tech now |
- Airbnb Commits To Fighting New York Regulators In Nigel Warren Case
- Le Web London Hears A Warning - Big Cos. Are About To Start Copying Startup Sharing Strategies [TCTV]
- Google Launches Maps Engine API To Allow Enterprise Developers To More Easily Create, Share And Publish Custom Maps
- Stripe Makes It Easier For Marketplaces To Collect And Distribute Payments To Multiple Accounts
- Google App Engine Adds Kinvey To Power Mobile Backend
- Yahoo Updates The Look Of Search, Bumping Up Results And Adopting A Google-Like Nav Bar
- Custom Goods Marketplace Makeably Raises $650K From Great Oaks, 500 Startups & Others, Shifts Focus To “Remixes”
- ‘Social Infrastructure' Provider Gigya Hires Paul Farmer, A CFO With IPO Experience
- Mobile Wallet Kuapay Gets An Upgrade, Reaches 600 Locations Through Trials With KFC & Others
- OpenBrand Adds Live Comps To Help Designers Show Clients What Their Designs Look Like In The Real World
- betaworks-Backed Tapestry Brings Easier Discovery And A Bit Of Rebranding To The Storytelling App
- Google Glass Should Be Banned For Privacy Reasons Say One In Five UK Residents, Per New Survey
- Watch Out Amazon, Japan's Rakuten Buys E-Commerce Fulfillment Company Webgistix To Expand Further In The US
- HTC Hopes Shrinking The Best Android Phone Available Is The Way To Win
- App-Only Horror Movie “Haunting Melissa” Challenges Traditional Storytelling
- With 35M Unique Viewers A Month, Twitch Hires An In-House Ad Sales Team To Ramp Up Monetization
- Enterprise SEO Platform GinzaMetrics Launches Major Update, Names LaunchRock Co-Founder Sean McCullough As CTO
- Email Management App Boxer Launches To Put You In Control Of Your Inbox
- Pandora Launches New HTML5-Based TV Experience, Starting With Xbox 360 and PS3
- App Annie's Mobile App Intelligence Data Gets A Major Upgrade – Now Available On Web, Updated Daily & Integrated With Tableau
| Airbnb Commits To Fighting New York Regulators In Nigel Warren Case Posted: 05 Jun 2013 09:08 AM PDT  Airbnb is providing legal support in aid of Nigel Warren, a host who recently was fined $2,400 by an administrative law judge. The company, which provides a peer-to-peer marketplace for people to make their homes available to rent to others, says it is committed to fight the ruling “until justice is done.” To recap, two weeks ago the judge issued an interpretation of the “shared space” exception to New York's short-term rental restrictions which found that Warren had was in the wrong for making a room in his apartment available for rent on Airbnb. The law in question was originally aimed at landlords who would buy up property to list spaces as hotels, making it illegal for people to rent out space for less than a month. There were exceptions to the law to allow for shared spaces and occupancy. But though Warren only rented his room three times while he was out of town and had a roommate present the whole time, the judge issued a fine for violating the city’s hotel law. It was actually Warren’s landlord who was fined, although he took responsibility for it. And, as a result, Airbnb wasn’t party to the case at the time. Now, however, the company is jumping in with support as Warren and his landlord file an appeal in the case. According to a blog post from public policy head David Hantman, Airbnb expects the case to take a while. He writes that the City often wins cases like this at the first two levels, but it plans to be in it for the long haul, even to the New York trial courts. For Airbnb, getting behind Warren in this case could help set a legal precedent, or possibly to push the local legislature to clarify existing law. Legislation was recently introduced in the NY State Assembly, for instance, that would exempt people renting their own homes — like, you know, Airbnb hosts. While Airbnb is providing legal support to Warren and his landlord, the company says that it won’t be doing this on an individual basis for everyone, and suggests that hosts check the local laws in their jurisdiction before listing their properties. OK! |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2013 09:06 AM PDT  Long-time analyst and noted commentator Jeremiah Owyang, partner at research company Altimeter Group, spoke at Le Web in London today about the so-called ‘sharing economy’ and had a few home truths to impart, especially to big businesses being disrupted by startups. Owyang thinks there are two things going on here. The startups will have to get used to big businesses co-opting ‘sharing’ business models – potentially making and exit to an incumbent harder. But at the same time there could be opportunities for startups to gain important traction by partnering with the big corporate giants. So for instance car makers are waking up to the fact that the car they sell one time could actually be worth US$270 000 in auto sales, or around nine cars, if it was shared. So just having a car used by one owner does not make a lot of sense. So there are lots of opportunity in the sharing economy and big companies are barely now beginning to wake up to it. In his speech he takes about companies ‘becoming a service’, leveraging marketplaces like Airbnb, and providing a platform for your users and customers to build your next set of products. The lessons for startups are obvious – the potential acquirers of ‘share economy’ startups are starting to wise up, and they have people like Owyang advising them. We unpacked some of this in this interview. |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2013 09:04 AM PDT  Google’s Maps Engine, its enterprise-focused service for developers who need to be able to create their own maps based on custom data, launched about two years ago and has been available commercially since last year. Today, Google is adding more functionality to the platform by launching an API for Maps Engine that allows developers to take their custom data, import it into Maps Engine and then use it in their own applications. The idea here, Google tells me, is to let organizations use Google’s fast mapping cloud infrastructure to layer their data on top of Google Maps and share them with their employees and customers. You may be thinking that Google already has a Maps API, but as Dylan Lorimer, Google’s product manager for the Maps Engine API, told me, the regular Maps API mostly focuses on giving developers access to Google’s own mapping content. The Maps Engine API is meant to handle developers’ own data. The whole system, by the way, runs on Spanner, Google’s distributed global database. The API, which was previously considered “experimental,” allows enterprise developers to easily upload, read and modify their data programmatically. Thanks to this new API, Lorimer noted, developers can now create maps and customized applications that align with their brands and also expose their data to any developer they designate. FedEx, for example, has been testing the API for a while now, and part of its store locator is already powered by it today. As FedEx IT manager Pat Doyle told me, the company has been using Maps Engine to power its store locator since January, after it decided to completely rearchitect its system to use Google’s services. The company worked closely with Google on this and some of its ideas flowed into the Maps Engine API, including, for example, an easier way to do server-side sorting for results around a specific location. Using the API, FedEx currently updates its store hours for its more than 50,000 stores every 15 minutes (each store currently has about 150 data points attached to it), so if a power outage or natural disaster closes a store, that will be reflected on the site within minutes. As Doyle noted, the system has been 100 percent reliable so far, and the company’s analytics show that more of its users now find what they are looking for when they use the store locator. You can also see a bit more about how FedEx did this in this video. The API currently only supports a somewhat limited slice of Maps Engines’ features, which also include basic spacial queries and manipulating vector data, but the team plans to expand the API quite a bit in the near future. Lorimer also stressed when I talked to him that Google has always been interested in bringing features like this to the larger developer community — that is, those without a pricey enterprise Maps Engine account. Google has nothing to announce about this right now, but it’s safe to assume that we will hear more about this API in the future. |
| Stripe Makes It Easier For Marketplaces To Collect And Distribute Payments To Multiple Accounts Posted: 05 Jun 2013 09:02 AM PDT  Payments startup Stripe is making an interesting move in the world of marketplaces that should make it significantly easier for collaborative consumption startups to take and process payments. The company is debuting a technology that allows for payments to be distributed to multiple bank accounts. Here’s the problem many marketplaces face with many of the existing technologies. When a buyer of a service (i.e. a person using Lyft for transportation) pays, the money can only be transferred to one account. So Lyft has to have payments sent to their own account, and then sent to the driver (i.e. the seller). With Stripe’s new technology, you can insert a few lines of code into your app, and you will enable the ability to add multiple accounts to where money can be sent to. With the new feature can send bank (ACH) transfers to anyone with a US bank account. To use this feature, a marketplace would charge customers as they normally would. Once they have enabled production transfers via the new API, the marketplace will be able to pay out any number of accounts instead of having funds automatically deposited in one main bank account for distribution. You can collect payee bank account details directly with Stripe’s API or with Stripe.js (which means sensitive details never touch a marketplace’s server). Once you create a recipient, you can transfer funds to them with a single API call. It costs a flat $0.25 per transfer. Co-founder John Collison tells me that marketplaces like Lyft, Sidecar, Exec, and Postmates are the company’s fastest growing segment of enterprise users. It made sense to develop this technology to better suit their needs. In the future, Collison says we can expect additional international expansion beyond the U.S., UK and Ireland. Stripe, which is currently processing millions in transactions every day, just acquired Belgian collaboration startup Kickoff and launched a partnership with Facebook-acquired, mobile app development platform Parse |
| Google App Engine Adds Kinvey To Power Mobile Backend Posted: 05 Jun 2013 08:44 AM PDT  Google is broadening its reach into the mobile app development world today through a partnership with Kinvey, which will provide an enterprise backend-as-a-service (BaaS) layer on top of Google App Engine. With Kinvey, Google App Engine will support iOS, Android and HTML 5. Kinvey, which will integrate with Google's new Mobile Backend Starter, a basic backend platform for Android apps launched on Monday, offers a set of features appealing to enterprise developers who need to integrate their organizations’ data and authentication systems into their mobile apps. Customers will be able to more easily integrate the Kinvey platform into Google App Engine: Kinvey will provide the integrations all the way down to the mobile device, and Google App Engine allows for the app to scale. For example, as explained to me by a Kinvey spokesperson, if a developer wanted to build an app on Kinvey and host the web component, business logic or Data Links on Google App Engine, they'd have to first build the app on App Engine and then manually “wire it up” on Kinvey. Now, developers using Kinvey can deploy directly from Kinvey into App Engine. The reciprocal also holds true. Developers using App Engine can consume Kinvey’s services using the libraries the company built for App Engine. The integration will be completed in the next few months. Kinvey, based in Boston, has had success with helping customers replace hand-stitched, backend systems running middleware on-premise with its service that manages the integrations for them in a cloud environment. Companies like IBM, SAP and Antenna Software made a fortune in this market. Companies like Kinvey provide a cloud-based mobile SDK so companies can connect data sources such as Salesforce.com and Sharepoint. Other companies that play in the BaaS market include StackMob, Usergrid, Appcelerator, FeedHenry, Sencha.io, Applicasa , CloudMine , CloudyRec , iKnode, yorAPI, Buddy and ScottyApp. |
| Yahoo Updates The Look Of Search, Bumping Up Results And Adopting A Google-Like Nav Bar Posted: 05 Jun 2013 08:40 AM PDT  Yahoo has tweaked its search results page today (yes, it still does search, albeit now powered by Microsoft’s Bing), with a visual refresh that’s meant to better emphasize top search results, and that clears up some visual clutter in the navigation bar and additional settings side bar. Yahoo’s redesign may look familiar, because it’s quite similar to the one that Google introduced a couple of years ago. As you can see by Yahoo’s own amazing animated GIF, results now appear higher up on the page, thanks to a single line navigation bar that appears at the top-most edge of the browser window. Yahoo’s branding is also now smaller, and there’s a sign-in area right of the search bar itself. Along the left-hand side you have a simple navigation menu, allowing you to change the search category type, and choose from different time options for results. Yahoo also says there are some improvements on the back-end which should result in faster load times, and notes that the new Navigation bar will spread to other Yahoo properties soon (which is also something Google did before). The page takes most of its cues from the new Yahoo homepage design, which it launched back in February this year. The company says this is just the beginning, and seems to indicate that further changes for Search results will be coming over the course of the next few years. The company has clearly been acquiring enough in terms of new product and talent to make some big changes to all aspects of its business, so maybe we’ll see some Summly summaries make their way to the results page, sort of like they’ve already done on mobile. |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2013 08:31 AM PDT  Brooklyn-based custom-made goods marketplace Makeably launched this past fall as a way to connect buyers with makers and other artisans who can craft unique, one-of-a-kind items ranging from apparel to household goods, and more. Today, the company is announcing a slight tweak to that earlier business model as well as $650,000 in seed funding, led by Great Oaks, with participation from 500 Startups and other angel investors. Founded by ex-Googlers, Ryan Hayward and Anastasia Leng, the angel investment included all of Leng’s former managers at Google, the co-founder tells us, as well as other Google and tech industry execs like Google X’s Obi Felten; Feedburner co-founder Steve Olechowski; Senior Director of Product Management at Flurry, Rahul Bafna; PM Director, Google Display Advertising, Christian Oestlien; Head of Innovation at TalkTalk Max Alexander; Director, Global Marcom for YouTube Anna Bateson; VP of Product Management and Cloud9 Wireless founder Sebastian Tonkin; VP & Head of Product Management, Visa U.K. and Ireland, Brendan Marry; and others. The marketplace initially was reminiscent of CustomMade, in that it also served as a resource for shoppers looking for custom goods. But today the company is relaunching version 2 of its website which puts the focus more on what the startup is calling “remixes,” as opposed to the more direct requests for creations. After the first six weeks of its public debut, Makeably pulled in $10,000 in transactional revenue, Leng says, but when the founders dug into the data they discovered that only around 5 to 10 percent of users were “power creators” – meaning those who came in with very specific ideas of what they wanted, and who generally weren’t constrained by a budget. However, the other 90 percent were just “remixing” the reference point products to their liking. “For example, they would see a design for a necklace they really liked, and would say, ‘can I have this in gold instead of silver?’ or ‘can you make this as earrings instead of a necklaces?’,” explains Leng. “They were remixing along one or two dimensions instead of creating a one-off every single time.” To better cater to the majority of the site’s users, a new version of Makeably has been under testing for a couple of weeks which now features items users can “remix” by selecting their own options and adding special requests via a “Make it yours” side panel to the right of the item. Here, buyers can choose from different materials, designs, sizes, and other changes, as well as input any other detailed requests into a provided form. Leng says that during the testing period, signs indicate this “remix” option is working. Bounce rates are down by half, there’s been an increase in visitors contacting buyers, and the average purchase price has gone up from around $20 to $30 to $80 to $100. The site is now on track to hit $100,000 in transactional revenue in the next month or two, she adds. In addition, maker profiles are being augmented with structured data detailing their skill sets and materials they work with, while also allowing them to showcase photos of works in progress, workspaces, or other projects they plan to work on. Buyers can click on “kudos” buttons to give their praise to these individuals, too, and in a few weeks’ time, they’ll have enhanced profiles of their own which keep track of those clicks. The team hopes that, going forward, Makeably can serve to help makers figure out how to expand beyond the creations they’ve already made, in a way where they’re not having to predict what consumers want, putting it out there, then finding out that no one wants to buy it, says Leng. The maker movement, combined the increasing consumerization of 3D printing technologies, and the growth of crafty marketplaces like Etsy are all pointing to a future where people will become more accustomed to ordering specialized items or simply becoming more involved in the “manufacturing” process in general. But Makeably is arriving during what’s still the early days of that larger shift, so the question it has it not one of whether the company is on the right long-term path, but one of timing. “That is what keeps me up at night,” Leng admits. “It’s not whether ‘does this idea have legs?’ or ‘will this work?’ It’s ‘will we have enough time and runway to really prove our point?’,” she says. But things are changing fast. When the startup began fundraising efforts in January, investors were skeptical about the idea. Upon her return to San Francisco just three weeks ago, they had changed their tune entirely. “I think for the first time they felt like this is a way to make customization really scalable, and it’s not tied to 3D printing,” she says. |
| ‘Social Infrastructure' Provider Gigya Hires Paul Farmer, A CFO With IPO Experience Posted: 05 Jun 2013 07:59 AM PDT  Gigya, which provides social login tools and other social networking and gamification features to customers like Pepsi and Verizon, has hired Paul Farmer as its first chief financial officer. Gigya says Farmer has 30 years of experience and that during his career he managed four initial public offerings. Not that every company he works for goes public — for example, he joined security company Silver Tail Systems last year, a few months before it was acquired by EMC. And before that he was CFO at Narus, which was acquired by Boeing. Still, whenever a company hires a CFO with that kind of experience, tech reporters are contractually obligated to ask if they’re planning for an IPO. CEO Patrick Salyer told me via email, “While we can’t discuss our specific financial plans, Paul is going to really help us scale and his experience guiding later-stage startups towards IPOs is incredibly valuable for us.” Back in February, Gigya told me that it was bringing in tens of millions of dollars in annual sales, and that its tools reached 1.5 billion users. The company is also announcing that it’s reorganizing its products into something that it calls the Connected Consumer Management Suite. It will continue to offer its existing services, but Gigya says the new platform makes room for future products. It sounds like the move also has a lot to do with data. “Through restructuring our platform, we’re giving marketers better, direct access to the data we collect so they can port it into platforms like Marketo, ExactTarget or any of the other vendors in our partner program,” Salyer said. |
| Mobile Wallet Kuapay Gets An Upgrade, Reaches 600 Locations Through Trials With KFC & Others Posted: 05 Jun 2013 07:58 AM PDT  Kuapay, a startup offering a consumer mobile wallet application and accompanying loyalty platform for merchants, is rolling out an upgraded version of its mobile app today. The app focuses on improved speed, security and a new user interface that makes it easier for users to track their credit card details, as well as discover nearby local merchants that support the Kuapay service. Based in Santa Monica, Calif., the company was founded in 2011 by Joaquin Ayuso de Paul, previously the co-founder of Tuenti, which sold to Telefonica for $100 million. The company uses an interesting combination of QR codes, barcodes, NFC or manual entry, any of which can be used at point-of-sale as an alternative to the credit card swipe. For security purposes, the app doesn’t actually transmit the credit card information between the phone and the register. Instead, the company integrates with POS systems like NCR, Micros, Aloha and others to complete the purchases. Security is a big focus for the company, which PIN-protects its app and encrypts financial data in a Kuapay vault, which is also only accessible with device-specific, encrypted tokens. In the case of a lost device, users can remotely disable their accounts via the web, which would prevent anyone from using their credit card data, even if they could get past the PIN. Around this time last year, Kuapay had 40 supporting merchants, mainly in the Santa Monica area. Today, it has grown its worldwide footprint to 600 locations. Instead of targeting the market region by region, however, Kuapay is spreading out in Europe, South America and Latin America, in addition to the U.S. The company is running a pilot program with KFC here in the States, which includes trials in more than 100 KFC stores, a dozen of which are also testing a mobile ordering system that allows customers to pay ahead of their arrival at the store. It’s now piloting trials at two gas stations (76 Gas) which would allow drivers to pay without having to swipe their cards at the pump, too. And it has closed deals with several major retailers in Europe, including two large pizza delivery chains. Meanwhile, in Chile, it has moved into production mode with three banks and the national processor in the country. (The company has $4 million in funding from a single, private investor in Chile, it should be noted). Stateside, Kuapay is being used in Santa Monica, L.A., San Francisco and New York, primarily with small businesses like dry cleaners, coffee shops and bookstores, for example. In the updated version of the application, users can now view all these merchants in their area and view their locations on the map, which is especially helpful in tracking food trucks using the service. Though Kuapay has some significantly sized deals under its wing now, the company’s efforts in attacking a worldwide market instead of growing region by region may find it struggling to gain consumer awareness and adoption. Shoppers already have far too many alternative ways to pay on hand, including Square and its overseas clones, PayPal, Google Wallet, and NFC-based initiatives, such as U.S. carrier-backed Isis, plus mobile payments services from leading credit card companies and banks. None have yet to establish a significant traction at point-of-sale — consumers still just swipe their cards or pay with cash. The fragmented mobile payments market is due for consolidation, which means smaller players like Kuapay may either get swept up by larger firms, or find themselves in need of a new strategy. On that front, Kuapay has another potential area of expertise it could fall back on, as it turns out. The company is supporting e-commerce transactions, too — in Europe with the pizza companies, but with a few major retailers here in the U.S., as well. De Paul says he’s not able to disclose which U.S. e-retailers are on board, saying only that the deals are “in the works” now and we’ll hear more about those soon. |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2013 07:42 AM PDT  This is pretty neat. OpenBrand, the UK/Czech startup that provides a ‘Dropbox for designers‘ and an online space for brands and agencies to manage brand-related design assets, has added the ability to generate “Live Comps.” What is a comp? Well, in this context, it’s referring to a composition that shows what a design will look like in the real world. So, for example, rather than a designer simply sending a client a print-ready design for a business card, a comp could show what that business card will look like in somebody’s hand or as a pile of cards scattered across a table. The idea is to give some notion of scale — and to add a bit of photo-realistic glamour to a design. After all, designers are in the business of selling ideas, too. However, manually creating these types of comps, depending on their complexity, can be quite time-consuming, and as a result it’s sometimes reserved for only the most important clients. That’s the problem that OpenBrand’s Live Comps feature sets out to solve. Live Comps support is fairly extensive and includes anything from prints, business cards, billboards, mobile apps and websites, to more complex shapes such as car wraps, product packaging, or a t-shirt as worn by a model. The feature is available for both OpenBrand’s free Dropbox-esque delivery service and its more comprehensive and paid-for offering that helps designers, agencies and brands collaborate, store and share digital assets. Interestingly, OpenBrand originally planned to use a third-party rendering engine to offer Live Comps, but ended up building out its own technology. The reults of which CEO Mirek Burkon says “are much better and possibilities crazier.” And I have to say the feature does look pretty snazzy. |
| betaworks-Backed Tapestry Brings Easier Discovery And A Bit Of Rebranding To The Storytelling App Posted: 05 Jun 2013 07:02 AM PDT  Tapestry, the digital storytelling platform launched out of betaworks, has been relatively quiet since its inception in November 2012. Today, however, Tapestry is releasing a major update to the app to make content more discoverable, and add more content to the Tapestry platform. Tapestry is an application launched out of betaworks that lets users create forward-moving, linear stories in a simple yet digital atmosphere. In other words, it has the same interactive qualities as digital content, with the focus and forward motion of a book. Those stories can also be consumed within the Tapestry app. The idea here is that Internet wandering, something that BuzzFeed and Techmeme and Gawker have made us all experts in, isn’t always the best way to consume media. Betaworks, being the experimental company it is, has dabbled in all kinds of media consumption, distribution, and even analytics with Digg and Chartbeat. Tapestry, however, is a way to test out the way users approach creating a new kind of digital content and consuming it. With Tapestry 2.0, the app grows up quite a bit. GM Jana Trantow explained that the November launch was more like a beta launch than a real launch, as the app was experimental and meant to test the waters. Since, the platform has accumulated around 2,000 stories, penned by authors ranging from Robin Sloan’s Italics all the way down to amateur works. With today’s update, your favorite stories and authors will be much easier to find, as the company is now adding tags, search and category filters. The update will also push a total of 70 new works to the platform, including the first one from a publisher, as Quirk Books is releasing William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. Version 2.0 of Tapestry adds the ability to subscribe to favorite authors, so as the content library grows, the company is prepping to improve discoverability. Betaworks companies are known to focus on user acquisition before business model, as the program tends to be ahead of the curve in exploring new, unconquered spaces. With Tapestry, the team is only now starting to figure out a business model. For now, the team is working with a few brands to feel out sponsorships, wherein those brands can push Tapestry-style content to their users. Last, but certainly not least, the Tapestry brand is getting a slight overhaul. “When we launched in November, the app was in true prototype form,” said Trantow. “Now we’re ready to actually establish the brand.” Tapestry 2.0 is available now in the App Store for iPhone and iPad. |
| Google Glass Should Be Banned For Privacy Reasons Say One In Five UK Residents, Per New Survey Posted: 05 Jun 2013 07:02 AM PDT  Google Glass isn’t even a product released for public consumption yet and already people are up in arms about its effect on personal privacy. A new survey of around 4,000 UK residents conducted by Rackspace and Goldsmiths at the University of London has found that 20 percent of respondents believe Google Glass should be banned outright, while 61 percent think Glass and other wearable camera devices should at least be regulated. The survey mirrors some early knee-jerk reactions to Google Glass, namely the banning of its use in some bars and casinos. Google itself has already forbidden facial recognition apps on the platform, to make it so that you couldn’t use the thing for stalkery or more sinister purposes, and for a whole host of other sensible reasons. Glass seems to strike many as a little too much like an all-seeing eye, and that’s not a good look when you’re already the product of a company people have privacy qualms about. Plus, in a recent interview Rackspace employee and early Glass evangelist Robert Scoble had trouble convincing BBC’s Jeremy Paxman that “thing on [his] head” could provide any possible advantage. The idea that someone has a camera on their face that could take videos or snap photos relatively surreptitiously is understandably going to give folks pause. And the idea that it’s a way for Google to gather even more information not only about its users, but about potentially everything they see, say and hear, is bound to ruffle the feathers of those who value their personal privacy. But in truth, Glass likely doesn’t encroach too much further on the average person’s privacy than your typical smartphone, especially given the rate at which that tech is progressing. The flipside of the survey also reflects a growing interest in wearable tech in general, however. It found that an estimated 8 million British citizens are already using wearable devices, and that 16 million plan on coming onboard with the trend as it starts to become more common. Seventy-one percent of those who wear the devices feel they have benefitted from them in some way, and 55 percent are using them for health and wellness purposes. Perhaps most interestingly, there’s a strong contingent of people who’d be willing to share data gathered from wearables with third parties, given the right incentive. Twenty-five percent would offer up data to third parties in exchange for health insurance benefits and other incentives, while 35 percent would be willing to strap on a device that shares data with Britain’s National Health Service, which is its publicly-funded health care system. Wearables could increase the quality of care, keep patient records more accurate and up-to-date, and provide early warning of looming health problems. The takeaway is that users are wary of wearable tech, but also willing to put aside their fears in the face of material benefit. Glass could face a lot of FUD before, during and after it launches, but people also clearly see the potential, too. Additional reporting by Natasha Lomas |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT  Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten is acquiring Webgistix, a U.S.-based logistics and services company specializing in fulfillment technology for e-commerce retailers. The acquisition is Rakuten's second logistics investment outside of Japan. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed at this time. Founded in 2001, Webgistix allows e-commerce companies to manage their supply chains with software for order fulfillment, freight management and shipment optimization. The company also owns a strategic network of company-operated fulfillment centers that enable merchants to reach 98 percent of e-commerce customers in the U.S. within 1-2 business days via ground delivery. Essentially, Webgistix is Rakuten’s answer to Amazon Prime in the U.S. Webgistix, which is profitable, took one round of an undisclosed amount of outside funding. Rakuten operates a number of web and mobile properties, chief of which is Rakuten Ichiba, the largest online retailer in Japan. It is also one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world, as measured by sales, and sells in 20 countries, including the U.S. via its marketplace The company has made a number of interesting M&A and investment moves over the past few years, including buying Play.com (the UK property), Buy.com in 2010 (now Rakuten.com), Kobo and, earlier this year, Grommet. Last year, Rakuten led Pinterest's $100 million round. Boosting logistics infrastructure and fulfillment has been a major priority for the marketplace. In August 2012, Rakuten Logistics began offering Rakuten Ichiba Merchants "Rakuten Super Logistics," which includes fulfillment service solutions, incoming/outgoing inventory management, storage, packaging, delivery, customer service and more. In November 2012 Rakuten bought French warehousing automation and logistics company Alpha Direct Services, which helped build out logistics across Europe and Japan. The acquisition of Webgistix will provide warehouse and fulfillment services to US-based Rakuten.com Shopping merchants, says Hiroshi Mikitani, chairman and CEO of Rakuten. “We want to empower merchants to be able to ship anywhere in the world,” he explains. Empowering the merchant, he adds, is part of Rakuten’s focus. That’s why merchants are able to create customizable storefronts on the marketplace. The next piece of the puzzle, says Mikitani, was adding fulfillment. Webgistix’s CEO and founder Joseph DiSorbo explains that the company provides a two-day delivery model that competes directly with Amazon Prime. “U.S. retailers on Rakuten’s platform will reap the benefits similar to Amazon Prime,” he says. While Amazon is a formidable competitor, the “game has not been won on the global marketplace, and Rakuten is empowering merchants in a different way,” DiSorbo says. Whether Mikitani and Rakuten can take on Amazon in a meaningful way is yet to be determined. Clearly, the company has no hesitations in acquiring its way into market share and technologies. As of last year, Rakuten was seeing about $5 billion per year in revenues and is growing fast in mobile. |
| HTC Hopes Shrinking The Best Android Phone Available Is The Way To Win Posted: 05 Jun 2013 06:58 AM PDT  Let’s say you’ve created an incredibly well-received smartphone and need to create another such device to send off into an incredibly competitive market. What do you do? Well, if you’re HTC, the answer is to make another one… but slightly smaller. In line with rumors that have cropped up over the past new weeks, Estonian news site Delfi has obtained some seemingly authentic shots of a tinier version of the HTC One. This smaller version is said to sport a 4.3-inch display (compared to the One’s 4.7-inch panel), 2GB of RAM, a dual-core processor, and the same sort of UltraPixel camera found in the big One. The battle of the not-so-mini Mini phones is heating up, or so it seems. Samsung just officially outed the Galaxy S4 Mini last week ahead of a June 20 press event in London. If all we’re doing is comparing spec sheets, then the mini One appears to have a leg up, but we all know that’s not all it takes to make a winner. It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming, either. Noted phone scooper EvLeaks pointed to the existence of a smaller One (known as the M4) in early May, and frankly it was only a matter of time before HTC tried to take the lauded One formula and apply it to a new spate of devices. Then again, that sort of strategy was what led the company to release a slew of rehashed, hard-to-differentiate phones a few years back, which certainly didn’t help HTC as much as its brass had hoped. Finding the balance between thoughtfully extending a product line and running said product line into the ground is a tricky feat to master, and HTC has never been very good at that. For now though, the company has at least some reason to celebrate. HTC published its May revenues earlier this week, and they seemed surprisingly promising considering the rough seas the HTC has been navigating lately. Pushing out a smaller, hopefully more aggressively priced version of the One could help the Taiwanese OEM pick up some much-needed traction, but hardware is only ever part of the issue. It’s hard not to look at HTC’s executive exodus (news of COO Matt Costello’s departure broke just the other day) and not wonder what the hell is going on over there. |
| App-Only Horror Movie “Haunting Melissa” Challenges Traditional Storytelling Posted: 05 Jun 2013 06:44 AM PDT  “Haunting Melissa” wants to challenge the boundaries of filmmaking by putting a ghost in your (iOS) machine. Created by Neal Edelstein, producer of “The Ring” and “Mulholland Drive,” and Hooked Digital Media, the app-only horror film’s aim is to create a visceral reaction in viewers as soon as they see a push notification for a new chapter on their screen. About a young woman plagued by mysterious noises and apparitions after her mother dies, “Haunting Melissa” delivers episodes of different lengths on a sporadic schedule. Some chapters are just a minute long, while others are 20 minutes. Viewers never know when they will get a push notification to download a new segment, mirroring the uncertainty faced by the movie’s protagonist. As a horror movie fan, I was unsure at first if “Haunting Melissa” would be able to recreate the delightfully creeped-out feeling I get when in a darkened theater. But watching the chapters in the dark with headphones on and my face a few inches away from a small screen reminded me of reading ghost stories while sitting alone in my house late at night, a feeling Edelstein says was deliberate. “You’re holding a window in your hand and for me, it influenced me to tell a story, but you have to change the way the story is told. You have to think about it from other perspectives. Yes, it’s linear, but it’s not a movie in an app. It’s not going to be Netflix or something of that nature,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to jam it into an app and have it digested in one story. I wanted to structure the story differently and challenge technology and challenge how people consume content.” To keep viewers hooked on “Haunting Melissa” even though there isn’t a regular schedule, the creators developed technology to allow them to add dynamic story elements to each chapter. In other words, if viewers re-watch a chapter, they see or hear different things that add new layers to the narrative and help set the atmosphere of the ghost story. Another challenge was how to create a mood for viewers watching the film alone on their iPad or iPhone. Edelstein and his team focused on sound, testing for iOS devices and outputting for stereo instead of 5.1 surround sound systems. ”Haunting Melissa” is like a technologically updated “The Blair Witch Project,” in that it derives much of its atmosphere from the POVs of characters filming or using video chat on their own mobile devices. Edelstein says he was inspired by the 1999 film, as well as “Lake Mungo,” another horror mockumentary. “We had to work to set the tone and suck people in. For me, there was the question of emotional connectivity,” says Edelstein. “When people put headphones on and sit in a dark corner, are they going to be frightened?” Hooked Media Digital will continue to produce app-only films, providing financing for filmmakers, says Edelstein. The company is developing freemium revenue models that will allow them to avoid in-app advertising. Viewers can see chapter 2 for free if they share it on Facebook and a season pass is $6.99. While Edelstein says a horror film was the ideal format to experiment with dynamic storytelling elements, he’s looking forward to working with filmmakers in different genres to see how far the app-only format can be taken and has deals with household names in the works. “We want to empower creative filmmakers to use these devices and this technology. We will help them with that and financing,” says Edelstein. “I think it’s an interesting time in Holly wood because not as many films are getting made, but people are looking for different opportunities. We’re perfectly positioned to take advantage of that.” |
| With 35M Unique Viewers A Month, Twitch Hires An In-House Ad Sales Team To Ramp Up Monetization Posted: 05 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  E-sports streaming startup Twitch has already seen massive growth in its audience since launching to the public just about two years ago. It has more than 35 million unique viewers a month, which is up from 20 million last September. Now it’s hoping to better monetize that audience, with the creation of an in-house sales team to go after big advertisers in the video game industry. The Twitch Media Group is the name of the new team, which is being overseen by chief revenue officer Jonathan Simpson-Bint. It includes SVP of sales Kym Nelson, VP of sales Andy Swanson, and senior sales manager Christina Grushkin, all of whom have experience in the gaming trade press prior to joining Twitch. Nelson had served as VP of west coast sales at IGN Entertainment over the last 10 years, where she led the company’s ad sales and strategic digital marketing programs. Swanson had previously held the role of publisher at Future US’s Games Group, which included magazines such as Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer, and PSM. He also served as senior director of strategic sales at Ubisoft and VP of digital biz dev at GameFly. Grushkin, meanwhile, had served as senior sales manager at Future US. The move to hire in-house came as Twitch has been steadily growing its viewership and its number of broadcasts. In addition to its 35 million unique viewers, the startup also has more than 600,000 unique broadcasters per month. There are more than 4,000 members of the company’s partner program, and viewers tune in for about 1.5 hours of video per day. That’s a lot of content to wrap ads around. “We’re growing extremely fast and we’ve been getting deeper into more complex and interesting relationships with both endemic and non-endemic advertisers,” CRO Simpson-Bint wrote by email. “The best way for us to put the pedal to the metal and really deliver on the unique promise that Twitch offers is to create and sell deeply integrated custom packages — and that’s best done by our own internal sales team.” That internal team will replace an ad sales partnership with CBS interactive that the companies struck last year. According to Simpson-Bint, its internal team is now responsible for almost all of the company’s sales efforts. Last fall, Twitch raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners to go after the e-sports market. Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates also participated in the round. The company, which is based in San Francisco, now hs 80 full-time employees. |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  GinzaMetrics, the Y Combinator graduate and 500 Startups-funded SEO management and content marketing platform, today announced a major update and redesign of its service. With this update, the company is introducing this new design to highlight features like its competitor comparisons, recommendations and a white label solution for its dashboard. The company, which launched in 2010, also announced that it has named Sean McCullough as its new CTO. McCullough was the technical co-founder and CTO of LaunchRock, the popular service for setting up “launching soon” sites and a co-founder of Ping.fm, which Seesmic acquired in 2010. Previous to joining GinzaMetrics, McCullough was also the CTO of Sodisco. As GinzaMetric’s COO Eric O’Brien told me, the team believes McCullough is the right fit for the team (“He is a hard-core engineer and entrepreneur with a penchant for death metal and good drinks,” she said). GinzaMetric’s staff has doubled in size over the last few months and now includes team members in six countries. As O’Brien also noted, the “feature and design updates come from a growing organic request for SEO and content marketing to get it together and become one, including social media and user-generated content.” Keeping SEO, social media and content marketing analytics and practices apart, she argues, “has been a frustration” for many of its clients. The update now also makes GinzaMetrics’ competitor comparisons more accessible for users with the help of high-level graph versions of their data and the ability to drill down to more detailed information. The product’s new page indexing feature, which it also introduced with this update, now allows it to provide daily updates of its recommendations that its users can then act upon to improve their SEO. According to GinzaMetrics CEO Ray Grieselhuber, this update is meant to position GinzaMetrics into the right spot to respond to the rising spend on social and content marketing. "When you build your platform for today's technology, meaning a unified search, social and content view, you can rapidly respond to what customers are really looking for," Grieselhuber said in a statement today. |
| Email Management App Boxer Launches To Put You In Control Of Your Inbox Posted: 05 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Yes, yes, email is still broken. Despite some innovative ideas about how to fix it and some awesome apps that have cropped up over the past several years, too many of us are still slaves to our inboxes, stuck in a Sisyphean cycle of archiving and responding, only to find emails replaced in a matter of hours… or minutes. And lo and behold, here comes another app out to fix it. The latest app to take on the task is Boxer, which was founded by Pyra/Google/Thing Labs/AOL veteran Jason Shellen, along with OtherInbox alum Ian Ragsdale and the team behind email app Taskbox. The app, which goes live today, is designed to give users more powerful task management and to-do options while tackling email. Fundamentally, the Boxer team sees email as a “to-do list that anyone can add an item to.” And so, it seeks to do something about that. Boxer goes beyond just simple email triage — something that Mailbox perfected with its swiping motions for archiving, deleting, and snoozing items in your inbox. Boxer can do that too, but it gives you lots of other options for what you can do with your mail. For instance, users can add an email to a to-do list, and set a date for accomplishing a certain task associated with it. Or, they can make a request of others to handle it. In either case, Boxer lets users create deadlines and assign priorities to items that are placed in these categories. Users can also “like” emails sent by others, quickly letting them know that you’ve received an email. There’s also a list of quick responses you can send. Boxer has provided a basic list of common quick responses, but they can also be customized as well. Unlike Mailbox, which today only works with Gmail and Google Apps, Boxer connects with a number of different email services. That includes Exchange, Gmail and Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, Apple’s iCloud, AOL Mail, and Microsoft’s Hotmail. It also has Dropbox integration, to enable users to automatically share files from their cloud folders. One other big advantage is that Boxer provides detailed profiles of your contacts, integrating information from your Contact Address Book, as well as Facebook or LinkedIn if you’ve connected accounts from those networks. It provides links to their social profiles, as well as quick links to messages they’ve recently sent, and icons for calling, texting, or emailing them. I’ve been using Boxer for just a few hours to test it out*, and while there are things I like about it, at times I found it a bit confusing. Adding ways to quickly respond and notify others that you got their emails was a plus. However, the dashboard for controlling to-dos and requests wasn’t laid out as well as I’d hoped, and frankly, those features just added an extra layer of complexity to the process of sorting through email. If the goal is to make managing email easier, well then, adding another layer of to-dos or requests on top of this already horrible, arduous task just doesn’t seem like the best way of reducing complexity. But hey, maybe that’s just me. I like being able to breeze through mail without adding it to another list and giving it a priority.** Anyway, the team is based in Austin and has seven employees. The Taskbox team had raised about $800,000 in seed funding before working on the new product. == |
| Pandora Launches New HTML5-Based TV Experience, Starting With Xbox 360 and PS3 Posted: 05 Jun 2013 05:30 AM PDT  Pandora today launched a new browser-based interface for TVs that it hopes will help set the standard for using the service in the living room. The first devices to support this new HTML5-based interface are the Xbox 360 and PS3, both of which will finally get their first semi-native implementations of Pandora thanks to this new version. Pandora’s goal, its CTO Tom Conrad told me earlier this week, is to become as ubiquitous as radio is today. In the last few years, Pandora has focused strongly on getting into more cars (it now has partnerships with 23 automotive brands and is available in 90 different car models) and other platforms. About a third of radio listening happens in the home, however, so to drive a path to this goal, the company has to figure out how it can become just as ubiquitous on the large screens that now dominate our living rooms. Already, more than 10 million people have listened to Pandora on their TVs and through TV set-top boxes, but as Conrad noted, to get this to work, the team had to create custom implementations for all of the TVs, set-top boxes and blu-ray players it supports (or give up control and allow the OEMs to create their own experiences). This fragmentation makes it hard for Pandora to quickly innovate and add new features to these platforms, which are often tightly controlled by the OEMs. The hope here, of course, is that more of these platforms will switch to standards-based interfaces over the long run. “The world doesn’t need more proprietary platforms fragmenting the innovative efforts of developers everywhere,” Conrad says in a blog post today. A browser-based version, then, gives the company full control over the experience and thanks to a smart implementation of this system, users can still control the experience with their regular remote controls. This new “10-foot” interface will also allow users to thumb-up and thumb-down tracks, as well as to play, pause and skip songs just like in Pandora’s other apps. If you own an Xbox 360 or PS3, you can now try this new version at tv.pandora.com. |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2013 05:00 AM PDT  The mobile app ecosystem changes quickly, even overnight at times. That’s why today mobile app analytics service App Annie is expanding its paid App Intelligence service to now include daily estimates for downloads and revenues, in addition to the weekly and monthly data it already offered, while also bringing its service to the web. Previously, App Annie had offered raw data to customers in the form of Excel or CSV formatted reports, but its clients wanted something that was easier to access – like the company’s online Store Stats service, for instance, which is available to anyone with a free account. With Intelligence Web, as the new service is being called, paying customers can dig into the data using just their browser, whether on desktop, mobile or tablet. The product looks and feels like Store Stats, but is loaded up with App Annie’s Intelligence data, which is updated overnight. The service also supports all iPhone, iPad and Google Play data for 2012 and 2013, and it supports all app categories on both iOS and Google Play. On iOS, all countries are available, and on Google Play, there are 44 countries offered. App Annie today has 50 percent of the top 100 iOS publishers by revenue using its analytics service, which helps the company maintain data accuracy among the top echelons of the Apple App Store. Across the board, the company is tracking a quarter of a million applications, with 40,000 publishers using the system both as free or paid users. (The company has declined to disclose the free/paid split, however). In addition to bringing its Intelligence service to the web, the company is today launching a service called Intelligence Visualization, too, which uses Tableau to power more in-depth and customizable visualizations of its app data. This offering ships with 25 templates out-of-the-box, but then allows customers to further drill down into downloads and revenue data by a number of factors, including app, publisher, country, category, platform and more. This summer, the Intelligence product will be expanded further to include support for viewing publisher data as well, as opposed to only being able to drill down on the individual apps themselves. The new products speak to App Annie’s interest in targeting a wider customer base than just app developers themselves, having already found some traction with those in marketing and advertising, as well as those in the finance industry – including VC’s who are interested in a mobile app’s early and ongoing traction, for example. In the months ahead, the firm plans to roll out more products to reach some of these groups, we’re told, such as tools that will allow customers to better understand user demographics and how people are using mobile applications. The Intelligence service is aimed at the enterprise market, so pricing varies, but it’s generally a minimum of $15,000 per year, with the average deal size coming in at around six-figures. 12 of the top 15 publishers on iOS by revenue now purchase App Annie data, the company claims, including Tecent, Google, Microsoft and Glu, to name a few. App Annie Intelligence customers won’t have to pay extra for the new web services – it will be bundled into their existing subscriptions going forward. Though the company doesn’t reveal details about the revenue its paying enterprise customer base brings in, you can infer some things by the nature of its funding and subsequent growth. App Annie raised a $6 million Series B round last summer led by Greycroft Partners and including participation from e.ventures, Infinity Venture Partners, Kii Capital and previous investor IDG Capital Partners. The raise brought the company to just around $7 million in outside funding, but today it has grown to 100 employees. |
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