tech now |
- Hike, India's Mobile Messaging Upstart, Expands Language Support & Adds Offline Messaging, Stickers & More To Fuel Growth
- Customer Outreach Startup Intercom Raises $6M Round Led By The Social+Capital Partnership
- Blackboard Co-Founder Michael Chasen Raises $12.75M Series A For SocialRadar, A New Take On Location-Based People Discovery Apps
- After 80M Installs, MoboTap Updates Its Dolphin Browser To Highlight HTML5 Apps
- Twitter The Ad Player Wants To Push More TV Buttons, Adds Viacom To Its Partner List
- Keen On… Silicon Valley: How We Need To Scale Down Our Self-Regard And Grow Up
- Gracenote's New TV Sync API Could Spawn Indie Second-Screen Apps
- Men's Clothing Startup Combat Gent Raises $1.84 Million From Tony Hsieh's VegasTechFund And Others
- Feedly Cloud Goes Live To Replace Google Reader's Backend, Power New Web Version Of Feedly's App
- The Open Source RepRap Simpson 3D Printer Design Reduces Friction, Uses Less “Vitamins”
- Rockmelt Brings Its Social Browser To Android With An Overhauled Interface
- Entelo, The Big Data Recruitment Platform Used By Box, Yelp And Square, Lands $3.5M From Battery And Menlo
- Apple TV Finally Gets HBO GO And WatchESPN, iTunes Shoppers Now Buying 800K TV Shows Per Day
- With $1M In Funding, Bunch Aims To Be The Center Of Your In-Depth, Topic-Based Discussions
- Elon Musk Demonstrates The Power Of Transparency With First Tesla Model S Recall
- A $100 Watch Can Tell If You've Had Too Much To Drink
- Nestio Launches A New Initiative For Landlords And Brokers To Make Rental Listings More Accurate
- Velodroom Does What Every Bike Light Should – Responds To Your Ride And Turns On And Off Automatically
- Turner's Media Camp Announces The Next Five Startups To Go Through Its Media-Centric Incubator
- Pindrop Raises $11M From Andreessen Horowitz, Citi Ventures And Others To Detect And Block Phone Fraud
| Posted: 19 Jun 2013 09:07 AM PDT  There’s no room at the digital inn for more mobile messaging apps, but that’s not stopping them crowding in. Hike, an Indian mobile messaging app that’s only been around six months but has amassed more than five million registered users in that time, is doubling down on its home market while expanding its accessibility further afield too. Version 2.2 of the hike app adds support for four new languages — Spanish, French, Russian, and Portuguese — building out the previously supported two: English and German. The company said it plans to aggressively expand its language support each month as it chases after scale. And, evidently, as it chases competitors such as Japan’s Line which is also expanding into global markets such as Europe and LatAm. “We’re targeting those languages which we’ve seen the most demand for,” says the company. “With these languages, and English and German already supported, we’ll be supporting approximately more than 85% of the world’s mobile population. In addition to this, we’ll also be adding support for four new languages every month.” Interestingly, hike does not yet support any Indian languages owing to the linguistic landscape being so diverse, with more than 15 major languages spoken across the region. It does plan to start tackling this though, with Hindu suport likely coming next to cover off a significant chunk of the population. It also intends to build native Indian language support and keyboards for all major languages into its app so it doesn’t have to depend on the OS/device (OS fragmentation is another big issue in the region). “We’ll probably be launching Hindi support next (which’d cover a significant portion of the Indian population), as well as some other top languages. You can expect much deeper local language support in the coming months,” it says. As well as extending its global reach by bolstering language support, the new version of the hike app adds a feature hike is hoping will give it serious uplift in its home market. Offline messages is an SMS conversation tech the company told TechCrunch about back in May. The feature allows users in India to keep in touch, regardless of whether the person they are sending a message to has 3G data enabled or not because messages are converted to SMS for delivery if there’s no viable data connection. Other new features in v2.2 of hike’s app include, somewhat inevitably, sticker packs — showing how hike is following in the footsteps of messaging competitors such as Line and Viber by sharpening its entertainment credentials. As Line has, hike has launched its own brand characters in sticker form, along with various other types of sharable imagery such as “expressions, rage faces, and some localised stickers targeted specifically at the Indian market”. Click to view slideshow.“It’s been around 15 hours since we launched, and we’re seeing the usage of stickers increase every hour. We’ll easily hit more than one million stickers shared on Day 1,” it says. “We expect it to grow significantly, both organically and through some innovative marketing efforts that we’ve lined up to take them mass market in India.” For now hike’s stickers are free but it intends to launch paid packs to monetise the feature in future — as Line has successfully been doing. “We do expect stickers to become a significant revenue stream going forward,” it says, but adds that its focus is not yet on revenue. For the moment, hike’s focus is on building out features to help it grow, since occupying such a competitive space as messaging absolutely necessities maintaining momentum — or the risk is to fall by the wayside as rivals streak ahead. Other new features introduced in v2.2 of hike include a mode called Last Seen, which allows users to share with chosen friends when they were last online. Hike also says it has improved the operation of a Walkie-Talkie feature — which it notes offers an accessible messaging option to Indian users who can’t use an English keyboard — to make that easier to use. “After this update, we plan to add a couple of really good features geared mostly towards growth and in-app engagement. We’ve observed that personalized content drives conversations, and we’ll leverage that in a very clever way soon to drive conversations on hike. We also plan to ride existing social networks and bring groups of friends on hike,” it adds. |
| Customer Outreach Startup Intercom Raises $6M Round Led By The Social+Capital Partnership Posted: 19 Jun 2013 09:01 AM PDT  Intercom, a startup promising to help online businesses communicate with their customers in a more personalized way, has raised a $6 million Series A. I wrote about the company last month when Facebook’s Paul Adams joined it as its new head of product design. At the time, Adams told me that Intercom’s work matches his own belief that businesses’ interactions with customers have to become more personal and relationship-based. CEO Eoghan McCabe offered a similar vision this week. “Loyalty is magic,” he argued, recalling that the personal service he received at a friend’s chain of coffee shops meant that he’d walk past competing shops and invite friends to this one. “It became kind of clear to me that on the web, you don’t really have those relationships,” he said, aside from “a few little outliers like Zappos who have invested heavily in great service.” In order to enable those kinds of relationships, McCabe said Intercom has a couple of key features. For one thing, he said that businesses usually have to “stitch together” products to run an online help desk, email marketing, customer relationship management, and marketing automation. That’s a flawed approach, because they’re all trying to accomplish the same broad goal — “to provide simple, human service.” So Intercom brings all of that functionality together in one place. Plus, McCabe said that by adding just a few lines of JavaScript to their site, businesses get a natural way to interact with their customers, not just by sending them marketing emails (which often come in at inconvenient times and are ignored), but also at the moment of greatest relevance — “when they’re inside your product.” That all sounds appealing, but are businesses really going to become more personal and less spammy just because they have better tools? “The thing is, no business inherently wants to be spammy,” McCabe said. “It’s shit for business. Even assholes know it’s a dumb thing to do.” The problem, he said, is that there’s “so much friction in the process that you can’t afford to be very targeted and personal.” Eliminate that friction and businesses can do a better job at this stuff. That’s also why McCabe said most of the new funding will go towards improving the product, while also hiring more people to expand Intercom’s own service team. The Series A comes from The Social+Capital Partnership, the firm founded by former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya, with participation from Freestyle Capital and David Sacks, founder and CEO of Yammer. Intercom previously raised $1 million from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, 500 Startups, and others. |
| Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:59 AM PDT  If you thought the “ambient location” craze has passed, prepare to be surprised. A company called SocialRadar is announcing today that it has raised $12.75 million in Series A funding from NEA, Grotech Ventures, and others including Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, Dave Morin and Kevin Colleran for a mobile, location-based people discovery app arriving first on the iPhone. What’s notable about the app, besides the fact that it’s arriving at a time when many have written off “people finders” as passé, is that the company’s founder and CEO is Michael Chasen, the former co-founder and CEO of Blackboard, who stepped down from his position at the company in late 2012, following its $1.64 billion exit to Providence Equity Partners in mid-2011. Blackboard may not be the most beloved learning-management system, but it did establish itself as a leader in the space, which new edtech startups today hope to disrupt. And now, Chasen believes he can push SocialRadar to the top of the “people discovery” heap as well. “One of the interesting things about Blackboard is that even though we were an enterprise software company, we really considered ourselves to be closer to the consumer,” Chasen explains. “I spent all my time on college campuses dealing with students and faculty to help put courses online.” While there, he noticed several interesting trends. Though only 56 percent of U.S. users have online profiles, on college campuses, it’s almost 95 percent. Smartphone penetration is around 60 percent in the U.S., but on college campuses, it’s over 90 percent, he says. Not only are the students more likely to carry these devices, they also use them in different ways. “They’re openly using their smartphones as location beacons and sharing their location with other people, as well as sharing their social information,” he says. But Chasen thought it was strange that although this is now the default behavior (at least within a particular demographic), there isn’t a simple way to just walk into a room, launch an app and find out who’s there and how you’re connected to them. Of course, that’s not entirely true. A number of startups including Highlight, Banjo, Sonar, and more have attacked the location-based, people discovery space with gusto over the past couple of years, with the movement really coming to a head at the annual SXSW event in Austin in 2012. Since then, however, many of the apps have struggled to find mainstream adoption. Some, like Glancee and Glassmap have sold. Others, like Kismet, have moved into new product categories. Intro pivoted. Chasen insists that SocialRadar is different from that lot, though. “I get that those applications use both location and sharing of information,” he says. One of his favorites in the group is Highlight, which he explains runs in the background and, when you’re near someone it thinks you’re interested in, it will give you an alert. “It is certainly a great app for meeting new people nearby that the Highlight algorithm thinks that you should meet, but it doesn’t give you the power to take out your phone when you walk into a room and see who’s around you,” says Chasen. Meanwhile, an app like Sonar – which does in fact tell you which of your friends are near you (and how close by) — Chasen describes as just a “straight list of people,” accompanied by others who are friends of friends. SocialRadar will instead focus on not just who’s nearby, but how you know them. For example, it would show you people who you work with, people you went to college with, and so on, not just names. But the other big differentiator between SocialRadar and the other apps, which often mine publicly available check-in data to find those nearby connections or have disregarded real privacy concerns, is that SocialRadar is meant to offer users more control. Users can choose to share their location with all others, with friends only, or stay anonymous. Users can also control how the app is run, choosing whether or not it’s background-enabled. That’s something that addresses one of the major pain points for end users of other location-based people finders like Highlight, which was said to have negative impacts on battery drain. And SocialRadar will allow for custom alerts, letting you tell it when to bother you with notifications and which people or groups you’re interested in tracking. (E.g. when my best friend is nearby, when a fellow frat brother is in town, when my co-workers are at this event, etc.) These differences, Chasen claims, will allow SocialRadar to succeed where others have stagnated. “There were hundreds of social networks before Facebook came out,” he says. “A lot of these other apps in the space I consider to be version one, toe-in-the-water. I wouldn’t even necessarily even put them in the same circle of competitors.” Them’s fighting words. SocialRadar, now a 10-person team based in Washington, D.C., is announcing its funding today, but the company was only formally founded eight weeks ago. However, the technology has been in development for much longer, Chasen says. Still, it’s very early days. “We got office space seven or eight weeks ago, and I was literally building chairs in my office three weeks ago,” he says with a laugh. (Side note: at Blackboard, Chasen says they had so many people, he had a division of the company that built office furniture. How things have changed for him now.) The iPhone version of SocialRadar will arrive in beta in a couple of weeks. |
| After 80M Installs, MoboTap Updates Its Dolphin Browser To Highlight HTML5 Apps Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:47 AM PDT  Long-time Android fans (fandroids?) will probably be familiar with Dolphin, the third-party browser that first made a name for itself during the ways when the stock Android browser left much to be desired. It's been making some considerable strides over the past year whether you noticed or not, and today the team at MoboTap have pushed out yet another substantial update into the Google Play store. The new build plays home to a handful of significant UI tweaks — users now have one swipe access to gesture and voice commands, and can drill down their search results to focus solely on results from sites like Amazon, eBay, and YouTube. The biggest addition to the mix though? A HTML5 web app repository that gets featured prominently when you first fire up the browser. It may not seem like a huge leap for the company considering just how strongly it's tried to play up its speedy HTML5 rendering over the past year, but Mobotap hopes that providing quick access to rich web apps will change how people interact with their phone's browser. “We want Dolphin to be people’s second homescreen,” MoboTap corporate strategy head Edith Yeung told me. "You don't actually need to run all these native apps, you just run things in the browser." MoboTap says they've got "over 200" web apps indexed in their storefront, all of which can be added to the browser's speed dial screen and slotted into different folders for quick access. Once you've got the speed dial loaded up with links it bears a passing resemblance to your typical Android homescreen, but their vision of a rich smartphone experience being contained within a browser hasn't been achieved just yet. Yeung concedes that it's very much a work in progress though, and that the company is working to make this particular sea change as smooth as possible — they've made their share of drastic changes in the past, much to the chagrin of unsuspecting users. So what's next in MoboTap's push to proliferate HTML5? So far we’ve seen a handful of gutsy companies make a case for the web as a platform — Google is still doggedly pushing the concept with ChromeOS and some frankly impressive hardware, while Mozilla’s Firefox OS is being loaded onto entry-level smartphones in anticipation of an impending launch this summer. That sort of hardware-inclusive approach is one hasn't been on the table thanks to MoboTap's size, but as far as they're concerned branching into hardware is problematic unless you're tremendously well-connected. "We have a very good relationship with the people at Firefox, but we have a very different theory," Yeung added. "Firefox likes to have complete control, which is great, but from our experience working with the OEM, it'll be different for any OEM to commit to any significant volume of phones." Instead, the company has been spending its time and resources trying to ink potentially fruitful pre-install deals with carriers (and especially big players in southeast Asia) — MoboTap linked up with KDDI to pre-load the browser on a slew of Japanese Android phones, and it quietly locked up a similar deal with China Telecom back in January. So far, the strategy seems to be working — MoboTap confirmed that Dolphin has already been installed on over 80 million devices across the globe, though the company wouldn’t break down how many downloads came from users who found the app on their own and installs stemming from pre-install partnerships. |
| Twitter The Ad Player Wants To Push More TV Buttons, Adds Viacom To Its Partner List Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:41 AM PDT  The Cannes Lions mega advertising event is in full swing today in the south of France and while Twitter is marking its first year with an official presence there with a big sign at the entrance to the main venue (pictured here), and a big data keynote (led by Twitter’s new chief media scientist Deb Roy) to go along with it, it’s also continuing to ink deals. The latest is with Viacom, which joins ESPN, Fox and Discovery among the broadcasters who will link up ads on Twitter’s platform to ads they’re running alongside their programs. The idea behind Twitter’s ad targeting platform Amplify, first launched in May, is to create ever more, and smarter, links between the two screens to better capture the ever-fickle consumer. Video will be a key feature of Amplify, and is another reminder of why other social media platforms like Facebook are also making video moves (with its hot photo property Instagram expected to add video services very soon). Twitter’s first Viacom deal is picking an easy target: the two will create social video campaigns that will run on Twitter during the popular MTV Video Music Awards on August 25. Last year’s Video Music Awards, Twitter says, was the most popular news event on its platform last year, with 52 million votes cast via Tweets for the “Most Sharable Video” and the show itself generating 14.7 million Tweets. The biggest peak of the night went to the moment cheesy manufactured pop band One Direction won Best Pop Video with 98,307 Tweets per minute, Viacom notes. That says quite a lot about how Twitter pitches itself as mainstream, and also about how it gets used. The aim will be, in future, for at least some of those tweets — if not all — to get linked up in two ways. One will be in terms of analytics to help give advertisers and TV companies an idea of what their viewers are interested in. The other will be to figure out when and where they are most likely to see an ad, based on their interactions on Twitter. “Our technology has automated ad detection. We know where and when each national commercial airs,” Roy noted today during his Cannes Lions presentation. “It’s no accident that Twitter [has] emerged as the prime platform for social soundtrack. It’s live [and] goes hand in hand with TV,” he added later. Roy, an associate professor at MIT’s Media Lab, came to Twitter via the company’s acquisition of BlueFin Labs, where he was the co-founder, and he made liberal use of his big data chops, with visuals of what he called the “social soundtrack” for different locations that visualized the “noise” coming from them across different times of day. This is more to try to indicate that this works than to give any huge insight. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for example, the highlighted sections indicate times when people are tweeting less. Those coincide with calls to prayer, he noted: Going down the line, future Viacom campaigns will also involve social video — likely appearing the form of Twitter cards — which will take place around events on VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, COMEDY CENTRAL, TV Land and Spike and more. “The VMAs virtually pioneered the social TV moment, triggering a demand among marketers to tap into the fan conversations and trending topics that Viacom networks create every day,” Jeff Lucas, Head of Sales, Music and Entertainment, Viacom Media Networks, said in a statement. “Through this partnership, we’re allowing marketers to insert their brands seamlessly into the torrent of fan activity and engagement around our networks on Twitter.” “As events happen in life, we continue to see Twitter as the place people share those moments, especially when those events happen on TV,” Adam Bain, President of Global Revenue at Twitter, added also in the news release. Image: Twitter |
| Keen On… Silicon Valley: How We Need To Scale Down Our Self-Regard And Grow Up Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:30 AM PDT  Oh dear, it hasn’t been a good few weeks for Silicon Valley. Along with the NSA scandal, there appears to be more and more criticism of Big Tech from mainstream, heavyweight American journalists like Nicholas Thompson and Paul Krugman. And leading the charge in this Silicon Valley bashing is the New Yorker staff writer and award-winning author George Packer. In both his new book, The Unwinding, and particularly in his recent New Yorker story “Change The World”, Packer warns that the love affair is over and Silicon Valley has lost its resonance with the rest of America. Packer should know. He grew up in Mountain View when it was a sleepy little town in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, not much different from any other middle class American community. But now, Packer told me, the “massive wealth” in Mountain View and the rest of Silicon Valley makes it “as far from North Carolina as Burma.” So what needs to change in Silicon Valley, I asked Packer, if it is to make itself relevant once again with the rest of America. Firstly, Packer told me, Silicon Valley needs to develop “daring” and “adventurous” technological advances that solve big problems. And secondly, he says, we’ve got to “scale down” our “self-regard” and recognize that we aren’t essentially different from any other successful industry and thus aren’t really changing the world. So are we going to listen to the advice of grown-ups like George Packer? Or are we going to continue to build products designed to make life more efficient for privileged 20-year-olds, thereby making ourselves more and more irrelevant to the needs of ordinary Americans? |
| Gracenote's New TV Sync API Could Spawn Indie Second-Screen Apps Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:15 AM PDT  Imagine watching a classic mystery film or seasons of Lost while using a second-screen app that gives you unofficial insights and conspiracy theories as their plots move along. That’s the promise of Gracenote’s new audio fingerprinting API that allows apps to hear your TV so they can show you content related to the exact moment you’re viewing. Gracenote is also launching the “eyeQ API” which lets developers draw on local and national TV listings in 28 countries and 30 languages, as well as bonus content. It could let people build a better TV guide experience than the channel by time grid. I’d personally like to see guides sorted by popularity or what your friends are watching. It will demo the APIs at next week’s TV Of Tomorrow conference. Founded in 1998 and backed by Sequoia, you might know Gracenote from its technology for identifying song and artist names when you put you put a burned CD into iTunes. Its new “Entourage API” relies on a similar database of audio fingerprints, but for around one million films and television shows. The API takes the television audio pulled in from a user phone, tablet, or computer microphone and matches it against that database to tell the app the current timestamp of the video in progress. Companies like the Syfy channel are already using it to power companion apps like one for its new show Defiance, but I see even bigger potential for independent developers. It solves a big problem for second-screen app makers who’ve typically had to rely on audio watermarks to sync their apps to video. Watermarks are a crummy system for syncing. First, the content providers need to have watermarked their own videos. Some licensing agreements from the content owners don’t allow any modifications, and it takes work, meaning not everything you see on TV is compatible with watermark-based second screen apps. Then there’s the fact that watermarks are audible in some cases, annoying the viewer. A user has to wait until a watermark is played for their app to sync, which could miss the cue if it’s too loud in the room. Gracenote’s API can identify a video from any part of its audio and doesn’t require content to be modified or watermarked. Gracenote’s president Stephen White tells me “Audio fingerprinting is the most elegant solution. It’s the easiest for broadcasters since it doesn’t require content to be modified, and it doesn’t require viewers to hear some beep every ten minutes.” Audio fingerprinting also means you don’t need anyone’s permission to build your own TV companion apps. Provide your expert amateur analysis, build companion games, or do whatever you want. Technology is helping the public reclaim what was once purely a top-down broadcast medium and give it their own spin through the second screen. |
| Men's Clothing Startup Combat Gent Raises $1.84 Million From Tony Hsieh's VegasTechFund And Others Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Men’s clothing retailer Combat Gent wants to be the place where young people turn when they need a new suit or dress shirt for work. To do so, it’s raised $1.84 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Tony Hsieh’s VegasTechFund, MHS Capital, Naxuri Capital, Blazer Ventures, Point Nine Capital, and Flint and Tinder’s Jake Bornstein. More and more, customers are getting comfortable shopping for clothes online. Emboldened by better choice and lower prices, smart shoppers are finding high-quality alternatives to department store clothing from sites that specialize in certain fashions or labels. And then there are startups like Combat Gent, which are creating their own line of clothing options. Combat Gent was founded with the idea of providing dudes entering their first jobs with a high-quality, low-cost alternative to clothes they would find in shopping malls or department stores. The company sources its own materials and production, and has designed its own line of basic, good-looking business attire. It was able to do that because its co-founders have deep experience in men’s fashion and tailoring. Co-founders Vishaal and Mo Melwani are cousins who grew up surrounded by fashion, as their parents ran the Las Vegas and Los Angeles Versace boutiques. With that background, they felt confident that they could build a new line of fashionable men’s workwear at affordable prices. Shirts start at $25, with suits costing $160. That is priced so that even customers just getting their start in the business world will be able to afford a good-looking outfit for work or formal occasions. Even better, the company has a 30-day return policy for all its clothing, with shipping free in both directions. With the new funding, the Combat Gent founders hope to expand their offerings — including a series of high-quality Italian cotton shirts that will run $40. It’s also looking at potentially expanding internationally. Point Nine Capital is based in Berlin and signals the company’s interest in entering the European market. Along with the funding news, the company announced that its founders had been named partners at FT Accelerator, a program devoted to helping startups focusing on fashion and technology. That follows their participation in the accelerator, and FT Accelerator's Enrico Beltramini joining Combat Gent as chairman of the board. |
| Feedly Cloud Goes Live To Replace Google Reader's Backend, Power New Web Version Of Feedly's App Posted: 19 Jun 2013 07:59 AM PDT  In 10 days, Google’s RSS feed-reading service Google Reader will shut down for good. In its wake, developers working on products in the RSS ecosystem have been stepping up to deliver apps, tools and other services to fill the void. Today, one of the frontrunners, Feedly, is transforming itself from RSS application to RSS platform, with the public debut of Feedly Cloud, the infrastructure that has been powering Feedly’s own apps and those from a small handful of approved developers. That infrastructure will also now power a new, standalone web version of Feedly (one that doesn’t rely on a browser extension), something that’s been among Feedly users’ top requests. The company first announced partnerships with RSS app makers Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader earlier this month, all of which are moving to support the Feedly API ahead of the Google Reader shutdown. For end users of those applications, Google Reader often powered the backend of their feed-reading experience, but the front end (the visual interface) was handled by a third party. Now those users can seamlessly transition away from Google Reader dependence, without any extra effort on their part. Feedly, through its "Normandy" project,” has been working to clone the Reader API, and it’s now running that on Google’s App Engine platform. Today, in addition to Feedly’s own apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and now web, as well as those select third-party partners listed above, the company is making its backend infrastructure more broadly available. It’s adding new Feedly Cloud partners IFTTT, Sprout Social, gNewsReader for BlackBerry 10 and Symbian/MeeGo, Press, Pure News Widget, and Meneré, in addition to those above, and will onboard others still in the weeks ahead. Though Feedly once struggled in the shadow of Google Reader, it has emerged in recent weeks as one of the top alternatives for end users in need of a new home for their feeds ahead of Reader’s demise. On the iPhone, Feedly’s app is currently No. 4 in the News section of the iOS App Store in the U.S., according to rankings from Distimo, and it’s No. 6 on Android. And while its overall ranking in the top charts has been sometimes sporadic, it has consistently stayed at the top of the news section in both stores for several months. Feedly says it now reaches 12 million users, up from 4 million pre-Reader retirement. Millions of new users have come to the service, and, more importantly, the company says that 68 percent of new users become weekly actives. Maybe 12 million users is a drop in the bucket for a web giant like Google, but for a small startup, these are notable numbers. However, Digg.com is preparing to launch its own RSS reader, too, just before Reader’s shutdown, which could change the current landscape if it’s any good. Ahead of today’s public launch of Feedly Cloud, Feedly has been processing over 25 million RSS feeds daily, accounting for billions of articles, and has seen over 200 developers getting in touch to request access to the Feedly API. The new version of Feedly on the web is live now. |
| The Open Source RepRap Simpson 3D Printer Design Reduces Friction, Uses Less “Vitamins” Posted: 19 Jun 2013 07:58 AM PDT  This is the Grounded Experimental Delta 3D printer, aka the Simpson, a project built by computer science teacher Nicholas Seward that does away with the excess frames, pulleys, and hardware associated with earlier models. Seward wanted a machine that could print itself and used “less vitamins,” namely metal parts that the machine couldn’t create from scratch. There are still motors and controllers, but there are fewer in this model than in any other I’ve seen. Does it work? In the video below we see the Simpson in action. Seward named his bot after George Gaylord Simpson, the creator of the theory of quantum evolution, and I’d say this bot is an interesting leap forward. The motion of the arms, in this case, is far more organic than the traditional linear gantry style devices I’ve seen. Because it uses fewer parts it’s far cheaper to make and because it can build itself it is a true RepRap or “self replicating machine.” Seward writes: "I want a machine that can walk or crawl and hopefully scribble its name. Maybe later the machine will run or skydive and make works of art. This is new territory for me and if I am not messing up then I am not working hard enough." The absolute best thing, however, is how open the RepRap community has been to Seward’s work. In less than a month, Seward went from idea to actual finished project and he is currently able to build smaller “baby” Simpson arms and hopes to print larger arms over the next few weeks. Rather than tear him down, the commenters are quite kind (“Congrats on getting it going. Such a magical moment when you see your creation actually starting to do what it was made to do, and it actually works!” wrote one with no apparent trace of sarcasm). It is the best of 3D printing, the maker movement, and the Internet rolled into one. |
| Rockmelt Brings Its Social Browser To Android With An Overhauled Interface Posted: 19 Jun 2013 07:58 AM PDT  Back when Rockmelt killed off its social-centric desktop browser to focus on mobile, they promised that an Android version was on the way. Today, it arrives. While the Rockmelt app for Android shares the same “core experience” as its iOS counterpart by focusing very, very heavily on a personalized homescreen that brings in content from your social networks and Rockmelt’s curated stuff, they’ve overhauled the UI pretty drastically. Why? “Because Android screens are so much bigger”, Rockmelt co-founder and CTO Tim Howes tells me. On the iPhone, most users don’t have too much trouble reaching their thumb across the entire screen. On any of the many jumbo screen Android phones (like the Galaxy Note or the HTC One), however, reaching the top of the screen means using a second hand, unless you’ve got big ol’ sausage thumbs. With that in mind, Rockmelt’s Android build moves most of its UI elements down to the bottom of the screen. They float around in free space, and fade away as you scroll down the page. Scroll up, however, and the swoop back into place. In landscape mode or on tablets, this UI elements are moved to the lower right corner, so as to be within reach of your thumb. You can see the iOS app and the Android app side-by-side here. Also new to their Android build is a feature that Rockmelt calls “elevator buttons”. As you scroll through your personalized content feed, a button will appear whenever new content has popped up at the top (or whenever you swipe up a few pixels). Tap the button, and you’re taken back up to the top — but you’ll also see a new down arrow button fade into place. Tap that, and you’ll drop back down to exactly where you were before. This feature only seems to work on Rockmelt’s built-in personalized content feed, not elsewhere on the web — which is too bad, really. Rockmelt first launched in 2010 as an attempt to bake all sorts of social media functionality (like sharing, chat, and popular content feeds) into the desktop browser. By December of 2012, they’d started to realize that they just couldn’t compete with the likes of Chrome and Firefox on the desktop; by April of this year, they’d cut their losses on the desktop and shifted their focus to mobile. Rockmelt says around 1.1 million people have tried the service since they relaunched their iOS app a few months ago. Alas, only 1/2 of those people come back the next day. The company has high hopes for Android, though. “In 3 weeks, we had as many iPhone users as we had in 3 months on the iPad,” says Howes. “In 3 days, we had as many on our web-based version as we had on iPhone. We can’t wait to see how the nearly one billion people on Android like it.” I’ve tried both the iOS and Android apps… and, to be honest, I’m not sure I get it. While it definitely has some neat tricks (like a one-swipe ‘Read It Later’ saving feature), I mostly just found myself confused. Then I started getting notifications that strangers had liked the same content that I’d “emoted” (content that I didn’t actually intend to emote with to begin with), and, er, yeah, I was done with Rockmelt. You can find Rockmelt for Android [free] in the Google Play store here. |
| Posted: 19 Jun 2013 07:30 AM PDT  In today’s tech industry, if you ask a startup founder to describe the biggest hurdles that stand between them and total world domination (or at least market penetration), it won’t be long before they begin grumbling about recruiting and the challenging process of hiring top-tier technical talent. The demand is there, and it’s transparent. Every company is looking for great talent, job boards are littered with their listings. But, in recruiting, the supply side of the equation remains opaque. Recruiters still really have no idea whether or not someone is looking for a job — which may potentially explain the recruiting spam in your inbox. With so many companies having experienced this problem first hand, serial entrepreneur Jon Bischke and Squirl co-founder John McGrath co-founded Entelo to help mitigate your recruiting pains. Launched in October last year, Entelo aims to assist companies of all sizes recruit technical talent by way of software that enables HR departments, recruiters and the like to leverage social data to search for and identify great candidates, even if they’re “passive,” meaning they have jobs but just may be looking for new opportunities. Since October, Bischke tells us, the startup has seen more than 80 corporate customers adopt its recruiting software, including familiar names like Box, Groupon, Square and Yelp. To meet this demand, expand its team and expand its predictive analytics engine, Entelo is announcing today that it’s raised $3.5 million in a Series A financing round led by Battery Ventures and with participation from Menlo Ventures. Entelo’s pitch to customers begins, of course, with the fact that it’s a card-carrying member of a new generation of startups hopping on the sexy bandwagon that is Big Data and data mining (“sexy” being a relative term, mind you). Who isn’t mining Big Data these days? All the cool kids are doing it: Waze, Google, Foursquare, Amazon, Yelp, Square, and so on. Bischke and McGrath want to put a new spin on TalentBin and Gild and the like by allowing companies to join it in mining the Internetwebs for the best prospective talent. Said another way: Entelo has built a database of 10 million-plus potential job candidates, tracking the activity and status of each, like, say, their contributions to Github and StackOverflow, their location on Twitter or tweaks to their LinkedIn profile. What differentiates Entelo, according to the co-founders, is that it’s essentially creating a more complete or robust resume than one would typically find on LinkedIn or Facebook. The data on our skills, job titles, achievements and projects is fragmented across a handful of sites, platforms and profiles. By pulling from those that are most relevant to highly-regarded technical talent, Entelo is betting that the resulting profile will hold more value to recruiters than the alternative. Not only that, but the deeper its Big Data goes and the more it hones its predictive analytics, the more it understands the signals and footprints that developers who have just changed jobs or are clearly looking for jobs leave on the Web. And, as it goes, the more it understands those signals, the better it can predict which of those top-tier Facebook engineers are getting antsy. Entelo not only wants to help companies identify passive candidates, but passive candidates that are more likely to be (actually) receptive to their recruiting efforts. The other potential use case Bischke says he’d like to see Entelo applied is in the huge back-log of resumes and applications companies keep on past candidates. While some of them were declined for a good reason, a number of them were probably great candidates, they just didn’t fit the bill for whatever reason. Maybe that’s because they didn’t have enough experience. But, two years later, Bischke wants Entelo to be able to tell companies, “hey, you’d be an idiot if you didn’t take a second look at this woman.” Well, it probably won’t call them an idiot, but you get what I’m saying. For more, find Entelo at home here. |
| Apple TV Finally Gets HBO GO And WatchESPN, iTunes Shoppers Now Buying 800K TV Shows Per Day Posted: 19 Jun 2013 07:13 AM PDT  Apple has added two major new content sources to Apple TV today, via HBO GO and WatchESPN integration. The new streaming services adds a considerable selection of content to the company’s streaming content device, bringing the HBO GO library to the platform, which offers HBO’s entire content library to cable subscribers who have the channel as part of their TV package. WatchESPN likewise offers additional content, including live programming from the sports network, including major golf tournaments, Barclays Premier League, U.S. college sports, tennis and more, as well as recorded shows and access to ESPN cable channel content. Like HBO GO, it’s also available to existing subscribers who have the channel as part of their cable package. Apple also added three new content partners, including Sky News, Crunchyroll and Qello to Apple TV at the same time. This brings some prime international content to the platform, from the UK, Ireland, Japan and other parts of Asia. Qello offers streaming of HD concerts, concert films and documentaries, a nice fit for Apple’s efforts with iTunes music sales via iTunes. Speaking of iTunes, the company also announced that its users have managed to purchase content at a rate of over 800,000 TV shows per day (with over 1 billion total to date), and over 350,000 movies per day (topping 380 million since iTunes started selling them) at this stage, which is a staggering number when you consider the going rate for each isn’t exactly cheap. Apple is still clearly in no danger of being toppled from its perch as a digital media sales giant, in other words, and that’s likely why it’s welcoming more streaming partners to the Apple TV service. Apple hasn’t yet opened up the Apple TV to outside developers, but it is slowly opening the gate for more and more content partners. It’s likely that the company wants to keep control over what appears on the set-top box, perhaps in deference to its existing studio and media partners, and also to ensure that viewers get a reliable, quality experience from whatever they try to view on Apple TV. Whether they’ll continue to stick with this staid approach, or open things up like they did with iOS on the iPhone, remains to be seen. It’s worth noting that this content was previously available via AirPlay on iOS devices, allowing users to beam it to their Apple TVs that way, but removing a step and potential technical/device barrier is always a welcome move when it comes to ease of use. |
| With $1M In Funding, Bunch Aims To Be The Center Of Your In-Depth, Topic-Based Discussions Posted: 19 Jun 2013 07:03 AM PDT  The Internet isn’t lacking for sites and services where people can post their comments and thoughts, but Andrew Sider, co-founder and CEO of a startup called Bunch, argues that there’s still something missing: “How do we connect with people, not around friends, not around social networks, but around a topic that they care about deeply?” After all, Sider said that many of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers probably aren’t passionate about the same things that you are. He acknowledged that online forums have filled this role in the past, but he said those forums are now intimidating to casual users and also kind of uncool. (Other attempts at reinventing the forum include a new startup called Discourse.) “The new reality is, I don’t believe in 20 years our generation will use forums,” Sider said. So Bunch tries to have to combine the accessibility of a social network with a commitment to depth and topic-based groups. When you first sign up, you have to sign in with your Facebook account, so your comments are tied to your real identity. Then you can join the communities that interest you — but you can only join three. After joining, you can view and participate in a stream of conversations around a given topic. Sider said these features should encourage people to only join the communities that they really care about and to post substantive, civil comments there. He added that Bunch is experimenting with other features that encourage depth, such as a bigger comment box and a minimum number of characters in each comment. I liked what I saw in the brief demo that Sider gave me, but I pointed out that it could be a big challenge to recruit a user base that comes from a number of disparate online communities. Sider said his initial strategy is integrating with other social networks — for example, users can cross-post their content between Tumblr and Bunch. (Apparently some of the early beta testers like the quality of conversation on Bunch enough that they’ve started to treat it as their default blogging platform.) Plus, users get a journal page showing their activity across different communities, and it’s visible to non-Bunch members, so you can promote it on other social networks. After all, Sider said that if you’ve got a good conversation going, you want to get other people involved, too. After a closed beta test of about 20,000 users (who have created more than 50 communities), Bunch is opening to the public today. It’s also releasing its iPhone app and announcing that it has raised $1 million in funding from Real Ventures, 500 Startups, BDC Venture Capital, Round 13 Capital, and undisclosed angel investors. |
| Elon Musk Demonstrates The Power Of Transparency With First Tesla Model S Recall Posted: 19 Jun 2013 06:42 AM PDT  Tesla just issued a “partial recall” for its Model S sedan. Per the company blog, some Model S vehicles made between May 10, 2013 and June 8, 2013 might have a defect in the mounting bracket for the left hand latch of the second row. Thus a recall is in place to strengthen this part. It’s a small recall. It’s just a rear seat belt. The news is hardly a blip on most car websites. But this is the first recall for the Model S. And with this news, Tesla is showing the rest of the car industry the proper way to talk to customers. Recalls are huge to-dos for car makers. Ask Jeep. The Chrysler division is currently under fire for millions of Jeeps that have a high risk of, well, catching fire. After months of consumer outrage and pressure from safety groups, Jeep issued a voluntary recall to install a trailer hitch to better protect the vehicle. This recall will no doubt cost the company a fortune, but exploding gas tanks is bad for business. It’s highly likely that Jeep was aware of the issue before the NHTSA started investigating claims in 2010. That’s how the car establishment works. Recalls are dictated by a spreadsheet weighing the cost of a recall verse that of lives lost. Capitalism for the win! If you see something, say something. And that’s what Tesla is doing. Elon Musk’s car startup is a master of public relations, but it’s also doing a lot of things that’s right for the consumer. Like the 2010 Roadster recall, Tesla will contact affected Model S owners to arrange for service. This time around, though, the service needs to be conducted in a service center, so Tesla will pick up the Model S, fix the issue and return it to the owner. Try that with your Jeep. |
| A $100 Watch Can Tell If You've Had Too Much To Drink Posted: 19 Jun 2013 06:40 AM PDT  The Japanese watch company Tokyoflash has long turned heads with their odd (if unreadable) designs but in a first they’ve added a breathalyzer to their Kisai watch, thereby allowing you to see just how drunk you’ve gotten at la Jetée. The video below is a bit, shall we say, obvious: the company hired a charming Scottish man to get drunk. He, in turn, does. He then tests the watch, showing off its various features. In short, the watch has a sobriety game – basically a little test of your hand eye coordination – as well as a real breathalyzer built in. While the readings probably wouldn’t hold up in court, it’s accurate enough for you and your drunk friends. Given the problems I could see associated with passing your watch around so people can blow directly into it, you may want to buy a few for your entire gang. The display on the right of the screen shows 10 different levels of blood alcohol content. A green display showing 0.00‰ means you’re sober. A yellow display showing between 0.41 and 0.60‰ means you’re buzzing. A red display showing 0.61‰ or above means you’re drunk! The watch costs $99 and charges via USB. Thankfully the face is actually readable so it should be a snap to check in every few hours for a round of “Who had more Kirin?” at your local watering hole. |
| Nestio Launches A New Initiative For Landlords And Brokers To Make Rental Listings More Accurate Posted: 19 Jun 2013 06:38 AM PDT  Today Nestio, the same service that helps you sort through and organize rental listings in the hunt for a new apartment, has today announced a brand new initiative to help improve the accuracy of listings across all of the web by offering a comprehensive service for brokers, landlords, and the end-user. In the rough, and quite crowded world of NYC rental listings, TechStars-backed Nestio made a name for itself by taking all the various rental listing services on the web and compiling them in one place. But the service has been quiet of late, working on solving yet another problem for its users. Despite the fact that Nestio offers a huge volume of listings, the service had little to no control over the accuracy of those listings. But to fix it, the company had to start all the way at the bottom of the food chain, with the landlords. See, landlords are currently using a number of outdated systems to update their various touchpoints, including leasing teams, brokers, and their own company website. They use a combination of phone calls, whiteboards, spreadsheets, word docs, and even fax machines to update the world on a various space or unit that’s just become available, or rented. That said, Nestio went quiet for nine months to build out a system to help everyone involved. It’s a web-based tool (optimized for mobile) that lets landlords, brokers and renters update and communicate rental listings in real-time. It looks a little like this: A landlord learns that one of his newly listed apartments has been rented. He updates once on the Nestio platform that Unit 4B has gone off the market, and the leasing team, brokers, and end-users all see the change in real time. Right now, the platform is only ready for the landlord side of the system, but broker functionality (wherein brokers can make their own updates in real time) will be available soon. Nestio has been evangelizing the new product for about six months, and has already landed 15 percent of the NYC landlord market. In the meantime, the team is reaching out to brokers with email blasts promoting the new system, and the open rate is about 76 percent. The new service is available to landlords today, with broker functionality coming soon. Check it out here. |
| Posted: 19 Jun 2013 06:14 AM PDT 
The Velodroom’s tricks are mostly about automating repetitive actions that are normally done manually on most bike lights, including powering on and off, activating brake lights and adapting brightness to current lighting conditions. It does all that while conserving battery via an auto shut-off mechanism that activates the light only when motion is detected, and it has an internal battery with 4x the energy capacity of two AAA batteries, which is rechargeable via USB. Essentially this makes Velodroom a more-or-less fix and forget solution to bike lighting woes, with the added benefit that it actually flares when you start braking, the same way a car’s rear lights do, which is bound to increase safety and visibility at night, especially for riders negotiating traffic in busy urban locations. Plus the variable light levels based on sensors should ensure the battery lasts as long as possible: Velodroom is targeting three months usage on average, or over 100 hours of continuous power when turned on at full brightness. Velodroom is the product of a team that includes Sven Sellik, Andri Laidre, Indrek Rebane, Tavvi Hein and Mihkel Heidelberg, who between them combine extensive experience in product design, electronics, programming and the science of sensors. The startup team wants to eventually reinvent more types of bike accessories, and move the market in general to more hassle-free products and designs, but is starting with the bike light since it’s a near-perfect demonstration of how readily available tech can improve a biker’s life right now. The Kickstarter project has two weeks left in its funding cycle, and is looking for £34,600 (around $54,000 U.S.). Pre-orders for backers start at £35 ($55 U.S.), and shipments should start as early as September 2013 if the startup sticks to its initial targets. Should everything work out according to plan, it’ll be great to see where Velodroom goes next with its high-tech approach to cycling accessories. |
| Turner's Media Camp Announces The Next Five Startups To Go Through Its Media-Centric Incubator Posted: 19 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Last Summer, Turner announced that it was creating a startup incubator focused just on young companies that were developing products for media businesses. The incubator, called Turner Media Camp, would leverage the conglomerate’s vast expertise in video and publishing to find companies with innovative ideas and help them find customers. With networks like TBS, TNT, CNN, and Adult Swim in its portfolio of businesses, the idea was that Turner would be able to provide startups that pass through Media Camp with introductions to key decision makers within its organization and others. In addition to connecting those startups with potential customers, the incubator would also help them refine their products to make them more useful for those media companies based on their feedback. Well it’s a year later, and Turner Media Camp is just starting its second attempt at the program in San Francisco. It’s picked five companies with different products and business ideas to take part in the incubator, which starts today. The five companies are as follows:
Media Camp director Sandy Khaund believes that the program will continue to get better as time goes on, and the incubator improves both the quality and diversity of the companies selected, as well as the programming of the 12-week accelerator. After last year’s class, the team has a better idea of what kinds of companies it was looking to have participate. And, of course, it had a larger number of applicants, thanks to publicity around the inaugural group. While the first Media Camp class had a number of companies focused on social discovery and distribution of content, the new group is a bit more diverse. The addition of new types of creation tools, as well as analytics and presentation startups should provide a wider range of partners for Time Warner networks looking at the class. Also interesting is the fact that for more than half the current group, this is actually not the first accelerator program that they’ve participated in. Cinemacraft is a 500 Startups alum, while Channelmeter just completed the Matter.VC accelerator and Tomorrowish had participated in the Mass Challenge program. Khaund said that’s partly due to Media Camp’s positioning as a sort of “grad school” for media-focused startups. While other incubators are about getting a minimum viable product out the door, “We’re more about where hockey stick makes the turn,” Khaund told me. “As a corporate accelerator, we can bring [companies] to scale pretty quickly, but they have to be ready with their A game.” The new batch of Media Camp companies will spend the next 12 weeks refining their products and talking to media companies, with a San Francisco demo day scheduled for September 12. |
| Posted: 19 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Pindrop Security, a startup that aims to prevent and protect against phone-based fraud, has raised $11 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Citi Ventures, Webb Investment Network, Redpoint and Felicis Ventures participating. The startup previously raised $1 million in seed funding from A16Z and others. Pindrop has developed a caller-ID product that helps detect, report and mitigate phone fraud by identifying key attributes of any phone call including the device used (based on audio analysis), ID, call path, and geographic point of origin. Pindrop says that its technology essentially creates a "fingerprint" that helps clients, such as banks, identify and avoid fraud. Pindrop also offers threat intelligence service that includes a detailed database of fraudulent callers in the world as well as analysis and predictive tools to track phone number reputation as well as a technology that analyzes phone calls to identify fraud by determining the true geographic origin and phone type. As co-founder and George Tech PhD Vijay Balasubramaniyan explains there isn’t a great wat to authenticate who is on the other end of the line of a call other than the series of security questions you get asked each time you call your bank. For example, credit card users activate their card using their phone and on the bank’s end, Caller-ID or Automatic Number Identification (ANI) is used to determine if it is the right customer. However, Pindrop says this information is limited and can be easily manipulated, leaving such services completely broken. A number of well-known financial institutons are already implementing, says A16Z partner Scott Weiss, who will be joining the company’s board. “There is an indomitable appetite for good security technology,” Weiss tells us. “This is not a bandaid, this saves real money for users immediately.” He added that Pindrop can reduce fraud by 20 to 30 percent. Clearly, security is a hot space for venture interest. But it’s also worth noting that Pindrop is a potential acquisition target for any financial institution who wants to own the security behind phone-based fraud detection. Stay tuned. |
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