to get there — they’re aiming to ship to backers starting this June.", "date": "4/1/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/screen-shot-2014-04-01-at-4-28-47-pm.png?w=638", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "project-tango,3d-mapping,lazeeeye", "title": "LazeeEye Wants To Give Any Smartphone 3D Mapping Capabilities", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/01/lazeeeye-kickstarter/" }, { "id": 74, "authors": "Alex Williams", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "The weekend is coming up and that means one thing. I have to do my expenses.\nIt’s time to organize my receipts and make an expense sheet and invoice document. After that comes the scanning – standing over the printer, making sure the wireless is working so it syncs with my MacBook Pro.\nThat will be followed by the email with the PDF files for all of the above. That will take care of my Saturday morning.\nBut today I had a briefing with OfficeDrop which now has a service that works with ExpenseMagic for scanning and creating expense documents from an iOS, Android device or your desktop. It seems good enough to offer the potential for eliminating much of the manual work I do in preparing expense reports during my precious weekends.\nOfficeDrop has scanning and optics in its DNA. The company started as a service you could use to send your mail for scanning. The model did not work. People wanted to do the scanning themselves.  So they pivoted, built a strong search engine to go with the scanning and now offer  a combined storage and collaboration service. They see themselves fitting between Box and Dropbox, offering a service for small business people for easily scanning receipts, ideally from a mobile device. Google Drive is also seen as a competitor.\nIn March of last year, OfficeDrop had 10,000 registered users. It took three years for the company to get to that point. It then launched an iPhone app. Today the service has 160,000 users. People love the mobile app to scan receipts on the go.\nExpense Magic takes receipts and creates an expense sheet that is available on the date you choose. It reads the receipt and processes it into an expense sheet.\nTo use the combined services, you need to create accounts with both OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic. In ExpenseMagic, you connect your account with OfficeDrop. An ExpenseMagic folder then appears in OfficeDrop. ExpenseMagic does not offer an Android app but you can sign up for the service and use OfficeDrop to scan receipts and then place in the ExpenseMagic folder.\nHere’s a demo:\nI gave it a try. I downloaded the app on my Android, took a photo of a receipt and moved it to the Inbox. I then signed up for ExpenseMagic and connected the account with OfficeDrop. I can now see the image of the receipt in OfficeDrop and the ExpenseMagic Folder. I placed the receipt in the folder and then looked for it in ExpenseMagic but did not see it.\nHealy Jones of OfficeDrop he had a similar issue when he first used the combined services. He said ExpenseMagic does the processing over night so don;t be surprised if you do not see it immediately.\nI like this service and will see how it works for my next trip. The user interface could use some improvement. It took me a while to figure it all out. If I did not have Healy to contact I am not sure I would have continued with trying to sync the services. All it needs to say is check back later to see your report.", "date": "8/17/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/odavatar.png?w=400", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "google-drive,box,officedrop", "title": "OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic Combine To Offer Easy Mobile Receipt Scanning and Automated Expense Reports", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/officedrop-and-expensemagic-combine-to-offer-easy-mobile-receipt-scanning-and-automated-expense-reports/" }, { "id": 75, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Mobile", "content": "For the first time in its history, the iPhone is experiencing a drop in sales.\nIn 2015 at this same time, Apple sold 61 million units of the iPhone. This year, for the period ending March, Apple only sold 51.2 million units, representing a 16 percent YOY drop.\nThis shouldn’t come as a surprise for most folks who know that we are close to (if not already at) peak iPhone levels. There simply aren’t as many first-time iPhone buyers out there.\nThis is particularly true in China, the world’s largest smartphone market, which has finally reached saturation and started to see an overall drop in smartphone sales. For Apple in particular, total sales in China are down 26 percent, though it’s unclear how large of a role the iPhone plays in that dip.\nMeanwhile, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models don’t offer anything particularly compelling to force yearly upgrades, as features like Siri did for the iPhone 4s and TouchID did for the iPhone 5s. Plus, the newly unveiled iPhone SE, a smaller, cheaper version of the iPhone, is not included in this earnings report as it went on sale on March 31. Plus, the iPhone SE, which starts at $399, isn’t necessarily as competitive on price as it may seem.\nApple has always seen a bit of a slow in upgrades on “S” years, when the company offers a new iPhone that has little to no physical change from the previous generation. Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed this on the earnings call today, saying that the iPhone 6s upgrade sales are actually slightly higher than upgrade sales to the iPhone 5s.\nStill, quite a bit hangs on the iPhone 7, as well as the newly released iPhone SE.\nLast quarter, the iPhone accounted for nearly 70 percent of Apple’s total revenue, which explains why Apple’s quarterly reported income is down for the first time since 2003.\nWithout growing iPhone sales, the company is in for a bit of a rough patch. And it doesn’t help that both the iPad and the Mac division are also down from the year before.\nThat said, Apple is betting big on its services business, which is showing growth. Services, which includes iTunes, App Apple Music, etc., is up 20 percent year over year. In some ways, the “peak-iPhone” problem is a boost to services sales. The greater the installed user base (Apple reached one billion registered devices earlier this year), the more purchases will come through Apple’s software ecosystem.\nPlus, these software-based businesses encourage consumers to purchase other Apple products, like MacBooks, Apple Watches and Apple TVs.\nUnfortunately, Apple doesn’t break out “Other Products” in any way that offers transparency, so we can’t decipher which products are bringing in the cash. In any case, it’s unclear if Apple can make up for the higher margins of their declining iPhone business with revenue from services and other products.", "date": "4/26/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/iphonesebottom.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "apple-inc,macintosh,touch-id", "title": "Apple iPhone sees first YOY sales dip ever", "topics": "apple-tv", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/apple-iphone-sees-first-yoy-sales-dip-ever/" }, { "id": 76, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "", "content": "LinkedIn is announcing a new Ads API, which could bring more large-scale social marketing campaigns to the professional networking site.\nIn a blog post that the company plans to publish on its marketing website later today, Marketing Solutions Lead Jen Weedn writes that API access has been one of the most-requested features from LinkedIn’s “tens of thousands” advertisers. Until now, those advertisers were limited to the company’s self-serve interface, but with the API outside developers can build customized tools for running LinkedIn campaigns. Weedn says:\nThe initial API partners include Adobe (specifically through its AdLens product), business advertising startup Bizo, and social marketing platform Unified. LinkedIn says approved API developers will receive high-level support, including “a direct line of communication with our product management team.”\nInterested developers can read more and apply here.", "date": "11/28/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/image001-1.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "unified,bizo,adobe,linkedin", "title": "LinkedIn Launches Ads API, Enabling Custom Tools For Large-Scale Campaigns", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/11/28/linkedin-launches-ads-api-enabling-custom-tools-for-large-scale-ad-campaigns/" }, { "id": 77, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Nokia unveiled a few new Android-powered Nokia X smartphones at MWC this year, and they look like an interesting combination of Nokia’s existing design choices with Windows Phone, Microsoft’s services and Google’s mobile OS. As interesting as they appear, however, and regardless of their ultimate merits, don’t expect them to usher in a new continuing lineup of Nokia Android hardware.\nI argued in a previous Droidcast on TechCrunch that the Nokia/Android mashup was essentially a non-starter; the alliance appears to have been in the pipeline already when Microsoft began the process of taking over Nokia’s hardware division, but there are clear indications that Nokia’s new owners won’t be as open to the idea of seeing the experiment through.\nIn a blog post, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Communications Frank X. Shaw provided a short summary of Microsoft and Nokia’s role and announcements at MWC this year. The letter is noteworthy in that it’s more reserved than what we normally see from Shaw, and in that it only mentions ‘Android’ once – and then only when Shaw is referencing competitor devices that the Nokia X competes with, and not the X line itself. Perhaps most telling is this excerpt, which Shaw offers as a means of contextualizing the Nokia X project:\nIn other words, what Nokia is currently doing ≠ what Microsoft will be doing with Nokia’s hardware division once the deal goes through, which is expected to happen towards the end of March this year.\nShaw goes on to emphasize the importance of getting Microsoft services out there in the hands of consumers, which the Nokia X project helps to accomplish, but he sums up with a reminder that Windows Phone is Microsoft’s main bet in the smartphone realm, and nothing happening at MWC will change that.\nOf course, Microsoft could stick with Android if these Nokia X devices prove to be very popular with the emerging market crowd they appear to target, and that results in a huge spike in usage of MS services. But the chances of that seem extremely low, and reading between the lines I’d say it’s almost certain Nokia’s Android experiment will be a short-lived one, regardless of outcome.\n", "date": "2/24/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/nokia-x-hybrid11.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "microsoft,android,nokia-x,nokia", "title": "If You Want Android On A Nokia, The Nokia X Is Probably Your Last Chance", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/24/if-you-want-android-on-a-nokia-the-nokia-x-is-probably-your-last-chance/" }, { "id": 78, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "The much-anticipated Leap Motion Controller began shipping to pre-order customers today, as reviews of the input device hit the web. The startup behind the controller has done an impressive job raising interest in the novel gadget, and sold an incredible amount of pre-orders to early adopters. But reviews so far have been mostly lukewarm, citing experiences that don’t necessarily live up to the hype.\nThe Leap Motion controller went back to the drawing board and put off its wide launch to spend more time in a wider beta in order to get the consumer experience right. It sounds like they were focusing on the right area with that effort, as most reviews say the Leap Motion experience is a little underwhelming, or at least something that’s an admirable distraction but not useful for truly productive usage.\nLeap Motion has done a good job of getting a decent selection and range of apps in the Airspace dedicated software store for its device at launch, so it has that going for it. But the problem here appears to be that all of the apps leave reviewers feeling more like they’ve just experienced a gimmick, than the next generation of computer interaction.\nWhat Leap Motion can do now (scrolling and paging through apps and virtual environments, completing next and back functions) is a far cry from what it will likely eventually be able to do, however. The Leap Motion and devices like it are a long bet, and I think the companies behind them understand this; we’ll see a bit of what they’re capable of shown off in tech demos and current generation software, but what they’re offering is an entirely new paradigm for thinking about digital interaction. That means it’ll take time before developers wrap their head around what kind of software experience fits this mould.\nAdapting Fruit Ninja or Google Earth to something like 3D gesture control is a simple enough process, one that’s opportunistic without being truly innovative. Some might say Leap Motion should’ve stayed in beta until it could begin to bring about the change needed to show its controller off to its full potential, but someone had to get the tech to market. It’ll grow accordingly, though I’m curious to see if consumer interest will be enough to sustain it through its awkward adolescence based on these initial, hopeful but ultimately reserved consumer-oriented reviews.", "date": "7/22/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/leap_in_hand.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "gesture-control,controller,leap-motion", "title": "Leap Motion Launches With Limited Appeal, But It Could Be A Ticking Time Bomb Of Innovation", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/22/leap-motion-launches-with-limited-appeal-but-it-could-be-a-ticking-time-bomb-of-innovation/" }, { "id": 79, "authors": "Will Eisley", "category": "Startups", "content": "\n\nAccording to a 2015 study of more than 4,000 designers conducted by Subtraction.com and Adobe’s Khoi Vinh, 64 percent of designers still prefer pencil and paper to begin the creative brainstorm process.\nThat’s not surprising: Paper is virtually always accessible and offers simplicity. Plus, pen on paper has been the traditional medium budding artists are taught from the beginning, making it easy to generate ideas freely and naturally.\nDespite this, most companies continue to invest in digital drawing. Apple, Wacom, FiftyThree and others continue to design innovative hardware and apps, such as the iPad Pro and Bamboo Paper, to enhance performance and increase speed while on the go. Are the efforts to bring digital deeper into the creative workflow all in vain?\nThe answer, as you might suspect, is no. Digital will never be a paper killer, but hardware and apps leveraging the latest technology advances are closing the gap with undeniable benefits in accessibility, efficiency and artistry.\nInspiration doesn’t only happen in front of a computer or canvas. In fact, a 2012 Harvard study found that distraction is actually a key variable for creativity — meaning, it’s more probable that your genius idea will occur when you’re not in your studio.\nHowever, we almost always have our phones with us. No matter where we are, we now have an unlimited toolkit of apps and services to turn raw inspiration into usable assets, such as color themes, shapes, brushes and patterns.\nFor example, apps can enable designers to turn any real-world object into a brush, texture, vector shape or color that they can use in mobile apps or desktop software. It allows designers to capture creative inspiration wherever they are and design with it immediately.\nWhile most people doodle out of boredom, designers sketch as the first step in their creative process. Sketching on paper is free-flowing and easy, but the challenge for designers is then having to quickly turn it into usable work — transferring ideas from paper to digital either by scanning and tracing, or recreating a digital version of what they sketched.\nThe benefit of drawing with mobile apps is you can sketch your mock-up digitally and have that sketch turned into a usable Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign file. Adobe Comp emulates the iterative process of paper, and saves time by eliminating the need to recreate work from scratch on the desktop.\nInterest in drawing on mobile devices is growing. There were more than 99,000 tweets about Apple Pencil within 24 hours of it being announced, and even CNN covered the excitement among the design community, calling it the tool to “replace paper sketchbooks.” That excitement is not misplaced.\nWith the rapid development of innovative pens and digital apps and improved hardware, artists are empowered to create a new medium of digital art where natural media can be realistically simulated, including watercolor, pastels and the aesthetic of oils on canvas — all on a single mobile device:\nIntegrating mobile technology and hardware into the concepting and ideation stage of the creative process may sound novel to some designers, but it isn’t new. When Wacom introduced its first pen tablet in 2005, it was initially met with skepticism. Yet today, we take for granted the prevalence and use of Wacom tablets for drawing.\nAs hardware and apps continue to expand capabilities and evolve to better emulate the paper experience, more designers will adopt digital as a larger part of the creative process. As technology advances, digital also will enable new forms of expressive painting, such as the ability to paint different lighting environments or apply 3D textures for paint.\nPaper will never be obsolete as a medium for ideation, production or publication, but initiating the creative process digitally will emerge as an increasingly faster way to capture ideas, iterate and turn concepts into production-ready designs.", "date": "2/24/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/drawinghands.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "fiftythree,wacom,digital-drawing", "title": "The Benefits Of Digital Drawing", "topics": "apple-pencil", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/24/the-benefits-of-digital-drawing/" }, { "id": 80, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Apple shared its quarterly earnings results today, and for fiscal Q2 2014, the company moved 43.7 million iPhones, 16.3 million iPads and 4.1 million Macs. That compares to 51 million iPhones sold during the first fiscal quarter, along with 26 million iPads and 4.8 million Macs, but that was a holiday quarter, so a dip is to be expected. Last year during the same quarter, Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones, 19.5 million iPads and 3.95 million Macs.\nEstimates for the quarter from Wall St. had pegged iPhone sales at 38.77 million units on average, with predictions of 19.36 iPads sold and 4.07 million Macs. iPod sales decreased from 5.63 million a year ago, too, and now sit at just 2.7 million for Q2 2014, but that’s not surprising given that they’ve been trending downwards a long time, and that Apple didn’t even update iPod touch hardware last year.\nApple’s year-over-year performance includes iPhone unit sales growth of 16.8 percent, while iPad sales slumped by about the same amount, with negative 16.4 percent growth. That iPad number represents a considerable miss, and will likely be cited by analysts as yet another sign that the tablet market might be nearing saturation. As for the Mac number, it’s just about flat from last year. The iPod tumbled even more than expected, but again, Apple doesn’t seem to be too concerned with that product category as it looks to other opportunities that are replacing it in terms of consumer interest, like the iPhone. Apple CEO Tim Cook cites the iPad mini being late last year as the reason for the big discrepancy (sales surged unnaturally during Q2 2013 as a result).\n", "date": "4/23/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ipod-iphone-ipad-family.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "iphone,macs,hardware,apple", "title": "Apple Sold 44M iPhones, 16M iPads And 4M Macs In Q2 2014", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/23/apple-hardware-sales-q2-2014/" }, { "id": 81, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Startups", "content": "One of the many joys of exploring a city like Taipei is its maze of lanes and alleyways, which are lined with small shops, incense-filled temples and leafy parks. The downside is wrangling with addresses like this: 台北市南港區八德路四段768巷1弄18號B1之1 (B1-1, No. 18, Alley 1, Lane 768, Bade Rd Sec 4, Nangang District, Taipei City). A new startup called POcode (which stands for “positioning code”) wants to help businesses in cities with equally serpentine non-English addresses attract customers and prevent them from getting lost on their way over.\nPOcode’s Web app generates an eight to 12 digit alphanumeric code for individual addresses that users can enter on its site to pull up a Web page with a map, directions and venue information. Each page also includes location coordinates in several formats (decimal, DMS, UTM, GPS) as well as a QR code and Microsoft tags (see an example here).\nFounders Mark Lee and Phil Foo, who are based in Malaysia, say navigation tools like GPS devices are often cumbersome to use when searching for addresses written in non-Roman alphabet languages. Potential competitors include address shorteners and Google Places, but Lee hopes businesses will use POcode because it gives them an easy to way to build a Web presence. The site plans to market to users in countries with languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet, such as Chinese, Russian, Korean, Japanese or Arabic. Use cases include restaurants and stores that want to attract expatriates who can’t read the local language or people throwing parties who don’t want guests to get lost.\nLee says he came up with the idea for POcode while trying to direct clients to his media production company on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. After confusing GPS directions led several people astray, Lee built a site with a map, pictures that showed his building from several angles, four different kinds of coordinates and a QR Code and Microsoft Tag.\nAs POcode grows, it will add features like an analytics dashboard that will let users see who is viewing their information, as well as an inbox messaging system so customers can reach business owners directly from the site. Lee says POcode will monetize through premium features such as custom POcodes, including ones with the digit 8, an auspicious number in Chinese culture, or easy-to-memorize codes.\nLee and Foo are currently bootstrapping the developing of their site with their savings, as well as ad revenue from their online magazine The Asian Angler, which grew out of their mutual passion for fly fishing.", "date": "10/17/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/screen-shot-2013-10-17-at-3-56-37-pm.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "gps,navigation,pocode", "title": "POcode Gives Small Businesses An Easy Alternative To GPS", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/17/pocode-gives-small-businesses-an-easy-alternative-to-gps/" }, { "id": 82, "authors": "Robin Wauters", "category": "Apps", "content": "This week at the Le Web conference in Paris, Foodie.fm will be formally launching its personalized social shopping platform for groceries. The Finnish startup basically aims to better inform shoppers about the food they buy, and help retailers communicate directly about the groceries they sell.\nAt the core of Foodie.fm is a recommendation system, which the company says relies on patent-pending technology, that learns from a user’s eating and purchasing habits, and suggests recipes and groceries that match his or her ‘taste profile’. The system takes into account personal preferences – think food allergies or intolerance, budgetary restrictions and predilections.\nRead more at TechCrunch Europe.", "date": "12/5/2011", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/foodie.png?w=214", "section": "social/", "tags": "foodie,foodie-fm,digital-foodie", "title": "Eat Smarter: Foodie.fm Debuts Personalized Grocery Shopping Platform", "topics": "", "url": "http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/12/05/eat-smarter-foodie-fm-debuts-personalized-grocery-shopping-platform/" }, { "id": 83, "authors": "Kim-Mai Cutler", "category": "Apps", "content": "While messaging has become a veritable war with apps like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Path and Facebook Messenger across Asia and Western markets, there’s been one longstanding app that’s presided over the space with very few apparent changes.\nWhatsApp, the Sequoia-backed messaging app that dominates in Europe and that is often tipped as an attractive acquisition candidate for companies like Google and Facebook, just went freemium finally on iOS. The app has been paid for years on the iPhone at a $0.99 price point.\nBut today it went free with an annual subscription fee of $1 after the first year. This isn’t really a surprise as CEO Jan Koum talked about this several months ago. It brings WhatsApp’s business model on iOS in line with other platforms like Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone.\nThe paid app business model is really a vestige of an older era when developers would sell their work up-front. But over time, many paid apps have made the switch toward going free with paid features. Games really triggered this wave, but other high-usage apps like messaging have gone for a freemium strategy.\nJapan’s Line, for example, made $58.9 million in the first quarter of this year in Japan through in-app purchases and sales of stickers — which apps like Path and Facebook Messenger have subsequently copied.\nWhatsApp launched back in 2009 and quickly grew popular in markets where SMS pricing made messaging through smartphone apps cheaper. It really dominates in European markets and has a strong foothold in India, as well.\nRecently, the company said it was bigger than Twitter with more than 200 million monthly actives, 10 billion messages sent and 17 billion received in a single day.", "date": "7/16/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/whatsapp.png?w=195", "section": "social/", "tags": "whatsapp", "title": "The Granddaddy Of Messaging Apps, WhatsApp, Finally Goes For A Subscription Model on iOS", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/16/whatsapp-free/" }, { "id": 84, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "Following increasing competition, most recently from SmugMug’s nifty Camera Awesome app, everyone’s favorite iPhone camera replacement app Camera+ is rolling out a major update today. There are a ton of new features in version 3.0 of the app, including speed improvements, multiple photo import, better sharing options, and more, but the biggest change isn’t really a consumer-facing feature at all – it’s an API.\nStarting today, developers can integrate Camera+ into other apps or create web services that make use of the photos shared by the app’s millions of users. According to Camera+’s maker, Lisa Bettany, several developers are already integrating Camera+ into their apps using the new APIs, including WordPress, Tweetbot, Twitterific, Foodspotting and Twitterlator Neue.\nFor those unfamiliar (Android users?), Camera+ is the 10th best-selling paid iPhone app of all-time, and it recently shipped its 7 millionth copy. The app serves to replace the iPhone’s built-in camera with a number of additional options for editing and sharing photos.\nWith Camera+ version 3.0, which rolled out a day earlier than expected, there’s a long list of improvements, including the following:\nWhile this feature set will definitely have everyone hitting up their App Store app today to grab the update, the most interesting change is the Camera+ API. With some nearly 600,000 iOS applications, offering other developers the option to integrate Camera+ into their own applications will lead to even more usage and visibility. Not only will Camera+ be able to serve as the photo-taking interface within other non-photography focused apps like Foodspotting, it will also allow developers to include Camera+ users’ photos as an option in apps related to social sharing, like those Twitter apps, for example, mentioned above.\nMore than that, it positions Camera+ as a service, instead of just a utility. And that, in turn, means it could one day take on the default photo-sharing services like Flickr and Photobucket, if the company chose to do so. After all, where do most of your photos come from today? Your phone! Wouldn’t it make sense for the service that manages your online photos to be built from the ground-up for mobile photo sharing? Camera+ isn’t discussing its future plans in this arena, but it seems like an obvious next step for the company as the mobile photo-sharing market continues to grow.\nThe updated version of Camera+ went live in iTunes this morning.", "date": "3/13/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/focusexposurelock.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "photos,photography,iphone-app,camera", "title": "Camera+ Sees Major Update: Dozens Of Features, New API, Integration With WordPress, Foodspotting & More", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/13/camera-sees-major-update-dozens-of-features-new-api-integration-with-wordpress-foodspotting-more/" }, { "id": 85, "authors": "Ryan Lawler", "category": "Fundings & Exits", "content": "On-demand laundry service Washio wants to be available in all the major cities throughout the U.S. With that in mind, the company has raised $10.5 million in Series A funding, led by Canaan Partners.\nFounded a little more than a year ago, Washio has developed a service that enables users to schedule pickup and dropoff of their laundry and dry cleaning through a mobile app. It launched originally in Los Angeles, but over the last several months has expanded to San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Since last September, the company’s revenues have increased 8x.\nBut it’s not stopping there: According to Washio CEO Jordan Metzner, the company plans to use its new funding to expand to additional U.S. markets. Currently operating in just three cities, Washio is looking to introduce service in New York, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Denver and Seattle, among others.\nThe company is also looking to hire more engineers and drivers. It has about 20 full-time employees and 120 drivers on the road in its three cities today.\nMetzner said Washio went with Canaan in part due to its early-stage investments in other marketplace startups, like Instacart, UrbanSitter and OneFineStay. As part of the investment, Canaan Partners principal Hrach Simonian is joining Washio’s board of directors.\nWashio had previously raised $2.8 million in seed funding from Sherpa Ventures, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Three Six Zero Group, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Ron Burkle, Nas, Anthony Saleh, Larry Rudolph, Jay Brown, Zod Nazem, Troy Carter, Scooter Braun, Yael Cohen, Tom Ryan and Frank Cooper.", "date": "6/9/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/washio-photo-shoot.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "washio", "title": "On-Demand Laundry Startup Washio Raises $10.5 Million Led By Canaan Partners", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/09/washio-10-5m-canaan-partners/" }, { "id": 86, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Asia", "content": "There’s less than a week to go until LG’s pre-MWC press conference, where the company is expected to lift the veil on a new flagship smartphone, the LG G5. But the South Korean mobile maker has another handset to show off in Barcelona — which it’s just announced today.\nThe 5.7 inch LG Stylus 2 is the follow on phablet to the G4 Stylus, which launched in May last year. The screen size of the sequel is the same but LG has shaved a few millimeters off the thickness, with the Stylus 2 measuring just 7.4mm vs 9.4mm for last year’s model.\nIt’s also a few grams lighter, weighing in at 145g vs 163g for the G4 Stylus. Despite being so slender the phablet does include an SD card for user expandable memory. It also packs a 3,000mAh removable battery.\nAnother changed is a tweak to the bundled stylus, which LG is now calling a “pen”. It says the new stylus has a “nano-coated tip” — for, it claims, enhanced accuracy vs the rubber-tipped stylus of 2015’s phablet. It’s also touting a new Calligraphy Pen font which is says will let people write with the stylus as if it were a fountain pen.\nAnother new feature aims to avoid phone and stylus being separated, so the phone will pop up a warning message when the handset is detected to be in motion yet the stylus bay is empty. So no more stylus separation anxiety.\nUnder the hood of the Android 6.0 device there’s a 1.2GHz Quad-Core chip, 1.5GB RAM and 16GB of internal storage (user expandable as noted above), so in classic phablet style it’s not going to be treading on the toes of the top of the range smartphone flagships.\nRound the back, there’s a 13MP camera situated near LG’s now trademark rear power key placement (love it or hate it). And the handset will come in a choice of three colors: white, brown and “titan” (aka a charcoal/metallic shade).\nThere’s no specific confirmation of pricing yet but LG says the price-tag will be “of a mid-tier phone” — adding that it’s aiming the handset firmly at the “mass-tier segment” (aka where there’s still some growth to be found in smartphones).\nThe company will be showing the Stylus 2 at MWC next week. TC will be on the ground in Barcelona to get hands on so stay tuned.", "date": "2/16/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lg-stylus-2-b1.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "barcelona,lg-electronics,smartphones", "title": "LG Outs Its Next Phablet, The Slender LG Stylus 2", "topics": "lg", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/16/lg-outs-its-next-phablet-the-slender-lg-stylus-2/" }, { "id": 87, "authors": "Jay Donovan", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "While you are riding into work on your daily bike commute, why not charge your phone? There’s a bit more to it than that, but ultimately that is exactly what the Siva Cycle Atom does. A brilliant idea.\nReaching their KickStarter goal of $85,000 after only a week, the newly funded Atom is on display on the floor of Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.\nThe Atom is a generator, complete with a detachable battery, that is fixed to the rear of your bicycle. As you pedal away, the generator is charging the attached battery. However it can also directly charge your phone too, using a smart switching system that goes back and forth between the device and the battery.\nFor example, if your phone is hooked up to the device it will directly charge your phone while you are pedaling, however when you come to a stop, your phone will automatically draw from the battery to keep you topped off.\nOnce you reach your destination, you simply detach the 1300mAh battery and take it with you for extra juice for your smartphone.\n", "date": "5/1/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/siva1.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "siva-cycle,disrupt", "title": "Charge Your Phone While You Ride Your Bike With The Siva Cycle Atom", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/charge-your-phone-while-you-ride-your-bike-with-the-siva-cycle-atom/" }, { "id": 88, "authors": "Erick Schonfeld", "category": "eCommerce", "content": "About six months ago, local advertising company Yext made a big bet on a new market. It’s pay-per-call business was growing at a rapid clip, but was limited in its potential reach. So CEO Howard Lerman spent $10 million building an entirely new and complementary product that lets local businesses manage their listings across dozens of sites like Yelp, SuperPages, Citysearch, Mapquest, Local.com, and Yahoo Local.\nYext now has 30,000 paying subscribers to PowerListings, up from about 500 six months ago. With one account, a small business can update their listings across all of these local sites from a central Yext PowerListings dashboard. It solves a huge headache for small businesses who can be bewildered with managing their profiles and listings across the myriad local sites on the Web. They have been signing up in droves for these accounts, which cost $400 a year.\nAgain, these are paying customers. The PowerListings business is on a $12 million revenue run-rate, and Lerman expects it to surpass his pay-per-call business by the middle of next year.He hints that more local listings partners will be added to the service in December.\nWhat Yext is doing here is creating a very clean database of local listings which are updated by the businesses themselves and then syndicated to local listings sites across the Web. With one change on PowerListings, a small business can make changes across Yahoo Local, Superpages, Yelp, and more all directly through APIs. Yext is building the central database for local businesses, and that could end up being very powerful indeed.", "date": "11/17/2011", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/yext-30k.jpg?w=400", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "", "title": "Yext PowerListings Now Powers 30,000 Local Listings", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/17/yext-powerlistings-30-000/" }, { "id": 89, "authors": "Brian Heater", "category": "Gaming", "content": "It’s no Pokemon Go, but it’s charming nonetheless, employing Google’s Cloud Vision to add a little bit of CGI dragon magic to your immediate vicinity. The “Dragon Spotting” game is free and accessible through a mobile browser designed to promote Disney’s upcoming Pete’s Dragon remake.\nThe page offers up the player simple instructions through a series of whimsically animated maps. It’s all pretty straightforward, though, asking you to identify a series of common objects – a table, a couch, a door, clouds, plants and bushes. The user snaps a photo or uses on from their photo roll and, boom, there’s a dragon, hiding in plain sight all along.\n\nGoogle’s Cloud Vision API does the processing, using the technology to identify the object in the photo. If it doesn’t find what it’s looking, it’ll send you back to the drawing board. And if you don’t find what it wants in real life, just shake the phone and it’ll move onto the next object.\n\nThe photos are fun and a nice little homage to the mix of live action and cell animation in the original, along with the CGI of its 2016 counterpart. Once snapped, photos can be shared via social, promoting the game and, by proxy, the new film. It’s also a nice cautionary tale. Apparently this place has been crawling with dragons the whole time.\nvia The Verge", "date": "8/11/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/p8112218.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "petes-dragon,disney", "title": "Disney enlists Google Cloud’s Vision for a ‘Pete’s Dragon’ AR mobile game", "topics": "google", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/11/petekemon-drago/" }, { "id": 91, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "The carpooling race in Europe has yet to produce a definitive winner, as Germany’s Carpooling.com and France’s BlaBlaCar continue to go head-to-head. Today, the latter is making its next move: BlaBlaCar is riding into Russia and the Ukraine — in part via an acquisition of local player, Podorozhniki. The price remains undisclosed.\nIt’s actually the fourth time BlaBlaCar has expanded via acquisition, although this is the first time outside of the European Union.\nThe company cites Podorozhniki’s early traction in the CIS market and its strong three-person team, led by founder Aleksey Lazorenko, as reasons for the purchase, and continuation of a strategy to gobble up the best local talent as a means to enter new markets. Also of note, Podorozhniki is backed by the Russian seed investor Arkady Moreynis.\nFounded in 2006, BlaBlaCar taps into the collaborative consumption phenomenon — long before anybody called it that — by offering a carpooling or ridesharing marketplace that connects drivers with empty seats to paying passengers, helping to offset long distance travel costs.\nDrivers can charge passengers through BlaBlaCar or directly, while there are a number of security mechanisms, such as phone number authentication and user ratings of members, resulting in trust being an important element of its platform.\nIn January last year, the Paris-headquartered startup raised an additional $10 million from Accel Partners, and existing investors ISAI and Cabiedes Partners, specifically for European expansion. It operates country-specific sites for the UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Italy, Germany — and now Russia and the Ukraine.\nNoteworthy is that rival Carpooling.com doesn’t yet have a Russian language property, so isn’t targeting the CIS region specifically. In terms of overall numbers, BlaBlaCar currently claims 6 million members, up from 3 million last April, no doubt helped by its recent acquisitions, with 1 million people make journeys using its site per-month. In contrast, Carpooling.com claims over 5 million members, with 1.3 million people carpooling each month.", "date": "1/28/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/screen-shot-2014-01-27-at-14-46-43.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "blablacar", "title": "European Carpooling Site BlaBlaCar Rides Into Russia And Ukraine Via Acquisition", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/28/bla-bla-russia/" }, { "id": 92, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Startups", "content": "Zazzy, an Amsterdam-based startup that allows anyone to design and customize their own 3D-printed jewelry is now launching a new marketplace that lets you sell your jewelry to others as well, instead of just buying it for yourself. The company believes the new platform, Zazzy.co, will make sense for artists and designers looking to expand their portfolios, as well as for others, including marketers, bloggers, tastemakers, and more, where it can serve as a way for them to add to their own collections of branded merchandise.\nFor those unfamiliar, Zazzy.me was founded in 2013 by Gert Jan Spriensma, one of Distimo’s (acquired by App Annie) first employees whose background is in industrial engineering, along with Martijn van der Veen, a UCL grad who studied A.I., computer vision, and graphics.\nThe company has seen over 60,000 users design their own necklaces, bracelets and rings to date. And in total, its customers have created over 200,000 designs since the platform debuted. On the site, customers use simple tools to select their jewelry and materials (e.g. gold-plated shiny steel, stainless steel, matte black steel, nylon, etc.), then create their designs using lettering and icons.\nZazzy doesn’t actually do its own printing in-house, however, but works with multiple printeries around the world, including exOne and Shapeways, for example. Ship times vary, but most customers receive their products in two to three weeks, Spriensma says.\n\nHe now likens the new marketplace, Zazzy.co, to a “Teespring for 3D printed jewelry” because, like the custom t-shirt platform, Zazzy customers can sell to their followers or even use their designs for things like charity fundraisers. Here, designers will be about to control their own profit margins by setting their prices, and the company will provide them with near-instant photorealistic renders of the designs which they can then use when listing or sharing their item with others.\nEssentially, Zazzy is stepping in to play the middleman in between the customer and a 3D printer like its partner Shapeways, but it’s doing so in an effort to simplify 3D printing for those who are unfamiliar with creating their own 3D files, yet still want to build something that’s uniquely their own.\n“It’s a really fun and effective way of engaging with 3D printing, without the hassle that comes with domestic printers,” explains Spriensma.\nThe marketplace is actually launching at the end of the month, he also notes, but is available for preview here.\nZazzy is currently backed by half a million in angel funding from a number of investors, including angels who founded companies like eBuddy, Freedom of Creation (acquired by 3D Systems), Hyves and Vakantieveilingen. Spriensma says Zazzy is now working to pursue some opportunities in the U.S. and the team is planing to move in the next six months.", "date": "4/8/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/161884-zazzybannerphoto-8-360c4f-large-1427965292.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "jewelry,zazzy,zazzy", "title": "Zazzy’s New Marketplace Lets You Design And Sell Your Own 3D Printed Jewelry", "topics": "3d-printing", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/zazzys-new-marketplace-lets-you-design-and-sell-your-own-3d-printed-jewelry/" }, { "id": 93, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Startups", "content": "RealDirect.com was built around a compelling proposition for home sellers — instead of paying the 6 percent broker fee, let RealDirect handle the listings and offer advice from agents, while only paying $395 a month or a 1 or 2 percent commission (depending on the level of services). Now, however, the site is also trying to be useful for home buyers.\nSpecifically, instead of expecting buyers to find the listings through various real estate databases, RealDirect is launching its own map-based interface. It’s pretty straightforward — you enter things like the neighborhoods you want to look at, the maximum price, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, then you get a map with all the houses that fit your criteria. You can also draw a lasso around the area that you want to search in and browse data about different neighborhoods.\nRealDirect also uses something it’s calling “compatibility rankings” — basically, it’s casting a wider net so that you don’t miss good fits just because they aren’t an exact fit for what you said you were looking for.\n“Every single buyer makes some sort of compromise,” says co-founder and CEO Doug Perlson puts it. “The idea of having a set of search results that are an exact match to your criteria is particularly troubling when it comes to real estate search.”\nFor example, if someone says they’re interested in apartments with at least 2,000 square feet, they’d probably be just as interested in one that matched all of their other criteria perfectly, but was only 1,997 square feet. Most other real estate search sites would cut off the search at 2,000, but instead of seeing your criteria as a yes-or-no cutoff, RealDirect treats them more as guidelines that it can use to give you the best results.\nFor now, RealDirect is limited to Manhattan and Brooklyn. Perlson says it will probably expand to other areas of New York City over the next 12 months, then open in other markets in 18 months or so. The company’s investors include Tribeca Venture Partners, High Peaks Venture Partners, Bendigo Partners, SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert, and About.com founder Scott Kurnit.", "date": "5/8/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/realdirect.jpg?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "NYC Real Estate Startup RealDirect Adds Map Search And Compatibility Rankings", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/08/realdirect-search/" }, { "id": 94, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Apple CEO Tim Cook was in Beijing today speaking to Chinese press about the launch of the iPhone with carrier partner China Mobile. The WSJ was also in attendance, and reported on a Q&A session in which Cook explained Apple’s view of the Chinese smartphone market, China Mobile itself, and the long road to this partnership.\nCook revealed that during the past quarter, Apple sold more iPhones in the Greater China market than it has at any time previously, which means it moved over 10.4 million iPhones in that region alone, something which was in part made possible because Apple selected China as a launch market for its iPhone 5s and 5c this year, which is a first for any of its iPhone roll-outs. iPhone availability early and now with China Mobile should help curtail Apple’s grey market problem in the region, too, Cook says, thanks to increased availability.\n“[A]s of this weekend we will be selling iPhones in more than 3,000 additional locations from what we were selling it before,” the WSJ quotes him as saying. The China Mobile deal opens up the iPhone to retail channels in cities where it had absolutely no presence before, he noted, and cited the carrier’s distribution network as an “enormous” asset.\nCook also fended off concerns about the increasing number of cheap devices competing with the iPhone in China, saying that Apple’s “North Star” has always been building the “best products in the world” and arguing that stats showing 57 percent of mobile browsing in China happens on iOS hardware should be enough to convince people of the effectiveness of that strategy.\nFinally, Cook shed some light on how the China Mobile deal came together, noting that meetings were ongoing between 2008 and now, and that the key meetings that led to this launch happened in fall of 2012 and in January of 2013. Cook’s carefully chosen language indicates that there was a lot of back-and-forth involved in making the deal come together:\nChina Mobile has an immense amount of consumer buying power backing it, so it’s possible even the immense amount of clout Apple brings to bear wasn’t enough to get them to just agree to the iPhone maker’s standard carrier terms. Apple also seems to have wanted to wait until China Mobile’s TD-LTE network was in place.\nWhatever the drama that went down getting to this point, Apple and China Mobile both stand to benefit immensely from this partnership, and it should help Apple in particular avoid any kind of growth plateau with the iPhone for another little while at least.", "date": "1/15/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/sanlitun-apple-store-china.jpg?w=640", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "", "title": "Apple Sold More iPhones In China Than Ever Before Last Quarter, Tim Cook Q&A Reveals", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/15/apple-sold-more-iphones-in-china-than-ever-before-last-quarter-tim-cook-qa-reveals/" }, { "id": 95, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Apps", "content": "Teens still love Facebook. No news there. According to a recent study by Piper Jaffray, 33 percent of the 5,200 teens surveyed choose Facebook as their most important social network.\nFollowing behind, Twitter has 30 percent of the vote, while 17 percent of teens say that Instagram is the most important social network.\nWhat’s notable, however, is that interest in Facebook seems to be declining heavily among teens. Though teens still dub Facebook their most important social network, Piper Jaffray reports that the numbers are down regarding how many teens see Facebook as the most important social media website.\nOver the past year, the number of teens who deem Facebook as the most important social media site has dropped from more than 30 percent to just over 20 percent. But it’s not just Facebook. Almost all social media sites have either seen a decline or stagnation in their importance to the teen demographic.\nYouTube may usurp Facebook soon as the most important social media site, though it too has shown a decline in importance. As it stands right now, YouTube also has around 22 percent of the vote, but seems to be declining at a much slower pace.\n\nBoth Instagram and Twitter show strong growth, especially this spring as kids gear up for summer.\nBut in true teenage fashion, the survey group of 5,200 teens made sure to note their favorite social media tools that were excluded from the list. According to the PJC study, teens are intrigued by Wanelo, Vine, Snapchat, Kik, and 4chan, in that order.\nVine has only been around for a few months, but has already risen to number 1 in the App Store. Snapchat is also a no-brainer, considering that teens make up the majority of a demographic that sends over 20 million snaps per day.\nJust as much as Twitter poses a threat, so too do these up-and-coming social apps that have taken teens by storm.\nHowever, Facebook Home (a new Facebook-baked Android skin) may prove useful as teens’ interest wanes. Not only will it give Facebook insight into which apps to look out for, as it monitors when and how often users launch apps, but it will put Facebook in front of users at a much more pervasive scale.", "date": "4/10/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/facebookteens1.jpg?w=270", "section": "startups/", "tags": "vine,instagram,twitter,facebook", "title": "Facebook Still Reigns Supreme With Teens, But Social Media Interest Dwindling", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/facebook-still-reigns-supreme-with-teens-but-social-media-interest-dwindling/" }, { "id": 96, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Task management tool Producteev just launched a new iPad app and a native Outlook plugin. Now part of Jive, the company also launched a new pro plan. For $99 per month, you get the Outlook plugin, custom branding and premium support for up to 100 employees.\n“There is a big market opportunity with people who use Outlook,” Producteev co-founder Ilan Abehassera told me in a phone interview. “They have no choice but to use Outlook, and they want something that goes further when it comes to task management.”\nWhen you install the plugin in Outlook, it takes over the task feature. You get all the Producteev features in a native interface. You can add a task like you would in Producteev, with natural language processing (“Finish presentation document @John #demo !tomorrow”). You can browse your activity feed, comments and more.\nBut the best part is that everything is instantly synced with Producteev on your iPhone, Android phone, Mac and more. In other words, the Outlook plugin is a full-fledged desktop client for Windows users.\nIt integrates well with Outlook as well. For example, you can add a task to your calendar to reserve time to get it done. “You can drag and drop your tasks to Outlook’s calendar. We are trying to help our users become more effective,” Abehassera said. Similarly, you can transform an email into a task in one click — you will be able to view the email on other platforms where Outlook is not available.\n“Our Outlook plugin is low-level engineering. The OffiSync team who was acquired by Jive two years ago worked on it,” Abehassera said. “There are very few teams in the world who can achieve this level of integration.”\nAs for the iPad app, if you are familiar with the iPhone app, you won’t feel lost. You will find the exact same features on a bigger screen. Task management should be ubiquitous, so the iPad app is a nice addition.\nIn addition to the new $99 per month premium plan, Producteev lets you subscribe to a limited lifetime plan. If you don’t need support, for $899, you will get the Outlook plugin and custom branding forever.\nBut when I talked with Abehassera, what he was most passionate about was the story behind the acquisition. According to him, what has happened since Jive acquired Producteev is the perfect example of a successful acquisition.\nWhen Producteev was acquired, the company was profitable with an impressive revenue growth rate of 10 percent month over month. After four years of hard work, it became much easier to raise money. In August 2012, Abehassera was in the process of raising a Series A round.\n“This is when Jive came along, with an offer that we all agreed on. In particular, Producteev would remain an independent business, continue to grow and more,” Abehassera said. “In three months, the deal was done — it went fast.”\nThere were a few key elements in this acquisition. The entire team moved to Jive. While Producteev was based in New York, everyone moved to Palo Alto. But everyone kept working on Producteev. Nobody left in the past year and a half.\nProducteev’s startup culture is intact. Development didn’t slow down after the acquisition. First, the team restarted from scratch to move to a new architecture that would support more users. Then, Producteev became free to boost its growth — 100,000 companies now use Producteev. And now, customers will be able to subscribe to a new pro plan again.\nThe development team doubled in size, but ships as often as it used to. And there are some upsides of working with Jive. “We couldn’t have developed the Outlook integration without Jive,” Abehassera said. Finally, with the new paid plans, the product will generate revenue again for Jive, legitimizing the work on this task management tool.\n“In general, you won’t find anything more agile than a startup,” Abehassera said. “We proved that we have become more agile ever since we joined Jive.”", "date": "3/26/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/todo.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "outlook,producteev", "title": "Producteev Adds iPad And Outlook Apps Following Jive Acquisition", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/26/producteev-adds-ipad-and-outlook-apps-while-looking-back-at-its-acquisition/" }, { "id": 97, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "Naysayers of ‘Silicon Roundabout’ (or Tech City, to use its UK Government-sanctioned name) can certainly point to some of the giddy PR surrounding the area as evidence of hype. But when you join up the dots, there’s a definite sense that we’re beginning to see signs of real growth for this tech cluster in the east end of London.\nAnd so it is that news comes today of what looks like another impressive hire for a Silicon Roundabout-based startup: Matthew Brazil, who was previously VP of Business Development for Radian6 (which exited to Salesforce for $326m) has joined social customer service outfit Conversocial as VP of Sales. This follows the recent hiring by neighbouring Songkick of former Googler Dan Crow as its CTO.\nNewly hired Brazil will lead Conversocial’s sales and marketing efforts as it gears up for a more aggressive push into the U.S. — which is particularly noteworthy given his links to Radian6, whose offering has plenty of overlap with Conversocial’s own Twitter and Facebook-based customer service tool. In fact, Brazil can be considered responsible for growing Radian6’s UK operation via 6consulting, which he co-founded and that was acquired by the company in 2011 (not long before itself being gobbled up by Salesforce).\nBut back to Conversocial and the topic of growth. Around a year ago the DFJ Esprit-backed startup claimed just 5 employees, while head count now stands at over 20. Its clients include B&Q, Barclaycard, Cafe Nero, Groupon, Net A Porter, Odeon, River Island, Sephora, Tesco, and Waitrose. States-side, the company has around 20 customers and is currently hiring out of its New York office.\nConversocial co-founder and CEO Joshua March tells me that “we’re starting to see Silicon Roundabout growing up”, not just in terms of how many companies in the area have VC-backing, but also how many are now “commercially successful, and growing and recruiting fast”.\nOn the specific issue of hiring, March says that events like Silicon Milkroundabout combined with the press coverage that the area has been getting, and the financial slowdown, has made startups a more viable option in the eyes of developers.\n“We’ve found it’s actually got easier to hire top developer talent over the last few years; but we’re also in the lucky position that there isn’t a start-up bubble (like there is in Silicon Valley and even New York to an extent) that has driven up start-up salaries to astronomical rates”, he says.\nHowever, “senior talent” with startup experience is still hard to find in London, although March thinks that will change rapidly “over the next couple of years”.\nAs for the naysayers, he has this to say:\n“Huddle, Moo, Mind Candy are just a few that have really broken out and are becoming major companies, but there’s also an increasing number at the stage just before, like us. It’s not just about a load of hackers renting a few desks with big dreams, but significant companies winning major customers around the world and expanding quickly, including to the US.”", "date": "7/9/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/104394v3-max-250x250.jpg?w=250", "section": "europe/", "tags": "silicon-roundabout,techcity,conversocial", "title": "Never Mind The Hype, Conversocial’s Latest Hire Points To Real Signs Of Growth In ‘Silicon Roundabout’ ", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/silicon-roundabout-naysayers/" }, { "id": 98, "authors": "Ryan Lawler", "category": "eCommerce", "content": "E-commerce design startup Minted has big ambitions for its crowdsourced marketplace of designs, with plans to launch in a whole new product category as well as give its artists a platform for creating new storefronts. To realize that goal, the company has raised an additional $38 million in Series D funding led by Norwest Venture Partners.\nThe new capital comes about one year after the company raised its last round, which came in the form of a $41 million investment led by Technology Crossover Ventures. That firm also participated in the latest raise, which will bring Norwest managing director Jeff Crowe onto Minted’s board of directors.\nAltogether, Minted has raised nearly $90 million in funding. However, the company operated for nearly seven years before raising its final $79 million over the last 12 months. Founder and CEO Mariam Naficy says that is due to the growth the company has seen over recent years, as well as its plans to invest and expand its manufacturing capabilities.\nOver the years, Minted has established itself as a place where customers could find interesting designs from a wide range of artists. The company got its start as an e-commerce site for selling holiday cards and other stationery products to users. A few years ago, it expanded to also include limited-edition art prints that customers could hang on their walls. Now Minted is entering another product category and will begin selling fabric and home decor products.\nMinted is able to offer so many designs because it takes a somewhat unique approach to sourcing them. Rather than create the designs itself or commission others to do so, Minted crowdsources art from its creative community through a series of design competitions.\nAfter artists and creative types submit their entries, the company narrows down the field through voting by its community and its own analytics, and it picks the best designs to print and make available to customers. Artists get an upfront reward when they win, as well as a commission for each item sold through its platform. Meanwhile, Minted handles all the sales, manufacturing, and fulfillment of orders that come in from customers.\nAccording to Naficy, Minted sees a small bit of overlap between designers who submit their pieces for use in its stationary and those who have participated in competitions for its wall art. Sometimes a stationery designer will try out for its art marketplace, while more traditional artists may occasionally decide to try their hand at greeting cards and other designs.\nIn the same way, Minted hopes to recruit talent for its new line of textile offerings and offer them a new creative outlet and medium to work with. Already the company has curated fabric and home decor prints out of more than 1,400 submissions from artists around the world.\nAlong with the new vertical, Minted is also trying its hand at a new way for artists to sell their goods on its platform. Previously, Minted only sold designs that had been submitted and won its design competitions. But now, the company will allow those artists to make other art or designs they’ve created for sale, as well.\nMinted is providing winning artists with the ability to set up their own storefronts, which will enable thousands of artists a new opportunity to make their goods available. It’s able to do so because all goods are printed on order, so it runs a lean operation without inventory or having to worry about bulk printing.\nAnd while today the company doesn’t do any of its own printing, it could look to change that. Naficy told me Minted is exploring the possibility of operating some of its own facilities, which would give it more quality control on certain products, as well as the ability to experiment in a way that some suppliers either won’t or can’t.\nThe funding is also being positioned to help bring some senior management on board over the coming months. In addition to boosting its overall engineering headcount, Minted is looking to hire for roles that include a CFO, head of operations and head of analytics. Once those roles are filled, Minted should be well on its way to scaling up and potentially adding even more verticals.", "date": "10/30/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/minted-fabric-close-up-e1414654720481.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "norwest-venture-partners,minted", "title": "Crowdsourced Design Marketplace Minted Raises $38M More, Adds Fabrics And Home Decor", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/30/minted-38m-textiles/" }, { "id": 99, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Sony has indeed added to its lineup of camera tech add-ons for smartphone devices today, with not one, but two new devices in the QX series of accessories. The QX1 and QX30 join the existing QX10 and QX100, with the QX1 offering interchangeable lenses as revealed in a leak earlier, and the QX30 offering 30x optical zoom.\nThe two new Sony accessories both offer ways to improve your photo quality on smartphones, but the QX1 really steps things up by offering a bayonet mount that works with existing E-mount and A-mount (with an adapter) interchangeable lenses. It also includes a shooting accessory kit that lets users set up the lens for selfies, and for getting tough high and low angle shots. Underneath the hood, there’s an APS-C Exmor CMOS sensor with 20.1 megapixel resolution, and Sony’s Bionz X image processor, which offers low noise on an area-specific basis for better low light shots.\nThe QX30 has greater zoom than any previous QX-series accessory, with a landscape-grabbing 24mm at the wide end and a tight 720mm equivalent at the narrow end. It includes optical image stabilization to reduce shake motion effects even at the top of the zoom range, and it has a digital zoom feature that allows users to extend zoom to a factor of 60x. 10FPS continuous shooting and lock-on AF make this a prime candidate for action shots, and it captures full HD video at 60fps.\nSony’s QX range still represents some of the weirdest gear in the mobile world, and there are no competitors out there, but Sony must see some value in the line and decent customer response if it keeps introducing new devices. The QX1 line especially should prove interesting, as it gives NEX and DSLR users a way to move away from dedicated camera devices and into a mobile-first solution, which could begin to erode those latter categories even further.", "date": "9/3/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/qx-series.jpg?w=700", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "camera,qx30,qx1,sony", "title": "Sony Unveils The QX1 And QX30 Lens And Camera Sensor Add-Ons For Smartphones", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/sony-qx1-qx30/" }, { "id": 100, "authors": "Kim-Mai Cutler", "category": "Social", "content": "Facebook said its fourth quarter revenue rose 40 percent year-over-year to $1.59 billion. Mobile revenues grew to make up 23 percent of the company’s total and mobile monthly active users rose to 680 million, or up 57 percent year-over-year.\nThe company beat analysts estimates, but shares initially tumbled by as much as 8 percent in after-hours trading. They’re now down only 0.3 percent to $31.15.\nAnalysts had forecast that revenue rose 34 percent to $1.52 billion last quarter, according to the median estimate from a Bloomberg survey of analysts.\nFacebook also beat analysts’ estimates on EPS and net income with about $65 million in net income to an average estimate of $45.8 million, and EPS excluding certain changes of 17 cents, compared to the forecast of 15 cents a share from the same Bloomberg survey. In the same time a year ago, Facebook earned $302 million in net income on $1.131 billion in revenue.\n\nAs for the revenue breakdown, Facebook has two primary revenue sources: advertising and payments. Ad revenue was $1.33 billion, up 41 percent from the year before. Payments revenue came in at $256 million, but was essentially flat year-over-year if you factor in some accounting changes that required Facebook to count four months of revenue instead of the normal three for the quarter.\n\nFacebook’s shares have risen 17 percent since the beginning of the year, on bets that the company’s aggressive push into mobile advertising is paying off. Mobile platforms now account for 23 percent of the company’s revenue, up from 14 percent in the third quarter. Facebook has since been much more forceful with putting sponsored stories into the mobile news feed and pushing app install ads. Ad platform Kenshoo told us earlier this month that it’s now seeing 20 percent of all Facebook ad spend going to mobile.\nFacebook still has to convince investors that it’s moving fast enough to accommodate a dramatic shift in consumer behavior to mobile devices away from the web. For the first time, Facebook had more mobile daily active users than ones on the web last quarter. Yet mobile revenue is still less than one-third of the size of the company’s web revenues.\nAt the same time, the company has launched a host of new initiatives in the second half of 2012 that may finally start to show traction. In August, Facebook launched a form of search-based advertising called Sponsored Results in search type-ahead ads after two months of testing.\nThey also rolled out Gifts last year. You would expect to see this product post its strongest quarter around the holiday season, when friends and family are sending last-minute Christmas gifts. Facebook did a small push around this, with promotions across people’s news feed just days before Christmas. It’s not clear where “Gifts” fall into on the balance sheet, whether that’s in the “advertising” or “payments and other fees” category.\nFacebook has also re-oriented the way it deals with developers on the platform, focusing less on monthly and daily active usage and more on revenue per app install. That may not arrest a slowdown in payments and fees revenue, which came in at $176 million in the third quarter, up just $20 million from a year earlier as developers migrated to the quickly-growing and lucrative Android and iOS platforms.\n", "date": "1/30/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/fb-logo.jpeg?w=288", "section": "social/", "tags": "facebook", "title": "Facebook’s Q4 Revenue Rises 40% To $1.59B, Shares Down Slightly In After-Hours ", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/facebooks-q4-revenue-rises-40-to-1-59b-shares-decline-7-percent-in-after-hours/" }, { "id": 101, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Ameyo, a Gurgaon-based startup that makes software for customer support and sales centers, has raised a Series A of $5 million from Forum Synergies. The company, which already has customers throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, plans to use the capital to expand into the United States.\nAmeyo claims its software has already been installed by 1,600 customers in 40 countries, including Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, Ola Cabs, and Chase Bank in Kenya, and manages more than one billion customer interactions every day.\nThe platform, which integrates with most major CRMs like SugarCRM, Salesforce, and Zendesk, bills itself as a cloud-based “all-in-one software-based communication solution” that makes it easy for support centers to manage each interaction with a customer and increase the speed of sales.\n“We believe CRMs do a good job of being the system of record, but fail to provide automation and interfaces to handle interactions and give an overall picture of engagement,” co-founder Sachin Bhatia tells TechCrunch.\nWhile Ameyo competes with a host of other contact center infrastructure products like Genesys, Five9, and Incontact, as well as sales acceleration software InsideSales.com, RingDNA, and Velocify, Bhatia says its key differentiation is flexibility. Many other products rely on hardware or IT departments, but Ameyo lets all departments—including collections, helpdesks, and sales—use the same platform and see the same data from integrated CRMs and business apps.\nAmeyo’s parent company is Drishti, which was founded in 2003 by Bhatia, Bishal Kumar, and Nayan Jain, and now numbers 300 employees. While Ameyo is targeted to large enterprises, Drishti also makes another platform, TexoCC, targeted at sales and support centers run by mid-sized companies. Its current clients include Subway, UrbanClap, Grofers, and PepperTap.", "date": "7/12/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shutterstock_102266374.jpg?w=738", "section": "asia/", "tags": "sales-software,call-center,ameyo", "title": "Support Center Software Ameyo Nabs $5M To Expand Into The U.S.", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/12/ameyo/" }, { "id": 102, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Ridesharing apps are not only different from traditional cab companies, but many tech companies, too. This means that they are often difficult to regulate under existing laws. Governments around the world are starting to roll out guidelines, however, that specifically address the business models of companies like Uber. Earlier this week, China’s government posted draft regulations that may force ridesharing apps to operate more like taxi fleets, and now India has proposed its own set of legal guidelines.\nPublished on the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways’ site, the guidelines call for all cars run by ridesharing apps like Uber and Ola to have emergency buttons, in addition to in-app features to call police. Companies also have to operate more like traditional taxi fleets, within-depth criminal background checks on all potential drivers, 24/7 call centers, branded vehicles, and a meter that tracks distance traveled and the passenger’s fee.\nUber and Ola implemented background checks and introduced privacy and in-app safety features after the rape of a female passenger by an Uber driver.Despite those measures, both companies continue to face backlash in the form of police investigation and bans in the state of Delhi, where the assault happened.\nFor example, last month Delhi’s government rejected Uber’s application to operate cars there, though a company spokesperson said at the time that it hadn’t received any official notification.\nWhile Uber, Ola, and TaxiForSure (which was acquired by Ola in March) have each had applications for radio taxi licenses rejected over the past year, they’ve been able to get around some of those roadblocks by operating as digital aggregators similar to an online marketplace like Amazon.\nMaking sure they follow legal guidelines is important for ridesharing apps, however, as they continue to expand in what is already one of the world’s largest markets for their services. For example, Uber said this summer that India is now its second largest market and will likely eventually overtake its U.S. operations.\nWhile the new guidelines aren’t laws—which means states do not have to follow them, according to the Financial Times—they may help both ridesharing companies and local governments by reducing confusion.\nIn a statement, a Ola representative said:\nTechCrunch has also contacted Uber and will update this post when we hear back from them. In a statement to the press, Uber India president Amit Jain said:", "date": "10/14/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shutterstock_132250520.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "ola", "title": "India Proposes Legal Guidelines For Ridesharing Apps Like Uber And Ola", "topics": "uber", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/14/india-ridesharing-guidelines/" }, { "id": 103, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "If you thought you and your RepRap were safe from posers, you’re sunk: Amazon has just opened a store for 3D printers and printer accessories that seems to, at the very least, allow smaller manufacturers to get a foothold in an increasingly tight market.\nAvailable on the “pop up web store” or whatever you want to call it are printers from Afinia and Flashforge (which, as you’ll notice, is a literal rip-off of the Makerbot) as well as offers from Makerbot owners who are selling used machines. In short, the store consists of smaller fry attempting to sell directly to a less educated consumer – which is fine.\nWith Staples selling Cube 3D printers and Toys “R” Us selling personalized ducks in Hong Kong, it’s clear we’re reaching the point when 3D printing is beginning to interface with the culture. It’s still “cool” enough to be cutting edge yet it’s lucrative enough for behemoths like Amazon to throw it a bone with this store.\nAnd what of the folks who want their 3D printers to be the hardware equivalent of underground prog rock? Well, we’re probably out of luck. I’ll know it’s gone mainstream when my Dad asks for one and, the way things are going, that should be some time next week.", "date": "6/13/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/screen-shot-2013-06-13-at-8-56-37-am.png?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "makerbot,3d-printing,amazon", "title": "Amazon Creates A 3D Printing Store, Vaulting The Technology Into The Mainstream", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/13/amazon-creates-a-3d-printing-store-vaulting-the-technology-into-the-mainstream/" }, { "id": 104, "authors": "Leena Rao", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Enterprise software company TIBCO is debuting a new version of its Yammer-clone Tibbr today. The newest version of the company’s social communications app includes geo-location capabilities called Tibbr GEO, which integrates the ‘check-in’ model in the enterprise.\nBy incorporating location into Tibbr, the service wants to physical places into data hubs that can immediately stream important insights relevant to that specific place. Tibbr GEO gives companies the ability to tag important places, whether in the enterprise or as part of the extended enterprise. As Tibbr users approach these places, they’re automatically presented relevant in-stream information.\nFor example, Tibbr says the geolocation feature could turn a gate into a contextual relevant data hub to give agents, pilots and flight attendants insights as they approach the gate. Or the section of every retail aisle could include data on individual shelf space, insights about individual products, how they’re selling, how fast they’re moving or how a new location might be affecting sales.\nTibbr Mobile applications now use HTML5 to deliver users a consistent mobile experience across all platforms and has also been updated to support offline access.\n", "date": "1/25/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/tibbr.png?w=107", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "", "title": "TIBCO Updates Social Enterprise App Tibbr With Geo-Location Features", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/25/tibco-updates-social-enterprise-app-tibbr-with-geo-location-features/" }, { "id": 105, "authors": "Matt Burns", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "The Consumer Electronics Show keeps on growing. Several years ago the show outgrew the massive Las Vegas Convention Center and started using part of the Sands Expo Center several blocks away. They called it Eureka Park and made the exhibit space less expensive in a bid to attract startups to the show. It worked. And it’s bigger than ever with startups filling both levels of the Sands.\nCES is now a startup show. That’s why TechCrunch is here.\nAvoid the nonsense of the LVCC and head over to the Sands Expo Center in the Venetian. This is where the interesting companies are located this year. This is where you’ll find startups making new wearables and smart home tech. It’s where small companies are displaying their new 3D printers and craving attention.\nThe only downside? You’ll miss Samsung’s latest refrigerators and the sad booth babes employed by car audio companies that dot the North Hall.\nCES 2016 is the largest to date with 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space. The CEA, the organization behind CES, expects 20,000 new products to be unveiled at this year’s show. It’s also quickly becoming an auto show and this year’s event features nine out of the top ten automakers exhibiting. Plus, Faraday Future is finally taking the wraps off its plan.\nYoung startups (or those tight on cash) have long attended CES, but not many did so in an official capacity. Founders would attend the show in partnership with a key partner such as Intel or Microsoft or NVIDIA. Or, they would simply get a suite in a local hotel and invite press for a drink and demo. Both still happen, but a quick browse of the Sands Expo Center exhibitors reveals that many startups are getting small booths.\nThere’s Atlas Wearable, Blocks and Double Robotics. Ring and Roost. Withings and Fitbit are there, too. 3D Systems has a large booth, but is surrounded by smaller 3D printing companies like Formlabs, MarkForged, and Voxel8. There are sections dedicated to the smart home and wearables and robotics — all away from the main convention center. Even Techstars and Indiegogo have booths at the Sands.\nThere’s now halls filled with rows and rows of startups barely out of crowdfunding vying for buyers and suppliers and the press to take notice.\nIt’s important to remember that CES is not open to the public. It’s a trade show primarily existing for members of the industry and those like these startups hustling their way into the industry. The press, like TechCrunch and Engadget, are just along for the ride (and page views).\n", "date": "1/3/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/cesdemo.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "ces2016", "title": "Startups Are Taking Over CES", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/03/startups-are-taking-over-ces/" }, { "id": 106, "authors": "Rip Empson", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "If you’re an iPhone user, you may not be as familiar with Astrid, which has turned into one of the most popular “to-do,” list-making apps for Android. We first wrote about Astrid when it joined thirteen other startups that composed AngelPad’s second batch. Astrid’s value proposition was simple: Offer users a clean, easy-to-use interface to enable sharing and collaboration around tasks. Other services have now come along to make this a familiar service, but the goal was for groups (businesses) to be able to assign tasks to each other, and broadcast to the group when those tasks are completed.\nIn the big picture, Astrid was conceived to be a social way to encourage friends and colleagues to help tackle your to-do list, from sending memos to buying your mom a Mother’s Day present. A year removed from AngelPad, Astrid has moved across platforms, as the startup now offers a mobile site, Android, and iOS apps, with a Windows Phone app on the way. But, what some may not know is that Astrid was started as a side-project by co-founder Tim Su, then a software engineer at Palantir Technologies. Su was joined by co-founder Jon Paris, and the two launched Astrid on the Android Market when it was still young, back in the fall of 2008.\nCollectively, the team were early adopters and proponents of Android, says Paris, but like so many others, they moved on to focus on building for iOS and other platforms. But, today, Astrid is officially returning to the platform on which it got its start, launching a new version of its service for Android tablets, accompanying a complete redesign for Android phones that features streamlined design and a new set of integrations aimed at helping users be more productive.\nMore specifically, Astrid’s new app for Android tablets can be used independently, or synced with Android phones, iOS, and Astrid.com. The app is available now for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom, and will be made available in the next week for Kindle Fire through the Amazon App Store. The goal here, Paris says, is to make the UX easy for new users to adopt and learn without disrupting the experience of those using older versions.\n And, to that point, the CEO tells us that Astrid has helped people complete over 30 million tasks and has racked up 3 million downloads across platforms. Yet, while Astrid is one of the most downloaded paid to-do apps in the Android Marketplace, the startup is today launching a new revenue stream via integration with TaskRabbit. Astrid has long offered users the ability to share tasks with family and friends, but, as part of its new look, users can now outsource individual to-dos to TaskRabbit, the fast-growing personal assistant that lets users list errands or tasks that needed to be completed in its marketplace. For those unfamiliar, it’s basically an on-demand delivery network for outsourced tasks.\nAstrid is also now offering users the ability to view suggestions/ideas through integrated search with Amazon and Google, for the simple reason that many of us start their tasks with a Google search before popping over to Amazon to make a purchase. Again, in case it’s unclear, what Astrid is trying to do here is match to-dos and tasks with products and services that help get them done, a la TaskRabbit and Amazon. Paris says that he thinks this can be a win-win for both eCommerce retailers (and startups like TaskRabbit), as Astrid’s users are inherently people with full plates, looking to manage their tasks and lighten the loads. And eCommerce sites now get the benefit of getting traffic from people that are more likely to buy.\nIn the case of TaskRabbit, for every user that ends up purchasing help on the site, for every transaction, Astrid takes a cut. Paris — and he’s not alone — believes that the to-do list space is understandably a potential goldmine for purchase intent, something that has been supported by the interest around Pinterest and its related monetization path.\nClearly Gmail set the stage for crawling what is considered personal and sensitive information (your inbox) and matching it to related ads. Astrid is basically doing the same, serving up related ads when you search within the app for products/services that help you check off your tasks, but the CEO says that he understands the personal nature of to-dos, so users can turn off this new feature. Although not totally analogous, given what happened to Path, transparency in these situations is definitely advisable.\nAs to what’s next, Paris mentioned that they are working with TaskRabbit to provide additional features around outsourcing your task list. A lot of people don’t know which of their tasks to outsource to other people, so the team is expecting to offer the ability for its users to post their task lists on TaskRabbit and let other users flag all the items that they can help with. Beyond that, the startup is also considering adding a premium version of the service, and is embarking on its mission to raise its Series A. (It raised a seed round back in July of last year from Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and a few angel investors.)\nAs the collaborative economy heats up, and startups like TaskRabbit gain traction, it behooves services like Astrid to take group collaboration and task assigning outside its own walls, to the marketplaces that specialize in that kind of commerce. That can potentially be a lucrative relationship for both parties, though that remains to be seen. Along with a refreshed look for Android, adding subtasks to its service is another bonus. And, hey, now the 10 people that have Android tabs get to use Astrid 4.0, too. (Just kidding.)\nFor more on Astrid, check it out at home here.\n", "date": "2/23/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/logo_astridtext.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "astrid", "title": "Along With New Look, Apps, Astrid Now Lets You Outsource Tasks To TaskRabbit", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/along-with-new-look-apps-astrid-now-lets-you-outsource-tasks-to-taskrabbit/" }, { "id": 107, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Social", "content": "The folks behind a forthcoming fashion catalog for the iPad, Bazaart, have launched an interesting side project in their downtime (what’s that?) from their participation in DreamIt’s new Israel-based startup accelerator program. In need of something similar for themselves, the company launched a Facebook app called “Pinvolve” which converts Facebook Pages into Pinterest pinboards.\nTo use Pinvolve, you have to first be logged into Facebook as one of the page’s admins before installing the app. Once up-and-running, Pinvolve creates a new section on your Facebook page which presents all your photo posts in a Pinterest-like fashion – that is, in the typical image pinboard style that’s now associated with the popular social networking service.\nThe app also pulls in the Facebook likes and comments associated with each post, as well as the comments’ text. If a post has a lot of comments, however, only the first few will be listed on the main Pinvolve page, with a link to the rest provided below. When clicked, that link will take you to the photo’s page on Facebook.\nHowever, Pinvolve isn’t just about re-displaying Facebook content with a Pinterest look-and-feel, it also provides tools that let you and the page’s fans re-share those posts over on Pinterest. When you hover over an image on the Pinvolve pinboard, Pinterest’s “Pin it” button appears. Clicking this will then re-post that content to Pinterest itself.\nYou can see an example of Pinvolve in action now, over on fashion model, blogger and designer Audrey Kitching’s Facebook Page here.\n\nAccording to Bazaart co-founder Dror Yaffe, the idea for Pinvolve came from his team’s own need to market their content on what’s now the third most popular social network.\n“We’ve been marketing our applications on Facebook and Twitter, but when Pinterest became a major player we were baffled,” he says. “As a young startup, our resources are very limited and it takes a lot of effort to market on another social network. So, as a side project, we’ve developed Pinvolve.”\nDespite the fact that the company has done very little marketing or media outreach, (save for a bit coverage by Israeli sites), the app is already installed on over 1,000 Facebook Pages as of today. Using Pinvolve on its own page, Yaffe says they’ve increased their re-pins by over 150%, and this figure is consistent across the app’s early adopters.\nAlthough the basic version is being made available for free, Facebook page owners are offered an option to upgrade to Pinvolve’s white label plan, which removes the “Get Pinvolve Now” button from the page, and allows you to customize the “like” button, the cover photo, and lets you link from the app directly to your Pinteret profile. For now, this option is available for the (pretty much no-brainer) price of $9.99. It will later bump up to $19.99.\nTo try out Pinvolve for yourself, head over to the app’s page here: http://apps.facebook.com/pinvolve.", "date": "4/9/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/pinvolve.png?w=355", "section": "startups/", "tags": "pinvolve,pinterest,facebook-app,social-media", "title": "Pinvolve Converts Facebook Pages Into Pinterest Pinboards, Increases Repins By 150%+", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/pinvolve-converts-facebook-pages-into-pinterest-pinboards-increases-repins-by-150/" }, { "id": 108, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Asia", "content": "Struggling Taiwanese mobile maker HTC is planning to slash costs by nearly a quarter and sell cheaper handsets in the hopes of turning a profit in its Q4, it said in an investor call today (via Reuters). It also confirmed its Q3 net loss: this stands at NT$3 billion ($102 million), up slightly on the preliminary figure of NT$2.97 billion it released in October.\nHTC’s Q3 results represent its first ever quarterly loss — which, while notable for such a veteran smartphone maker, came as little surprise after more than a year of sliding sales.\nIn its Q4 last year the company reported a 91% year-on-year drop. In its Q4 outlook today, HTC said it expects revenue to be in the range of NT$40 billion to NT$45 billion (vs NT$60 billion in the year ago quarter).", "date": "11/5/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/htc-soft2.jpg?w=400", "section": "asia/", "tags": "", "title": "After $102M Loss In Q3, HTC To Slash Operating Costs By 24%, Focus On Selling Cheaper Handsets ", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/05/htc-q4-expectations/" }, { "id": 109, "authors": "Ron Miller", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "IBM announced today that is has teamed with the Toronto Raptors to bring cognitive analysis in the form of IBM Watson to the NBA team’s talent evaluation process.\nThe new tool called IBM Sports Insights Central, pulls in data from a variety of sources including statistics, video, social networking sentiment analysis, medical records and much more. It compares this data against the team’s needs, a player’s likelihood of succeeding, staying healthy and working well with coaches and teammates for the duration of the contract.\nThe idea behind it is to help them draft the best players and find free agents and trade targets that not only meet the needs of the team, but also fit well with the team’s on-court philosophy.\nThe new tool was created by working across divisions within IBM starting with IBM’s digital experience agency, IBM Interactive Experience, which worked with the Raptors to create a tool to meet the team’s needs. It developed the solution announced today by layering on several different pieces of IBM technology.\nIt starts with Watson’s ability to analyze vast amounts of unstructured data quickly, explained Jim Rushton, global leader for IBM sports and entertainment practice. It also includes other tools from the IBM Bluemix platform including the AlchemyAPI (which the Watson group purchased last year) and some help from IBM Research, which fine-tuned the tools to match Toronto’s player development requirements.\nThe company is also working with a touch-screen company called MultiTaction to provide table and wall-sized displays to show data visualizations and help better understand the data and how it fits the team’s needs.\n\nOne thing that Rushton made clear was the tool is designed to take advantage of Watson’s ability to sift through vast amounts of data and then present it in a way that makes sense to humans. It can help coaches and general managers build on their own experience and deep understanding of the game, and give them more information to work with, but it’s not the final arbiter, just an adjunct.\n“You will never replace the human element. This solution was developed to augment the human element, to bring together all this data where humans might not see the patterns,” Rushton said.\nThe tool is part of the sports management practice that Rushton was brought on board to lead back in November.\nIBM is hoping that they can use the Toronto tool as a template of sorts for other teams. Certain elements might change within the tool, but overall it hopes to make this a repeatable solution across major league sports.\nEventually, they plan to add player health evaluation to the mix where they enter information about the person’s medical history and perhaps even monitor the health of the player in real time using some sort of wearable.\nRushton pointed out that with the explosion of player salaries, especially in leagues with guaranteed contracts, making the correct player decision could be the difference between winning and losing and between earning millions in revenue versus carrying what amounts to a dead expense.\nUsing statistics in sports is not new or revolutionary. In fact, it’s the basis of the now-famous Money Ball book and movie, but with ever more data to sift through, it becomes increasingly challenging for humans to make sense of it.\nThis new tool could help bring more clarity and assist teams as they make these critical personnel decisions, at least that’s the goal.", "date": "2/10/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/16664179073_caa3c84b5d_k.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "nba,analytics,watson,ibm", "title": "IBM Watson Teams With Toronto Raptors On Data-Driven Talent Analysis", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/ibm-watson-teams-with-toronto-raptors-on-data-driven-talent-analysis/" }, { "id": 110, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "A Northern German state’s data protection commissioner has threatened to fine Mark Zuckerberg $26,000 for Facebook allegedly violating the country’s law stating citizens may use media services anonymously. Facebook plans to “fight [the threat] vigorously”. That’s wise, as altering its real-name policy could jeopardize Facebook’s future. Prohibiting pseudonyms lets Facebook remove spammers and serve as an identity provider for the web.\nThe Guardian reports that Thilo Weichert, the data protection commissioner of northern German state Schleswig-Holstein has informed Facebook Ireland and Zuckerberg that the CEO may be fined €20,000 for breaking German privacy law unless Facebook provides an option for Germans to use the service anonymously.\nFacebook meanwhile believes the real name policy is crucial to keep its service secure. Section 4 of its Statement Of Rights And Responsibilities explains “Facebook users provide their real names” and “You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook” such as when the service asks for people’s real first and last name upon signup.\nFacebook believes it is complying with wider European data protection laws and the laws of Ireland where its European subsidiary is based. Facebook responded to the news in a statement to TechCrunch:\nFacebook’s position would pit European law against Germany’s. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner holds that Facebook’s real name policy, which states that users cannot use a fake name to register for the service, complies with European data protection principles and Irish law. In fact, the Irish Comissioner sees the policy helps people better manage their private information securely.\nIn some sense, Facebook already has an anonymous option — you can browse some of the site while logged out. For example, you can visit Facebook Pages and read their updates but not comment on them. Facebook likely wants to discourage this, though. As it doesn’t show ads within the site to people who aren’t signed in (though it does show ads to users when they log out).\nAdvocates for Weichert’s position might say political dissidents, whistleblowers, those being stalked, and others deserve a way to use Facebook anonymously. But that’s a slippery slope towards social chaos that hampered Myspace. For now, Facebook’s policy is that is that if you want total anonymity, that’s alright, just don’t use Facebook. If you argue this shows Facebook’s only intent is gathering personal data, well, it’s a business and securely absorbing and leveraging that data is what powers that business.\n\nEven if Facebook was forced to repeatedly pay fines, flouting Weichert’s interpretation of German anonymity law is likely the best move for its business. If it bowed to Weichert’s call to provide an anonymous option, other conservative nations could call for the same.\nSuch changes could hurt the service. With anonymity can come an abandonment of responsibility for ones actions. Anonymous Facebook users might sling hate speech and otherwise harm the experience of everyone else. The real name policy also helps Facebook fend off spammers, as it has legal grounds to delete fake accounts at will. An anonymity option could create a loophole for spammers.\nRequiring real names has also turned Facebook into an identity provider for the Internet. Other sites can use its identity system rather than requiring users to create a new profile. By doing so, third-parties can cut down on uncivil behavior that throwaway, one-off accounts facilitate. People don’t want to say offensive things and break terms of service if it means their real Facebook account with their real social graph could be suspended. The advantages of a unified, cross-web identity for fighting abuse has turned Facebook’s commenting widget into one of the most popular blog commenting systems in the world.\nCurrently, advertisers may be willing to pay more because they know they’re reaching a faithful version of someone, not a character they’ve made up.\nDown the line, the real-name policy could also create new monetization schemes for Facebook. Facebook’s best move therefore may be to fight this German data protection commissioner to the bitter end. Even then it may want to refuse to change its policy despite the consequences.", "date": "1/7/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/facebook-vs-germany-done.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "facebook-privacy,facebook", "title": "Facebook Will Fight German Anonymity Law And $26K Fine Against Zuckerberg To Keep Real Name Policy", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/07/facebook-anonymity/" }, { "id": 111, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Apps", "content": "Powa Technologies, a UK startup that’s been working on an integrated mobile payments and e-commerce platform with some augmented reality thrown in, is today announcing its first round of outside funding — and it’s a doozy. The company says that it has picked up a Series A round of $76 million to take its technology global, and to a retailer near you with what CEO and founder Dan Wagner describes as the ultimate “killer app” for commerce.\nThe funding is coming from a single investor that Powa has declined to name, describing it only as “one of the largest investment management funds in the world.” But well-placed sources tell us it is Wellington Management, a Boston-based investment specialist with billions of dollars under management. Prior to this round, Powa’s growth was funded privately, largely by Wagner himself investing under $20 million to date.\nPowa first emerged in the public eye in June 2012, looking like another Square-style mobile payments clone (complete, even, with some contentious use of photographs with hands that looked suspiciously like those used in Square’s promotional photos). One exception was that mPowa, as the service is called, was aimed early on at bigger corporations, as well as the small businesses that have been the focus of Square, iZettle, PayPal’s here, SumUp and the rest. Since last year, mPowa has inked deals with companies like Portugal Telecom and First National Bank in South Africa to resell the product.\nBut the bigger plan, according to Wagner, will go well beyond mobile payments.\nIt will extend to include a wider transacting platform that brings together online and offline retail transactions with a further product called PowaTag. This has yet to be released, but Wagner describes it as a technology that can recognize “any image” taken on a mobile device and subsequently send a user to a site to buy it. Wagner says that those who have signed on for the full Powa platform include Electrolux, the BBC, and Harper Collins, among others. “We were always dangerous to competitors,” Wagner told me in an interview. “Now we’re deadly.”\nThe company is nothing if not aiming very high. Part of the funding will go towards staffing up the company, which is currently at 130 but soon hiring 250 more in the UK and 200 more employees elsewhere in the world. (One executive that’s getting announced at the same time as the funding: George Thaw, the former COO of SAP, who will be the CEO for channels, overseeing Powa’s re-seller and system integrator initiatives. Wagner tells me there are some more interesting executive recruits to be announced soon.)\nIt’s a piece of news that is good enough in these teetering-economy times that no less than the UK’s prime minister, David Cameron, has provided a statement endorsing the company:\n“We have seen some great British success stories in technology lately, as well as more encouraging news for the economy. So I am delighted that Powa is further contributing to that with the creation of 250 jobs to expand their growing business,” he said. “E-commerce is vital to our economic success. One in five of our small businesses export. If we could change that from one in five to one in four we would wipe out our trade deficit at one stroke. That is why this expansion of Powa is such good news – helping British Business increase trade both at home and abroad.”\nPowa is not giving an exact valuation except to note that the $76 million values it in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Wagner also says that this is his first step to raising the profile of the company en route to a public listing — whether that would be in the U.S. or UK has yet to be determined. He says he chose to go the route of an investment management company rather than a VC or private equity house so that he could continue to have “complete freedom” to make business decisions. Powa retained Barclays to help find a backer and eventually help prepare Powa for listing.\nFor as crazy as such a large investment sounds for a company that may only vaguely ring a bell, Wagner is not someone to be overlooked. He’s a serial entrepreneur with pretty extensive e-commerce and analytics experience, who well understands that one of the Holy Grails for a lot of businesses has been a solution that integrates everything, including legacy and new streams of revenue, in a way that is painless for everyone involved.\nWagner’s first company, the market analytics startup M.A.I.D., was sold to Thomson Reuters many years ago for $500 million; his second company, Venda, has developed e-commerce sites for companies like Tesco, Orange, and the Universal Music Group — which could give some clue to where he holds contacts today and who Powa may count as clients in the future.", "date": "8/20/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/screen-shot-2013-08-21-at-02-53-22.png?w=169", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "powa-technologies,square,mpowa,mobile-payments", "title": "Powa Technologies Picks Up A $76M Series A Investment To Take Its Mobile Payment And E-Commerce Platform Large", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/20/powa-technologies-picks-up-a-76m-series-a-investment-to-take-its-mobile-payment-and-e-commerce-platform-large/" }, { "id": 112, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Mobile", "content": "There’s no “mobilegeddon” taking place on Bing, but Microsoft did announce today that it’s taking steps to improve the search rankings for mobile-friendly websites. The changes follow a similar move by Google which last month rolled out a change to its ranking algorithm which penalized sites that aren’t easily usable from mobile devices. The update was significant enough that some began referring to the shift as the “mobilepocalyse” or “mobilegeddon,” given the impact it would have on mobile search results.\nThe mobile-friendly update also comes at a time when the web search business finds itself at a crossroads. More users are accessing content in native mobile apps, something that Facebook in particular has capitalized on. Google also confirmed this month something that many have suspected for some time: that more Google searches are now taking place on mobile devices than on computers, in 10 countries including the U.S. and Japan.\nThat’s why it makes sense that Google would need to optimize its search engine for mobile users. After all, if people use their browsers less on mobile devices than on the desktop web, and therefore do fewer Google searches, that ultimately affects Google’s bottom line with regard to its ads business.\nHowever, Bing has decided to take less drastic measures compared to Google when it comes to adjusting its ranking algorithms to factor in a site’s mobile friendliness.\nIn addition to labeling select search results as “mobile-friendly,” which it began to do just recently, the search service will also now improve the rankings for mobile-friendly webpages.\n\nBut there’s a big difference between Bing’s approach and Google’s: Google is actually penalizing webpages that aren’t mobile-friendly, meaning those where the text isn’t easily readable without tapping and zooming, or those where tap targets need to be spaced more appropriately, as well as those where the page features unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.\nBing, meanwhile, says that relevant results, even when they’re not mobile-optimized, won’t get shoved down in search results.\nAs the company explains today in a blog post:\nAlso like Google, Bing is offering webmasters tools that will help them analyze their page’s mobile-friendliness ahead of the update, so they’ll know what areas of their site need to be fixed. The tool will arrive in a few weeks.\nThe requirements for being considered a mobile-optimized site by Bing aren’t too different from Google’s. Sites will need to be easily navigable by touch, readable within zooming and scrolling horizontally, and compatible with mobile devices (e.g. no Flash). Bing is also considering factors like whether or not the site has pop-ups among other things.\nBing didn’t say when the ranking changes will take place, only that they’re due to arrive in the “coming months.”", "date": "5/14/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/navigation.png?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "search,bing", "title": "Bing Follows Google With Its Own “Mobile-Friendly” Ranking Algorithm Change", "topics": "microsoft", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/14/bing-follows-google-with-its-own-mobile-friendly-ranking-algorithm-change/" }, { "id": 113, "authors": "Devin Coldewey", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Researchers at the U.S. Navy have created a high-tech, in-helmet display for divers in the service that looks like something out of “Iron Man” — perhaps one of Stark’s early prototypes. The invention could make divers safer and more effective, and it definitely looks cool.\n\n“By building this HUD directly inside the dive helmet instead of attaching a display on the outside, it can provide a capability similar to something from an ‘Iron Man’ movie,” said Dennis Gallagher, leader of the research team, in a Navy press release (look, it’s just the go-to visual metaphor these days, okay?). “You have everything you visually need right there within the helmet.”\nInformation could be passed to DAVD (Divers Augmented Video Display) from surface sources, like a ship overhead sending birds-eye imagery (well, water birds) or, in the future, cameras or miniature sonar built into the helmet itself. Divers frequently have to do their work in low visibility conditions like nighttime or silty water, so alternative vision modes are a highly practical addition.\nDAVD goes directly in front of both eyes, allowing for the illusion of depth — a crucial element of true augmented reality. There are other HUDs, such as those in fighter jets, but the challenge presented by a wireless, underwater version completely contained in a pressurized suit is a unique one.\nIt’s just a prototype now, but the team, located at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, hopes to make it available for first responders and eventually commercial divers as well.", "date": "6/3/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/151130-n-pd526-001.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "hud,heads-up-display,research,navy", "title": "Navy researchers develop ‘Iron Man’ style in-helmet HUD for divers", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/03/navy-researchers-develop-iron-man-style-in-helmet-hud-for-divers/" }, { "id": 114, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Apps", "content": "Foursquare has made a name for itself out of the growth in smartphones, but as it tries to build up business in newer markets, it’s covering all of its bases. Today the company announced an update to its app for feature phones, specifically for Nokia’s range of S40 devices — which include its Asha handsets, sold and marketed as low-end smartphones. It looks like this may have been the first time in years that this app has gotten attention. Along with the new app, Foursquare also inked a deal with Nokia to come preloaded on new Asha devices when they hit the market in coming months.\nWhile Nokia’s Symbian smartphone platform has died, and while Windows Phone (Nokia’s new smartphone platform of choice) has yet to gain much critical mass, S40 is actually putting up a respectable performance. According to these figures from StatCounter, it’s third after Android and iOS for worldwide mobile platform market share, with 13.9 percent of the market at the moment.\n\nLooking at how that breaks down in different countries, the picture is more interesting and points to how a strong presence on these devices could be a good way specifically for targeting users in emerging markets. Again, from StatCounter:\n\n“Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Nokia S40 phones, and now they’ll all have access to Foursquare,” the company writes in the blog post. “Now, all those people can use Foursquare to make the most of where they are and where they’re going.”\nFor a company like Foursquare, fighting for mindshare among smartphone users and their millions of apps, going into slightly less-crowded territory like this is a smart move, all the while helping it continue to achieve critical mass for its location services, advertising and more. It also refocuses a little more attention on Nokia’s other line of business in a week when all eyes are on what it might reveal on the 11th — quite possibly Nokia’s most high-end smartphone yet.\nStill, it’s a move that appears to be a more recent decision. When I met CEO Dennis Crowley back in 2012 during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, he was squarely focused on building out new products, making use of all the fancy gadgetry of smartphones and not focusing on lower-end devices.\nFast forward a year to February 2013, he admitted that the company hadn’t done any proper work on low-end devices in years. “We have a bare bones one that is not very pretty, which supports feature phones. We’ve had that since 2009,” he told me. “It’s not super sexy. We think our stuff is so niche that for now we don’t have HTML5 in our strategy. We’re a small team so we have to focus on where our users are.”\nLooks like that focus has expanded to pick up new users, some on feature phones.", "date": "7/9/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/foursquare-nokia.jpg?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "s40,feature-phones,foursquare", "title": "Foursquare Checks In With Feature Phones: A New App For Nokia S40 Phones And An Asha Preloading Deal", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/09/foursquare-aims-for-feature-phones-with-new-app-for-nokia-s40-phones-and-preloading-deal/" }, { "id": 115, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Businesses are eager to spend money on big data, but few have a clear cut plan for what they plan to do with the technology, according to a new Gartner report. 64% of organizations surveyed have already purchased or are planning to invest in big data solutions in 2013, compared with 58% in 2012. Of that 64%, 30% have already invested in big data tech, 19% plan to invest within the next year and another 15% plan to invest within two years. Less than 8% of Gartner’s 720 respondents, however, have actually deployed big data technology.\nBig data is expected to drive $34 billion of IT spending in 2013, but though organizations are intrigued by the promises of big data solutions, most are still trying to figure out how the technology fits into their strategy.\n\n“For big data, 2013 is the year of experimentation and early deployment. Adoption is still at the early stages with less than 8% of all respondents indicating their organization has deployed big data solutions. 20% are piloting and experimenting, 18% are developing a strategy, 19% are knowledge gathering, while the remainder have no plans or don’t know,” said Gartner research vice president Frank Buytendijk in a statement.\nThough many organizations are still unclear about which big data solutions they will invest in or how much they will spend, Gartner spotted trends in how they plan to use the technology. 49% want to increase their company’s efficiency by using big data to reduce costs or identify risks earlier, while 55% hope it will help them improve customer service. 42% of organizations want to develop new products and business models using insight gleaned from big data, while 23% want to monetize information directly.\nEvery vertical industry surveyed by Gartner had companies that are planning to or have already invested in big data solutions. Media and communications, banking, and services firms are the most enthusiastic big data adopters. 39% of media and communication organizations surveyed said they have already invested in big data, followed by 34% of banking organizations and 32% of services firms. The industries with the most planned investments over the next two years are transportation, with 50% planning to invest in big data technology, followed by healthcare at 41% and insurance companies at 40%. Most of these organizations are located in North America, where 38% of organizations surveyed said they had already invested in big data technology. 45% of organizations surveyed in the Asia-Pacific region said they plan to invest.\nWhile most organizations are laying out their big data investment strategy, 15% of Gartner’s respondents are still trying to figure out what big data actually means, which is not shocking considering how broad and complex the term is.\n“Perhaps unsurprisingly, this concern came mainly from respondents with no plans to invest. Organizations should be sure they are educated about big data opportunities in their industry to ensure they are not missing the boat,” said Gartner research director Nick Huedecker in a statement.", "date": "9/23/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/big-data.jpg?w=211", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "enterprise,gartner,big-data", "title": "64% Of Organizations Have Invested In Or Plan To Invest In Big Data Tech, But Only 8% Have Started Using It, Says Gartner", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/64-of-organizations-have-invested-in-or-plan-to-invest-in-big-data-tech-but-only-8-have-started-using-it-says-gartner/" }, { "id": 116, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "The Galaxy S IV leaks are coming fast, from a number of sources including the company itself, and this morning brings two in rapid succession. First, as Matt reported earlier, shots depicting the addition of new Smart screen settings from a version of Android 4.2.1 for the Galaxy S III surfaced, and now another source is claiming to have received images of the same thing from a U.S. model Galaxy S IV.\nThe Galaxy S IV screenshots come from GSM Israel, a blog with a pretty solid track record in reporting early leak information. This time around, the blog say it’s very confident that these screenshots are legit, as they come from a “very reliable” source. Another reason to believe these are the real thing? They match up pretty closely to the earlier GS III screen leaks depicting similar changes to that device’s settings screens, as you can see in the side-by-side image below.\nAlongside a screen that seems to confirm Samsung will indeed be including “Smart scroll” in the new version of its Galaxy S smartphone, along with features that change screen orientation, pause media playback and disable screen timeout based on head positioning, these leaks also indicate we’ll see the rumored 1.8GHz quad-core processor powering this phone. Data from the Quick System Info Pro app also suggest rumors about the GS IV’s 1920×1080 pixel screen, with Retina-busting 440 ppi pixel density and an approximately 5-inch display, are also accurate.\nThere’s also a screen of the device’s camera options, which indicate it’ll be able to max out at 13 megapixels, another oft-rumored spec for the still-unannounced device. Samsung likely won’t have many surprises left to deliver on stage when it unveils the Galaxy S IV next Thursday, March 14 at a presentation in New York City, but this still looks like a phone that will help Samsung continue its Android device sales dominance. And we’ll still be on hand to make sure you get the news and confirmations of these features live as they happen.", "date": "3/6/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/compare-shot.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "android,samsung,galaxy-s-iv", "title": "U.S. Galaxy S IV Screenshots Leak, Backing Up Smart Scroll Claims And Some Hardware Specs", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/06/u-s-galaxy-s-iv-screenshots-leak-backing-up-smart-scroll-claims-and-some-hardware-specs/" }, { "id": 117, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Startups", "content": "Maybe you love Tim Tebow. Or maybe it’s Lady Gaga that tickles your fancy. Whoever the celebrity may be, we’re all huge fans at one point or another, which is why a new startup out of The Fort in D.C. is ready to connect you to your idols in new and interesting ways.\nIt’s pretty simple: You hop on over to Hugefan.com, and you’ll instantly see a few featured experiences. One that certainly grabbed my eye while writing up this post was an opportunity to “Pillage Startup Treasures” with Paul Singh of 500 Startups. Celebrities range from famous Polish celebrities to sports stars to actors to really anyone that makes you go: “Holy Shit! That was (insert celebrity name here)! Take a pic! Quick!”\nThe company just launched a few days ago so there isn’t a ton of inventory on the site just yet, but luckily there’s a feature that may help with that. Huge Fan has a dream machine-style offering, that lets you enter in your perfect experience with a celebrity which just may come to fruition.\nAfter signing up, you can “Request an Experience” in mad lib format. All you have to do is fill in the blanks of the following sentence: I want to (blank) with (blank). For some that means attending an off-Broadway play with Kristin Chenoweth, while others are more interested in playing poker and drinking single malt scotch with Christopher Walken. To each his own, right?\nThe site is still in beta, but under the watchful eye of The Fort (an incubator we met with on our DC mini meet-up road trip), it wouldn’t be a surprise to see HugeFan blossom into a successful little site.\nThis slideshow requires JavaScript.", "date": "4/10/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/screen-shot-2012-04-10-at-7-19-38-pm.png?w=193", "section": "startups/", "tags": "huge-fan,hugefan-com", "title": "HugeFan.com Wants To Connect You With Your Idols", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/10/hugefan-com-wants-to-connect-you-with-your-idols/" }, { "id": 118, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "Advertising tech company Appsfire is rolling out a new ad unit again! This time, it’s called Brichter-San, and it’s all about taking advantage of the load time when you pull to refresh.\nThese are native ads, but the content is automatically provided by Appsfire. Once again, Brichter-San seems to be mostly about app promotion. After implementing the ad unit, your app will automatically pull the ad name, icon and description from the company’s servers.\nHere’s how it works. When you are in an app and swipe your finger down to pull to refresh, the app will show you a small ad above the usual loading wheel. It’s natively coded, so developers can customize this ad unit to make it look better in their apps.\nIn the background, the app will keep refreshing your content, just like it would when you pull to refresh. When your content is up to date, the ad won’t disappear, you have to hit the dismiss button.\nIf you tap on an ad, it works like Appsfire’s other ad units. The complete App Store description pops up with the description, screenshots and more. The UI is a replica of an App Store page. All of this happens without ever leaving the app.\nThe ad unit is called Brichter-San in tribute to Loren Brichter. Brichter developed Tweetie, one of the first popular Twitter clients on iOS. His app was so popular that Twitter acquired it — he invented the pull-to-refresh gesture as well.\nRecently, many major mobile companies announced that they were launching mobile advertising networks, such as Twitter and Google with YouTube. Facebook should make an announcement soon as well.\nAppsfire’s major challenge will be to compete with these heavyweights. It remains to be seen if the company can sign enough deals with advertising partners and developers to make these ad units a success.\nDisclosure: Appsfire co-founder and CEO Ouriel Ohayon used to run TechCrunch France. I didn’t work for TechCrunch at the time, so we never worked together.\n", "date": "4/24/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/brichter-san.gif?w=720", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "france-newsletter,appsfire", "title": "Appsfire Launches ‘Brichter-San’, A Native Pull-To-Refresh Ad Unit", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/appsfire-launches-brichter-san-a-native-pull-to-refresh-ad-unit/" }, { "id": 119, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "No need to wonder if your family saw that reminder about dinner or if co-workers noticed you uploaded a PowerPoint, as Facebook Groups will soon display a count and a list of names of who saw each post. For example: “Seen by 2”, and when hovered “Josh Constine | Eric Eldon”. The feature is rolling out to English-language groups starting now.\nThese “read receipts” is a feature Facebook recently added to Messages and Chat, and that has historically been found in some private email and SMS services. Bringing them to more public social feeds is a bold step.\nThey’ll certainly simplify coordination in Groups and remove the need for “did you see that?” messages. But will read receipts come to the news feed? Some users might find that very creepy.\nFirst, here’s how they work in Groups. Whenever someone publishes an update, as soon as at least one person sees it a checkmark and a count of the total number of impressions will be displayed.\nAny user, group member, or admin with permission to see the post can then hover on the count to see a drop-down list of the names of everyone who has seen the post. You can see these counts and lists from web or mobile. Facebook will note “Seen by everyone” in that case so you know if you’ve reached your whole squad.\n\nI see this as quite a useful feature for Groups. By referencing Reads vs Likes, you’ll get a better sense of what content resonates with your Group. It keeps everyone on the same page, and will be especially helpful for Groups designed to arrange meetups or disseminate critical information.\nWhen asked if read receipts would make their way to the news feed, Facebook said it was “not going to discuss what we might (or might not) do in the future.”\nFacebook spends a lot of time fighting spam and scam hawking “profile spy apps” that would supposedly let you see who has viewed your profile. It’s repeatedly stated that no app can do this, and I’d say it’s highly unlikely to ever show who looked at photos. I mean, people might be a lot more apprehensive to browse photos, especially of romantic interests, if they knew other people could see their activity.\nIn the news feed, though, it could make posting seem more like a conversation where there are cues to tell if someone is listening, rather than feeling like you’re talking into a black hole. Even if people didn’t agree / Like, you’d know they had heard you. It would also show users they have a community supporting them when they post less “Likable” updates about personal hardship.\nOn the other hand, news feed read receipts could make publishing feel like a contest, where having more friends and more impressions means you’re better than more private people. [Update: If Facebook did bring read receipts to news feed, I’d advise they be visible only to a post’s author as to decrease vanity and competition]\nMost importantly, if brought to the news feed, the feature could make people self-conscious about visiting Facebook frequently. You might look down on the friend who “reads” every one of your posts, judging them for “having no life”. In turn that could decrease feed reading by making people feel creepy for browsing.\nSo while there are advantages, read receipts seem like they belong in Groups as a collaboration tool, not in the news feed as a sign of who’s most popular, and who’s quietly watching you.\nDid you notice? Facebook Messenger And Chat Now Show If Someone’s Read Your Message", "date": "7/11/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/facebook-group-read-receipts.png?w=388", "section": "social/", "tags": "facebook-messenger,facebook-privacy,facebook", "title": "Facebook Groups Start Showing Exactly Who Saw Each Post", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/facebook-group-read-receipts/" }, { "id": 120, "authors": "Rip Empson", "category": "eCommerce", "content": "Whether they’re .com, .org, .biz or .awesome, domain names can be significant — and some would likely argue that a memorable, premium domain is worth a pretty penny, maybe even priceless. Picking up a name that’s easy to remember can be a boon for traffic and can add a little brand protection to a company’s arsenal. While big purchases often go unreported, top domain names have been known to fetch a high price, with “insure.com” and “sex.com” ranking as the highest on record at $16 million and $13 million, respectively.\nToday, we can add another one to the list, as financial website Forexpros.com has purchased “Investing.com” for $2.45 million, making it the [second] largest (known) purchase of a single domain name in 2012. [Update: We’ve since learned that CardLab purchased GiftCard.com for approximately $4 million in October of this year.] Before then, dudu.com and personalloans.com ranked the highest, each selling for an estimated $1 million. According to Domaining.com, the sale puts Investing.com among the top 26 or so domain names purchased, right between coupons.com and tom.com. The largest known sale of 2011? Why that would be the purchase of social.com by Salesforce.com, of course.\nWith the purchase, Forexpros will today launch a global financial portal under the Investing.com URL, where it plans to offer a free resource for novice and semi-professional traders and investors to find realtime quotes and charts, breaking news, financial tools, technical analysis and calendars.\nAccording to Forexpros founder and CEO Dror Efrat, the site will service all asset classes, including stocks, bonds, commodities, futures and Forex. As to why the company decided to shell out $2.45 million for the purchase? Efrat and the company’s 70 employees want to turn Investing.com into a one-stop shop for financial traders and investors around the globe by providing streaming, realtime data and financial analytics. The user-friendly, memorable domain name is a small (and somewhat expensive) step in that direction.\nThe founder says that Investing.com will be looking to differentiate itself from the biggest entities in the space (like Bloomberg and Reuters) by offering its content for free, including that which would generally fall under the “premium membership” umbrella on other sites and by appealing to novice and semi-professional traders and investors, rather than pros and large firms. The site will also be accessible in 18 languages, which the founder hopes will help it reach a larger, international audience.\nInvesting.com has over 70 employees in offices located throughout the world, with its largest branches in Cyprus, Madrid and Tel Aviv. According to Efrat, Forexpros.com, which was founded in 2007, was averaging 3.6 million unique users per month before the company decided to go big and re-brand under Investing.com.\n“We are thrilled to launch investing.com today and believe that with our streaming real-time data, powerful analysis tools and great interface we can become a preeminent financial portal for novice and semi-professional investors and traders,” Efrat tells TechCrunch.\n", "date": "12/11/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/screen-shot-2012-12-11-at-3-06-57-am.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "domain-names,domains,investing-com", "title": "Top Domains: Forexpros Buys Investing.com For $2.45M, Launches One-Stop Financial Portal For Everyday Investors", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/11/investing-com/" }, { "id": 121, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Europe", "content": "Ahoy, Hungary and Croatia, TC is in town and we’d love to see you. As part of Startup AddVenture, we’ll be holding a mini pitch-off in Budapest and Zagreb. We’ve been through this part of the world a few times but this time we’re giving away two tickets to Disrupt New York to the winners so you’ll want to take part.\nI will be in Budapest on April 18 starting at 9am in LogMeIn R&D Centers and Zagreb on April 20 at 9am FER, Zagreb University. We’ll have a full roster of speakers before the pitch-off so be ready to learn.\nYou can find out more and buy tickets here. We have a special discount code for bootstrappers and students – TCADDVENTURE – which will give you a 29% discount.\nDisrupt New York is less than a month away so be there or be szögletes/trg.", "date": "4/17/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zagreb.jpg?w=738", "section": "europe/", "tags": "budapest,speaker,croatia,new-york", "title": "Join Us At The TC Pitch-Off In Budapest And Zagreb", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/17/join-us-at-the-tc-pitch-off-in-budapest-and-zagreb/" }, { "id": 122, "authors": "Deano Roberts", "category": "Diversity", "content": "In one of the most widely viewed TED talks of 2012, General Peter van Uhm, the highest-ranking military commander of The Netherlands spoke about his chosen instrument for making a contribution in our world — the gun.\n\nIn my case, I didn’t necessarily start out choosing the gun; it chose me. As a young man from a rural Montana family with six siblings, my hope of a college education was predicated on gaining compensation for either my academic or athletic prowess. West Point came seeking both.\nI wish my choice at that time had been inspired by a desire to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, but I suspect it had to do more with personal economics and selfish aspirations. That internalization of selfless service and the willingness to place the wellbeing of others ahead of myself (and now my family) is a disposition that has matured over two decades and now shapes the core of my character.\nAfter almost 20 years of waking up every day (sometimes in very far away places) to a wardrobe of camouflage, an environment fraught with personal risk, and a team that would and has literally died for one another, I wanted a place that would continue to challenge me while allowing me the privilege to still make an impact on others’ lives at scale.\nSilicon Valley was exactly that place. The Valley is a space, like the battlefield, that rewards speed, decisiveness, risk taking and adaptability. Technology is an operating environment that, like the operating environments of Bosnia, Iraq or Afghanistan, recompenses rapid iteration and innovation. That is why I now wear the camouflage of Silicon Valley — a mostly pressed (but still slightly disheveled) dress shirt with sleeves rolled up and un-tucked with jeans and shoes that looked scuffed but not Burning Man tattered.\nAt work when I hear the words “crisis,” “risks” and “pressure,” I smile a bit and, like most veterans, have an understanding of those words and their impacts in a completely different context. By all measures those descriptions of daily operations in any rapidly scaling technology company are very real feelings and concerns. But to your average veteran, those “crisis” days just seem like any average Tuesday. We are comfortable in that crisis state.\nEvery veteran operates off two principal maxims: 1) Fulfill your boss’ intent passionately, ethically and without complaint. 2) Take overwhelming accountability for you and your team’s actions should they come up short and when you’re met with success immediately divert that praise to your team.\nI am proud of Silicon Valley’s occupation with diversity and the notion that inclusive teams make things better. There is another underrepresented diversity group among our peer population: veterans. As with other diverse populations, veterans bring the sum of their experiences, choices and culture to benefit any team by broadening their perspectives, processes and outcomes.\nSo on this Veteran’s Day in Silicon Valley, which is about as far as one can physically, social-economically, and practically be from the front lines, I and most veterans don’t seek your appreciation or recognition. Rather, we’d simply ask for your consideration. Consideration that these women and men could benefit your teams. Consideration that the experience and training they have operating in stressful environments — often short of resources and frames of references — make them exactly the team members you need for your rapidly scaling organizations.\nAt Slack, our product and teams are driven by the most important of our values: empathy. Empathy begins with the recognition that another and their experiences exist. So in this spirit of empathy, as more or more of our nation’s veterans put down the gun for their next instrument of change, I’d encourage your consideration.", "date": "11/11/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/shutterstock_196352051.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "Why I Chose The Gun And Then Silicon Valley", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/11/why-i-chose-the-gun-and-then-silicon-valley/" }, { "id": 123, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "The most popular crowd-funding sites, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, have been slower to embrace a native mobile experience. With Kickstarter, the official app is iPhone-only at present, and Indiegogo doesn’t have an app at all. Recently launched FunderCloud can help with that, offering a way to browse and search across both sites at once, on either iPhone or iPad.\nFunderCloud was the result of one man’s frustration, David Knell, a full-time systems engineer, indie iOS developer and self-described “huge crowd-funding fan.” Like many of us, he was also annoyed at the lack of a native iPad experience for these services. “I have personally backed many projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo and have been waiting for an iPad app from either of them,” he said at the time of the app’s 1.0 launch earlier this fall. “Nobody has delivered, so I built one that works for both sites.”\nHe also wanted an easier way to search projects across both sites, he says, which is something the app’s early adopters appreciate, too. “I think people don’t like jumping between different user experiences to perform similar tasks,” says Knell.\nWith the FunderCloud mobile app, users can browse and filter projects by site, popularity, creation time or end time, location and category, and can quickly favorite projects and receive alerts when the project is nearing the end of its raise.\nThe app was updated at the end of November to include a search option and the above-mentioned notifications, which are two fairly notable additions that now make FunderCloud a much-improved experience over the original release. Search, in particular, was one of the most-requested features to date, in fact.\nKnell is not a fan of using in-app purchases, he tells us, because he doesn’t think people should be nickel-and-dimed every time they want to use a feature. So he made the FunderCloud app a one-time fee of $1.99 in the App Store. That fee, though, will limit the app’s scale, possibly only reaching the most serious crowd-funding enthusiasts. But Knell is okay with that, noting that he’s a one-man shop, and is keeping things lean, even responding to customer emails himself, as well as helping those who are experiencing a problem directly.\nHopefully, Kickstarter and Indiegogo won’t take steps to shut down FunderCloud, given that it’s filling an un-served niche in the crowd-funding market. But since public APIs for these services are lacking, the techniques FunderCloud uses to collect the sites’ data could potentially be in violation of the sites’ Terms of Use, depending on how they perceive the way the app handles data aggregation.\n\nFor example, Kickstarter prohibits third parties from using any processes to manually or automatically crawl the pages of its website, and says the service is provided for “your own personal, non-commercial use.” Indiegogo also has a line prohibiting automated systems. However, in both cases, the context of those clauses involves statements about protecting the site’s security, infrastructure, and preventing spam, which could leave room for an interpretation that would make what FunderCloud does more permissible.\nSays Knell, he’s read and re-read the terms on both sites, and tried to be respectful as possible to make the service as non-invasive as Pinterest or a search engine. “You can actually Pin a Kickstarter project and the same information that is displayed in FunderCloud will be displayed in Pinterest,” he says. “I am not selling or licensing their content out. In fact, I’ve been very cognizant of how much data I show on the listing screen,” Knell adds.\nFurther down the road, Knell may consider adding more sites beyond Kickstarter and Indiegogo if there’s demand…or, we suppose, if the app isn’t shut down first.\nFunderCloud is $1.99 on iTunes.", "date": "12/2/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/fundercloud.jpg?w=400", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "", "title": "FunderCloud For iOS Lets You Search Across Kickstarter & Indiegogo At The Same Time", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/02/fundercloud-for-ios-lets-you-search-across-kickstarter-indiegogo-at-the-same-time/" }, { "id": 124, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Why do you need a tiny climate sensor? Who knows, but Clime is making them. These tiny sensors – shaped like little candies – can transmit the current temperature wirelessly to phones and other devices and will soon able to offer far more interesting data with the help of a tiny chip-based sensor array.\nThe devices, created by Bart Zimny and Andrzej Pawlikowski, are essentially rubber-clad transmitters. You drop them anywhere you want to sense – a windowsill or empty room or spooky basement – and the sensors do the rest. The goal is to create a cheap home automation system with these sensors at the base.\n“We want to manufacture devices for masses, for people who are not geeks that buys every novelty,” said Zimny. Both creators are product designers who have worked in 3D printing. This is their first product.\nThe sensors can currently measure humidity, temperature, light and movement and they’ll be adding CO2 and pressure sensing, as well as light color sensors. They’re planning to ship in October; there’s no price yet but you can get in line to order on their website.\nThe pair plans on creating actuators and other systems to turn on and off climate-management systems and to open and close windows. By spreading a mess of these tiny sensors around an office, for example, they can easily allow you to manage various parts of the home, turning off air conditioners and opening vents with giddy abandon. It can also be cool just to watch the temperatures go up and down.\nThe team is self-funded and they’re bootstrapping their first batch of sensors.", "date": "7/9/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/screen-shot-2014-07-09-at-11-16-09-am.png?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "hardware,clime", "title": "Clime Sensors Are Tiny Tags That Tell You When Things Are Heating Up", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/09/clime-sensors-are-tiny-tags-that-tell-you-when-things-are-heating-up/" }, { "id": 125, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "Facebook wants you to know it’s listening when you report bullying, hate speech, identity theft, and spam, so today it launched a new Support Dashboard for tracking these reports until they’re resolved. Users can check to see if their report has been reviewed, be notified of whether the offensive content was removed or left up, and learn why the decision was made. The Support Dashboard is gradually rolling out to the Account Settings menu starting today with Facebook tracking Timeline and photo flags there, and monitoring for more content types will be added soon.\nCyberbullying has emerged as huge problem across the Internet and especially on Facebook, where Consumer Reports says one million children were bullied from June 2010-2011. The Support Dashboard should make users feel more confident about spending time on Facebook because they know if they’re abused and report it, their problems will actually be heard and responded to.\n\nFacebook’s progress on fighting bullying and other abuse are commendable, especially compared to other social networks. While younger but with more mature user bases, Twitter has no abuse reporting options, only spam flagging and blocking, and Google+ lets you report several types of abuse, but won’t notify you of its decision to remove or leave up flagged content.\n\nLast year Facebook created “social reporting” to help users resolve bullying and other abuse issues themselves. If someone posts a photo of you or anything else that you find offensive but that doesn’t technically violate Facebook’s community standards, the system lets you ask the uploader to take it down.\nIf that doesn’t work or the abuse does violate the site’s policies, users can escalate the complaint by sending it to Facebook through “Report” buttons around the site. And now they can track complaints about violence and threats, self-harm, bullying and harassment, hate speech, graphic violence, nudity and pornography, identity and privacy, intellectual property, phishing, and spam through the Support Dashboard.\n\nFacebook says, “we have consistently received feedback that once people report something to us, they did not know where it went or whether it was handled.” That’s unfortunate, since Facebook pays to have “employees who assess reports 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in dozens of languages.” Dropping the veil between the abused and those that can help them should make Facebook seem like a more friendly place.\nI’ve spoken with friends who teach in middle schools, and sadly they say that cyberbullying is one of the most prevalent activities their students engage in on Facebook. In fact, by 2007, Pew reports the that 39% of social networking site users had been harassed and that 34% of teens were very upset or afraid of online harassment. President Obama even took to Facebook to denounce cyberbullying last year.\nSimilar to how it’s generally believed that kids bullied in school are less likely to want to attend, and get worse grades, Facebook could be losing users and engagement due to fears of cyberbullying. This isn’t just a moral issue, it impacts Facebook’s business too. Hopefully beyond making victims feel safer, the Support Dashboard will serve as a warning to bullies that if they abuse other users, they could have their accounts terminated and lose all their Facebook friends.", "date": "4/26/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/facebook-community-support.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Track Your Facebook Abuse, Bullying, Spam Reports With Transparent New Support Dashboard", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/26/facebook-support-dashboard/" }, { "id": 126, "authors": "Leena Rao", "category": "Startups", "content": "Applying to preschool in San Francisco is not that different from when you may have applied to college 15 years ago. You have to complete a bunch of applications either by hand or print them out from an online application, and then you have to mail them in manually with a check to each school. It’s archaic and fairly frustrating in the highly connected world we live in (I don’t even own a printer). KidAdmit, an early-stage startup in San Francisco, was born out of the same frustration.\nFounded by local mom and finance exec Tejal Shah and her cousin and former PayPal engineer Parth Shah, KidAdmit is sort of like the common application but for San Francisco preschools. As Shah explains, she faced the same challenges outlined above when applying for preschools in San Francisco and thought there was a better way to bring this online.\nSome schools have their own online applications, but KidAdmit aims to bring all these into one place where you can store all of your information (and potentially auto-fill this info) into each application for each preschool. You can also pay your admissions fees to each school via the platform.\nBeyond just the application, you can search for preschools in your area, save schools to a list, and access general information about the school even if it hasn’t signed up to be part of KidAdmit’s “common app.”\nThe company was previously focused just in San Francisco, but last week, expanded to include preschools in the greater Bay Area. Currently 25 percent of San Francisco preschools allows you to apply via KidAdmit. Shah adds that this is a huge market when you think about the fact that there are 35 million applications for preschool every year around the country.\nIt’s also worth noting that the startup has raised seed funding led by K9 Ventures (Manu Kumar) with SV Angel, Wayee Chu and Ethan Beard participating.\nI used KidAdmit for several of my preschool applications for my daughter this past year and found it to be super easy to use. I found myself wishing, however, that every school would sign up with KidAdmit — many do not allow you to apply via the site, but just provide general information. But the startup is working on adding more schools, and like many compelling startups these days, has aimed to solve an offline problem online.", "date": "5/2/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/kidadmit_-_an_easy___efficient_way_to_search__compare___apply_to_multiple_preschools_online-___kidadmit.png?w=642", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "KidAdmit Wants To Take The Hassle Out Of Applying For Preschools In The Bay Area", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/02/kidadmit-wants-to-take-the-hassle-out-of-applying-for-preschools-in-the-bay-area/" }, { "id": 127, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Ameyo, a Gurgaon-based startup that makes software for customer support and sales centers, has raised a Series A of $5 million from Forum Synergies. The company, which already has customers throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, plans to use the capital to expand into the United States.\nAmeyo claims its software has already been installed by 1,600 customers in 40 countries, including Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, Ola Cabs, and Chase Bank in Kenya, and manages more than one billion customer interactions every day.\nThe platform, which integrates with most major CRMs like SugarCRM, Salesforce, and Zendesk, bills itself as a cloud-based “all-in-one software-based communication solution” that makes it easy for support centers to manage each interaction with a customer and increase the speed of sales.\n“We believe CRMs do a good job of being the system of record, but fail to provide automation and interfaces to handle interactions and give an overall picture of engagement,” co-founder Sachin Bhatia tells TechCrunch.\nWhile Ameyo competes with a host of other contact center infrastructure products like Genesys, Five9, and Incontact, as well as sales acceleration software InsideSales.com, RingDNA, and Velocify, Bhatia says its key differentiation is flexibility. Many other products rely on hardware or IT departments, but Ameyo lets all departments—including collections, helpdesks, and sales—use the same platform and see the same data from integrated CRMs and business apps.\nAmeyo’s parent company is Drishti, which was founded in 2003 by Bhatia, Bishal Kumar, and Nayan Jain, and now numbers 300 employees. While Ameyo is targeted to large enterprises, Drishti also makes another platform, TexoCC, targeted at sales and support centers run by mid-sized companies. Its current clients include Subway, UrbanClap, Grofers, and PepperTap.", "date": "7/12/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shutterstock_102266374.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "sales-software,call-center,ameyo", "title": "Support Center Software Ameyo Nabs $5M To Expand Into The U.S.", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/12/ameyo/" }, { "id": 128, "authors": "Alex Williams", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "MuleSoft has acquired Programmable Web from Alcatel-Lucent effectively marking the telecommunication company’s exit from a core API community.\nFor MuleSoft, a data integration company, the deal provides a vehicle for it to offer what it calls a GitHub for APIs that will integrate its APIhub with Programmable Web’s API database and rich editorial focus on the correlating market space. For Programmable Web, it provides a stable home, a place where it can extend its API database to a community that can build out apps using the MuleSoft APIhub platform.\nProgrammable Web will continue to maintain its blog and API database. It will remain an independent entity and connect with the MuleSoft APIhub. The hub will serve as  a place for getting the support developers often need when integrating APIs. Developers will collaborate on the APIs, similarly to the way a service like GitHub works.\nThe larger goal is to help companies connect its legacy, on-premise systems to third-party services and platforms. Companies need to get their data out into the market. APIhub with Programmable Web will help accomplish that.\nMuleSoft essentially provides a message bus and a cloud platform for managing data integrations and connecting data points to services such as Workday or Salesforce.\nAlcatel-Lucent acquired Programmable Web in 2010. At the time, Alcatel-Lucent had hopes for fostering a developer ecosystem and build out its own API management strategy. But the effort never really seemed to take hold. Hopefully, it will be a different story with Programmable Web part of MuleSoft.", "date": "4/23/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/pweb.png?w=190", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "api,alcatel-lucent,mulesoft", "title": "MuleSoft Buys Programmable Web From Alcatel-Lucent, Marking The Telco’s Departure From A Core API Community", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/mulesoft-buys-programmable-web-from-alcatel-lucent-marking-the-telcos-departure-from-a-core-api-community/" }, { "id": 129, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "As a tech reporter who spends a lot of time covering new mobile applications, I tend to have a fairly large collection of app screenshots on my iPhone, which can be difficult to organize and search through. But app developers and designers have it even worse. They’re not just taking numerous screenshots of some final product, but are building up large collections of mobile interfaces, including those from their own works-in-progress as well as others interfaces they reference for inspiration.\nToday, a new mobile application called Screenshotter is being released on the App Store, offering a simple tool for organizing and managing app screenshots.\nThe new app was built by the team at Cluster Labs, whose mobile photo-sharing application Cluster helps you organize and share your favorite photos with family and friends.\nLike Cluster, the new Screenshotter app is well-built, with a clean and modern interface.\nCluster co-founder and CEO Brenden Mulligan says the app was originally built as an internal tool for his own team, but they’ve now decided to release it to the community for free in order to help others. A designer himself, Mulligan also felt a more personal need for such a creation, having faced the problem of a cluttered Camera Roll, where tons of screenshots were mixed in with other photos. And because the thumbnails are so small, it’s difficult to see what the screenshots are referencing.\n“I could create individual screenshot albums in the photos app, but then I’d have a ton of albums of photos mixed up with albums of screenshots,” Mulligan explains. But, he adds, “screenshots and photos are totally different, and I want them separate.”\n\nWith Screenshotter, that’s possible. When you first launch the app, you give it access to your iPhone photos by tapping the button “Organize My Screenshots.” It will then automatically collect your screenshots and display them on the main screen. To organize them into folders, you simply tap the screenshots then tap “Move to Folder” and enter a name. You can also tap an “archive” icon in the lower-right to move them out of view, but still keep them accessible.\nThat’s really all there is to it. After organizing your shots, you can then easily go back and retrieve them or flip through your saved collections for later reference, or share them with others via text, email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. For now, there’s no backup option available, meaning the app runs 100 percent on your local device and is not being archived on the company’s servers. But Mulligan says that’s something they hope to add in a later release.\n\nScreenshotter to some extent competes with other photo-organizing apps favored by designers, like Ember for example. But where Ember is a tool with a number of other, more complex features for photo sync and management, Screeenshotter is a simpler, more straightforward option only tackling the organizational problem itself.\nThe app is a free download here on iTunes.", "date": "5/20/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/iphone4.png?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "designers,mobile-apps,cluster,screeshots", "title": "Screenshotter Is A Simple Tool For Organizing Mobile Screenshots", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/20/screenshotter-is-a-simple-tool-for-organizing-mobile-screenshots/" }, { "id": 130, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "Unified is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding, plus a $10 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank.\nThat sounds like a nice chunk of change, but equally noteworthy is the fact that the equity funding was led by iHeartMedia (the radio and digital media company formerly known as Clear Channel). The two companies previously announced a strategic partnership to develop custom products for advertisers, as well as an investment of undisclosed size.\n“We specifically chose iHeart because of the strategic value they brought to table in terms of data sets — it’s not just cash,” said Calvin Lui, Unified’s president and chief strategy officer. After all, Lui noted that in addition to its social advertising business, Unified aims to bring data together from a variety of marketing channels, an approach he contrasted with other social marketing companies that are mere “point solutions.”\n“We have such rolling momentum with these major brands that we continue to win flagship relationships with, and all of that is premised on having a system of record for all of our data, so we can collect information from multiple sources, extract value and execute against that,” Lui said.\nThe new money will allow Unified to continue developing its product and find new markets. Lui emphasized that that doesn’t just mean geographic expansion but also adding new products.\nSpecifically, Vice President of Corporate Communications Dave Donohue said the company plans to expand its data offerings beyond social media, starting with broadcast advertising — another area where it would make sense to work with iHeartMedia. (To be clear, while Unified expands its data business, the ad-buying product will remain focused on social media.)\nIt’s been more than three years since Unified announced raising a $14 million Series A. Asked why the company waited so long to raise more money, Lui said that the team knows how to “deploy capital very efficiently.”\n“We understand that there are cycles to the business and the industry and we’re here for the long-term,” he added.\n\nOver the past couple of years, Unified also acquired analytics companies Awe.sm and PageLever. Donohue said the company is open to making more acquisitions, “but this round isn’t aimed at funding acquisitions.”", "date": "9/10/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/employees-ulife.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "foundry-group,advance-publications,iheartmedia,unified", "title": "Social Marketer Unified Raises $30M Round Led by iHeartMedia", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/10/social-marketer-unified-raises-30m-round-led-by-iheartmedia/" }, { "id": 131, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "French food delivery startup FoodChéri, which operates an online only restaurant along the lines of EatFirst in the UK or Munchery’s original model in the US, has raised €6 million in Series A funding led by 360 Capital Partners, and Breega Capital.\n\nAlso noteworthy is that Samaipata Ventures is already an investor in Jinn, the Europe same-hour delivery startup, which counts food delivery as one of its most popular categories.\nCurrently serving 1,000 meals per day to “busy professionals” in Paris and various suburbs, including Neuilly-sur-Seine, Levallois, Boulogne-Billancourt, and Issy-les-Moulineaux, FoodChéri lets you order fresh chef-prepared meals that are chilled and ready to reheat and consume upon delivery.\nIt’s a model that avoids some of the pitfalls faced by restaurant delivery services, such as UberEATs and Deliveroo, in that orders can be pooled for delivery as food doesn’t need to be delivered hot. FoodChéri also enables orders to be placed “on-demand” or days in advance.\n“[We help] city dwellers eat fresher, healthier home-style meals with the convenience of fast food delivered to your doorstep,” explains FoodChéri co-founder and CEO Patrick Asdaghi, who was previously CMO of La Fourchette.\n“We solve it with a ‘full-stack’ food operation, from creating the recipe and preparing the ingredients to last-mile delivery, and everything in between”.\nAsdaghi tells me the initial focus for FoodChéri was serving dinner for busy professionals, but in April 2016 added lunches. The startup also targets smaller companies that don’t have their own cafeterias or are looking to provide an alternative and healthier lunch option for staff.\n\n“Many of our customers work full-time and don’t always have the time or energy to make their own meals, or want a change from the local cafeteria or snack shop, but still want to eat well without exploding their budget. In France our main competitor is Frichti even though they have a slightly different positioning in terms of the food offering”, he adds.\nMeanwhile, FoodChéri says the funds will primarily be used to extend delivery areas within the Greater Paris region before potential international expansion. In addition, the startup plans to spend on recruitment to add a further dozen or so staff to its current 40 person headcount, and for further product development.", "date": "9/19/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/team-couleur.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "French online restaurant FoodChéri raises €6M Series A", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/french-online-restaurant-foodcheri-raises-e6m-series-a/" }, { "id": 132, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "Foursquare recently announced it has grown to 33 million users, but another, albeit older, location-based app called Life360 just crossed a milestone of its own: 34 million users. Yes, this family locator utility is now bigger than Foursquare – at least in terms of registered users. To be fair, the companies don’t disclose their actives.\nLife360 is not what you would call an overnight success story. It was launched all the way back in 2008, Android first, before people were perhaps as comfortable with sharing their location as they are today. Its core use case involving family location tracking has slowly grown more relevant over the years, especially as more children and teens adopt smartphones. In fact, according to a recent report from Pew Internet, 37 percent of U.S. teens now own smartphones.\nThere are a number of applications busying themselves in the family locator or check-in space outside of Foursquare, of course. Both Apple and Google offer half-hearted efforts with apps like Find My Friends and Latitude, specifically. Others focus primarily on one aspect of family messaging – like the “panic button” apps that alert a network when a family member is in trouble. And more recent entrants like Hubble believe there’s room for apps focused mainly on private family networking.\nBut Life360 CEO Chris Hulls thinks that the real potential for family connectivity outside of Facebook lies not in building smaller, more private, social networks, but rather with utility.\n“There’s there’s interesting bias that whoever’s going to win family is going to look like Facebook but with a smaller group,” he says. “But maybe whoever wins family is just going to be doing things that’s so different from what’s out there today, that’s what’s going to make them take off.”\nFor Life360, its smartphone applications for iOS, Android and BlackBerry, offer a suite of services that have set the standard for what family locator utilities should provide: location-tracking, check-in (e.g. the “mom, I’m okay” button), geo-fenced alerts, messaging (both one-to-one and group chat), and the emergency/panic button alerting functionality.\nBut the plan now is to extend Life360 beyond being just an app. “A lot of times, when people think family location, they immediately think tracking, and we’re trying very hard to shake those connotations,” says Hulls. “When users use us, it’s much more like a family network users use to coordinate their daily lives.”\nOn that front, the company has raised a $3 million strategic round from BMW, closed in December, which will allow its service to be integrated into vehicles from the automaker. When complete, drivers won’t have to punch in an address to their navigation system, but can instead navigate to a person – the family member they’re heading out to pick up.\n\nIn addition, the company is also working on a deal that will allow the service to control home security systems, by automatically arming the alarm when it detects that no family members are in the house. This will include controls for thermostat and heating, too. “We want to be a platform for family data in a much bigger way,” Hulls explains  Life360 has a few alarm system partners on this, he adds, but he can’t yet disclose names.\nTo move from app to platform, Life360 has also hired Steve Corona, former CTO of Twitpic, who is now helping the company build out the infrastructure and APIs. Hulls says this is a key hire because Life360’s infrastructure is massive – it’s the third biggest user of PHP in the world because users’ phones are connected all the time. He even notes that they get more request volume than WordPress and Wikipedia.\nAnd though it may have taken some time to get there, just two months ago, Life360 began to monetize. Though it had experimented in the past with revenue generation, the company was primarily focused on growing its footprint. Now the company offers a premium suite of services for $5 per month (intro pricing – will be $7/month later on). This package includes an OnStar-like functionality which connects users to a live operator to get help, like roadside assistance or a locksmith, as well as stolen phone insurance ($100 towards replacement costs), the ability to add more geofences, and the ability to view a family member’s location history.\nThough Life360 hasn’t yet marketed the service beyond making it available in app, the company has seen thousands of free-to-paid conversions so far. In the future, the company plans to add more features, including a “Circles” function to loop in caregivers or babysitters when need be, messaging improvements, and a (premium) concierge service.\nLife360 is backed by $10 million in outside funding, including the recent $3 million strategic round from BMW. The company is planning to raise a B round in the near future.", "date": "4/26/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/life360_horizontal_logo_gradient_cmyk.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Life360, A Family Networking App With More Users Than Foursquare, Is Now Headed For Cars, Smart Home Systems", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/26/life360-a-family-networking-app-with-more-users-than-foursquare-is-now-headed-for-cars-smart-home-systems/" }, { "id": 133, "authors": "Matthew Lynley", "category": "Apps", "content": "For a split second, Alphabet was the most valuable company in the world. Not so much any more, however, with the company’s market cap continuing to slide after it reported its first-quarter earnings.\nRelatively speaking, shares of Alphabet are only down around 5 percent in extended trading. But for a company worth more than $500 billion, that’s erasing tens of billions of dollars in value — and increasing the gap between itself and Apple. Alphabet still continues to print money, but it fell under what people were expecting for its earnings report. The company posted earnings of $7.50 on revenue of $20.26 billion, while analysts were expecting earnings of $7.96 on revenue of $20.38 billion.\nAlphabet’s cost-per-click — basically how much it makes off each advertising click — continued to decrease, down 9 percent year-over-year for the first quarter. That’s continuing a trend that has seen that number decline for some time now. The theory is that as usage switches over to mobile, the increased number of paid clicks will make up for that declining cost per click. Paid clicks for Google were up 29 percent year-over-year for the first quarter, and the company’s revenue continues to increase.\nThere has been a lot of talk about weakness in Alphabet’s “other bets,” like Nest, which, according to many reports has been a whiff by Alphabet’s standards. This quarter, the company reported $166 million in revenue off “other bets,” while that segment posted an operating loss of $802 million. Last quarter, revenue was $80 million on an operating loss of $633 million. Growing, but so far still losing a significant amount of money. Naturally, it’s Alphabet’s core business that’s carrying the weight of the costs of its other bets, which include properties like Nest.\nFacebook, too, has continued to print money off its advertising business while betting a lot on its own “other bets,” like its purchase of Oculus for $2 billion. So it’s not like Alphabet’s strategy is entirely unique. And again, Facebook’s portfolio of additional services and products hasn’t yet shown that each are a dramatic large business on its own, but it’s Facebook’s continued revenue growth — and regular positive surprises — that keep its shares climbing, like Alphabet.\nSo, for the time being, Alphabet’s core advertising business — Google proper — remains its strength, while its other hardware bets seem to still be in the process of figuring out how to build a sustainable business. Google’s strategy has been to continue cranking on its ads business while throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, including buying Nest for $3.2 billion, but it seems like it hasn’t quite found an extra branch of revenue that will help it continue to grow, and potentially surpass Apple again.\nThis year has been a good one for Alphabet, which has seen its stock grow significantly. On the year, shares of Alphabet are up around 39 percent. But that rise has slowed recently, with shares only moving up around 6 percent in the past three months.\nFor a brief moment, Alphabet became the most valuable company in the world, dethroning Apple after handily beating its earnings expectations in the fourth quarter last year. Apple quickly regained that title and is now worth around $60 billion more as of the end of regular trading, and that gap widened after the company reported its first-quarter earnings.\nDoes this miss mean Alphabet’s strategy is working, or otherwise? Hard to say just yet, given that it only recently began breaking out its other bets, and some of those have only materialized in recent years — Alphabet acquired Nest in 2014, for example. These bets sometimes take time to materialize.", "date": "4/21/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/alphabet-earnings.png?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "earnings", "title": "Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B", "topics": "alphabet,google", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/21/alphabet-slides-6-after-missing-earnings-expectations/" }, { "id": 134, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "It’s easy to tell when a video has been successful online, right? Just go to YouTube and look at how many views it has.\nExcept YouTube isn’t the only site around (as I remind myself anytime I look at the view counts on TechCrunch’s YouTube channel). That’s why Visible Measures, a startup focused on video analytics and advertising, has launched a new site called True Reach, bringing viewing data together from across the web.\nThe data displayed on True Reach is pretty straightforward — it shows you a bunch of videos and their total viewership across what it says are hundreds of video sites, including YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and AOL (which owns TechCrunch). If you click on a video, you’ll not only be able to see it play, but also view the number of sites and clips (Visible Measures and True Reach is more interested in the success of an entire video campaign rather than an individual video) being counted.\nCEO Brian Shin compared this to “the total box office” of a video, whereas looking at YouTube is “just one big theater chain.” For example, his team pointed me to Land Rover’s video promoting the new Range Rover Sport, which has around 503,000 views on YouTube, compared to a True Reach of about 6.2 million. Less dramatic but still significant — Jean-Claude Van Damme’s epic split video for Volvo 77.3 million views on YouTube, and a True Reach of nearly 140 million\nShin also said that while True Reach is focused on marketing campaigns, it’s not limited to Visible Measures clients.\nBut if someone isn’t a client, I wondered about how accurate the technology could be at determining that two different videos on two different sites are part of the same campaign. He replied that the data collection is largely tech driven and “extremely technically scalable,” but there are also humans checking the results.\nThe information on True Reach is available for free. Presumably, Shin is hoping that it’ll lure some visitors into becoming Visible Measures customers. Last year, he suggested that the company had been “a little closed” and unknown to anyone who wasn’t a customer, and this seems like a smart step to reverse that.", "date": "1/22/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/true-reach.jpg?w=640", "section": "startups/", "tags": "true-reach,visible-measures", "title": "Visible Measures Launches New Site To Show The “True Reach” Of A Video Campaign", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/22/visible-measures-launches-true-reach/" }, { "id": 135, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "eCommerce", "content": "Jackthreads, the members-only online shopping club helmed by founder Jason Ross and Thrillist’s Ben Lerer, is working on something brand new in the ecommerce space. The goal: to make the online shopping experience more like the real-life, brick-and-mortar shopping experience.\nToday, the move is but an incremental one, as the site launches a new button alongside items that shows number of views, number of times that item has been placed in a cart, and the number of times someone has “wanted” the item.\nThe company has been focused on this initiative since last year, when Jackthreads launched “Chat with Jill.” The feature allowed young, female customer service agents to live chat with customers, giving those guys the feedback of a woman. The idea is that many male shoppers want more social proof when they’re preparing to make a purchase, and Lerer claims that this feature resulted in a “huge spike in conversion.”\nToday’s feature launch moves toward the same goal, though this time letting male members of Jackthreads give each other social proof. By seeing that a certain item is wanted or purchased by many of your peers may just be the tipping point to a sale, giving the customer the confidence to pull the trigger.\n“It’s a small gesture, but we expect to substantively affect conversion for a certain kind of guy,” said Ben Lerer. “It’ll be interesting to see how it goes as we measure it, but we think it should change the game for a lot of our guys.”\nEarly last year, Jackthreads claimed to be doing 30 percent of its traffic and revenue via mobile, and in May the company launched an iPad app.\nToday’s that’s grown to 65 percent of traffic and half of revenue coming from mobile, pushing the company to focus on a mobile-first lens as well as social proof going into 2014.\nAfter all, that’s seemingly the key for man-focused online shopping, and we’ve seen a number of companies cater these needs.\nFor women, moving to online shopping just meant avoiding the hassle of a store. Women know their sizes, what they like, and trust their opinions. For men, according to Jackthreads, the transition is a bit more daunting.\nInstead of shopping with a friend or girlfriend in a store filled with patrons and store attendants, online shopping is a lonely experience. It’s all up to the shopper.\nToday’s new views button (internally called “Busy Store”) is just one step toward changing that.\nThis is a very step-by-step process, however a year from now this social visibility should be present across the entire shopping experience,” said Jason Ross. “At the product and sale level, shoppers will be able to see which sales and items are getting the most engagement, and within the navigation they’ll be able to sort and filter by engagement as well. It aligns perfectly with our strategy of reducing the barriers to fashion and lifestyle discovery for our guys.”\n", "date": "1/15/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/screenshot-2014-01-15-09-47-55.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "ben-lerer,jackthreads", "title": "Men’s Fashion Club Jackthreads Makes Online Shopping Less Lonely", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/15/mens-fashion-club-jackthreads-makes-online-shopping-less-lonely/" }, { "id": 136, "authors": "Devin Coldewey", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "The latest move by McDonalds to distance itself from its enduring image as a greasy, unhealthy fast food apocalypse is once sure to please fitness-conscious parents: for a limited time, every Happy Meal now comes with a working pedometer.\nThe Step-it is a simple device that comes in six colors that, once activated, tracks a kid’s steps and their general activity level. Steps show on an LCD and the activity is indicated by a light that blinks more rapidly as (theoretically) the child exercises.\n\nIt’s timed to coincide with the Olympics, naturally, though it’s not actually an official promotion. It’s only available in the US and Canada for the next four weeks — which is probably costing the company a fortune, even if these little things only cost a buck or two each to make.\nBelieve it or not, this isn’t the first time McDonalds has offered pedometers with its meals. It also gave them away back in 2004 as part of another fitness awareness campaign.\nWith luck the devices will spur an interest in, you know, walking and stuff. In retrospect, it might have been better to tie this to Pokemon GO than the Olympics, but who can say?\nUpdate: Never mind! The AP reports that McDonalds is recalling the trackers because of possible skin irritation issues.", "date": "8/17/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/hamburglar.png?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "pedometers,step-trackers,fitness,mcdonalds", "title": "Step trackers in Happy Meals let you tone your McNuggets", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/17/step-trackers-in-happy-meals-let-you-tone-your-mcnuggets/" }, { "id": 137, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "Europe is a key market for Apple. Last quarter it remained the second-highest revenue generating region after the U.S. Yet it’s an increasingly challenging market, yielding the lowest growth of any region for Cupertino in its Q3. And for smartphones at least, it’s also a market firmly in thrall to Google’s Android OS (not that Apple would put it that way). In its Q4 earnings today, Apple reported total revenues of $8,023 billion in Europe for Q4, down three percent on the previous quarter. Total revenues in the region were up eight percent year-on-year, but sales of Macs were down three percent.\nThe iPhone 5 launched in the U.S. during Apple’s Q4 — but Apple does not break out iPhone (or iPad) sales by region. Cook also noted that: “We launched iPhone 5 in the US during the quarter, and while we launched in some international countries in the bulk of the world we did not launch in and so I would have expect to have seen more significant growth in the US vs the rest of the world.”\nIn contrast to tough times in Europe, Cook lauded a “really phenomenal” quarter in China during the Q4 earnings call, with full year revenue $22.8bn — up over $10bn year-on-year. He said Greater China “now represents about 15 percent of Apple for the fiscal year”.\nIn its Q3 earnings, Cupertino blamed the tough macro-economic situation in Europe for softening demand for its products and leading to “essentially flat” sales — indeed, it blamed the region for a rare miss against Wall Street expectations in Q3, along with speculation about forthcoming products (ie the iPhone 5). France, Greece and Italy were singled out as being “particularly poor” during the quarter, while Germany saw “only single digital positive growth” in Q3. The U.K. bucked the trend, delivering “solid” 13 percent growth.\nGoogle’s Android OS is making life increasingly difficult for Apple in Europe. In its most recent report from September, market research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech (KWC), which tracks 12-week smartphone buying patterns, reported that Android had increased its share in Europe by a fifth (20.2 percent) in the past year — to gain more than two-thirds of the smartphone market. Android OEMs such as Samsung have driven sales by building phones with larger screen sizes than the iPhone, such as the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy SIII. KWC noted that 29 percent of the Android devices sold in the 12 weeks prior to its report had a screen size of more than 4.5 inches.\nDuring its fiscal Q4 Apple launched an iPhone with a larger screen — 4 inches vs 3.5 inches — and announced a smaller version of its iPad tablet as it seeks to squeeze demand for Android phablets.\nIn additional European Apple news, the company appears to have quietly raised the price of App Store apps in select European countries. TheNextWeb is reporting it has shifted the base price of apps from €0.79 to €0.89 in countries including Belgium, Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the price rise and will update this story with any response.\n[Image: C.G.P. Grey]\n", "date": "10/25/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/5022877197_89bb8b6a5d.jpg?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "aapl12q4,apple", "title": "Apple Fighting Revenue Stagnation In Europe: Fiscal Q4: $8,023BN Total Revenue, Down 3% On “Essentially Flat” Q3", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/25/apple-fighting-revenue-stagnation-in-europe-fiscal-q4-8023bn-total-revenue-down-3-on-q3/" }, { "id": 138, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "After taking so long to transition to its next-gen OS platform, the company formerly known as RIM has an awful lot riding on its first BlackBerry 10 handset, the Z10. The handset launched at the end of January in the U.K. and early February in Canada (and is due to make its official U.S. debut this month). Not a great sign, then, that some U.K. phone retailers appear to be cutting the price of Z10 tariffs, a mere month after launch — suggesting demand isn’t as strong as hoped, and that the device isn’t as competitive against the high end of Android and iOS as BlackBerry needs it to be.\nBoth Carphone Warehouse and Vodafone have slashed tariffs, according to the Telegraph. It also appears that Phones 4u is offering cheaper deals now. BB10 is BlackBerry’s attempt to turn around its sliding smartphone fortunes by offering a device to compete with the likes of the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy SIII. BlackBerry’s global smartphone marketshare fell to just 3.5 per cent in Q4 2012, according to analyst Gartner, down from 8.8 per cent in Q4 2011, while Samsung and iOS took 52 per cent of all smartphone sales in Q4 2012.\nCarphone Warehouse initially priced the BlackBerry Z10 from £36 per month on pay monthly contract, bundling the cost of the handset into that tariff. It is now offering the phone from as little as £29 per month, although that tariff includes a £29 up-front free for the handset. The Telegraph also says Vodafone has introduced a new web-only deal for the Z10, costing £33 per month (this tariff also requires an up-front fee of £129). Phones 4u is also offering the Z10 on a £29 per month contract (again with a £29 charge for the handset), having initially launched the phone on contracts starting at £36 per month. It is also offering even cheaper tariffs, of around £20 per month, but with a much higher up-front fee for the device.\nThe Telegraph quotes James Faucette, an analyst at Pacific Crest, who said the tariff cuts move the Z10 away from the highest margin segment of the smartphone business. “We believe that meaningful price cuts so soon after launch, while probably at the initial discretion of the carriers, is likely to relegate the Z10 to being a mid-tier device with very low gross margins,” he said.\nBlackBerry has been making a lot of noise about Z10 sales but hasn’t backed up its hype with any hard numbers, saying only that demand had exceeded expectation and that the Z10 is selling in “large numbers“. We’ve reached out to BlackBerry, Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4u for comment on the tariff reductions and will update this story with any response.\nAsked how sales were going in the Z10’s launch market, the U.K., at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona last week, BlackBerry’s U.K. & Ireland MD Rob Orr also shied away from sharing any numbers, saying he was unable to provide much detail ahead of BlackBerry’s quarterly results.\nEarly sales in the U.K. have been “very positive”, he told TechCrunch, adding: “I’m in a quiet period so I’ll caveat my statement with the fact that our fiscal year ends on [March 1st] and we publish results on the 28th. Regulated from a quiet period perspective I can’t share too much detail but I’m very pleased with the results, the partners are very pleased with the results. Take a look at some of the feedback on Phones 4u’s site or Vodafone’s site are very positive.\n“The feedback from our enterprise customers has been brilliant. Really really good. They love what we’ve done with BES 10, they’re aligned with the approach that we’re taking, they’re cracking on with all their internal trials and their user testing and all the stuff that enterprises do before they do mass rollouts. So I’m really pleased. Couldn’t really have asked more from the support I’ve had in the market.”\nExpect to get more concrete details on exactly how positive (or not) the BB10 launch has been when the company announces its fiscal Q4 and fiscal full year results at the end of this month.\nWhile the introduction of cheaper monthly tariffs may not help BlackBerry’s bottom line in the long run, it may help to drive a few more Z10 sales in the short term to help buoy up its results. In the mean time, all the vague, non-quantifiable statements aren’t helping dispel the sense that RIM isn’t yet doing enough to dig itself out of the smartphone doldrums.", "date": "3/4/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/z10-6.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "bb10,blackberry-z10,rim", "title": "U.K. Phone Retailers Offer Cheaper BlackBerry Z10 Tariffs A Month After Launch — Soft Demand For First BB10 Handset?", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/04/z10-uk-tariff-cuts/" }, { "id": 139, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "Airport Chatter, which debuted just in time to take advantage of the busy holiday travel season, is a new mobile application aiming to be the one-stop shop for everything related to air travel, from the time of departure to the time of arrival. The app includes venue profiles for the shops and services inside airports, allowing users to not only discover the hours of operations and other business info, but also post check-ins and reviews. That makes it something like a miniature version of Yelp, specifically designed for airports.\nBut co-founder and CEO Mark Wagner explains that the company’s goal is bigger than that – the venue listings feature is only one of many they have in store. The goal is to go beyond becoming the next “Gate Guru,” for example, in order to offer users a more complete travel platform that can help them with every aspect of their trip, including tracking flight status, booking ground transportation, tracking the progress of checked baggage, and most notably, socializing with fellow travelers.\nSome of these features are further along in development than others. For example, Airport Chatter’s website speaks of a forthcoming feature called “Radar” which will allow users to meet new friends to “make trips more exciting.” Radar, however, is not yet available in the current iOS release. Wagner says the team debated about the launch timing, but decided that it would be better to launch before the holidays to gain that early boost in new users.\nThat bet paid off, it seems. Since its late December debut, Apple has featured Airport Chatter on two of its lists – “New & Noteworthy” travel apps, and another featured list called “Traveling Home.”\nWagner explains he came up with the idea for Airport Chatter around a year ago, having always been a big aviation geek, who loved everything about airports, airplanes and travel. “For me especially, [it was about] ‘what can technology do to help the travel experience?’ because A) there are so many travelers, and B) everyone is on smartphones,” he says. He and his friend Izzy Kirsh began working on an earlier version of what is now Airport Chatter, and launched it as a web app this April.\nNot surprisingly, they soon found that the majority of the traffic hitting their website, essentially a list of airport venues, was coming from mobile. After joining forces with Sydney-based Rab Memari, who had been working on a similar concept, Wagner then tracked down developer and CTO Ygor Lemos using AngelList, to help them move to mobile.\nThe end result, created over six months of remote teamwork, is today’s iOS app, Airport Chatter. At launch, the app features 30 airports across the U.S. and 4,600 venue profiles offering the hours, phone numbers and other business listing details. Users can check-in and review these locations, as well as track the live feed for their airport, or the global feed for all airports within Airport Chatter.\nThe startup has also partnered with SITA, which provides air transport communications and info technology. This will allow Airport Chatter to integrate other flight-related information into its app in the future. For example, one of the more promising features the SITA partnership will bring is baggage tracking. “You’ll be able to enter your baggage number and we’ll provide you real-time updates throughout your trip,” says Wagner. This service is still in beta on SITA’s side, so it will be some time before it’s available in the app, however.\nAirport Chatter is available for free from the iOS app store, and the startup plans to develop an Android version in the future. Eventually, the goal is to monetize by offering mobile coupons for the venues in the airports, as well as by helping users with bookings for ground transportation and hotels.\nAirport Chatter is currently bootstrapping, but plans to start raising seed funding after the holidays.", "date": "12/28/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/overview-profile-phones.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "Flying Home? Airport Chatter Brings Airport Info To iPhone, Socializes Travel", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/28/flying-home-airport-chatter-brings-airport-info-to-iphone-socializes-travel/" }, { "id": 140, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Apps", "content": "Google posted an update to its Android Developers Blog today which includes a complete checklist for the new Material Design aesthetic Google has adopted across the OS for its own apps and menu visuals. The Checklist is aimed at mobile software designers, but it’s a good read for anyone interested in getting a grasp on how their favourite software might be reimagined for Google’s refreshed mobile platform.\nThe checklist covers tangible surfaces, which is how Google describes the ‘card shuffling’ type effect of layers of paper passing over one another, complete with shadows and transition animations. Print-inspired aesthetics involve using body colors, key lines and an absence of shadows on elements like texts and images, which are meant to represent “printed ink” on a page. Looking at this section, classic page-setters and print designers might feel a reassuring whiff of familiarity – and perhaps renewed usefulness.\nAuthentic motion talks about how UI elements never just appear abruptly, but animate into the frame. Different UI elements can animate into presence in different ways, depending on what’s appropriate for the content type and position, but in general these transitions involve small elements scaling into dominant positions when activated, like album art taking up half of the screen once tapped.\nAdaptive design discusses how to make sure that apps are set up to scale for various devices, which is one of the main goals of Android Lollipop, an OS Google has described as spanning multiple types of devices. Google describes how a short list of core UI elements should behave regardless of where they appear, in order to promote a uniformity of experience wherever a user encounters Android.\nAndroid Lollipop is a big change for users who are used to previous versions, speaking as someone who has spent some time with the developer preview. But it’s definitely a pleasant experience from the design perspective, and Google is doing its best to make sure that new sense of striking visual effect makes its way to third-party apps quickly and efficiently, too.", "date": "10/28/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/layering.gif?w=640", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "material-design,lollipop", "title": "Google’s Material Design Checklist For Android Shows What’s Coming In Lollipop Apps", "topics": "google,android", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/googles-material-design-checklist-for-android-shows-whats-coming-in-lollipop-apps/" }, { "id": 141, "authors": "Mike Butcher", "category": "Europe", "content": "It’s probably a little tricky to raise a protest march consisting of 10,000 Muslims outside the Googleplex in Mountain View, Santa Clara. But in the centre of London, it happens to be a cinch. Especially when they can simply bus and train in from other parts of the UK. So it’s with no doubt just a little trepidation that Google UK – and its offices across Europe – faces ongoing mass protests from Muslims protesting about trailers for the anti-Islamic film ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ which appeared on YouTube recently and lead to worldwide protests and has been implicated – directly or indirectly – in the death of a US ambassador. Google refuses to remove the videos. And so the protests look set to continue for many weeks to come. Eventually a million-strong march in Hyde Park is planned. So while YouTube HQ will be sunning itself in balmy Silicon Valley climes, it’s likely that we will see a wave of continuing protests in Europe, and outside Google’s beleaguered offices.\nYesterday’s demonstration was the third organised in a month, but probably the biggest to date, with thousands travelling from hundreds of miles away, including Scotland. Imams in mosques across Britain helped to organise the protest, which lasted four hours and blocked roads almost up to Buckingham Palace.\nAccording to protesters the film in question – which has not been released, though incredibly amateurish trailers were – insults the Prophet Mohammad and demeans Muslims, and remains available on YouTube.\nA Google spokesperson told us: “We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions. This can be a challenge because what’s OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere. This video–which is widely available on the Web–is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube.”\nQuoted by the Telegraph, protest organiser Masoud Alam said: “Our next protest will be at the offices of Google and YouTube across the world. We are looking to ban this film. This is not freedom of expression, there is a limit for that. This insult of the Prophet will not be allowed.” Mr Alam plans “a million strong” protest “in the next few weeks”.\nHere’s a video from the protest that has been uploaded… to YouTube:", "date": "10/15/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/screen-shot-2012-10-15-at-16-36-01.png?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "", "title": "10,000 Muslim Protesters Demonstrate At Google UK HQ Over YouTube Film", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/15/10000-muslim-protesters-demonstrate-at-google-uk-hq-over-youtube-film/" }, { "id": 142, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Apps", "content": "LocalUncle is an iPhone app made by a Swiss startup that wants to apply the power of crowdsourced, location-specific information to crack real-time questions & answers. What is the Wi-Fi password at the local hotel? Where can I find cat food in Dresden? All that and more can come from the digital lips of your LocalUncle.\nThe app is actually a relaunch but despite a promising start it didn’t achieve enough user traction — something the app makers blame on bad timing and clunky version-one technology, among other things. Q&A services stand and fall on the size and engagement of their user-base so the team behind LocalUncle decided they needed a slicker, speedier app.\nLocalUncle CEO Philip Estrada Reichen won’t say how many users the first version of the app has, but does say the userbase has been “in aggregate” to more than 600,000 unique places — i.e. one user has checked in to each place at least once — and also to more than 3,000 “areas” in the world (again: one user, at least once).\nHere’s how LocalUncle works: the app presents the user with a map view with locations of text-based questions and answers pinned on it (if there are any). As you pan and zoom around the map the app automatically identifies the name of the particular district you’re looking at — say Soho or Notting hill — giving you the option to ask a question that relates to that area. ‘What is the best stall for woollen scarves in Portobello market?’ perhaps — or subjective queries such as ‘what’s the best restaurant in Soho?’\nOnce you’ve typed your question, the app routes it to the user who it thinks is most likely to be able to answer it and they reply with, hopefully, a non-snarky answer. How does the app know who to route each question to? This is based on Foursquare location check-in data — the first version of LocalUncle sat on Foursquare’s API — plus location data gathered from tracking the movements of users’ phones. So its “intelligent routing algorithms” look at about both past and current location before deciding who can best answer a question.\n“Our [first] version is Foursquare-connect only. This means that 100% of our userbase has connected their Foursquare accounts to our system which means that we already have tons of��location-data from our users,” says Reichen.\nIf that user knows the answer they can respond in the app and you’ll get the answer pushed to your iPhone. If they don’t respond, the app tries another user who might know the answer — until, hopefully, your Q gets an A. Using push notifications ensures questions get answered as quickly as possible, says Reichen. If users don’t respond to any of the questions pushed at them they’ll get asked fewer questions, and vice versa — although the algorithm is designed so that users can only get a set amount of questions pushed to them in a fixed time-frame so they won’t ever get swamped.\nLocalUncle’s automatic place detection feature is proprietary tech built by the app makers to improve the user experience — meaning that place names appear automatically as you pan around the map. They have also built proprietary geo-fencing technology that maps a Foursquare check-in/iPhone user’s location to an exact point on the map (and its related district/city/country etc). This allows them to create a location-history profile of their user-base so they can route questions to “the most appropriate experts” — or at least, the people who have been to that place the most.\n“We reduced local search to its minimum viable state: a split-screen map/conversation view and one always visible text-bar to input your question. It’s as simple as any location-based Q&A app can possibly get,” argues Reichen.\nAsked about competitors in this space he name-checks LocalMind as its main competitor — a location-based Q&A startup that raised a total of $650,000 and has just been acquired by Airbnb (Reichen calls this an acqui-hire — adding: “LocalMind failed”).\nAccording to Reichen, the main differences between LocalUncle and LocalMind are: simplicity of interface, with minimal screens and a text bar present to ask questions on every screen; clean, uncluttered design with no need to navigate between multiple screens and simple swipes to transition between the few views that are on offer; and auto-detection of the user’s area. Taken together, he argues this makes LocalUncle faster and easier to use than rivals — thereby giving it the edge in a space that isn’t perhaps as crowded as you might imagine, unless you compare the service to — in Reichen’s words — “web 1.0” review-style offerings like Yelp that were not designed to function in real-time.\nNew LocalUncle users can only ask one question per 24 hours — or, if they want to unlock unlimited questions, they need to invite 20 friends to join the service (the limit will be also lifted for the “first couple of hundred” app downloaders — as an incentive to early adopters and to drive downloads). This is one of the ways the app makers are hoping to spread the word about the app and start gaining traction. Another way is by opening it up to all iPhone users, not just Foursquare users (as per the first version of the app).\nBeing iPhone only is also a potential problem for a platform trying to scale up to a significant user base that can power its service — being as Google’s Android OS is now the dominant global smartphone platform. Reichen says the reason the team focused on iPhone is because that’s where their coding expertise lies but they do plan on building an Android version in future — and that’s one of the reasons they will be looking to raise their next round of funding so they can hire in Android talent.\nCurrently LocalUncle is funded by founder money from its two co-founders, Reichen and CTO Philipe Fatio. Other backers include three of the co-founders of Swiss travel startup GetYourGuide.com who put in seed money and also act as advisors. In addition, LocalUncle won 30,000 Swiss Francs ($32,700) at a Swiss business plan competition — and are one of two finalists to compete for another 100,000 CHF ($109,000) at the end of January 2013. Reichen says LocalUncle will be looking to raise a $1M Seed Round by Spring 2013.\nIn terms of business model, this is not going to come overnight, concedes Reichen — but he argues there is bags of potential in future with the kind of data the platform could generate. “Revenue is not going to happen in the short-term, that’s why we’re raising money. But in the long run we’re positioned very well to make money,” he says. “We capture a user’s intent at a very interesting point in time: we know WHO is looking for WHAT, WHERE and WHEN! These people are usually looking for a place where to spend their money and time and get influenced strongly by our community. Local businesses will be very interested to be a part of that conversation.”\nPossible revenue avenues include selling “highly relevant” ads, or allowing businesses to push real-time deals at users who are in the vicinity — with LocalUncle charging the business a fee to push the info, says Reichen. The platform could also be used as a mobile CRM tool, allowing businesses to service potential customers’ queries — and the app maker’s charging a monthly fee to differentiate their staff’s answers from general users’ answers (i.e. something akin to a ‘verified’ answer or a ‘business/pro’ account). He adds that the startup is also exploring some other ideas for generating revenue but is keeping these under wraps for now.\nRight now, LocalUncle’s biggest challenge is getting enough people to use it. Without a significant user-base, the number/quality of its ‘experts’ will remain questionable — and that will constrain its usefulness. If it can live up to the dream of slick, quick real-time Q&As, you can imagine it being a very sticky app indeed. On the other hand, if you ask a few questions and fail to get any compelling answers new users might soon go back to asking their Twitter/Facebook buddies for local recommendations.\nAsked about how LocalUncle can successfully traverse this initial, difficult user growth ‘hump’ — and build a user-base that’s big enough to power a super slick service — Reichen concedes there is “no silver bullet for growth” but also claims that the value of its service grows automatically over time because existing LocalUncle users won’t stay in the same place (users of the first version of the app will be “converted” over to LocalUncle 2).\n“Even if nobody checked in (which is impossible, since half of our user-base checks-in at least once every 24h) and even if nobody joined LocalUncle anymore, the service would stil get better, automatically, by the minute, for the existing users,” he says. “This is simply because our users move around. That anonymized location-data automatically ‘grows’ the service, because more and more neighbourhoods are added by our users in the background. So, even with zero usergrowth, the amount of places you can ask about on LocalUncle would keep growing steadily.”", "date": "12/17/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/localuncle-2-app-icon.png?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "app,qa", "title": "Real-Time Location-Based Q&A iPhone App, LocalUncle, Relaunches With Faster Tech, Slicker Interface, Same Grand Platform Plan", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/17/take-two-real-time-location-based-qa-iphone-app-localuncle-relaunches-with-faster-tech-slicker-interface-same-grand-plan/" }, { "id": 143, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "If you’re a bitcoin nerd, you’ll know that finding cheap, low-power mining hardware is pretty hard to do. USB “thumb drive” miners are traditionally woefully underpowered – the little mining rig under my desk right now is running three three BlockErupters and I’m essentially paying for the pleasure of mining bitcoin – but this 11GH/s unit seems to have what it takes to at least make a dent in the blockchain.\nConfused as to what this does? Read my tutorial for a bit of context. Essentially this board runs the calculations that makes bitcoin work and, more importantly, runs them fast enough to earn you a little money.\nIt’s sold by ASICRunner and is in stock right now. At a little over $265, it’s affordable to the average miner and it can run on a standard USB hub and host machine, which seems to include the Raspberry Pi. It uses last year’s Bitfury chips, special ASIC designed for mining, on a “stick” board with a single USB jack. This means you can place a bunch of these on a hub and because they aren’t as power-hungry as a traditional ASIC you don’t have to worry about them overheating.\nWill you make much money with this rig? Probably not. It’s essentially baby’s first bitcoin miner and you’ll max out at about $15 a month until the difficulty goes up too far for this device to even be effective. However it’s an exciting change in the mining landscape and well worth considering if you want to attach a few of these together and try to make your money back that way.\nvia Cryptocoinsnews", "date": "4/4/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/img_3103.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "bitfury,bitcoin", "title": "The 11GH/S HexFury Is The Latest In Low-Power ASIC Bitcoin Miners", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/04/the-11ghs-hexfury-will-is-the-latest-in-low-power-asic-bitcoin-miners/" }, { "id": 144, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Twitter is on double time these days when it comes to rolling out new products and pressing ahead under new CEO Jack Dorsey — a strategy that will likely get a decent gust of air Wednesday during the company’s Flight developer conference. In the meantime, TechCrunch understands that there is another area where Twitter is looking to expand: customer care, positioning Twitter as a better replacement for 1-800 numbers and online contact forms.\nCustomer service should not come as too much of a surprise for those who use Twitter: the company already has a decent amount of traffic from people who take to Twitter to complain about (or praise) brands, or ask questions of them.\nAnd even without any specific customer service products, Tweets to B2C brands are growing at 50 percent each year, Twitter said in August when it made an announcement about its intentions to do more in customer care.\nTwo companies, Sprout Social and Oracle, have been working to develop solutions for businesses who want to use Twitter as a platform for interacting with customers.\nGnip (the big-data group Twitter acquired in 2014) has been behind the data feed that businesses like Sprout and Oracle will use to power those customer service tools. Oracle declined to discuss the service it is building, while Sprout confirmed it has a live a Twitter-based customer service product, but would not specify how it’s priced or what the terms of its commercial relationship with Twitter is.\n(Twitter also published a 122-page white paper when it announced the Oracle and Sprout partnerships, with case studies from companies like Hilton, T-Mobile and Nokia showing how the social network was already being used for customer service initiatives.)\nThe August announcement was light on detail and seemed to get little notice when it came out. But in the meantime we have picked up more specifics from from inside Twitter, which has been working internally and with partners on building a more formal set of customer care business tools.\nThere are several different areas that the company is considering.\nThey include the ability to search and surface real-time relationships between businesses and the individuals who interact with them, so that a customer rep can get a better sense of a customer’s tone and history with the company. (For example, to identify a persistent problem with a user’s phone connection versus identifying someone who straight up dislikes the company in question, no matter what.)\nAnother involves creating a way to better prioritize requests for help that come through on Twitter. This might be based on responding to Tweets more quickly if they are getting more engagement — especially if they are negative — before they have a chance to go viral and damage a brand more.\n(There could be a snag with this one. Prioritizing based on engagement might mean that if you haven’t lucked out in inadvertently creating a viral sensation with your complaint Tweet, or if you have minimal followers who will see what you wrote, you may end up getting sent to the bottom of the heap and ignored.)\nA third area is around the idea of how to structure conversations with customers. Often, the default progression of a Twitter conversation is to send someone to email or phone to continue the conversation after Twitter contact is made. The idea here seems to be figuring out how to both initiate but also complete the customer request without leaving Twitter’s platform but remaining secure and private, and potentially feeding into larger CRM databases.\nBeyond what Twitter has announced, executives at the company see customer service as a key part of Twitter’s future business.\nOne source described it to TechCrunch as just as potentially important as what Twitter has been building in advertising. But even without that possible hyperbole, others are also hinting at the possibilities in public appearances.\nBoard member, former CEO and co-founder Ev Williams, speaking at a Re/code event earlier this month, highlighted how Twitter’s role as a place for customer interactions goes back far in its history, but also how it’s a big business opportunity for the future.\n“In 2008 or 2009, before we monetized at all, we saw 1 million people sign up to follow Starbucks… That is incredible commercial value,” he said. “We saw companies large and small, Twitter formed a connection between brands that didn’t really have a community channel. Now it’s a major source for customer service and marketing, there’s a robust business there… That part’s always been very powerful [and] as the utility and business grows that naturally grows with it.”\nYou can see how this is a logical move for the company.\nFor starters, it could help position Twitter as a larger and more sticky player in the area of business services, as a platform to facilitate all kinds of B2C interactions, from customer service through to marketing and advertising and maybe even selling products, too.\nA more formal customer care offering is also potentially filling a gap. According to analysts at SocialBakers, there have been 21 million questions asked on Twitter this year so far this year, with carriers, airlines and finance companies topping the list of those being contacted by customers on Twitter. But there’s a gap in how many get answered: just 30% on average, the analysts say.\nAnd as more brands use Twitter as a customer care channel, it makes Twitter more useful to regular consumers, who might visit more frequently as a result.\nCome to complain, stay for the Vines and news updates. For a platform that has faced criticism for lacking mainstream appeal, customer service could be one weird trick to help Twitter’s engagement.", "date": "10/20/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/twitter-up.png?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "customer-service", "title": "With Customer Care, Twitter Wants To Sharpen Its Profile As A Platform To Do Business", "topics": "twitter", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/20/with-customer-care-twitter-wants-to-sharpen-its-profile-as-a-platform-to-do-business/" }, { "id": 145, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "European mobile payments player, iZettle, which offers smaller merchants the ability to process card payments via its mobile card readers, is expanding into what amounts to small business loans — announcing a capital advance product, called iZettle Advance, which will be available to select iZettle customers who need funds to grow their own businesses. So it’s basically moving onto even more of the territory where traditional banks fear to tread.\niZettle Advance will be rolled out gradually in its European markets starting with the Nordics, says CEO Jacob de Geer. The startup’s fastest growing markets at this stage are the Nordics, the U.K. and Brazil — although he adds it currently has no plans to offer the Advance product in Latin America at this point.\nThere’s no word on what proportion of its customers could be granted loans at this stage. The amount that can be borrowed will also depend on the business in question, so on factors such as how much revenue they are processing on a monthly or yearly basis (a figure which iZettle is of course privy to, given its existing role processing their card payments).\nExpanding into offering a capital advance product is a bid to tackle another pain-point for small businesses, says de Geer. “Everyone told us that getting access to capital to growth their business was something they were all looking for but nothing they could find from the traditional banks. So with that in mind we thought this was a suitable product for them,” he adds.\niZettle customers will be pre-assessed for the financing so there’s no application process — to minimize the admin burden on SMEs.\n“There’s such a big gap in the market,” he adds. “Small businesses are looking for simple solutions and instant access — and we think we can provide them with that, with the current platform set-up that we have.”\nClearly there’s a customer retention play here too, given the capital advances will only be offered to existing — and presumably longer term — iZettle users. There’s also a platform lock-in element, as loans are paid back automatically as a fraction of the customer’s card sales. Bottom line: you’re less likely to switch to another mobile card payments provider if your card payment processing is tied up with paying back a business advance to your current provider.\nThe rate at which the loans can be paid back can also vary, based on the customer’s month to month sales — to better fit with the dynamics of smaller businesses, says iZettle. And there’s no interest charges. It’s a fixed fee for the advance, which also varies per customer. The amount that can be borrowed is a moveable feast too — once again depending on the business in question.\nde Geer says iZettle is leveraging what it knows about its existing users to be able to extend them the offer of business financing, although he says it’s also doing some additional risk assessment — such as looking at “more traditional measures”, like credit rating.\n“We have a pretty sophisticated on-boarding process since we have to deal with risk with every merchant that we on-board, both from a regulatory compliance perspective but also from a risk perspective. We can leverage pretty much on the things that we’ve come to learn over the last five years,” he says.\n“We add on top the history that the merchant has with us, over the time that they’ve been a customer — since this is a product that will only be offered to iZettle customers and not to anyone,” he adds.\nThe loans product is being financed by iZettle initially, according to de Geer — rather than it working with a bank partner to provide capital for the loans. Although he says they may look to change how the product is funded in future, depending on how it performs and scales. Presumably even potentially ending up working with the banks who have traditionally been less than keen to loan to the segment of the business market iZettle addresses.\n“Right now we’re doing it by ourselves. I would assume that if the product proves successful, which we strongly believe, I wouldn’t be surprised if we tried to fund it in another way. I think time will tell. But if we get the advance big enough and get it across multiple markets I think we’re going to need to rethink how we fund this,” he tells TechCrunch.\nThe initial launch is being funded by a new round of Series D finance for iZettle, also announced today. The round of €60 million ($67M) is led by prior investors Intel Capital and Zouk Capital. Existing investors Creandum, Dawn Capital, Index Ventures, Northzone and 83North also participated in the round.\nThe Series D investment will also be used for “continued growth” focused on iZettle’s existing products. “The market is far from saturated,” argues de Geer. “We have a great position in the European space and also LatAm that we can grow significantly in all the markets where we current play. There are also new markets. We’re currently in nine markets in Europe. There’s still a few to cover.”\nDoes it have any designs on entering the U.S. at this stage? Europe remains “very prioritized” for iZettle, says de Geer, but he adds it’s not ruled out launching over the pond. “We’re still looking into the U.S. market and the potential of launching in the U.S. Nothing has been decided,” he notes. In the U.S. there are of course more rivals to contend with — such as Square, a company de Geer names as the rival iZettle shares most business “DNA” with.\nMeanwhile, here in Europe, yesterday another of iZettle’s rivals in the mobile payments space, SumUp, also pulled in a new tranche of financing — announcing a €10 million expansion to its fifth round, from investors including BBVA Ventures, Groupon and American Express. SumUp tells TechCrunch it now has more than 300,000 customers, and is anticipating breaking even next year.\nIts latest funding will be used to expand onto iZettle’s home turf of Sweden this year, along with another unnamed market that’s switching to EMV payments as its market standard later this year. Those two new additions will bring SumUp’s operational count to 15 markets.\nAlso on the slate for its new funds: a new proprietary NFC card terminal model that’s compatible with Apple Pay. It says it’s currently testing this in a closed beta, with no announced timeframe for shipping it to merchants yet.\niZettle has already launched a product in the U.K. which supports Apple Pay and other contactless payment solutions. “We see both Apple Pay and Samsung Pay as the first true mobile payments play that we believe will fuel this growing industry,” notes de Geer.\niZettle isn’t breaking out customer numbers at this stage but he says it’s making a conscious decision to expand its product portfolio — via the new small business financing offer — in order to continue growing the business, rather than driving for profitability at this point. Is that a necessity, given the small margins in the mobile payments space (one of the reasons that, historically, banks have focused their efforts on monetizing larger business entities)?\n“Yes and no,” says Geer. “It’s fair to say that there are other products with better margins [than payments] but still I would say that the current product has really taken us to a position where we can decide whether we would want to be profitable or whether we want to continue growing, obviously with a loss.\n“I think we are at that junction. I think this [Advance product] just makes a lot of sense. We’re so heavily regulated, and we can use that regulation to actually launch similar products. And solve problems in the same kind of merchant category we’re currently in.”", "date": "8/28/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/cyn8okcng665iv0hkj8ph-tlcbqxrycninzdbuhmfku.png?w=738", "section": "europe/", "tags": "izettle-advanced,financing,mobile-payments,izettle", "title": "iZettle Gets $67M To Expand From Mobile Payments To Small Business Financing", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/28/izettle-moves-into-business-financing/" }, { "id": 146, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "Browser-maker Opera has been making a lot of headlines of late — with last week’s announcement of its big strategic shift to WebKit. Followed hard on the heels by the news of its $155 million purchase of Skyfire. But the Norwegian software maker’s decision to abandon its own web-rendering engine in favour of the defacto WebKit standard, has had another, less visible impact: the company has reportedly dismantled a core technology developer team, according to Norwegian publication digi.no, letting some very long serving employees go.\nUpdate: Opera has now confirmed the downsizing to TechCrunch. See below for CEO Lars Boilesen’s comments.\nDigi.no reports that a team of around 100 Opera developers in its Core Technology division has shrunk by more than 90 positions, with “a large contingent” taking a severance package before Christmas — “including veterans Yngve Pettersen, André Shultz and Lasse Magnussen” — and a further 50 to 70 taking redundancy in January. (Magnussen’s LinkedIn profile indicates he left Opera last month, after 14 years and eight months with the company — with his last role listed as being in the “core dept.”.)\nAsked about his move, Magnussen told TechCrunch: “The process, from Opera’s side, was done, IMO, very professionally and the severance package we were offered was voluntary as well as substantial.” He added that package was “just what [he] needed to take the plunge”, noting that Opera hasn’t “been the same” since founder Jon S von Tetzchner left.\nSome of the Core developers have moved on to other departments within Opera, according to Digi.no — although it is not clear exactly how many have stayed on in new roles. The publication notes that Opera’s last quarterly report included a line stating it had reduced staff from 931 to 840 employees, but says the company has refrained from discussing the specifics of the downsizing.\nDigi.no quotes Opera HR Director Tove Selnes confirming certain aspects of the downsizing. “This reorganization has been resolved in cooperation with the individual,” she is quoted as saying (via Google Translate). “We’ve come to terms with about 90 people, both in development and not development-related departments.”\nShe goes on to add that the move to WebKit will create more new “final product” roles within Opera than the company has ever had.\nAt the time of writing Opera had not responded to requests for comment. We’ll be updating this story with any additional information. Update: Opera CEO, Lars Boilesen, confirmed the cuts are linked to its switch to WebKit. “We will still have a Core team but it will be less people going forward,” he told TechCrunch.\nBoilesen was unable to confirm the exact size of the post-switch Core team, as he said developers will work on other activities in addition to Core roles. But he said that overall, the size of the developer team at Opera now numbers “around 600″. Of the around 90 jobs that have gone in the Core team, around half were developer roles — with many other less technical roles such as checking website compatibility something Opera has been freed up from by moving to WebKit.\n“Today we are living in a world where there are very few platforms for mobile, very few platforms for Windows, very few platforms on tablets… We think WebKit’s good enough, to switch, and by doing that we free up a lot of resources,” he said.\nAs Opera reduces its Core team, it is ramping up its product focus, said Boilesen — and that’s what redeployed Core engineers who have not left the company are likely to be focusing on. “We tried to take our best Core people and move them to product lines so we can get really exciting new stuff out… We have now double the amount of people on desktop. We’re coming out with a brand new UI, brand new product in Q3. We’re coming out with a new beta version for smartphones with a new native look and feel. We’re coming out with a new tablet product… so we’re pretty excited about this but the unfortunate thing is we don’t need so many engineers,” he added.\nLast week Opera said it now has 300 million users of all its browser products, across mobile, tablets, PCs and TVs.", "date": "2/18/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/opera_software_logo.png?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "browser,opera", "title": "Opera Shrinks In-House Developer Team As It Prepares Shift To WebKit", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/opera-shrinks-in-house-developer-team-as-it-prepares-shift-to-webkit/" }, { "id": 147, "authors": "Kim-Mai Cutler", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "While there are plenty of enterprise mobility and device management companies, they may not go deeply enough in controlling the end-user experience for an employee or a customer.\nMany of these enterprise mobility startups use standalone apps that a tablet user can switch in and out of to the browser. That might be a security risk for restaurants that, for example, want to let their customers order from an iPad or a distraction for teachers that want to manage attention in the classroom.\nAnfacto, a startup with talent from Google and an earlier company called 3LM that Motorola acquired, is building custom versions of the Android OS that let enterprises offer single-purpose devices for the workplace, conferences or the classroom.\n“This is a level of control you can’t have with an application,” said CEO Hristo Bojinov.\nAnfacto’s Android variant called FleetOS could let customers like UPS give their drivers Android tablets that they can use exclusively for tasks like scanning packages.\n“The idea is that we can lock down the experience from a user standpoint,” Bojinov said. “The customer can go in and decide what applications and features can be run.”\nHe said a conference could give away tablets to attendees and push applications to them while they’re roaming around the event. Or a company like TaskRabbit or Uber could give their contractors phones specifically for managing errands or drives. Or they could partner with a hardware maker that wants to make tablets exclusively for kids with only specific, child-friendly apps.\nThe company is already profitable through a few early contracts, and took some strategic funding from DoCoMo Capital. They say FleetOS competes against expensive legacy solutions in the older Windows PC market.\nBojinov said he got the idea for the company because so many hardware makers were asking for it. Their solution has a policy server where an IT administrator can set the rules for what’s allowed or disallowed on their devices. They can also manage graphical resources like wall papers to offer a more customized or personal experience.\nThe company has 12 people on its team, with most of them in Palo Alto. They’re also opening an office in Bulgaria, where Bojinov grew up.", "date": "9/30/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/screen-shot-2013-09-28-at-11-25-53-am.png?w=400", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "", "title": "Anfacto Lets You Create Single-Purpose Android Devices For The Workplace, Restaurants And Events", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/30/anfacto-2/" }, { "id": 148, "authors": "Alex Williams", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Insightly has raised $10 million for its CRM service that integrates with Gmail, Outlook, Office 365 and other services. Emergence Capital Partners, Sozo Ventures and TrueBridge Capital Partners participated in the Series B round led by Matt Holleran, founder and managing director of Cloud Apps Management. Insightly has now raised a total of $13 million.\nThe company, which serves more than 184,000 customers in 100 countries, will use the funding to localize the service, hire new employees and extend marketing to its international markets.\nInsightly enhances its email app with hooks into calendars, an address book, tags and a host of other services, such as custom filtering. The company is also putting an emphasis as well on its mobile apps, which are increasingly a critical aspect of a small business arsenal.\nFounder and CEO Anthony Smith said that small businesses are realizing that even when they are getting started, CRM systems are invaluable for engaging with customers. To engage these more sophisticated customers requires providing freemium services, a core aspect of what Insightly offers.\nThe success of a startup is increasingly defined by the way it turns a web experience into a transaction. Big sales deals are the rarity in this new market reality. Freemium services are now the standard more than anything else.\nThe small business CRM market is growing fast, especially with the advent of mobile devices. Insightly competes with popular services, such as High Rise and Capsule CRM, but it also faces tough competition from popular new services, including Streak, an app that puts Gmail in a wrapper to deliver a lead-based service that allows companies to leverage the popular email service.", "date": "9/12/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/insightly.png?w=128", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "crm,insightly", "title": "Insightly Raises $10M For CRM Service Wrapped In An Email App", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/12/insightly-raises-10m-for-crm-service-wrapped-in-an-email-app/" }, { "id": 149, "authors": "Alex Williams", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Monetate has raised $8 million for its platform that helps companies such as Best Buy increase their sales through the analysis of information from multiple sources such as interactions with the web site, email data and search engine information. The Series C round brings the company’s total funding to $43 million. Existing investors OpenView Venture Partners, Common Fund and Lead Edge Capital participated in the round.\nThe service is designed to sit on top of a company’s infrastructure. Customers add to the header of their sites a JavaScript tag, which combines data from a user’s visit with other data sources to create a more detailed profile. This data is then used to deliver a personalized experience. Using the Monetate dashboard, for example, users can target customers from particular regions. Real-time weather data and other data then gets pulled in, giving a retailer the ability to offer hiking boots if the weather is expected to be decent over the weekend.\nThreadless, the community site that makes, supports and buys art, has used Monetate to improve the experience of using its outdated mobile site. After getting a baseline on the quality of the site, they used Monetate to begin targeting customers.\nMonetate is a cloud service, more well-suited to larger customers. On TrustRadius one customer writes:\nMonetate also competes with Adobe, WebTrends, SiteSpect and Optimizely.\nPhysical retailers need more sophisticated ways to target customers across multiple channels. There’s a big market there but the challenges will increasingly come from data analytics providers that can offer APIs to pull data and make recommendations at a level of sophistication compared to Amazon.com.\n\n", "date": "12/5/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/resources-monetate-com_ios_images_profile_real_images_59114844icon59114844-pdf.png?w=400", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "", "title": "Monetate Raises $8M To Help Companies Target Online Customers", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/monetate-raises-8m-to-help-companies-target-online-customers/" }, { "id": 150, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Fundings & Exits", "content": "Not every company or brand needs to be accessible by a downloadable app distributed through a mobile application store, like iTunes or Google Play. Meanwhile, building out massive web destinations also doesn’t make sense in the mobile era, where content is increasingly consumed in “bite-sized” chunks. A company called Wrap Media, which now has $3.5 million in Series A funding from FF Angel LLC and Raine Ventures, is working on developing an alternative with what it’s calling “wraps” –   smaller stories delivered as card-based, swipe-able content that arrives by way of the mobile browser.\nIt’s easier to understand a “wrap” by viewing one for yourself, which you can do from this link, for example, if you click on it from a mobile device. After launching the wrap, you can swipe through the pages left and right, and swipe up and down to see more content. You can even watch embedded YouTube videos, or tap through links to connect with the brand on social media.\nPotential use cases include everything from being able to share stories like the wrap referencing an art installation linked above to being able to embed coupons or merchandise you can buy directly from the automated emails businesses send out, like digital receipts or order confirmations, for example.\nBut what Wrap Media has built, to be clear, is not another mobile website creation service, but rather what founder Eric Greenberg refers to as a “presentation layer” which can sit on top of any platform. The wraps are initially being delivered by way of the mobile web, but he says the long-term goal is to be able to serve these experiences from anywhere, whether that’s the small screen of a mobile phone, or even the living room TV.\nGreenberg previously founded several companies, including systems integrators Scient and Viant, which were backed by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Capital and others. But the idea for Wrap Media initially grew out of a mobile social gifting app he was building which used a card-based user interface. As it turned out, the interface itself had more potential than the app, so he pivoted the company to focus only on that aspect of the business around a year ago.\n\nWith Wrap’s web-based authoring tool, companies can build app-like messages using tools that are as simple to use as Microsoft PowerPoint. The messages can be shared as a link anywhere – email, SMS, or social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. They’re meant to serve as a new format for mobile marketing – allowing companies and brands to tell their stories without having to invest significant resources in development and design, while still looking like they did.\nInstead, “wraps” can be built in as little as 15 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the length and content included.\n“This is a story that can’t be told today…because you’d have to develop something from scratch. And to do something like this, is a minimum of six figures,” explains Greenberg. “So instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with developers and designers, you can literally create these interactive experiences with a junior marketing manager, with no code and no design experience,” he says.\nThe company already has a half-dozen customers it can name, including CBS Interactive, Loverly, StumbleUpon, and a few e-commerce brands and retailers. However, Wrap Media is in various stages of discussions with around 50 other companies.\nPricing for the service, still in private beta, is priced both as a software-as-a-service and on a transactional basis, depending on the customer, though exact price points are still in flux. While cheaper than the hundreds of thousands one would pay for high-level design teams, Wrap is not exactly “cheap.” The service will start at around $300-$500 per month per user on the small business side, but is targeted more so at large enterprise customers.\nThe company now has $3.5 million in funding, which includes $3 million from Founders Fund’s seed stage fund FF Angel LLC and Raine Ventures, with the remaining $500,000 from Greenberg himself. He also seeded the company with $2.5 million of his own, bringing the total raise to date to $6 million.\nWrap Media expects to release to the public this September.", "date": "4/14/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/coachella-astronaut-iphone.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "wrap-media", "title": "Wrap Raises $3.5M For App-Like Marketing Tools That Work Over The Mobile Web", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/wrap-raises-3-5m-for-app-like-marketing-tools-that-work-over-the-mobile-web/" }, { "id": 151, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Despite its potential, the jury is arguably still out on the best use-case for Augmented Reality. But one startup, Augment, thinks it has the answer: helping to sell products by letting customers see what they might look like in the real world.\nA graduate of the Paris-based accelerator Le Camping, today the company is announcing a €220k (~$289k) funding round — capital it will use to take its offering to the U.S., where it has recently hired a biz dev and sales person, and incorporated a local subsidiary.\nTargeting e-commerce sites, catalogs and sales people out in the field, Augment offers a platform where 3D models can be uploaded, and free apps for iOS and Android to let customers visualize products/designs embedded in their environment in “real size”. So, for example, you might be shopping for a new couch and by using Augment you’d be able to see how it looks and fits within your actual living room, through the view finder of your iPad.\nThe advantage of using Augmented Reality as a sales tool is that it increases engagement and conversion rates, and lowers the likelihood of a product being returned because it didn’t look how the customer had imagined. Or so the pitch goes. “In short, it removes the uncertainty from buying online or from a catalog,” says co-founder Jean-François Chianetta.\nCompetitors in the Augmented Reality platform space include Aurasma, Blippar and Metaio. “Our differentiator is that we provide the easiest platform to visualize your own 3D models in Augmented Reality,” says Chianetta. “We let people register to our upload interface, upload their models and share them right away.”\nFurthermore, he says that unlike others Augment doesn’t do “games, dancing characters or advertising campaigns” and is 100% focused on using Augmented Reality to help sell. “We provide augmented reality as a service so our customers don’t need to do big upfront investments to benefit from it.”\nThe company monetizes in a number of ways including charging to embed the Augment button on e-commerce sites, an “offline” mode for sales people taking the iOS or Android app out on the road, and print integration.\nToday’s new funding comes from a group of Paris-based angel investors: Tristan Vyskoc, an active investor in startups in the Parisian ecosystem; Laurent Therezien, a web entrepreneur who was part of Lastminute.com and Voyage-Privé; Olivier Mathiot, co-founder and currently VP of Marketing and Communication of PriceMinister; and Nicolas Vauvilliez, who was COO at LeGuide.com and is now owner and CEO of 1001 Maquettes.", "date": "4/17/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/augment_screenshot6.jpg?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "augment", "title": "Le Camping Alumni Augment Raises €220K To Take Its Augmented Reality Sales Tool To The U.S.", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/augment/" }, { "id": 152, "authors": "Matthew Panzarino", "category": "Finance", "content": "Target CEO Brian Cornell said today at the Code conference that the company is committed to offering Apple Pay as an option for customers. “I’d love to have Apple Pay in our system right now,” said Cornell, adding that he sat down with Tim Cook and explained that Target would be supporting it.\nBut the rollout, he said, will have to wait until Target rolls out the required chip and pin upgrades to adhere to new standards. Chip and pin (or chip and signature) machines are ubiquitous in almost every other developed nation, but the U.S. is just getting around to sending out chipped cards and firing up terminals capable of taking the higher security cards. My own personal debit card just got a chip last month and I had to request it on my credit cards.\n“People in our space are under attack,” said Cornell, explaining that he didn’t want to distract the team rolling out their chip and pin upgrades to all of their stores by adding in additional variables like Apple Pay.\nThe reason that Cornell is so gun-shy about security is obviously due to its incredibly high-profile hacking in 2013, where an enormous amount of credit card numbers were stolen. That breach cost Target an estimated $162 million in 2013 and 2014 and resulted in the hiring of Cornell, Target’s first outside CEO.\nApple Pay is currently offered in a host of retailers like Whole Foods, Walgreens and more. Best Buy announced in April that it would offer Apple Pay in its iOS apps that day and in its U.S. retail stores later this year.", "date": "5/27/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/img_3461.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "brian-cornell,target", "title": "Target Wants To Offer Apple Pay, But Focus Is On Chip And Pin", "topics": "apple,apple-pay", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/27/target-wants-to-offer-apple-pay-but-focus-is-on-chip-and-pin/" }, { "id": 153, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "Wearables continue to be an area of focus for device makers, large and small. Here’s another would-be entrant to the space: Tinitell is a wearable phone and GPS tracker for kids, with electronics small enough for the whole device to be strapped to a toddler’s wrist.\nIt’s the work of a Swedish startup, founded last year, which has taken to Kickstarter to raise $100,000 to turn its prototype into a shipping commercial product by April next year. At the time of writing they are just shy of $30,000 pledged, with 29 days left of the campaign to run.\nAs well as being small, Tinitell is designed for basic operation. This connected wearable doesn’t have a screen on the device itself, with just a hardware button to activate the interface, and voice recognition to summon a particular contact.\nSay ‘Mum’ and it will call the assigned number based on that pre-recorded voice label. There is also a way to cycle through contacts manually, using physical volume keys, and wait until the device has spoken the name of the contact you want to call.\nThe voice interface is based on matching what’s being said to pre-recorded name labels, rather than being fully fledged voice recognition software — which helps keep the processing power requirements down.\nContacts are added to the device via Tinitell’s website or via an app. This also allows for parents to manage who can contact their child’s device, and also locate it on a map should they need to.\nTinitell takes a 2G GSM SIM for connectivity, to power the voice calls and GPS tracking. It’s battery powered, and apparently good for an hour’s talk time on a single charge or seven days on standby. It’s also water resistant and sandbox proof, to ensure it’s robust enough for outdoor child’s play.\n“I came up with the idea for Tinitell when I was hanging out with a friend who is also a father,” says founder Mats Horn. “His son wanted to go outside and play, but he didn’t have a cell phone. He had lost a cell phone once before, and we didn’t feel like lending out our smartphones. Worst of all, we couldn’t join him outside because we were busy cooking dinner. His son ended up playing in his room with his iPad, and I thought that was sad.\n“I loved being outside when I was a kid… This led me to think there should be a simple mobile phone for kids, nothing advanced, just a nicely designed speaker and microphone to handle quick ‘hellos’ and ‘come heres’.”\nHorn argues that market for a simple mobile for kids is “largely untapped” — although it must be said that there are a lot of kids phones already out there. But the wearable aspect of Tinitell gives it the advantage of being harder for the child to lose than a phone. It’s also arguably less obtrusive than other GPS tracker systems for parents to keep tabs on kids, such as Locca. Whether those are big enough advantages to get parents flocking to buy Tinitell remains to be seen.\nWearable devices are certainly going through a sort of Cambrian Explosion of incarnations at present, as companies try to figure out the use cases and form factors that stick. (On the not-going-to-stick front, I’m pretty sure you can write off the ridiculously unwieldy Rufus Cuff, for one.)\nTinitell’s bet is there is space for dedicated connected kids’ wearables. And they are not the only startup to think so — the Moff Bluetooth bangle is a wearable toy that augments the gestures of play with sound effects. There’s also the Guardian Bluetooth Low Energy-powered tracker wristband, also designed specifically for parents to keep tabs on kids.\nCost is likely to be a key factor in whether these kids’ wearables flourish or perish. Tinitell is being offered to early Kickstarter backers starting from $99 — rising to $149 once early pledge levels are claimed. So it’s not exactly cheap.\nTinitell’s Horn says he’s been funding development on the device through private stipends and loans, thus far. The startup also won Sweden’s largest entrepreneurship competition in 2013.", "date": "4/30/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/screen-shot-2014-04-30-at-1-40-16-pm.png?w=638", "section": "europe/", "tags": "gps-tracker,wearables,tinitell", "title": "Tinitell Is A Wearable Phone And GPS Tracker For Kids", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/30/tinitell-kickstarter/" }, { "id": 154, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Europe", "content": "The PC industry may be shaken up by the rapid encroachment of tablets into consumer and enterprise spending habits — a trend that’s seeing lighter devices like the iPad, as well as cheaper tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and more, eat into the market share of bigger and more expensive computers. But it’s all a matter of perspective: today IDC said that it’s actually lowering forecasts for tablet shipments this year and in the future.\n“Growing competition”, IDC says, from smartphones with bigger screens (the recently-legitimized phablet) and wearables like smart watches, combined with a lack of exciting tablet product launches in Q2, are leading the analysts to says that there will be 227.4 million tablets shipped worldwide in 2013, down some 2 million from 229.3 million as previously estimated.\nYes, it’s not a huge drop, and you can argue that these are only estimates anyway. And it’s still some 57.7% higher than 2012 shipments. But IDC’s figures point to some themes that are worth watching for: whether even less-expensive tablets are possibly still too expensive for what consumers are willing to pay; whether even tablets — in some regards pared-down in functionality from PCs — are still too over specced for what many consumers want and need; and the issue of how much of our wallet we will want to dedicate to these products, as more of them enter the market.\nOn the enterprise side, IDC notes that right now, in fact, the tablet is pretty minor but is growing: It notes that tablet adoption in sectors like education and retail collectively accounted for 10% of all tablet sales in 2012, and that will only grow to 20% by 2017.\n\nIDC also notes that it’s starting to see more developed markets already take their feet off the gas in terms of rapid adoption, with “maturing markets such as the U.S. now expected to cede share more rapidly to emerging markets such as Asia/Pacific.” It predicts that by 2017 there will be 407 million tablets shipped.\nMore immediately, competitive pressures will mean lower prices for tablets coming soon, IDC notes. “We expect average selling prices to continue to compress as more mainstream vendors utilize low-cost components to better compete with the whitebox tablet vendors that continue to enjoy widespread traction in the market despite typically offering lower-quality products and poorer customer experiences,” writes Tom Mainelli, research director for tablets.\nIn terms of regional activity, IDC points out that North America, Western Europe and Japan, which had traditionally been the leaders in tablet adoption, are already seeing some slow-down in sales, compared to other parts of the world. Today they account for 60.8% of the market, but that will drop to 49% by 2017, with emerging markets making up the remaining 51%. (Another proof point for why it’s so important for companies like Google, Facebook and others to build out their businesses in these markets.)\n\n“Year-on-year growth is beginning to slow as the tablet market approaches early stages of maturity,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst for IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. “Much of the long-term growth will be driven by countries like China where projected growth rates will be consistently higher than the worldwide average.”", "date": "8/29/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/kids-on-tablets.jpg?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "phablets,tablets,idc,research", "title": "IDC Lowers 2013 Tablet Forecast To 227M, As Phablets And Wearables Crowd Into The Market", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/29/idc-lowers-tablet-forecasts-to-227m-units-in-2013-as-phablets-and-wearables-crowd-into-the-market-rapid-adoption-in-developed-countries-like-u-s-slows/" }, { "id": 155, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "A number of apps over the years have attempted to make it easier for friends to get together offline by helping them to plan everything from casual get-togethers to more formal events. Now Microsoft is taking a shot at this space with a new social polling app called Tossup. The app lets a group of friends vote on things like where and when to meet, what restaurant to choose, as well as RSVP. In addition, the app can also be used for general opinion-gathering.\nTossup is one of the latest projects to emerge from Microsoft Garage, the company’s program which works something like an internal accelerator at Microsoft, allowing employees and teams to turn their ideas into real-world projects, many of them being cross-platform mobile apps. Recent Garage releases have included things like social apps for trip tracking or seeing what people are chatting about nearby, Android lockscreens, an alternative mobile keyboard for Excel users, an Android Wear search app, news and weather apps, games, and much more.\nWith Tossup, the focus is largely on simplifying event planning. To use the app, you first have to register with both your phone number and Facebook or your email. Then, you can create the question or questions you want to send out to friends, either using Tossup’s own polling options (e.g. “Where should we go for lunch?”) or you can write your own. In the case of determining a venue, the app lets you pull up nearby restaurants via Yelp to include in your poll.\nTo get friends’ input, you invite them to chime in via a link that’s sent out via email or text message, if they’re not already on the app. When a friend clicks the link, they’re prompted to install the app in order to participate in the poll. If the app is installed, the link will take them right to the poll question itself.\n\nAs recipients vote, their selections are shown visually in the app, and a “comments” section allows users to further discuss their upcoming plans by way of a text chat interface.\nWhile the app is best used for event planning, you can also use it to ask any sort of question, which puts it into competition with other social polling apps like Straw, Rudder, Cinch, Polar (Google acqui-hired the team but the product lives on), and many more.\nTossup is available on both iOS and Android as a free download – Microsoft doesn’t generally charge for its Microsoft Garage apps, as the organization is more interested in just getting the projects out there in the wild and seeing what sort of consumer feedback or adoption follows.\nTossup’s arrival follows on the heels of Microsoft Garage’s recent release of a wave of five other projects, a JavaScript software library called Maker.js, and apps including InstaNote, Work Item Studio, and Receipt Tracker, plus a Surface Pro 3 dock called 3-in-1 Dock. In total, Microsoft Garage is now home to over two dozen different projects.", "date": "7/6/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/tossup2.png?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "", "title": "Microsoft’s New Tossup App Lets You Poll Your Friends, Plan Events", "topics": "microsoft", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/06/microsofts-new-tossup-app-lets-you-poll-your-friends-plan-events/" }, { "id": 156, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Apps", "content": "Pan-European train travel booking website Loco2 has launched its first smartphone app, letting iOS users book and pay for trips via a dedicated app. Launching an Android app is also on its roadmap for this year.\nThe London-based site, which was founded all the way back in 2006 and was one of the first European travel startups to gain access to major train company booking systems, now has more than 120,000 paying customers, according to co-founder Jamie Andrews. (It does not break out an active user metric as it does not require users to register in order to make a booking.)\n“We made well over £10m of sales in 2015,” he tells TechCrunch. “[We] took the decision in July to raise further investment rather than go for profitability at this stage. We’ve subsequently expanded our team and marketing efforts — for example we just launched an advertising campaign on the London Underground.”\nWhile he says France was Loco2’s best market by far initially — unsurprisingly so, given the country’s size and investment in high speed rail infrastructure — Andrews says growth is coming from more areas now.\n“Spain and Italy have grown strongly since the beginning of last summer,” he says. “Recently we’ve seen a big increase in UK sales, demonstrating the appetite amongst our users for domestic UK bookings, and in part providing the rationale for developing mobile applications.”\nIt may seem an oddity that a digital business with so many years’ operation under its belt is only now getting around to launching apps but given the complexity of hooking together multiple European train companies on a single booking platform, Loco2’s initial focus was on fundamentals like securing access to real-time train data and integrating with operators’ booking systems. tl;dr pan-European rail booking platforms are not built in a day.\n“Following the launch of our Trenitalia integration last year we now have the ‘big five’ in Western Europe (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy) so our geographical coverage is largely complete,” he notes, adding: “We’ve also doubled the size of our tech team in the last nine months, so have been able to focus on mobile/UX in addition to ongoing improvements to the back-end.”\nIn terms of user demand for mobile, Andrews says Loco2 has been seeing a substantial increase in the number of people booking domestic trains via its platform – which in turn has made having a mobile app more of an imperative.\n“A year ago 95 per cent of customers were booking trains outside of their home country; this has now dropped to closer to 70 per cent outside of peak holiday-booking season, demonstrating that users want to use Loco2 for all their train travel not just their holidays,” he says. “Domestic bookings are much more frequent and more suited to apps.”\nLast month almost a third (31 per cent) of Loco2 sessions were booked via its mobile site. “We expect mobile to increase now that we have an app and are catering more to the domestic travel market,” he adds.\nInterestingly, while the Loco2 founders’ raison d’etre for launching the business was to simplify booking and routing challenges involved in specifically planning long distance train travel across Europe, Andrews does not rule out adding additional modes of transport in future – “if we see demand for that”.\nThere are now multiple multi-modal travel booking startups operating in the region, such as GoEuro and Rome2Rio, aiming to serve demand and grow usage by combining transport options to offer people more choice on routes, timings and price. Loco2 has stuck steadfastly to rails so far, although it has also inked a partnership with multi-modal player Rome2Rio.\nMeanwhile, other travel startups, such as car sharing platform blablacar, are also bringing private transport options into the European travel planning mix, to further expand the ways and means  travelers can use to carry out a trip — while also, inexorably, expanding the competitive mix. The prices of long distance trips on blablacar are typically far cheaper than the cost of traveling by rail (although trips may well also take far longer).\nDiscussing the competitive landscape, Andrews names KKR-owned Trainline, which recently acquired French train booking platform Captain Train, as its main rival but flags up that Loco2 does not take booking or payment card fees from users, unlike Trainline. He also name-checks GoEuro as a rival, at least in part. But goes on to say he is confident Loco2 has superior routing options vs its main competitors — thanks to greater market reach (such as covering Spain’s rail network).\n“Loco2 excels at genuine pan-European travel thanks to the big investments we’ve made in routing — Loco2 returns results for searches like Edinburgh-Milan or Cologne-Madrid. Despite the funding and acquisition fanfare, both Trainline and GoEuro fail at such itineraries, and no-one else in the market comes close,” he argues.\nLoco2 raised a further £670k in angel investment back in July 2015, although its funding levels are far more modest than others in the space — with only around £1 million in seed funding raised from business angels prior to its last raise. Whereas GoEuro, for example, pulled in a $45 million Series B back in December, led by Goldman Sachs.\nAndrews says Loco2 is now considering taking in more from investment to continue to grow the business — including by expanding into new markets. “We could choose to head for breakeven now but we don’t want to throttle our considerable growth potential, so we’re currently looking at possible VC/private equity options,” he says.\nThe advantage of being an early digital mover in a very traditional industry, which required securing hard-won agreements with slow-moving rail companies to access data and booking systems, is likely to count for less as other startups who came later to the market benefit from a more general opening up of core systems. So Loco2 will likely need to accelerate its product focus — such as by adding mobile apps — to keep being able to claim advantages over better resourced rivals.\nThere’s certainly little doubt the market is heating up now that it’s been opened up, and competition is going to get increasingly fierce — even if more people are tempted to book more European trips online.\nOne Loco2 feature Andrews flags up as a personal favorite is a times/seats overview enabling users who are booking complex travel itinerary to get an easy overview of “sophisticated journeys spanning multiple rail operators” at the point of purchase (pictured right) .\nAs well as aiming to smooth out travel planning wrinkles for its users, Andrews dubs customer service as a big priority for the business, with Loco2 — for instance — applying for compensation on behalf of users who book via its platform and go on to experience train delays.\n(On customer service generally, he points to the site achieving an average rating of 9.2/10 on Trustpilot after over 8,000 reviews — asserting this is “a claim that cannot be made by anyone else in the market”.)\nIn terms of growth potential from here on in, he says Loco2 is eyeing selling more tickets for European rail trips to people who live outside the region. While, within Europe, he notes there are some key national rail operators outside the five countries it covers that have not yet released APIs for third parties to integrate with.\n“We would love to work more closely with these rail operators to help them open up new sales channels,” he adds.", "date": "4/27/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/screen-shot-2016-04-27-at-7-54-42-pm.png?w=664", "section": "europe/", "tags": "app,ios,loco2", "title": "‘Europe by rail’ booking platform, Loco2, finally gets an app", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/27/europe-by-rail-booking-platform-loco2-finally-gets-an-app/" }, { "id": 157, "authors": "Kim-Mai Cutler", "category": "Apps", "content": "Kristian Segerstrale, the EA executive who was in charge of leading the company into a games-as-a-service era, has just left the company. CEO John Riccitiello just announced it in an internal memo and said that EA COO Peter Moore is taking on his responsibilities.\nSegerstrale came into EA through its $400 million acquisition of Playfish, a social games developer that he co-founded with a high school friend Sebastien de Halleux.\nThat deal was a watershed moment for the social gaming industry and an acknowledgment that virtual goods and currencies could represent a significant new revenue model for the industry. Disney quickly followed on with a $750 million deal to buy Facebook games developer Playdom. Although Zynga has had a rocky year following its debut as a public company, most of the largest and highest-grossing developers on iOS and Android employ a free-to-play model that includes purchases of virtual currencies and goods.\nSegerstrale was leading the charge on moving EA into this world where games are not sold as $50 or 60 dollar products off shelves, but instead are services that people subscribe to or pay for through virtual goods and currencies.\nInternally, it’s not a terribly surprising move. His co-founders Halleux and Sami Lababidi left in early 2011, while Segerstale chose to take on the challenge of moving an older, more bureaucratic gaming company with a market cap of more than $5 billion into a world where games are free-to-play. Riccitiello says that Segerstrale is going back into the world of startups, but we don’t have more details on his next move at this time.", "date": "2/26/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/kristian_segerstrale.jpg?w=360", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "EA’s Digital EVP, Playfish Co-Founder Kristian Segerstrale Departs", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/segerstrale-ea/" }, { "id": 158, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Drama", "content": "uBeam could be vaporware, according to a blogger claiming to be uBeam’s former VP of engineering. They accuse the startup of being unable to fulfill promises made about its technology. [Update: Reporter Lee Gomes confirmed with the author that they are former uBeam VP of Eng Paul Reynolds. More below]\nuBeam says it’s building a device that could wirelessly charge your phone or other electronics from several meters away. But in a series of blog posts about the startup, the author asserts that the product is a sham. The criticism will increase the pressure on uBeam to reveal a working prototype.\nTechCrunch cannot confirm these accusations or the identity of the blogger, and we’re awaiting a response from uBeam, but the blogger contends that:\n\nWe contacted uBeam; it did not provide comment. uBeam has repeatedly defended itself against past claims that its technology is impossible, saying it has made scientific breakthroughs, and citing high-profile additions of ultrasound experts to its team, advisors and investors as proof that it has potential.\nThe company has claimed that its critics aren’t privy to its proprietary technology and are making wrong assumptions about how it works. Perry, 25, has repeatedly told me the technology is in fact possible, and that it’s safe and efficient enough to be practical. Still, she’s repeatedly refused to provide a demo, though in November said uBeam would finally show off its tech in 2016.\nThe lofty opportunity to change the way electronic devices are powered has attracted more than $23 million in funding from big-name investors, including Upfront Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Marissa Mayer and Mark Cuban.\nTechCrunch has closely covered uBeam because of the potential market size for its technology and the funding it’s received. However, we’ve reiterated our skepticism about the product until we see a live, production-ready demo of cell phone charging at a distance.\nThe new claims dispersed across 20 blog posts on “Lies, Damn Lies, and Startup PR” add fuel to this skepticism. Details saying the author left their role as VP of engineering in October after two and a half years led contributors to Hacker News to name who they believe to be the author. We’ve contacted that person for more information, and also commented on the blog seeking information from the author.\nAs these claims come from an alleged former employee and someone unwilling to directly reveal their identity, the motives behind why the author published these reports are unclear. But the most obvious is that they appear to feel that uBeam is misleading its investors, the public or both. We’ve sought comment from lead investor Upfront Ventures, as well.\n[Update 2pm Pacific: Science news outlet IEEE Spectrum’s Lee Gomes says he’s confirmed with the author that they are indeed former uBeam VP of Engineering Paul Reynolds, as Hacker News contributors suspected. In a tweetstorm, Gomes says uBeam engineers tell IEEE Spectrum that the company isn’t close to delivering its promised product, can’t reach the energy transfer rates it’s purported, and won’t meet the 2016 deadline for a public demo that it told TechCrunch.]\nThe author writes that they originally joined uBeam in hopes of working on a challenging problem with an inspiring CTO, Marc Berte, who left in January 2015. They say “When I left it was an ugly departure, but was reported to the investors as ‘the VP Engineering left for personal reasons’ — personal reasons being ‘sick of putting up with this bullshit’.”\nEnergous, a competitor in the wireless space, is accused of also never releasing a working product despite going public and currently having a market cap of $174 million. The author claims Energous is purely designed to financially benefit the founders.\nFinally, the author also details why the physics of saturation would severely limit the distance and level of power uBeam could transmit as to make its promise of charging across a room infeasible. Sprinkled in are various insults and comparisons of Perry to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, a toddler and Smeagol of Lords of the Rings.\nWhile previously, derision of uBeam’s product has come from those outside the company without intimate knowledge of how it’s supposed to work, this report is different. If it is indeed from uBeam’s former VP of engineering, it could indicate uBeam will have severe difficulty shipping a wireless power product that meets its own promises, or even one that’s useful at all.\nThe accusations could increase scrutiny on uBeam to provide a convincing demo of its technology. Otherwise, it could find it difficult to raise additional funding, hire or retain talent, and avoid a negative press spiral.\n\nVenture capitalists in some sectors are increasingly eager to fund serious scientific innovations, although they can be much tougher to do due diligence on than simple software that can be assessed based on immediate market traction. The economics of startups are such that VCs seek risky bets that could provide huge returns, even if it means a high percentage of their investments fail.\nYet to avoid enormous wastes of capital that could fund more worthy and impactful businesses, VCs will have to dig deeper than what sounds like a big idea from a smart team.", "date": "5/11/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/power-cord-blue.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "wireless-charging,ubeam", "title": "Wireless charging startup uBeam accused of being the next Theranos", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/charged/" }, { "id": 159, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Sometimes a device comes so close to being perfect that you’d be forgiven for not realizing that with just a single tweak, it can become, in actual fact, perfect. The Kindle Paperwhite is such a device, as an e-reader that Amazon has crafted so well that you pretty much never need look beyond for anything better. But while a regular book ends up with wrinkly pages after being caught in a surprise downpour on the beach, the Paperwhite fizzles – unless you get the Waterfi-treated Kindle Paperwhite.\nThe Waterfi version is shipped in the original Kindle packaging without any outward appearance of having been modified. It looks and feels like a Kindle, albeit a slightly heavier version, and interacting with its touchscreen is the same as you’d find with an unmodified version. But because of Waterfi’s special treatment process, its Kindle Paperwhite is completely waterproof – submersible to above 200 feet in either fresh or salt water, for any length of time.\nThat means it isn’t just splash resistant, though it is that too – you could literally go scuba diving and sit on the ocean floor (in more shallow waters) and read “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,” if you had a hankering to do so. Or you could read in the bath; or at the swim-up bar at your favorite Caribbean all-inclusive resort; or in the inflatable kiddie pool you set up in your backyard to escape the summer heat.\nI showered with mine, and I was able to read pretty well so long as I didn’t hold it directly under the spray from the shower head, which triggers touch responses. I also put it in a bowl of water completely submerged and left it for three whole days, after which it came out working good as new. I’m convinced you could store this Kindle underwater for a month and you’d still have some reading time thanks to the long-lasting battery – imagine clearing up drawer space by storing Kindles in your toilet tank, so it’s ready right when you need it.\nThere are good arguments for making any and all electronics waterproof, but the Kindle Paperwhite, that travel and beach companion, is perhaps the number one candidate I can think of right now. For the Wi-Fi version (without ads) it’ll cost you $239.99, or $299.99 for the 3G-capable edition, so that means you’re paying $120 over and above the current price at the low end, but it really is like giving your Kindle superpowers, and it’s hard to put a dollar value on the added convenience of that.", "date": "6/20/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/kindle-paperwhite.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "waterproof,waterfi,kindle-paperwhite,amazon", "title": "This Waterproof Kindle Paperwhite Is Humanity’s Greatest Achievement", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/20/this-waterproof-kindle-paperwhite-is-humanitys-greatest-achievement/" }, { "id": 160, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Europe", "content": "Why does it still take two days in Europe for a card transaction to show up in your bank statement? Meet Number26, the Simple of Europe — a fintech startup that promises to fix all the oddities of the European bank system. In other words, Number26 is a bank that doesn’t suck. The startup is launching today in private beta on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt London.\n“We are providing Europe’s most modern current account, bank account,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me in a phone interview before Disrupt. “Attached to it comes a MasterCard.”\nAs a reminder, commercial banks in Europe suck. In the U.S., you can show up and open an account in five minutes. In Europe, you need to make an appointment with a bank’s local branch, bring documents and fill a lot of forms. You can also sign up online, but you’ll have to go to the post office to send documents.\nWhen you sign up for a Number26 account, the process is much easier than any other bank — you don’t have to physically send anything as the entire process takes place on the company’s website. The company told me that you can sign up in five minutes.\nAt the very end of the process, Number26 starts a video call to verify your identity. You simply show your passport to the webcam and answer a couple of questions. A call is much less painful than having to go to your local post office to send copies of your passport.\nAfter that, you will receive a debit card that works in all MasterCard ATMs and shops. So far, Number26 doesn’t seem very different from traditional online banks in Europe.\nBut this is when it gets interesting. Number26 focuses a lot of its attention on the user experience of the mobile app. In addition to being a beautiful app, there are a few interesting features that make the app stand out of the crowd.\nFirst, transactions show up in real time. Every time you use your card, you can open the app a few seconds later to see the transaction right on your statement.\n“When you look at a MasterCard transaction, all of these transactions have an online authentication,” Stalf said. “The terminal contacts the MasterCard cloud and the cloud network tells that this card number is linked to this processing company. We see what’s happening with the processing company in real time, because this transaction needs to be authorized.”\nOther banks could technically do the same and display transactions in real time. But it’s more difficult for them to implement these features due to their existing infrastructure.\nYou can also open the app and block your card with a simple button. But if you find your card a few minutes later, you can simply unblock it. You don’t need to wait and receive a new card.\nIf you lend your card to a friend that you don’t really trust, you can also block ATM transactions for let’s say an hour. Whenever you get your card back, you can unblock ATM transactions in the app. Everything works in real time.\nFinally, Number26 added a few financial tools in its mobile app. For example, you will see how much money you spend at restaurants or clothing stores. It’s very reminiscent of Mint, but Mint is only available in the U.S. and Canada.\nAnd then, there are all the reasons why you wouldn’t trust a startup to manage your money. Once again, it works a lot like Simple.\n“Because we need a banking license, in the background, we have a banking partner,” Stalf said. “The money sits in this bank. Regulators require us to do that. And on the other end, because it’s a German banking license, all the amounts are insured until something like 6 million euros.\nWhile the startup is based in Berlin, a German banking license lets you operate in other European markets. So far, the company accepts clients in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But it will be very easy to scale to more European countries in the future.\nFor the end user, there is no card fee for EUR payments, and no service fee for your account. Number26 takes a cut of every MasterCard transaction. Its partner bank will also invest the money sitting in the bank accounts. All of this is transparent for the end user.\nIn the future, the startup will add new features to make the product more compelling. For instance, Number26 plans to add overdraft and savings options. It is also looking into building a corporate solution as well.\nYou can also expect innovative futures that you won’t find in your existing banking app. For example, the company wants to use your smartphone’s geolocation to compare it with the location of your card transactions. This way, Number26 can detect suspicious activity and ask you to accept or block a transaction.\nIn the long run, the company wants to integrate other fintech startups directly into your Number26 account. “We could integrate TransferWise for international transfers for example,” Stalf said. “The idea is to be the connector for finance startups.”\nThe team of 17 has raised $2.6 million so far (€2 million) from Earlybird Venture Capital, Redalpine Venture Partners, Axel Springer Plug and Play Accelerator. It will be hard to convince conservative customers and compete with traditional banks and their advertising money, but Number26 definitely has a chance when it comes to creating the best banking experience in Europe.\nJudges: Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Jon Bradford (Techstars), Bindi Karia (Silicon Valley Bank), Brenden Mulligan (Cluster).\nQuestion: Your app is gorgeous. There has to be a major pain point that you are solving to make people switch. How did you find that real time data was a pain point?\nAnswer:\nQuestion: The relationship with the regulator is complicated. How do you do it?\nAnswer: We have a banking partner in Germany. We’re doing much more than using their technology. And we can do video conference calls to verify customers all over Europe.\nQuestion: What’s the plan for making money?\nAnswer: We have two short term revenue streams. But we have long term plans as well, becoming a fintech hub.", "date": "10/20/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/number-26-1-2.jpg?w=738", "section": "europe/", "tags": "n26,disrupt-europe-2014,battlefield,number26", "title": "Number26 Is A Bank Designed For The 21st Century", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/20/number26-is-a-bank-designed-for-the-21st-century/" }, { "id": 161, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "Mobile analytics provider Kochava is announcing it has acquired Toronto-based ad tech company InferSystems and will use its technology to build a product called the Kochava Optimization Beacon.\nAs explained to me by Kochava CEO Charles Manning, the new product allows the company to move beyond mobile ad measurement into optimization. In other words, an advertiser using Kochava currently has to look at campaign data, determine which ad networks or publishers aren’t performing, then contact someone at the ad network to adjust their spending accordingly. With the new Optimization Beacon, this analysis and adjustment can happen automatically, based on rules and goals identified by the advertiser.\n“Moving forward, measurement has to include optimization,” Manning said. “Because if you don’t, you’re not taking into account all the data you’re collecting.”\nThere’s plenty of ad optimization technology out there, but Manning said it’s largely controlled by the demand-side platforms, i.e., the buying tools used by many advertisers. The issue there, he suggested, is that advertisers are then choosing DSPs based on their optimization capabilities, not the quality of their ad inventory. By “moving the optimization goal post” and giving advertisers similar capabilities, Kochava allows them to focus on whether or not a DSP gives access them to premium publishers and desirable ad units.\nManning emphasized that Kochava is still not doing any of the ad-buying itself, making it an independent player in this process.\nAcquiring InferSystems made sense, he added, because of its experience using machine learning to optimize display ad campaigns. Plus, this allows Kochava to jump into optimization without spending years on development.\nThe financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the InferSystems team is moving to Kochava’s headquarters in Sandpoint, Idaho, bringing the company’s total headcount to around 50.\nThe Kochava Optimization Beacon is currently in beta, with plans to go into general availability at the end of March. In the meantime, Manning is recruiting more ad networks to support the technology — he said he doesn’t think it’s “a big ask” because it should give those networks priority with advertisers.\nAnd yes, Manning is aware that the product name might remind some people of iBeacon technology, which is also used for mobile marketing. He said it’s just a coincidence — Kochava does support iBeacons, but Manning likes the beacon name here because it suggests “a broadcasting system” for the entire mobile ad industry.", "date": "2/27/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/kochava-beacon.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "infersystems,kochava", "title": "Kochava Acquires InferSystems For Mobile Ad Optimization", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/kochava-acquires-infersystems/" }, { "id": 162, "authors": "Rip Empson", "category": "Apps", "content": "Last fall, Finnish designers Jori Lallo and Karri Saarinen soft-launched a simple bookmarking tool called Kippt that aimed to give users a more elegant way to store their information on the Web. At the time, Kippt was just a side project, as Lallo was working with Pownce founder Leah Culver on Convore, the YC-backed message board app. Over time, the founders added a number of integrations and features and published an API to let users modify their extensions and build their own apps using Kippt’s tools.\nSince March, the founders have been focusing on their bookmarking app full time, developing a plan to take the app beyond bookmarking with the goal of changing the way people collect, share and discuss links and online information. Today, the startup is launching the next phase of its vision: A new version of the app, which sees it move from being a simple utility tool to a collaborative service that allows users to co-create lists, add comments, and share them publicly with the Kippt community.\nThe startup is also announcing that it will be participating in Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch. While YC’s resources and funding will help Kippt scale and build out its product, Lallo tells us that Kippt’s users have been asking for more collaborative and social features from the get-go. So, the founders didn’t see a reason to hold their launch until Demo Day, they wanted to get their new collaboration tools into the hands of users as soon as possible.\nAs a tool that enables users to save and organize links into simple lists, collect bookmarks and clips with their colleagues, while making all of that shared content searchable, Kippt shares commonalities with popular bookmarking and productivity tools like Delicious, Pinboard, and Evernote. While Kippt was initially aimed at an individual use case, the longterm roadmap is much more ambitious, as Lallo says that they’re aiming to do the same for links as GitHub did for code. That is to say, actually make it actually social.\nAnd while Delicious and Evernote may be nominal competitors, the co-founder thinks that, in setting out to change the way people collect and share links, its true competitor is still good ole email and those pesky wikis.\nGoing up against email is a daunting task, but the founders believe there’s no better way to do this by creating a collaborative utility app, a la Google Docs, where teams can quickly and easily comment and discuss links and lists, save links and changes, extract quotes, etc.\nKippt’s new collaborative lists let users add other people to their lists so that they can share or add new clips and invite other users to join, making it a great tool for work and side projects. In emails and chat rooms, discussions tend to either be slow or too noisy, so, a la social collaboration apps like Yammer, Kippt has added commenting functionality so that users can just open a clip, comment, and keep that discussion out of everyone’s inboxes.\nUsers can also create public lists and clips, take advantage of an improved “read later” feature, toggling read later status for any clip depending on which list it’s save to, as well as the ability to modify clips in its new extension.\nTo support development and pay for the founders’ expensive tea and coffee habits, Kippt is also launching a Pro Account option, which offers advanced features, like indexing users’ imported clips for easier searching, for $25/year.\nOffering extensions for every major browser and a read and write API on top of its new collaborative features, Kippt is becoming a much deeper tool that speaks to a greater variety of use cases, be it individual or group, or at work or at home. It’s getting deeper while maintaining its awesome design and ease of use. That being said, Lallo says that the startup has a long list of features it wants to add as it grows (most of which revolve around social and clip management).\nIt will be interesting to see how the startup evolves as it hunkers down at Y Combinator, but it’s definitely one to watch.\nFind Kippt at home here.\n", "date": "6/14/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/kippt-logo.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "kippt", "title": "YC-Backed Kippt Launches Collaborative Bookmarking App To Become The GitHub For Links", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/14/yc-backed-kippt-goes-collaborative/" }, { "id": 163, "authors": "Frederic Lardinois", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "As expected, Google today announced a new version of its Nexus 5 Android phone, the successor of what has likely been the most popular of the company’s Nexus phones.\nThe LG-made Nexus 5X has a 5.2-ich display and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor with 2GB or RAM and sports a 5.2-inch display with a 1080p resolution. That’s a slightly larger screen than the old Nexus 5, but the resolution hasn’t changed. The battery has a capacity of 2,700 mAh.\nThe 5X will cost $376 for the 16 GB version and $429 for the 32 GB version. Pre-orders from the Play Store starts today. The phone will also come with $50 in Play credits.\nGoogle will now also offers its own Apple Care-like program. For $59, you can extend your warranty and protect your phone from accidental damage for an extra year.\nThe phone will run the latest version of Android (Marshmallow) out of the box and should work on the networks of all U.S. carriers.\n\nThe camera was always one of the Nexus 5’s weakest points. The new Nexus 5 now sports a 12.3-megapixel camera in the back (up from 8 megapixels in the old model) and a 5-megapixel camera in the front. Together with Google’s improved camera app, this hopefully means that you can now actually take good photos with the new Nexus 5. But given how often we’ve been disappointed by Nexus cameras, we’ll withhold comment until we get our hands on a review unit.\nThe camera will support slow motion videos, too.\nAs expected, the 5X also features a fingerprint scanner on the back. Android Marshmallow is the first version of Android to support fingerprint scanners out of the box, so it always seemed very likely for the company to offer this feature in its new Nexus phones.\nThe Nexus 5X will use the new USB-C connector for charging. USB-C can transfer data faster, but more importantly, it can carry more power and, hence, charge your phone faster.\nGoogle was involved in creating this new standard and first introduced USB-C support in its latest Chromebook Pixel. Apple, too, has jumped on the USB-C bandwagon, though it’s currently only using it for its small Macbook — not for its phones.\nThere are still some Nexus 5 features Google hasn’t talk about yet. We expect to hear more about them later today.\n", "date": "9/29/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dsc_0819.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "googlenexus15,google-nexus-5x", "title": "Say Hello To Google’s Nexus 5X, Starting at $379", "topics": "google", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/say-hello-to-googles-nexus-5x/" }, { "id": 164, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "Media", "content": "Video news startup NowThis is partnering with FWD.us, the immigration lobbying group backed by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives, to tackle one of the biggest issues in this year’s election cycle.\nLast night at South by Southwest, the two organizations announced a partnership where NowThis is creating a video series focused on immigration. NowThis President Athan Stephanopoulos told me they’re planning to publish eight videos total, to be released every one or two weeks between now and June.\nThe series will be promoted across NowThis’ various social channels (it doesn’t publish any content to the NowThis website itself), but Stephanopoulos said Facebook will be the series’ “primary distribution platform.”\nWhile FWD.us had a bit of a rocky start after being announced in 2013, it hasn’t gone away. And its big issue of immigration reform has certainly been in the headlines recently, albeit mostly in ugly and xenophobic ways.\n“The reality that many people let slip away is that we are a nation of immigrants – yet our immigration system is broken and outdated,” said FWD.us President Todd Schulte in a statement. “Telling stories that show exactly why we need to fix our immigration system is critical in our fight for reform. Sharing these stories will build urgency around this issue: we must challenge the absurd proposals of mass deportation this election cycle and we cannot and should not tear families apart.”\n\nHowever, Stephanopoulos emphasized that NowThis is creating this as “an editorial series in partnership with FWD on immigration,” not as an ad for the lobbying group.\n“This has been an issue that resonates with our audience and is a key topic of the election, of which we are covering in a unique way,” he said. “We are doing deep dives into the issues of the election and this is the one we are doing in immigration.”", "date": "3/13/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/nowthis.jpg?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "immigration,fwd-us,nowthis-news", "title": "NowThis teams up with immigration lobby group FWD.us", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/13/nowthis-teams-up-with-fwd-us/" }, { "id": 165, "authors": "Frederic Lardinois", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Earlier this year, Neone announced its plans to launch a private social network based on a small hardware appliance called the Neobase. The original Neobase Kickstarter didn’t succeed, but instead of giving up, the team decided to rework its original plan, and now Neone is back and ready to sell the Neobase directly to consumers.\nThere is still a Facebook-like private social networking component at the heart of the $199 Neobase, but the team now thinks of it more like a communications hub that focuses on secure sharing. Besides the social networking feature, the Neobase also features a photo-sharing service — and the plan is to add more features like this with future updates.\n\nAs Neone CEO and founder Dave Glassco told me, he came up with the idea of this product a few years ago. What he wanted was basically a jukebox and digital file cabinet that he — and his friends — could access from anywhere.\n“More than ever before, people are aware of Internet safety risks and worry about who sees and controls their online activities,” said Glassco. “We built the Neobase to give people an easy way to share and communicate with unprecedented safety and control; they can now feel free to share with family and friends.”\n\nIf you’re technical enough, you could always install a home server, but the idea behind the Neobase is to create a product that is easy to set up and use for anybody. “I wanted to build something my mother could use,” Glassco said. “And I wanted to be able to trade files with somebody who didn’t understand Internet security.”\nThe other option, of course, is using a cloud service (and maybe running your own with something like ownCloud). Glassco argues, however, that whenever you use a cloud service, you have to trust the vendor that your data is really private. The Neobase only pings Neone’s servers to check for updates and to share its IP address with the company so your friends’ Neobase units can reconnect to yours after a networking outage or after your ISP assigns you a new IP address.\nThe Neobase itself is a small Linux server in a Google OnHub-like cylinder. It runs on an ARM chip with 2GB of RAM and sports a one terabyte drive inside. The device features a USB port for extending the unit’s disk space and other functionality in the future, as well as an ethernet port, and, of course, WiFi.\nThe interface for the service is about as straightforward as it could be (with a focus on private sharing and communication over Twitter-like message blasts). It’s a pretty stripped-down interface, but that’s exactly what should make it easy to use.\nAll content on the unit is encrypted, and connections between Neobase units run through secure VPN tunnels. Why do Neobases have to talk to each other? The idea here is to create a decentralized mesh network of Neobase hubs. You can add as many users to your own unit as you want to (though there is obviously a limit to how many users you could realistically host on a single machine). But when you add somebody to your friends’ list who also owns a Neobase, you’ll be able to see the files they share from their own unit, too, for example.\nThe question is whether there is a real market for this kind of product. Neone isn’t selling it as an easy-to-use NAS server but as a private communications hub that you can use with your family.\nWhile Neone argues that your privacy is at risk when you do so, most people seem to be perfectly happy using cloud services — and while Neone offers mobile apps that can access the Neobase, too, cloud-based mobile social networks have only gained in popularity over the last few years. If you think the Neobase is for you, though, you can now order it for $199 (the price will go up to $249 at some point in the future) from the company’s homepage.", "date": "11/11/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/neobase-shelf_white.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "owncloud,social-networks,cloud-storage,internet", "title": "Neobase Wants To Become Your Private Home Communications Hub", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/11/neobase-wants-to-become-your-private-home-communications-hub/" }, { "id": 166, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Bio", "content": "As the quantified self movement continues to pick up momentum, the range of consumer devices tracking physiological signals is set to expand. But harvesting bio-signals requires specialist kit — which can be either expensive to buy or tricky to put together yourself for prototyping purposes, unless that’s your particular area of expertise. Well, here’s a device that wants to change that. BITalino is a simplified system for makers, app developers and researchers who want to quickly start capturing bio-signals.\nThe low cost (€149/$197 + shipping and taxes) kit of modular blocks includes a swathe of physiological sensors that can be broken out to use individually or linked together and used in whatever combination you’re after. BITalino’s approach is plug and play, to keep things as simple as possible. The sensors in the kit can interface with computing platforms such as Arduino (and derivatives) and Raspberry Pi, says project lead Hugo Silva. BITalino also includes Bluetooth connectivity so can be used in desktop and mobile environments.\n“Currently there are several APIs for platforms including Android OS, Java or Python; BITalino is also cloud / web compatible through a software framework based on WebSockets, HTML5 and CSS3,” he tells TechCrunch.\nSensors included in the BITalino kit are:\nThe board also includes an LED block for visual feedback, a microcontroller unit and a power management block to power the other units.\nThe kit is the result of a collaboration between Portuguese bio-sensor maker, PLUX – Wireless Biosignals (co-founded by Silva in 2007), and a not-for-profit research centre in the country, called Instituto de Telecomunicações, where Silva is currently doing his PhD. He isn’t aiming to make money off the BITalino kit itself — hence its low cost and bootstrapped status.\n“BITalino by itself won’t be a money maker; it is more thought out as a community driver/motivator,” he says. “BITalino is sold with everything needed for people to start developing. The hardware prices start at €149 (+ shipping and taxes) and includes all the sensors and parts to jump start their work. The APIs and software framework is provided free of cost as well.\n“Our goal with BITalino is to empower the community with basic tools for rapid prototyping of biosignal-based projects. We are looking forward to lower the prices even more as the production scales up.”\nAs well as its low relative cost — “BITalino makes technologies that usually cost several thousands of dollars readily available for anyone at very low pricing”, according to Silva — he says the platform’s other disruptive factor is its goal of “democratising” bio-signal acquisition technologies. The grand aim behind that being to help bring down the cost of developing affordable medical devices for developing and low-income countries.\nWhile BITalino overlaps somewhat, in competitive terms, with Arduino and (the also not-for profit) Raspberry Pi, Silva says it is carving out a niche by specialising in bio-signal capture and processing. “The Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms can be seen as competitors, however, biosignals have specific requirements (e.g. tolerance to noise, sampling frequency) for which these platforms are not particularly tuned, and many projects end up heavily bounded by the high cost and limited access to suitable hardware materials,” he says.\n“The closest platform that one can find in this segment is the Libellium e-Health sensor platform for Arduino and Raspberry Pi, however the price point for this platform is above $500 and it does not provide either the same sensors, or the same versatility in terms of hardware and software. BITalino provides a framework for very integrated (stamp-like) systems to be developed, and has a growing and wide range of APIs and software tools.”\nBITalino went on sale in mid August 2013 and just over 100 of the modular kits have been pre-ordered or sold to-date. Research institutions are a strong initial customer base, as you’d expect — but BITalino is also being targeted more broadly at students, hobbyists and app developers, so there’s plenty of scope for that number to grow.\n“We’ve sold to countries ranging from U.S., South Africa, Italy, Spain, UK. BITalinos are already being used by people from institutions such as the MIT, University of Florida, Zurich University, among many others,” Silva adds.\nHere’s a video demonstrating some possible use-cases for BITalino:", "date": "9/5/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/screen-shot-2013-09-05-at-10-36-59.png?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "raspberry-pi,arduino,bitalino", "title": "BITalino Is A Low Cost, Modular Bio-Signal Sensor Kit That Makes It Quicker & Easier To Build Medical Devices & Health Tracker Apps", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/05/bitalino/" }, { "id": 167, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Video", "content": "\nIt’s midnight.\nThe city is alive with Saturday night fever, and Pier 94 is just as awake, and perhaps a bit more drunk. Tequila shots (and plenty of beers) are flowing, along with Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Energy Bites.\nIn other words, this place is like one giant vat of FourLoko, topped with a sprinkling of coders. For the most part, they seem ready for anything. We’ve heard that the majority of them are ahead of schedule, which is good news considering that the alcohol-induced energy rush will only last so long.\nWe caught up with Jake, a 15-year old hacker who’s back for the second time to code away, along with Matt Hall, co-founder and CEO of Docracy and former Hackathon winner, and both seemed confident in their hacks. However, Jake has all the energy in the world (despite eating basically nothing), while Matt says he’s typing at a rate of one character per minute. Clearly, youth is an advantage once the clock strikes midnight.\nWe also brought along some Nerf Vortex blasters (the ones that shoot discs) so that the hackers could take a break and let loose a bit, which basically means that the floor of Pier 94 is currently littered with little green discs.\nAll in all, the hackers are hitting their stride with about 11 hours left to perfect not only their product, but their presentations. We’ll keep you updated on the action as it’s happening.\n\nDisrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.\nIf you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.", "date": "5/19/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/hacknight1.jpg?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "hackers-never-sleep,tc-disrupt-hackathon", "title": "This City Never Sleeps, And Neither Do The Hackers", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/19/this-city-never-sleeps-and-neither-do-the-hackers/" }, { "id": 168, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Apps", "content": "While health-conscious nerds might like to play around with quantifying their activity and lifestyle for kicks, people with diabetes have no choice but to track their blood sugar if they want to stay well. It’s a key part of managing this chronic disease, which requires regular insulin shots to replace what the body can’t produce.\nVienna, Austria-based mySugr was founded back in 2012 (although the team also won a TC pitch off back in 2011) with a mission to make managing diabetes “suck less”, as co-founder Fredrik Debong puts it — one of two of the four co-founders himself living with type 1 diabetes. It’s doing this via building digital products that take the strain out of aggregating diabetes-related health data and simplify management of the chronic condition.\nThus far, mySugr has amassed more than 230,000 registered users of its diabetes management apps and web-based educational tools, which use gamification elements and daily goals, to help users stay engaged and motivated with the grind of diabetes therapy compliance. They’ve also built an Optical Character Recognition app that allows users pull data from existing (non-connected) blood monitors into their smartphones where they can do more useful stuff with it.\nMySugr has gained FDA medical device certification for its diabetes logbook app — a process Debong says  took some one and a half years, including the research involved — noting it was one of the first “ten or 15 apps to ever be registered with the FDA”. They have also secured medical insurance cover for the business. “Now looking at the current development of the FDA and how they are approaching medical device apps and mobile apps it turns out we were right, so we’re happy to have that behind us already,” he adds.\nThe main demographic for its products at this point is 35 to 50 year old diabetes sufferers, with the U.S. its single largest market. The products are also available in Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. MySugr’s business model is b2c, via direct subscriptions and freemium ad-supported versions of the software, but they are also licensing products to healthcare insurers.\n“Our logbook application… synchronizes blood glucose values with different hardware devices, blood sugar meters, very soon blood pressure measures, scales, everything like that. To really have something that totally aggregates your health data but also helps you to get value out of the data,” says co-founder Frank Westermann.\n“Before we created mySugr there was a messy [management situation] for people with diabetes. Normally they write down their blood glucose values in a paper-based diary. Super boring, annoying and only a few people do it. What we do is we build a whole experience out of aggregating your data — we use gamification elements, so we get rewards points, you can make challenges in our application. We have a daily goal, which is to beat your diabetes monster… So we really created an experience out of logging your health data. And that is what makes us totally different from all the other apps out there.”\n“Our approach… is patient-focused, patient-centric. Frederik and I do have diabetes. We have half of our company suffering from diabetes, so we exactly know the problems we have in our day to day lives and we try to solve these day to day problems,” he adds.\nThey have more products in the pipeline, but are keeping those under wraps for now. Today the team is announcing a new seed funding raise — of $4.8 million from two new investors, Switzerland-based Roche Ventures and U.S.-based iSeed Ventures. Existing investor XLHealth, from Germany, also participated in the round. Total funding raised to date is around $5.8 million.\nWhat’s the new cash injection for? Serious scale — as befits the team’s missionary zeal to help more diabetes sufferers like themselves. “We’re going to beat fucking Nike,” is Debong’s concise summary (he notes the team knows of two people who have tattoos of the mySugr product logo right now — so it’s chasing Swoosh quantities). “If we can scale this to 5 million people or to 380 million then we’ve changed the philosophy of the earth.”\n“When it comes down to it, what we founded the company on was to make diabetes suck less. And that has since day one been an unspoken mantra,” he adds. “Change the philosophy of diabetes therapy. Diabetes therapy takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. And just letting go is so easy. So if we can flip that and change the attitude when it comes to therapy — that’s actually the mission.”\n\nThere’s certainly growing momentum behind digital health. Just this week Apple announced an initiative to turn iOS devices into a medical diagnostic research resource, called ResearchKit. The proliferation of powerful processing and sensing devices, coupled with the human preoccupation about personal wellness, makes for a potent combination — and a sizable business opportunity in the healthcare space.\nWith connected devices gathering and providing access to more and more healthcare information the role of doctors will change to “more of a coach”, argues Debong.\n“In general what mobile health has the ability to do is to make decision-making for us patients much easier,” he says. “If we have the data at the tip of our fingers, that’s great. Now, as you see in the development of healthcare worldwide we start to see a lack of doctors, a lack of time when it comes to how doctors treat patients. And by enabling validated products, such as ours, to be used in diabetes management or in other disease management programs it will be much more efficient how a doctor is able to service populations.”\n“M-health gets right now into the mass market. That’s a development that’s definitely been fueled by Google and Apple opening up their systems, building platforms which is great,” adds Westermann. “It’s very good for us.\n“On the other hand ResearchKit… from a technology standpoint is just a great tool. It will help a lot to understand disease data better. For example diabetes is a very, very data-driven disease. It’s all about insulin units, carbohydrate grams, and blood glucose levels. And data is a big part of diabetes therapy. And it’s a big part of other diseases so it’s great to aggregate more data to better understand these diseases.”", "date": "3/11/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/screen-shot-2015-03-11-at-1-40-48-pm.png?w=738", "section": "europe/", "tags": "mysugr", "title": "Digital Health Startup mySugr Gets $4.8M To Make Diabetes “Suck Less”", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/11/digital-health-startup-mysugr-gets-4-8m-to-make-diabetes-suck-less/" }, { "id": 169, "authors": "Jon Russell", "category": "Asia", "content": "Budget hotel aggregators were one of the breakout startup ideas of last year, particularly in India. Hype around the industry has quietened down this year but there’s a big round today: Treebo Hotels has raised $17 million led by Bertelsmann India Investments with participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and Matrix Partners India.\nFounded in June 2015 initially as Zipotel, Bangalore-based Treebo is a ‘tech-powered’ budget hotel aggregator that provides a standard of accommodation across a network of partner hotels in India, for example clean linen, bedding, free WiFi etc. Typical room cost is between $15 and $50. It sounds basic to Western standards but, as anyone who has ever traveled off the beaten path in Asia can testify, many of these things are often missing — and that can be very painful.\nIt’s much the same as the model pioneered by OYO Rooms, a popular startup that has raised over $125 million from the likes of SoftBank.\nTreebo started out with just four hotel partners in Bangalore, now it has 125 hotels, covering around 3,000 rooms, across 25 cities in India. In an interview with TechCrunch, Treebo co-founder Rahul Chaudhary said that the company is aiming to reach at least 800 hotels before the end of 2017.\n“India has a population of more than one billion which is a fairly large opportunity,” he said. “Budget accounts for around 65 percent of the market so we’re talking about [an industry that is worth] north of $15-20 billion per year.”\nChaudhary said that Treebo plans to invest the capital it has raised in three major areas: increasing its marketing and branding efforts, expanding its geographical footprint in India (as above), and further developing its technology stack.\n“We’re building a large consumer brand and have taken a fairly brand-led approach compared to others,” he said. “But we can’t get into a ‘loved’ brand arena without significant brand marketing spend.”\nIn terms of technology, he explained that the company’s current headcount for tech — which includes product development and design — would double to 80 people before the end of this year.\n“We want to build a digital hotel company,” he explained. “We are building the hospitality side but also need to build the tech.”\nOne thing to note about Treebo, which differentiates it from others in the budget hotel aggregation space, is that the company works exclusively with its partners in a franchise-style approach. That means that partner hotels use Treebo, and Treebo only, to manage their bookings and stays. So, while other networks allow hotels to list their rooms on other travel booking sites too or just sell partial inventory, Treebo runs what it calls a “full inventory model.”\nOYO and others have headed overseas with their idea, and numerous companies have sprouted up in Southeast Asia, including Rocket Internet-backed Zen Rooms and RedDoorz, but Chaudhary said Treebo is not tempted to look outside of India.\n“Not in the foreseeable future,” he said, “but I won’t rule out creating tech that can be replicated in say Vietnam or Romania, this is an emerging market problem. There’s a long long way to go and India can keep us busy for the next two to three years.”", "date": "7/22/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/screenshot-2016-07-22-18-54-43.png?w=738", "section": "asia/", "tags": "india,budget-hotel,budget-hotel-network", "title": "India’s Treebo Hotels raises $17 million for its budget hotel network", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/22/indias-treebo-hotels-raises-17-million-for-its-budget-hotel-network/" }, { "id": 170, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "Just when you thought Finnish mobile OS maker Jolla had given up on making its own mobile hardware, given its recent financing troubles which led to it having to shutter a planned tablet, it gets back in the game — albeit with a limited run of 1,000 smartphones intended for developers and enthusiasts of its platform to test the latest and beta releases of its Sailfish OS.\nThe community handset is called Jolla C, and has been priced at €169 — with shipping limited to Europe. All 1,000 handsets sold out yesterday, on the day the program was announced to the Sailfish community. Jolla says it’s looking to see if it can expand the size of the initiative. Devices are slated to ship to buyers in July.\nSpecs wise the 4G handset looks much like Indian OEM Intex’s Sailfish powered Aqua Fish smartphone with a 5-inch display, 2GB of RAM, a 1.3GHz Qualcomm processor and Sailfish 2.0. While the platform is compatible with Android apps, the Jolla C intentionally ships without any third party content — to offer the “purest” OS experience.\nFor this developer-focused device Jolla is abandoning The Other Half hardware feature found on its debut smartphone — which had been an attempt to differentiate a handset by including swappable back plates and an internal connector that could support powered add ons on the rear of the device, such as keyboards or e-ink screens.\nThe hardware is really not the point here though. The program is a move by Jolla to further foster the Sailfish developer community to pull in energy and ideas, as community manager James Noori notes in a blog about the initiative: “With this program and the Jolla C device, we are going to focus on the software side of things and encourage the community to develop more for Sailfish OS itself.”\nJolla has been pushing an OS licensing business strategy in recent years, and has signed up OEMs in India and Africa to put out devices running Sailfish. It also has interest in Russia.\nAs part of its community device program, which is slated to run until May 2017, Jolla C buyers will be invited to live online community sessions. A limited group of first registrants will also be invited to attend an International Sailfish Community Event in Helsinki next month.\nJolla announced it had finally closed a $12 million Series C round earlier this month, having struggled to get the necessary funds at the back end of last year. The developer program does risk raising a few eyebrows among Sailfish enthusiasts given that Jolla had to cancel its planned tablet — and is running an extended refund program for the vast majority of pre-orderers who won’t get the slate. Some of whom will have to wait until next year for their refund. Yet it’s now taking in more pre-order money from backers.\nResponding to this point and another about the cost of the Jolla C on its community forum, Jolla’s head of comms said it had “very much” hoped to be able to give devices free to developers but its financial situation “just does not allow this”. He added that Jolla has “set the price as low as we could”, and is not making any profit on the Jolla C.\n“Using the second part of the tablet refunds for this [i.e. to fund a free Jolla C developer device] does not really work, since we need to finance our operations until the next financing round at the end of the year — unfortunately this is the reality we live in,” he adds.", "date": "5/27/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/jollac_press_04.jpg?w=573", "section": "europe/", "tags": "sailfish-os,jolla,meego,smartphones", "title": "Jolla launches a community device program for its Sailfish mobile OS", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/27/jolla-launches-a-community-device-program-for-its-sailfish-mobile-os/" }, { "id": 171, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Opinion", "content": "A tug of war between innovation and monetization as Facebook grows could dilute The Hacker Way, says a paywalled piece from Fortune. But a plan hatched since it filed its S-1 to IPO. Rather than sacrifice the user experience for revenue or vice versa, Facebook is merging the two. Content is being transformed into ads, and those ads are being blended into blank spaces and feeds where they’re less obtrusive.\nScaling a company from 200 twenty-somethings to 3,000 thirty-year-olds is no cakewalk. If the plan works, though, Facebook could bridge the gap between engineering and advertising, make the company feel a whole lot smaller, and let The Hacker Way live on.\nFortune’s Miguel Helft and Jessi Hempel describe Facebook as an organization split in two:\nFacebook started as a hacker culture, where the primary goal was making the site more fun to use. It would be years before monetization became a serious question. As the site and team grew but co-founders and early employees left, Zuckerberg became increasingly responsible for shepherding the product. Growing reverence for the leader’s ability to see what people want before they do led Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth to say “The reason Mark has final word is because he is fucking brilliant.”\nFortune noted that “The cult of Zuck is downright Jobsian in its intensity.” [Correction: This statement was by Fortune’s writers, not Bosworth as this article originally indicated.]\nGoing a little overboard, Fortune write that Facebook “holds bootcamps to teach engineers to “think like Zuck,” forces people to change projects midstream, and even mandates all-nighters.” That’s not completely accurate, Bosworth wrote on Facebook this morning:\n\nStill, Facebook engineering’s mantra is “move fast. break things.” It doesn’t matter who comes up with a product. If it’s great, it will get shipped. Even Zuckerberg’s letter to investors in the S-1 described The Hacker Way as “an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration” and his belief that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”\nTaken at face value, these ideals seem at odds with the polished, no-nonsense business wing of Facebook run by Sheryl Sandberg. There, the money to fund the site’s innovation must be made, and it’s more about who you know than what you do. Fortune explains:\n“There’s a term spoken quietly around Facebook to describe a cadre of elites who have assumed powerful positions under the leadership of Zuckerberg’s chief operating officer: They’re FOSS, or friends of Sheryl Sandberg. Many have followed her there after studying with her at the Harvard Business School or working with her at the U.S. Treasury Department or Google. Several middle and senior executives who have left the company say that Sandberg has put friends in powerful positions, sometimes even when they were less qualified than other Facebook employees, and once there they enjoy special status. “You can’t really cross a FOSS,” says one former senior manager.”\nThis distortion of the meritocracy might be the biggest threat to Facebook’s culture, and something Zuckerberg should seek to curtail.\nBut the secret to merging Zuck and Sheryl’s halves of Facebook is that profitability and site usability are not a zero-sum game. Facebook doesn’t have to make its advertising sidebars bigger and the rest of the site smaller, nor must it paste banners atop its mobile interfaces. It’s going to make the ads vanish before our eyes by turning them into content that fits naturally across the site.\nAt yesterday’s Facebook Marketing Conference, Facebook unveiled its plan. Gone are the old premium ad units where brands could plaster any message they wanted. Now all premium ads are built directly off of the organic content published by a brand’s official Facebook Page. And instead of appearing just in the sidebar, those ads can appear on the web news feed, the mobile news feed, and even on the logout page in a unit many times larger than Facebook has ever sold.\n\nShill too hard, and a brand will seem sleazy compared to your friends in the news feed. But if a brand provides inspiring text, beautiful photos, or funny videos…hey, that’s a lot like what my friends share. When it shows ads on the logout page, Facebook simply makes the revenue pie bigger because there’s no social content there to distract us from. Plus, Facebook has found that ads which are really content get much better click-through rates and produce brand favorability.\nThere are dangers on this road. We want the most relevant news feed possible. Too much artificial presence of brands, even just mentions of how our friends interact with those brands, could make the site less addicting. Rate limits on news feed ads must be upheld, and Facebook will need to do everything in its power to teach brands what resonates.\nThe shift to ads as content could unchain Zuck’s visionary engineering and product teams. They won’t have to slow down to ask or be asked “how will this make money?” — a question that contributed to the stagnation of the tech giants before it. They can work confidently and autonomously on the original mission of making the site fun. The shift will relieve Sheryl’s driven ads team, who won’t have to figure out how to shoehorn ads into the sidebar or convince clients to buy space in tiny boxes.\nThis is how the cult of Zuck and the friends of Sheryl Sandberg are teaming up. If it succeeds, The Hacker Way stays and Facebook won’t have to decide whether “Stay Focused, Keep Shipping” means the product carrying the content, or the ads that pay for it. They’ll be unified, and so will the company.\n\n[Image Credit: Ali Manazano and Mark Zuckerberg]", "date": "3/1/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/facebook-f-fmc-print.jpg?w=295", "section": "social/", "tags": "facebook-marketing-conference,facebook", "title": "How The Cult Of Zuck Will Survive Sheryl’s IPO", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/01/cult-of-zuck-and-the-friends-of-sheryl-sandberg/" }, { "id": 172, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "", "content": "Here’s another startup trying to turn content recommendation into a business: Ideal Media.\nSimilar in concept to Outbrain and Taboola, Ideal Media works with publishers to add a recommended content unit to their pages. Then it makes money by including sponsored content in the mix. You can see an example in the recommended content under this photo on the OneBigPhoto site (there’s a screenshot below). Director of Sales Matthew Mosk told me via email that Ideal Media is building customized, native integrations, so the look will change from site to site.\nMosk added that Ideal Media’s units won’t just work on the web but also on mobile, social media, and tablets, and that it has “a highly targeted channel strategy (automobiles, sports, tech, health, women’s, etc). “But the real differentiator, or at least the one he emphasized, is the fact that the company isn’t just promoting content but helping customers create it, too — the Ideal Media team will offer free content marketing services to its advertisers.\n\nWhy is that important? Well, Mosk said his company will be able to create content that’s actually interesting and relevant, rather than just being a straightforward ad:\n(Unfortunately, Mosk wasn’t able to provide me with a sample of Ideal Media’s content-creation skills, so I can’t firsthand whether the content in question is actually better than most ads.)\nAnd yes, Mosk said Ideal Media plans to continue offering content creation for free, though it may start charging for more premium content marketing services.\nJust to compare, I also asked Outbrain if it provides any content marketing services of its own. A spokesperson told me that the company doesn’t write any content, but it did acquire Scribit, which allows customers to search for content from publications like the Huffington Post.\nGetting back to Ideal Media, the company was founded by Eder Holguin, whose past roles include serving as the chief revenue officer at the Virtual Fan Network. It’s funded by Holguin, along with friends and family.", "date": "9/6/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ideal-media-logo.jpg?w=300", "section": "startups/", "tags": "content-recommendation,ideal-media", "title": "Ideal Media Takes A More Hands-On Approach To Combining Recommended Content With Ads", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/06/ideal-media-takes-a-more-hands-on-approach-to-combining-recommended-content-with-ads/" }, { "id": 173, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "Scale Model, the betaworks-backed marketing platform for better audience targeting, has today announced the launch of its fully-baked V2.\nScale Model hooks into the Twitter Ads API to help brands and influencers better understand their audience, and the way that their own follower community, or sub-communities, interact with one another.\nUpon the initial launch, Scale Model was building out community models for brands manually, which could take up to 48 hours, depending on the complexity. Today, however, the company is launching a fully self-serve product, where individuals and brands alike can not only track and understand their audience, but run flexible campaigns around that data.\nFor example, the San Francisco Giants’ audience is comprised of many sub-communities. While almost all of them share a broader interest in baseball (which is reflected in their tweets, bios, RTs, favorites, etc.), they also break apart into smaller sub-communities, such as Giants fans, coaches, amateur players, SF natives, etc.\nWith the help of Scale Model, the Giants social team can instantly look at its audience segments and better understand how they overlap. They could see, for instance, that “hot dogs” is a keyword across the majority of their sub-communities, and use that as part of a marketing campaign for one of their games.\nBy making the platform self-serve, with clearly indicated pricing tiers, Scale Model is now able to consider other platforms to conquer. Twitter is but a slice of the pie when it comes to social media marketing, and Scale Model has the technology to empower brands and influencers across a number of platforms.\nFor now, Scale Model is only available for Twitter, but I wouldn’t expect that to remain true for much longer.\nIf you’d like to check out Scale Model for yourself, hit up the website right here.", "date": "9/22/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/scalemodel1.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "betaworks,scale-model", "title": "Scale Model, the betaworks-backed tool for audience targeting, goes self serve", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/scale-model-the-betaworks-backed-tool-for-audience-targeting-goes-self-serve/" }, { "id": 174, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Europe", "content": "Online video services from the likes of Netflix and Apple may represent the future of the TV business because of their popularity with consumers intent on watching video on a variety of screens beyond the large console in the living room, but today OTT video is proving fertile ground for another kind of enterprise: IP litigation.\nNetflix has been served with another patent suit by OpenTV and sister company Nagra in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, this one covering four patents related to digital TV services.\nThe news comes less than a week after the same two plaintiffs, both owned by Swiss company Kudelski, also filed a patent case against Apple. That latter case concerns five different patents. As with the Netflix suits, they are in connection with Apple’s digital media content services, covering both video and music as well as other services.\nThe most recent Netflix suit, and the Apple suit from last week, are both embedded below.\nThis latest case appears to be at least the third patent case filed by Kudelski against Netflix, with the first dating back to December 2012, and another from October 2013 in the Netherlands (where Netflix launched services last year). Given Netflix has operations in other countries, this could point to Netflix seeing legal heat from Kudelski elsewhere, too.\nA spokesperson for the Swiss company has declined to comment. It’s not clear how much in damages it is seeking, but Kudelski itself is valued at around $770 million.\nThe patents in question in this latest case are as follows:\nAs with many patent suits, it looks like the case against Netflix, at least in part, is being used as a stick to get Netflix closer to cutting a licensing deal with Kudelski.\n“On December 15, 2011, OpenTV wrote to Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and notified him of the existence of The Kudelski Group patent portfolio generally. OpenTV explained that its technology may be relevant to several aspects of Netflix’s services, and invited Mr. Hastings to contact OpenTV to discuss the matter further,” the suit notes. “Hastings did not contact OpenTV to discuss the matter further.” After some discussions around licensing, the suit notes, no conclusions were ever reached.\nMuch of Kudelski’s activity appears to be directed by Joe Chernesky, SVP, Intellectual Property, at Kudelski, who Reuters notes company hired away from well-known patent holder/litigator/licensee Intellectual Ventures in May 2012.\nBut while many patent cases are described in the context of “patent trolls” who serve no purpose beyond collecting licensing fees for IP that they own, this appears to be more of a directly competitive case for OpenTV. The company is considered an early mover in the world of digital television and collectively Kudelski holds over 3,000 related patents, with 800 of them at OpenTV itself (which was spun out of tech originally at Thomson Mulitmedia and Sun Microsystems).\nThe company says it has some 120 pay-TV customers worldwide taking a combination of content protection, digital TV and advertising solutions.", "date": "4/15/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/netflix1.jpg?w=700", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "nagra,opentv,netflix,apple", "title": "OpenTV, Nagra Pile Another Patent Suit On Netflix As They Gear Up For Apple Fight", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/opentv-nagra-pile-another-patent-suit-on-netflix-as-they-gear-up-for-apple-fight/" }, { "id": 175, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Government", "content": "There are many visions of what our hyper-connected future might look like. We’re packaged countless variants on the shiny-techie-future vision theme every day as marketing departments lay it on thick to try to put gloss on their latest product and restless grease on the wheels of consumption.\nThing is, these tales of shiny futures are not really that interesting. Given they are artless fictions. What’s far more interesting is how technology is being applied in the here and now — and how it’s already interacting with and impacting social structures. And if you look at those tell-tale signs then sure it’s possible to extrapolate some possible futures — some of which really aren’t very pretty at all.\nTechnology replacing humans is one recurrent theme. We can argue about how many jobs are being destroyed by technology. But that’s sort of missing the point. Given that technology is a tool that people can apply in various ways, the number and type of human jobs that get replaced will, at the end of the day, be determined by us, not by the technology.\nOr, more likely, by the companies that apply technology at scale. Look, for example, at supermarkets and big box retailers replacing multiple (human) check out operators with ranks of self-service machines — with perhaps one solitary human overseer standing silently off to the side.\nOr Uber recruiting an entire university robotics department to try to accelerate the development of driverless cars. Because robots can’t protest a dwindling revenue share. Because robots don’t get a revenue share.\nBut who wants to live in a future where every physical shop (if indeed there are any in such a technology-maximized scenario) is a self-service warehouse where the atoms in the drear air stir only to synthesized thank-yous spat from money-harvesting machines, suffixed by the rustle of a departing plastic bag — attached to another silent human.\nSure, if all you think about are profit margins you won’t find any value in the seasonal tapestry of face-to-face human communication. Or the variable elbow grease of human labour. You’ll seek to edit it out as an unpredictable inefficiency. But what happens to society when we trade a person for a button press? Or a human being for a delivery drone?\nWhat happens when we start to view every interaction as merely a quantifiable string of dollar signs — allowing ‘less human’ to mean the same as ‘lower cost’?\nWe as individuals — and as a society — are also reduced. Reduced in character, colour, culture, communication, cohesion. There’s no shortage of collateral damage if you extrapolate a tech-fueled future that thinks only of maximizing profit margins. So why can we so easily glimpse that possible future? Indeed, why do we keep sketching such dystopic scenarios? Why do we seem convinced technology has to capture and control and do everything — as if we humans are powerless to choose how to use our own tools?\nAs better minds than mine have pointed out, humans are, at base, social creatures, yet we are prone to falling for trivial tricks that would sell us a substitute for the social connection we generally crave. Emollient services that proffer a tech-sanitized workaround for our raw, emotionally fretted edges. So sure it’s not always companies hammering the shiny technology wedge between genuine human interactions. Undoubtedly, we do this to ourselves too.\nAlbeit companies know our weaknesses, and seek to exploit them. They always have. Technology just makes that kind of exploitation insanely scalable.\nPerhaps mass surveillance — a tech-powered dystopia we are living through right here, right now — is not just a massive trampling of our human rights, but also a giant red flag reminding humanity of the importance of moderating our consumptive impulses.\nBecause as well as being social creatures, we are all-too-easy addicts. We can’t get enough of a good thing. We don’t always know when to stop. Sometimes we need to make ourselves really, really sick before we can be compelled to change our ways. If we learn there’s a button we can push to get a treat, we’ll push it and push it and push it. And keep pushing it. Our present tense world-view can be made to shrink to fit a button press. Or a social network.\nPoint is, a little technology is amazing. But all technology, all the time is dystopia. And strutting and fretting our entire lives digitally is a reduction of the rich possibilities of life beyond the algorithm. Even as the increasingly comprehensive digital footprints we generate are also, clearly, a way too tempting repository for governments and companies to ignore — and so they do the opposite: lift, store and manipulate the substance of our digital lives at will.\nMaybe the appropriate response to being systematically dehumanized by vast technology-powered data-harvesting infrastructures is to act a little more human, be a little less tech obsessed. You know — buy a book from a second-hand bookshop. Pay with cash. Walk down an unfamiliar street. Order a drink in a place you didn’t find beforehand on Foursquare. Talk to a stranger you didn’t match with on Tinder. Leave your phone in your pocket — or better still, at home. Unfold a piece of paper and breathe.\nVirtual reality? It can never be a fraction as fascinating as real, lived, actual reality where chaotic possibility is threaded through every undesigned moment — if only you take the time to lift your eyes off the screen and look around you.\nAnd sure, the GooglesAlphabets and Amazons will promise to ‘engineer serendipity’. Or say they can transmute our collective behaviors into a predictive extrapolation they’ll claim resembles telepathy — in a bid to deliver you the thing you’re after before you even thought to want it. Of course they will. Because they really want to be able to do this. It’s the holy grail of commerce.\nIf they can digitally steer or synthesize a proto human intention before it’s become a fully formed thought chain-linked to a guaranteed transaction they get to win the money-makers’ never-ending jackpot and laugh all the way to the bank — until the very last neon light winks out in the Nevada desert.\nMore realistically the giant data miners of our lives will make algorithms that segment collective human behavior into generalized buckets and apply these stencils over individuals, blurring our detail in the process. Because you can’t abstract infinite variety. You can’t contain multitudes. You can’t synthesize all the shifting shades that will ever be perceived.\nAnd so the strategy of control attempts to use ubiquitous technology to disrupt our attention so we forget to think for ourselves.\nUndesigned existence is the real magic. And ‘engineered serendipity’ is both an oxymoron and a dictatorship of the dreary; a notion created by a confederation of bottom-line bores who have somehow attained far more social control than their pedestrian focus on profit margins should ever have afforded them.\nIf all you’re allowed to be or do or know is what’s predetermined by aggregated behavioral patterns parsed by algorithms you might as well be living in a medieval monastery — just without the vaulted ceiling of mystery that exalted such a prior pre-defined existence.\nRemember: the algorithm is not God. It’s never been omniscient, and it never will be. The algorithm is just a tool for optimization. And most of the time it’s the slave of commerce.\nSure, you can think of technology as a lidless eye — given how it tends to watch and record what we do. But ceaseless surveillance is not a synonym for supernatural. It’s technology applied to constrain and reduce; to turn the creative chaos of possibility into a predictable pipeline that can be controlled or monetized. If you think that sounds like magic you probably need to recalibrate your inner lens.\n\nSo really, as we use and shape technology tools and services, we the people making the tech and buying the tech and living with the tech need to sharpen our focus on what’s really important. And what’s really true. A ‘shiny, hyper-connected future’ is meaningless if we don’t actually want to live in it. If we as individuals threaded within the fabric of society end up feeling less connected to each other, more dehumanized by the tools we use then why are we buying into the marketing fiction? What’s in it for us? What’s in it for society as a cohesive whole?\nThe fiction of the shiny sci-fi future is repackaged and sold to us again and again to try to herd us towards some near term commercial goal. But what’s the actual, lived reality of these marketing fictions? Fewer human jobs and more ephemeral employment that rebrands social precariousness as ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’? Fewer actual human interactions and more synthesized, packaged substitutes that feed off the sense of isolation and dissatisfaction their (over)use cultivates?\nDoes that sound like a fair trade? In exchange for granting a free pass to an army of digital middlemen to mediate more and more aspects of our lives via their shiny layers we get what — mild diversion and marginal convenience? Cat GIFs on Facebook and pizza dropping from the sky at the push of a drone-summoning button? Are we really so easily infantalized? Can our inner lives be so cheaply bought?\nThing is, it doesn’t have to be technology or people. It’s possible to imagine a future where technology works FOR people. Where unchecked software is not eating the world but is applied selectively, by societies, as a tool to help tighten and reinforce the jointed scaffolding of real-world communities. To help build actual connections, not devalue real-world social structures to try to replace them with mediated digital alternatives.\nBut that means recognizing when it’s necessary to moderate the trajectory of a platform, say, or shape algorithmic applications with people-focused regulation to ensure valuable social structures aren’t ripped out or ripped apart by the indifferent interests of corporate accountancy. And — as individual users of technology — recognizing when it’s time to leave your phone alone for a bit and talk to the people around you.\nIf we can find the right balance between technology and society, it’s possible to imagine many good things being created by humans using ever more sophisticated tools. But achieving that balance requires continuous sweating toil to define society’s red lines — and the discipline not to be distracted or swayed by the superficial sheen of shiny things.\nHard work for sure, but the kind of socially engaged activity that yields genuinely satisfying rewards — and benefits the many, not the few.", "date": "11/15/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/photo-06-11-2015-22-02-40.jpg?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "surveillance,technology,tracking,society", "title": "How Much Technology Is Too Much Technology?", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/how-much-technology-is-too-much-technology/" }, { "id": 176, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "If you’ve ever soldered or welded, you’ll know that things get pretty hot. MesoGlue intends to fix that. It’s a room-temperature metallic glue that lets you stick parts together with reckless abandon and electrical control. The most interesting part of the entire system is that it allows us to solder parts onto boards without heat which will lead to press-fit electronics which, in short, is an amazing development.\nThese sorts of things are still fairly uncommon and the fact that it works at all should do much to improve the growth of DIY electronics and even reduce the energy needed to solder PCBs en massed. The MesoGlue Silver looks and acts like regular silver solder and you can even use the glue to attach chips to heatsinks permanently without thermal paste, a boon for high-performance computing folks. It’s a really cool technology that may change the way we make electronics.\nFounded by Prof. Hanchen Huang and Paul Elliott of Northeastern University along with Prof. Stephen Stagon of the University of North Florida, the company is still in its early stages but should be ready to rock and roll soon.\n“Both ‘metal’ and ‘glue’ are familiar terms to most people, but their com­bi­na­tion is new and made pos­sible by unique prop­er­ties of metallic nanorods–infinitesimally small rods with metal cores that we have coated with the ele­ment indium on one side and galium on the other. These coated rods are arranged along a sub­strate like angled teeth on a comb: There is a bottom ‘comb’ and a top ‘comb.'” said Huang. “We then inter­lace the ‘teeth.’ When indium and gallium touch each other, they form a liquid. The metal core of the rods acts to turn that liquid into a solid. The resulting glue pro­vides the strength and thermal/electrical con­duc­tance of a metal bond. We recently received a new pro­vi­sional patent for this devel­op­ment through North­eastern University.”\n“The metallic glue has mul­tiple appli­ca­tions, many of them in the elec­tronics industry. As a heat con­ductor, it may replace the thermal grease cur­rently being used, and as an elec­trical con­ductor, it may replace today’s sol­ders. Par­tic­ular prod­ucts include solar cells, pipe fit­tings, and com­po­nents for com­puters and mobile devices,” he said.\nIt it saves me from burning my little fingers while making an electronic clock, I’m all in.", "date": "1/11/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/smdlong.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "mesoglue", "title": "MesoGlue Is A Metallic Glue That Replaces Hot Solder", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/11/mesoglue-is-a-metallic-glue-that-replaces-hot-solder/" }, { "id": 177, "authors": "Anthony Ha", "category": "", "content": "SocialWire, a startup building Facebook ads for retailers, has raised $1 million in “seed extension” funding. The company is also announcing that Chief Revenue Officer Bob Buch, a former exec at Aol and Digg, is taking on the role of CEO.\nWhen I talked to Buch this morning, he acknowledged that when he tells people that he works in the advertising business, they usually respond, “Oh, I hate advertising.” But that, Buch said, is “why I’m doing this.” The company’s goal to is to create advertising that’s a “win win win” — something that attracts customers for advertisers, makes money for publishers (for now that means Facebook), and actually exposes consumers to relevant products. He compared it to his work at Digg, where the ad formats pushed advertisers to communicate their message in “more newsworthy ways.”\nIn the case of SocialWire, the company’s working on a technology that it calls Dynamic Product Ads. Instead of just showing people a generic ad for a store (“Shop at Nordstrom’s!”), SocialWire can present them with a specific product that’s targeted at their interests, so the ad is much more likely to be relevant and attention-grabbing.\nAs outlined in a company blog post, the Dynamic Product Ads take advantage of a number of Facebook’s targeting capabilities, including interests and location (so people who live in San Francisco and are interested in golf, Tiger Woods, or something related would see ads for golf lessons in San Francisco), as well as Custom Audiences (so a retailer can use their own data about different customer segments to deliver customized ads).\n\nThis is a bit different from SocialWire’s initial focus of connecting organic social sharing with promoted Newsfeed stories. Buch said the vision remains the same, but the team decided that initial product wasn’t going to grow quickly enough. As it developed the new platform, SocialWire started to get a lot of interest from advertisers, and it’s already working with LivingSocial, Shoedazzle, and others.\n“All of a sudden we were off to the races,” Buch said. “We realized, ‘There’s a lot of technology here that we want to build, so we need to raise another round.'”\nSocialWire announced a $2 million seed round last fall. Buch argued that the company hadn’t quite reached the point where it made sense to reach a Series A (“you’ve got your product market fit, you’ve got your core technology, now go scale out your revenue”) , so it raised the seed extension instead. The funding comes from new investor SoftTech VC and previous investors First Round Capital, 500 Startups, Accelerator Ventures, and Joi Ito.\nBuch also said that he’s taking over as CEO while founder Selcuk Atli becomes executive chairman. He said he really liked being the only business person at the company when he joined, because it meant it was “a very technical and product-oriented team.” However, they reached a point where they looked at the work Buch was already doing at the company and “it just made sense” for him to become CEO. Still, he acknowledged that this could be a “sensitive” situation.\n“The guiding principle for me has always been transparency,” Buch said. “I wasn’t even willing to do it unless it was something that Selcuk was totally supportive of and that everybody else wanted. This isn’t a coup or a forced takeover. This is what we all think is the right plan.”", "date": "5/2/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/socialwire-logo.jpg?w=214", "section": "social/", "tags": "bob-buch,socialwire", "title": "Facebook Ad Startup SocialWire Raises Another $1M, Chief Revenue Officer Bob Buch Becomes CEO", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/02/socialwire-seed-extension-new-ceo/" }, { "id": 178, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "Will algorithms or crowdsourced recommendations lead the way when it comes to the mobile shopping done via aggregators like Fancy, Wanelo, Polyvore or Fresh? A startup called Wish is betting on the former, likening itself to “an AdWords for shopping.” Today, the company is expanding its automated matching technology, which pairs people to product, into a new area: a mobile marketplace called “Wish Closet.” This feature will now allow the company’s nearly 15 million users to buy and sell items found in each other’s closets.\nLaunched by former Google, Yahoo and Facebook employees, Wish’s technical co-founding team believes that the best way to connect consumers to items they would want to purchase is through an algorithm combined, of course, with an engaging mobile experience.\n“At Google, we worked on matching billions of different queries with web pages,” explains CEO Peter Szulczewski, who spent seven years at Google where he worked on AdWords, AdSense and Search. “And we think the best way to match millions of consumers to the best products is actually through technology.”\nUnlike other services like Wanelo or Polyvore where “trending” and popular products are ranked to help drive e-commerce sales, Wish is more focused on finding just what an individual user likes.\nThe company originally began as a wish list website, allowing users to add items they like to various lists – not much different from creating Pinterest boards, for instance, but instead focused only on shopping. As new items are added, Wish gets smarter about a user’s preferences. It then helps merchants target those shoppers who are interested in items similar to what they have to sell.\nFor example, says Szulczewski, if a merchant has 100 blue, lace dresses to sell, Wish can point them to users who also have blue, lace dresses saved on their wish list. The merchants can reach those consumers with promotions when they’re browsing their feed, or even with push notifications.\nCurrently, Wish works with around 500 Amazon and eBay merchants who reach the company’s some half a million daily active users.\nNow, the company is bringing its product-matching technology to the users themselves with the debut of Wish Closet. Similar to Poshmark or Threadflip, Wish Closet lets users sell pre-owned items to other app users.\n\nBut unlike competitors which rely more heavily on user-initiated searches, “sale” parties, and other means of active discovery, Wish will attempt to connect buyers and sellers also through its algorithm.\nAfter the sale is made, Wish will verify the buyer’s details, handling the payment processing, and providing the shipping labels that can be printed out and placed on the box before being dropped off at the Post Office. The company will take a 20 percent commission on these sales, it says.\nThe expansion comes at a time when Wish is reporting recent growth, now with week-over-week engagement up 15 percent, and users adding 5 to 10 million products to their wish lists every day, as well as sharing 200,000 products and lists with family and friends. The consumers spend around 30 minutes per day browsing the app and saving 19 items on average to their lists.\nWhile these metrics are promising, the company doesn’t disclose how many transactions it has processed (“hundreds of thousands” is the ballpark figure) or what the dollar amount of those transactions are. It also can’t say how much better its technology works than those competitors relying on the popularity sort alone.\n“Typically when a new merchant comes on, we ask them to select three to five items, they will sell hundreds of items in the first 48 hours,” Szulczewski says. However, he admits that the company does try to help the merchants get a lot of transactions in the first few days, since the company is still trying to prove to the retailers that Wish is a meaningful distribution channel for them.\nHowever, if the company now plans to apply that same focus to getting users’ closet items to sell, too, then it could establish itself as a worthy competitor to others like Poshmark or Threadflip, especially since it will now marry the secondhand marketplace concept with buying new all under one roof. It also aims for a slightly different demographic (women 15-25), while Wanelo skews a little younger and Poshmark a little older, or so Szulczewski believes.\nThe new Wish Closet feature, which had been tested already with some 10,000 sellers, is now available in the company’s mobile applications here on iOS or here on Android.", "date": "7/29/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/mzl-sbnwksts-320x480-75-1.jpg?w=270", "section": "startups/", "tags": "wish", "title": "Mobile Shopping App Wish Expands Into Re-Commerce With Debut Of “Wish Closet”", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/29/mobile-shopping-app-wish-expands-into-re-commerce-with-debut-of-wish-closet/" }, { "id": 179, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Apps", "content": "Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 90,000 registered developer accounts in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the company to work on Google’s platform. And it hints that Windows Phone may be next in line.\nConsidering that Android is currently the most popular smartphone platform globally, this potentially gives Twilio a much bigger opportunity to deliver services to the wider smartphone market — with Android and iOS together accounting for 75 percent of the existing smartphone market, according to Gartner.\nTwilio is kicking off its Android service with features to integrate voice features into Android apps: as with Twilio’s existing APIs for iOS apps and websites, the Android VoIP APIs effectively let developers incorporate VoIP features directly into apps, to create features like in-app calling that work without needing to launch any additional apps or services. Other features in the SDK include real-time presence, with developers able to build buddy lists to let users know who is online, and who can voice chat; and app backgrounding, which lets users receive voice calls even if the relevant app is not being used.\nBut what’s potentially most interesting about the launch of the Android SDK is that it could lead to some interesting bridges built between Android apps, iOS apps, web apps and traditional voice calls.\n“We now support the vast majority of smartphones globally,” Thomas Schiavone, director of product management for Twilio, noted in a statement. “With this many developers and our proven success on iOS, we know we’ll see some incredible and innovative cross-platform communication apps in the months to come.”\nSchiavone further said that there will be SDKs for other platforms coming soon — and hints that the next SDK to come might be for the Windows Phone platform. “We are looking at what will be next,” he told TechCrunch. “Android and iOS are the leaders, but at this time there is no clear number three. However, we are watching all the other platforms and are particularly interested in Window’s Phone.”\nThat would also make sense, given the strategic partnership Twilio already has with Microsoft. That partnership was announced earlier this month and means that Microsoft now offers Twilio’s APIs to tens of thousands of Microsoft Azure cloud developers.\nIn addition to that development, Twilio has been releasing a steady stream of other news in the last month that points to the company looking to expand quickly and make good use of its $33 million in funding to date. Its services are now available in 12 countries — 10 in Europe and the U.S. and Canada — and in April, Twilio hired a full-time executive in Europe, James Parton, poached from Telefonica. But it has also seen one significant executive departure, too: Danielle Morrill, an early employee who headed up marketing, just this week left to work on her own startup, the Y Combinator-backed Refer.ly.\nThe Android SDK has been running in a private beta, the company tells me, and from today it will be available to all Android developers.", "date": "5/15/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/diagram-platform-img.png?w=233", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "", "title": "Twilio Calling: Cloud Telephony Startup Adds An Android SDK, Now Works On 75% Of All Smartphones", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/15/twilio-calling-cloud-telephony-startup-adds-an-android-sdk-now-works-on-75-of-all-smartphones/" }, { "id": 180, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Fundings & Exits", "content": "A company that brought you the world’s first origami-inspired folding kayak is back again with a new model – the 16-foot Coast (and Coast+), which is a longer, expedition-style kayak designed for multi-day trips and choppier waters. The Coast offers some neat improvements over Oru‘s original 12-foot folding kayak, but retains the remarkably simple fold-out design that makes it easy to pack and carry, as well as fun to paddle.\nThe California-made Oru kayaks are built using a tough corrugated plastic for the hull, with nylon straps that secure the top seam and provide a seal that won’t take on water – even if you’re ambitious enough to do a roll, provided you have a good cockpit skirt. The box that the Oru Coast folds into, despite its 16-foot length, will fit in most car trunks and closets, and easily qualifies as standard checked baggage on flights, meaning it can go places other standard (and even traditional folding) kayaks can’t.\nThe Coast weight in at 31 pounds, which is incredibly light for a boat this size, and will support paddlers up to 400 lbs and 6’6″. It’s designed to be used by paddlers of all skill levels, and includes a built-in adjustable footrest. Oru says it should take 10 minutes or less to put it together from its folded configuration, and based on my personal experience with its original 12-foot model, that should be about right once you’ve done it a few times and gotten over the learning curve.\nThe original Oru Bay is a terrific kayak; it’s as fast as equivalent hard-bodied boats, and so far has proven incredibly durable, too. Oru runs these kayaks through incredible failure testing prior to shipping them to consumers, including doing things like dropping them off of buildings.\nOru debuted a Bay+ upgraded model of its original kayak late last year, but this time, it’s doing both a Coast and Coast+ right at launch. The Coast+ version of the new boat provides ratchet buckles for easier assembly, an improve, more ergonomic seat, thigh braces, and deck lines plus a folding hatch for additional accessory and storage support. Both new models should be faster and more comfortable than the Bay, owing to their elongated design.\nOru looks to start shipping the Coast beginning in August tock the first backers, with a target goal of $40,000 for its funding total. It’s already more than halfway to that mark after just a few hours of accepting backers, so there’s little doubt it’ll reach that threshold.", "date": "5/19/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/c2cf80f4955f18f0db0f631d9f23c499_original.jpg?w=700", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "", "title": "Oru Seeks Adventure With The Coast Folding Expedition Kayak", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/19/oru-seeks-adventure-with-the-coast-folding-expedition-kayak/" }, { "id": 181, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "Persuading publishers to make their eBooks available to read over the Web is probably quite a big ask. Persuading them to sell those eBooks on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis, enabling readers to purchase specific pages or chapters of a book only — well, that’s just crazy talk. Not so crazy, it seems, that one UK startup is taking a stab: ValoBox launches its on-demand browser-based eBook service today, with publishers O’Reilly Media, Profile Books, Guardian Books, Constable & Robinson, and Snowbooks, signed on at debut.\nFounded by Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks, who are also the team behind the online book publishing service, CompletelyNovel.com, ValoBox’s pay-as-you-go model sets out to solve the problem of “how to get hold of expert content when you’re short on time and money”.\nIt does this by making available the eBook content it sells via a standard web browser (or in the cloud), which in turn means that ValoBox is able to offer a completely different purchasing and consumption model. Users can search the full text of a book, then buy and read only the parts they want, all from within ValoBox’s online reader, which can be accessed at anytime via any supporting web browser. That means no downloads, or the upfront cost of the full eBook. Cleverly, if a user does go on to buy the whole book on ValoBox, it shouldn’t work out more expensive, as whatever they’ve already spent will be discounted from the total purchase price.\nSocial media sharing is built-in to encourage users to share their purchases, and there is an embeddable widget for blogs etc., too. As a further incentive, ValoBox offers a 25% affiliate revenue share if others go on to make a purchase.\nIn terms of competitors, there are other companies who offer a way to consume eBooks through a web browser, though ValoBox thinks it is pretty unique with its pay-as-you-go model.\nOtherwise, there’s the likes of Safari Books and 24Symbols, which offer an eBook subscription service, which as Lewis tells me, is “great for heavy book buyers, but ValoBox works for people who want to quickly access some content, and for whom a long-term commitment doesn’t make sense”.\nThat may particularly apply to educational and similar non-fiction content — hence today’s starting lineup of publishers — and to that end, ValoBox says it’s also running private trials with a number of other major educational and trade publishers.", "date": "10/25/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/215936v2-max-250x250.png?w=250", "section": "startups/", "tags": "valobox", "title": "ValoBox Launches Pay-As-You-Go eBook Offering; O’Reilly Media, Guardian Books & Other Publishers Sign On ", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/25/pay-as-you-go-ebooks/" }, { "id": 182, "authors": "Frederic Lardinois", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Google’s Android for Work program makes it easier for businesses to allow their employees to safely use their Android phones for both work and personal use. It gives IT the ability to manage work apps, which are siloed from the rest of the phone, and employees can still put their own private data on the device, which in turn is shielded from IT.\nWhen Google launched this program earlier this year, it had already signed up a wide range of partners to help bring Android for Work to market. Today, it’s expanding this program by adding a new device manufacturer and — for the first time — carriers to its partner ecosystem.\nThe new carriers, which will now offer support for Android for Work to their business customers (and market the program) are AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Rogers, Bell Canada, Telus Mobility and KT (disclaimer: Verizon, as you may remember, now owns TechCrunch).\nIn addition, Google has added Silent Circle — the makers of the security- and privacy-focused Blackphone — to its list of partners. It joins Samsung and that company’s KNOX platform in its list of Android for Work devices that can be used in regulated industries like government and healthcare.\n\n“Privacy is about being able to decide and control what information to share and how you share it,” said Silent Circle’s President and CEO Bill Conner in today’s announcement. “We’re delighted to join the Android for Work program. It’s a significant step forward in Silent Circle’s development which enables us to deliver privacy and security to a broader enterprise customer base, while meeting their need for the wide-ranging apps and services provided by Google.”\nGoogle says more than 10,000 businesses, including the World Bank, U.S. Army and Guardian Life Insurance Company, are currently either “testing, deploying or using” Android for Work. That, of course, leaves us guessing how many of these 10,000 are actually using Android for Work in production (enterprises aren’t exactly known for moving quickly, after all). But there can be little doubt that this service solves a real problem for many enterprises, especially if they want to allow their employees to use their own devices.\n", "date": "7/30/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/android-work.png?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "byod,android-for-work", "title": "Google Adds 8 Carriers To Its Android For Work Partner Ecosystem", "topics": "android,google", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/30/google-adds-8-carriers-to-its-android-for-work-partner-ecosystem/" }, { "id": 183, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Apps", "content": "Before we get too far into this, I want to be fully transparent and disclose up-front that this is weird and mostly irrelevant.\nInexplicably, Vimeo user Marcello Gómez Maureira has created a video that shows a piece of meat power-right-swiping through Tinder.\nThe title of the film? “Tender: It’s how people meat.”\nSo, naturally, I love Marcello and this video.\nA few fun jokes you could use to caption this as you inevitably share it with your social networks:\n“Tinder sure is a meat market!” (Stolen from BoingBoing, just like the video.)\n‘Ooh baby, I like it raw!’ (Stolen from ODB.)\n“People on Tinder just treat you like a piece of meat.” (Unfortunately, not stolen. I’m just not that funny.)\nSomething about being forced to upgrade to Tinder Plus. (I’m really bad at this.)\nI told you this would be weird. Sorry. Carry on. ", "date": "5/23/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/screenshot-2015-05-23-12-05-32.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Meat This New Tinder User", "topics": "tinder", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/23/meat-this-new-tinder-user/" }, { "id": 184, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Apps", "content": "Just when you thought chat app makers had run out of things to say — i.e. because they’ve said it all already, via text, VoIP, videochatting, emoticons, snaps, pokes, stickers, Chat Heads, WHATEVER — along comes London-based app studio Ustwo to pour its distinctive brand of fun-loving mischief into the category.\nAfter launching Rando last month, a random photo-sharing app which sparked plenty of confusion/curiosity over its lack of social sharing features (curiosity appears to be winning, with more than a million randos since shared), Ustwo has turned its attention to two-way communication and unboxed Honk!: a messaging app for iOS and Android.\nUstwo brands Honk! as a “super chat” app. What’s a super chat app exactly? “We had felt that none of the [messaging competitors] had that spark.. they felt too ‘message/// not enough SUPER CHAT,” (un)explains Ustwo co-founder Matt Miller via email. Clearly a man with a very visual mind. On its blog, Ustwo adds that it was “playing with the concept of non-verbal communication”  — photo-sharing being the monster truck driving most digital social interaction these days — and wanted to build a messaging app that wasn’t so “streamlined” and focused on text, but rather all about imagery and playful self-expression.\nTo my eye, Honk is the sort of app you could imagine a DrawSomething-addicted lolcat cooking up after a particularly heavy fish-supper. Its splendid tagline says it all: “If you have nothing better to do or say. Honk!”\n\nThe app encourages users to treat messaging each other as a game — furnishing folk with the tools (camera, pen, colour palette, fonts, Flickr Creative Commons photo search) to cook up a heady cocktail of visual banter with which to amuse/terrify/meme-ify their friends. Messages are segmented into portions that are filled up individually — to create the overall messy messaging patchwork that is a Honk!\nThe segments look likely to encourage people to create composites of their friends’ faces. And turn running jokes into visual memes. It’s part messaging app, part game. Or as Ustwo puts it: “an alternative way to communicate with friends, show them what you’re up to and exchange nonsensical but engaging messages with them”.\nMore Honks below.\n", "date": "4/18/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/photo-18-04-2013-15-29-231.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "photo-sharing,messaging-app,honk,ustwo", "title": "Move Over Chat Heads. Ustwo’s New App Honk! Wants You To Meme-ify Your Friends With “Visually Explosive” Messaging", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/18/ustwo-honk/" }, { "id": 185, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "The Nokia Lumia 620 is not a flagship smartphone — for high-end Windows Phone hardware, look to the Lumia 920 (or Samsung Ativ S). But what makes the 620 interesting is its (low) price: this is an entry-level handset that puts a polished mobile computing experience in your pocket without breaking the bank or compromising usability with dire, underpowered hardware.\nWhen Nokia unveiled the 620 back in December it talked about wanting to add something more compact to its lineup. And the phone is certainly pocket-friendly. But the size of the 620’s price-tag is the real focus here: the Lumia 620 is Nokia’s cheapest Windows Phone 8 device by far (the Lumia 510 is cheaper still but that handset runs WP7.5/7.8, not WP8). Nokia’s target markets for the 620 are currently Asia-Pac, the Middle East and Africa, Europe and Canada. The company won’t comment on whether it will be bringing the handset to the U.S. in the future.\nDriving down the cost of Windows Phone hardware so it can better compete with Android’s reach is a key plank of Nokia’s strategy. “We are clearly innovating with Microsoft around Windows Phone, and are focused on taking that to lower and lower price points,” said CEO Stephen Elop, on a Q4 investor conference call last month, adding: “You will see that over time compete with Android.”\nThe 620 is a crucial step along that road. In the U.K. it’s on offer SIM-free from £150 (approximately $235) — which means it’s lining up against a swathe of mid-range to budget Androids, while avoiding scraping along the very bottom of the budget barrel. At sub-£100, most phones are dismal performers — with sluggish processors, cramped low res screens and plasticy build quality — but even around the £150 mark there are plenty of duds. The Lumia 620 stands out from the underpowered crowd by showing that an entry level smartphone can get the performance basics right.\n\n\n\nNokia said “compact” and the Lumia 620 is certainly that. It will slip into pockets and fit in the daintiest of hands. While its screen size is a smidgen bigger than the iPhone 4/4S — at 3.8 inches on the diagonal — its overall footprint is almost identical, albeit a little thicker in the waist (at 11mm). The screen itself is clear and bright without being especially crisp, thanks to its midding resolution.\nOn the design side, the phone has a rounded look and feel. And while there’s no getting away from how much plastic is involved in its construction it feels sturdy rather than flimsy. All its curves, coupled with the glossy shell, can make it a bit of a slippery character — it managed to fly from my fingers and crash-land on the floor during testing (but seemed no worse for wear after its tumble). The gently rounded back also means it won’t lie flush with a flat surface, such as a table, so if you try to use the touchscreen without otherwise anchoring it the handset will move/spin with your fingers.\nNokia has decided to go all out for bright and bold with the overall look of the phone by offering a range of vividly coloured shells, including a glossy two-tone acid green/yellow one (pictured in close up above, and below top right) and bright pink, blue, yellow and white in a matte finish (pictured below). Shells are swapped out by pressing on the camera lens while pulling back on the top edge.\n\nAs easy as it is to swap the shells it does feel a little gimmicky but if you’re the sort of person who likes to colour-match all your accessories then it might excite you. More exciting is that Nokia has released 3D print files for the case shell of another Lumia handset — the 820 — so it’s possible the company might also decide to release a 3DK for the 620 in the future (although the 620’s shell incorporates the headphone jack unit so it seems unlikely).\nBeing plasticy, the 620 is relatively lightweight (127g). It has three physical keys on its right-hand edge: a power/wake-up button in the middle, a volume rocker at the top and a dedicated camera button — which is a great addition — towards the bottom. On the front, you get the familiar trio of Windows Phone navigation keys: back; the Windows home key; and (Bing) search. These aren’t physical keys but the symbols have been printed atop the touchscreen so they’re visible at all times.\nThere’s a five megapixel camera on the rear of the phone, with a single LED flash. Photo resolution is 2,592 x 1,936 pixels and picture quality is average to poor — with subjects often acquiring a fuzzy halo and lacking crisp definition. It’s fine for quick snaps for uploading to Facebook etc. but is not an area where the 620 wins any plaudits. The front-facing lens produces extremely low-quality shots so is really only suitable for low-resolution video chatting.\nElsewhere, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top edge; a Micro-USB port for charging/transferring files on the bottom edge; and a small rear speaker on the back, towards the bottom corner. The Micro SD card slot can be got at by removing the shell (but without having to take out the battery). The Micro SIM tray is tucked away under the battery. Talking of which, the phone has reasonable stamina for its class. Nokia reckons you’ll get up to 9.9 hours of 3G talk time, or 61 hours of music playback on a single charge. I found it easily lasted a day’s average use.\nCall quality is reasonable although not stand out — sounding a little muffled, rather than super crisp. The rear speaker wasn’t bad either, for such a budget device, with no evidence of distortion at the top of the range and the ability to pump the noise up relatively loud.\n\nThe Lumia 620 runs Windows Phone 8, which sets it apart from other low-cost Windows Phone handsets as these tend to run the previous incarnation of Microsoft’s mobile platform, Windows Phone 7 (either 7.5 — or the last update, 7.8, which includes the new, more flexible homescreen found on WP8). If you don’t have a huge budget and simply must have Windows Phone 8 the Lumia 620 is pretty much your only hope right now. At least until Huawei’s “entry-level” Ascend W1 arrives to rain on its parade.\nMicrosoft’s OS has positioned itself as a ‘third way’ to the smartphone ‘duopoly’ of Android and iOS, claiming WP is less controlling than Apple’s iOS, but more controlled than Android’s free for all. In truth, Windows Phone can feel very micro-managed since Microsoft doesn’t allow its OEMs to skin the OS with their own UI, meaning every Windows Phone looks and feels exactly the same.\nIf you like the Windows Phone look — big, bright tiles coupled with lashings of typography, rather than icons/graphics — then that’s not necessarily a problem. But it can feel like a bit of an acquired taste and/or rather clinical. Microsoft also, inevitably, lards the OS with made-in-Redmond services — which brings advantages, such as 7GB of free SkyDrive cloud storage (in the 620’s case), but can also feel a bit limiting. Want to make the search key default to Google rather than Bing? Forget it.\nStill, there’s no denying Windows Phone offers something different to the competition, with social networking data (from Facebook, Twitter et al) working like the blood in its veins, continually pumping personalised updates onto your homescreen, and trickling down through native apps such as the calendar. All told, it’s the lazy person’s way to stay in the loop. Add to that, there’s no shortage of messaging options — with the built-in social networking extending your communications options so you don’t have to dive off into dedicated apps as you swipe around the UI. Web browsing also feels fast and responsive.\nAt the Lumia 620’s price point, the main OS alternative is of course Android — but at this price Nokia’s handset is effectively competing on performance grounds, rather than UI/OS philosophy. Far too many cheap Androids can feel sluggish and underwhelming, if not downright frustrating thanks to poor hardware. That’s not universally true of course — there are exceptions — but budget Android buyers need to do their research to avoid owning a lemon.\nWhat the Lumia 620 shows is that Windows Phone can be an attractive low-price alternative — offering slick entry-level performance, with a solid browser, messaging, maps and of course integrated social networking, plus, in the 620’s case, value-add extras such as free cloud storage and Nokia’s free streaming music service.\nAs an OS, Windows Phone still has work to do — it’s solid but not glitch free — nor is it lightning fast on the 620, with the loading animation a constant companion, though never for too long. But, on the plus side, it’s really easy to use and, most importantly, packs in a lot of functionality for your cash. But — but! — you do need to make your peace with its relative lack of apps.\nThat cool new app your friend told you about? It won’t be on Windows Phone. Not now, and maybe not ever.\n\n\nWindows Phone had some 150,000+ apps at the last count (vs more than 700,000 Google Play apps as of October last year) so, just looking at the numbers (ignoring the whole ‘app quality’ issue), it is very far behind the Android experience. Relative lack of apps remains a very big caveat about Windows Phone. That said, not all Android apps can run (or run well) on every budget handset so again, on performance grounds, the 620 can still make a compelling case for budget buyers.\nThere are still some seriously big holes in the Windows Phone app catalogue, such as Instagram and Dropbox, along with plenty of disruptive startup apps you’re inevitably missing out on such as Snapchat and Vine — but at this budget price it does feels a bit indulgent to gripe.\nNokia has also stepped into the app breach to bolster the platform with offerings such as its (free) Mix Radio music streaming service, which includes an offline listening feature and does not require any kind of registration to get the tunes up and running, along with Nokia Maps and turn-by-turn sat-nav app Nokia Drive (with free downloadable world maps), plus the likes of City Lens: an augmented reality app that helps you hunt for stuff in your local area.\nGaming seems to be a particularly weak area for Windows Phone apps (despite its Xbox-branded games hub) so the Lumia 620 is not such a great choice for pocket gamers. But — elsewhere — Microsoft has managed to get some big name apps on the platform, including Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Evernote and Angry Birds. The latter does not appear to be offered as a free ad-supported download on Windows Phone, as it is on Android and iOS — presumably because of Windows Phone’s limited marketshare — so you’ll need to be prepared to spend around £0.79 ($1.24) to download each Rovio title.\nOne more thing: generally speaking, apps do tend to be more expensive on Windows Phone which is something else budget buyers need to factor in to their evaluation of the 620. There’s no doubt apps are Windows Phone’s weakest link.\n\n\nThe Lumia 620 is an impressive smartphone for the price. Its dual-core chip delivers decent all-round performance with responsive web browsing, maps and apps, and a UI that’s a pleasure rather than a sluggish chore to swipe around. Budget buyers are all too often fobbed off with underpowered, undesirable hardware that makes for uninspiring, frustrating software. This entry-level phone says there is another way to put the mobile web and smart messaging in your pocket.\nBut the trade-off is an ecosystem that feels a little more sterile than Android, both in terms of how much it lets you customise the experience to your tastes and the extent to which you can extend and augment it with third-party apps. There’s no denying Microsoft’s platform falls short on apps. But, at this entry-level price at least, the Lumia 620 makes up for that with solid performance and simplicity. Decent performance may partly be down to Windows Phone lacking the processor-draining apps to really push it. But even if that’s the case the result is a budget phone that, unlike some entry-level fodder, does the basics well — and that’s a great start.", "date": "2/10/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/nokia-lumia-620-2.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "nokia-lumia-620", "title": "Nokia’s Cheapest Windows Phone 8 Lumia, The 620, Gives The Budget Android Pack A Run For Its Money", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/10/nokias-cheapest-windows-phone-8-lumia-the-620-gives-the-budget-android-pack-a-run-for-its-money/" }, { "id": 186, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Apps", "content": "Portugal Ventures-backed company Wizi knows a thing or two about social geolocation services, having made a business in recent years building Foursquare-like apps for carriers, including Telefonica and Vodafone. One example being Vodafone Radar — an app which it says garnered around half a million downloads.\nBut working with carriers, say co-founders Paulo Dimas and Jorge Medeira, is painstakingly slow compared to the pace of startup development — taking, for instance, a full two years to launch just one app with Telefonica in Brazil. (“It’s horrible” is their concise verdict on working with carriers).\nWhich is why they decided to branch out on their own last April, launching a social location app for checkins and keeping abreast of friends’ whereabouts called FacesIn, initially for Android. That pretty standard ‘SoLoMo’ service has now morphed — via a partial pivot — into something more interesting: delivering location-based alerts on where people of interest to you will be in the near future.\nSo rather than continuing to chase the bandwagon of apps and services that promise to keep you appraised of your friends’ real-time movements, such as the aforementioned Foursquare or Swarm or other real-time location mapping/pinging services, FacesIn can now parse public data and social postings to alert you when someone you are interested in is going to be at a public event in your vicinity soon — such as speaking at a conference. The idea being to give users the chance to cross paths with people they want to network with.\n“Everybody is doing ‘the now’ — so who’s nearby now. That’s interesting. But nobody is doing ‘soon’. Nobody is doing who is going to be in this location in the near future,” says Dimas. “So we believe there’s a lot of value here. For instance if you are in London and you want to pick events to go to, typically people do it because they want to meet somebody, they want to connect, they want to follow up.”\nIf you were talking about pro-actively monitoring the schedules of celebrities or general web users that would sound pretty stalkerish but the initial focus for the new version of the app is on tech startup entrepreneurs and investors. Who of course have a special thirst for networking, contacts building and co-locating.\nUsing online data sources such as CrunchBase and AngelList, the team has curated a list of around 500 “VIP” individuals of especial relevance to this group — including TC’s very own Editor-At-Large, Mike Butcher (I checked and they confirmed Mike is on their list) — cross referencing this list with public information sources such as Eventbrite and Twitter to gather data on these people’s future locations so it can keep its own users in the loop.\nIt’s also pulling follower and other data from AngelList and Twitter to get info on who its users are most interested in (such as people they follow and actively engage with on these social platforms); and from LinkedIn — again to get info on who users may be most interested in meeting (via their contacts list). FacesIn does not scrape VIP targets’ location data from LinkedIn itself; only public information sources are used for gathering their location signals.\n“We try to infer the relevancy. That’s a big challenge,” Dimas tells TechCrunch, discussing how it determines when it should send a notification of a tech VIP’s future location. “We are trying to overcome major challenges in this domain… We try to make it as automatic as possible to the user. Because we know users are lazy and so we try to, by combining the distance to the location, the relevancy — the affinity level (we have a kind of a score for each contact that you have, or each person that you follow), and by combining these variables we decide if this notification is relevant. Because of course we don’t want to spam the user. And we also don’t want to ask many questions to the user. That’s why you turn on LinkedIn and it does the work for you.”\nEven if they weren’t able to plug into LinkedIn — say if the platform decided to close off its API to them — the team says it could still use smartphone contacts data to power its service (although it stresses it has a good working relationship with LinkedIn). So it’s not wholly dependent on any one of these other platforms, even though it does rely on public data to power its predictions.\nWhat about business model? Wizi isn’t expecting tech folk to pay to be pinged that Butcher (or another startup luminary)  will be passing through their city in a few weeks. The app is entirely free for now. Rather, in future, the co-founders believe there’s a business to be had in selling its social utility to salespeople who also have a special need to coincide in meatspace with potential leads so they can press flesh and seal deals.\nBut first they’re testing and honing their concept on the startup crowd. Because these sorts of predictive notifications need careful tuning. There is obviously a fine line between utility and spam — given the app needs to determine which of the people who you find interesting are you really most interested in meeting.\nHow does it do that? Natural language processing and textual analytics of your social activity, coupled with machine learning algorithms is the team’s special sauce here. To help its algorithms improve, the app asks users to give feedback on whether individual notifications were useful or not so it can better learn their preferences.\nFacesIn is also designed to be an “invisible” app — so it runs in the background and only intrudes on the user when it has something to tell them. The team say they are aiming for a maximum of two notifications per day.\n“What we are doing differently is talking about the future, and not about the past and the present… Of course it’s a big challenge. If it wasn’t everybody would be doing it,” says Dimas. “We have now combined a set of technologies — namely in the domain of natural language processing, and also machine learning, and that allows us to interpret, to understand when for instance somebody is going to be a speaker at an event. We collect that data and combine it with the profile data that we already have from the social networks.”\n“We are doing this progressively,” he adds. “What we are doing to start and to gain an initial critical mass is to focus on a specific target of users. In this case we are targeting the startup ecosystem… And so by analyzing all event data that are published by CrunchBase… we have lots of data that we can process.\n“Of course people may say they are going to be at an event, or they are announced as speakers at the event, and they may not be there in the end. But we just link them to the event page to keep the user informed about all the details.”\nPeople whose locations users of FacesIn are monitoring are not informed their movements are being tracked and re-broadcast in this way — the app has no public list equivalent to Twitter’s ‘following’ list. However the team stresses all the future location information it is drawing on is public data; so it’s just joining a few dots and automating notifications. Albeit that may still feel a little creepy. But this is what you get when dispersed pieces of (big) public data are brought together with a little lightweight data processing.\n“We believe there is so much value in this but when you talk about it… the reaction is ‘oh, isn’t that freaky?’ But it’s possible to do. And it’s valuable for the user,” says Dimas. “Aren’t we in a world where privacy is always a concern with everything you do?”\nThe team has pulled in around €500,000 in seed funding specifically for FacesIn from Portugal Ventures. It’s looking to raise a bridge round in the next 12 to 18 months to continue developing the product and — it hopes — turn a free social utility that’s pitched at the startup ecosystem into a service that salespeople will be willing to pay for. An iOS version of FacesIn is also planned for Q2 or Q3 this year.\nAsked about competitors they name-check a few social location apps — such as Highlight, Glympse and Connect — but again point out that rivals are solely focused on real-time location (as FacesIn was prior to its pivot), whereas their new flagship feature is all about looking ahead to the people and opportunities that are headed your way.\nNow the team needs to prove it can deliver genuinely useful predictive signals — rather than generating yet another feed of location-based noise. The proof of this algorithm’s utility will be in the selective deliverance.", "date": "2/21/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/p10304851.jpg?w=738", "section": "europe/", "tags": "", "title": "Social Location App FacesIn Pivots To Future Whereabouts", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/21/facesin/" }, { "id": 187, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "Get ready for another wave of social location-based mobile apps. Facebook has just opened new APIs that allow apps on its platform to tag posts with friends and Places, read the location of your old posts, and search for specific posts by coordinates and distance parameters. Additionally, Open Graph apps can now play back video and display big photos in news feed and Timeline.\nBy allowing apps to tag Places, Facebook can use the location data to show their posts to nearby friends. That means posts from Foodspotting, Gogobot, Path and other apps will be able to inspire serendipitous meetups just like Facebook check-ins. This is a big step towards Facebook becoming a hub of activity stories from around the web rather than just hosting its own content.\nThe APIs create parity between what apps can publish and users can post through Facebook.com and the Facebook mobile apps. For example, Facebook explains that “an app used to share your favorite meals can now make it possible to add where you ate and who you were with.”\nFacebook will be able to collect lots more location-as-a-layer data thanks to the new APIs. This helps it determine where users spend their time, and therefore what local content and ads will be especially relevant to them.\n\nThe option to add GeoPoint data will let apps create more interesting aggregated stories on their users’ Timelines. For instance, an app could reference the GeoPoint of your stated place of residence against all your checkins at restaurants around town through its app to give you an average distance you travel to eat.\nFriend tagging will be useful for apps like Path that have their own social graphs. They’ll be able to tie their user profiles to Facebook profiles, and make posts syndicated to Facebook appear with Facebook friend tags instead of just a simple text list of names.\nApps will be able to create maps and other data aggregations based on posts from other sources thanks to the new Read capabilities.\nFacebook previously had partnerships with Foursquare and several other location-based apps that allowed them to contribute official checkins. By opening this capability to all developers, more innovative apps will emerge, users will have more options of who to publish through, and Facebook will gain valuable data.", "date": "3/7/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/attachment.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Facebook SoLoMo-fies The Platform, Lets Apps Tag Friends and Places ", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/07/facebook-solomo-fies-the-platform-lets-apps-tag-friends-and-places/" }, { "id": 188, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Startups", "content": "\nGary Flake is a cool guy. He’s the CEO and founder of Clipboard, a web clipping service that lets you grab pieces of the Internet and save them in your own curated catalog of web-flavored goodies.\nIt’s quite intuitive, and as Robin Wauters said at launch time, it’s highly addictive.\nThe first thing I had to ask Flake was centered around privacy. It’s a growing issue in the industry, and Clipboard in particular likely has access to troves of valuable data with regards to the way we use the Internet. Flake said that as it stands now, there are no intentions to use that data for revenue, or even to take it out of the private realm.\nAt that point, I couldn’t help but ask about the obvious: Pinterest. See, Clipboard doesn’t necessarily compete directly with Pinterest — the services are fundamentally different in that Pinterest is aspirational images and Clipboard is saved web clippings (utility-based). Even so, a Clipboard redesign in February was strikingly similar to the Pinterest layout.\nFlake assured me that his redesign was imagined well before Pinterest hit the scene, and that he really doesn’t see Pinterest as competition at all. As I said before, the services are fundamentally different.\nAnother interesting tidbit discovered in our chat had to do with Clipboard’s highly impressive list of investors. Of the 14 or so investors, Flake only knew two or three of them around the time of investment. When all is said and done, it came down to the idea. Flake said that it’s such a simple idea, that when you see the product for the first time it really resonates with the users who have this particular need.\nAnd who doesn’t? Everyone sees something on the Internet, whether it be an article, a coupon code, a picture, or an entire website, that they simply have to tuck away to check on later. Clipboard solves that problem, so it’s no wonder that the company is pulling in cash from names like Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, DFJ, SV Angel / Ron Conway, Betaworks, First Round Capital, CODE Advisors, Founder’s Co-Op, Acequia Capital, Vast Ventures, Ted Meisel (former CEO of Overture and now at Elevation Partners), Blake Krikorian (former CEO of Sling and now an Amazon board member), and Vivi Nevo.\nIf you’d like to get in on the action, just click here to register. ", "date": "4/25/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/screen-shot-2012-04-25-at-10-31-00-am.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "gary-flake,clipboard", "title": "Clipboard CEO Gary Flake On Privacy And The Pinterest-Esque Redesign", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/25/clipboard-ceo-gary-flake-on-privacy-and-the-pinterest-esque-redesign/" }, { "id": 189, "authors": "Rip Empson", "category": "Apps", "content": "Digital dating is nothing to scoff at; it’s a big business, and it’s changed a lot of lives — mostly for the better. Yet, while dating has seen enormous progress during the Digital Era, there’s still a lot garbage out there, and the space is still mostly dominated by a handful of old names. A gaggle of dating sites and apps have appeared over the past five years, but few have had real staying power, and many have gone the way of the dinosaur.\nWhile it’s still too early to make any pronouncements, it’s looking more and more like Tinder could buck the trend. Created by Hatch Labs — an LA-based startup backed by IAC, the same Barry Diller-led digital media giant that owns Match.com and OKCupid — Tinder has grown like a weed since it launched in October. A crazy, dating weed.\nIn part, that’s due to timing, and in part because Tinder is based on a familiar, throwback model, drawing on the same addictive formula behind Hot or Not. Essentially, it’s Hot or Not made mobile, casual and connected to Facebook, but rather than promising to introduce people to their one true soul partner/life mate, Tinder just wants to make it easier to flirt — and get you off your ass to meet people. In the real world.\nBy focusing on reducing the “creepiness” factor (always a relative term in dating, mind you), reducing spam and by targeting young people, Tinder has been able to find that elusive, exponential growth curve. (Unsurprisingly, it’s initial growth spike came from college campuses, and the average age of its users is still 23.)\nIt’s also fairly easy to use: It’s free, it doesn’t focus on building traditional profiles, instead pulling basic info from Facebook, is location-enabled, and matches users to other people nearby based on similar behavior, interests and so on. If you’re not interested, you can pass. If you are, it connects you with the other person, allowing you to chat and arrange a meeting offline.\nThanks to the above, the app has been seeing the same kind of growth that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter saw in the early days, Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad tells us. But what does that mean, exactly? When we wrote about Tinder in early January, it had served one million matches and users had made 35 million profile ratings. Today, Rad says, Tinder has served 50 million matches and users have made 4.5 billion ratings.\nSo, while the team is keeping a tight lid on the number of downloads and users it’s attracted to date, from what we do know (and what we’ve been hearing from other sources), it’s safe to assume that both number well into the millions. And keep in mind: The app was released in late October.\nTinder also seems to be avoiding a common trend among popular mobile apps: High number of downloads, but comparatively low engagement. In Tinder’s case, Rad tells us that around 50 percent of users open the app once a day, while approximately 75 percent open the app once a week and around 85 percent use the app every month.\nBased on this growth, rumors have been circulating for months now that claim Tinder is in the proces of raising a big round of outside funding, or is in the process of being acquired. At this point, the founder says, neither of those are true. While the company isn’t sharing how much it’s raised to date, we do know that IAC is it’s primary investor, and owns a minority stake in the business, having been the sole investor in its seed and series A rounds (which we hear total in the millions). And the startup was incubated within IAC.\nIAC would likely love to own Tinder outright, as would others, but at this point the startup is resolved to stay independent, and go public rather than sell. Of course, there’s a long road ahead, and these things have a habit of changing. Furthermore, while Tinder has opted not to raise outside capital, our sources tell us that this hasn’t stopped venture capitalists from courting Tinder in every way possible.\nWith plenty of runway ahead and initial growth and scalability snags behind, Tinder has begun to focus more on product development as well as an area that will be key to its future: International markets. To date, 15 percent of Tinder users hail from outside the U.S., the CEO tells us, with the highest adoption coming from Canada, Australia, Brazil and Ireland. (In recent weeks, Rad says, Tinder was seeing 2,000 downloads/day in Brazil.)\nGoing forward, the team of 13 will begin its international growth efforts in the UK, Australia, Latin America, Germany, France and China, in particular. To do that, the company is working on additional language support, targeted marketing and hiring local reps in each of these countries. Rad also sees big opportunity for growth in Asia, thanks to the explosion of mobile adoption, and is currently working on partnerships that will help it move into Asian markets and localize the Tinder experience to native languages, networks and so on. (Like how to leverage the biggest Chinese and Asian social networks for authentication, as opposed to relying on Facebook, for example.)\n Tinder has also been busy building tools that will help it follow through with its mission to solve social, discovery and networking problems outside the confines of dating. Today, for example, the startup is releasing a new feature called “Matchmaker,” which allows users to create matches between any two Facebook friends — for any purpose.\nOnce users establish that connection, the two friends can chat within Tinder without sharing their contact information. The idea is to create a casual, simple way to make an introduction, whether you want to set two friends up on a date or make professional connections. Rad tells us that Matchmaker is anonymous and solves the awkward problem of introducing people and then being included on the resulting thread — an annoyance often experienced in email and Facebook intros.\nWith Matchmaker, the introducer doesn’t have to be removed from the thread, they can send the message to the two people they want to connect, and that’s it. If the recipient isn’t on Tinder, they’ll see that they get a message on Facebook, and they can then quickly create a Tinder login if they want to see the post.\nAnother cool feature of Matchmaker is that the person who makes the introduction can see if the match is active and they can get a sense of their success rate. Rad assures me that this feature is intended to be high level so that it’s not creepy, allowing users to get just enough of a sense of the activity level of the intros they curate so that they can check back in (or send a reminder) if the conversation goes silent.\nAgain, the idea is that, while there are plenty of media through which people can make digital introductions, those connections tend to carry more weight if they’re friend-approved. If that intro comes from a close friend, you’re more likely to follow through on it than if not. Of course, there’s the question of whether or not people will want to make introductions in a professional context through a networking that’s primarily associated with dating. For this reason, the startup is launching the feature in beta to test it out and to see if it catches on.\n As part of this new release, Tinder is also making some improvements in the areas where its user experience has been less-than-impressive. In particular, many users have complained that the app’s sorting algorithm has matched them with teenage or underage users. (Not cool, Tinder, not cool.) So, in this release, Tinder now includes age filtering, so that users can select their preferred age range, along with making some general improvements to the accuracy of its matching algorithm and improving the speed of chat within the app.\nAs of now, Tinder remains exclusively an iPhone app, but the CEO tells us that the team is working on an Android version, which will be ready “within the next few months.” The team also has plans to develop tablet apps, but don’t expect Tinder to show up on the Web anytime soon. Tinder is going to remain mobile-centric for the foreseeable future.\nIn a crowded space, Tinder has, so far, managed to buck the trend and find that elusive, exponential growth curve. Of course, the next year will be critical. As growth inevitably levels out a bit, Tinder will have to keep evolving if it wants to avoid being another flash in the pan. International could hold the key to sustaining that growth, but it remains to be seen whether users will be willing to think of Tinder as more than a casual flirting and dating tool. That could be a tough sell, but if they get there, expect Tinder to stick around for awhile — and be on the receiving end of calls from every VC on the block.\nFor more, Find Tinder here.", "date": "5/24/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/screen-shot-2013-05-23-at-4-34-44-pm.png?w=227", "section": "social/", "tags": "mobile,apps,dating,tinder", "title": "50M Matches Strong, Hot Mobile Dating App Tinder Is Ready To Go Global, And Move Beyond Flirting", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/24/50m-matches-strong-hot-mobile-dating-app-tinder-is-ready-to-go-global-and-move-beyond-flirting/" }, { "id": 190, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Apps", "content": "\n\nLeap Motion’s gesture-based controller launch is less than a month away, but so far we’ve heard relatively little about app support, besides the fact that the company is working hard on filling out its Airspace app store. Now, Leap Motion and Google are announcing support for Google Earth for Leap Motion tech, which will be built-in to the desktop Google Earth app for Windows, Mac and Linux as of version 7.1 (out today).\nThat’s a good initial user pool for Leap Motion, since Google Earth has been downloaded by over 1 billion people according to Google’s stats. The endorsement by Google is crucial because of the company’s stature, and the fact that it builds a whole lot of software, including the Chrome browser, and because it gives potential Leap Motion owners a very tangible, natural and commonplace app to test out Leap Motion’s utility with.\nAnd we won’t have to wait until mid-May to find out how effective it is – 10,000 developers arleady have access to Leap Motion Controller hardware as it is. Leap motion is looking for devs to try it out and submit their own YouTube videos of the experience, by flagging the posts with #LeapInto. Those will go into a playlist the company will share to show off its tech.\nLeap Motion continues to rack up the pre-launch hits, with major retail and OEM partnerships. The HP arrangement that will see its 3D gesture tech built-in to future laptops and other devices in particular is huge news. But all that hype means it will face high expectations at launch, and Google endorsement drives those expectations even higher.", "date": "4/22/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/leap-motion-google-earth.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "gesture-control,google-earth,leap-motion", "title": "You’ve Got The Whole World In Your Hands As Leap Motion Gains Google Earth Support", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/leap-motion-google-earth/" }, { "id": 191, "authors": "Natasha Lomas", "category": "Europe", "content": "The Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which costs as little as $25/$35 and has helped fledge many a DIY hardware project, has racked up worldwide sales of 1.75 million, its U.K.-based creator, The Raspberry Pi Foundation, said today. The first Pis went on sale in March 2012, with its U.K. makers imagining they might sell a thousand in the first year (in the event they sold circa one million — and are now well on their way to two million).\nAnother U.K.-specific milestone for the device is that one million Pis have been produced since the Foundation shifted the bulk of production to a factory based in the U.K. (Sony’s Pencoed, Wales facility). So that’s one million U.K.-made Pis.\nInitially, as with scores of inexpensive electronic devices before it, Pi was made in China. But the Foundation, itself a U.K. startup, was keen to support a production facility closer to home — to make it easier to visit and oversee elements of Pi production, but also to support local manufacturing. And so Sony was brought on board and the Pencoed factory turned out its millionth Pi today.\nThe rest of the 1.75 million Pis produced to-date were built in China. The Foundation’s primary Pi distributor, Premier Farnell/element 14, shifted all its production to Wales back in March but a small portion of non-U.K. Pi production remains.\nAs well as keeping the maker community busy by powering DIY hardware projects like this solar-powered FTP server, the Pi has been helping schoolkids cut their teeth on coding projects. At the start of this year, Google put up $1 million to fund 15,000 Pis for U.K. schoolkids, for example. Further afield, Pi has been used as a low-cost component to kit out school computing labs in Africa.\nBack in April, the Pi Foundation revealed details of the countries where the — at the time — 1.2 million Pis had been shipped to. The vast majority (98%) were being sold in Western nations such as the U.K. and the U.S. Helping Pi spread further around the world to reach more developing nations is one of the Foundation’s challenges this year, Pi founder Eben Upton said then.\nDiscussing what it’s been doing to improve Pi distribution globally since then, Upton said Pi distributor RS Components now stocks units locally in South Africa — and can then ship directly to a number of countries in Southern Africa. “This has important implications for delivered cost, and also for reliability of delivery — it can be challenging to ship stuff into Africa reliably from Europe,” he told TechCrunch.\n“We’re continuing to work to understand how to get units into South American markets without incurring very import high tariffs. Nothing to announce yet, but it’s high on our radar,” he added.\nUpton also revealed that Pi shipments are growing in Asian markets.  “Looking at the per-country stats, while the U.S. remains our largest market, and the U.K. our largest per-capita market, what’s really striking is that Asian markets, notably Japan, Korea and the Philippines, are consistently up month on month,” he said.\nToday’s millionth-made British Pi (rightly) isn’t going to stray far. “Sony have made us a gold-plated case to keep it in, and we’ll be displaying it proudly here at Pi Towers [in Cambridge, U.K.],” the Foundation said today.", "date": "10/8/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/7988262046_92331bed50_z.jpg?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "sony-pencoed,raspberry-pi", "title": "Raspberry Pi Microcomputer Racks Up 1.75M Global Sales, 1M Of Which Were Made In U.K.", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/08/1-75m-raspberry-pis/" }, { "id": 192, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Startups", "content": "Hello, Charlotte! The TCMobile is now back in your beautiful city and we’re ready to hang out tonight at Packard Place. We had a great night in Durham and we’re ready for more NC.\nYou can RSVP here and we would love to chat with you tonight. We want to hear from everyone but if we miss you please email us at ny@techcrunch.com with the subject line CHARLOTTE ROCKS.\nSpecial thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.\nGreenville is happening on July 12th at 411 University Ridge. RSVP here.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThanks to Erwoods.com and MyApply.com for excellent food.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSponsors:\n", "date": "7/11/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/screen-shot-2012-05-29-at-5-49-56-pm.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "charlotte,meetup,southeast-meetup", "title": "Reminder: We’re In #TCCharlotte Tonight And Waiting To Hear Your Pitch", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/reminder-were-in-tccharlotte-tonight-and-waiting-to-hear-your-pitch/" }, { "id": 193, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Apple received a patent from the USPTO today (via AppleInsider) that describes a technology that would allow device casings to employ a combination of pressure and capacitive sensitivity to detect input. At the very least, the tech could be used to map functions like those Apple currently assigns to the home, power and volume buttons to areas of an iPhone or iPad’s bezel.\nOther uses for the patent, which was originally filed in 2009, are described by Apple as a backup or alternate input method for when standard capacitive-based touch interaction either won’t work or is impractical. Capacitive input, the kind used in the iPhone’s touchscreen currently, is much more accurate and responsive than resistive input, but it doesn’t work when wearing gloves, or when there’s sufficient grime on a screen, or when unwanted input signals are coming from a wrist resting on the display and confusing the sensors.\nApple’s system is proposed as an alternative input mechanism for those kinds of situations. And since it’s not exactly a traditional resistive (pressure-only) resistive input method, it could also use capacitive clues to make it more refined as well as being much more sensitive to changes in pressure than capacitive systems. The combination of both types could guard against accidental input when a device is in a pocket, for example.\nAs the system could live right in the housing of a device (the iPhone 5’s metal casing would be pretty perfect for it, in fact), it could greatly alter the way people interact with Apple devices. You could put scroll bars on either side of a smartphone, for instance, so that moving a finger or thumb up or down with differing pressure pages through content faster or slower.\nThe company could build context-dependent controls into the back or side housing of all-metal devices with this tech, or even use it to add input to an iWatch housing. The benefits are mainly that it could provide a way to keep the screen clear, which becomes more important as we move to devices with smaller bezels, or smaller displays in the case of an iWatch.\nAs with any Apple patent, however, this isn’t a roadmap. But it could be a neat way of adding another dimension of interaction to compete with recent changes from other OEMs, including touch input through gloves and eye movement tracking.", "date": "3/5/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/screen-shot-2013-03-05-at-7-38-00-am.png?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "iphone,patents,apple", "title": "Apple Patents Squeeze Sensitive Device Housings That Could Be Used In Future iPhones And iPads", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/05/apple-patents-squeeze-sensitive-device-housings-that-could-be-used-in-future-iphones-and-ipads/" }, { "id": 194, "authors": "Rip Empson", "category": "Apps", "content": "Last year, we introduced you to MemSQL, a plucky young Y Combinator alum that was building technology that would let developers give their databases a Nitrous boost, while simplifying application development and maintenance. Founded by ex-Facebookers Eric Frenkiel and Nikita Shamgunov, MemSQL raised $2.1 million in seed funding last July from an impressive roster of investors, before going silent to plug away at their private beta.\nAfter a year of development, MemSQL is officially ready for primetime. Today, the startup launches its next-gen database into the world, and it’s got some shiny new coin to go with its new product, bringing total investment to $5 million. As part of the follow-on seed funding, existing investors First Round Capital, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Paul Bucheit and Ashton Kutcher are joined by IA Ventures, Max Levchin, Aaron Levie and Data Collective — to name a few.\nThe startup intends to use its new capital to scale its infrastructure and take advantage of areas of the market where fast analysis of machine data is crucial, like financial services, digital advertising technology, and telecom and mobile services.\nThose familiar with the space may wonder what makes MemSQL so special, out of the multiple VC-backed, already-been-around-for-awhile “newSQL” startups out there doin’ their thing. (Like Clustrix, GenieDB, VoltDB, RethinkDB, ScaleDB, JustOneDB, Tokutek, Akiban, CodeFutures, ScaleBase, etc.)\nWell, because both Frenkiel and Shamgunov were previously database guys at Facebook, and they’ve taken some parts of FB’s approach and repurposed it for speed and flexibility — and a wider audience. It also helps that Shamgunov spent 6 years as a database engineer at Microsoft working on SQL, has several patents to his name, and is a world medalist in computing machinery contests. We’re still not really sure what that means, but it sounds impressive.\nThe co-founder’s Microsoft experience also helps MemSQL, because essentially what these guys are trying to do is offer a cheaper, works-for-everyone alternative to what the big players like Oracle and MSFT offer for the enterprise at a much higher price point.\nBut before going any further, for those unfamiliar, the “newSQL” movement is basically trying to build a better replacement for legacy SQL databases, like MySQL, which tend not to play so well with all these modern, newfangled web applications. They struggle to keep up with these data producers, when that, after all, is their job.\nWhat’s more, big data is big and will only get bigger, and developers and companies need better ways to manage that data, control it, and get the most out of it. For companies that operate businesses on the Web, it’s imperative that when they get hit with a lot of traffic or once they move all their data etc. into the cloud (which can make for slower through-put thanks to bottlenecks) that they be able to fall back on memory storage to keep their apps or operations up and running. Big companies like Facebook and Twitter have the engineering resources to be able to do this efficiently, but most companies don’t.\nMemSQL offers a database that is relational and distributed, and tweaks the way data is put into memory, with the right structures and access patterns, so that apps can functionally use SQL at scale without having to use Memcached or NoSQL.\nFor those who just fell asleep, basically that means less engineering overhead — less work for developers. This is ideal, Frenkiel says, for apps that need to process machine data at hyper speed, as MemSQL claims to be able to increase an app’s through-put (and ability to retrieve actionable insight) by 30x while still offering SQL and flexibility.\n“Quickly sifting through actionable data has become a competitive advantage in the enterprise, particularly as organizations are saddled with increasingly large and complex data sets,” Frenkiel says. “MemSQL was designed to tackle Big Data problems by accelerating an application’s throughput while still offering SQL, unlike other solutions which tend to either be too slow or too limited in functionality.”\nMemSQL at home here and product demo below:", "date": "6/18/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/143659v2-max-250x250.jpeg?w=250", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "y-combinator,memsql", "title": "Accelerate Your Database: MemSQL Launches With $5M From Ashton Kutcher, Max Levchin & More", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/18/memsql-launch-and-funding/" }, { "id": 195, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Does the high-res Nexus 7 beat out the iPad mini? Why has Apple’s average selling price gone down? Is Google’s new Chromecast dongle an Apple TV/Airplay killer?\nWe discuss all this and more on this week’s TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast. The show features John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, Darrell Etherington, and Romain Dillet. Packed house, I know.\nSo sit back, relax, and listen to us make fun of each other while discussing this week’s developments in gadgetry.\nEnjoy!\nWe invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.\nClick here to download an MP3 of this show.\nYou can subscribe to the show via RSS.Subscribe in iTunes\nIntro Music by Rick Barr.", "date": "7/26/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/gadgets-chrome-nexus-iphone4.png?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "iphone-4,chromecast,nexus,gadgets-podcast", "title": "This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Nexus 7, Cheap iPhone 4s, And Chromecast", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/26/this-week-on-the-tc-gadgets-podcast-nexus-7-cheap-iphone-4s-and-chromecast/" }, { "id": 196, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "Music discovery platform Shazam is today rolling out a new feature in partnership with over two dozen artists that will allow Shazam users to see which songs their favorite musicians are listening to on the service. The news comes just ahead of Apple Music’s worldwide debut tomorrow, which will introduce streaming music, radio and other features, including a social network called Connect – a sort of Facebook for musicians that lets them share music, videos and notes with fans.\nAccording to Shazam, the company has signed up over 30 top artists to participate in its new song-sharing feature, including well-known names like Pitbull, Calvin Harris, Maroon 5, Meghan Trainor, Coldplay, Usher, One Direction, Alicia Keys, Shakira, Mariah Carey, Imagine Dragons, Linkin Park, and many others.\nCombined, these artists have a total of 600 million-plus Shazam followers, the company notes. Soon after launch, Shazam says it will expand this functionality beyond the initial 30 artists to include hundreds of others from around the world.\nThe company will also now reveal “Shazam Counts” – the number of times a song has been Shazamed – for the first time ever.\nThe social networking feature will be made available in the updated versions of the iOS and Android mobile applications, out now. To get started, users will have to follow their favorite artists on the app in order to seeing what they’re “shazaming.” This action will also allow users to be notified of other information, including new singles, new albums and new videos, the company says.\n\nThe feature’s launch appears to be in reaction to Apple Music’s upcoming social features, which introduces a way to follow favorite artists – something that’s available on Shazam as well. Artists on Shazam will now have a new page on the service that shows their Shazam discoveries, their top tracks, videos and their follower count. Again, this mirrors what Apple is launching with Connect, where fans will follow artists and then be alerted to new releases, or engage with content like audio, videos, photos, or even text posts.\nOf course, Apple Music’s Connect could still be a hit or a miss. This is not the first time Apple has tried to implement a social layer around music, after all – it tried and failed before with its earlier social network called Ping which shut down a few years ago. Apple is hoping that, with Connect, it will be able to own the relationship between a musician and their fans.\nBut for now it’s unclear if artists will actually take the time to create exclusive content for Connect, or if it will largely include the same sort of posts the artist is already sharing on other social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, for example.\nIn the meantime, despite Apple Music’s potential reach, Shazam has a slightly differentiated offering by allowing artists it’s working with to share what they’re actually listening to these days. That’s something many artists already like to do – being known as taste makers – and helping unearth new musicians and bands before anyone else.\nThis new feature also squarely ties into Shazam’s larger goal of being a place to discover new music. The company already offers a number of ways to find new songs you’d like, including music charts, a news feed of sorts, Facebook integration (to see what friends are shazaming), a worldwide map of users’ Shazams, a trending section to see the top tracks or the top tracks by specific regions, and more. With the ability to find and follow artists, get information about their music and the music they like, Shazam is clearly hoping to position itself as a competitor to Apple Music Connect when it comes to music discovery.\nThat being said, Shazam is also working with Apple Music, as it does with other streaming services like Spotify or Rdio. Fans will be able to listen to the songs artists Shazam by tapping on a new “Listen on Apple Music” button included in the app, the company says.", "date": "6/29/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/08_shazam_android_insitu_final.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "artists,musicians,apps,music", "title": "Shazam Takes On Apple Music Connect With New Social Features Aimed At Musicians And Their Fans", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/shazam-takes-on-apple-music-connect-with-new-social-features-aimed-at-musicians-and-their-fans/" }, { "id": 197, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Apple hasn’t said anything yet about any iPhone 6, nor will it until the fall (or whenever it actually announces it) but that hasn’t stopped the Internet’s collective imagination and curiosity from creating countless mock-ups of what the next generation of Apple smartphone will look like. Just this morning, we heard about how the iPhone 6 could have 1704×960 resolution for its display, which is 3x resolution compared to the original iPhone device. Here’s a roundup of the best guesses regarding the look and build of the new device to date.\nSigns, including case designs being shopped on the usual wholesale Asian ecommerce websites, suggest that we’ll see a larger iPhone with a slimmer design, sort of like a shrunk down iPad mini. 9to5Mac has provided videos using physical mockups of gray and gold designs of the supposed iPhone 6, built based on specs reportedly received by case manufacturers with access to Apple’s upstream supply chain.\nThese show how it compares directly to a wide range of iOS devices, so you can get a good feel about how it should shape up to the iPhone 5s and any other Apple hardware. That is, if this even turns out to be an actual thing that’s real and not just the fever dream of a thousand Apple fanboys.\nThe high quality versions in 9to5’s videos represent the reported 4.7-inch version of the upcoming iPhone, but there’s also now a physical version of the 5.5-inch version of the iPhone that’s also supposedly in development. It’s a crude, fan made 3D print, but it does provide some notion of how an Apple phablet might look compared to other gadgets designed for normal human hands.\n\nOn the less likely end of the spectrum, frequent Apple device mockup maker Martin Hajek has provided a concept of what a Nano-like iPhone 6 design might look like. It’s basically a Sony Xperia Z2 in a lot of ways, though, and almost definitely not what we’ll see in a final, actual shipping product from Apple.\n\nIf you’re in the mood for more fantasy, there’s this dual-screen iPhone 6 concept that shows what an iPhone with a screen on both the front and back might look like, complete with a 4K resolution display. The dual screen comes via a slide out back panel, which will never ever ever happen. Not in a million years, not if the dinosaurs came back from the dead.\nApple’s next iPhone will almost certainly make its official debut in September, as it has for the past few years, and we likely won’t find out what it’s definitely going to look like until then. But anticipation is a key part of each new hardware refresh cycle, so for the time being, let these visions of sugarplum fairies dance in your head and think about what’s on the horizon from Cupertino.", "date": "5/14/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/articleheader.png?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "design,mockup,concept,iphone-6", "title": "Here Are The Best And Most Interesting iPhone 6 Mockups So Far", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/14/here-are-the-best-and-most-interesting-iphone-6-mockups-so-far/" }, { "id": 198, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Gaming", "content": "Pokémon Go isn’t a global phenomenon just yet as the game has only been available in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. But the game is preparing for its European launch. Pokémon Go is now available in Germany on the iPhone and Android — other European countries should follow soon.\nThe game isn’t geo-blocked per se. You can download the app from the App Store from anywhere as long as you have a U.S. account for example. Today’s launch simply means that German customers with a German App Store or Play Store accounts will be able to find Pokémon Go (App Store link and Play Store link).\nRight after launching the game in the U.S., the company behind Pokémon Go Niantic Labs announced that the European launch had been delayed due to server issues.\nAnd it’s true that Pokémon Go has had its fair share of downtime. The game regularly becomes unresponsive because there are simply too many people playing it. I’ve been playing the game with a Pokémon Trainer Club account and I got logged out constantly before the 1.0.1 update. After the update, I simply wasn’t able to log in at all for a few hours. Now it’s working again.\nSimilarly, Pokémon Go incorrectly requested full access to your Gmail and Google account before yesterday’s update. Now that Niantic Labs fixed these issues, the company can start rolling out the game in new markets again.\nGiven that the game is only available in Germany for now, it looks like the company wants to make sure that the servers can hold the charge before launching all European countries at once. But you can certainly expect other European launches over the coming days. Up next: Asia.", "date": "7/13/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/4960399530_39fa90e94b_o.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "niantic-labs,pok%c3%a9post,pok%c3%a9mon,pok%c3%a9mon-go", "title": "Pokémon Go expands to Europe starting with Germany", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/pokemon-go-expands-to-europe-starting-with-germany/" }, { "id": 199, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Apps", "content": "In the past few months, Tinder has been working on a feature called Super Like, which let users tell one of their matches that the situation is more serious than simply swiping right. Today, Coffee Meets Bagel has added something similar in ‘Send A Woo’, letting CMB users express higher-than-usual interest in a potential match.\nCoffee Meets Bagel launched in 2013 with an interesting twist on online dating. Rather than swiping through endless matches as though you’re playing a mobile version of ‘Hot or Not,’ Coffee Meets Bagel promised its users one potential match a day. Using Facebook Connect, the app could sift through friends of friends to make sure these matches were somewhat relevant.\nIf both users liked each other, the app would then connect them in a text conversation. Since then, the app has grown up a lot, ditching Twilio as a way to start text conversations and opting for in-app Instant Messaging. Oh, and Coffee Meets Bagel also raised $7.8 million in funding in February of 2015.\nFounder and CEO Dawoon Kang says that January is one of the hottest times for online dating, and that the introduction of ‘Send a Woo’ is meant to help users find more meaningful connections and have more meaningful conversations with those connections.\nCoffee Meets Bagel facilitates this connection through the “Bean Shop”, which essentially lets you spend real money to have virtual currency to spend within the app. Users must use beans to send woos, among other things like check out mutual friends.\nBecause Coffee Meets Bagel only allows one match per day, the ‘Send A Woo’ feature will likely grow in popularity, as you only have 24 hours to get someone to like you back and you have no other potential dating options on that site for the whole day.\nIn beta testing, Kang said that the app saw 3x more matches for folks who used ‘Send a Woo’.\nYou can check out Coffee Meets Bagel here.", "date": "12/21/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/screen-shot-2015-12-21-at-8-30-28-am.png?w=662", "section": "social/", "tags": "websites,coffee-meets-bagel", "title": "Coffee Meets Bagel Adds Its Own Version Of Super Like With ‘Send A Woo’", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/21/coffee-meets-bagel-adds-its-own-version-of-super-like-with-send-a-woo/" }, { "id": 200, "authors": "Romain Dillet", "category": "Europe", "content": "It’s been five years already, and Jolicloud still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Yesterday, at an event called the Jolicloud Ecosystem Party at Numa, the company presented its long-term vision for the company. It also gave everyone a sneak peek at Jolicloud 2, a step forward in the company’s ultimate goal to build the only platform you need to simplify and centralize your life on the web.\n“I always considered Jolicloud as an incubator to experiment and start new projects,” co-founder and CEO Tariq Krim told me in an interview. “And today, we’re taking down our operating system. We are making a bet on HTML5, which is an open platform. Our vision is to make a personal cloud platform and to empower our users.”\nWhile Jolicloud already had a web platform, a second version is coming out in March. Users can expect multiple products around the same idea. The company wants to unify all your services and make everything works together. The first two products are Jolicloud Home and Jolicloud Drive. Chrome users will get more features, but Jolicloud will work in every browser.\nWith Drive, you can connect your account with all your cloud storage services. Many people use separate services — for example Dropbox for your personal files, Google Drive for your documents and professional stuff, Box for your company, etc. You can unify all your accounts in a single interface.\nBut you can also interact directly with your files. You can open a PDF, an MP3, a movie, an epub book and more. For example, let’s say that you use Dropbox camera upload on your phone. When you take a photo, it is automatically uploaded to Dropbox. You can open this photo in Jolicloud, add a filter, crop and edit without ever leaving the website. Then you can save to Dropbox or even save to another storage service.\nSimilarly, you may want to move a big movie from your Dropbox to your Microsoft OneDrive account to free some space in your Dropbox. You can just drag the file to the OneDrive tab. Then, everything happens in the background — Jolicloud’s server will begin downloading the file from Dropbox and then upload it to OneDrive. You’ll have to pay $4.99 a month for this feature. With the pro version, you will also be able to connect multiple Google accounts (or multiple Dropbox accounts, etc.).\nThe second service, Jolicloud Home, is where you will find all your online activity in one place. After linking all your social accounts, such as your Facebook, Tumblr or Instagram accounts, you can browse these feeds directly in Jolicloud. For example, if you can’t remember the name of a SoundCloud song, you can even filter to see only the stuff you have liked. You can create and save custom searches like on Twitter. All of this is very visual and intuitive.\nIn parallel, Jolicloud wants to go all in with Chrome. “One billion people are now using Chrome on all their devices,” Krim said. The next step for the company is probably to build a Chrome app and take advantage of all the Chrome APIs. Chrome evangelist François Beaufort took the stage at the Jolicloud Ecosystem event.\n“People still use their computer a lot. We live in the cloud, but we still have many files on our computers,” Krim said. “We want to address that by letting people access their online files when they are offline. We also want to merge local and cloud storage so that you can move from one to the other without even realizing it.”\nFinally, Jolicloud invited a few French startups to pitch at its event — Bunkr, TVShow Time, Mixotv and Whyd. The idea was to showcase France’s talent when it comes to designing beautiful and effective products. All these services will be available in Jolicloud 2 as well.\nJolicloud’s vision is still mostly the same — the startup wants to become the center piece of the complicated cloud puzzle. But the execution is much better with Jolicloud 2. Now 1.3 million users strong, the existing users will be migrated to the second version in the coming weeks. “I learned a lot with our previous mistakes. We communicated too much on the products and didn’t talk about the big picture,” Krim said. “We consider Jolicloud 2 as a rebirth for the company.”\nPhoto credit: Cédric Duclos", "date": "2/20/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/tariq-jolicloud-ecosystem-party.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "france-newsletter,jolicloud", "title": "Jolicloud Introduces Jolicloud 2, Your Digital Home On The Web", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/jolicloud-introduces-jolicloud-2-your-digital-home-on-the-web/" }, { "id": 201, "authors": "Mike Butcher", "category": "Europe", "content": "\nPrezi has come a long way since the days it was a struggling startup in Budapest building a new way for people to create presentations to blow the mind of an audience. Today they have over 100 employees and a San Francisco HQ. It’s become a popular alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint and Keynote, and the company is even now advised by Jack Dorsey.\nAt DLD in Munich last week I ran into Peter Arvai, Prezi CEO and Co-founder, where he revealed – on the video here – that after announcing 15 million users last October, they are now on 18 million users. He said they are also course to book 2 million more users per month over the next year. Clearly they are hitting an exponential growth curve.\nOne of their key areas is Asia, where their simple business model has appealed to users who like the lightweight Prezi model, which doesn’t require desktop software. For instance, there are already five books out about how to use and create presentations on Prezi.\nIf you’re not familiar with Prezi, it uses a map-like metaphor for creating presentations instead of a slideshow. So you can use it in a or linear or non-linear way. In addition, if you’re caught out on the road and don’t have access to you laptop, you presentations will sync to you iPhone and iPad.\nThe company was co-founded by Hungarian architect/artist/designer Adam Somlai-Fischer with Peter Halacsy and Peter Arvai in 2009 and has raised a $14 million Series B led by Accel Partners. Previously it raised Series A financing from Sunstone Capital.", "date": "1/30/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-30-at-16-03-42.png?w=246", "section": "europe/", "tags": "", "title": "Prezi Hits 18M Users For Its Presentation Platform, Asia An Area For Future Growth [TCTV]", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/prezi-hits-18m-users-for-its-presentation-platform-asia-an-area-for-future-growth-tctv/" }, { "id": 202, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Apps", "content": "Gone, a service that launched out of Austin to help your sell your old crap, has today announced a partnership with UPS that will allow the company to rapidly scale nationwide.\nGone traditionally works by letting users snap pictures of their old gear, which is then automatically priced, picked up same-day by a Gone helper, packaged, and either shipped to a buyer or sent over to Gone to re-sell for later. A few days later, a paycheck arrives in the mail to the original seller.\nWith the UPS partnership, Gone is introducing Gone Lite, which automatically ships users the packaging materials necessary for them to send off the item themselves, either through a home pick-up from UPS or by dropping it off at a local UPS branch.\nThe most helpful thing about Gone is that the app automatically lists a reasonable price for the seller and ensures no back-and-forth between buyers, as that’s all handled by Gone. But it goes deeper than that.\nAs of today, Gone integrates with the user’s email (the same way TripIt does) to scrape out receipts, confirmations, etc. so that it has an inventory of the stuff that you own already. This means that almost every time you list an item, if the receipt is in your email, the information describing the product will be automatically input into the app without any extra work from you.\nGone launched six months ago and currently offers Gone On-Demand (the full-fledged product) in both Austin and San Francisco, with plans to expand to New York and Seattle next. However, today’s introduction of Gone Lite means that anyone with an iOS device can use the service, as long as they’re within range of a UPS location.", "date": "3/24/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gone.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "gone", "title": "Gone, The App For Selling Your Old Crap, Taps UPS To Go Nationwide Instantly", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/gone-the-app-for-selling-your-old-crap-taps-ups-to-go-nationwide-instantly/" }, { "id": 203, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "“The Number Facebook Doesn’t Want You To See”, an article from Thursday by BuzzFeed claimed Facebook is hiding the number of people who see your posts so you don’t feel bad that most people don’t Like or comment. This morning, a Facebook engineer wrote a retort claiming that is “just plain wrong”, and that Facebook’s testing showed most users are more interested in feedback than total views.\nBuzzFeed cited a Stanford study of 220,000 Facebook users that says they underestimate their posts’ audience size by a factor of three. In reality, Facebook users reach 35% of their friends with each post and 61% of their friends per month.\nThe article hinged on the idea that if you have hundreds of friends yet only get a couple of Likes per post, it’s not that people don’t see your posts, it’s that they ignore them or don’t care  enough to Like. BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel writes that Facebook “knows full well that the only thing worse than speaking to an empty room is speaking to a room full of friends and family and having them ignore you.”\nHe’s right. That’s not very pleasant, and it’s his reasoning for why Facebook won’t tell normal users how many people see their posts, and it sounds plausible. Facebook doesn’t want to hurt our feelings and prove our friends don’t care about us. Sure. In some cases when I post something I think is really interesting and I get little feedback, I wonder whether my friends find me boring or Facebook didn’t show it to that many people.\nBut Facebook news feed engineer Lars Backstrom brings his own data to the argument. It’s not an official statement by Facebook, though I was tipped off to it by Facebook PR. About the potential view count feature BuzzFeed suggests the social network is purposefully denying users, Backstrom writes:\nIt’s not a matter of hiding anything from users, apparently. It’s just a trade off of value and screen real-estate. Facebook could add it view counts, but it would provide too little utility and take up too much room. That makes sense, especially on mobile.\nWhen the view count number is relevant, Facebook shows it, like for advertisers, Page owners, and Groups. Facebook gave view counts to Groups because it would help people schedule events and make sure everyone in the group was on the same page. Let’s say a book club posted it was changing its meeting location, members could see whether all their fellow bookworms had seen the post, or whether they should be called or texted so they don’t get lost. The feature provided enough utility to warrant the space it took up.\nBut not everyone wants others to know what they’ve seen when it comes to normal news feed posts. That’s something Warzel never mentions. View counts could raise privacy questions if they come with a list of names like Groups post.  If Facebook had view counts with names and you visited someone’s profile, they could find out because you had suddenly viewed all their recent posts. That’s why when people suggested Groups was just a stepping stone to Facebook showing news feed view counts, I wrote that would be too sketchy, and unlikely to happen.\n\nBackstrom concludes that “this BuzzFeed article suggests that we have lots of ulterior motives when we make decisions about News Feed. The reality is that we’re just trying to show people as many interesting stories as possible.” Warzel tweets to me “never wrote that ppl were crying out for post view counts, like he says. Only that it’s in fb’s best interest not to show them.” He believes hurt feelings equal fewer users.\nIn my opinion, quite the opposite could be true. Showing view counts with names could decrease Facebook usage.\nSome people might find view counts fascinating, but they’re unruly. Scanning a list of hundreds of people to see who saw your posts sounds like a chore. It would take up screen space and most wouldn’t use it consistently. But the real danger is that view counts could cause a chilling effect on Facebook browing. You might be apprehensive to freely bounce around Facebook if you knew your were leaving digital breadcrumbs everywhere you went.\nWarzel tells me he was imagining view counts would be “anonymized”, without names. He tweets “don’t agree that it’s a real estate problem. could have separate analytics-doesn’t have to be on each post.” He says we know too little about our social network audience, and that anonymous, aggregate view counts could change that. If Facebook wants to back up Backstrom’s claim that view counts are omitted because they’re not worth the real-estate, it could place them somewhere where they wouldn’t detract from the average user’s experience. For example, on the perma-linked page dedicated to each post. That would let interested users dig for their view count without cluttering the Facebook home page.\nBut is this transparency for transparency’s sake, or do we really need this data?\nIn the end, I’d bet the missing view counts stems not from some malicious fight to keep users in the dark, but from Facebook’s philosophy of trying to only build things that are useful for a wide audience. Maybe it is in Facebook’s interest to hide view counts, but because you’d find them boring, not illuminating. Making this data available, though a bit buried, could be the right balance.", "date": "7/14/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/government-spying-e1277133356662.jpg?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "facebook", "title": "Facebook Engineer Fires Back At BuzzFeed: Users Don’t Care How Many People View Their Posts", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/14/who-views-your-facebook-news-feed-posts/" }, { "id": 204, "authors": "Drew Olanoff", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "During my trip to India, one of the most interesting companies that I met with was ZipDial. In a really cool home-turned-office in Bangalore, a team of brilliant people have turned a phenomenon that is unique to the country into a booming business. That phenomenon is missed calls.\nWhile that might not sound like big business, once you realize why this is a prevalent behavior in India, it will make perfect sense. Basically, a lot of residents in the country use prepaid cellphones. Each connected call and sent text costs money; therefore the missed call was born. If you were to drop your friend off at their house and head home, you would call them and then hang up, as to signal that you’ve arrived safely. This way, nobody is charged for the call.\nIt’s kind of like the behavior of paging someone with “911” back in the day, as if to say “call me immediately.” While the pager behavior never turned into a business, the missed-call behavior most certainly has, and ZipDial owns the space.\nThe service that the company provides is provisioning a phone number that advertisers and companies like Disney and Gillette can plaster on billboards and newspaper ads, allowing people to call the number and disconnect without getting charged. After that, the person is sent a text message with communication about deals, coupons or any other messages that the business wants to convey. This is important because incoming text messages are free for prepaid cellphone users. The telecom companies in India love it, because it’s creating traffic that never existed before.\nThese companies can learn more about their “followers” by sending them surveys, which we’re told that many folks participate in. In many cases, these campaigns have outperformed those taking place on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.\nThe company has just announced reaching the milestone of 400 million missed calls, and I spoke with  founder and CEO Valerie Wagoner to discuss how ZipDial has made waves in a market that didn’t exist before.\nTC: Why missed calls? What was interesting to you that screamed opportunity?\nWagoner: Growth in mobile adoption has been astonishing over the last five years or so, shooting up to more than 700 million users. Around the 2009-2010 time frame, there were more than 20 million new, first-time mobile users added to the network every month. That’s the population of Australia joining the network every four weeks!\nHowever, there was also a massive gap between innovations in the industry around data and smartphone apps and the actual capabilities of real users who today are still 96 percent feature phone users in India. While this will evolve as handset prices drop, and I am confident that smartphone adoption will exceed the predicted 25 percent penetration in the next three years, this still leaves an huge gap in the market between what people want and the tools they have.\nWhile only 4 percent of users have smartphones and fewer than 50 percent even know how to send text messages, 100 percent of users love dialing “missed calls.” It’s an exceptionally prevalent peer-to-peer user behavior where users dial a friend’s number and then hang up on purpose in order to signal something such as “call me back” or “I’m thinking of you” or “I’ve arrived home safely.”\nTC: What have you learned about Indian culture after launching the project that surprised you?\nWagoner: 1) Word-of-mouth is powerful, beyond what we had ever anticipated. Two examples:\na) Simply as a test we created a Cricket Scores service whereby a user could ZipDial (or dial and hang up, toll-free) to a particular number to get back an instant SMS with the latest cricket score. We did zero marketing other than me posting the ZipDial Cricket number on Facebook a couple times. Within a few months the service completely took off and there were millions of users zipdialing millions of times per day.\nb) Upon realizing that Cricket had gone viral, we knew we needed to capture this social graph more intelligently. We built ZipDial Friend Referrals to incorporate into our customer campaigns, and it’s been amazing how well it has worked. The user experience starts with an ad in traditional media (e.g. print, TV, point of sale), and after ZipDialing to respond, the user is prompted to refer friends to the brand. In every case, there is a viral increase in reach of between 20-75 percent in responses (and therefore effectively an increase in ROI of 20-75 percent) due to friends inviting friends to participate in the campaign. It still amazes me that even though fewer than 10 percent of our users have smartphones or access to Internet, they are able to create these viral campaigns and build a social graph.\n2) Willingness to pay among low-income consumers is much stronger than others would give credit. For example, take mobile payments. For users in India earning $100-200 per month, mobile payments is not about splitting a dinner bill with friends. A lady living in a slum or village who can save a $0.50 bus ride and 4 hours between travel and waiting in line to pay an electricity bill would gladly pay at least $0.50 fee for that payment transaction, something we more-connected users in the U.S. would refuse to pay. There is vibrant consumption happening even if it is at lower-value transactions, and there is strong willingness to pay for goods and services of value.\nTC: Are you profitable? If not, when?\nWagoner: We could be profitable today, at two times our current run rate, at three times, etc. It is a question of strategy and how fast we want to grow. The last 12 months for us have been squarely focused on understanding our customer metrics like ARPU, acquisition cost, retention and customer lifetime value. On that foundation, we are turning up the dials to scale faster even if it means profitability is stretched out.\nTC: Tell us about your favorite usage of the service by a client.\nWagoner: While many customers are enjoying ZipDial for a more specific pain point like collecting customer feedback, my favorite use case is when customers embrace consumer loyalty more completely. The three customers most attuned to this use case are Gillette, Greenpeace and the Disney Channel who are all using ZipDial in the same way – ZipDial Followers to build ongoing consumer loyalty.\nEvery touch point they have with a consumer in the “real world” carries a ZipDial number as a call to action. The engagement started by dialing the first ZipDial call to action number activates an application on the platform, and the engagement continues in a flow of activities. Users become ZipDial Followers and get updates and engagement, similar to being a Twitter or Facebook follower.\nFor example for these customers:\nGillette starts with print ads, TV ads, or placards of agents giving out sample razors in shopping centers. Users engage with activities like “hear actor Salman Khan’s special message about his new movie” or “pledge to support rededication of the Gateway of India to Indian soldiers” or calling women to ZipDial to answer surveys about whether they prefer a beard or clean-shaven face on their man.\nGreenpeace in their PR or carried by agents who greet citizens on the street. Users ZipDial to pledge support for the various causes they support like “stop deforestation and save tigers,” “stop toxic dumping by corporations,” or “more strict regulations for food safety in India.”\nDisney Channel in all of their programming, including both direct Disney engagement like “vote for your favorite Disney princess” or “spot Mickey and ZipDial as he pops up on the screen” as well as brand solutions for their advertisers like “answer a quiz competition for Horlicks.”\nZipDial followers recruit their friends to engage (as mentioned above regarding friend referrals). In that way, every “real world,” traditional media not only becomes interactive and sticky, but also viral.\nMarketers then use ZipDial Analytics for their “real world” campaigns in the same way that they would use Google or Facebook Analytics for online performance and engagement. Here are some interesting metrics from these three customers:\nGillette has more than 2.4 million ZipDial users engaged compared to 1.63 million Facebook likes. Users who respond to Gillette ads invite an average of 2.8 friends to join Gillette’s ZipDial Followers, though interestingly, users who were recruited by a friend are even more likely to invite other friends at an average rate of 3.2 friends.\nGreenpeace has over 1.4 million ZipDial users compared to 131,000 Facebook likes. Click-through or “dial-through” rates on updates to Greenpeace’s ZipDial Followers are extremely high at 21 percent, which is far above the typical 2-3 percent response rate they get on updates to non-followers. Greenpeace also has a very high rate of viral reach. Users who responded to Greenpeace promotions have recruited an additional 54 percent of users to follow Greenpeace.\nDisney, in only their first month of using ZipDial, acquired more ZipDial users than their still only 281,000 Facebook users. Within only that first month, Disney also saw a very high active rate with an average of 8.1 engagements per user.\nNot only do these advertisers drive more engagement, but this also directly translates to analytics on performance and ROI of their traditional media spends. ZipDial Analytics allows marketers to slice data across media channels, geography, user profiles, etc.\nTC: Would missed calls ever work in the U.S.? Where else would it work?\nRegardless of what phone you are carrying, the simplest thing you could ever do is dial a number, especially when it takes a split second for only one ring. Therefore, when it comes to driving interaction with traditional media, zipdialing will inevitably drive more responses, even in the U.S.\nThat said, the reason we are focused on expanding first within emerging markets is because of the huge market need. Markets like the U.S. have highly connected consumers and relatively massive amounts of data on consumer profiling and personalization. This fundamentally does not yet exist in India and emerging markets, and that is the ground the ZipDial is breaking.\n———\nAs I traveled the country, I asked people what they thought about ZipDial and the other opportunities that India has as a market. Wagoner had some pretty good ideas on what else can be done there:\nWagoner studied emerging markets in college and took a chance by moving to India after working at eBay as a Business and Product Manager for two years. It has clearly paid off. To date, ZipDial has raised money from Times Internet and 500 Startups, but from what I’ve heard, there is more funding on the way.\n[Photo credit: Flickr]", "date": "3/6/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/8079664230_5437818307_z.jpg?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "bangalore,india,zipdial", "title": "ZipDial Has Turned 400M Missed Calls Into Moneymaking Connections", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/06/zipdial-has-turned-400m-missed-calls-into-moneymaking-connections/" }, { "id": 205, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "If you can’t beat ’em, aggregate ’em. That was my take in late 2010 when a host of daily deal aggregators sprang up at the height of the whole Groupon-clone thing. So you’ll be forgiven if this post reeks of déjà vu for you, too.\nBownty, the Denmark-based daily deal aggregator, which currently targets the UK, France, Spain, Germany and Denmark, has raised $1.1 million in new funding from Danish SEED Capital, and Accelerace Invest, the startup accelerator and investment programme.\nThe new funds will be used to further expand across Europe, with a focus on raising awareness of the Bownty brand and its consumer proposition. Yes, there’s life in those daily deals yet.\nCompeting with the likes of Buyometric, Deal Zippy, and City Treats, Bownty aggregates over 2,500 deals from over 100 daily deal sites each day, including Groupon, Living Social, KGB Deals and Wowcher.\nIt’s a familiar daily deal aggregator play: Subscribers receive one daily email that matches their preferences, thus negating the problem of so-called “daily deal fatigue” caused by too many and spammy emails advertising irrelevant deals. There are also apps for iOS and Android. In addition, users can store all of their deals in their Bownty “Deal Wallet”, which will notify them of any expiring deals.\n“There has been a lot of skepticism about the future of this industry,” says Steffen W. Frølund, Founder and CEO of Bownty in a statement. “But this investment proves that the daily deal market is not dead. We have seen significant growth and I believe there is still huge untapped potential in curating the daily deals marketplace.”\nMeanwhile, David Ventzel, Senior Management Consultant at Accelerace Invest, chimes in: “The fast expansion of Bownty from Denmark to the UK, France, Spain and Germany supports our belief that this company represents the future of online2offline commerce”.\nThat future is a daily deal aggregator, apparently.\nGotta go, it’s 2010 calling…", "date": "4/4/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/unnamed-1.jpg?w=307", "section": "startups/", "tags": "bownty", "title": "Is That 2010 Calling? Daily Deals Aggregator Bownty Raises $1.1 Million", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/bownty/" }, { "id": 206, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Advertising Tech", "content": "Twitter today is debuting a new advertising format that will encourage its users to tweet more often, while talking about an advertiser’s brand. With the new ads, businesses and brands will now be able to post a call-to-action that offers some sort of exclusive content that can only be unlocked with a tweet — like the ability to preview the trailer from a new film, gain access to an exclusive Q&A, get a recipe from a favorite food company and more.\nThe feature is an extension of Twitter’s previously launched “Conversational Ads,” which give advertisers the ability to post images and videos along with call-to-action buttons that include customizable hashtags.\nThe difference with these new “Instant Unlock Cards,” as they’re called, is that users have to tweet in order to view the content being promoted. That is, the content is only unlocked after the tweet is posted.\nThis is something that could spur Twitter’s user base to interact with the service more often. But more importantly, it could potentially even push people to sign up for a Twitter account, if they were interested in viewing the content from the brand in question.\nBoosting user growth is something Twitter desperately needs these days, as its monthly active users grew just under 1 percent in the last quarter, to 313 million. The company has not figured out the secret sauce when it comes to convincing users as to why they need to set up a Twitter account for themselves — after all, Twitter’s content of interest can be viewed by logged-out users, as well, while the most newsworthy tweets eventually make their way into articles that are later disseminated to other social networks, like Facebook, or are shared by news broadcasters on air.\nIn addition to the possibility of giving users a reason to tweet, the new ad also capitalizes on the type of activity brands try to encourage anyway — that is, to have people tweeting and sharing their message with their friends and Twitter’s wider network.\n\nThese promoted tweets featuring the Instant Unlock Cards will appear in users’ timelines and offer explicit instructions on how to view the exclusive content they’re offering. But instead of requiring users to write out their own tweets, there will be a button users can click that will pre-populate the tweet with customized text, like the brand’s custom hashtag.\nDuring its beta trials, Twitter reported that brands saw an average 34 percent earned media rate, it says. That means for every 100 paid impressions, the advertiser saw 34 views. Brands that had early access to Twitter’s new features included Coca-Cola, AMC, Marvel and Axe Body Spray.\nAMC used the ad to promote the world premiere of its “The Walking Dead” trailer, which was the best use of the format. Coca-Cola and Marvel simply encouraged Twitter users to pick between two options and then tweet their support accordingly.\n\nAlong with Instant Unlock Cards, Twitter says it’s also rolling out more advanced analytics for brands tracking their conversational ad units, which will help them track engagement metrics and earned media associated with their campaigns.", "date": "8/4/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/screenshot_742.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "ads", "title": "Twitter’s newest ads are designed to get users to tweet", "topics": "twitter", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/04/twitters-newest-ads-are-designed-to-get-users-to-tweet/" }, { "id": 207, "authors": "Matthew Lynley", "category": "Apps", "content": "Around ten years ago, Jules Urbach was sitting at the table at his mom’s house, coding away, when there was a knock at the door. His mom answered, but the visitor was for him. Directors J.J. Abrams and David Fincher had some questions about a rendering technology Urbach was working on, which had the potential to make movie scenes look much more realistic with shorter load times.\nAbrams and Fincher were being prescient. What Urbach was building would go on to be used in films like The Avengers and commercials for Transformers. It also made him enough money so that he could move out of his mom’s place.\nUrbach started a company called OTOY, short for Online Toys, in 2009. OTOY specializes in rendering complex 3D environments using cloud-based servers, making it making it easier — and faster — to build scenes for video games and movies. And now, OTOY now also integrates with Unity and Unreal Engine — two of the biggest tools used by game developers in the world.\nThese kinds of integrations all help companies offload the complex technological aspects of things like rendering games, making it easier to focus on the gameplay and art assets instead. Octane 3, the company’s tool, can export those Unreal Engine and Unity applications directly to the cloud, and they can be easily shared on the web. And those apps can be streamed to virtual reality devices like the Gear VR.\nNormally all of this takes a tremendous amount of time to render properly, but Urbach’s goal was to cut that down to a few seconds. He did that by finding a way to transfer the rendering technology to GPUs, increasing the speed at which it worked — and slicing the time required to render those scenes to a fraction of what it used to be. And to do all this, OTOY has raised more than $50 million in financing over the course of its lifetime.\n“It’s like Photoshop, everyone understands how light in the real world works,” Urbach said. “You don’t need to do tricks or be a visual effects studio to master and get it look real, it looks real — it’s all physics. My goal was to get the tech on the rendering side to be done and ready to where we could take on projects like [Transformers] and do it at a fraction of the cost, because [Octane 3] can render it like a video game.”\nHere’s an example of how the technology works: imagine taking a mesh of a forest where a video game character is walking around. To render all the lighting properly — and make the forest look lifelike, especially as a character walks around — normally takes a tremendous amount of time and computing, and is incredibly difficult to do in real time. But the goal of Octane is to essentially make it possible to look at it from all angles and have the lighting, shading and visuals of it looking correctly and lifelike in real-time.\n\nUrbach says by switching those processes over to a GPU speeds up the rendering time by anywhere from 10 times to 40 times faster. All this helps scenes and environments essentially render in real time, rather than having to record those scenes frame-by-frame. The advantage of all of this is that it can be rendered on remote servers like Amazon’s AWS, which allows game developers or artists to scale up and down what they need. (The company has a few demos running on its site.)\nShould it be successful, this kind of technology would be a holy grail of virtual reality and augmented reality. All of that rendering has to basically be done in real time as a user pans his or her head around and looks at all angles of the environment surrounding them. In a perfect world, Urbach says he is building the holodeck from Star Trek — a real-time holographic environment that shifts and changes with the way the person is looking. Matterport, for example, can capture the inside of an apartment and use Octane to correctly render the lighting on things like furniture as a user pans around and looks at various parts of the apartment.\n“This is something I had spent all these years in college trying to master with a paintbrush, he mastered with an algorithm,” co-founder Alissa Grainger said. “When we met him he had these renderings of a face in his mom’s living room on the coffee table. He was rendering skin the exact same way [I did when] I was a portrait artist [using watercolor].”\nWith all this, the technology can essentially provide a mixed environment — both pre-rendered and streaming — for developers. For example, the forest can be pre-rendered and saved on the device, but as people move around, the changes can be made on cloud servers and then streamed, making the experience look life-like and in real time.\nUrbach started on the path after he first played Dragons Lair, an interactive cartoon game that is basically a film that requires some controller input to determine what the hero’s next action will be. If a player puts in the wrong input, the hero Dirk ends up killed by a squid or dropping to his death. Each time, however, the scene was previously animated — making it feel like a live cartoon throughout the game. That sort of live entertainment fascinated Urbach, and he wanted to build the technology himself.\n“If you played that thing in ’83 the way I did, it blew my mind in ways that very few things have done since then,” he said. “You can have a video game that looks absolutely perfect, that’s the holy grail. I basically kept asking my mom to buy me an arcade machine, it was probably thousands of dollars. It was too expensive, so I said, ‘I’m gonna build this thing myself.”\nHistorically, the company sold an application, but recently shifted to also moving toward offering a subscription-based model, much like other publishing services like Photoshop. That helped the company lured Autodesk as an investor, Urbach said.\nFor the most part, OTOY’s business has been funded by its Hollywood endeavors — such as working on films like The Avengers and commercials for Transformers. Part of that is no doubt helped by the company’s connection with Ari Emmanuel, an icon in the entertainment industry, who sits on the company’s board of advisors. Urbach’s first task was building marketing materials for Transformers — which he used as a testing ground for his technology.\n“I remember being told this Transformers [film] model, it takes 40 hours to render one frame, and I was able to get really good quality and I was rendering at 60 frames per second at 4K,” Urbach said. “What’s happened in that time, the quality we have in Octane is pretty much better than what the final output of those films in 2006.”\nStill, there are still significant hurdles — as typified by the bumpy road encountered by predecessors in the game streaming space. The canonical one is OnLive, a video game service that streamed games like YouTube videos to computers that were fully playable — on a good Internet connection at least. Gaikai is another example, but perhaps a brighter one. Shortly after emerging, it was promptly snapped up by Sony, and its technology still exists in the form of PlayStation Now, a subscription-based gaming service similar to OnLive. OnLive could have been slightly too early to properly capitalize on its technology, but OTOY is pushing boundaries too.\nAbrams still checks in periodically with Urbach, and his mom, to find out how things are going.\n“That was a big validator, I’ve never met a big director like [David] Fincher, they were incredibly interested,” he said. “I really credit those two guys helping me pursue this and push it further, there’s a future if it helps a filmmaker like Abrams [is excited about what you’re working on].”", "date": "12/22/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pasted-image-01.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "otoy", "title": "OTOY Looks To Give Developers The Tools To Build Lifelike Real-Time 3D Environments", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/22/otoy-looks-to-give-developers-the-tools-to-build-lifelike-real-time-3d-environments/" }, { "id": 208, "authors": "Mike Butcher", "category": "Europe", "content": "Building what amounts to a neural network inside a platform has long been one of the goals of computing and many a startup, but in the main they remain the preserve of university computing labs. They also tend to need a lot of computing power usually distributed via the Internet. ‘Smart keyboard’ startup Swiftkey hopes to change that today with the release of a new Alpha version of its Android keyboard which, they claim can almost literally think for itself about what you want to type next.\nUntil now Swiftkey’s keyboard has come packed with some preset algorithms which you can train over time. But this new version, they claim, uses artificial ‘neural networks’ to predict and correct what you are about to type in an even fuller, more accurate manner than before.\nSwiftKey Neural Alpha is effectively a re-engineering of the Swiftly platform and an experimental project out of SwiftKey’s ‘skunkworks department’ called Greenhouse.\nNeural networks are a ‘subfield’ of artificial intelligence inspired by the way the human brain works.\nSwiftkey was the world’s first keyboard to introduce a three-word suggestion bar above the keys that could pretty accurately predict your next word, powered by its ‘n-gram’ technology which provides accurate predictions for common phrases. However, it has limitations because it can’t understand the underlying meaning of words and has to be taught.\nNo company has done a neural network on a keyboard before, but the keyboards available from Google and Nuance (Swype) both experiment with them for image recognition and translation. However, SwiftKey’s neural network model, they say, understands word similarity, allowing it to compare words on the fly.\nBen Medlock, Co-founder & CTO, SwiftKey, says this version is the culmination of some of the ideas put forward by British computer scientist and father of the field, Alan Turing.\nSwiftKey Neural will be available in Google Play as of Thursday at 9am Pacific/12 noon Eastern here.", "date": "10/8/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/precog.gif?w=500", "section": "europe/", "tags": "swiftkey", "title": "Swiftkey Releases Predictive Keyboard Built On A Neural Network", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/swiftkey-releases-predictive-keyboard-built-on-a-neural-network/" }, { "id": 209, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Social", "content": "It’s been a year since social rewards and analytics company, Badgeville took home the prize for Audience Choice Winner at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010. Today, Founder and CEO Kris Duggan spoke at this year’s Disrupt to talk about how far the company has come over the past 12 months. When Badgeville started, he says, it had 4 people, $300,000 in seed funding and 10 beta customers. Now it has 35 full-time employees, has raised $15 million in capital and has 85 paying customers, including big names like NBC, Discovery and Universal Music. It’s also pulling in 5 to 10 million in sales, notes Duggan. Not bad for just one year in.\nBut in even bigger news, Badgeville is now launching its latest product: Social Fabric, a new technology based on users’ online behavior.\nThis “behavior graph,” as Duggan calls it, is different from the “social graph” found on Facebook and Twitter, which is limited to a user’s network of friends. It’s also more advanced than the “interest graph” on Facebook, where the feedback loop is as simple as a list of “likes.”\nInstead, the behavior graph is built by tracking users’ on-site activity, which can include virtually anything a publisher wants to track, like clicking a link, reading an article, commenting, liking, replying to another comment, or sharing, for example. But it’s not limited to only content-producing websites. Retailers can use Social Fabric, too, to track activity related to purchases, recommendations, referrals and more. Even enterprise application makers could leverage Social Fabric to track internal activity, like a closed support ticket or users who added answers to a help site’s Q&A section.\nThere are three main components to Social Fabric: activity streams, social notifications and alerts, and the ability to follow people and objects.\nThe activity stream functions as sort of like a behaviorally-based, site specific version of Facebook’s News Feed. It shows users a stream of activity related their interests, including what your friends have been doing on the site – what they’ve been reading, commenting on, liking, etc. It can show you who has responded to a comment you left, or what users seem to like the same content as you do. The options, again, are up to the publishers themselves.\n\nBadgeville is currently working on improving the filtering algorithms for this stream, to better highlight the activity that would be most interesting to a given user. Tasked with the algorithm improvements is Tim Piatenko, a developer who knows a little something about the matter, having previously worked on analytics at social gaming company Zynga.\nAnother piece to the new Social Fabric system are the real-time alerts, which pop in (usually at the bottom of the page) to show you this same activity as it happens, while you’re browsing the website. The end result is a more engaging experience for users, while also providing the site’s publisher with a more detailed analysis of user behavior.\n\nThe third and final piece to Social Fabric is the “Follow” button which, unlike on social networks, can be applied to other things besides just people. Users can follow topics, videos, articles, or any object that can be tracked.\n\nSo why is a gamification company delving into social mechanics? Were badges not enough to fully engage users? As it turns out, it’s not a simple either-or situation. Adding social activity to the already-present game mechanics in Badgeville’s core product, helps to deliver better and more addictive on-site experiences, as the game-related activity becomes just another interest that can be tracked.\nDuggan says Badgeville already has half a dozen companies planning to implement Social Fabric over next week or two, so stay tuned.", "date": "9/12/2011", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/badgeville-250x250.png?w=250", "section": "social/", "tags": "disruptsf2011,social,tcdisrupt,gamification", "title": "On Its One-Year Anniversary, Badgeville Launches A New Product Called Social Fabric", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/on-its-one-year-anniversary-badgeville-launches-a-new-product-called-social-fabric/" }, { "id": 210, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Fundings & Exits", "content": "Fishing isn’t necessarily sexy. But it turns out that it’s one of the most popular participation sports in the world, or at the very least one of the most profitable.\nAmberjack looks to capitalize on that by offering a service that lets users book fishing trips from outfitters using their own filters and preferences without having to endlessly search the web for the right trip.\nAmberjack co-founder Jerome Tufte says that the fishing industry is worth $40 billion annually in the United States alone, but that the experience of booking a fishing trip is broken without a centralized search and booking platform.\nAmberjack wants to fill that space, and has raised $500k in seed funding led by BoxGroup/David Tisch to make it happen. The round also included participation from Slow Ventures, Prehype, Scott Belsky, Jay Livingston and Josh Abramson.\nIn many ways Amberjack is modeled after Airbnb in that outfitters can add their own profiles to the platform and customize them at will, with Amberjack taking a small slice of each successfully booked transaction. Using the platform — from browsing on the user side or setting up a profile on the outfitter side — is free. Users can search for trips based on their own criteria or take a look at curated featured trips that are put together by humans at Amberjack.\nThe service is launching now out of beta, and interested users can head over here to check out the website.", "date": "4/6/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/screenshot-2015-04-06-16-12-18.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "david-tisch,amberjack", "title": "Amberjack Reels In $500K To Let You Book A Fishing Trip", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/06/amberjack-reels-in-500k-to-let-you-book-a-fishing-trip/" }, { "id": 211, "authors": "Alex Williams", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Tintri has raised a new $25 million round of funding for its storage appliances designed for virtual environments. The round was led by Menlo Ventures and joined by existing investors NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners.\nTintri has now raised more than $60 million since its launch in March of last year.\nVirtualization comes with a host of issues. Companies face considerable complexities in keeping apps running at high performance. But as the virtual machines on the servers take on more load, the apps slow down. More storage is often added to ease the problem. Storage then becomes a critical factor for performance but at a considerable cost. The disk drives on traditional storage can be slow. Bottlenecks form in the I/O.\nTintri is recognized for its ability to manage the storage environments that are so important in virtualized environments. It is one of the next generation flash storage providers that are putting pressure on traditional giants such as EMC and NetApp. Its secret sauce is in its de-duplication, compression and flash technology. The appliances can have a terabyte of flash which makes for super fast capabilities that traditional storage can not provide.\nWe are too often reminded that we are entering the age of big data. But what about big storage? It may seem boring but the market is alive with activity. Every enterprise in the world is wrestling with the storage issue. Companies like Tintri are positioned to make major inroads to companies that want better performance, less cost and smaller footprint that comes with traditional storage options.", "date": "7/24/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/tintri-logo.png?w=177", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "storage,flash,virtualization,tintri", "title": "Tintri Raises $25 Million For Storage Designed To Improve Virtual Machine Environments", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/tintri-raises-25-million-for-storage-designed-for-virtual-machine-environments/" }, { "id": 212, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Remember OnLive? Despite a messy sale to escape a dark and stormy financial picture, the company lives on, and in March it launched its new CloudLift subscription gaming service. Today, it’s partnering with Wikipad, maker of the dedicated Android gaming tablet, to deliver full AAA PC gaming to the tablet. OnLive already offers this to any Android device with access to Google Play via its app, but the version for Wikipad is optimized, with special support for its dedicated built-in gaming controller.\nThe Wikipad 7 will be the first to get the OnLive treatment, but support will also be extended to Wikipad’s forthcoming Gamevice hardware, which adds a detachable gamepad to any tablet that wants one. The game streaming from OnLive can be paired with the CloudLift subscription service which makes it possible for players to pick up right where they left off on their home gaming rigs thanks to cloud-based save states and metadata.\nIt’s a move that should add value to both Wikipad’s business and OnLive’s user base, but in the end it’s unlikely to prove truly game-changing to either. Especially as players like Nvidia are moving to create their own streaming game services like GRID, the system that works in the same way as OnLive but with the backing of one of the biggest mobile chip and graphics card makers in the world.\nIt has yet to prove itself a sizeable business for anyone involved, however, which could just be a case of the tech (especially on the user end) needing to play catch-up with the service.", "date": "6/17/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/wikipad-2.jpeg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "streaming,gaming,onlive,wikipad", "title": "OnLive Is Now Streaming Top-Tier Games To The Wikipad Gaming Tablet", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/17/onlive-is-now-streaming-top-tier-games-to-the-wikipad-gaming-tablet/" }, { "id": 213, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "Bitbar, the startup behind cloud-based mobile app testing platform Testdroid, has announced that it has closed a $3 million funding round. The round was led by Creathor Venture, DFJ Esprit, Finnvera Venture Capital, and, interestingly, mobile chipmaker Qualcomm via its venture arm, Qualcomm Ventures. Finland’s TEKES financing also participated.\nThe new funds will be used by the Finnish company to expand its mobile developer tools beyond Android, iOS and HTML5, as well as “beyond just testing”, though it isn’t elaborating any further for now. The company had previously raised an undisclosed seed round from unnamed angels and Finnvera Venture Capital.\nBitbar provides a range of mobile software development and testing solutions based on open standards aimed at app developers and enterprises to make it easier to ensure that their mobile apps work properly on the devices that they are targeting. Its flagship product is the cloud-based Android testing solution, Testdroid Cloud, which offers automated and real-time testing for mobile application developers via hosting and providing access to over 200 Android-powered smartphones and other devices.\nAs the Android ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragmented, along with the proliferation of competing mobile platforms overall, app compatibility and testing is a big headache for developers. Getting an app to run smoothly across various configurations is both costly and time-consuming, requiring many hours of manual testing as part of the QA process — presuming, of course, that you have access to each and every device and OS version being targeted. And that’s the killer. Offering access to a multitude of devices via the cloud, provided as a service and supported by automated tools and scripting, is obviously a far more efficient way of going about it.\nTo that end, along with Testdroid Cloud, Bitbar offers Testdroid Recorder to automatically generate standards-based test scripts and Testdroid Server for companies to build in-house test labs.\nIts customer list includes Ancestry.com, BMW, Critical Path, eBay (US and UK), Evernote, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, LivingSocial, Lookout, PayPal, Pinterest, Saffron Digital, SoundCloud, Swiftkey, Tesco, The Weather Channel, Top Free Games and Wooga.\nCompetitors to Bitbar include TestOject, and testCloud. The latter takes a slightly different approach to multi-device testing by employing the crowd instead of automation. Similarly, U.S.-based uTest also takes a manual approach with its crowd of 60,000 ‘professional’ testers, as does Bangalore’s 99tests.", "date": "4/17/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/bitbar_logo.png?w=400", "section": "europe/", "tags": "dfj-esprit,qualcomm-ventures,testdroid,bitbar", "title": "Bitbar Raises $3M From Qualcomm, Creathor, DFJ Esprit, And Finnvera For Its Testdroid Mobile App Testing Platform", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/bitbar/" }, { "id": 214, "authors": "", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Patent blogs were lit up after the Supreme Court’s decision in Prometheus v. Mayo. Some have hailed the decision as a “harbinger of progress to come” while others have denounced it as revealing “just how little the Court understands the nuances of science, philosophy and language – let alone the patent law itself.” Describing the decision as “controversial” is probably an understatement.\nThe opinion focused primarily on Section 101 of the United States Patent Act, which sets out the basic categories of patent eligible subject matter. The statute is short and sweet: “Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefore …” So simple, right?\nObviously not. Interpreting Section 101, Courts have consistently held that abstract ideas, natural phenomena, and laws of nature are not eligible for patent protection. Courts have also (less consistently) held that mathematical algorithms are either abstract ideas or laws of nature. Software is essentially composed of mathematical algorithms. Thus, the judicial interpretation of Section 101 could decide, once and for all, whether software patents are valid. If you’re serious about software patents, you read Prometheus v. Mayo with bated breath.\nThe case: Prometheus Labs patented a test to identify the appropriate dose of thiopurines, a class of drugs used to treat gastrointestinal disorders. The problem with thiopurines is that at levels too low the drug is ineffective, while at levels too high it is toxic – even worse, different people metabolize the drug differently.\nAlthough scientists knew that levels of blood metabolites were correlated with effective treatment, Prometheus discovered the specific range of this correlation and patented a test that basically involved (1) administering thiopurine drugs and (2) determining whether the concentration of blood metabolites fell within a specified range. Mayo Labs purchased these tests from Prometheus for some time, but eventually went in-house, developing and marketing its own test. None too pleased, Prometheus filed suit against Mayo for patent infringement.\nI know what you’re thinking. What does any of this have to do with software?\nIt turns out that software patents have tormented the Supreme Court for years. In 1978, the Court first refused to grant patent protection to a mathematical algorithm, but then in 1981 held that a process having novel elements, which included software, could be patented if the software was tied to a specific machine. As Professor Menell of U.C. Berkeley put it, “Coming during the first decade of software’s ascendancy, the [prior case law] produced more heat than light in applying century-old patent jurisprudence to an amorphous, rapidly developing field of technology.” Well said.\nIn 1998, the Federal Circuit ruled that software by itself was patentable, without need for any specific machine, so long as the invention produced a “useful, concrete, and tangible result.” That all changed in 2008, however, when the Federal Circuit displaced this “tangible result” standard with the “machine-or-transformation test” (call it “MoT” for the sake of brevity). MoT provides that a claimed process is patent-eligible if (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.\nThe Supreme Court affirmed this decision, but noted that MoT was not the exclusive test of patentability, although it was “a useful and important clue, an investigative tool.” Since then, most lower courts have continued to rely on MoT in evaluating software patents, having little else to guide them.\nThat’s unfortunate because MoT fails, hard. And this failure is partially to blame for the present – somewhat ridiculous – state of the patent system, where startups essentially ignore prior patents (far too many to review anyway) and large companies stockpile and cross-license nearly worthless patents to protect themselves from patent trolls that are likely gunning for them.\nMy favorite example of MoT shortcoming is the infamous “Method of Exercising a Cat,” which consists of directing a laser pointer in the vicinity of a cat, then moving the laser pointer “so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.” Judges have remarked that this patent could satisfy MoT because “the sedentary cat becomes a fit feline” – it involves both a transformation (the physical properties of the cat) and a specific machine (the laser pointer).\n\nMuch more ink could be spilled laying bare the many faults of MoT, but you get the idea. MoT is supposed to limit patents to technological or industrial processes, it has been fashioned as a gatekeeper, a threshold analysis if you will. The fundamental problem is that MoT allows the tail to wag the dog (or cat) by focusing on whether a new invention is “tied to a particular machine” or “transforms a particular thing” rather than the invention itself.\nCourts seemingly cannot do any better. This reflects the immense difficulty of creating an effective “gatekeeper” test that draws conceptual circles around categories of technology that are rapidly changing and says definitively, as a threshold matter, what’s in and what’s out. Instead, we need an approach that is focused directly on the invention, its practical application, and whether, if patented, it would stymie further discovery by precluding the fundamental building blocks of innovation. This is what Section 101 is really about.\nBack to Prometheus v. Mayo: Given these problems, many hoped the Supreme Court would provide some much-needed guidance in applying Section 101. Wishful thinking I suppose. The highest court ultimately decided that the metabolite correlations themselves are laws of nature and that Prometheus did not “add enough to the correlations to allow the processes they describe to qualify as patent eligible.”\nThe Court reasoned, “If a law of nature is not patentable, then neither is a process reciting a law of nature, unless that process has additional features that provide practical assurance that the process is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the law of nature itself.”\nWhat would be “enough” to make the processes patent eligible? What “additional features” would provide the requisite practical assurance? The court doesn’t say. While the word “enough” was helpfully italicized in the court’s opinion, italics alone do not add clarity to otherwise vague, amorphous standards. Although we can applaud concern over monopolization of natural laws, simply saying that Prometheus did not add “enough” to these laws is basically useless.\nThe court also notes that “the steps in the claimed processes (apart from the natural laws themselves) involve well-understood, routine, conventional activity previously engaged in by researchers in the field.” These steps do not include, as the court remarks, “an ‘inventive concept’ sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the natural law itself.”\nSo, besides the correlation between metabolite levels and effective treatment (which is an unpatentable natural law), there is nothing “inventive” about the test developed by Prometheus; really they were just trying to patent an underlying law of nature.\nThis analysis is all bad. Section 101 tells us what categories of inventions are eligible for patent protection. Section 102 tells us a quality that an invention must have (i.e., novelty) to be patentable. Patent-eligibility under Section 101 is not the same as patentability under Section 102 (even though they sound alike).\nThe court should not be sneaking the Section 102 analysis into a Section 101 inquiry. In fact, in that 1981 case I mentioned earlier, the Supreme Court specifically said, “the ‘novelty’ of any element or steps in a process, or even of the process itself, is of no relevance in determining whether the subject matter of a claim falls within the [Section] 101 categories of possibly patentable subject matter.” See, all bad.\nThe take away point is that the Supreme Court didn’t give us what we needed; in fact, it probably made things worse from a doctrinal standpoint. This is especially true because the opinion supports the view that Section 101 is a threshold inquiry that must be decided before any analysis under Sections 102, 103, or 112. That the court nevertheless sneaks Section 102 principles into its Section 101 inquiry is telling – it’s telling me that the threshold approach isn’t a very good one.\nDespite all this, there is some encouraging language at the end of the opinion:\nThat’s something we can all agree on. It also shows a willingness by this Supreme Court (the decision was unanimous) to think about principles of patent law from a policy perspective. Perhaps we’re seeing a shift in that direction, with more focus on the invention, its practical application, and the effects of patents on further discovery. That is, after all, what Section 101 is really about.\nThe other possibility is that the court is punting to Congress. In the penultimate paragraph, the court says, “And we must recognize the role of Congress in crafting more finely tailored rules where necessary.” I won’t hold my breath.", "date": "4/8/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/patent-law1.jpg?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "startups,patent-law,patent-law-101", "title": "Patent Law 101: What’s Wrong And Ways To Make It Right", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/08/patent-law-101-whats-wrong-and-ways-to-make-it-right/" }, { "id": 215, "authors": "", "category": "Opinion", "content": "Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Jesse Stay, the author of Google+ For Dummies, Facebook Application Development For Dummies, and the currently in-progress book, Google+ Marketing For Dummies. Jesse consults with organizations big and small on social media technologies, marketing, and design philosophies.\nThis quote, from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, embodies a perspective I think many fathers such as myself are experiencing as our children enter this amazing world of technology we now live in. In the play, Miranda, raised most of her life on an isolated island, comes upon a group of drunk sailors straggling off a ship. Miranda, oblivious to any sort of “morals”, or “culture”, was fascinated by this “Brave New World” she had come in contact with.\nAldous Huxley also reiterated this idea in his satirical book, “Brave New World” back in 1932. Huxley was fascinated with the Industrial Revolution and with the Utopian visions of Wells and other authors he thought to parody these books with a negative view on what might happen to society as a result of technology. Little did we know that Huxley’s “science fiction” of a world where technology would replace the natural capabilities of man would actually become the “science reality” of today.\nAs a Father of 5 kids, I sought to start this column on Techcrunch in order to share my challenges and struggles as a Dad in this continually changing world of technology. The truth is, as my kids get older, I begin to realize what little I know about how to lead them and guide them through safety and security in our current “Brave New World”, so they are able to make the greatest contribution on society.\nTo me, it’s not even a moral issue, but an issue of how do I provide the best, and most optimal life for them where they are free and capable of getting the most out of life without any roadblocks, especially at a young age as their minds are still developing and they don’t have the capability to understand the world around them. Each week you’ll see new topics from me about the struggles I’m trying to comprehend as I open this world of technology up to my family.\nAs I was contemplating my topic for this week’s column, my attention was brought to this video by Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of the anti-pornography group, “Porn Harms” (which is down right now as I’ll explain why later). To tell you the truth, I kind of blew it off the first time I saw it. It seemed like the typical video or article you see that gets discredited by Snopes. It wasn’t until last week when I was at a banquet I was invited to, and she happened to be at my table, that I realized she was really serious, and these things actually happened to her.\nIn the video Hawkins talks about how on a Delta flight, a man in front of her viewed porn on an iPad, in plain view of other passengers. According to an email I got from Hawkins, she confirmed to me that “The pornography was completely nude. I’m 90% certain the girls were no older than 14. One of the images showed one girl whipping another.” You can see the video below:\n\nTo add to that, in my research of this I learned that this is not the first case of passengers openly viewing child porn on Delta flights. Another man, a University of Utah professor, on a Delta flight from Utah was recently accused of viewing child porn in front of other passengers. As opposed to Hawkins’ case, this man was actually prosecuted, and is facing jail time. It seems Delta has some answering to do (to Delta’s credit, Hawkins says Delta is working to train their staff now to know how to deal with these situations in the future).\nOn top of all of this, I’ve come to find out that, since Hawkins’ video talking about her experience on this flight, Anonymous has been attacking the websites and email of Porn Harms, and making harassing phone calls to Hawkins and her family. The website, “Adult Video News”, also attacked Hawkins for her reaction on the flight. Both groups seem to be trying to advocate porn being allowed during air flight with their crusades. Yes – in front of your kids.\nAs a Dad, this type of stuff has me scared to death. Kids are being exposed, and even addicted, to porn younger and younger in today’s world (some suggest as young as 6!). We’re in a world where it’s okay for my kids to get exposed to porn at every angle with no retribution. In fact, retribution goes against those that are against it, as I’m sure I’ll see in the comments of this article. There is absolutely no protection for our kids in this effort, or very little if any. Flight attendants receive little training on what to do in situations like Hawkins’.\nPorn sites, in a world where it’s completely possible to ensure the age of an individual with technology, are doing little to keep out the kids. As a business person I don’t blame them – as long as government doesn’t crack down on it, why not get my kids addicted to their industry while they’re young? Society seems to have put laws out there, but no one seems to care that the laws are there. Maybe, in this Brave New World my perspective is just wrong. Maybe it’s okay for me to be encouraging my kids to look at porn openly to expand their horizons. Does that seem wrong to anyone else but me?\nAs a Dad, adults watching porn and kids watching porn are two different things. Moral issues aside, I want to protect my kids from these things. My kids should be able to make free and clear decisions when they turn 18, free from addiction to hamper those decisions. Technology is not doing enough to help them. Why aren’t porn sites making it harder for my kids to view porn? Why aren’t more people doing something about allowing me, as a parent, to decide how I want to protect my children? Turning the internet off isn’t the answer. Nor is comprehensive internet filters – those rarely work and in my opinion are just a bandaid, especially in a world where our kids are getting more and more mobile.\nI’m afraid my only option is to stay involved with my kids (and maybe I shouldn’t be afraid of that). Watch them and be there for them as they are exposed to this Brave New World of technology. But what do I do as they’re around others that think this is okay to view in public settings around other children? Perhaps in the end the fix to our society is family, and the nurturing of our children through parents who care for them. People say it’s the ability to discern authentic relationships that goes first when kids are exposed to porn and become addicted at a young age. Maybe it’s just that – relationships, that will protect them, as they grow old enough to make those decisions on their own.\nImage credit: First Edition, cover artist Leslie Holland.", "date": "3/4/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/200px-bravenewworld_firstedition.jpeg?w=200", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Porn And Parenting: The Brave New World", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/04/porn-and-parenting-the-brave-new-world/" }, { "id": 216, "authors": "John Mannes", "category": "Entertainment", "content": "Accusations that Spotify has been punishing artists for signing exclusives with other streaming services hit the internet in full force this morning, originating from a Bloomberg article.\nWhen confronted by TechCrunch, a Spotify spokesperson gave the same response they have been giving since the story broke — that the accusations about burying search results are “unequivocally false.”\nHowever, while Spotify has been clear about rejecting one part of the argument against the company, there is another piece of the story that remains unaddressed. Hidden in the details, the accusations are really twofold, including both the notion that\nTaking the statement from Spotify at face value, the company is incredibly clear about not suppressing tracks from artists that signed exclusives with other streaming services deeper in search results.\nThat said, a representative of a singer-songwriter told Bloomberg that the artist turned down an appearance on an Apple Music show because of fears they would “lose promotion from Spotify.” This is not about suppressing search results, this is about promoting music differently on the Spotify platform as a direct result of exclusives signed with streaming services like Apple Music.\nThe New York Times also reported yesterday that executives at two major record labels said Spotify had instituted a policy similar to the one described by the artist who opted out of the Apple Music show.\nSpotify has long been against exclusives in the music industry, but ultimately hasn’t been able to do much about big deals from Apple Music and Tidal. The picture painted by the artist and record label executives is not unequivocal, but it is very close to it.\nThe ethics of discriminating against artists for signing exclusives is murky at best. What’s particularly concerning is that exclusive deals can be used to finance albums, which means such policies can disproportionately impact up-and-coming musicians with respect to established artists that can more or less afford to do what they want.\nSuch practices are a good short term strategy for discouraging the practice, but ultimately it’s users who suffer. If it’s true that Spotify is affecting promotion in this way, the decision cannot be with the listener’s best interest in mind. It’s true that exclusives are bad for piracy and bad for consumers as well, but the solution will not come from putting the average person in the middle of a fight over market share.", "date": "8/26/2016", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/gettyimages-542128546.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "tidal,online-music-stores", "title": "Spotify might not suppress search, but that doesn’t mean artists with exclusives get treated equally", "topics": "apple-music,spotify", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/spotify-might-not-suppress-search-but-that-doesnt-mean-artists-with-exclusives-get-treated-equally/" }, { "id": 217, "authors": "Steve O'Hear", "category": "Europe", "content": "Companies like Echonest, recently acquired by Spotify, and Gracenote have long since offered music meta-data that others can incorporate into their apps. Consumer-facing services, such as Last.fm, also offer an API, and late last year Pandora competitor Senzari added MusicGraph to the mix.\nToday another music startup is throwing its hat into the music meta-data ring. Dublin-based Seevl has released an API for developers to let them easily add music recommendations and artist data to their apps. The new offering gives app makers access to some of the underlying technology that currently powers the Seevl consumer-facing app, which is a cross-service music discovery offering that gives music recommendations and lets you build ‘mix tapes’, amongst a plethora of music-related features.\nThe Seevl API is powered by the startup’s own music meta-data graph, which itself is built on top of Freebase, Wikipedia and MusicBrainz, and uses Seevl’s in-house semantic technologies and recommendation and search algorithms — both founders, Alexandre Passant and Julie Letierce, previously worked at the renowned Semantic Web R&D lab DERI.\nI asked Passant, CEO/CTO of Seevl, who the new API is aimed at? “Broadly speaking, anyone looking for music and artist-related meta-data,” he says. “The main target being music-related startups/businesses (from streaming to e-commerce) looking for a turn-key solution to enable search, discovery, recommendations, and personalization on their platform, or wanting raw data to build their own system on top of our API.”\nThis could be anything from a company wanting to add a simple “related-artists” feature, which, using Seevl, could be deployed with a few lines of Javascript, says Passant, “while a company looking for an ad-hoc personalisation stack may use our artist-data methods and add a machine-learning layer on top of it.”\nOr, as another example, an app could display fact-sheets about every artist, genre and record label that goes beyond the traditional plain biography that music apps generally provide, thus increasing engagement.\n“One feature that we provide (and that we haven’t seen in any competitor) is the ability to explain the relations between two artists. That is particularly useful for bringing context to recommendations (if you like X you should like Y *because* …) or to build graphical interfaces for music discovery,” adds Passant.\nAnd whilst the API doesn’t currently afford the ability to offer personalised music recommendations on its own, Passant says Seevl has built such functionality into its core product and is willing to help, should a developer wish to go down that route. “It’s not natively provided by the API, but that’s something we can help on the integration side, as we’ve done it for seevl.fm,” he explains.\nThe Seevl API is free to use for non-commercial hacks/personal use, but for commercial use is also one way the startup plans to generate revenue. Developers, developers, developers…", "date": "4/9/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/screen-shot-2014-04-09-at-14-42-53.png?w=738", "section": "europe/", "tags": "seevl", "title": "Seevl Releases API To Let You Add Music Recommendations And Artist Data To Your App", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/09/a-hard-days-night-coding/" }, { "id": 218, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Media", "content": "Public broadcasters continue to face a lot of pressure as going concerns in the face of bigger overall pressure for the media industry, and like all media companies, they are looking towards a new generation of entrepreneurs for innovation. Those two trends are coming together in a new accelerator, San Francisco-based Matter, which debuts its first class of startups today.\nHere’s the list:\nMatter was a long time in materializing. We first wrote about the project almost a year ago to the day, when it was called the Public Media Accelerator and had just appointed Corey Ford from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors to run it, after receiving funding commitments from the Knight Foundation and PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Ford and founding partner Jake Shapiro were just preparing to go to SXSW to check out startups for the program.\nFast forward a year, and the group has now rebranded as Matter, added another major backer in the form of San Francisco public broadcaster KQED, taken digs in SF (space pictured here) and switched over to a for-profit status to run things.\nAccording Shapiro, the move to for-profit status from non-profit was to make sure that both those involved with Matter, including the startups themselves, knew that “everyone had skin in the game,” while still holding on to some of the ethos of public broadcasting and the wider remit of serving a public good.\n“We wanted to see if we could construct and accelerator focused on the mission of public broadcasting, while still making sure that we could advocate success within the full model of entrepreneurship today,” he said in an interview earlier.\nIndeed, Matter seems to be part of a bigger, if latent, trend in the world of startups that are focused on trying to bring more “do good” mentality closer to the center of tech innovation. Rally.org, the crowdfunding platform for causes, is another example. The BBC’s accelerator activities in the UK is another.\nWhile Shapiro believes that bringing the public media ethos to startups could help shape the way they develop their business, this is also about bringing more exciting ideas to old media. “There is this huge engine in entrepreneurship and innovation that is happening, some of which has been out of reach for public media, given our funding structures and ecosystem,” said Shapiro, who himself comes from the Public Radio Exchange. “It’s more about tapping into innovation rather than changing corporate tax structure. There is an enormous amount to be learned.”\nTurning away from non-profit should not be viewed as Matter outright rejecting the role that non-profits can play in innovation, either. “We’re huge admirers of what Mozilla and Wikpedia have done on the internet, and we know you can achieve huge scale,” Shapiro said. He notes that groups like the Knight Foundation continue to have a number of programs that are still run as non-profits that also give out funding to startups.\nSo far the proof has been in the pudding. Shapiro said that Matter received “hundreds” of applications for their grants, each totalling $50,000, along with mentoring and workspace in downtown SF. The final group of six, with founders coming from areas as diverse as Apple (former engineers), digital video, open source and media veterans, will show off their goods on a demo day June 13.", "date": "3/6/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/screen-shot-2013-03-06-at-13-47-36.png?w=400", "section": "startups/", "tags": "public-radio,accelerators,knight-foundation,matter", "title": "Matter, A For-Profit Media Accelerator Backed By KQED, Knight And PRX, Debuts First Class", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/06/matter-a-for-profit-media-accelerator-backed-by-kqed-knight-public-radio-debuts-first-class/" }, { "id": 219, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Uber has paused its auto-rickshaw service in Delhi. Called UberAUTO, the feature represented one of the car-hailing app’s attempts to localize to the Indian market. It launched in April and competed with a similar service from Ola.\nUber released a press statement that said “At Uber, we continuously experiment with products to ensure that we can provide the most efficient, affordable, and reliable ride to everyone everywhere. We are temporarily removing this product to solve specific problems that need to be resolved to help it scale.”\nThe company didn’t provide more details about the issues UberAUTO encountered.\nAuto-rickshaws are a popular mode of transportation in Indian cities, but UberAUTO was up against rival services, including Ola’s (which is available in six major cities, including Delhi), and Jugnoo, which has raised $8 million in funding and lets users hail auto-rickshaws for deliveries in addition to transportation. Smaller contenders include MGaadi and AutoWale\nIn Delhi, UberAUTO also competed with the government’s own auto-rickshaw hailing app called PoochO.\nIndia is Uber’s second-biggest market outside of the U.S., but it faces a formidable rival in Ola, which has the infrastructure and funding to quickly launch and scale localized services. Ola has raised more than $1.4 billion so far from investors including Didi Kuaidi (Uber’s main rival in China, another key growth market) and SoftBank.\n(h/t Quartz)", "date": "12/8/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/rickshaw.jpg?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "", "title": "Uber Suspends Its Auto-Rickshaw Service In India", "topics": "uber", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/uber-suspends-its-auto-rickshaw-service-in-india/" }, { "id": 220, "authors": "Ron Miller", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "In a stunner today, Microsoft Corporate VP Bob Stutz stepped down from his job running Microsoft Dynamics CRM.\nMSDynamicsWorld broke the story, and Microsoft has confirmed the news in a statement.\nA memo with the news went out to employees today at 4 pm, and Jujhar Singh, who has been a key player on the team, will be taking over for Stutz. As for Singh, Microsoft had this to say in a statement:\nChris Kanaracus, who is managing editor and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says it’s too soon to say how the change will affect the overall direction of the program.\n“I think it is difficult for anyone to predict just what Jujhar Singh will do, but the Dynamics Convergence conference is coming up in 3-4 months. Any major strategic plans and messaging changes are going to start happening right now,” he said.\nAccording to his online bio, Stutz was “responsible for defining the long-term strategy and technology direction as well as the development and delivery of on-premises and cloud versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM worldwide.”\nThe move is a big blow to Microsoft as Stutz has been a key player in building the Dynamics CRM tool, R Ray Wang is who is founder at Constellation Research told TechCrunch.\n“He’s been building a team that has kept Salesforce on its toes. They turned Dynamics CRM into a worthy competitor for SFDC,” Wang said.\nOver the last couple of years, Microsoft has been making a concerted effort to build up the CRM tool and try to compete more strongly with Salesforce, SAP and Oracle in the CRM market. To that end, it has built a cloud and on-premises version of the software and has a major update coming out at the end of this quarter (soon).\nIn a move to give upgrade the update some sex appeal, the company is integrating it with Microsoft Delve, a tool designed to help surface information, a key feature for busy sales people. It’s also integrating with the voice command module, Cortana, to enable users to interact with the program using voice commands, and it’s designed to work with the Cortana Analytics suite announced earlier this year.\nAll of this is designed to push the CRM tool, where Microsoft has lagged in marketshare behind Salesforce, SAP and Oracle.\nThere is speculation about where Stutz will land next, with some people suggesting it could be at one of Microsoft’s CRM rivals, but we will have to wait and see on that point.\nUpdate 11/19/15: According to multiple reports, Stuz’s break didn’t last very long and he will be joining Salesforce as Chief Analytics Officer.", "date": "11/16/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/15533847633_bf5fa3ffd8_k.jpg?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "bob-stutz,microsoft-dynamics", "title": "Microsoft Dynamics Corporate VP Bob Stutz Steps Down", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/16/microsoft-dynamics-corporate-vp-bob-stutz-reportedly-steps-down/" }, { "id": 221, "authors": "Mike Butcher", "category": "Apps", "content": "You would think that combining a health and fitness app with social networking features had kinda been done for a while. Strava has a sort of network where I can follow my friends’ runs. And other apps have similar features. But it would seem there’s a qualitative difference to some fitness platforms some of us have missed that some investors are still interested in exploring. PumpUp, a social fitness app (on iOS/Android) says it has found a sweet spot in this area by appealing in particular to women via allowing them to post photos of their progress, thus creating a highly focused, supportive social community.\nAs results it’s now closed a $2.4 million seed round led by General Catalyst Partners. The cash will be used to expand the community, team and product. Additional investors included Azure Capital Partners, Relay Ventures, Freycinet Investments, and a number of angel investors. Prior to this it had raised an undisclosed seed round of financing, and a $200,000 Angel round in September 2013.\nThe startup also announced a new number: over 1.7 million users. (Just for contrast, Strava has raised $16.1M to date but it’s not known how many users it has yet).\nPumpUp’s appeal is very much driven around community, combining photo sharing, fitness goals, meal sharing and fitness tracking. Not a million miles away from what a lot of supportive Facebook groups do, but this just shows once again the inexorable move away from the desktop web to the mobile world.\nWith PumpUp you can share selfies (similar to a Facebook meets Instagram interface); build and store custom exercise plans; get custom coaching; track activity such as reps, calories burned, time spent exercising, progress over time etc.; and share healthy recipes.\nPhil Jacobson, co-founder, says the startup is “leveraging mobile technology” in this regard and is on a hiring spree in Canada and the US to boost his team.\nHe added that internationalization and localization are “in our product pipeline. We currently have a lot of demand for Spanish, Arabic, and French languages. We also plan on making it easier for PumpUp members within a specific geography to connect with each other.”\nNiko Bonatsos of General Catalyst Partners believes “consumers today are looking for inspiration and guidance regarding their physical activity and eating habits without being overwhelmed by a plethora of applications. PumpUp is uniquely positioned as a horizontal platform that provides an open, safe and positive community to engage with compelling health and fitness related content.”\nIt’s worth noting that it’s among women that PumpUp has found most traction. According to the company, over 90% of its community is female. Why? It’s that old ‘not on Faceboook’ thing. They can comfortably share stuff they wouldn’t want out in the wilds of Facebook or other social networks, while still being connected into a supportive community who are all bent on getting healthier and fitter.\nBack in May, the startup exited beta and was billed more as a ‘virtual personal trainer in your pocket.’ However, it did focus on photos as its special sauce to boost users’ motivation via the medium of photos. It claims PumpUp members who share photos to the network are “more than five times more likely to stay on track with their goals”. This might be its leverage against apps like Gain Fitness, Cody and Fitstar to name a just few.\nThe startup was founded in May 2012 and went through Waterloo, Canada-based incubator, Communitech Hyperdrive, last year.", "date": "7/24/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/newsfeed.png?w=640", "section": "social/", "tags": "pumpup", "title": "Appealing To Women, Social Fitness App PumpUp Raises $2.4M Led by General Catalyst", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/24/appealing-to-women-social-fitness-app-pumpup-raises-2-4m-led-by-general-catalyst/" }, { "id": 222, "authors": "Alexia Tsotsis", "category": "Social", "content": "Founder and investor Joshua Schachter has spent a great deal of time trying to solve the problem of not being able to easily find relevant things and people; initially with his first startup Delicious — which he sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million — and now with his latest efforts at incubator Tasty Labs. Tasty Labs, which has $3 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, launched its first project (Jig) in August and has now come through with its second service, Skills.to.\n“There are huge unsatisfied needs,” says Schachter, who says he is operating with a compass but not a specific road map on how to more efficiently connect people. He eventually hopes that Skills.to turns into something of a portable reputation system, “If you can make it easier to find people who do stuff, then you can tap into the whole world of people out there who are good at what they do.”\nSkills.to is currently building up its dataset, so its core functionality consists of tagging people with skills categories like “angel investor” and “Xgoogler” or searching for skills like “iOS developer” which brings up lists of Twitter accounts tagged with that skill. Schachter isn’t quite sure what the end result of that process will be, but eventually wants to incorporate some sort of messaging system, either through Twitter DM or another solution.\n\nMissing a slick design and some obviously core functionalities, Skills.to is still in its beginning stages, and Schachter is using the iterations of this and Jig in order to learn in public about the “needs” market,”I’m a fan of development in public,” he tells me, “I don’t believe in doing eight months of development and then releasing a product.”\nIn the same space as companies like Vouch, the initial feel of Skills.to is reminiscent of Tagsona, an internal Yahoo tool used to find people working on similar projects. Schachter tells me that when user feedback is incorporated, the eventual scope will go beyond simple tagging. His eventual goal is not to build something like Klout, which is more about influence, but instead to turn Skills into a place where people can find who is “the best in the world” at a specific task.\nWhile it’s obvious that Skills and Jig are not completely formed initiatives, Schachter’s objective in iterating on these projects is to explore the future of social software, creating products that move beyond “sharing software and witty comments,” and push people towards connection with a purpose.\nWith Skills specifically Schachter is focusing on catering to the early adopter tech set, and trying out Twitter integration, as Jig was primarily Facebook focused. “I wish we were already on our 37th thing,” he says.", "date": "3/28/2012", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/screen-shot-2012-03-28-at-6-23-19-pm.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "skills-to,tasty-labs,joshua-schachter,delicious", "title": "Joshua Schachter Launches Newest Tasty Labs Project, Skills.to", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/28/joshua-schachter-launches-newest-tasty-labs-project-skills-to/" }, { "id": 223, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "FindIt, a new mobile application offering universal search across emails and files stored in the cloud, is today making its official debut. With the FindIt app for iOS, you can quickly connect your Gmail, Dropbox and Google Drive accounts, and then proceed to search by keyword, person, time or file type. But the ability to search for items is not what makes FindIt unique — it’s how you search.\nThe concept of aggregating a user’s email, local file systems, and various cloud services in order to offer a single mechanism to search across data sets is not a new one. FindIt currently competes with other file aggregators on web and mobile, including, for example, CloudMagic and Younity (which, coincidentally, TechCrunch just took a look at today). But more broadly, FindIt also competes with some of the moves Google has been making in recent months to personalize search. Its opt-in Google Search “Field Trial,” for instance, combines data stored in Google’s more personal services like Drive, Calendar and Gmail, which then becomes searchable through Google.com.\nHowever, explains FindIt co-founder and CEO Levi Belnap, the problem with search, and especially mobile search, is not in the capabilities of the back-end search technology involved. It’s the process of searching and the way that search results can be narrowed and filtered that needs a change.\n“Search technology, in and of itself, is actually pretty good these days,” he says, noting that many companies, his included, likely take advantage of the same open-source technologies to power their backends. “But the process of searching on a phone is broken. There’s not enough space to open up advanced search and type in all these different variables. Plus, nobody wants to type anything on a phone,” he adds.\nWith FindIt, after you connect your accounts during setup, you can then search in a manner that more closely resembles how humans think about the things they’re trying to remember. For instance, if you’re trying to remember a restaurant you visited, you wouldn’t just type in “Italian,” but you may remember that you ate there a month ago, or that you went there with certain friends.\nThat same concept of drilling down in a more natural way is applied to FindIt’s own search interface, and to get there, you just tap. You can either kick off a search with a keyword then apply filters, or you can start off by tapping on “search by person,” “time” or “type” directly from the homescreen.\nAfter you type in your keyword(s), you then tap on filters to narrow your results, specifying you only want emails or images or presentations, perhaps, or only want to see files from last week or 30 days ago.\nThis is easier than swiping through a long list of results on your phone, which is what you have to do today when using some competing apps, or even your native mail client, or the Gmail, Dropbox or Drive apps themselves.\nIn the version of FindIt awaiting App Store approval now, the app will support multiple accounts and will introduce an even more visual way to search through time. (Pictured below.)\nBelnap says the idea came to him after having left his earlier work with a clean-tech nonprofit to attend Harvard Business School. He trained his replacement for half a year, but then found out that a month after he started school, the guy had quit. “I learned that he didn’t work with the right people and the right things,” says Belnap.”He just didn’t have the information he needed when he needed it.”\nBelnap had, of course, left a wealth of this info in files and folders, but for the new hire, it was a matter of not knowing where to look to find it. This, he says, inspired him to begin thinking about whether or not there could be a technical solution to that problem.\nInitially, FindIt was conceived as a web app, but user feedback soon pushed the team, which also includes co-founders Alex Pak and Ben Morrise, toward mobile.\nNow participating in TechStars Chicago, the company is planning on quickly adding several more cloud services to FindIt, beginning with ones professionals would need, such as Box or Microsoft Exchange, for example. Longer-term, the plan will be to go freemium, where paid users will be able to access data from more complex, business-focused platforms, like Salesforce.\nFindIt plans to move to the Bay Area following TechStars (likely Mountain View/Sunnyvale), and has a small amount of seed funding from the incubator, friends and family.\nThe app is a free download here in the iTunes App Store.", "date": "7/26/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/32.png?w=400", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "aggregator,mobile-app,search,findit", "title": "FindIt Launches A Universal Search App For iPhone With A Visual Twist", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/26/findit-launches-a-universal-search-app-for-iphone-with-a-visual-twist/" }, { "id": 224, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Enterprise", "content": "Amazon today announced that it’s making Zocalo, its secure document storage and sharing service designed for enterprise use, generally available. The news comes, not coincidentally, on a day when cloud storage competitor Dropbox announced lowered pricing and storage increases for its Pro customers.\nZocalo, which is Spanish for town square, launched into a limited preview just last month, along with very aggressive price points. For $5 per user per month, end users would receive 200 GB of storage. They can then use that service to store all manner of files, comment on and within files, share them with others, upload new versions and more, all from any device, including PCs and Macs, as well as Android and iOS devices.\nMeanwhile, IT admins are able to manage Zocalo, integrating it with existing corporate directories, including Active Directory, which allows users to sign in with their existing Active Directory credentials. IT can also apply the appropriate permissions for users, making sure they only have access to the documents they’re meant to see.\nThe Zocalo service is now open to all AWS customers, says Amazon this morning in a blog post, and includes a 30-day free trial, as previously announced.\nWhile Zocalo is aimed at the enterprise crowd, many of whom are still paying for legacy, on-premise solutions, it is to some extent a competitor with consumer-first services like Dropbox, which is now trying to stretch itself further into the “Pro” and business markets where it’s up against other cloud storage rivals like Box and Google Drive.\nIt’s also not the first cloud storage service from Amazon – the company offers a consumer-grade service called Amazon Cloud Drive, a Google Drive competitor whose biggest advantage may be its integration with the company’s own Fire phone. (Fire phone users have unlimited photo storage for their smartphone photos in Cloud Drive.)\nAlong with today’s public launch, Amazon notes that AWS CloudTrail, a web service that records AWS API calls and delivers log files to you, is also now integrated with Zocalo. CloudTrail will now record calls made with the Zocalo API, which is currently internal, but is planned to be made public in the future, says Amazon.", "date": "8/27/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/zocalo1.png?w=738", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "amazon-web-services,aws", "title": "Amazon Opens Up Its Enterprise Cloud Storage Service Zocalo To All", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/27/amazon-opens-up-its-enterprise-cloud-storage-service-zocalo-to-all/" }, { "id": 225, "authors": "Sarah Perez", "category": "Apps", "content": "Can a mobile classified app topple the behemoth that is Craigslist? A company called letgo aims to find out. Its app, which lets users buy and sell items locally, has quietly grown to over 2 million downloads since its launch earlier this year. And today, the company is announcing having raised $100 million in Series A funding from South African media company and tech investor Naspers Limited, which also has stakes in a number of sizable tech companies, including China’s Tencent, India’s Flipkart, Russia’s Mail.ru, and classifieds platform OLX.\nIn fact, the OLX connection comes into play here, as letgo founder Alec Oxenford previously co-founded OLX. Oxenford still serves as Chairman to OLX, which serves over 240 million users in emerging markets like India, Brazil and Poland. That experience gives him a solid background in the online classifieds space.\nBut with letgo, both Oxenford and Naspers are looking for entry into the U.S. market.\n“Letgo is perfectly tailored for the typical American consumer,” Oxenford explains. “It’s a fun, easy to use, and highly visual mobile marketplace that allows users to post, buy, sell and communicate with each other instantly and for free.”\nStill, the app is not without significant competition stateside, where sites like Craigslist and online marketplaces like eBay still dominate. But Oxenford thinks he can do better, thanks to letgo’s focus on mobile.\n“There has been a lack of innovation in the U.S. classifieds space, particularly when it comes to mobile,” he says. “We think letgo’s mobile first design, which is streamlined to make buying and selling locally easier and faster than ever, is a key advantage for our platform.”\nFrom the consumer’s perspective, letgo is very simple to use with its clean and modern design, use of clear imagery, and integrated chat. After downloading and installing the app, it only takes a few taps to list items for sale or to communicate with a seller if you’re interested in buying.\nIf anything, the app reminds me of Facebook’s Groups which, though a broader platform for creating online communities, today has a significant number of groups dedicated to local selling. Much like letgo, Facebook Group members can quickly post items, view each other’s profiles, and kick off private chat sessions by way of Facebook Messenger.\nLetgo is basically the non-Facebook version of what otherwise seems to be a similar shopping environment. But one advantage letgo has over Facebook is that Facebook only lets you search for items across a single group, when you may belong to several local selling groups. (I belong to at least a dozen, for example.) That can make hunting down a specific item challenging.\nPlus, Facebook chats between buyers are sellers are often missed because Facebook pushes all these messages to users’ “Other” inbox, which is where messages from non-friends reside (at least until you reply). And because you can’t get to your “Other” inbox from the Facebook Messenger app, Facebook loses its mobile advantage.\nPerhaps that explains letgo’s traction. Since its launch in February 2015, letgo users have posted more than 500,000 listings and exchanged nearly 3 million messages. And while the actual transactions take place offline, Oxenford says that the total gross merchandise value of those deals is over $25 million. Consumers are using the app to buy and sell a wide range of items, including things like bicycles, furniture, apparel, and cars, for example.\nGiven that letgo isn’t taking a percentage of the sales as in other online mobile marketplaces, it’s unclear at this point how the company plans to generate revenue. For now, the app itself is a free download and free to use. The founder declined to detail letgo’s business model or offer info related to revenue generation.\nFor now, that’s because letgo is more heavily focused on gaining traction in the U.S. market. Already, the majority of its users hail from the U.S. or Europe, but letgo plans to launch an aggressive marketing campaign targeting U.S. consumers in the months ahead.\nEven without the marketing dollars, letgo has grown a decent-sized audience, and it has become a top 10 ranked free shopping app in Google Play in the U.S., Sweden, Turkey, New Zealand, Norway, Italy and Spain.\nIn addition to expanding its U.S. footprint, New York and Barcelona-based letgo also plans to use the new capital to grow its team, which today numbers 39.\n“Alec has distinguished himself as an expert with an extraordinary track record in mobile e-commerce,” said Martin Scheepbouwer, CEO of Naspers Classifieds, in a statement about the investment in letgo. “We have seen firsthand Alec’s ability to execute on his vision as we worked together to build OLX into the global force it is today. In letgo, Alec has built a platform that is perfectly tailored to the American consumer, and we’re excited to help his team take it to the next level.”\nLetgo is available on both Android and iOS devices.", "date": "9/3/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/letgo-app.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "mobile,classifieds,e-commerce,letgo", "title": "Mobile App Letgo Raises $100 Million From Naspers To Take Over Classifieds In The U.S.", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/03/mobile-app-letgo-raises-100-million-from-naspers-to-take-over-classifieds-in-the-u-s/" }, { "id": 226, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "A/B testing of sites and apps is usually the domain of developers and IT teams. With the relaunch of its Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), however, Wingify hopes to make A/B testing accessible for more people, even if they don’t have HTML or coding experience. This means that companies can open up A/B testing of their products to marketing teams and product managers, letting them see immediately what works or doesn’t, and allowing them to implement changes to sites and native iOS apps immediately.\nBased in Delhi, Wingify’s products are currently used by 3,700 brands in 75 countries, including Microsoft, GE, and Rackspace.\nTo use VWO, marketers add a single snippet of code to their websites, as they would with Google Analytics. After that, they can use VWO’s platform to perform A/B and multivariate testing and make changes to their sites or apps.\n“A user can point and click to change a page’s headline, add or change buttons, drag and drop to change layouts and publish new versions of their web page to measure their effectiveness as compared to the default versions of the webpage,” explains founder and CEO Paras Chopra.\nThe platform also makes the A/B testing easier for marketing teams by offering a library of more than 300 testing suggestions called the “Idea Factory” and then generating real-time reports about what features are working on their sites or apps, which Chopra says can lead to increased sales and conversions.\n\n\nBy offering a A/B testing that does not need coding or HTML expertise, Wingify hopes to differentiate further from its main competitors, which include Optimizely and Adobe Target.\n“VWO’s big differentiator is its focus on providing a code and IT-free resource that any marketer can pick up and use immediately and access to a set of user research, heatmap and personalization tools that go beyond A/B testing. Plus, VWO is also the only solution that brings a visual and code-free web A/B testing technique to both web and native iOS apps,” says Chopra.\n“Finally, VWO is unique in the way it allows arbitrary segmentation of A/B tests and results to find interesting opportunities to run personalized campaigns. It’s the only solution that lets marketers to dive into data, focused on specific criteria in order to find out what’s working, without having to define those ‘buckets’ in advance.”", "date": "6/25/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ios_testing.png?w=738", "section": "startups/", "tags": "ab-testing,vwo,wingify", "title": "Wingify Launches A New A/B Testing Platform For People Without Coding Experience", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/25/wingify-launches-a-new-ab-testing-platform-for-people-without-coding-experience/" }, { "id": 227, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Apps", "content": "It’s not where your friends are, but how close they are that matters. After years of exact coordinate checkins, both Foursquare and Facebook are now focusing on ambient proximity — constantly and automatically sharing your approximate distance from close friends. Ambient proximity lets you know if a friend is near enough to meet up with, yet without the creepiness of seeing their every move on a map. That balance could finally make location sharing appealing to the masses.\nFoursquare’s new ambient proximity app Swarm was announced today and will become available in the coming weeks. It creates a feed of your best friends lumped into groups based on how far away they are, like around 500 feet or about a mile. Facebook Nearby Friends launched earlier this month and is rolling out to iOS and Android users in the U.S. Inside Facebook’s main app, the Nearby Friends feed shows the vague distance of any friends who’ve opted in, such as 1/2 a mile or 1 mile. If you want, you can send them your ongoing, real-time, exact location for a few hours. Suddenly, after years of stagnation, there are new ways to get together offline.\nCheckins and exact ambient location sharing certainly never caught on with the general public. The space is a graveyard, with apps like Loopt and Glancee being acquired, while Sonar, Banjo, Highlight, and even Google’s Latitude have failed to gain major traction.\nFacebook launched Places for checkins, but location-tagged photos and status updates have proven more popular. And while Foursquare has been at the center of the location app sphere, it only had 45 million registered users as of December. Plus, many of those use Foursquare primarily for Yelp-style discovery of local places rather than sharing where they are.\nThe issue is that exact location is only really useful when you want to rendezvous with someone. Most of the time, either you or your friend is busy and you can’t have spontaneous meetup, Knowing precisly where they are feels a bit like spying.\nIf you are available, it’s hard to tell whether your friend actually wants you come join them just from their checkin or moving map beacon. See they’re down the street or checked in at the local coffee house? They could be on a date, in a meeting, hard at work, or just trying to get some alone time. Dropping in can lead to awkward situations. You’re best off contacting them first to make sure. And by then, knowing their exact location ahead of time isn’t helpful because you could have just asked them.\nAmbient proximity solves many of these problems. Knowing someone’s current neighborhood or approximate distance from you indicates if they’re close enough to make joining forces convenient. Then you can just ping them with SMS, a messenger app, or directly through the app (in the case of Facebook Nearby Friends) to ask specifically where they are and if they’d like to get together. You can’t surprise them by showing up unannounced.\nMost imporantly, since ambient proximity feels less creepy, more people are likely to opt in to sharing it. These apps thrive on network effects. They get much better when a critical mass of your friends use them instead of just your most privacy-progressive, early-adopter buddies. Swarm and Nearby Friends could make it simple to join friends in the park, see who else is at a concert, find people to grab dinner with, or gather after the bars close.\nThere will still be two major hurdles to adoption. Most quantitatively, Swarm is a standalone app that will start with zero users, and Nearby Friends is buried deeply in Facebook’s main apps. Foursquare and Facebook will have to find ways to promote them without seeming pushy. On the more fuzzy side, these companies will have to convince users this isn’t the Big Brother-esque, invasive, always-on exact location sharing of yore. And it isn’t the cumbersome checkin process either.\nPerhaps one day our perception of privacy will evolve to make Latitude-style, non-stop broadcasting of our exact locations feel natural. That could take a while if it ever happens, though. Ambient proximity gets the job done in a way that feels safe. After a decade of social apps suckering us into staring at screens all day, getting out on the town thanks to ambient proximity could be a literal breath of fresh air.\nDisclosure: I advise a college friend’s stealth social location-sharing startup codenamed ‘Signal’ that is based in San Francisco. This advising role has been cleared with AOL and TechCrunch’s editors.", "date": "5/1/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/proximity3.png?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "facebook-nearby-friends,facebook,foursquare", "title": "Ambient Proximity Is The Next Phase Of Location Sharing", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/01/ambient-proximity/" }, { "id": 228, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Apple has secured a new patent (via AppleInsider) for a special three sensor camera designed for thin, wireless devices like the iPhone. The three sensors would each capture a separate color component, as divided by a special light-splitting cube that would divide up light entering the camera into red, green and blue (or other color set) wavelengths.\nWhy? Better resolution and lower noise since they don’t need special filters or algorithms to separate out the color information of a captured image on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Using this tech, Apple would potentially be able to boost the image quality of its mobile cameras, especially in video capture scenarios.\nThis would be a much more expensive technology to implement vs. current iPhone camera arrays, and its component parts would likely also take up more space inside the case, something Apple typically wants to avoid. But more accurate colors and better low-light performance might balance out those downsides, depending on how much Apple can minimize the parts required.\nApple has been pushing its camera tech further with each successive generation of the iPhone, making sure that it remains generally considered among the best smartphone cameras available. It’s the most-used camera on the planet, according to Flickr’s stats, and it’s not surprising to see them searching ways to continue to press their lead.", "date": "3/24/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iphone-6-plus-camera1.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "iphone", "title": "Apple Patents A Light-Splitting iPhone Camera Sensor System", "topics": "apple", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/apple-patents-a-light-splitting-iphone-camera-sensor-system/" }, { "id": 229, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Asia", "content": "Apple will extend several of its environmental projects in China, one of its fastest-growing markets.\nThese initiatives include a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to protect forests used in the production of paper packaging for Apple items, as well as an effort to increase the use of renewable energy in factories that supply Apple components.\nAccording to the WWF, China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper products. Its partnership with Apple is a five-year project meant to reduce the amount of water and pollution created during the paper production process by implementing new forestry techniques, growing tree plantations instead of harvesting wood pulp from natural forests, and increasing the use of recycled paper.\nApple’s announcement comes three weeks after it said that it will build solar power plants in Sichuan Province with several Chinese companies including SunPower. Apple has already worked with SunPower on projects in the U.S., including solar panel farms for data centers in Reno and North Carolina.\nThe Cupertino-based company says that 87 percent of its global operations — including data centers, retail stores and offices — currently run on renewable energy and the Sichuan Province project “will bring Apple even closer to its commitment to reach 100 percent.”\nChina is not only one of Apple’s main sources for components, but also among its most important markets. Last quarter, revenue from iPhone sales there rose 71 percent to $16.8 billion. This means that the company’s environmental initiatives are more than just public relations boosters—if they succeed, they can make a sizable impact.", "date": "5/10/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/screen-shot-2013-11-25-at-8-37-50-pm.png?w=649", "section": "asia/", "tags": "renewable-energy", "title": "Apple Expands Its Renewable Paper And Energy Initiatives To China", "topics": "apple", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/10/apple-environment/" }, { "id": 231, "authors": "Matthew Panzarino", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "There have been so many permutations of the standard backpack at this point that it’s hard for a bag maker to come up with an original spin that adds anything to the formula. WaterField, a San Francisco-based manufacturer with a reputation for quality, has done an admirable job with their new Staad bag.\nThe Staad is a handsome backpack with a waxed canvas or ballistic body, trademark orange WaterField lining and a large weathered leather flap in black, brown or tan. The company shipped me out both the ‘slim’ 15.5×12” and ‘stout’ 16×14.25” models to try out, but most of my impressions will be of the stout version, as that’s the one I wore out and about for a few weeks.\nThe stout model is set up for a 15” laptop but I used it with a 13” MacBook Air. The laptop pouch features a single side that’s softly lined, but provides a nice centrally aligned placement for good weight distribution. There’s another pouch stacked right on top of that one that fits a full-size iPad or Air quite nicely. Along with the laptop and its power adapter, it comfortable fit my Nintendo DS, a compact 4/3 Olympus camera and lens an iPad charger and other miscellaneous batteries and cords in the large main compartment.\n\nThere are only two other pockets in the interior, left and right of a unique central zipper. I used the two pockets to fit a smartphone and cable each, or a phone in one and my iPhone backup battery pack in the other. They could also be good cord keepers. I found myself wishing the back had additional interior storage, but as I’m trying to travel lighter and lighter, it wasn’t a major deal. Something to consider if you like to keep your stuff all compartmentalized though. WaterField offers a bunch of different kinds of gear and cable pouches, so one or two of those might be in order.\nThe pouches span the width between the zipper and the edge of the bag, and are about a hand deep. Nicely wide and not deep enough to make it hard to fish stuff out of the bottom of.\n\nThe central zipper splits the bag open like a fruit peel about half-way down the front, where it stops just above the flap clasp. I’ve never seen a backpack open quite like this. It’s interesting to get used to at first but actually makes it easier to get down into the depths of the bag without having to unpack everything from the top down. It’s also likely that this was done because the bag is narrower at the top with a wider ‘butt’ down at the bottom. There are a few interesting byproducts of this design, some more beneficial than others.\n\nBecause the bag is thin at the top and fat at the bottom, it lays very close the natural curve of your back, with the straps sewn to the top edge just behind the front flap. This makes it extremely low profile which, I’d guess, was the whole point. This is awesome when you’re ducking through crowds or trying to navigate gaps in public transportation. I found it almost never hit or got caught on stuff when I was traveling with it on my back, something I’ve always had issues with while using other backpacks, even though I didn’t carry much more with me.\nHowever, the unique design of the bag makes it less than suited to air travel. The interior storage is distributed across the back, rather than out. This is fine when it’s on, but if you’re on a flight trying to find a place to put it, the Staad can be a bit too wide. The width is especially evident when you’re trying to find space under an obstructed seat. Most seats had enough left-to-right room, but I encountered some where either the seat supports or the configuration of the floor panels made it almost impossible to wedge the bag under there. And, on some smaller planes it was simply too wide for the overheads (though that’s a lot of bags these days).\n\nWhich brings us to the external pockets. They’re fine, on the whole. Small beaded zipper pouches that should be weather resistant, but are very easily accessible to those looking to get into them when you’re not looking. Conversely, I found it very hard to open them myself without removing the back from my back. That’s kind of a bummer when it comes to things like storing your boarding passes or Passport when traveling through airport security. I typically keep my Passport in an interior coat pocket or front pant pocket while out and about, but I like to have it in my bag for easy in-and-out along with tickets and boarding documents while I navigate security. And because the flap covers all but the front pockets, your choices are limited.\nThe pouches on the back of the bag do not fit a Passport at all, and if you have paper tickets, you’ll have to fold them to get them in there. so I’d love it if they were a bit longer. Not a huge deal, but something to consider if you’re a frequent air traveler. Also, it’s not TSA compliant, so you’ll have to pull your laptop out of the bag at security.\nThe entire bag exudes quality of craftsmanship from top to bottom, and was extremely comfortable, no matter what I had in it. The straps were wide enough and well configured for the size of the bag and the potential weight. The one construction quibble I had was that the main clasp on the front of the bag is a ‘vintage’ arrangement that feels a bit like some WWII-era bag latches, but with a plastic retaining pin. I got used to it after a while, but it’s not a standard configuration, and the plastic assembly feels a bit out of the place amongst the handsome scuffed leather and waxed canvas on the front of the bag.\nThe Staad is a fantastic option for a light duty backpack that should last you many years. As with most of WaterField’s stuff, it’s an investment that should pay off with a lot of years of service. The stout runs around $329, which is a bit above average but not crazy for a high quality bag that should only look better with age.", "date": "12/1/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/screen-shot-2013-12-01-at-4-01-15-pm.jpg?w=400", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "bags,waterfield,staad", "title": "WaterField’s Staad Is A Durable And Gorgeous Low-Profile Backpack In Leather And Canvas", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/01/waterfields-staad-is-a-durable-and-gorgeous-low-profile-backpack-in-leather-and-canvas/" }, { "id": 232, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Education", "content": "Back in February of this year, PayDivvy, a social payment platform that lets people split bills for utilities and other services and each pay their share, announced that it had been acquired and that it was no longer accepting payments on its platform. We reached out at the time and Mike Melby, the co-founder and CEO, said that he would be able to tell us more when the time was right. Today, nearly six months later and now that the deal has finally closed, the company has finally come out with buyer’s name: it’s Higher One, the publicly-traded universities and students payments and financial services company.\nHigher One is not planning to reopen PayDivvy’s service as such, but it will be integrating PayDivvy’s technology into its platform and offering it to its target student customers.\n“We’re excited about the foundation that PayDivvy has created to allow consumers to easily split and track their bills and share expenses,” said Whitney Stewart, the VP of product for Higher One. “We plan to incorporate these new features into our student account offering so that students can focus on the important stuff, like study and graduating while we help them get their shared expenses paid more easily.”\nThere is also a possibility that Higher One may eventually extend its services for users beyond those at university. “They are focused on universities but when people graduate they don’t have lose them as customers,” Melby noted today.\nTerms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but what Melby has done is give us some insight into how this deal came about. He says that in fact PayDivvy had been involved in a year-long sale process, with more than one offer falling through before finally connecting with Higher One. The reason for a sale was simple: after first launching in 2011 at Finovate, PayDivvy raised around $2m of angel funding but started to get offers for a sale at the same time that it was starting to explore raising a Series A.\nThat would have been a route to pursue, but as Melby told me, “payments are really hard.” Not only were there already other players out there trying to do something similar — specifically WePay and Venmo — but then Venmo was sold to Braintree for $26.2 million, and WePay has raised significantly more ($19.2 million) than PayDivvy had.\n“Location was a disadvantage, too,” Melby says. “I was told by investors if we were had moved from Newport Beach to Silicon Valley, we would have raised twice as much and sold for lots more.”\nMore importantly, there were yet more companies jumping into the social payments space. And yet “no one has done anything extraordinary,” he says. “No one has the magic to overhaul the existing payment system,” which is still reliant on Visa and MasterCard networks. Dwolla is one that Melby thinks could possibly have a shot.\nSo because of all of that, PayDivvy pressed on with a sale, finally getting success on that front. “Higher One has proven to be a great partner,” Melby notes. “Aside from the fact that their strategy and customer base is a perfect fit for our technology, the team is super intelligent and picky about the assets they look to acquire.” Higher One is still run by its original founders.\nWhile Melby and his co-founder Ray Tamblyn have both moved on to other places — Melby is back in private equity, as VP for New Evolution Ventures; Tamblyn working on something new — PayDivvy’s engineering team will continue to work with Higher One.\nBut the experience of starting a company, raising money, then deciding to exit the venture through a sale, and then having a sale fall through more than once, and then eventually, after months, get completed, is one that Melby will not forget soon. It’s the other side of the exit myth, in which a company like Yahoo quickly swoops down and scoops up small startups to beef up its talent and IP. For any startups out there who may be thinking of a similar route and wants to talk to someone who has been there, Melby says to hit him up.", "date": "8/1/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/paydivvy-logo.png?w=140", "section": "enterprise/", "tags": "payments,higher-one,paydivvy", "title": "Social Bill Payments Service PayDivvy Sold To Higher One To Expand Its Education Payments Platform", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/social-bill-payments-service-paydivvy-sold-to-higher-one-to-expand-its-education-payments-platform/" }, { "id": 233, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Samsung is doing a series of teasers this year to hype up the launch of the next Galaxy S6 (or whatever it’s calling its 2016 flagship Android smartphone), and the latest details the tech and progress of wireless charging. In a post on Samsung’s official blog, the company’s lead engineer for IT and Mobile Seho Park described how advances in wireless charging over the past few years have made the tech much faster, more efficient and easier to integrate into devices from a components perspective. He closes with a suggestion that 2015 will be a watershed moment for wireless power, and a hint that “upcoming Galaxy smartphones” will fully partake in said moment.\nThe Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy S5 support wireless charging, but only with the help of optional accessory backs designed for the purpose. This year, Samsung’s newest flagship could support wireless charging out of the box, complete with support for a range of standards, including things like Qi, PMA and WPC. The blog post by Park includes a section in which he describes advances in tech made last year that brought together support for multiple standards on a single chip, which he goes on to explain would make it to market around six months to a year after their introduction, i.e., around now or in the near future.\nSamsung taking wireless charging and making it not only a default part of the Galaxy smartphone experience, but also a simple-to-use version of the tech that works with every charging tech available on the market, would be a huge boon for owners of its devices. I’d argue that wireless charging tech is still one of those things that never made it past the stage of offering a lot of promise, but little real-world benefit to consumers. Charging plates are generally either large and awkward, or finicky in terms of who they require the charging devices to be placed, or both. Standard battles mean that the built-in chargers Starbucks is installing in stores aren’t compatible with most shipping devices, and even when things have been compatible, they often feature physical designs that make a charging pad aimed at one device impractical for use with a smartphone made by another OEM.\nWhat Samsung needs to do with the next iteration of its Galaxy line is refine: That means taking a new approach to design, which it appears to be doing with all-metal enclosures, but also bringing technologies that have long been available to Android OEMs to the next level in terms of practical benefits for everyday users.", "date": "2/17/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/galaxy-teaser.jpg?w=720", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "smartphones,wireless-charging,wireless-power", "title": "Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Lineup Should Boast Next-Gen Wireless Charging", "topics": "samsung", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/17/samsungs-galaxy-s6-lineup-should-boast-next-gen-wireless-charging/" }, { "id": 234, "authors": "Josh Constine", "category": "Social", "content": "When Facebook hit a limitation in Android’s virtual machine, Dalvik, that would halt its app development, Google and Facebook worked together to create a patch for Gingerbread. “We’re a significant app to them, and they’re a significant platform for us,” Facebook’s Director of Mobile Engineer Mike Shaver explains. It’s another example of Facebook’s hardcore mobile engineering training coming to fruition.\nToday at a “whiteboard session” on Android at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Shaver talked to a group of reporters about the Dalvik fix, Facebook’s relationship with Google, and how it’s turning not just software engineers but project managers, designers, and even customer support staffers into mobile developers.\nThe turning point was when Facebook hired mobile training house Big Nerd Ranch to put employees through an intensive, 40-hour iOS and Android development crash course. Shaver said “it’s eight hours a day, five days a week. If you have a guest come, they’re sent away. Zuck can leave a message. This is what you do. People come out with their heads a little melty but they can write production code that Monday.” Big Nerd Ranch is the same squad that’s taught iOS development at Apple and Android development at Google. Facebook has trained 450 mobile engineers with the program since July.\nStaffers turned mobile marines recently uncovered a huge stumbling block in Android Gingerbread, which runs on about half of all phones running Android, which on about half the phones in the world. Android’s virtual machine Dalvik, which actually runs the apps you install, had a 3 million method limit. Facebook had already hit that limit, meaning it couldn’t build any more features into its native Android app.\nShaver laid out Facebook’s three options: Stop developing its Android app, stop offering its Android app for Gingerbread users, or fix Dalvik. Luckily, “we could look under the hood and see why we were hitting this limit. Not common to be able to do this in the mobile operating system,” Shaver says, complementing Android’s openness.\nSo a bunch of Facebook mobile engineers spent a few weeks analyzing the problem and came up with a patch that was only about six lines of code. Shaver happily admits, “We were able to send the patch over to Google to get their opinion. They were very helpful.” Google looked at the patch for a day and gave Facebook the go-ahead. Then Facebook began testing. Shaver says the social network was able to collaborate with Google to use their test labs.\n\n“We went from Defcon 1 and sirens, where we could no longer develop Facebook for half the Android world, to people staying up to fix it, to being able to extend the platform a bit and work with Google on it.” Without the patch, Facebook says it would have had to consider stripping out features, such as the ability to send SMS messages from Facebook For Android. Later today, Facebook will publish an engineering blog post that details the patch so other developers can use it and avoid wasting weeks butting their heads up against Gingerbread Dalvik limits.\nThe whiteboard session overall conveyed the idea that after being an iOS-first company for so long, Facebook is getting serious about utilizing Android’s reach to push its mission of connecting the world. While many of its employees might still prefer iPhones, Android’s low-cost and availability is making it the favorite in the nascent international markets Facebook is relying on for growth. Having devs ready to build Android, as well as having Google’s support, means it can lace social into the DNA of the open operating system.", "date": "3/4/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/facebook_android.jpeg?w=150", "section": "social/", "tags": "", "title": "Facebook And Google Bury The Hatchet (Temporarily) To Kill A Core Problem In Gingerbread Dalvik", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/04/facebook-google-dalvik/" }, { "id": 235, "authors": "Darrell Etherington", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Apple is preparing an 8GB version of the iPhone 5c for launch, according to a series of new rumors today. There’s a reported leak of a document from German carrier O2 alerting its staff to the new phone (received via our Tips line from Caschys Blog), and an apparent image of a barcode identifying an 8GB blue model of the new phone, too.\n\nThe combined reports provide pretty strong evidence that Apple is working on a smaller capacity iPhone 5c, which makes sense as a way to help it continue to apply price pressure to its line of smartphone devices. The new SKU would retail for 60 euros less than the current 16GB version, which translates to around US$85 less. Building a new model with 8GB of flash instead of 16 or 32GB would cost virtually nothing in terms of altering production lines and would save lots in supply costs allowing Apple to reap greater margins on lower-cost hardware.\nThere’s reason to believe that Apple offering an iPhone at that size spec would make it difficult for users to have enough space on their device for all their desired apps and media, but the company does sell an 8GB iPhone 4S alongside the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s. Apple does offer an increasing number of first-party apps either pre-installed or for download, some of which have considerable space demands.\nBut it also offers a wide range of cloud and streaming services, making on-device storage less of an issue. And the 8GB version would live alongside higher spec devices, which is sometimes a strategy used by gagdet-makers to get consumers to look at a mid-range option that they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily have considered.\nThere’s still no guarantee we’ll see Apple introduce this version of the iPhone 5c tomorrow, or that it will make its way to all markets, but it’s a step that would fit with possible goals of moving more 5c hardware and applying price pressure. We’ve reached out to Apple for more info and will provide more details if we receive any.", "date": "3/17/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/iphone5c-back-high-angle.png?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "iphone,apple,iphone-5c", "title": "Apple Said To Be Launching An 8GB iPhone 5c Tomorrow", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/apple-said-to-be-launching-an-8gb-iphone-5c-tomorrow/" }, { "id": 236, "authors": "Catherine Shu", "category": "Startups", "content": "TradeGecko, the cloud-based sales management platform that we profiled in December, is busy building its product portfolio. The startup, which offers small businesses streamlined alternatives to traditional sales and inventory management tools, just launched its Online Ordering tool. TradeGecko’s first mobile app is set for a September debut and WooCommerce integration is also coming soon.\nFounder and CMO Carl Thompson started TradeGecko with the idea of saving merchants from the spreadsheet hell he encountered while running his own streetwear clothing label. TradeGecko’s new Online Ordering tool continues that ethos by giving wholesale businesses a more efficient ordering process.\n“Traditionally, the wholesale business would supply their retail customers with a physical order sheet via fax, or an electronic version via email. Creating these order sheets and managing data from completed orders is a time consuming nightmare vulnerable to errors,” Thompson explained to me in an email.\n\nThe clean and simple interface of TradeGecko Online Ordering is designed to replicate the standard order sheet used by retailers.\n“Being able to see account details, order history and available stock creates transparency between you and your customers,” says Thompson. “This boosts customer confidence, trust and results in increased sales.”\nOnce buyers enter an order, it is pushed into TradeGecko as pending orders for users to accept and fulfill. Thompson says that the simplified process helps eliminate double handling errors. The company hopes to add an online payment feature to TradeGecko Online Ordering soon.\nThe startup’s first mobile app, which is currently taking on beta customers and scheduled for an early September launch, will allow traveling sales representatives to create orders and view up-to-date customer and product data.\n“We take a holistic approach to business software and see TradeGecko at the center of a much bigger business ecosystem,” says Thompson.\nBefore founding TradeGecko, the startup’s team began developing a mobile sales app that worked on top of Netsuite and Salesforce. After joining Singapore-based incubator program JFDI and working with mentors like Lumatic CEO Scott Rafer and Scrive board member Boris Nordenstrom, they realized that business model was unrealistic. TradeGecko’s upcoming app lets the team come full circle by launching a mobile sales solution on top of their own platform, says Thompson.\nAlong with its mobile app, TradeGecko is also taking beta customers for its upcoming integration with WooCommerce, the fast-growing e-commerce platform for WordPress that has scored over 1.2 million downloads. Integrating WooCommerce-powered stores with TradeGecko will enable vendors to use a single platform to manage multiple sales channels (such as e-commerce, retail and wholesale), saving them from having to manually update inventory across multiple systems.\nLearn more about TradeGecko’s upcoming integrations and app here.", "date": "8/13/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/tradegecko-logo-green.png?w=290", "section": "startups/", "tags": "smbs,singapore,tradegecko", "title": "Inventory Management Platform TradeGecko Launches Online Ordering, Starts Taking Beta Users For Its Mobile App And WooCommerce Integration", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/13/tradegecko-new-launches/" }, { "id": 237, "authors": "John Biggs", "category": "Gadgets", "content": "Before the robots replace us we will make love to them. This point is becoming increasingly clear as I wander through the odd world of teledildonics and marvel at the leaps and bounds by which the technology – once in the realm of fantasy – has become a mundane reality.\nIf you are skittish or squeamish about human sexuality I beseech you to click out right now or visit another, more palatable site. As it stands, I believe, this topic is part of technological advancement, no matter how squishy it seems.\nBecause I write about teledildonics I was invited to visit a site called Flirt4Free [NSFW] where, women, dressed or undressed, live stream themselves in their little jewelbox rooms. It’s some sort of proto-Gibsonian sex club where everyone is smiling and you, the user, can peek in briefly before deciding and requesting a paid show which usually consists of a slow striptease. The ladies, who ranged in style and fetish served, were all charming and beautiful and it’s abundantly clear why a lonely man or women would frequent their haunts. The human gaze, even over the Internet, is an important thing.\nThe site recently enabled something called the Kiiroo and outfitted some of the women with white dildos, called Pearls, that respond to touch along the tip and sides. On the other end a user docks with something called the Onyx. This is a wireless Onahole (a sex jar) and has a motorized arm that slides up and down. Originally aimed at those in long distance relationships, this system now allows strangers to safely “integrate” with each other over vast distances.\nThe site features a few Kiiroo-equipped women under the “Interactive” heading. You choose one. When you initiate a session the women languorously enable their Pearls while the user on the other end turns on his Onyx. The Onyx takes a while to connect on OS X but when it is ready to go it begins to buzz rhythmically like a drone ready for take-off. The user should lubricate the device before entering. The women then use the Pearl and the sensations are transferred to the Onyx.\nThen begins the true test of your sexual mettle. Having sex with the Onyx is like mating with a 3D printer. The motors buzz, the machine wiggles, and the system tries to mimic the onscreen action with about a second’s delay. As you can imagine it’s a mish-mash of sensation that is at once pleasurable and slightly disturbing. But this is not a quiet pastime by any stretch as the motor is as loud as a broken Furby.\nWas it pleasurable? Yes and no. The titillation of the live person at the other end was certainly fun but the device itself was, for lack of a better word, imprecise. It’s an exciting prospect, to be sure, and well worth a look if you’re into this sort of thing.\nBut the price – about six dollars a minute for the visit and $369 for the Kiiroo – is quite steep. The Kiiroo was originally aimed at couples but this solution, ostensibly one of the first of its kind, is aimed at those who would be willing to spend cash for release.\nAs an old hand at testing sex jars, the Kiiroo coupled with the site was definitely something different. The Kiiroo can also be paired with specially coded videos that are far better synced. Whereas the Kiiroo and a computer is a masturbatory experience, a Kiiroo and a human on a screen is something a bit different. It is private, it makes you slightly vulnerable, and, thanks to the buzzing motors, feels a bit goofy. As the technology improves, however, I can see a real benefit to this system. It is human, it allows interaction not normally associated with act of self-pleasure, and with more immersive experiences I suspect it will be well worth the price of admission.\n\nIn the end does the Kiiroo replace companionship? Absolutely not. Can it help a long distance relationship? Potentially. Does it at a clever twist to the standard webcam model? Absolutely. The system, no matter how sterile or robotic, can mimic intimacy through a mediated platform and it’s pretty fun. While the costs could be potentially disastrous (I’m reminded of when I was a teen and my friend once rang up sex lines with reckless obsession from all of his friends’ houses during a six month period resulting in massive phone bills) the prudent user will hopefully know when to fold.\nAm I worried about Kiiroo? No. When we give robots power over the last thing that makes us human we risk losing everything to them. I have no fear that we’ll be lost to Kiiroo any time soon but its forthcoming offspring, coupled with VR and whatever else we invent, will lull us into strange worlds that will be increasingly difficult to escape. Perhaps, dangerously, many of us will want to make the trip and some of us will want to stay longer than we should. To paraphrase the bard: “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such robots in’t.”\n", "date": "11/15/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/robotdap-e1433960740130.jpg?w=738", "section": "gadgets/", "tags": "pearl,robot,9,sex-toys", "title": "Inside, Robot", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/inside-robot/" }, { "id": 238, "authors": "Jordan Crook", "category": "Apps", "content": "\nInstagram has just launched a brand new standalone app called Hyperlapse, which focuses entirely on mobile video creation.\nThe app looks dead simple, but is actually doing a lot in the background. When you first open Hyperlapse, you’ll go through a very quick tutorial and are then sent straight into a full-screen camera. The button on the bottom starts and stops recording. Once you have recorded a video, the app gives you a single control over the content: speed.\nUsers can switch from 1x speed (a slower version) all the way up to 12x speed (super fast).\nBut beyond speed, the real draw here is the ability to shoot a steady video on mobile that appears professionally shot.\nGenerally speaking, image stabilization tech is processing-intensive to the point where it really isn’t feasible on mobile. However, by using the gyroscopes in the phone itself, the Instagram team used algorithms to calculate the movements of the phone and correct it in the shot. They’re able to get away with this by using a cropped portion of the massive resolution available in your phone’s camera, leveraging the extra pixels of the sensor to stabilize the view.\nThe end result is an app that creates beautiful, souped-up videos that look and feel as though they were shot by professionals using expensive equipment.\nWithout a doubt, the technology itself is impressive. And the execution isn’t all that bad, either.\nInstagram chose to let Hyperlapse stand as its own app, rather than integrating it into the main Instagram app. This makes sense given the fact that such a great feature would be buried within Instagram proper, either upsetting the loyal users who don’t like it or hiding from users who might love it.\nThat said, Hyperlapse doesn’t have its own feed. When you complete a video, you can either send it directly to Instagram or Facebook through an automatic app switch on your phone. It’s also automatically saved on your phone’s camera roll. This means that there is no single place for a person to watch a feed of Hyperlapse videos, just like there’s no dedicated video-only or photo-only feed for Instagram.\nFrom a business perspective, it’s no surprise that Instagram and Facebook want to push all the content created with Hyperlapse onto their own massive networks, as opposed to opening up yet another place for content to live, away from their existing users. However, I’ve always felt that video never belonged on Instagram in the first place.\nFor a long time, the biggest hurdle to creating the “Instagram for Video” was the fact that it was so difficult to film a compelling, beautiful video on a smartphone. The entrance of HD video on mobile changed that, but then image stabilization got in the way. Now, Hyperlapse solves the problem of image stabilization (and bravo!), but it doesn’t change the issues around consuming mobile video.\nInstagram is all about simplicity. Pre-set filters take the place of a tedious editing process, and a few buttons take the place of actually going to a bunch of different apps and uploading the picture. You can comment if you wish, but a double-tap to like will do the trick, too. From start to finish, the process is centered around simplicity.\nThe same was true for Instagram’s consumption experience before video. It was the ultimate time sink. Users could open up the app during any lull, whether they were meant to be paying attention during a meeting or sitting on a bus or at a dinner with friends. Almost all the photos were pretty (because that’s the point) and if you didn’t like one, you merely had to flick your thumb to get to the next. The bits of content were bite-sized and silent.\nVideo changed all that. Not only was it harder to capture beauty for an extended period of time (15 seconds) as opposed to a single moment, but it was intrusive and sometimes startling to have a video pop up out of the blue. It took time to decide whether or not it was actually worth watching — up to 15 seconds, sometimes.\nWhile I still don’t care for Instagram video, Hyperlapse feels like something truly new in the mobile video landscape. Videos made on the new app and sent to Instagram will undoubtedly up the Instagram Video game on the whole, as Hyperlapse clips are silent by default and are steady and engaging even without filters.\nHowever, I do think the app is interesting enough that power users would enjoy a feed where they can take inspiration from other Hyperlapsers.\nAll that said, Hyperlapse is potentially the coolest thing Instagram has done since building Instagram.", "date": "8/26/2014", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/img_0023.jpg?w=738", "section": "social/", "tags": "hyperlapse", "title": "Hands-On With Hyperlapse, Instagram’s New Video Creation App ", "topics": "facebook,instagram", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/26/hands-on-with-hyperlapse-instagrams-new-video-creation-app/" }, { "id": 239, "authors": "Jon Russell", "category": "Asia", "content": "LG had a good 2014, posting record quarterly shipments and doubling its annual profits. The company released some eye-catching smartphones (and smartwatches), but much of its success came down to solid, affordable mid-range devices.\nWith Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s biggest event, taking place next week, LG has revealed four new mid-range products ahead of time that will be important for its continued success in 2015.\nThe devices range from four-inches (Joy), to 4.5-inches (Leon), 4.7-inches (Spirit), and five-inches (Magna). Each is available in 3G and LTE flavors.\nThe three larger phones are all powered by a 1.2GHz chip (3G models) or 1.3GHz quad-core chip (4G versions) with Android (5.0) Lollipop installed out of the box. The main difference is each one’s camera and battery capacity.\nThe LG Magna, Spirit and Leon each offers an eight-megapixel rear camera, which drops to five-megapixels on the 3G model. The Magna packs the highest quality front-facing camera (five-megapixels), followed by the Spirit (one-megapixel) and Leon (VGA camera).\nThe Joy is the entry-level model, with a choice of 1.2GHz quad-core or 1.2GHz dual-core processors, and a five-megapixel rear camera and front-facing VGA on both versions.\nLG often debuts new features and design ideas with its high-end devices first. True to form, a number of settings from its top phones made their way into this mid-range line-up, including the hand-triggered selfie timer ‘gesture shot’, and ‘glance view’ for pulling up important notifications.\nThere is no confirmed price for the phones at this point, but you can be sure they will be significantly cheaper than the likes of Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s soon-to-arrive Galaxy S6. The four new LG phones will begin hitting the retail market in “selected” countries from this week, the Korean company said.\n“For millions of consumers around the world, the deciding factor on which smartphone to buy isn’t how fast or how big it is but how balanced it is. With our new mid-range smartphones, more and more customers will be looking to LG for their next handsets,” commented Juno Cho, head of LG Mobile, in a statement.", "date": "2/22/2015", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/newrangeshot015b201502231049210485d.jpg?w=738", "section": "mobile/", "tags": "lg", "title": "LG Reveals Four Mid-Range Smartphones For Those On A Tight Budget", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/lg-midrange-2015/" }, { "id": 240, "authors": "Ingrid Lunden", "category": "Apps", "content": "Glympse — an app that lets users chart their location on a map and then their journeys from point A to B with others — is today announcing the latest phase in its expansion strategy: its first services in non-English languages. Chinese, German, Japanese and Spanish are getting turned on today, and French, Italian, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese will be added in the “near future.”\nThe company, which today is also announcing that it’s reached 10 million active users, has taken a strategy of growing by making itself as ubiquitous as possible. It has apps not just on iOS and Android but Windows Phone and BlackBerry; integrations with major car makers like Ford, Mercedes Benz and BMW/Mini; and a new API to bring in even more developers.\nBut for now, Glympse’s extra language support is coming only to iOS and Android, a spokesperson tells me.\nThe new support will mean that non-English speakers will now be able to share their locations and routes in supported languages. For an app that already counts some 40% of its users outside of the U.S., the step is a crucial one as it continues to gain critical mass and tap further into the rising tide for mobile mapping services. That’s a trend that has seen companies like Apple develop stronger mapping services of its own; Google make $1 billion+ acquisitions; and Nokia dig further into ways that it can differentiate itself as it continues to struggle in its handset business.\nGlympse’s move to add extra languages was a long time coming for the app. Bryan Trussel, the co-founder and CEO, told me months ago (when we met in Spain, no less) that this was on the cards due to user requests. “Localized versions of Glympse are one of the most requested features by our fans outside the US. We’ve been working hard to implement and support those languages to better serve these users. We’re now enabling millions of users to engage with Glympse in their native dialect,” Trussel, co-founder and CEO of Glympse, noted in a statement today.\nThe language selection will by default be based on what a user sets as the prefernce on the device itself, although it can also be set in the app. In fact, a spokesperson tells me that the French, Italian, Korean and Portuguese are actually already in the app, but only in preview-mode. “Users can go into settings and select those languages to test — they currently being verified by native speakers to make sure they are completely accurate before they go live,” she says.\nThere have been a number of different mapping services that have hit the market — including those that provide simple maps, to those that offer navigation services, and those that provide extra features such as social location or directory services for what is near to you. Glympse, in a way, is a complement to all of these: Glympsers can use the app to share where they are, and where they are going, with other people, by way of links that can be posted to social networks or sent via messages. The resulting link looks something like this:\nWhile the application of this technology has fun aspects, it can also have very practical purposes, such as in work environments when you are running late to an appointment, or for tracking how your young-adult children are getting home from school. Trussel noted to me that it’s even likely that we’ll see an integration soon where people can use it to help chart where a plane is flying so that you can get to the airport at the right time to meet it, if you’re collecting a passenger, or just interested in where they are.\nWhat’s also interesting is that while apps like Snapchat have popularized the idea of ephemeral messaging, with the piece of content having an expiration point, Glympse also provides a similar feature, with messages only remaining active for a set period of time. (In recent months, the company has started to create ways for users to archive Glympses indefinitely, through a recent Evernote integration.)\nGlympse is backed by $7.5 million from Menlo Ventures and Ignition Partners.", "date": "8/16/2013", "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/glympse-spanish-recent.png?w=400", "section": "social/", "tags": "location,maps,glympse", "title": "Location-Sharing App Glympse, Now With 10M Users, Adds Chinese, German, Japanese And Spanish To Its iOS, Android Apps", "topics": "", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/16/location-sharing-app-glympse-now-with-10m-users-adds-chinese-german-japanese-and-spanish-to-its-ios-android-apps/" } ]