tech now |
- Foursquare Tries To Find Revenue By Turning Your Data Into A Samsung Galaxy S4 Ad
- British Airways' In-Flight Hackathon Spawns Solutions To The Engineering Crunch
- Microsoft To Set Up Windows Stores In 600 Best Buy Locations, Launching This Summer
- What Are Millennials' Favorite Kind Of Apps? (Hint: Not Games)
- The HTC One Mini Is The Perfect Robin To The One's Batman
- Social Commerce Service Fancy Goes International, Now Ships Worldwide
- In The Shadow Of YouTube, Vuclip Grows Its Mobile Video Network To 80M Uniques, Fends Off Suitors And Eyes Up Acquisitions
- Twitter Opens Up Tweet Performance Analytics To All, For Free
- Social Tech Entrepreneurs Get £1M Grant To Address UK And Global Social Issues
- Google, CodeAcademy And Mozilla Back Launch Of Code Club World
- Amazon Creates A 3D Printing Store, Vaulting The Technology Into The Mainstream
- Apple Reportedly Trying 4.7- and 5.7-Inch Screens On iPhones Next Year, Cheaper Model Coming In Fall
- Social Gifting App Maker Wrapp Closes On $15 Million In Series B Funding
- CloudFlare's Mirage 2.0 Speeds Up Mobile Sites By Using Virtualized Images And Minimizing Requests
- What's Fueling Growth In The Fragmented World Of Messaging Apps? Immigrants.
- WhatsApp Still Killing It By Messaging Volume Despite Free Rivals Crowding In
- Encap Raises $2M For A Mobile ID App As An Alternative Two-Factor Authentication
- Tuenti Launches Zero Cost Data Tied To Its Social Network (With PRISM-Free Privacy)
- Yahoo's Shopping Spree Continues With Conference Calling Startup Rondee
- RelateIQ Launches With $29M From Formation 8, Dustin Moskovitz And More To Be Your Next-Gen Relationship Manager
| Foursquare Tries To Find Revenue By Turning Your Data Into A Samsung Galaxy S4 Ad Posted: 13 Jun 2013 09:30 AM PDT  Foursquare this morning has launched a pretty new visualization feature called Foursquare Time Machine, which offers a new way to view a history of your check-ins on an interactive map. And oh, it’s also an advertisement for Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone. Hey, look, Foursquare is trying to make some money by using your data! How clever! The company has long since allowed users to delve into their check-in history through a searchable timeline it offers on the Foursquare.com website. And while the new Time Machine offers a briefly fun diversion for bored office workers looking for a little escapism, there’s not much value to it as a real product feature that you would return to again and again, following your first, more curious exploration. As the Foursquare blog post explains, Time Machine lets users view their history and “zoom through time and space” to visualize your check-ins and “discover all the places you should head to next.” On that latter point, it appears to be referring to the images at the bottom of the Time Machine page which suggest other venues near your top check-in spots, which you can click on and save for later, if you choose. Users can also compile and then share their stats as a custom infographic to networks like Facebook and Twitter, which is seems many are excited to do. But all this is really just a front to allow Foursquare to show you (and generate some revenue from) a large Samsung Galaxy S4 ad. The site is branded on the left side and on the top right (upon first launch), and, after clicking “fetch my history,” the middle of the Time Machine’s top navigation teases “The Next Big Thing.” As that experience loads, Samsung Galaxy S4′s branding shows yet again. There is literally nowhere on this micro-site where you can’t see the word “Samsung.” To be clear, this is not a Foursquare product or feature, this is only an ad. The company has been busy in recent weeks beefing up its online experience at Foursquare.com, in an effort to get more users to consider visiting its site on the web where it could monetize better through ads. This is tough, since Foursquare is still generally known as a mobile check-in app, and not the Yelp alternative it now wants to become. In addition, Foursquare has been opening up its platform to more businesses and advertisers, striking deals with the major credit card companies for member discounts, bumping up its sales force, and more, all in an effort to finally make some money. And it has bought itself a little more time to figure things out, too, thanks to its recent $41 million round, closed this spring. It’s a timely move for Samsung as well, as the branded Time Machine experience comes on the heels of a recent Reuters report stating that Galaxy S4 sales were going to disappoint. Brokerages downgraded Samsung, citing weakening profit growth for the company. Though the S4 became the fastest-selling smartphone since its launch in late April, that momentum has now slowed, leading Samsung to a need for bigger and more creative ads. You know, just like this. |
| British Airways' In-Flight Hackathon Spawns Solutions To The Engineering Crunch Posted: 13 Jun 2013 09:22 AM PDT  An 11-hour flight, 150 techies, and one problem: How do we educate more engineers? This was the premise for the British Airways UnGrounded “Innovation Lab In The Sky.” While heavy on ideas with few to execute them, the flight forced Silicon Valley elite to stop and think about education. How? It took away their Wi-Fi. Something crazy happens when you cram brainy people in a flying fuselage with no Internet. They actually talk to each other. No work could be done and there was nowhere to hide. Andreessen Horowitz partner Todd Lutwak, Google(x) VP Megan Smith, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and an army of startup founders didn’t have a choice. They had to brainstorm, productize, and pitch their solutions to the world’s shortage of great programmers. Shaky TakeoffFrom March when British Airways announced the flight, a marketing stunt appealing to entrepreneurs but with a social good angle, it came off a bit half-baked. What would we do up there? No one seemed to know. An open discussion would surely devolve into chaos, especially when you factor in the open bar. Luckily BA brought on renown design firm IDEO to turn the problem into a process for improving education in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). The itinerary started yesterday in San Francisco with an intro session at the Clift hotel. British Airways announced it would launch APIs to surface their cheapest tickets and offer access to their seat-selection system with hopes that partners could build better apps in exchange for a small revenue cut. BA then piled the passengers into shuttles and shipped us to SFO. There, we did what any self-respecting adults would do at 3 p.m. with the rest of the day off work. We drank. Champagne and scotch flowed in the BA departure lounge, which made the prospect of spending the night at 30,000 feet with a bunch of nerds a lot less daunting. We boarded the double-decker plane, lifted the wheels, and the IDEO ice breakers started. A geeky crossword with clues like “A gem of a programming language” was distributed, and we were asked to sketch portraits of each other. So far, so bubbly. Grab Your Magic MarkersWhen we finally got down to business, it started to feel like less of a wank and more like a mission. The issues at hand? STEM seems geeky to kids, there aren’t enough women involved, the emerging market is desperate to modernize, and the first-world economy demands more tech talent. We were tasked to come up with solutions, commit them to poster board, pitch them to each other, and present the best ones at the G8 Innovation Summit and DNA Conference in London where we landed. Seeing dignified tech execs fumbling with magic markers and getting ink all over their hands had a bit of perverse pleasure to it, and some of the projects were downright silly. A nutrition label-style sticker for tech products that tells kids what STEM education went into building them? Oh yeah, because kids love nutrition labels. A “global network that connects tech talent to jobs”? Yes, LinkedIn does exist. But some weren’t so bad. AdvisHer sought to put promising female STEM students in touch with successful women in tech who could mentor them. A crowdsourced children’s television show hoped to let kids show off cool science projects to each other. Maybe I’m biased, but I thought my team had a decent idea for a next-generation bookmobile where kids could play electrical engineering and computer science games like a mobile Exploratorium. Each passenger was given little stickers to paste to their favorite projects. I wandered the aisles of hand-drawn pitch decks taped to the overhead compartments. Veteran VCs and corporate VPs giddily promoted their ideas to scrappy young founders, pandering for votes. Then something special happened. Somewhere in the hackathon’s fourth hour I forgot we were hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour and just lost myself in the spirit of progress. It wasn’t until I looked over to the window and saw the sunset over the wing that I remembered how surreal the scene was. It made me think that we discount the value of turning off our phones and thinking uninterrupted for a while. When we do disconnect for a digital detox, we’re usually on vacation, not trying to solve big problems without the aid of Google search. Maybe we shouldn’t need an actual lack of connectivity to connect. High-Minded, But UnGroundedAfter a comically short three-hour scheduled nap time, we were awoken by a perky voice on the loud speaker announcing the votes had been tallied. The winning projects were: “Beacon In A Backpack,” a mobile stem toolkit that helps travelers become STEM evangelists to rural villages; CertifyMe, a certification tool to determine if developing world talent has the STEM skills for serious tech jobs; Init, that tech nutrition label idea I can’t see any gadget-maker showing on their boxes unless legally required; and, my favorite, AdvisHer. Women in STEM education majors can sometimes feel out of place. They’re often the minority and can face unfair scrutiny, trouble finding work groups, and misogyny. A better mentorship program like AdvisHer could keep them on the path to high-powered engineering and tech product management jobs where their perspective is sorely needed. AdvisHer founder and Women Innovate Media managing director Kelly Hoey tells me “If girls in pipeline programs don’t see more role models, we’ll never change the percentages of women entering and remaining in STEM-related fields.” She follows that the AdvisHer site is live, and “We’ll see if the constituents we designed the site for embrace it as enthusiastically as we hacked it.” Tomorrow, AdvisHer and the other winning teams will present to the G8 Innovation Summit and DNA conference, which features speeches and panels from tech leaders like Microsoft’s Paul Allen, Lean In’s Gina Bianchini, and several of the flight’s passengers. The hope is that the DNA (Decide Now Act) conference organizers will find a way to put one of the UnGrounded flight’s projects into practice. Simon Talling-Smith, British Airways’ EVP, tells me he thinks the event performed “Beyond expectations” but admits the goal “was more to create proposals than make them happen today.” In Silicon Valley, though, ideas mean nothing and execution is everything. That’s why the lack of a concrete plan to fund or implement the output of the flight was disappointing. Even the winning team has little plan beyond just putting its idea out there and seeing if anyone takes to it. This makes the ideas generated on the flight feel like well-wishing in a space that needs real impact. But up above the clouds, the UnGrounded passengers seemed satisfied to suspend their cynicism for a minute and just dream. While the plans in our colorful posters may never come to fruition, the importance of STEM education won’t be forgotten. The people aboard are in a position to pass that insight on. We need more engineers to bring about tomorrow, and the next generation can’t afford that understanding to vanish into thin air. [Image Credits] |
| Microsoft To Set Up Windows Stores In 600 Best Buy Locations, Launching This Summer Posted: 13 Jun 2013 09:21 AM PDT  Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with Best Buy to set up its own store-within-a-store in 500 Best Buy locations in the U.S. and 100 Best Buy and Future Shop locations in Canada. These stores, which will be up to 2,200 square feet in size, will go head-to-head with Apple’s mini-stores in many of these Best Buy locations. Microsoft hopes they will become the “premier destination for consumers to see, try, compare and purchase a range of products and accessories, including Windows tablets and PCs, Windows Phones, Microsoft Office, Xbox and more.” "The Windows Store offers a large-scale, hands-on customer experience that will show customers how Windows and Microsoft devices and services can make it easier for them to work and play," said Tami Reller, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer of the Windows Division at Microsoft in a canned statement today. "We're pleased to partner with Best Buy in bringing the latest technologies to consumers at scale in a unique environment where they can explore how Microsoft products fit together across entertainment, travel, music and other scenarios."
As Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc also notes, Microsoft hopes that these stores will give shoppers the opportunity to showcase its own Surface tablets in a dedicated area and show off “the latest and greatest PCs, laptops, convertibles and more.” The stores will also feature an “ecosystem section” to show off Xbox SmartGlass, SkyDrive and other services. The stores will be staffed by dedicated Microsoft specialists and the alliance will also train an additional 1,200 Best Buy sales associates. Earlier this year, we also heard that Best Buy is going to give Samsung its own space in its stores (so maybe Best Buy plan is just turning itself into a little bazaar now?). Microsoft itself currently runs 68 Microsoft Stores in malls across the U.S. |
| What Are Millennials' Favorite Kind Of Apps? (Hint: Not Games) Posted: 13 Jun 2013 08:50 AM PDT  At the SourceDigital13 conference this morning, Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf offered a look into how mobile users on iOS are spending their time in apps, as well as the differences between men and women’s app usage, and trends particular to advertisers’ favorite demographic (those aged 25 to 34), the latter which led to some surprises. Flurry, whose analytics offering for mobile developers has allowed the company to gain broad insight into mobile user behaviors, has seen its network grow to over 300,000 apps and three billion app sessions per day over the past five-plus years, says Khalaf, which allows it to track trends across more than a billion mobile consumers worldwide. During the month of May 2013, the company took a random sample of its data to gain insight in a number of areas, one being a look at what time of day apps are used the most. Flurry found that app usage steadily grows over the course of the day, and peaks in the evening – something that again the company positioned against TV viewing behavior, noting that TV viewing peaks strongly in the evening, while apps are used all day. The company had previously said in December that the time spent in mobile apps was starting to challenge television, for example, but today notes that for ad-buying purposes, there’s more to consider than just total hours spent. Ad spend in apps can be effectively spread throughout the day, Khalaf says, because consumers are on their mobiles consistently, despite the evening peak. Though the above usage data is fairly common sense, a deeper look into trends among the highly-desired young adult (25-34) demographic led to a few surprises. Probably the biggest finding is that this group under-indexes on mobile games, as compared with the rest of the mobile population. “Given the popularity of game apps you might expect that Millennials drive that usage,” explains Khalaf, “but in fact they under-index for game app usage. It turns out that it's the middle-aged Gen X-ers who grew up with gaming consoles who are over indexing on games.” Go figure. This group also under-indexed on time spent in Utilities and News, while over-indexing in Sports, Health and Fitness, Music, Media and Entertainment, Lifestyle and Shopping. In other words, they have a healthy appetite for apps and content in general, just oddly not as much for mobile games. In particular, it’s females ages 25 to 34 who dramatically over-index in the Sports, Health and Fitness category, spending over 200 percent more time in these apps than the rest of the population because of what appears to be a greater interest in self-improvement (or at least, using apps to help them with that goal). They also – stereotypically – turn towards Lifestyle and Shopping apps more so than men, where they spend 75 percent more time than the rest of the population. Males, meanwhile, over-index in Music, Media and Entertainment, as well as Social and Photo-Sharing, while under-indexing in News & Magazines.
Image credits: charts – Flurry; iPhone - Hello |
| The HTC One Mini Is The Perfect Robin To The One's Batman Posted: 13 Jun 2013 07:56 AM PDT  The days of a standard phone size are gone. 3.5-inch? 4.3-inch? 5-inch? Phone makers are less concerned with which size is right, and clearly becoming more concerned with offering as many sizes as possible. Case in point: Engadget has surfaced a leaked photo of what appears to be a smaller version of the HTC One, or the One Mini. Obviously, the photo itself isn’t confirmed, nor is the phone, but the picture seems to match up to some earlier leaks, so at least leak volume seems to be lending credibility. According to Engadget’s source, the HTC One Mini has a 4.3-inch 720p display, a metallic unibody design, Android 4.2.2 complete with Sense and BlinkFeed, and all powered by a Snapdragon 400 dual-core chip. None of this is confirmed, but we do call into question the metallic unibody design, as the picture appears to show a plastic bezel on the phone. You’ll also notice that there is Beats branding on the phone, as well as the same front-facing speakers that HTC is pushing as a key feature of the One series. Thrilling. Perhaps more interesting than the phone itself, though, is the constantly evolving nature of smartphone size trends. Remember when Zoolander came out? Derek answered a phone that was the size of a mini army action figure, and finally heard the voice of God. Before Apple ushered in the era of all-touch devices, small was the new new thing in cell phones. Clearly, that changed. Android manufacturers pushed against Apple in size, knowing that Jobs was reluctant to deviate past the 3.5-inch iPhone screen. Galaxy devices had larger screens, Droids had larger screens, and HTC jumped on board, too. Until one day, Apple announced that the iPhone 5 would have a 4-inch display, the first time that the size of the iPhone display had ever changed. It was almost unsettling. Zoom to today. Android manufacturers are pulling back into 4- to 4.3-inch territory with phones like the Motorola Razr M, the Galaxy S4 Mini, and now the HTC One Mini. Meanwhile, rumors are swirling that Apple is experimenting with even larger screen sizes, according to a recent report by Reuters. In other words, they’re covering all the bases they can. Perhaps I’m annoyed that my 4-inch iPhone 5 doesn’t fit as snuggly in the pocket of my jeans, whereas a friend of mine could be downright obsessed with the video viewing and gaming experience on his giant Galaxy Note 2. People are different, and so must their phones be. But it also seems clear that phone makers, while spreading a variety of sizes out in front of consumers, are still looking for the sweet spot. So where will we land? Your guess is as good as mine, but be prepared for some more back and forth before phone makers have figured out how to please our eyes, our hands, and our pants pockets all at the same time. |
| Social Commerce Service Fancy Goes International, Now Ships Worldwide Posted: 13 Jun 2013 07:26 AM PDT  Fancy, the one-time Pinterest competitor that has long since set its sights on social e-commerce, is expanding today with the launch of its internationalization efforts. The company is now making its service available in 30 languages and is shipping its products worldwide. Going forward, Fancy will automatically detect which language to use based on browser settings or device settings. However, web users will also be able to go into the Preferences menu at the top of the screen on the desktop site and change that selection if they choose. According to Fancy COO Michael Silverman, the company is also handling logistics and customer service locally. He explains that Fancy had been seeing a lot of demand from non U.S. audiences, which is what prompted these changes. “Just over 50 percent of our users are domestic and the other half is international – including Europe, the Middle East, and Asia,” says Silverman. “Outside of the U.S., there are a bunch of young shoppers on mobile devices who want to shop this way…and we are the only ones doing this.” That statement could be misinterpreted to mean that young, international shoppers want to buy products using their mobile phone and Fancy is the only social shopping site available to them. That’s not true, of course. What is true is that many of the top competitors in this social shopping market – product discovery sites like Polyvore, Wanelo, or eBay-owned Svpply, for example – link out to other e-commerce sites on the internet, which is not always an ideal experience. The resulting link may be dead, the product may be sold out, or you find that the company doesn’t ship to your country (or charges so much for international shipping, that you wouldn’t want to bother). On Fancy, users are buying directly from its own website and checkout directly there, too. That being said, Fancy still has some tough competition. In the U.S., its iPhone app is ranked #237 in the “Lifestyle” section, behind eBay Fashion (#130), Polyvore (#47) and Wanelo (#18), as well as hot, young adult e-commerce stores like ModCloth (#108), and brick-and-mortars gone mobile like American Eagle (#95) or Nordstrom (#94). However, it is a bit ahead of Pose (#305) and Svpply (#389). And a quick (non-scientific) look at its web traffic shows similar trends in terms of stateside competition, at least. It’s closely tied with Wanelo, for example, which now has over 8 million registered users according to its website. Officially, Silverman says Fancy has over 7 million registered users worldwide and 12 million uniques across all platforms (web and mobile) as of last month. (Note that Fancy had until recently been thefancy.com. It now redirects to Fancy.com, but there’s no data on that URL.) It makes sense that Fancy would try to shift its battle to the world’s stage instead, by focusing on growing its footprint in other areas where competition may not be as fierce. The company has been experimenting in other directions as well. Earlier this year, it acquired Samplrs.com, an artisanal foods seller, which Fancy used to beef up its Fancy box subscription service. As for all those acquisition rumors we keep hearing (with unsubstantiated reports ranging from Apple to Yahoo), Silverman says only “I don’t know why you are hearing that, it’s not something that is coming up in discussion over here.” Hmm. |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:51 AM PDT  When it comes to online video networks, Google’s YouTube is the oversized and undisputed king of the hill with 1 billion monthly unique visitors. Yet that domination sometimes obscures some of the interesting developments that are afoot among the smaller startups also working in the same space. Vuclip, the California-based mobile video streaming network that focuses its efforts mainly in emerging markets, is today reporting that it now has 80 million monthly unique users, nearly double the 45 million it reported back in February, along with 1.5 billion minutes of mobile video served every month across 700 channels+ of content from Disney, Sony and other premium providers. Backed by $35 million from the likes of NEA and SingTel, the startup’s CEO, Nickhil Jakatdar, tells TechCrunch that with the current rate of growth, it expects to be profitable by the end of 2014, without needing to raise any more money. That, and Vuclip’s video streaming inventory and the technology underpinning it, are now making the company an acquisition target. We have heard from well-placed sources that Vuclip has been approached both by large portal companies, as well as carriers, looking for assets like these. On the portal side, it seems that the interest may be in the video platform and the technology — both offering inventory and ways of monetizing it to companies looking to sell more rich-media online advertising. Carriers, meanwhile, might be more interested in picking up Vuclip’s captive video audience as a way of connecting and selling services to mobile consumers. (Reminder: one of Vuclip’s investors is the carrier Singtel’s Innov8 fund.) Jakatdar avoids commenting on the details of who may have approached the company, but he does admit it has been, and that he has said no for now, partly because he wants to see how much further he can grow the company before it either gets transformed or shut down by a new owner (not uncommon practice in the world of M&A). “We’re not ready to hand over the keys,” he says, but he also adds that the company is interested in buying more assets itself. In February, Vuclip made its first acquisition, the mobile video company Jigsee, to expand its own premium content inventory and app capabilities in India, one of Vuclip’s biggest markets. Now the aim is for “a few more” acquisitions in the next year. These, he notes, will be about picking up more technology to improve its platform, rather than to acquire users or content (which it seems to be doing fine on its own steam). The fact that Vuclip is significantly smaller than YouTube has pushed it to think beyond advertising when considering how best to make money. Not only does it lack the scale needed to get any kind of decent return on ads placed alongside premium content — let alone those trying to monetize long-tail content — but mobile advertising is still a small-time game, especially in the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America where Vuclip is used most. Mobile data networks constrained in these parts of the world, and the mobile ad business is simply not big enough there yet. “In the U.S., mobile advertising is only now starting to become an interesting business,” he says — mobile ads cracked the $1 billion mark a couple of years ago, and are rising rapidly to $15.8 billion worldwide in 2013, says eMarketer — but emerging markets are still getting a small proportion of that. Recall, too, that overall digital ad spend in 2012 was nearly $100 billion; mobile ads are still relatively small. In addition, Vuclip’s user base is not yet premium enough to merit high CPMs: the majority of devices, he says, are “the Asha’s of this world, not the Galaxy’s,” referring to Nokia’s low-end smartphones and Samsung’s high-end Android devices. That’s changing, of course. In the Middle East, he notes, iPhones are booming on their network; but not fast or big enough to drive a mobile ads business. And so Vuclip is turning to something else to make money alongside mobile marketing: paid content and carrier billing. The company offers content on an a la carte, bucket pre-purchase, and subscription basis, with one-off and “valuepacks” seeing the most usage, Jakatdar says. Right now, the conversion rate on paid content offerings is between 5% and 6% — meaning of all the video views it sees on its network, that’s the percentage that are paying for the privilege, usually for cents per view. The carrier billing decision is because these are emerging markets we’re talking about, where users often don’t have payment cards and so cannot hold iTunes accounts and the like. But while carrier billing, charging purchases to a user’s bill or off a prepaid account, is often touted as a very easy, user-friendly, successful way to charge for content on phones, it also has its challenges. Interestingly, the company’s projections on breakeven are based on the fact that right now, only 25% of its user base is actually being offered paid content. That’s because many carriers in the markets where Vuclip is most popular are not offering carrier billing yet themselves. Jakatdar says that it will be adding 10 more carriers to the roster this year in Asia before focusing on adding carrier billing in Latin America next year. |
| Twitter Opens Up Tweet Performance Analytics To All, For Free Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:23 AM PDT  Twitter now provides you with pretty extensive metrics and analytics for the performance of your tweets via its Ads dashboard (via TNW), in a move that looks designed to get more people (including individuals) aware of and using the Twitter Ads platform. The new free analytics dashboard access allows anyone to see the performance of their tweets, including how many Faves, Retweets and Replies each has received, as well as letting them sort by “Best, Good or All” for at-a-glance ranking of tweet performance. Besides letting me know that I’m pretty terrible at Twitter, it’s a great tool for anyone who might want to check their actual reach and engagement without signing up for a third-party product or using a Twitter client from an outside developer, some of which have these kinds of tools built in. It reveals things you might now have known about Twitter, like the fact that posts which do well in terms of Faves and Replies don’t seem to do very well at all in terms of Retweets, and vice versa. You can also download all the information as a CSV for later use, and see how many people are clicking on the links you tweet, which is pretty useful for anyone who wants to track exactly how much Twitter is helping them in terms of drumming up engagement. All of which is to say, this could become a treasure trove of data for marketers, although it does seem to lack some data in terms of actually populating these fields for me in my own personal dashboard. This has previously all been content given over to Twitter’s business customers looking to build an ad following, but so long as Twitter has the resources in its ad department to support it, making the tools more accessible to all is a good way to adds more input channels to its overall revenue picture. Even if individual bloggers and “social media experts” aren’t huge catches in terms of constant revenue, they each add to the sum total, driving Twitter’s potential profits up. To gain access, just navigate to ads.twitter.com, sign in with your Twitter credentials and click the “Analytics” link at the top of the page (you don’t actually need to bother with the Twitter Advertising sign-up process). |
| Social Tech Entrepreneurs Get £1M Grant To Address UK And Global Social Issues Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:10 AM PDT  One of the areas of the tech scene in the UK which has received a lot of enthusiasm in the UK has been social entrepreneurship, especially in tech. But until now, not a great deal of money has gone into the area. That changes today with a new initiative from Founders Forum for Good, the entrepreneur organisation, and the Nominet Trust non-profit. Launched today by Annika Small, CEO of Nominet Trust, and Martha Lane Fox in front of Founders Forum attendees the new partnership, “Social Tech, Social Change” will put £1 million into 20 new ventures that have radically new ideas of how technology can tackle major social issues such as social care, child welfare, education, health and environment. Among those who will be advising the project will be Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, Brent Hoberman (PROFounders), Jonathan Goodwin (Lepe Partners), Sir Tom Hunter, Dame Tessa Jane Jowell, and Mike Lynch (Autonomy founder). The idea is to back genuinely disruptive, profitable, scalable businesses that use technology to tackle social challenges in the UK and beyond. Founders Forum for Good is backed by Founders Forum, the global organisation run out of the UK for some of the world’s biggest entrepreneurs. Nominet Trust, is the UK's only dedicated ‘Tech for Good’ and the core funder of FFFG. Nominet Trust will not be seeking equity or IP in the projects funded but instead provide a grant as well as mentoring from its network and Founders Forum For Good. Annika Small, CEO of Nominet Trust, said that while the UK's digital economy is thriving, contributing more than 8% of the UK's GDP, there needs to be more done in social businesses. “We are just at the start of a journey tech for social good and companies like Big White Wall, Cybermentors, Apps for Good and CodeClub are first-class examples of what great work can be achieved on a global scale.” Brent Hoberman told us: “We’re looking for creativity in the business model and the design, not just the technology. Social entreprenruers ARE entrepreneurs – and we have to create the market of social technology.” The call for entries for the Nominet Trust Social Tech, Social Changefund will run between June – September 2013 with grants awarded from October 2013. Those interested in applying to the Nominet Trust Social Tech, Social Change fund can find out more here. If you plans to apply there are a few rules: If you win the grant you have to form a legal entity, it’s for first proof of concept stuff not existing projects, and it’s not to buy hardware/software. That’s a grant up to £50,000 per project, and applicants get to keep their IP. Nominet Trust was founded in 2008 by Nominet, the not-for-profit organisation responsible for the smooth and secure running of the .uk internet infrastructure. FFFG is run by CEO Dafna Ciechanover Bonas, but founded last year by Martha Lane Fox. Bonas will co-ordinate all the founders and advocates from the Founders Forum side. All money, applications and judging will go through and be awarded by Nominet Trust as they obviously own and operate the fund. |
| Google, CodeAcademy And Mozilla Back Launch Of Code Club World Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:10 AM PDT  CodeAcademy has been a huge story in the last couple of years. Now a new player is emerging with a complimentary real-world model. Code Club, a UK network of volunteer led after school coding clubs, is launching a new open source Code Club World framework to give every child in the world the chance to learn to code. This will provide project materials and a volunteering framework to support the running of after-school coding clubs. The project is backed by Google, CodeAcademy, and Mozilla and the first international Code Club World clubs are set to launch in Luxembourg and Kiev. Code Club World will provide all of the Code Club teaching materials in plain text form in English, uploaded to a special Code Club World page on Github, for programmers and developers to download and translate into local languages. There will be tips and practical advice on building a Code Club. Code Club founder, Clare Sutcliffe said they’ve had people contact them from all over the globe asking if they can set up a Code Club in their country. “We're a small operation here in the UK, so we're been unable to support anyone outside the UK. But, we've been listening and we don't feel that Code Club should be restricted to just this small island. Which is why we're incredibly excited, on our first birthday with over 800 active Code Clubs set up in the UK, to launch the Code Club World framework for the developer and programmer community to make a difference globally.” Zach Sims, co-founder of CodeAcademy added, “It’s great to see Code Club open to the world. We’ve seen the impact coding has on children first hand at CodeAcademy, and we are excited to watch Code Club open in more countries.” Code Club World will write a new set of projects every school term and post them to the Github page, and will launch with French, Brazilian Portuguese, Ukrainian and Turkish with more to follow. |
| Amazon Creates A 3D Printing Store, Vaulting The Technology Into The Mainstream Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:05 AM PDT  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. Available 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. With 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. And 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. |
| Apple Reportedly Trying 4.7- and 5.7-Inch Screens On iPhones Next Year, Cheaper Model Coming In Fall Posted: 13 Jun 2013 04:50 AM PDT  Apple is looking at various changes to its iPhone lineup over the course of the next year, according to a new report from Reuters, including two sizes of larger smartphone devices, in both a 4.7-inch and 5.7-inch flavor. The “phablet” plans are also being considered alongside a less expensive iPhone model, which is slated to begin production next month, according to Reuters’ sources, after a brief delay as Apple attempts to get the colors right for the new plastic-backed device. The cheaper iPhone would be launching in September following full production kicking off in August, according to some of Reuters’ sources, with an initial shipment target of around 20 million low-cost devices for the holiday quarter next year. The report details echo what we’ve heard from other sources recently, including from fairly accurate analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who previously shared reports of multi-color options for the cheaper iPhone, with a thin plastic case and the same 4-inch screen as the iPhone 5. Reuters adds that it should cost around $99 when it launches, and that its release timeline might be pushed back by as much of a year. Reports of the low-cost iPhone have been making the rounds in more or less reliable circles for a while now, which is the more interesting component of this new report. Other sources have reported that Apple is looking at bigger-screened devices, so-called “phablets” to compete with similar offerings from Android smartphone manufacturers, including the Galaxy Note line from Samsung. But even Apple’s flagship smartphone, the iPhone 5, lags behind most competing general-purpose non-phablet devices like the HTC One and Galaxy S4 in terms of screen size at 4-inches. Apple’s big-screen iPhone plans are less evolved than those for its low cost device, the report claims, with one of Reuters’ sources suggesting that we could still see the plans shift considerably before anything reaches a production stage. Apple has discussed the idea with production partners, but has not set any kind of timeframe for test production or launch as of yet. Reuters says that Apple is considering the different screen sizes comes as there’s increased pressure to field more than one device a year. Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested that we might see a larger iPhone when the trade-offs of battery life, screen quality, color reproduction and other failings brought about would be possible to counteract, speaking at the recent AllThingsD D11 conference. He did admit that some consumers are interested in those devices, however, so it’s likely that these reports come from Apple’s attempts to overcome those limitations with engineering. Plenty of Apple products don’t make it past the testing phase, however, so while you can be sure Apple is experimenting with big displays for iPhone, you can’t be equally sure we’ll ever see one. Still, Cook’s guidance to consumers and media that they can look for big product launches in the fall and through next year specifically do line up with the timing of possible iOS phablet launches reported by Reuters today. |
| Social Gifting App Maker Wrapp Closes On $15 Million In Series B Funding Posted: 13 Jun 2013 04:30 AM PDT  There is a very real “crunch” going on at the Series A and Series B levels of funding, as a number of startups that launched to great enthusiasm a few years back are having trouble getting more support from investors nowadays. That’s especially true for companies with a heavy focus on the social web. But Wrapp, the social gifting service, has shown that it is not another victim. Wrapp is announcing today that it has closed on $15 million in fresh funding to continue to grow its business, which is jointly based in Stockholm, Sweden and San Francisco, California. The round, which serves as Wrapp’s Series B, included participation from existing Wrapp investors Greylock Partners, Atomico and Creandum, along with new investors American Express, Qualcomm Ventures, and SEB Private Equity. This brings the total amount invested in Wrapp to $25.5 million. Wrapp co-founder and COO Carl Fritjofsson swung by TechCrunch TV on his latest visit to San Francisco this past week to give us a hands-on look at the latest version of Wrapp and discuss the new funding, and you can check it all out in the video embedded above. He said that the fresh money comes after a period of solid growth for Wrapp, which allows people to give their friends presents such as gift certificates to certain stores. More than 1 million users have gifted more than 15 million gift cards through the service, he says, with more than 200 retailers worldwide providing gift cards through the platform as a marketing tool. Going forward with the new funds, Fritjofsson says that Wrapp is going to focus on more growth in its existing areas — and evolve the product in new ways. “We’re moving slightly beyond the pure friend to friend gifting” to extend its focus onto more comprehensive platforms and tools for the businesses who are catering to those users, he said. Also in the video, we also talked about how Wrapp compares to other players in the space, most notably Facebook and its Karma acquisition which is now Facebook Gifts (that portion of our chat starts at around the 7:00 minute mark), what the experience in general was like raising a Series B during this general crunch (that starts at 5:30), more about what the future holds for Wrapp (starting at 8:00), and lessons learned from building a multi-national startup (that starts at 9:04.) |
| CloudFlare's Mirage 2.0 Speeds Up Mobile Sites By Using Virtualized Images And Minimizing Requests Posted: 13 Jun 2013 04:00 AM PDT  About a year ago, CloudFlare launched Mirage, a service for its paying users that aimed to speed up website loading times by delivering smaller images and using “lazy load” to just download images that actually appeared in the browser’s viewport. Today, the company is almost completely revamping this service based on what it learned from this first version. As the Cloudflare’s founder and CEO Matthew Prince told me, the first version of Mirage took every image on a site and then created five copies of it in different sizes to match the most often used screen sizes. This worked, but it also meant that the new images often didn’t match the layout of the page or size of the screen perfectly. To overcome this issue, CloudFlare is using a pretty ingenious trick in Mirage 2.0. Instead of creating multiple copies, it simply creates a highly degraded version of the image that’s often just 1% of the original file size. This image does, however, contain all of the meta data the browser needs to place the image on the page and start rendering the page. Once the page finishes rendering, CloudFlare’s new Virtualized Image Loader kicks in and starts replacing these images with their full-resolution versions. The effect, Prince told me, is similar to the old progressive JPEGs you’re probably familiar with if you’ve been on the web long enough. This switch between the two images is the trade-off website owners have to make when they use Mirage. This technique prevents the browser from having to wait for image downloads before it can start rendering the page, which should make the user experience feel significantly faster, but users may be a bit surprised to see these highly degraded images at first. Here is an example of how much of a difference Mirage could make on our own site (we’re not using it right now, though): All of this, of course, also works for regular websites, but CloudFlare is specifically aiming this at mobile sites. Imgur, the popular image host, has been testing this feature on its site and as Alan Schaaf, the company’s founder and CEO told us, Imgur has “seen great improvements with Mirage 2.0. We’re really happy that CloudFlare continues to launch innovative products to ensure pages on Imgur.com load as fast as possible.” To speed up loading times even more, the Virtualized Image Loader also takes the device’s capabilities and network conditions into account. CloudFlare’s vast network and user base allows it to sample a massive amount of data and can now adjust how aggressive Mirage 2.0 compresses data depending on the network the request is coming from. In order to keep packet loss at a minimum, the service also combines all of these images into one request instead of initiating a new request for every image. Mirage 2.0 is now available in beta for all paying CloudFlare users, including those with a $20/month pro account. The good folks at CloudFlare, however, also gave us 50 promo codes for free access to the Mirage 2.0 beta, even if you’re just using a free account. If you’re interested – and a CloudFlare user – just head over here to sign up. |
| What's Fueling Growth In The Fragmented World Of Messaging Apps? Immigrants. Posted: 13 Jun 2013 03:45 AM PDT  Even though it might seem intuitive that one messaging app will rule them all, WeChat, Line, WhatsApp and others are proving that messaging remains a stubbornly fragmented category with many geographic regions of the world seeing different leaders. KakaoTalk rules in South Korea, while WeChat dominates in China, while Line rules in Japan and the U.S. has no overwhelming leader. One thing that’s interesting to note is how these apps are growing outside of their home markets. They are, in fact, spreading through immigrants, according to app tracking company Onavo. So immigrants aren’t just bringing their languages and cultures to new countries; they’re bringing apps too. The company is basing its thesis on correlations between usage of different apps in the U.S. market. Onavo has a couple data compression and management apps that several million people use to manage their data. Because they track data flowing in and out of every app, they have a gauge on which apps are actively being used at any time on an anonymous, aggregated basis. They, for example, found that U.S.-based users of foreign messaging apps were several times more likely to use international dialing apps and dictionary or translation apps related to the home country of their messaging apps. That hints that they might be first-generation or recent immigrants. KakaoTalk users are much more likely to also use other Korean apps, like Viki, which lets people watch Korean TV dramas. WeChat users in the U.S. were 61 times more likely to also use Chinese social network RenRen, 56 times more likely to use a Chinese-English Dictionary and 52 times more like to use QQ. Line, which dominates Japan with 69 percent of iOS users in that country using the app on a monthly basis, has much smaller reach in the U.S. market. But U.S. users of line are 11 times more likely to use WeChat and eight times more likely to use KakaoTalk. WhatsApp, the Silicon Valley-based messaging company which has found 78 percent market share in India, reached new records this month with more than 10 inbound billion messages sent per day. Its U.S. users are seven times more likely to use an Indian TV app called NDTV, seven times more likely to use Bollywood Music Radio and six times more likely to use Bollywood music app Saavn. Viber, another app that’s found reach in India, has U.S. users who are nine times more likely to use an Islamic prayer tracking app Athan, eight times more likely to use Hindi radio app Raaga and seven times more likely to use Bollywood Music Radio. If immigrants are helping to spread these apps beyond their home markets, it bodes well for countries that have large and very spread out diasporas like China. |
| WhatsApp Still Killing It By Messaging Volume Despite Free Rivals Crowding In Posted: 13 Jun 2013 03:14 AM PDT  Along with Skype, WhatsApp is the granddaddy of the mobile messaging app space. But despite its relative great age (~47 months), certainly compared to the myriad messaging newcomers, it appears to be continuing to build usage momentum. Earlier today WhatsApp announced a new daily messaging metric record, following on from its recent “bigger than Twitter” boast. Its new daily high is 10 billion+ inbound (sent) messages and 17 billion+ outbound (received) messages — making for a total of 27 billion+ processed missives in 24 hours. The reason for the inbound/outbound discrepancy is down to WhatsApp’s group chat feature which means one sent message can be seen by multiple participants. Group chat in WhatsApp still refers to message-based comms since it doesn’t support VoIP calls (although it does offer the ability to send audio notes — so keeping true to its messaging ethos). Back in April WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum told the AllThingsD Dive Into Mobile conference that the messaging app was seeing an average of 8 billion inbound, and 12 million outbound messages per day, so its new daily record is still within touching distance of those averages. Still, it does indicate WhatsApp is continuing to build momentum, despite all the additional (free) competition in the messaging app space. Most recently Facebook has stepped up its efforts, with the launch of its Home launcher for Android that adds a messaging layer called Chat Heads atop smartphone content in a bid to keep users chatting within Facebook, rather than using rivals’ messaging software. (Albeit, Home hasn’t got off to a great start.) Other newer mobile messaging players, such as Line and WeChat, have focused on offering multimedia messaging options, with support for emoji/stickers and video, and in Line’s case additional games and apps featuring its kawaii characters. Line has also been building out its global presence, having pushed beyond its home market of Japan, and the Asian region in general, to target Europe via Spain and also the U.S. and Latin America. The latest version of Line’s iOS app adds support for additional European languages (h/t to TNW for spotting): namely German, Italian and Portuguese, showing that it’s keeping up the pressure on WhatsApp in a region that’s traditionally been one of its strongholds. Back in March Line also added French and Brazilian Portuguese to support its push into Latin America. As well as going aggressively after a global user-base, Line continues to bolster its in-app functions. v3.7.0 of its iOS app adds an in-app browser, for instance, plus themes featuring its sticker characters; alerts for chats that failed to send; and a photos button in the chat room menu to view all sent/received shots from that chat. WhatsApp has taken a different route to most of its messaging rivals by charging users for continued use of its service, with a $0.99 per year fee on most mobile platforms. Whereas Line, for instance, is monetising its service via in-app add-on content — such as paid stickers and gaming related downloads. In its Q1 earnings earlier this year, Line reported revenue of $58.9 million with game in-app purchases accounting for around half and paid stickers for around a third of that figure. The freemium approach appears to be working well for Line, from a revenue generating point of view – WhatsApp’s revenues have been rumoured to be $100 million annually — but so far at least WhatsApp appears to be weathering the challenge posed by free-at-the-point-of-use competitors with no apparent signs of messaging momentum dropping off. Most mobile messaging apps carry a natural lock-in since users typically require their friends to be using the same service in order to chat to them (Yuilop is an exception) so unless your friends decide en masse to move to a new service, you’re probably going to stick with what you’ve got. It remains to be seen whether WhatsApp rivals’ feature-focused innovations — pushing the envelope on multimedia comms and expanding entertainment-focused content — can start to lure significant numbers of its long-time users away. |
| Encap Raises $2M For A Mobile ID App As An Alternative Two-Factor Authentication Posted: 13 Jun 2013 03:05 AM PDT  As high-profile sites like Twitter, Google, and most recently Evernote and LinkedIn turn to two-factor authentication to help their users protect themselves from malicious hackers and security breaches, Encap, a startup based out of Norway, has created an alternative it says is better and safer, using an app on a person’s mobile device. The company today announced a round of funding — we understand it to be $2 million — from Norwegian early-stage VC ProVenture Seed, which it will use to further develop the solution and take it to new markets outside of Scandinavia, specifically the U.S., where it has recently opened an office in Palo Alto. This latest round takes the total invested in Encap since 2010 to $2,850,000, with the earlier round coming from Alliance Ventures. Most two-factor authentication services use codes sent via SMS or (in the case of enterprise services or some online banking) a separate physical device that generates a code, which a user then has to physically enter on a site to continue a log-in process. While that leaves more room for error and customer frustration, Encap takes this process into a mobile app, and then improves on it: instead of generating new codes for users every time, it asks the user to enter a PIN into the app. Like this: Encap then generates a code behind the scenes and sends it to the site in question — which then authenticates the user and lets him proceed to purchase goods, transfer money, or enter a site. “It’s two-factor authentication that feels like one-factor authentication,” says Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, the CEO of Encap. You can see a more complete video of how it works here. The opportunity, as ProVenture sees it, is that user authentication and security are still relatively nascent areas that will continue to evolve as new threats emerge. “Encap is a company with the potential to disrupt a market that will be worth more than $5bn by 2017,” said Herbjørn Skjervold, Managing Partner, ProVenture Seed, in a statement. “Multi-factor authentication combined with risk profiling is now seen as the replacement for passwords, but the exact mechanism to deliver this level of security is still in flux. This presents an enormous opportunity. Encap has all of the advantages of the systems currently being adopted by the big players, but none of the downsides – it is well positioned to take advantage of dissatisfaction from both users and service providers.” The other key with Encap is that the main delivery of its service is via a white-label solution, meaning that it can be integrated via an API into any business’s mobile app to work with their online websites, or for transactions in the mobile apps themselves. In its early days, Encap is aiming its solution at transactional sites and services, specifically banks, financial services and e-commerce companies. Its first customers include Santander Consumer Bank of Norway and payment card specialist EnterCard. “We are targeting financial services companies, in particular banks and payment players looking to provide mobile and online financial services to consumers,” Jørgensen says about the company’s strategy in the U.S. “We are also targeting cloud and enterprise companies that are looking to offer their users, many of which are now mobile, banking-grade security balanced with ease of use.” Given that a lot of enterprises still use separate devices to generate secure codes for workers to enter the company site, but those workers are all also using smartphones, this could also help cut down on how many devices need to be provisioned and managed. Encap also notes that the service can also be used to authenticate a user at a point of sale, creating a secure way of initiating a mobile payment. Longer term, you can see how this could work not just with these verticals but also more consumer-focused sites that are looking for a quicker way to authenticate users to complete transactions or simply to get into a site. “We are working on deals with our partners in the U.S. and Europe and expect to make significant customer announcements by the end of the year,” Jørgensen says. |
| Tuenti Launches Zero Cost Data Tied To Its Social Network (With PRISM-Free Privacy) Posted: 13 Jun 2013 02:34 AM PDT  You might not have heard of Spanish social network Tuenti, but it was acquired by Telefonica back in 2010 for $99 million and has garnered over 14 million users. Since then it’s opened up to worldwide users in most languages, launched new apps (Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Firefox OS) and moved heavily into messaging. It’s also become more than just a social networking app. Last year it launched an MVNO – Tuenti Móvil – and now it’s unveiling a new strategy. Tuenti Móvil customers will now be able to call, chat, and share without using data or phone credit. It sounds crazy but in fact it’s clever. It will draw more customers to the Tuenti MVNO because it’s tied to this social network. Just over a year ago, they launched in Spain a data-centric MVNO offer with 1GB for a €6 tariff which is very competitive in Europe. Here’s how it works: The free (called “Zerolimites”) data tariff on Tuenti Móvil is automatically activated as soon as the user purchases a data bundle with any of Tuenti Móvil's tariffs. If the user consumes the entire Gig of data they are allowed, they still get to use the Tuenti app, and send messages, without it being reflected on their bill. If they run out of cash and can’t top up the account (kinda important in cash-strappedSpain right now) they can still continue to use the Tuenti app for 30 more days. The fair use policy of Tuenti is 1GB per month of exclusive use of the Tuenti app. But here’s the secret sauce: there is an enormous viral factor in that anyone on any operator can use the Tuenti app. So when your friend on Tuenti Móvil runs out of credit, they can still chat with you though the app. That just incentivises more people to sign up to Tuenti Móvil, knowing that their temporary cash flow issue won’t be a problem. This is a big deal for younger mobile users, of course. The numbers are not big right now. Tuenti Móvil has so far reached 150,000 customers in its the first year. In theory this new service will help those numbers. CEO and founder Zaryn Dentzel says “we're not just a social network anymore, but rather an integrated social communication multi-platform, primarily mobile, that's backed up by innovation and added value.” Like Twitter, Tuenti's messages are limited to 140 characters and Facebook you can share photos etc — "moments" in Tuenti lingo — that appear in your contacts' timelines. Users broadcast to everyone (Twitter), to your close friends (like Facebook), or just directly to single contacts, a little like you would on an app like Pair. In Spanish “tu enticed” means ‘your entity, your identity’, hence the name and in English it's a pun on the number 20, or 20 close friends. Note also that the data is sent via SSL – an interesting point in the age of Prism. It means none of the activity on Tuenti is ever indexed in Google… |
| Yahoo's Shopping Spree Continues With Conference Calling Startup Rondee Posted: 12 Jun 2013 11:16 PM PDT  Thought Yahoo’s acquisition spree would culminate with a $1.1 billion deal for Tumblr? Nope, not so much. In fact, the buy-happy company just quietly made its second acquisition in 24 hours — in two different markets, no less. Yes, Yahoo followed this morning’s purchase of iOS photo app maker, GhostBird Software, by making a play into the enterprise conference calling space. Wait, what? Yep, users of six-year-old free conference calling service, Rondee, were tonight informed via email that the startup has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. It will also suffer the same fate met by other recent Yahoo acquisitions — like MileWise, Astrid, GoPollGo and Loki Studios to name just four — in that it will soon be going the way of the dinosaur. After June 30th, the company’s website now reads, users will no longer be allowed to access their data or create new conference calls. The startup will continue its progressive shut down from there, officially closing operations on July 12th, before ultimately cutting off user access to their calling data on July 30th, the startup said in an email to its customers today (copied below). However, to avoid stranding its users completely on such short notice, the company said that it’s arranging for “user Login ID and on-demand pins to work with InstantConference,” a company (and, previously, a competitor) it describes as a “highly reputable conference calling service.” Not sure that’s much consolation. “Hey, we may be forcing you to leave … but at least the place we’re sending you has electricity, right?” What’s A RondeeRondee, for those who haven’t been following the crowded and congested conference calling market, launched in 2007 on a mission to build the “Evite for conference calls.” The startup set out to lower the barriers to entry in the conference calling arena and make it accessible to the masses. Today, that means it offers basic conference calling capabilities around the clock (for free) to anyone with an email address. Granted, for those looking to get “fancy” with call recording, like having access to audio, custom tones, call directories and call scheduling, some account setup is required. But that’s about it. Users can choose between free, on-demand conference calling, or free, “Scheduled Rondees,” in which users can pick a future date and time to schedule a conference call and let Rondee send out email invitations to which invitees can respond to and use via the company’s website. Straightforward, easy to use and free. Of course, while those are traits every company should shoot for, the VoIP market looks a little bit different than it did six years ago, becoming nearly ubiquitous thanks to companies like Skype and Google, meanwhile, startups like UberConference have moved onto free visual conference calling to compete with Hangouts et al. Today, Rondee’s basic VoIP model sounds very familiar. So Why Did Yahoo Just Buy This?While Yahoo nor Rondee has shared any real details on the terms of the deal or the motivation, we do know from a quick Google search (and a look at its press page) that the startup has been pretty quiet of late. Sure, it’s likely this wasn’t an exorbitantly expensive buy for Yahoo, but this also hasn’t been an area of strength (or focus) for Yahoo for a long time, which starts to make it seem like there isn’t really a good explanation for this one. Maybe Yahoo wants to integrate Rondee into its internal conference solution, for internal IT use, seeing as it’s cheaper than buying an enterprise solution? Probably not. Er, Maybe Because…What may be more likely (and hopefully is the case) is that Yahoo liked the team and was eager to make use of its talent, so Marissa Mayer pushed Yahoo’s Acme Acqui-hire Button so that Rondee can join it in re-building Yahoo Messenger. Maybe? After all, on its website, Rondee says that it will be joining Yahoo’s Small Business Team, so while it may be a stretch, motivation could lie in the company’s has-been messaging client. Marissa Mayer has made talent acquisition one of her top priorities since becoming CEO, and mostly her shopping spree has targeted mobile — in other words, showing the company understands that its mobile strategy and products have to evolve if Yahoo ever hopes to be truly relevant again. (And, really, it’s probably a little late, but…) Right now, it’s easy to take a look at Yahoo’s product portfolio and sigh. Case in point: People used to Yahoo Messenger as their go-to chat app. (Well, some people did, somewhere. We’re still trying to find out who they are exactly.) But the point is that Yahoo’s messaging client used to be enormous, and now it’s about as cool as the Macarena. Meanwhile, sadly for Yahoo, gamified and chat-ified messaging apps are all the rage and continue to proliferate, especially in emerging markets. In some Upside Down World, this could mean that there’s still opportunity here for Yahoo. Don’t Shoot The Messenger?Though with Google’s assets like gChat, Google Voice, Gmail and Hangouts, just to name a few, Yahoo has a long way to go. A pretty long way. Sure, if anyone knows how to get Yahoo up to speed using Google’s playbook, it’s Marissa Mayer. But then there’s WhatsApp, iMessage, Viber and too many more to name. Google launched free voice calling from Gmail nearly three years ago, and adding similar capabilities and enhancements to Yahoo Mail would make sense — and wouldn’t hurt. Of course, even if it were somehow able to pull it off, weakly copying Googles Roadmap doesn’t do Yahoo any favors. It’s dangerous and, well, just sad. Or maybe not. Maybe Yahoo will use Rondee as part of a foundation on which it will build a Hangouts competitor. Why the world needs that, of course, is another question entirely — sorry to say, Yahoo Mail diehards. These are a few possible explanations for Yahoo acquiring Rondee, though I’m not sure they’re particularly satisfying. To this point, it’s worth reading this post (really, lament) on Yahoo Messenger from Yahoo’s former director of global tech initiatives. Marissa Mayer seems to be making an effort to address some of the internal idiocy Smith cites as contributing not only to the downfall of Messenger itself but to the downfall of products subsequently created (internally!) that might have saved it or at least prolonged its life. Mostly, Smith attributes Yahoo’s struggles to crappy leadership, a management focused on preservation rather than trimming-to-grow or innovation, the ole “it’s hard to get stuff done at a big company” line and a lack of a unifying product vision. The latter of which, at least, fittingly smacks of the very product strategy currently at work in Google Land. This seems to be a familiar tune at Yahoo, though it is heartening that some of that stuff is fixable. However, watching Marissa Mayer acquire all these startups that are on their last lifeline or just keeping their head above water is suspect. Now, it could be questionable in a good way, provoking media attention, buzz and providing a (relatively) cheap way to bring in quality talent. And maybe we’re watching a grand vision unfold, with Marissa acting as the Great Unifier it sounds like Yahoo desperately needs. Sure, this could be akin to watching Tony Stark miraculously build an Iron Man suit from spare parts and scrap metal … or this turnaround strategy very well prove to be suspect in the same way that a bunch of bricks painted yellow does not gold bullion make. For more, find Rondee’s email to users below:
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| Posted: 12 Jun 2013 09:35 PM PDT  Last summer, word started to trickle out about a young, stealth startup called RelateIQ that was rumored to be one of the more ambitious players among the new (and expanding) class of Big Data startups. Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin had founded RelateIQ the summer before to tackle some enduring problems in the way we manage our professional relationships — the same ones that led to the birth of Plaxo lo a decade ago, and many more since. Though we live in the Digital Age of smartphones and cloud computing, Evans and Louglin were frustrated by the fact that people still manually entering important professional data into aging and stuffy relationship management tools. On a mission to change that by using Big Data to automate relationship tracking and by taking mobile seriously, RelateIQ was able to attract $9 million from Accel, Morgenthaler and SV Angel in Series A financing, while recruiting key advisors like LinkedIn’s former chief data scientist DJ Patil, Bob Cohn (of Octel, Lucent and Sequoia fame) and current Apple board member and former Intuit CEO, Bill Campbell. Fast forward to today and, after two years of extensive and stealthy testing and fueled by a hefty new round of funding from a roster of familiar names, the startup is finally throwing open its doors to the public. The new Series B round, which was first reported by former colleague Evelyn Rusli of the WSJ, brings RelateIQ’s total funding to $29 million and values the company at $100 million. The company has since confirmed these numbers, telling us that its new, $20 million Series B round was co-led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s new, “smart enterprise”-focused venture capital firm, Formation 8 (which just raised its first, $448 million fund) and Accel Partners. The lead investors were also accompanied by an impressive supporting cast, including Battery Ventures, AMC Cloud Ventures (via Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang), Thrive Capital, Allen & Co. and Facebook and Asana co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz — among others. Not bad for a startup that works out of the basement of a home decor business in Palo Alto, right? (Never you mind that Facebook used to house its servers in the same basement before “The Social Network” Era.) In fact, considering that CRM and relationship intelligence software isn’t exactly The New Kid On The Block, it makes one wonder what it is about RelateIQ that attracted this gaggle of tech industry veterans. Traditionally, the Customer Relationship Management space (and to a lesser degree social CRM) has been dominated by veteran enterprise software companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP. Today, however, the Bigs find themselves being chased by a bevy of startups that are trying to beat them at their own game by using advances in cloud computing and data tech (among others) to offer smarter, more consumer-friendly experiences or by moving downstream to bring enterprise-grade tech to startups and small businesses. As Evelyn points out, this has forced CRM incumbents to modernize, get more mobile and social either by building out their platforms themselves and acquiring (like Jive’s buying Producteev), or by turning to Big Data startups to help them make sense of enormous data sets. RelateIQ, which has 100 clients already in tow at launch including companies like T3 Advisors and WellnessFX, wants to go after the incumbents by not only offering social integration and data enrichment out of the box, but by significantly reducing the amount of manual data entry required to get more insight into their professional relationships. Features like the ability to quickly deploy new workflows, the founders explain, are attractive to teams that manage their business’ external relationships, whether in business development, sales or product, allowing them to get started immediately. Of course, using algorithms and machines to try to better understand and glean insight from the chaos of human relationships is an uphill battle. RelateIQ wants to close that gap by sucking in and analyzing faster, on a bigger scale, and by offering more nuanced analysis of the details in your professional relationships, than the next guy. It does that by automatically capturing data from email, voice, social networks and calendars and analyzing language in those communications to identify words and phrases in an email that might indicate a lead is getting ready to take the next step, or just the opposite. In other words, the idea is to reduce the amount of work you have to do and only surface the critical stuff you can’t ignore. The startup’s SaaS service also eliminates the headache that results from the fact that your contact information is scattered across multiple platforms or hiding in someone’s spreadsheet or address book. RelateIQ cleans your contact info and merges it from across address books to give companies one reliable source of contact info, along with offering features of a digital personal assistant, like email tracking and prompts when you forget to reply to important contacts. The other key to RelateIQ’s value proposition is mobile, allowing teams to track and manage their professional relationships in realtime, collaborate with colleagues and access dynamic reporting and updates contact info from native Android and iPhone apps. By adding an automated intelligence layer to relationship management, it becomes easier for overworked teams to prioritize legit leads and save those that are falling through the cracks by automatically bubbling up forgotten leads in your contact list. The ability to do that on-the-go while you’re on a business trip — without having to manually log calls from your iPhone — is huge. But what is this all going to cost, your ask? While its mobile apps are free, its SaaS product runs $49/user/month or $99/user/month for its premium version. For more, find RelateIQ at home here. |
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