Thursday, June 20, 2013

tech now

tech now

Aiming To Become The ‘Valedictorian' Of Smart Calendar Apps, Tempo Raises $10M

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 09:03 AM PDT

tempo

Tempo, a SRI-incubated smart calendar app that launched in February, is announcing that it has raised a $10 million Series A.

The round was led by Relay Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Relay also led Tempo’s (previously unannounced) $2.5 million seed round, and the company’s other seed investors — Mayfield Fund, Horizon Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, SingTel Innov8, Miramar Venture Partners, SRI International, Golden Venture Partners, Seavest Capital Partners, ENIAC Ventures, Gaurav Garg, and Peter Wagner — participated in the Series A as well.

Relay’s Kevin Talbot, Sierra’s Ben Yu, and SRI’s Norman Winarsky are all joining Tempo’s board of directors.

When founder and CEO Raj Singh discussed the funding with me earlier this week, he reiterated his vision to turn the smart calendar into a platform for a powerful personal assistant app. (That’s one of the reasons why it’s particularly noteworthy that Tempo came out of SRI, which was also the birthplace of the voice-powered personal assistant Siri. Winarsky was a co-founder and board member at Siri.) In other words, by having a user’s schedule information, Tempo can push information to you as you need it.

You can already see some of that vision in the current version of Tempo, which automatically surfaces things like emails, LinkedIn profiles, and driving directions that are relevant to each meeting, but Singh said there’s more to come.

“We think of ourselves as a big data company, and we’re building our understanding of calendar,” Singh said. That’s also why Singh argued that Tempo will win out all the other smart calendar apps that have been emerging, such as Cue and Sunrise. “Don’t get me wrong, there are companies that have won purely because of UI, but you’re going to win this game by being the valedictorian and investing in technology in an unprecedented way.”

Tile Wants You To Stop Losing Important Stuff With Its Bluetooth Tags Plus App Combo

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT

Tile

Startups aiming to tap into the ubiquity of smartphones and extend their reach with additional hardware add-ons (plus an app) are winking rapidly into existence, as the disruptive vanguard for the long-imagined Internet of Things. Connected objects are just smarter with an app on hand to tap into the data. The latest entrant to this nascent space, Tile, has been incubated out of Silicon Valley mobile accelerator Tandem Capital, with $200,000 in funding, and has just kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Selfstarter to raise $20,000 to fund initial production of its connected gizmo.

So what is its connected gizmo? Its Tiles are bluetooth low energy tags designed for attaching to valuable items so that these real-world objects — wallets, bikes, suitcases etc — can be traced if they go missing. “We’ve created a super, super inexpensive device that doesn’t need recharging, that gives GPS-like functionality,” explain Tile co-founders Nick Evans and Mike Farley.

These Tiles are used in conjunction with the Tile app, which allows the user to do things like ring a particular Tile to figure out where they put their keys down, say, or view a map of the last known location the Tile they fixed to their bike was at. Tile’s app also lets users turn on a range view when they are within 100-150 feet of a Tile, so they can try to retrace their steps and find where they dropped their item.

Tile’s creators are hoping to get enough people using its Tiles that the usefulness increases based on a distributed network effect. Each Tile app is capable of picking up the location of any Tile, regardless of its owner. So when a Tile user marks one of their tagged items as lost, the whole network is alerted to be on the hunt for it. Should another Tile user then pass within range of the item their smartphone will record its location and send a notification to the owner of that Tile — without that other Tile user being party to any of this background communication.

Effectively, it’s a crowdsourced scavenger hunt, where players are intentionally kept in the dark about the specific role they are playing so that it’s only the person who’s stuff it actually is who gets sent the info to retrieve it.

It’s a nice idea but one which does require a high density of Tile users to create the network needed for it to work. Evans and Farley stress that initially they won’t be playing up this side of Tile, but rather flagging up functionality that doesn’t require a wide network of users to fly — such as the range finder view and ring a tile features that allow Tile users to figure out where exactly in their house their misplaced keys have gotten to.

Targeting its rollout to particular cities, and perhaps also going after specific communities such as college campuses, is another strategy it’s looking at to ensure it builds out its user-base in a way that enhance the overall usefulness of the service to those users, in the shortest possible time frame.

“Where you lose your items is frequently where your friends and your family also go — so in the house, in the office, at restaurants where you typically go to and what not — so as those people around you join the Tile network your little world is going to get populated, so the most important people that join the network are your friends and family. And that is going to be so beneficial that we see it spreading through word of mouth,” adds Farley.

Each matchbook-sized Tile will cost $25 so it’s not exactly inexpensive enough at this point to encourage people to tag all of their important things. And being a still relatively sizeable slice of hardware, it’s not a very elegant thing to stick on personal mobile electrics like smartphones and laptops. Asked whether Tile might look at creating virtual Tiles for digital items that already contain the sensors required to power its Tiles, so for instance a virtual Tile could be added to a smartphone without the need to attach a physical Tile at all, the co-founders said it is something they are looking at, down the line. Initially though they intend to focus on hardware Tiles.

Each hardware Tile is designed to last one year, with the idea being that users don’t have to worry about replacing its batteries. After around 11 months of use, Tile owners will be sent a notification to return their Tile to the company for recycling. They’ll need to pay to purchase a replacement though. This ongoing cost is where Tile sees its initial business model — making a small margin on each Tile — but the co-founders have other ideas in the pot, including the possibility of licensing their technology to other companies. For instance, high end suitcase makers could incorporate their tag tech directly into bags, so suitcase buyers also get the tracking system as part of the whole package.

Facebook Now Allows Publishers To Highlight Their Pages And Authors' Profiles In Shared Links

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:55 AM PDT

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This isn’t exactly Facebook’s mystery announcement (we’ll still have to wait a little bit for that), but in the shadow of its press event today, Facebook also today made a small but interesting update to its Open Graph tags for media publishers that you’ll likely see in your news feed soon. Publishers can now add two new tags to their HTML that will help Facebook add links to their own Facebook pages and links to the author’s Facebook profile in content previews.

When the publisher tag is set, a “like” button for the publisher’s Facebook page will appear in the content preview whenever an article is shared. The author tag works similarly and will display a “follow” button in the preview that allows Facebook users to follow the author on the site. This, of course, only works if the author has activated Facebook’s Twitter-like follow feature.

All it takes for a publisher to activate this is to add two lines of code to their HTML pages. These tags join Facebook’s other Open Graph tags for displaying article titles, descriptions and associated images.

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Facebook also announced a number of other small changes to its platform. Developers will now have to submit at least two screenshots of their app’s user flow when they submit their apps for review, for example, and they can now suppress the creation of a News Feed story when they create a new event for a page.

YouTube Says It Will Bring Advertisers Into Its Partner Program, Starting This Fall

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:47 AM PDT

youtube logo

YouTube just announced (as part of this week’s Cannes Lions advertising event) that it’s expanding its partner program to include advertisers.

The program already provides the top YouTube content creators with access to resources for improving their production skills and distribution (and as a result improve their monetization).

YouTube says the advertising program will be structured identically to the existing partner program — just, y’know, for advertisers. The program will start in September with a week-long workshop in Los Angeles. Each advertiser will be assigned a partner manager to help them develop their content strategy.

“By inviting advertisers into our partner program, we hope to give them access to resources and expertise that will help them develop even more compelling and authentic content on YouTube," said Lucas Watson, YouTube’s vice president of video online global sales, in the announcement press release.

With this program, YouTube-owner Google seems to be encouraging businesses to create advertising that’s designed specifically for the video site, rather than just repackaging existing TV ads and video content. Those kinds of custom campaigns could potentially be more lucrative for YouTube and its content partners — the company also says it will “facilitate the development of strategic alliances with some of YouTube's top creators” so that advertising and content can be integrated in new ways.

The initial advertising partners are American Express, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and PepsiCo, along with their ad agencies. This is currently just a pilot program, but YouTube plans to expand it to include 100 advertisers by the end of 2014.

Timehop Debuts Sync, A Way To Time Travel Through Your Offline Photo Archives

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:40 AM PDT

timehop-sync

Timehop, the startup dedicated to helping you remember your past in an ever more fast-paced world, is taking its first major step beyond collecting content solely from social media services. The company is now debuting Timehop Sync, a desktop client for Mac and Windows which uploads your photo library, and the memories contained within, to the Timehop service.

Originally a hackathon project that would email you Foursquare checkins from a year ago, the startup has gone through a number of transitions before becoming the product it is today. In early 2012, it rebranded itself from 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo to  Timehop, and began emailing users Facebook status updates, photos they were tagged in, plus Twitter and Instagram posts. Later, after unsuccessfully trying to get email subscribers to transition to the web, co-founder and CEO Jonathan Wegener says the team realized mobile would be a better direction, given that half of Timehop’s emails were already being opened on iPhones.

Though the company declines to provide its user numbers, Wegener did tell us that the iPhone app’s debut was “huge” for Timehop, and the number of shares per user have since increased by 20 times.

“That was really surprising to us – how much of a publishing mindset people have when they’re on the mobile app, versus being in a consumption mode when they were reading their Timehop daily email,” he says.

With Timehop Sync, the plan is to give those users more to share.

“Personally, I have about 13 years of digital photo history, and of my 30,000 photos,  maybe 300 made it to Facebook, Instagram and the other social networks. The vast majority of my photo archive is still offline,” explains Wegener.

“When you take a photo, you’re taking it to look at later. And right now, you rarely go look at your old photos – because it’s overwhelming, because there’s no context, because opening iPhoto and looking at 30,000 photos is going to be an entire day. The big irony is that you take all these photos without ever looking back at them,” he adds.

And since Timehop’s overarching goal is to inspire people to rediscover their past through its “this day in history” bite-sized chunks, the service needed to be able to tap into these private collections.

Using the desktop client itself is simple. You just download the app, install it, and it then automatically starts to sync your photos back to Timehop. By default, the app will upload users’ Pictures folders on Mac and Windows, as well as those stored in iPhoto on Mac. An option to add other folders is also available.

While you can’t granularly pick and choose which photos are uploaded, when they’re shared back with you, they remain private, unless you specifically choose to share them more broadly with your network of friends. Timehop has also implemented some basic logic for handling these larger photo collections, including a means to suppress duplicates and skip over non-meaningful files like screenshots, as well as a way to cluster photos into albums where photos have been taken together at the same time.

Going forward, Timehop will continue to focus on its iPhone app experience, while the email newsletter will remain up-and-running for Android and other non-iPhone users. Wegener says the company is just experimenting too quickly to be able to manage two different platforms (iPhone and Android) right now.

The new Timehop Sync client is available for download here.

Yahoo Closes Its Purchase Of Tumblr For $1.1B, Reconfirms Karp At The Helm Of Social Site

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:24 AM PDT

tumblr-yahoo

In a week where Tumblr CEO David Karp did the rounds at the Cannes Lions advertising confab in France, Yahoo has now confirmed that it has completed its acquisition of the social network and blogging site for $1.1 billion — first announced in May.

As Yahoo said previously, it will keep Tumblr as an independent site, which will continue to be run by founder Karp. Although, in Yahoo’s words, “the product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately by the Tumblr team,” it will nonetheless be adding one billion monthly visitors to Yahoo’s overall online audience, which it will hope to monetize through advertising and other marketing services.

“Tumblr can bring complementary content to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. Yahoo! will support Tumblr’s efforts to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience,” the company noted in today’s statement.

Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, also added in her support: “Tumblr is an incredible company. I'm thrilled to officially welcome David and his team to Yahoo!.”

No updates today on any of Tumblr’s usage numbers, which were put out last month at the time of the deal: over 300 million monthly unique users, and 50 billion blog posts with 75 million more getting added each day.


Online Gadget Retailer Grand St. Goes Mobile By Launching An Android App

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT

Grand-st

Online retailer Grand St. was formed to help customers find interesting new technology from the vast array of new hardware manufacturers out there. Now it’s taking its online store, with one new product each day, and making it available on mobile devices for Android users.

While we’ve seen a significant growth in the number of software products and apps over the years, due to the lower cost of development, building actual physical things has also become easier than ever. With an influx of great hardware hitting the market, Grand St. want to help surface some of the best. So it’s created a curated marketplace of goods its team loves, making one new item available every day.

With the launch of the Grand St. mobile app on the Google Play store today, the startup is looking to take advantage of the large — and growing — number of Android users out there. While the site itself is still in private beta for now, any Android user who downloads the app will be able to log in and purchase items from its online store.

Still, while Android has the lead in pure number of smartphones out there in the wild, we’ve heard over and over how users of the OS tend to lag behind iOS in terms of engagement or mobile commerce. Or at least, that’s what Apple CEO Tim Cook would like us to believe. So when going mobile, why go Android first?

For one thing, it’s the OS that they know best: 80 percent of the Grand St. team has Android devices, and they’ve all been developing apps for the Google-owned OS for the last four years. And many of its users already have Android devices, frequently making inquiries about devices and their availability or compatibility with the OS. In an email, Grand St. co-founder and CEO Amanda Peyton also praised the way Android has evolved over the last two years, saying that its hardware, store experience, and SDK have all seen “incredible improvements” in that time.

“We wanted to create a native commerce experience from scratch that was both beautiful and, from an interface perspective, something that felt different,” she wrote. “We support Android’s commitment to openness and wanted to build a native experience that for once catered to the Android community first.”

Based in New York, Grand St has raised $1.3 million from investors that include First Round Capital, David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk, betaworks, Collaborative Fund, MESA+, Quotidian Ventures, and Undercurrent.


Chartboost Launches Groups Where Game Developers Can Trade Traffic

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT

chartboost

Chartboost, a platform that helps game developers promote each others’ titles, is opening a ‘Groups’ feature where multiple developers that want to partner up from a specific country, incubator (or wherever, really) can do direct deals.

The San Francisco-based company has quietly built a formidable network incorporating 16,000 games and 8 billion ad impressions per month. They started out by facilitating advertising trades between mobile game makers and helping developers cross-promote titles within their own network of apps. They earn revenue by selling remnant inventory.

The company’s CEO Maria Alegre said the company started getting feedback that groups of four or five developers wanted to trade with each other, instead of doing one-to-one deals. She says indie developers might want to partner up in one group, or game makers from a specific geographic region might want to work together.

“We find that these partnerships are usually based around friendships,” she said. “They might have met at this incubator or at GDC [Game Developers' Conference]. Or they might just respect each other’s work.”

Alegre says that direct deals perform better than typical mobile advertising campaigns. A click-through rate on a direct deal between two different developers is about 10.7 percent, compared to 8.1 percent on a regular network. If a developer cross-promotes their own titles to existing players, the click-through rate is even better at 12.7 percent.

She says the practice has become so popular that about 71 percent of the publishers Chartboost works with are doing direct deals.

“Basically, direct deals have become a required tool for any big developer that needs to do user acquisition,” she said.

They also can have a leveling effect on the entire mobile gaming ecosystem, with indie developers being able to partner up and have similar network effects as bigger game developers like King or Kabam.

“The vision of Chartboost is — instead of first having to make enough money to build a platform team or network tech, we’ll give that technology for free to anyone,” Alegre said. “For most developers, it’s never enough of a priority for them to build a platform internally unless they have so many hits in a row, that they have money to invest in it. But we’re democratizing access to the network technology.”

Chartboost, which started out as a bootstrapped effort, eventually grew fast enough that they attracted $19 million in funding from Sequoia Capital earlier this year. They now have more than 60 employees, mainly in San Francisco.

U.K. Video Startup Grabyo Launches Its Ad-Supported Real-Time TV Clip-Sharing Tech With Sky's Next Top Model

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 07:22 AM PDT

Grabyo

A new video-focused startup has just launched a second-screen offering, partnering with TV broadcaster Sky to allow TV viewers to legally share real-time clips of its content. There’s just one supported show at launch — Sky Living's Britain & Ireland's Next Top Model, due to be aired in the U.K. this evening — but Grabyo says it is due to launch with another major UK broadcaster “shortly”. It’s also apparently in discussions with “a number of international broadcasters”.

London-based Grabyo says its platform allows TV broadcasters to extend the monetization of their audience through ad-supported clip-sharing. Its technology ingests real-time TV so when a viewer wants to clip a segment of the show during broadcast it’s a one button operation to grab the last 20 seconds of the content. Clips can then be shared to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Grabyo’s Twitter integration means clips can be viewed inline, as Twitter cards.

For the purposes of the Next Top Model partnership, viewers will be directed from Facebook and Twitter to grabyo.com/sky where they can create and share the clips but Grabyo said its tech can be embedded within apps.  Clipping for the Next Top Model partnership can also be done directly from Facebook, via a tab on show sponsor TRESemme’s Facebook page.

Ads are added to the clips as post-roll. Clips also contain branded stings. Broadcasters like Sky who sign their content up with Grabyo are obviously waiving any copyright claims over the shared content so clip-sharers won’t be hounded by their copyright lawyers.

Grabyo founder and CEO Will Neale tells TechCrunch the attraction of the platform to broadcasters is that it offers a way for them to monetise something their audience is already doing. ”Broadcasters are, and quite understandably, protective over their content.  That said, we’ve had an extremely positive response from broadcasters as we enable them to retain ownership of their content and control the experience, whilst driving social engagement and generating incremental ad revenues,” he says.

“Not only are we helping broadcasters to drive social buzz around their shows, but we are also enabling them to generate incremental ad revenues – by giving brands the opportunity to extend TV sponsorship into social media.  This is very attractive to both broadcasters and brand sponsors.”

Clippers can’t do a great deal with the clips they grab beyond sharing them with their social media buddies — there are no video filters or ‘remix’ options. Frankly that’s probably a step too far for broadcasters at this point. But they are free to add comments and hashtags alongside shared clips.

Asked about the potential to incorporate more creative filters to video clips, to allow viewers to share more personalised pieces of shows, Neale says: “Grabyo is enabling viewers to share professional TV content. As such we believe there is less of a desire to edit and augment content as there might be with amateur video footage.  However, we are open to new ideas provided they are within the confines of what is deemed acceptable by broadcasters and other rights holders.”

Grabyo is self-funded at present. Its technology has been built by the team behind live interactive TV platform ShowCaster, which launched back in fall 2011. In the course of that company’s work with broadcasters it identified a gap in the market for a real-time TV clip-sharing platform — leading it to start building Grabyo.

Over A Year After New Content Policies, “Self-Harm Social Media” Still Thrives

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 07:06 AM PDT

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About a year and a half ago, just in time for National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, Tumblr took a hard stance against blogs on its network that encouraged “self harm.” This includes those that glorify or promote anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders, the company said, as well as those focused on self-mutilation and suicide. The company also said it would revise its Content Policy, and start showing Public Service Announcements (PSAs) when users search for certain keywords on the site, like “thinspo” or “proana,” for example. Other services like Pinterest and Instagram soon followed suit.

Here’s how well that’s working today.

The Challenge

Tumblr, which thrives on the emotional, sometimes diary-like output from a younger demographic who’s shying away from Facebook and the prying eyes of moms, dads, co-workers and bosses, serves as a pseudo-anonymous enclave where people can post, share, opine, vent and dwell on their interests — even when those interests are unhealthy ones.

The company is already well-known for having a “porn problem” — that is, it toes a fine line between permitting adult content but not wanting to host it directly. That’s a whole ‘nother ballgame, as they say, but while viewing pornography can be addictive, it’s not potentially lethal to the viewer.

The same cannot really be said for Tumblr users who are seeking out self-harm content, however.

In the U.S., 20 million women and 10 million men suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some point in their life. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental condition, as the sufferer is literally starving him or herself to death.

In addition to eating disorders, according to Your Voice, the offshoot nonprofit associated with rising mobile network for shared secrets Whisper, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for college students, but 75 percent of that demographic doesn’t seek help for mental health problems.

In other words, the chances for outreach and connection with sufferers are few and far between.

The problem with eating disorders, as well as other mental troubles involving “self-harm,” is that continually being exposed to content that portrays some sort of glorification of the practice involved — whether a rail-thin model or a photo of an arm marked up with cut marks — is extremely toxic to those who are susceptible to the disease or condition.

“We do know that exposure to the kind of content that glorifies dangerous behaviors that are characteristic of those that struggle with eating disorders which can be life-threatening is a real problem — particularly for people who have a genetic predisposition to being vulnerable to eating disorders,” explains Susie Roman, National Eating Disorders Association‘s (NEDA) Director of Programs. She says that social media sites can further entrench the disorder with those who are viewing the images and messages, and it can also delay or prevent them from seeking help or entering into recovery programs.

Tumblr, unfortunately, is the worst offender.

“We hear that Tumblr is where people are constantly seeing content that is very triggering and very harmful, in terms of pro-ana and thinspo images and content. We don’t actually get a lot of complaints about Facebook…we just hear a lot more about Tumblr,” Roman says.

Ashley Womble, Director of Communications for the subsidiary of Mental Health Association of New York City (MHA-NYC), which handles the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, also agrees that by its very nature, Tumblr is home to more self-harm content than others.

“If you type in ‘kill myself’ or ‘suicide’ on Tumblr, you’re going to find some really dark stuff,” she says. “You’re going to find that a lot of people are writing about the suicide ideation online; they’re posting pictures of self harm to what I consider to be a disturbing level. If you type in that same search term on Pinterest, you would not find that. In fact, you might not find anything.”

Her organization, which also works with Facebook, Google and Pinterest, sees more referrals from Tumblr than any other social media site.

Depression, stress and thoughts of suicide are not uncommon among Tumblr’s top demographic, either. “Half of all college students have said that in the last year, they’re either so stressed or so anxious, they’re unable to function,” explains Whisper co-founder Michael Heyward. Most at risk are those who are likely turning to a site like Tumblr in the first place — the bullied, or those who feel outcast or different. LGBT kids are four times more likely to commit suicide, for example. “The numbers are staggering,” Heyward adds.

According to the research team at SimiliarWeb, which studied a sample of 1.6 million Tumblr blogs, only 0.17 percent contained one of the more obvious self-harm tags (e.g. Cutting, Suicide, Self harm, Suicide note, Suicide notes, Suicidal, Suicidal thoughts, Committing suicide, Thinspo, Thins, Anorexia, Anorexic, Thinspiration, Bulimic, Bulimics, Eating disorders, Bulimia, Purge, etc.). If that figure was extrapolated to Tumblr’s overall user base, there would be nearly 200,000 blogs about these subjects. If it included the “alternate” words — the misspellings (“thynspo”) and less obvious terms — that number may be even higher. (Note that SimilarWeb’s study can’t discern the positive self-help blogs from the negative).

Social Media PSAs And Policies

While one could argue that a social media service has no business or responsibility to police the images or posts that appear on its platform, it’s worth noting that when it comes to “self harm” content, all the major sites have taken action.

Pinterest

Last year, Pinterest also came under attack for its growing number of thinspo images around the same time  Tumblr took its big stand. And in the month following Tumblr’s announcement regarding its revised content policy, its plans to suspend non-compliant blogs and run PSAs, Pinterest soon after did the same.

According to Roman, NEDA technically reached out to Pinterest first but the company was already in the process of reaching out to them, as it turned out. She describes Pinterest as having an interest in being proactive, and a “receptive” and “eager” partner.

Like Tumblr, Pinterest posted a revised Acceptable Use Policy where it explicitly spells out what sort of content is prohibited (that which “creates a risk of harm, loss, physical or mental injury, emotional, distress, death, disability, disfigurement, or physical or mental illness to yourself, to any other person, or to any animal.”) However, it did stop short of banning topics altogether because someone searching for “warning signs,” “help,” “support groups,” or “recovery stories” may include those banned terms in searches, a company representative explains.

That being said, Pinterest partners with NEDA and SuicidePreventionLifeline.com to help provide the site with PSAs that run against searches for terms like “proana” or “suicide,” for example (the latter is more dominated by the “Suicide Girls” pinups, we should note).

Instagram

Meanwhile, Instagram, though never having weathered quite as broad a media attack on the matter as Pinterest once did, quickly followed the others’ leads. In April 2012, it also updated its content policy to ban accounts, images or hashtags that glorify, promote or encourage self-harm. And it went a step further, making hashtags like ”thinspiration,” “probulimia” and “proanorexia” no longer searchable. This remains the case today. Plus, a year after the policy was enacted, the site also banned the new hashtags its community had turned to in order to avoid censorship (e.g. misspellings like “thynspo”).

Instagram also partners with NEDA to run PSAs related to eating disorders; for searches related to things like “cutting” or “suicide,” Instagram points users to BeFrienders.org instead. Unlike Pinterest, which more unobtrusively displays its PSAs at the top of its website or in the app’s search-results pages, Instagram actually requires users to click  ”Show Photos” or “Cancel” after reading a pop-up PSA message.

Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, is a bit different. Though the site is not running PSAs against self-harm searches on its newly launched “Graph Search” service, nor on individual communities, it’s highly involved in monitoring content. Simply put, the company attempts to make the most serious self-harm content unfindable by the general public. (A search for “suicide,” for example, sends you to page after page of organizations involved in prevention.)

Its content policy prohibits self-harm like the others, and Facebook offers tools to allow users to report suicidal content, it provides suicide hotline info worldwide, and works with partner organizations to help inform its policies. Though a number of potentially “triggering” groups remain, Facebook has huge teams of moderators to police content related to self harm, hate speech and more, in addition to its automated systems. So while there are pages of “thinspiration,” for instance, there aren’t massive sub-sites (Facebook Pages or communities) with millions of members supporting each other’s decision to starve or kill themselves.

Tumblr Runs Its Own PSAs

When asked for an update on Tumblr’s earlier plans for PSAs, a company representative provided only a brief comment via email: ”We have been and continue to suspend blogs based on reports we receive from our users and partner organizations.” The company never responded to subsequent requests to discuss the matter further by phone, or follow-up questions. The rep added, however, that “there is no plan to run PSAs or any other content on individual user accounts, nor are there planned changes to Tumblr’s content policies.”

Roman corroborated Tumblr’s claim that the site has worked with NEDA in the past, and even provided the organization with a dedicated email address that would allow the group to contact Tumblr of reports coming from its Media Watchdog program. She also says that some of those blogs did get pulled down. However, when pressed to ballpark how many requests were handled in this manner, Roman said there were “dozens.”

That’s not a lot.

Tumblr has more than 116 million blogs, so clearly a “one-off” method like this was not intended to be a long-term solution. The solution is, of course, running those PSAs — the alternative being Facebook’s heavy involvement in content oversight, something that a startup like Tumblr could probably not afford…at least, pre-Yahoo. But it has also struggled to communicate with its non-profit partners about its plans.

NEDA helped Tumblr craft the language for the PSA which Tumblr posted on its staff blog, and provided the company with a list of search terms to run PSAs against, like the terms it has in the past given to Facebook. But a year later, NEDA’s own PSAs still don’t run, despite the company’s assurance to the organization earlier this year that a solution was in the works.

“Because of so many technological challenges, given the magnitude of the content of proana and thinspo content, they were experiencing a lot of problems with being able to address it [with PSAs] on a one-by-one flagged basis,” Roman says of Tumblr’s explanation. “We’re disappointed to see that, a year later, the PSA is not popping up.”

But oddly, Tumblr is running PSAs, NEDA was just not aware of this.

Either the startup had not let NEDA know that PSAs have been running against search terms (they weren’t using NEDA’s text, however) or Tumblr rolled these out very quietly or very recently — perhaps not making a big announcement about its troubled users in advance of the big sale to Yahoo. Today, messages on select Tumblr searches for general terms, like “ana,” “thinspo” or “suicide,” for example, read:

“If you or someone you know is dealing with an eating disorder, self harm issues, or suicidal thoughts, please visit our Counseling & Prevention Resources page for a list of services that may be able to help.”

(Some searches also show no posts when Safe Search is switched on.)

Roman says that NEDA’s earlier contact at Tumblr didn’t answer the company’s questions about the missing PSAs as of just last week, and instead directed her to another Tumblr staffer who also never responded. The nonprofit did not advise on the “Counseling and Prevention Resources” web page or the current PSA, and — since it doesn’t do counseling, actually — would have provided different language about how it would like to be referenced.

However, Womble’s experience with Tumblr has been different. Her suicide prevention organization advised the service to put outreach information on its website and provided Tumblr with a list of terms that match those searching for info on suicide. She doesn’t know when Tumblr began showing the messaging next to searches, but is satisfied that it is doing so now.

Is There Another Way?

Though Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram’s content policies say all the right things, those vulnerable to eating disorders, depression and other mental illnesses have found thriving communities on the sites nonetheless. It’s difficult for sites to keep up as users change their preferred tags. Instagram may have revisited its policies this year to correct for the now-rampant misspellings that are used to bypass search filters, but across it and other sites, searches for misspelled words (“proanna” or “thyn”) or other non-obvious tags (“thigh gap”) will still take you directly to large communities that have seemingly continued on undisturbed.

Whisper, for what it’s worth, is the only service that’s really trying something different. Instead of policing someone’s (unhealthy) thoughts, which may glorify or promote self-harm and then trigger others, the small but growing startup allows the post to appear to go through. But the post doesn’t show up for other Whisper users to view.

“We’re not going to sweep things under the rug. But if you ever say something even remotely suggestive, we remove the posting and watermark it,” Heyward explains. Only the poster can see the watermarked version. The copy reads, “your Whisper has been heard” and directs users to Your Voice for help and offers a hotline number.

For those posts that are borderline – and many are – the service has created a supportive community where negative and trolling content disappears with less than half a minute. “We don’t mess around with banning,” says Heyward.

Today, he believes that other social media sites need to do more. “A lot of people are unwilling to make short-term sacrifices for long-term viability of the business,” he says, pointing out that Myspace also once had a lot of issues around cyber bullying and teen suicide. ”[These sites are] addicted to traffic…they’re not willing to do anything that even remotely alienates a small amount of the audience or that’s going to affect their daily numbers.”

Facebook, however, removes harmful posts all the time. So will Whisper. “It’s the right thing to do morally and ethically,” Heyward says, “and by happenstance, it’s the right thing to do for the business, as well.”

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or 800-931-2237 for the referral helpline offered by NationalEatingDisorders.org. Not in the U.S.? Try Befrienders Worldwide or the International Association for Suicide Prevention.

Image credits: top: Jenni Holma, Getty Images; sad boy: Shutterstock / sokolovsky

Live From Facebook's ‘New Product' Mystery Announcement

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT

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Just last week, a small chunk of the tech press was surprised to find invitations for a Facebook announcement waiting in their mailbox.

“A small team has been working on a big idea,” it read.

The only other thing Facebook would say about the announcement is that they’d be showing a “new product”. No comment on what it might be, or which team it would come from. With that said, we think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect.

We’ll be live at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. where the announcement is scheduled to begin at 10 AM Pacific (12 PM Central, 1 PM Eastern, 6 PM London). We’ll be bringing you the up-to-the-second details from the event as they break and, as always, we’ll have photos and live commentary from the scene leading up to the announcement. So be sure to tune in early — say, 9:30 AM?

SiteScout Acquires IP Developed By Defunct Ad Exchange adBrite

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 06:45 AM PDT

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Ad exchange adBrite shut down earlier this year, but its technology isn’t disappearing entirely — self-serve ad-buying company SiteScout is announcing that it has acquired “certain intellectual property assets” that were developed by adBrite.

Neither the financial terms of the deal nor the specific assets involved are being disclosed. This is purely an IP purchase, SiteScout says — it isn’t hiring any adBrite team members.

When I spoke to SiteScout CEO Paul Mokbel about the deal, he said he isn’t getting into the ad exchange business (exchanges work primarily with publishers, while ad-buying platforms like SiteScout work with advertisers), and instead, his company is “cherry picking different components to integrate into our stack.” He predicted that we’ll start “seeing the fruit of this acquisition” in the next quarter or two, but it also sounds like the company is still figuring out exactly what it’s going to do — in Mokbel’s words, “It’s definitely a win for us, and it’s going to take some time to position it properly.”

He added that he was particularly impressed by adBrite’s ad-serving code, which he described as “phenomenal.”

Mokbel said adBrite had a lot of funding with which to develop its technology (more than $40 million, according to CrunchBase). He didn’t draw the comparison directly, but later in our conversation he noted that SiteScout is entirely bootstrapped, and it now has eight-figure annual revenue — I heard last fall that its revenue for the past year had been $20 million.

Logitech Decides To Retain Its Harmony Remote Division

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 06:38 AM PDT

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Logitech took to the wires today to announce the Harmony Ultimate Hub, a device that turns an iPhone or Android device into a universal remote, is available for purchase. It’s $100.

But more importantly, Logitech also announced that it decided to keep the Harmony division within the company rather than spinning it out into its own company, turning the division, once again, into a startup fighting for attention in the wild electronic forest.

Once upon a time, May 5, 2004 to be exact, Logitech acquired the privately held Intrigue Technologies of Canada, maker of the famed Harmony remote controls, for $29 million in cash. Fast forward nine years. Logitech did the company right, pushing out countless quality products under the Harmony name, cementing it as a leader in the market. However, with growth slowing, Logitech was pondering spinning the division back out into the wild.

As today’s press release states, the company has determined that retaining ownership is in the best interest of its shareholders. Apparently the success of the Harmony Ultimate, a universal remote that merges the touch capability found in a smartphone with the traditional remote controls, changed Logitech’s mind. The new remote “exceeded the company's expectations for customer connections.”

The universal remote, and with it, Harmony products, have been under assault from startups and outside players the last few years. Countless hardware startups have attempted to turn the smartphone into a remote. But a smartphone does not a quality remote make. There’s something comforting about have a physical remote on a coffee table, always willing to change the channel. It’s so much easier than pulling up an app on a smartphone.

It’s not going to get easier for the Harmony division. As more smartphone makers include IR ports within their devices, the competition will get tougher. But if the wonderful Harmony Ultimate and the Harmony Ultimate Hub is any indication, the engineers and product managers at Logitech know what they’re doing.

Vine Has A Head Start, But There's Plenty Of Room For An Instagram Video Win

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 06:34 AM PDT

Instagram super8

Facebook is making an announcement later today that we have heard could do with Instagram, its very popular photo app, getting a video service. If true, Facebook would be entering a crowded market – but one that is nevertheless ripe for the picking, with no single app yet to achieve more than one-tenth of a potential audience.

We got the researchers at Onavo to pull together some statistics for us on how the leading video apps are playing out at the moment, charting what percentage of consumers are accessing these apps each month. (To keep things simple, we kept these numbers restricted to iPhone and U.S.-only.)

Here’s how the market shares of video apps look at the moment:

As you can see, Twitter’s Vine — the newest player on the scene, launching only in January of this year — is far and away the biggest of the top-five video sharing apps. It has 10.7% of all iPhone users monthly. Among the next four biggest — Keek, Cinemagram, Viddy and SocialCam — as of the month of May, not one of them managed to attract more than 0.9% of users. Among those four, Keek is the only one that is not in decline, according to Onavo’s figures.

But Vine’s winning share says something else: it points to how small this market is at the moment. Assuming that most people would not use more than one video app, together all four still make up less than 13% of all iPhone users. On the other hand, as a sign of why Vine specifically might pose a competitive threat to Facebook, it is also the only one of the four video apps that has been growing — and sharply, too.

How much growth is left? Compare the video app proportions to those of photo apps. For all the video apps out there, there are even more photo sharing services, but these are reaching into much bigger proportions of consumers, and bigger overall numbers.

Instagram has been steadily creeping up and is now at 35.5%; while the second-largest, Snapchat, is at just under half that size, at 16.8%; Flickr is at 1.15%; and Facebook’s own camera is at 0.46%. (In the last quarter, Facebook noted that Instagram has now passed 100 million monthly active users, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they updated that number today. That is, if the news is about Instagram.)

While Snapchat is the opposite of a public posting site — the ephemeral quality is something that Facebook itself tried to mimic in its own Poke app — it’s notable that Snapchat lets people take both photos and video. And I don’t think the feature growth will end there: I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it move into more ways of “sharing” pictures longer term, and possibly attracting people away from sites like Instagram. (There’s  another story to tell here, too, about how Yahoo will need to start making good use of all its new acquisitions and talent fast to turn around things like that paltry Flickr mobile audience share. Another time.)

Indeed, while Instagram looks like the clear winner now, we are still far from being in a saturated market in photo apps. Video looks small compared to photo, but when you compare photo app use to social networking app use, it also pales. Facebook, notes Onavo, is currently being used by some 72.40% of users. Twitter is in second at 27.10%, with Pinterest at 10.90% and LinkedIn at 9.65%.

The video opportunity

Video, and specifically video with a social and/or mobile spin, are hot tickets at the moment. For consumer apps and websites, video provides a route to picking up more users, getting those users to spend more time on their networks, and possibly laying the groundwork for brand-friendly advertising. For users, the rise of smartphones with good cameras, combined with a surge of interest to document our lives and share those clips with others over better and faster networks, are all contributing to a boom in the market.

But it’s not at all a sure-fire formula. Lightt, a video taking, editing and sharing app that is popular with Instagrammers, is currently getting a lot of prominence from Apple in the “new and noteworthy” and “photo & video” sections of the App Store. But Lightt didn’t make the top-four cut, Onavo tells me.

We’ll see if that changes. Backed by investors like Maveron; and founded by Alex Mostoufi, who also started up and then sold me.com to Apple, Lightt is still young and may yet have some more flashes left in it. Mostoufi tells me that it’s currently “doubling and sometimes tripling” its user base every week.

Photo: Instagram

Note: I updated the first graphic and subsequent text here to incorporate Keek, which is the second-largest video app after Vine, according to Onavo’s revised figures.

Vine Goes On The Offensive, Teases New Features Ahead Of Instagram Video Launch

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 06:09 AM PDT

Screen Shot 2013-06-20 at 9.07.15 AM

Nice timing, Vine.

As we inch closer to Facebook’s big Instagram press conference today, Vine co-founders Dom Hoffman and Rus Yusopov have taken to Vine (what else?) to show off some new features and UI enhancements that should be coming to the app soon.

As you can see from the Vines (embedded below), things are still relatively unclear. What we can glean from the six-second looping videos is that users may finally be able to create and save Vine drafts before sharing them. This would allow users to start a Vine, save it as a draft, and create other Vines in the meantime.

It’s a must-have feature for the new creation medium, which seems to ask for the passage of time in certain circumstances (like a Vine of you finishing your dinner, for example).

We also see an apparent redesign of the video stream, wherein the camera button moves to the bottom center of the screen and remains in place as you slide down the stream. Vines will pass down the stream one after the other, with no breaks for comments or likes.

It appears as though users have to click into particular Vines that they’d like to comment on, like, or read comments on.

The Verge has also spotted potential category additions to the app. As it stands now, popular hashtags float to the top of the Explore page, along with Editors picks. But the forthcoming update could bring standardized categories like Science & Technology, Comedy, Art, etc.

Clearly, Vine is pushing back against the possibility that Instagram will launch a highly competitive video-sharing service today. But as I’ve said before (and will likely say again), Vine will survive.

Revamped Video Stream/Categories:

Drafts:

A Term Sheet Written In Plain English? Put That In Your Silicon Valley Pipe And Smoke It

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 06:06 AM PDT

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From the painstakingly obvious in retrospect why did nobody think of it before department: London-based early-stage VC Passion Capital has updated its standard Term Sheet so that it’s written entirely in plain English. For those of you who have never had to navigate a venture capital Term Sheet, the document outlining the terms of any proposed investment, they are usually worded by the legal profession, and as a result, dense in legal-gobbledegook.

Why are they written that way, you may ask? Part of the answer is that’s just the way it’s always been done. So, Passion Capital, being one of the newer firms on the European VC block, has decided to buck the trend. And in doing so, the early-stage VC, run by Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero, is inadvertently challenging the rest of the investment community to follow suit.

Put that in your Silicon Valley pipe and smoke it.

The inspiration for dropping the legalise of its Term Sheet came from seeing the way the photo sharing site 500px updated their Terms of Service (TOS) with a second column with explanations written in plain English, says Passion Capital’s Burbidge. However, since, unlike a TOS, the majority, if any, of a Term Sheet isn’t legally binding, Passion realised it could go one step further. “So we knew there was no restriction on us to re-write the whole thing in plain English,” she says.

Of course, in retrospect or to an outsider looking in, the idea seems pretty obvious. Why, therefore, aren’t all Term Sheets written this way? Burbidge notes that some term sheets will have 1-2 clauses that are legally binding (Confidentiality and Exclusivity, for example), so that could be one reason. “But I think generally the main reason is to dress it up,” she says. By using legal jargon it looks a lot more “real” and meaningful and “the formality serves a purpose of making it feel ‘official’ and therefore more important.”

More cynically, it could be argued that a legally-worded term sheet is “also meant to be slightly intimidating,” says Burbidge. “And of course there is the most cynical view which is that when written in legal syntax it gives an advantage in negotiations to the party that understands (or drafted) the language in the first place”.

But, either way, googling archaic legal terms or going down the rabbit hole that is Quora trying to understand the likes of Liquidation Preference, Tag-along and Drag-along, isn’t necessarily the best way for an entrepreneur to spend their time (although, perversely, I quite enjoyed it).

For example, Passion’s new Term Sheet defines Liquidation Preference in these relatively simple terms:

We're not asking for any complex preference rights… but we do ask for a so-called simple 1x liquidation preference. This means that if the company is sold, we'll get the higher of either the amount of our investment or our ownership percentage of the sale value. In the worst case if the company is wound down with very little left, then anything left would be distributed to us as the investor.

“I’d rather take the time saved from having them parse through a legal term sheet and use that to sit down with them to talk about their go to market strategy, user acquisition, hiring the right team members or simplifying the product proposition”, says Burbidge. “Those are the areas where they should really be tested.”

Full Term Sheet embedded below (lawyers, look away now):

FitStar Raises $4M Round Led By Trinity To Make The Best iPad-Led Home Workouts

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 05:48 AM PDT

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FitStar, the San Francisco-based startup that just launched a workout app with Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez, just raised $4 million in a round led by Trinity Ventures to expand its line-up of fitness apps. Earlier investors like Google Ventures also participated.

The round was put together a few months ago before the company launched its flagship app earlier this month. CEO Mike Maser, who came up with the idea while traveling solo out in New Zealand, isn’t sharing specific stats yet on retention or the size of the company’s user base because it’s only been a few weeks. But he did say that users have burned at least a collective 4 million calories through the app.

Maser said the deal with Trinity came together in part because the firm had really been looking for a mobile health-related play for a while.

“They are smart, just genuinely good folks with high integrity,” he said. “They’ve been looking at the space for a long time and they were hungry to make an investment in consumer health. There was a just instant simpatico in what they were looking for in an investment and what we were looking for in a new partner.”

FitStar’s first app is a video workout app where Gonzalez leads users through several dozen exercises that can all be done without the assistance of any equipment or a gym. Unlike classic DVD or home video workouts, the app responds to the user and customizes the difficulty of the exercises based on their fitness level. There’s a simple diagnostic questionnaire at the beginning and then the app will raise the difficulty level over time depending on how committed the user is to the regime.

Since launch, the app was featured in the “Editor’s Choice” category by Apple, and stayed in the top 100 apps for about a week. It’s still sitting in the top 5 for the “Health and Fitness” category in the U.S. That’s pretty normal though because the top free ranks tend to be dominated by games and social networking apps, not health and fitness or productivity titles.

Maser said to expect an iPhone version of the app next. He’s still quiet on when the company will eventually come out with workout apps targeted at different demographics with other fitness celebrities.

FitStar has a freemium monetization model with paid versions that give the user more workouts per week, nutritional guidance and e-mail support. The prices of those paid subscription add-ons range from $4.99 to $11.99 per month.

The other component of the business will be merchandising. FitStar also just opened up a store with branded apparel and books on nutrition. They're also partnering with companies like Kiip, a mobile rewards startup, to offer free Amazon MP3s and other goodies to FitStar users.

“We offer a high fidelity experience that should appeal to apparel makers and food and beverage companies,” Maser said.

FitStar is also backed by Advancit Capital, a VC firm from Viacom and CBS Corporation vice chairman Shari Redstone, and Floodgate.

Fanboys Rejoice, GrabCAD Gets Mechanically Engineered For Android

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 05:07 AM PDT

Viewer - brake

GrabCAD, the online community and cloud-based collaboration tool for mechanical engineers and other stakeholders involved in designing physical products, is adding Android to its arsenal today. Like the company’s existing iOS offering, the Android app enables users to view any of the 200,000 or so 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) models shared by the GrabCAD community, as well as access files stored on GradCAD Workbench, a private space in the cloud for engineers and supply chain partners (and even customers) to share and collaborate on ‘work-in-progress’.

Interestingly, GrabCAD’s CEO Hardi Meybaum says that, despite the consumer mindshare of Apple’s iOS, not least amongst designer types, an Android app was the company’s most requested feature. It turns out, he says, that mechanical engineers tend to use mobile devices powered by Google’s OS, something that I get the impression took GrabCAD slightly by surprise.

However, whichever got out the door first, being present on both of the leading smartphone/tablet platforms would seem to be central to GradCAD’s mission to break down the walls of collaboration for those involved in the design of physical objects. Meybaum characterises the problem when he says that traditional CAD tools “are closed but the process is open”. By that he means that proprietary CAD systems traditionally make it difficult for mechanical engineers and other partners involved in the process, not least in manufacturing, to share 3D models and give feedback as the product develops — partly because everyone involved would need to have access to the originating CAD software, which Meybaum says can cost upwards of $4,000 per-seat.

“But with GrabCAD, anybody can view the work”, he says. In addition, building hardware — which Meybaum notes with a glint in his eye is seeing a renaissance at the moment — is inherently distributed, making remote collaboration a necessity. Moving to the cloud speeds up this process and potentially reduces time to market significantly.

It may seem obvious to those of us who have seen the cloud disrupt other industries and software for the better, though Meybaum says that for CAD files it’s not technically trivial. Getting those 3D models and proprietary file-formats converted so that they are viewable in a web browser or on mobile devices takes some decent engineering chops. To that end, GrabCAD has opened an R&D office in Cambridge, UK, to be closer to some of the traditional CAD software companies, in addition to its Boston, U.S. HQ and an engineering base in Estonia. In fact, it employs 45 staff, including engineers, across all sites.

However, GrabCAD’s Workbench offering, which gets it general release next week, isn’t just about engineering teams being able to share and view 3D models via the cloud. It also supports other file types, such as images/sketches and PDFs, and — crucially — the ability to mark up designs and leave instant feedback. With something like GrabCAD, gone are the days when work is only presented at monthly or weekly team meetings, for example, but can be ongoing no matter where each stakeholder is physically based, including when they are mobile. Update a design, and a manufacturing partner is China could immediately suggest changes, ask questions, or explain any ramifications. That does sound like progress.

Talking of which, GrabCAD now boasts nearly 700,000 engineers registered for its community, up from 250,000 last October, many of which it will hope to turn into paying Workbench customers — although some already are. It’s currently growing at a clip of 2,000 new community members per day, while 240,000 3D models have been shared publicly. As well as Workbench, the startup makes money via crowdsourced ‘challenges’ sponsored by companies such as GE.

Late last year GrabCAD raised an $8.15 million series B round led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from new investor David Sacks (co-founder of Yammer and former chief operating officer of PayPal), and existing investors Atlas Venture, NextView Ventures, and Matrix Partners. This brought GrabCAD's total funding to around $14 million, having previously disclosed a $1.1m seed round, followed by a $4m Series A.

Valar Morghulis, Or, ‘Why I Don't Care That HBO GO Is On Apple TV'

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 04:10 AM PDT

King's_Landing

Warning: there are some minor Game of Thrones spoilers in here, but come on, you should have seen it by now–it's very easy to pirate!

Apple TV got HBO GO and Watch ESPN and some other content yesterday. Cool. Am I supposed to care?

This is a minor product update. Sure, it's great for Apple TV users to get the additional content. But the real story to me is the absurdity that you still need to have cable to (legally) watch HBO.

All spring, I gathered around a TV with a bunch of friends and we'd watch the smash-hit Game of Thrones, naturally, through a friends' parents' HBO GO account on a laptop connected to the TV.

Many of us pay for our own Hulu+, Netflix, Spotify, and other accounts, or at least share them with a sibling. But none of us are willing to pay absurd rates for cable, and thus we can't have HBO GO.

It's asinine that the technology for producing quality content is so incredible (Blackwater Bay, anyone?) and yet we still have to have decades-old technology to access it.

There is clearly a market for a standalone HBO GO app. Netflix began offering online video streaming in 2007. Hulu started up in 2009. In 2010, HBO Go launched. Now, halfway through 2013, I'm supposed to get excited that there *might* be a broadband-only HBO Go in five years?

Pirates of the Iron Islands

HBO does a pretty good job right now–their content is top-notch and the HBO GO interface is great. HBO does a great job of being very lax about multiple sign-ins, to the point that it's a running joke with many of my friends of "whose account are you using" and if you even know that person.

And yet, you still need a cable subscription for any of HBO's content. And good luck if you're not in the U.S.

I know, HBO isn't worried about its record piracy right now; they claim it helps the show’s record ratings (more hype and awareness). And yes, the company has said on multiple occasions that it won’t do a standalone version soon.

This is short-sighted. A massive group of people–from the young, more-Internet savvy and more mobile demographic to, you know, every person not living in America who wants to watch the Starks and Lannisters–are growing accustomed to accessing HBO’s content without paying for it. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is a problem that will grow every year.

HBO receives marketing and sales support (think of those free trials of HBO you get when you sign up for cable), and other major financial incentives from the cable companies.

But tying everything to these old set-top boxes isn't a winning long-term strategy for anyone.

The Iron Throne

Content has been and will be an enormous treasure to fight over. Right now, the Houses Comcast, Time Warner Cable (which hasn’t been affiliated with Time Warner since 2009), Cox, Verizon, and AT&T rule the Seven Kingdoms, and renting cable from them is about as pleasant as being Walder Frey's wedding guest.

Their customers resent them and actively seek a way out. By keeping premium content like HBO tethered to cable subscriptions, these cable companies are protecting their present and very near future. This is exactly how big companies and mature industries get disrupted.

Isn't the whole point of a good business strategy to put yourself in a better position for the future? The cable companies, like mad kings, seem to be trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their customers before their reign ends.

DirecTV is a great example of a network that's actually embracing the 21st century. Their NFL Sunday Ticket, featuring every game and other features like showing every touchdown of the weekend, is extremely popular and has no doubt won them many customers away from the cable companies. Instead of trying to hide this gem in a walled garden, DirecTV offers a web version. This is the way forward.

Monsters & Kings

In Game of Thrones, for those of you who've managed to make it through this entire post without ever seeing an episode, the phrase Valar Morghulis means "all men must die." We aren't sure if the crazed author George R. Martin is going to literally kill every male character, or if a King or Queen will be able to seize the throne long enough to outlast the series.

The cable companies can figure this whole Internet thing out, and quickly, or they will die. It will be a long, slow, annoying death, or pivot out of the content space, but eventually, they'll be gone.

Most of these cable companies are also Internet providers. They have two products: television and Internet; more users want Internet than television, and many would like premium content at the right price, via either platform. The cable companies insist on using premium content to try to prop up cable sales, rather than just switching the premium content to their more popular product, or making it available on both.

I've yet to hear a good rationale for why this can't happen. Because calculator sales will hurt abacus sales?

If you have a choice between $50 for cable, $15 more for HBO, and $80 for Internet ($145) — versus — $122 for faster internet (for video streaming), $15 for HBO, and $8 for Hulu+ or Netflix ($145), which are you going to take? Probably the one with faster Internet.

That’s where the cable companies can survive, and even thrive. But they have to be more flexible and see their premium content (all of their content, really) the way their users do.

In the most recent Thrones’ season finale, Tyrion Lannister ominously notes, "Monsters are dangerous and, just now, kings are dying like flies."

The cable companies are kings right now. But their kingdoms are ripe for the taking. Netflix and Amazon are producing exclusive content to rival HBO and the old guard of Starz and Cinemax. Apple has long been interested in a TV project, the shape and scope (beyond Apple TV) of which is unclear.

The clock is ticking for the cable companies and HBO. Kings are dying like flies. And winter is coming.

Images via, io9, and my own screenshot.

AP Takes A Stake In Bambuser, The Real-Time Mobile Video Service That Helps Eyewitnesses Tell Their Stories

Posted: 20 Jun 2013 01:30 AM PDT

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Bambuser, the upstart mobile video service that has carved out a name for itself as a crucial tool for eyewitnesses to record and transmit footage of major events — be they political uprisings, bombings or a star sighting — is today announcing another step along the route to becoming a part and parcel of the traditional media world. It’s taking an investment from the Associated Press, the storied news organization that works with dozens of newspapers, websites and broadcasters to source and report on the news of the world.

The exact amount has not been disclosed but Sandy MacIntyre, the AP’s global head of video news (who is also joining Bambuser’s board), says it is in the “mid six figures” and is more strategic about where the companies will go together in the longer term.

This is the AP’s first investment in a video-based social media service, but this is not the AP’s first dalliance with Bambuser.

The pair have actually been working together for the last three years; and for the last year, AP reporters have been using Bambuser’s backend to record and then deliver video to its studios from the field; and also to source content from citizen journalists to bolster overall coverage. Notable events that have benefitted from that relationship have included the siege of Homs; video taken by activists inside the Syrian government’s Taftanaz air base; the Oklahoma tornado; the Russian meteor; and the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

“At end of the day we are judged on being first and right so anything that helps us with the speed of delivery or accuracy through crowdsourcing, we will aggressively want to be in that space,” MacIntyre told TechCrunch. He notes that the decision was made to stay away from an outright purchase for now because this part of the news ecosystem is still “at an infant level.”

“We are better doing this together with a startup company,” he adds. “They are experts in their space and doing a partnership makes more sense than trying to master that space ourselves.”

Indeed, one of the big issues in traditional, big media companies is the inability to innovate and move fast enough to keep up with the pace of change; deals like these are one way of tackling that challenge. (The AP, of course is no stranger to that criticism and falling in its shadow.) The tune has changed quite a lot these days. “User-generated video content of live and breaking news is the new frontier of news generation,” MacIntyre says. “Every story that breaks, your first thought is where are the user-generated images. With Bambuser as part of our stable we would expect that kind of coverage to grow in future.”

One of the key advantages with Bambuser, apart from the fact that it is free for regular people to use (only professional news organizations get charged) is that it’s a very strong platform for sourcing content because it works over even the most basic handsets and most basic networks — one of the ironic advantages to first opening for business in 2007 — before the first iPhone had even landed in the market.

The plan will be to build out existing areas of coverage, but also to help Bambuser build out its bigger business model, effectively doing for other news organizations what it has been doing for the AP up to now on an exclusive basis: creating a cost-effective platform that can be used by reporting teams to both record and transmit video footage, and also help source footage that can be authenticated and used alongside that “professional” coverage.

So for now Bambuser will keep its monetizing restricted to a B2B play (and leave to those other news organizations to continue to figure out how to finance their news services), but you can see how, with the flattening of the internet, there could be scope for Bambuser to use investment to grow other aspects of its own platform. Whether it can do this without stepping on its customers’ toes in the process is another question.

“Working so closely with the AP over the last year has proven the huge demand for user-generated video content,” noted Hans Eriksson, executive chairman at Bambuser, in a statement. “This equity investment is an important milestone in Bambuser's journey as it not only brings our two organizations closer, but enables us to share our expertise to an even greater extent.” The company has recently rolled out a new SDK for organizations to more easily embed content from Bambuser on third-party sites — a crucial move to take the service to a wider market.

In this deal to grow its customer base, it looks like the AP will remain a key partner in the process: “Through Bambuser, AP can source UGC video news live from the scene from eyewitnesses exclusively for its broadcast and online publisher customers. This not only ensures that the AP remains the foremost global provider of live video news, but also helps its customers overcome their own UGC challenges,” the AP notes in a statement.

The company does not disclose the size of its user base or revenues, or total past funding. It has raised at least $2.5 million more to date, in addition to the AP’s most recent investment.
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