Monday, June 3, 2013

tech now

tech now

Say Goodbye To Ugly Newsletters, Stamplia Launches Its Email Templates Marketplace

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT

logo-stamplia

Stamplia, launching today from French startup Kiwup, is an email templates marketplace where web designers can sell HTML templates for newsletters, transactional emails and signup forms, and in turn let companies focus on the messaging of their email campaigns rather than design.

“The current problem is that customers know what they want to tell in their message, but don’t know how to design it,” says Kiwup co-founder and CEO Vincent Martinet. “With Stamplia we can finally say goodbye to all those ugly designed newsletters which are available online or from an email provider and increase the profitability of email campaigns.”

It’s an idea that’s attracted investment too. Kiwup tells TechCrunch that’s it’s closed $130,000 in seed funding from Jeremie Berrebi and Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures — capital it’s using to publicly launch the service.

There’s no doubting that the bar for design has been raised in recent years — consumers expect a minimum quality of branding — so it follows that this should apply to email newsletters and other email-based campaigns. “Any company knows that having an email strategy is vital for business promotion, therefore a good newsletter strategy is mandatory,” says Martinet. “Readers are extremely sensible and they need just a few seconds to see and assess a commercial layout. If the design is ugly or not interesting, then all your work and emails will be useless, so it’s important to carefully create your newsletters before starting the campaign.”

Stamplia also ties into the trend of outsourcing as much of the non-core elements of running a business via the use of companies that focus on one specific problem or the increasing number of niche online marketplaces that operate a much more efficient means of matching service providers with clients.

Stamplia therefore aims to reduce the friction for web designers who spend too much time acquiring clients, producing estimates, invoicing and chasing payments. They simply upload their HTML/Photoshop designs, along with picking a category and including some metadata to help with search, and set a price between $4-15 depending on the type and flexibility of the template.

All templates are manually vetted by Stamplia and a preview is generated of what the email will look like on 25+ email clients/devices, using technology from Litmus, as well as conducting a spam test to ensure it will get through spam filters.

Designers earn a commission of between 50 percent and 70 percent dependent on volume of sales. In addition, Stamplia will offer an API so that email providers or any app developer can include an email template catalog in their wares, providing another revenue stream for the startup.

In terms of competition, there are a ton of sites that offer web design templates and themes for sale. However, Martinet says that Stamplia is the first to focus purely on the email template problem and to include transactional email templates (welcome messages, shipping instructions, service updates, invoices, receipts etc.) which, he notes, are the emails that companies send most.

LinkedIn Upgrades “Who's Viewed Your Profile” Section With New Look, Better Analytics

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 08:59 AM PDT

wvmp

LinkedIn has been busy upgrading pieces to its business social network in recent weeks, with updates to its contacts, the release of a new mobile contacts app for iPhone, revamped user profiles, the addition of channels to its news site LinkedIn Today, and most recently, added security via two-step authentication. And now, the company is rolling out improved analytics and a new look for its “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” feature, which tracks the number of times your name has appeared in LinkedIn Search, and how that has changed over time.

Now with some 225 million users, the company has been working to launch more features that keep people engaged with the site, returning to it more often, and staying with it longer. By appealing to human’s natural curiosity, the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” feature is a regular draw for those interested in their popularity or “findability” on the network, but it can also help you seek out new connections, discover mutual friends, or simply provide better insight into what people are searching for across LinkedIn.

For free users, the feature now showcases a recent list of those viewing your profile, with some basic analytics to the right. At the bottom, it also suggests users upgrade their free accounts for access to historical data.

Premium users, meanwhile, can see who’s been looking at their profile over the past 90 days, as well as which industries or geographies those searches coming from. Plus, in addition to the trend graphs and search result counts, it also shows you want keywords people are querying which then led them to find you. This feature is most helpful for those who are hoping to have their LinkedIn resume found by potential employers or those looking to heavily network on the site for other reasons  as the keyword tracking can help you understand what people are looking for when searching across LinkedIn.

Next to each member’s profile in the results list is a button lets you message or connect with the searcher, depending on whether or not you’re already connected.

This upgraded section will roll out beginning today to users worldwide.

Microsoft Details Its Plans For Making Windows 8.1 More Attractive To Businesses, Adds New BYOD Tools, Selective Remote Wipe & More

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 08:52 AM PDT

windows8.1

Windows 8.1, which will launch in preview on June 26th, isn’t just about bringing the Start button back. For Microsoft, it’s also an opportunity to get businesses of all sizes to take another look at an operating system they mostly ignored so far. Today, at its TechEd conference in New Orleans, the company provided new details about the features it is adding to Windows 8.1 to make it more attractive for businesses and enterprise IT departments.

Microsoft says it built Windows 8 “to bring the most powerful and modern computing experience to businesses and to help professionals stay connected to their colleagues and clients from anywhere, anytime.” The next version will build on this and add a number of new “manageability, mobility, security, user experience and networking capabilities.”

BYOD, NFC Tap-To-Pair Printing, Selective Remote Wipe And More

One area Microsoft is especially addressing with this update is the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement. Microsoft is making it easier for users to join their workplace domains with their own devices, for example. With this, IT administrators can grant registered users access to some resources while stuff enforcing their own rules, for example. Also new in Windows 8.1 will be easier ways to allow user to sync folders with their corporate data centers, which is made possible because syncing will be integrated natively into the file system. Windows 8.1 also adds a number of device management tools to the operating system that should help IT administrators to manage all of these devices.

One feature IT administrators will definitely appreciate in Windows 8.1 is the ability to selectively wipe corporate content from devices. Corporate data, Microsoft writes, ” can now be identified as corporate vs. user, encrypted, and wiped on command using EAS or EAS + OMA-DM protocol.”

For those who still need to print documents, Microsoft is adding NFC tap-to-pair printing, which should make setting up new printers and devices a bit easier (and companies can also just put an NFC sticker on a printer that isn’t already NFC enabled). Windows 8.1. will also allow users to print directly to WiFi Direct printers without the need to install drivers.

Windows 8.1 will also now support embedded wireless radios and mobile broadband-enabled PCs or tablets can now be turned into WiFi hotspots.

Other improvements include improved biometrics, pervasive device encryption and, of course, the return of the Start button and boot to desktop. You can read more about all of the details here and here.

Apple's WWDC App Subtly Flattens Visual Elements, Developers Should Take Note Of The New Normal

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 08:46 AM PDT

Screen Shot 2013-06-03 at 11.43.47 AM

Apple’s dedicated app for its Worldwide Developers Conference arrived today, and it brings a look at some of the sessions happening during the event next week, but it also shows off a dramatically different UI compared to past iterations of the app. The changes sound a lot like what’s said to be on tap for a visual refresh in iOS 7, and might be a good early indication of what Apple will be bringing not only to its own apps, but for what it will expect from those from the developer community as well.

9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman retweteeted the tweet below, which shows pretty clearly the evolution of the WWDC app over the past few years, spanning 2011 to 2013. As you can see, there’s a fairly different design language at play. What started out with textures meant to mimic 3D effects, more use of contrasting colors and shaded buttons has now become a much flatter design. The changes are mostly subtle, but from what we’ve heard recently, that’s what’s in store for iOS 7, too; sweeping, system-wide changes, but ones that tweak the interfaces rather than overhaul them completely.

Even the icon itself is much simpler and cleaner than most of the ones Apple puts out for its own mobile software. But both the icon and in-app elements still retain a slight gradient, which is not technically representative of perfectly “flat” design. Still, it’s a definite toning down of what we’ve seen before. Viewing the WWDC app itself as emblematic of the overall changes the company is planning for its mobile OS might be reaching, but at the very least it’s probably a cue of where Apple might be headed with changes to stock elements across the OS.

That means a new look for app developers trying to achieve a “native” look on the platform, which could actually result in a lot of work for some to bring their apps up to spec. Lately, it seems like a lot of app developers have deviated from strictly copying Apple’s iOS design principles, however, and offered their own take, which seems to involve more and more flattening of visual components, but even slight changes can result in big headaches for designers trying to achieve a certain effect. Still, the changes overall look like improvements to me, so hopefully more third-party apps follow suit with this subtle but refreshing new look.

Chrome Starts To Take Off In Mobile Browser Share, But Android Dips Among Mobile Operating Systems

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 08:13 AM PDT

App Store - Chrome for ios

Among mobile browsers, Safari continues to lead the pack by a wide margin, according to this month’s data from NetMarketShare. But the real movement is happening within the Android segment, with Chrome growing fast as the stock Android browser lags behind. Android overall dipped slightly in May in terms of mobile OS share, hitting an eight-month low, according to NetMarketShare’s tracking.

Android’s stock browser lost over 2 percentage points of share between April and May, and Chrome mobile gained just under a full percentage point. Google has been pushing the mobile version of Chrome, shipping it on devices with Android pre-installed since last fall. That has resulted in a steady upwards movement of share, growing from 0.34 percent last July to 3.22 percent this past May. Stock Android browser share is actually flat over that 11-month period, however, indicating that Chrome’s share is all coming in new device sales, and not as a result of people switching from one to the other on their own devices.

According to OS share, Android is down slightly from last month, and in fact hits a low point compared to many previous measuring periods. Apple’s iOS is up slightly from last month, but mostly flat, and Symbian, Java ME and BlackBerry actually all experienced small bumps, meaning Android’s nearly 2 percentage point fall didn’t result in a big win for pretty much any platform. Still, it’s interesting to see those numbers dip during a month when Android saw the launch of two big new flagship phones in the Galaxy S4 and HTC One.

Overall, though, the most interesting story here is Chrome’s mobile growth. Google is making a big push for cross-platform compatibility and portability, and a lot of what it’s showing off on the Chrome side of things is designed to bring mobile and desktop together. To achieve that goal, it becomes instrumental that mobile Chrome achieve greater uptake, which is an uphill battle considering that it only arrived last year. Still, it seems to be gaining momentum, which is good for Google’s long-term goals.

PlanGrid's Blueprint App Adds Automatic Hyperlinking And Web-Based Markup

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT

plangrid

PlanGrid, a startup that hopes to replace blueprint printouts on construction sites with those that can be viewed on an iPad, has just released its latest app update. PlanGrid version 3.0 is designed to make it easier to find connections between plans, with an automatic hyperlinking feature, as well as improved collaboration with web-based markup.

Since being launched early last year, the startup’s app has been quickly adopted by a number of big construction agencies and major brands. It’s now been used on more than 35,000 different construction projects, including some major retailers you may have heard of — like Starbucks and Nordstroms. Its system now stores more than 2 million pages with blueprints — with more than 10,000 new pages being added every day.

With that in mind, the company hopes to accelerate growth with a few new features. First, it’s added automated hyperlinking between blueprints stored on the app, basically using machine learning to figure out which plans refer to one another and then creating links between them.

PlanGrid CEO Ryan Sutton-Gee said linking between various PDF files is usually the first monkey-type job that new recruits get, since it’s something that no one really likes to do. Since there can be up to 10 links per page and thousands of pages per project, being able to scan through and add those hyperlinks automatically will save tons of man-hours for PlanGrid customers.

In addition, PlanGrid has added a new feature that will allow users not on the app to mark up blueprints. App users are able to make notes which can be seen by all other users referring to the same plans. Now that ability will be available to those who are accessing blueprints through PlanGrid’s web-based viewing tool as well. That will allow those who are back at their desks to send notes to iPad users in the field, improving communication between the two.

PlanGrid has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Box, 500 Startups, Y Combinator, and Navitas Capital, as well as angels such as Suleman Ali, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Matt Cutts, Ray Levitt. The company now has 11 employees and is based in San Francisco.

Grove Takes Skateboard Scraps And Turns Them Into The iPhone Skate Case

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 06:55 AM PDT

6ef945422346328e14880436c43954fb

If you have an iPhone, chances are you’re concerned with fine craftsmanship and design. But what about being green? A new phone case out of Portland could help you achieve both at once.

Meet the Skate Case.

Each Skate Case is made from recycled skateboard material and rubbed with citrus oil to bring out the unique coloring of the wood. This means that if you buy a Skate Case, no one in the world will ever have the same case as you. Pretty cool, right?

See, when skateboard manufacturers build skateboards, there are plenty of leftover materials and scraps that go to waste. According to Grove, the Portland-based Skate Case manufacturer, there is enough skateboard waste material from PS Stix each week in Portland to fill up an entire school bus.

Instead of letting that waste live in a landfill, Grove rescues it and works with MapleXO, a company that sells jewelry made of old skateboards, to create iPhone cases.

In essence, they take thin wood strips and laminate them into a single block. From there, the team mills the case from that single block, and then hand-files the fine details like the docks and buttons. Finally, Grove sands down the case and rubs it with citrus oil to bring out the unique coloring.

The Skate Case is a two-piece case that slides on, with holes for the 3.5mm headphone jack and charging port, as well as a wooden button for the lock button up top.

Clearly, aesthetic quality isn’t really an issue with the Skate Case, but what about durability? According to the founders, the Skate Case is made with a solid surface core that sits underneath the laminated maple, which helps to protect your phone.

The Skate Case has a lot going for it, but with all that rad, the price tag is a bit hard to swallow. You can pick up the Skate Case online for $149, and shipping will take 2-5 days.

If only they put a bird on it.

Twitter Releases Vine For Android Smartphones As It Tops 13M Users

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 06:28 AM PDT

VineAndroidBlog_0

Twitter has released Vine for Android, bringing the 6-second video sharing service to Google’s mobile OS for the first time. The Vine app is available for Android smartphones right now, and is a free download for anyone running Android 4.0 or higher.

The Vine app for Android arrives just about five months after it arrived on iPhone, when Twitter launched the app back in late January after acquiring the startup behind Vine. In that time, it has managed to amass an impressive 13 million users on iOS alone.

The version that arrives today for Android isn’t necessarily feature complete; the official Vine site says that it will be delivering a host of new features in future updates, including access to the front-facing camera, push notifications, the introduction of hashtag and mention features, and searching for both people and tags. These will arrive in “frequent” updates according to the company. Already, the Vine app for Android has a unique Android feature, as it supports zooming on both the Galaxy S4 and the HTC One.

Vine previously updated the iPhone app to add some of these features, including use of the front-facing camera, people mentions in posts and comments and improved people search in a big update that arrived at the end of April. Twitter’s Vine team appears to have taken the approach of launching a basic product and refining it on iOS, and now looks primed to do the same on Android.

The tech world will be watching the next few weeks closely to see what effect Vine’s arrival on Android has on its user base, and there’s a pretty obvious opportunity for comparison ready at hand: Instagram. Instagram launched on Android back in April of 2012, after managing to build a user base 30 million strong on iOS. The photo-sharing app then added a million new users in just 12 hours thanks to Android users flooding the service.

Twitter had said that Vine would be coming to Android “soon” back at the end of April, though they didn’t offer a more specific date when it confirmed that impending release. Its launch today should certainly prompt a spike in new users, though just how many remains to be seen.

Microsoft, Stop Trying To Make Windows RT Happen

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 06:21 AM PDT

fetch

Bloomberg is reporting this morning that Microsoft is cutting the price of Windows RT for small tablets in a seemingly desperate bid to spur sales.

It’s a rather predictable move and a touch sad. Tablets based on Windows RT, an operating system that’s pure garbage, are not selling, because, referring to my first point, Windows RT is trash. And since they’re not selling, Microsoft is making concessions and that means cutting the price.

Windows RT was supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to iOS on tablets. Microsoft built the platform to be more robust than the Apple counterpart by including a lot of Windows 8′s desktop tools to run on lower-power devices. But in doing so, Microsoft forked its operating system, forcing developers to choose between Intel-based Windows 8 or ARM-based Windows RT (or Windows Phone 8 or Xbox).

Now, some eight months after Windows RT’s launch, very few mainstream apps have made their way into the Windows Store. There are only a smattering of Windows RT devices available. Meanwhile, Windows 8 devices are quickly becoming as inexpensive as Windows RT.

Microsoft has failed to provide buyers with legitimate reasons to buy a Window RT tablet over an iPad or Android device. Windows RT can run most of Microsoft Office, something traveling shower ring salesmen probably find enticing.

Cutting the price could help.

Android tablets went through the same sort of soul-searching early on, too. For several years, Android tablets were overpriced and without any real reason to exist (remember the HTC Jetstream?).

Then came the $250 B&N Nook Color followed a year later by the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7. Suddenly, thanks to their $200 price tag, Android tablets were a viable option for buyers. As popularity exploded Samsung and others cut the price on larger versions, helping to entice more buyers, thus expanding the Android tablet’s market share.

I’m not sure even a $200 tablet could save Windows RT, though.

Computer makers are dropping Windows RT support en mass. HP killed its RT support early on. Samsung followed suit. HTC recently stopped developing its large RT tablet, instead focusing on a smaller, likely 7-inch model. As Bloomberg notes, Dell also has another RT model in the works.

Just the Dell XPS 10, Surface RT and the Asus VivoTab RT carry the Windows RT banner. Lenovo quickly killed its Windows RT-powered IdeaPad Yoga 11. Any other model is too far outside of the mainstream to matter.

Acer just announced the Iconia W3 at Computex. The 8-inch Windows tablet is supposed to hit at 379 Euros later this month. The small-ish tab packs modest specs: 720p display, dual-core Atom Z2760 CPU, 32 or 64GB internal storage with a microSD expansion slot. But it runs Windows 8, not Windows RT.

In fact, at Computex, Taipei’s massive computer tradeshow, there isn’t a hint of Windows RT. And this is the same tradeshow that featured dozens of Windows RT examples last year. The only talk of Windows 8′s lackluster sibling came from Acer’s chairman who told WSJ that Windows RT won’t be “so influential anymore,” also noting that it would be difficult for Windows RT to overcome the lack of compatibility that the full Windows 8 version has.

Windows RT was a mistake from the onset. It’s ridiculous to force consumers to choose between battery life and usability. They’d prefer both. Like on the iPad.

Microsoft can cut prices and perhaps later introduce device subsidies, but it won’t help. Consumers, and more telling, device manufacturers, have spoken. Neither find Windows RT devices to be worth their money. As widely stated at the Surface RT launch, the platform simply has too many compromises.

Ericsson: Global Smartphone Subs To Hit 4.5BN By 2018 (25% CAGR), Video To Account For Half Of All Mobile Data Traffic

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 05:59 AM PDT

mobile-devices

If you thought smartphones were ubiquitous now — and in certain places they pretty much are — prepare for a whole lot more people to be coming online on their phones in the next five years. Network kit maker Ericsson has published its latest mobility report, based on traffic measurements of live mobile networks, which projects that global smartphone subscriptions will rise from 1.2 billion in 2012 to 4.5 billion by the end of 2018 — a CAGR of 25 percent.

Ericsson is also expecting the monthly mobile data usage per smartphone to rise from 450MB in 2012 to 1,900MB by 2018. Even larger growth is on the cards for tablets, with monthly data usage forecast to rise from 600MB in 2012 to 3,100MB in 2018 — a CAGR of 30 percent. By 2018, Ericsson also reckons LTE (4G) will cover 60 percent of the world’s population. As for the mobile data driver, it’s video — with video growth underpinned by increasing availability of faster networks as LTE spreads. Larger devices with bigger screens with higher resolutions are also causing users to gobble up more MB, according to Ericsson:

The fastest growing segment in mobile data traffic is video. Increasing usage is driven by continual growth in the amount of available content as well as the better network speeds that come with HSPA and LTE development. Larger device screens and better resolutions will also drive video traffic as they will enable high definition and eventually even ultra high definition video.

Ericsson’s data shows video makes up the largest segment of mobile data traffic today — and is expected to grow by around 60 percent annually until the end of 2018 when it’s forecast to account for about half of total global traffic, dominating mobile content consumption. Good news if you’re Vine, then.

The data also shows music streaming gaining in popularity — with a projected annual growth rate of around 50 percent, although Ericsson notes there is a “high degree of uncertainty” in the audio forecast because it’s “very dependent on how music streaming services develop over the coming years.” So that likely refers to stuff like Apple being rumoured to get into the streaming space, and the knock on effect a Cupertino iRadio could have on other services, should it indeed come to pass as rumoured.

On the social and web front, Ericsson reckons web browsing and social networking will each constitute around 10 percent of the total data traffic volume in 2018 — so achieving some sort of parity, even if social networking still ends up taking up more of mobile users’ time and therefore more mindshare. According to Ericsson’s data, smartphone users are spending the largest portion of their time on social networks: an average of 85 minutes a day in some networks.

Ericsson has also broken out mobile traffic by device type, to give a breakdown of what different devices are being used for right now, which shows how quickly video has established itself on tablets — passing smartphones video volumes already. The latter device type remains the most popular device for social networking, which dovetails with how personal smartphones are vs tablets and laptops which can be shared within groups and families:

Spotify Community ShareMyPlaylists Introduces Moods To Give Songza The Blues

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 05:58 AM PDT

SMP-logo-[NEW]

Spotify community and playlist sharing site ShareMyPlaylists is rolling out a new feature today: Moods will let users select playlists based on, er, mood.

Feeling happy? The site has you covered. Feeling cool? There are playlists for hipsters, too. Feeling intimate? Okay, you get the idea.

In total there are 12 moods on offer, all generated off the back of the 136,000 Spotify playlists that have been published on the site since its launch in 2009. It builds on existing playlist features that include the ability to browse by genre and to generate a playlist based on artist or track, which is powered by The Echo Nest.

The idea behind Moods is to make it even simpler to discover music that suits a user’s “frame of mind,” says ShareMyPlaylists founder Kieron Donoghue. “I guess this puts us closer to Songza's model of playlists for all occasions. The big difference between them and us is that we have tens of thousands of more playlists than they do and our playlists are curated by the community at large.”

In contrast to Songza, ShareMyPlaylists doesn’t rely on a small pool of taste makers to create playlists internally, notes Donoghue. “After all, the best music nerds out there are the passionate music fans who don't necessarily have any other platform to demonstrate their musical knowledge,” he says.

The UK startup wants to be that platform. It’s currently seeing over 1.5 million monthly unique visitors to its site and mobile apps, and earlier this year released an API to let developers access its treasure trove of playlist data.

Dig deeper into how the Moods feature works under the hood, Donoghue says that filters are applied to all playlists so that only the best playlists are eligible based on number of plays, subscribers and social interactions. “From there we apply our own algorithm that cross references with our internal analytics and API search stats to come up with a shortlist of playlists allocated to each mood,” he says. Finally, ShareMyPlaylist staff do a human "sense check" to be double sure that all the playlists for each mood are appropriate.

The new Moods feature is available on the site as of today and will be coming to ShareMyPlaylists’ iOS and Android apps “very soon,” says the company.

Apple Reportedly Brings Warner Music On Board For iRadio Streaming Service Ahead Of WWDC

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 04:52 AM PDT

iradio

Apple has secured rights with Warner Music Group for publishing and recorded music, according to reports from both the New York Times and the Wall Street journal. It has also recorded rights for Universal Music Group, but not for music publishing, as it makes a final push to land agreements with all three major music labels in order to launch a streaming music service in time for WWDC, which kicks off next Monday, June 10.

The news comes after earlier reports that Apple had apparently hit a snag in its negotiations over streaming music rights, which had stalled the entire process. Apple is now back at the table according to the NYT’s sources, which says it hopes to speed things up in hopes of still making the WWDC dates. Still, despite a re-opening of negotiations, if the paper’s reports are correct, Apple hasn’t made all that much progress, and still remains in talks with Sony Music and Sony/ATV, as well as Universal Music Group, for the remaining rights needed. Talks are apparently hinging on Apple’s desire to secure more extensive licensing terms for music in its library.

The labels don’t want to merely replicate the existing deals they have with companies like Pandora which result in around 4 percent licensing fees, however, according to the Times. Instead, they’d be looking for as high as 10 percent, but they are amenable to providing Apple with streaming rights since there’s greater opportunity for selling through digital downloads on the back of an iRadio service, thanks to the immediate proximity to the service of the iTunes store.

Based on previous reports, many suspect that Apple’s music service would be free and ad-supported, which would be a very different approach to that taken by Google, which recently launched its Google Play Music All Access service, a subscription-based streaming offering that works in combination with the existing Google Play Music traditional digital music sales channel. All Access will also be arriving on iOS in just a few weeks’ time, according to Google’s Android and Chrome chief Sunder Pichai, which means that if Apple can’t get deals in place, Google’s streaming music service might appear on iOS sooner than Apple’s own.

At this point, it’s very likely Apple has the technology component of its streaming service down, and all that remains is to secure a green light from labels to get it to market. That’s still a big missing piece of the puzzle, but we’ll see if WWDC prompts a last-minute resolution among the remaining holdouts.

WorldStores Raises $15M Series C To Build Out Its Amazon-Style Ecommerce Model For Home & Garden Products

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 02:52 AM PDT

WorldStores

WorldStores, a U.K.-based online retailer of home and garden products going after supplier scale to fuel its growth, has raised £10 million ($15.2 million) in Series C funding, led by Serena Capital. Existing investors Balderton Capital and Advent Venture Partners also participated in the round. The new funding brings WorldStores’ total funding to-date up to £21 million.

The retailer says it plans to use the new funding to continue to invest in growing its supplier network and expanding of its product range — which currently exceeds more than 500,000 lines. Ramping up the number of products it ranges is a core plank of WorldStores’ growth strategy. It reckons it stocks more than 15 times more products than its main competitors, and says this breadth of choice helped it attract more than 200,000 new customers in the past 12 months.

Flexible delivery options are also oiling the wheels of its growth, with more than 800 suppliers linked directly into its technology platform — allowing it to offer next-day or day-of-choice delivery on 80% of the goods it sells. WorldStores says its sales grew by 50% last year, and it’s targeting £75 million of sales in 2013, all in the U.K. All of which sounds much like the Amazon ecommerce philosophy: big, broad and — from the consumer delivery point of view — as convenient as possible.

It’s also worth noting that European home furnishings giant IKEA’s focus on its bricks and mortar retail experience has left something of a gap for a dedicated online player to muscle in. IKEA does sell some products via its website but its focus remains on getting customers to come to its stores in person — where they spend money on incidentals (like eating in its restaurants) — which means IKEA’s ecommerce offering is deliberated curtailed, stocking only a limited range of the products that are available in its physical stores.

Commenting on the funding round in a statement, Marc Fournier, managing partner of Serena Capital, said: “We are most impressed with the company's accomplishments and its ability to become a national UK leader in such a short period of time. We look forward to supporting the management and the company in these exciting times of fast growth. Serena Capital will participate in making Worldstores a unique online retail leader for the home through the depth and quality of its products and through the excellence of its customer experience.”

EZTABLE Targets China & SE Asia As It Seeks To Become The OpenTable Of Asia

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 02:25 AM PDT

EZTable logo

With projected revenue of $7 million this year and 100,000 monthly active users, EZTABLE is one of the top successes to have emerged from Taiwan’s young startup industry. Founded in 2008, the restaurant reservation platform is poised to launch in Southeast Asia and expand its presence in China.

EZTABLE, which is already established in Shanghai, plans to rollout in other major Chinese cities, including Beijing, and Bangkok by the end of this year, before moving onward to Jakarta and other Southeast Asian cities in 2014. The company, which is backed by investors Rose Park Advisors, appWorks Ventures and NineYi Capital, is currently raising its Series B funding.

CEO and founder Alex Chen says EZTABLE was inspired by his frequent use of OpenTable to make restaurant reservations while working as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank in Los Angeles.

In order to adapt to the Taiwanese market, however, EZTABLE had to make some significant changes.

“After two months of operating, I realized we needed an entire overhaul because managers in Asia want to see results before they pay. OpenTable’s business model is that you have to buy the hardware and software and pay an installation fee before you start using it, but restaurants here didn’t even know what online reservations are,” says Chen. “They said, people just make phone reservations, why should we bother providing online reservations?”

EZTABLE switched to a freemium-like model, charging a low subscription fee and doing away with transaction fees altogether. To make money, EZTABLE developed an e-commerce model, selling restaurant vouchers with exclusive deals. Seventy percent of the company’s revenue currently comes from voucher sales, while 15% comes from subscription fees and the remaining 15% from advertisements.

“We get two kinds of users, ones who have not yet decided when they want to go to the restaurant, so they buy a voucher first for the deal and then use EZTABLE later to make reservations. After people make a reservation, we also display the vouchers for purchase,” says Chen. About 25% of EZTABLE users who make a reservation also purchase a voucher, spending an average of $25 per diner in each transaction.

In addition to up-selling customers, another benefit of vouchers for restaurants is a reduction in the rate of no-shows, a perennial problem with reservations. Chen says that in Taiwan the average no-show rate for mid- to high-end restaurants is about 10%, but for EZTABLE’s clients that rate is reduced to just 1.5%.

Chen says EZTABLE will continue to use its current business model as it expands. The company decided to target Bangkok as its first city in Southeast Asia because it has a high concentration of five-start hotel restaurants catering to tourists, as well as a rapidly growing e-commerce market.

After China and Southeast Asia, Chen hopes that EZTABLE’s next stop will be Japan, which the company would tackle with a local partner because of the different localization strategies required there.

Eliademy, The MOOC Founded By Ex-Nokians, Gets Android App To Benefit The Wider Moodle Community

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 02:00 AM PDT

Courses - 1

CBTec, the e-learning startup founded by ex-Nokians and members of the now defunct MeeGo team, has released an Android app for its Eliademy MOOC platform that’s also compatible with the widely used open source VLE Moodle. That’s because both Eliademy and Moodle are based on the same codebase, while in addition it provides CBTec with a nice new revenue stream: The Android app is free for Eliademy users, but will cost 99 cents for use with compatible Moodle installations.

In its current form, Eliademy is a free, cloud-based VLE initially competing with legacy players like Blackboard, but CBTec’s broader plan is for it to become a leading MOOC (Massively Open Online Course), pitting it against Kleiner-backed Coursera and many others in the fast-growing MOOC space. To achieve this there’s a heavy focus on localisation from the get-go.

Launched in February this year, the platform is already available in 13 languages and is targeting 40 languages by the end of 2013. Part of this strategy is to help it win in emerging markets and the ‘Rest of the World’, something that CBTech thinks differentiates it from companies who have their origins in Silicon Valley. "We start from the opposite direction with heavy investment in localisation, understanding the different cultures, different education systems they have," CBTec’s CEO Sotiris Makrygiannis, who was most recently director of applications and site manager of Nokia's Helsinki R&D center, told me back in March.

Along with multiple language support — the latest to be added is Latin (yes, Latin!) — Eliademy provides common VLE and MOOC features, such as a CMS for course content, support for file attachments, a task manager, shared calendar, and discussion forums. In addition, it offers a student grading system to enable teachers to get a holistic overview of a student's progress, along with notifications akin to the social networking apps that we've all become accustomed to.

Although the platform is based on the open source Moodle, a project that CBTec is contributing back to, it has a much cleaner and more modern design in an attempt to avoid the over-engineering that can creep into any codebase with a large number of stakeholders. And of course Eliademy is cloud-based so that instructors and students just need to sign up.

How then does CBTec plan to make money with Eliademy? Part of that answer comes with today’s Android app, which serves as a way to monetize the much larger Moodle community. The app itself even includes a directory of compatible University Moodle installations and a way for students to theoretically log in to any VLE running Moodle 2.2+ with web access turned on. The bigger plan, however, is to add a course content marketplace to Eliademy, thus unlocking its true MOOC potential. I’m told to expect more on that this September.

EduClipper Launches Its “Pinterest For Education” To Bring Better Crowdsourced Curation & Sharing To The Classroom

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 11:06 PM PDT

My Stuff Page

Back in 2007, Adam Bellow launched a site called eduTecher to aggregate and surface the best educational resources and content on the Web. A high school teacher himself, Bellow set out to highlight new technologies and educational tools that could be used in the classroom to improve the learning experience. When a new generation of community curation tools began to take hold on the Web, like Pinterest, Bellow decided to leverage the increasing popularity of crowdsourced curation to take eduTecher to the next level.

After a year in development, this week the teacher-turned-entrepreneur officially launched eduClipper, a platform that allows teachers and students to explore, share and contribute to a library of educational content. In both function and design, it’s essentially a Pinterest for education, with one notable difference: Because eduClipper is built exclusively for teachers and students, unlike Pinterest, you probably won’t find it blocked by your local school. (Which should be welcome to news to teachers, who have become eager adopters of Pinterest over the last few years.)

The idea behind eduClipper, Bellow says, is to give students the same power of social curation they would have with Pinterest, allowing them to locate and publicly broadcast the best learning resources. In other words, educators and students the ability to explore thousands of pieces of educational content, find lesson plans, resources and videos, search for the most popular content by subject or interest.

With eduClipper, users can share individual eduClips (or pieces of content) or eduClipboards (collections of content) with colleagues or students, while cross posting or embedding that content on other social platforms or sending them through email.

EduClips are created through the site’s bookmarklet (a Chrome extension), so, once it’s installed in their browser, teachers and students can grab any content they find on the Web, Google Drive, Google Apps and more, and add them to their collection, i.e. their eduClipboards. Once grabbed, the site automatically grabs the source link, too, so that it’s easy to get back to the original content and easy to give proper citation.

Teachers and students can share these clipboards so that their classmates and colleagues can collaborate during assignments or in-class activities, create groups to share these resources with and align the content that’s clipped and shared to Common Core Standards. That’s the big advantage of eduClipper over Pinterest, that content can easily be organized and annotated for each class or subject by way of these learning collections. It has also has the benefit of being created by a teacher who has spent the last five years searching for and curating the Web’s best educational content.

“There’s a ton of great content on the web that we want to share with colleagues and students,” the eduClipper founder says. “But it becomes difficult to share because our students and teachers are not all connected in the same place.” So, beyond showcasing specific contributors, the platform also enables this realtime collaborative clipboarding for group work — something that’s increasingly becoming the norm in today’s classrooms.

Bellow also tells us that he wants the platform to go beyond group boards to enable the sharing and co-curating of community-generated content, both public and private, which he hopes will pave the way for better K-12 learning portfolios. A use case that could be of interest to EdTech startups like Pathbrite, which could help extend the functionality of the eduClipper platform and give teachers and students away to create a multimedia (and more three-dimensional) record of their projects, experiments and credentials.

“In addition to finding and sharing content, eduClipper will allow teachers and students to post and share their best work, lesson ideas, and more to the global community,” Bellow continues. “In essence, we are going to be building a digital resource hub that empowers students to create and curate their own learning portfolios.”

Since the founder began development on eduClipper a little over a year ago, over 35K teachers have created accounts on the platform during alpha testing, with 300 classrooms having used the site over the past two weeks. To help build the product and early traction, the startup raised $600K from Learn Capital and Western Technologies (an early investor in Facebook). As the platform is now open to all teachers and students, Bellow is setting out to begin raising a series A round.

While the platform has appealing design and ease-of-use to recommend it, eduClipper is not without competition. EduCanvas, a startup out of Imagine K12′s third batch and the “Evernote-meets-Pinterest” clipping service, Clipboard, are both attacking this space — not to mention the extremely well-funded Grockit, which just raised $20 million to bring Learnist (its own social learning service / Pinterest for education) to the masses — just to name a few.

There’s enough interest in education and among schools for this kind of search, curation and clipboarding service that there should be plenty of greenfield, at least for awhile. But, if this really catches fire, it’s hard to imagine the network effect not taking hold and giving most of the mindshare to one or two winners.

As it moves forward, look for eduClipper to differentiate itself from the competition by developing for mobile and by extending its platform to enable teachers to be more creative with the tools they use every day, whether it be YouTube, Slideshare, Prezi and more. If it hopes to win in this space, key concerns going forward will also be reliability, data portability and the ability to connect and integrate with other services and apps. The more open the better, or so the thinking goes.

For more, find eduClipper at home here.

Nimbuzz Offers Free Service To Hutch In Sri Lanka, Continues To Push Telco Strategy in Asia

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 11:04 PM PDT

nimbuzz_logo

Nimbuzz is continuing its push for South Asian dominance with its latest telco partnership. The Indian messaging startup just announced a tie-up with Hutch in Sri Lanka, offering six months of free Nimbuzz usage to Hutch subscribers.

Today’s announcement is just another in a steady string of telco partnerships that the company has been striking up. In May, it linked up with Mobilink in Pakistan, to give the telco’s 35 million subscribers access to Nimbuzz at a flat cost.

The deal was similar to one that Nimbuzz made with India's Aircel in February. The company has a total of eight telco tie-ups in India, covering nearly 75 per cent of the country, except for Vodafone’s users, said Vikas Saxena, Nimbuzz’s CEO.

The point of all these deals is to ease friction in getting Nimbuzz on phones in the country.

Saxena explained that billing continues to be an issue in Asia, where credit cards are not as common as they are in the West. Here, telco billing is one of the easier ways to reach users, offering the option of prepaid credit or through monthly phone bills. ”Ringtones and ringback tones sell (over phones) like hotcakes here, even though you can download these over the Internet,” he said.

Telco billing is a strategy that even music providers in Asia have turned to. KKBOX and Deezer, for example, have used carrier tie-ups in the region to reach users more effectively.

A second reason for the telco tie-ups is that bundled offerings are especially necessary in price-sensitive markets like India and the neighboring countries.

In the Aircel deal, for example, signing up for Nimbuzz granted users 40Mb of data per month to use. It doesn’t sound like much, but it helps in a country where people hold multiple SIM cards to use different offers from rival telcos, such as more voice minutes from one and free texts from another.

The smartphone messaging landgrab
Nimbuzz has a total of 150 million users, and counts more than 210,000 new registrations per day. 25 million of its users are in India.
Its plans to stake a claim to South Asia is not unchallenged. Other Asian messengers are eyeing new markets too, and have large existing user bases to pull new users toward them.

Tencent’s WeChat app has a base of 300 million subscribers, and Japan’s Line just passed 150 million. US-based WhatsApp has 200 million active monthly users. Korean Kakao Talk has a smaller but growing base of 90 million, according to recent reports.

Vikas Saxena, Nimbuzz CEO

The fight for Asia’s new markets is evident. WeChat has started to air TV commercials in countries in Asia. And in the emerging markets—clashing head-to-head with Nimbuzz, especially—WeChat just made its apps compatible with the low-end Nokia Series 40 Asha smartphones. WhatsApp is also compatible with the Asha line.

India, as a relatively less penetrated market, appears to hold great potential for getting a large volume of users onboard. But several barriers persist in the immediate timeframe.

For one, the smartphone base is growing but still minuscule because of the relative price of smartphones to average income. Data plans are generally priced a little outside of mainstream access, too, resulting in a small mobile data subscriber base. According to the country’s regulator, only 2 percent of Indian cellphone users had 3G subscriptions in 2012.

Besides price, part of this can be blamed on the country coming late to 3G. The spectrum licenses were only auctioned in 2010.

For now, Saxena is eagerly waiting for smartphones to become mainstream in India. “When smartphones get below $100 in the next two to three years, the 60-70 million mobile Internet users will become 200-300 million,” he said.

Nimbuzz gets a cut of data revenues or has flat fee deals with the telcos, but this isn’t the main plan for revenue—mobile advertising is.

In March, it launched a commercial tie-up with Mentos-maker, Perfetti Van Melle (India). Nimbuzz has a Chat Buddy module allows Mentos to directly chat with Nimbuzz’s users.

It seems opt in: Nimbuzz users can install the Mentos Chat Buddy and solve a murder mystery, with a prize awarded by a lucky draw.

Line has a similar strategy. According to an e27 interview with Bubble Motion’s CEO, Thomas Clayton, the Japanese company charges brands about $200,000 for official accounts on the app, which allow brands and celebrities to broadcast messages to users.

Nimbuzz is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners. Saxena would not say if the startup was profitable yet.

It employs less than 100 people, most of whom are located in India. It also has a regional office in Dubai.

The Sisyphean Problem Of Email

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 09:33 PM PDT

sisyphus-email

Advice that should be given to modern people considering marriage: “Before you marry, consider this, ‘Is this the person I’d like to watch stare at their phone for the rest of my and their life?”

In the Greek myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus, as punishment for aspiring to immortality, is given the task to roll a boulder up a hill every morning only to have it roll back down every night. A grisly situation that, every morning, he must remedy by rolling the boulder back up the hill.

There are plenty of aphorisms about the digital human condition, many of them quite astute: “Email is a to-do list given to you by other people” is one of my favorites. So is the one at the beginning of this post. If you’d really like to drill down, “The problem with email is that it’s email” is up there, as long as you realize that email is just today’s go-to stand-in for all of human communication.

If you're like most people in information technology, you could spend 16 hours of your day replying to email without even touching anything else. You could achieve the ludicrous construction of Inbox Zero, and still, the next morning, wake up to Inbox 276.

It’s overwhelming, and absurd, but for those of us who rely on that number to feel confident or useful, we start leak emailing. Answering an email in a taxi, or right before a meal or, the worst, after sex. You become the person whose phone is more alluring than other people, the person who’d rather have a digital conversation than a regular one. Because your phone is the closest form of drug, your job becomes what you do in your spare time and even in your most intimate moments. You are a textbook case of Existentialism.

In layman’s terms, you suck.

“Does the realization of the absurd require suicide?” Albert Camus asked in his own spin on the Sisyphean myth. “No. It requires revolt,” he answers. And no, setting up a douchey auto-reply highlighting how important you are, another textbook case of Existentialism, is not the answer. Every blogger who complains about email is just complaining about how popular they are. I’m at Inbox 46,761 — a success problem.

The revolt required in this case, before you spend six hours or more of your day in email, is to train people to not expect an answer. And to be okay with calling or finding some other method to get what you need if you don’t get a response. Otherwise you’re the guy sending an email from the toilet.

Step away from the rock.

Transportation App Corral Rides Loses Access To Lyft's Driver Data

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 09:08 PM PDT

corral-logo

Looks like not everyone is embracing the vision behind Corral Rides, which aims to bring all of your transportation options together in one place — cabs, ridesharing, mass transit, and more.

A reader tipped us off that Lyft, which was one of the main services in the app, has been removed at the company’s request. (Apparently this actually happened several weeks ago, but I thought it was interesting enough to report, even if a bit late.) A Lyft spokesperson offered this explanation: “To maintain the integrity of the Lyft community and experience, it is our policy not to work with third-party aggregators.”

When we first covered Corral Rides, we noted that the app got access to the driver data from Uber, Lyft, and SideCar without the companies’ permission. Corral Rides co-founder Noam Szpiro told us, “The way we see it though, we're just sending them free traffic and customers. If they want to be the option not listed, that's up to them." (Also, apparently the current app is only part of the company’s larger vision.)

When I emailed Szpiro’s co-founder, Snir Kodesh, to ask about the situation with Lyft, he said, “Their main concern was that we don’t provide the culture value-prop (they want to be identified as a ‘friend with a car’ service, rather than just an A-to-B transporter), which is clearly difficult to quantify with words/images.” He said he’s “trying to work with them to brainstorm solutions on how to bring them back to the app.”

Corral no longer has access to Uber driver data, either, but Kodesh argued that there’s plenty of information in the app. If you’re looking for a car service, there’s still InstantCab and SideCar. And Uber hasn’t been removed entirely. The app no longer shows driver availability, but it does provide Uber pricing estimates. And it still shows information on mass transit, driving, biking and walking.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)