tech now |
- To Spark Children's Imaginations, Hullabalu Raises $1.8 Million From SV Angel, Great Oaks & Others For iPad Storytelling App
- Microsoft Launches Bing Translator App For Windows With Augmented Reality Translations, Support For 40 Languages
- Amazon's Relational Database Service Hits General Availability, Gets SLA With 99.95% Monthly Uptime Promise
- On Spying, A Deficit Of Trust
- Fashion Brand Cuyana Lands $1.7M From Canaan Partners To Get Women To Buy Fewer, Better Things
- Video Discovery Startup Showyou Launches Channel Platform, Unveils A Revenue Model
- BlackBerry Messenger Reportedly Taking The Cross-Platform Plunge June 27 With Android And iOS App Launches
- Aiming To Be A One-Stop Shop For Social Marketing, Brand Networks Raises $68M In Its First Funding
- Eric Schmidt-Backed Slice Moves Beyond Receipt Tracking With Debut Of Bookshelf, A Social Network For Readers
- Comedy Central Launches Stand-Up App So You Can Watch All Your Favorite Comedians And Discover New Ones
- ‘Uber For Local Home Services' Provider ClubLocal Launches In The Bay Area
- France's Netatmo Raises $5.8M To Extend The Reach Of Its Connected Weather Station
- Social Video Network Keek Passes 45M Users, Adding Over 24M Users Since Vine's Launch
- Box Wants To Help Enterprise App Developers Make Money Via New Monetization Program, Box $rev
- After Pivoting To Be U.S. Only, Mobile Messaging App Lango Adds Topical Emoji To Piggyback On Trends & TV Chit-Chat
- H.Bloom Floral Service Preps To Launch In 5 New Cities, Starting With Boston On June 11
- 7digital Makes A Play To Be The Go-To Streaming Radio Backend As Google And Apple Services Loom
- SnagFilms Launches Updated Website With Social Sharing, But Just In Private Beta
- There Are Two Races In The Mobile Market, Claims Flurry, And Both iOS And Android Can Win
- Fitstar, The Startup Looking To Reinvent The Home Workout From The iPad, Finally Launches
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 09:59 AM PDT  New York-based Hullabalu is launching today with a new take on children’s storytelling – instead of digital books with interactive bits as is now common on iPad, this new tablet app itself is the story where the action progresses as children engage with the magical world Hullabalu introduces. The startup was founded mid-2012 by Suzanne Xie, whose first company Weardrobe was acquired by iLike.com back in 2009, then later sold to Google with iLike where it became Google Boutiques. She more recently launched subscription-based snacks via Lollihop, which closed up in early 2012. With Hullabalu, Xie has leveraged her industry experience and connections to fund her new creation, raising $1.8 million from investors including SV Angel, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Rothenberg Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, as well as angels like Gokul Rajaram (head of ads at Facebook), Garry Tan (YC partner, Posterous co-founder), Chris McCann (President of 1-800 Flowers), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder), Brian Sugar (founder of Sugar Media), Mike Greenfield (Circle of Moms founder); Fran Hauser (President of Time, Inc. Digital); Andy McLouglin (Huddle founder); Michael Levit (partner at Founders Den); Scott Tannen, Josh Spear, Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting co-founder), and others. Xie says she was inspired to enter the world of children’s entertainment because of her own fond memories of reading sci-fi and fantasy when she was a kid herself – and her team feels the same way. “But there’s not much of that that’s being told to younger kids,” she explains. “There’s obviously many reasons behind it, but obviously one of the biggest is that traditionally stories have always been told through text and with worlds that rich, it’s often very hard to get that across to a young child. There’s too much text and vocabulary for them to understand,” Xie says. “With how kids are picking up the iPad and learning how to interact with apps, we thought this was the perfect time for us to create a fantastical story,” she adds. Hullabalu is launching as a paid iPad application ($3.99), introducing the child to an adorably crafted purple panda bear called Pan, who has adventures alongside a cast of characters in the magical world of Hullabalu. One of the most noticeable things about the application is that it offers high quality design and animation – the likes of which aren’t often seen in early stage startups unless they’ve licensed content from bigger companies. There are a few exceptions, of course – Leo’s Pad from Kidaptive comes to mind, but that one has the benefit of having the president of a 3D animation studio as its CEO. Hullabalu, meanwhile, has only a team of six, many of them young and relatively new to the industry. Xie is the sole founder, and serves as the lead writer and editor of these Hullabalu “stories.” It should also be noted that Hullabalu isn’t purely educational in nature the way many of today’s children’s apps are – that is, it’s not core curriculum-based, though it does teach logical thinking in the sense that actions have consequences. While there is some text which appears at the bottom of the screens, it’s narrated and can be hidden from view. Simply put, the app is less about learning to read, and more about sparking children’s creativity and imagination, Xie says. In addition to the story itself, kids can also launch a photo booth app from the homescreen for a little bit of extra fun. Going forward, Hullabalu plans to expand its lineup to include additional applications that continue the story, the first of which is due out this summer, and the next arriving later this year. Though initially, the plan is to generate revenue by charging for the app, the eventual goal is to introduce merchandise like stuffed animals (some of which already decorate the startup’s offices), stickers, stationary, and more. Hullabalu is available for download here in iTunes. |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 09:58 AM PDT  Microsoft today launched its Bing Translator app for Windows (including Windows RT). We don’t usually write all that much about Windows apps and translation apps aren’t exactly new, either, but it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally brought virtually all of the features of its mobile translator app for Windows Phone, including camera-based translations for 7 input languages, to the desktop. Bing Translator, which is only available in Windows’ Modern UI/Metro mode, supports a total of 40 languages and also allows you to download language packs for offline usage. For the most part, of course, this is par for the course for language translation apps these days. Google’s Translate for Android app also features all of these tools and supports 70 languages. Here are the languages the Bing app currently supports:
Microsoft’s implementation of the camera-based “augmented reality” translation mode is a bit smoother, however, as it will just overlay a translation over the camera image (and you can tap to save the caption). Google Translate, on the other hand, makes you tap on the words you want to translate. Admittedly, that’s not exactly hard, but Microsoft’s approach feels a bit easier and more like what iPhone users are accustomed to from tools like Word Lens. Heavy Windows 8 users (there must be some…) will also appreciate that the app integrates with the Windows 8 “Share” charm to give you easy access to the translation tools. |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 09:10 AM PDT  Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) today officially hit general availability and now offers a Service Level Agreement with a 99.95% uptime promise for multi-availability zone deployments. RDS has already been on the market for three and a half years, but Amazon never considered it to be “generally available” because the company continued to add new features and hadn’t provided a Service Level Agreement for it yet. As Amazon notes, organizations ranging from NASA’s JPL to Unilever, Flipboard and Airbnb are already using its service and the company is processing “trillions of I/O requests every month” for what it says are “tens of thousands of businesses” that rely on the service. For developers and organizations that rely on RDS, the big news here is obviously not the fact that Amazon now essentially considers the service to be out of beta, but that the Service Level Agreement ensures that they will receive service credits when their databases become unavailable. A 99.95% uptime means Amazon expects about 22 minutes per instance per month. Should that level fall under the guaranteed update, Amazon will refund 10% of the charges paid and 25% if it falls under 99%. It’s worth noting that this only holds for multi-availability zone deployments, however, which cost up to 50% more than Amazon’s standard deployments. RDS is now one of four database solutions Amazon offers and probably the most traditional one, with support for MySql, Oracle and SQL Server. It’s also an area where Google’s cloud offerings are relatively competitive, thanks to its recently Cloud SQL service and where Microsoft, too, is making some inroads with its own cloud-based database and big data services. |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 09:07 AM PDT  After it was revealed that the National Security Administration was collecting phone records of every single U.S. call on the Verizon network, even President Obama’s most ardent supporters are losing faith that he would usher in a more transparent government. Loyal Democrat, former Vice President and Internet inventor, Al Gore called the NSA’s massive spying program ”obscenely outrageous”. Americans have always accepted the necessary evil of secrecy to protect citizens, but a disturbing trend in politically motivated security scandals has eroded the trust that justifies secrecy in the democracy. As a result, there hasn’t been enough public support for Congress to update our badly antiquated cybersecurity laws. Secrecy is not an unlimited free pass for wonton privacy invasion: the government has to prove, at least somewhat regularly, that the good outweighs the bad. Unfortunately, we have been presented with little evidence that massive spying operations are producing the intended effects. Last year, in a rare freak-everyone-out Wall Street Journal OpEd in support of improved cybersecurity legislation, President Obama resorted to an imaginary example to prove his point. "Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials…Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies that operate most of our transportation, water and other critical infrastructure systems. Fortunately, last month's scenario was just a simulation," he wrote. Yet, there appears to be more evidence that the harm to a free media has been greater than the alleged benefits of intrusion. There has been a baffling level of secrecy around the trail of Wikileaks source, Bradley Manning‘s trial: most journalists have been denied access to the proceedings, there’s no transcript, and even the judge’s name was redacted in one government report. “I can’t think of a reason for it,” says Eugene Fidell, an expert in military legal history at Yale Law School. Fidell tells me he doesn’t suspect malicious intent, but does think the military brass involved don’t understand the value of public opinion or the need for reporters to do their job. “It is utterly inimical to daily journalism.” Nor is that the only case: after it was revealed the AP had been wiretapped for weeks to uncover who had leaked information about a foiled Al-Qaeda bomb plot, President Obama issued new orders to protect journalists, saying he was “troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.” While we may not know the intent or the full scope of these scandals, it is clear that there’s a culture within the security apparatus that doesn’t respect journalistic or independent oversight. And, the lack of trust is getting in the way of badly needed cybersecurity reform. The national still doesn’t have an up-to-date, comprehensive plan to protect critical infrastructure (water plants, electrical systems, and nuclear facilities, etc). One audit discovered porn-watching employees unintentionally downloading malicious software onto vulnerable missile sites. Like this year’s failed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), each time Congress attempts to pass security reform, it gets muddled in a privacy-versus-safety debate and we go another year without important protections. The Senate’s resident tech wonk, Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A), has called for increased transparency and oversight into the nation’s spying programs, but the NSA has apparently denied his request to even estimate how many innocent Americans are being targeted. National security is important, but not infallible. If there is no evidence that intrusive spying is necessary, than its constitutionality will be as imaginary as the examples used to justify it. [Image Credit: Flicker user aussiegall] |
| Fashion Brand Cuyana Lands $1.7M From Canaan Partners To Get Women To Buy Fewer, Better Things Posted: 06 Jun 2013 09:01 AM PDT  It may seem counter-intuitive for an apparel and accessories company to encourage women to buy fewer things, but that’s exactly what a new startup called Cuyana is doing. Cuyana, a San Francisco startup that makes responsibly sourced, high-end apparel and accessories sold only online, is announcing today that it’s closed on $1.7 million in seed funding from Canaan Partners to scale out its company. Cuyana currently has a full-time staff of five along with 10 part-timers, which will likely grow in the months ahead. Also today, Cuyana is kicking off what it’s calling the “Lean Closet” movement: Customers who buy Cuyana items will also receive a bag in which to put unwanted items from their own closets to send back to the company in exchange for store credit. Cuyana will then donate those items to nonprofits. The idea, Cuyana co-founders Karla Gallardo and Shilpa Shah told me in an interview this week, is to encourage women to pare down their closets to only include well-made things that they actually love — such as the things Cuyana makes (of course.) “We create premium quality collections from around the world with a minimalist design that will last forever, and pieces you can wear every day,” Gallardo said. “The result is having a lean closet, which allows you to have a life free of clutter.” It’s an idea that is not exactly new — wealthy women have stocked their closets with timeless classics from the likes of Alaia and The Row and Celine for years — but Cuyana says it’s bringing well-made ethically produced items from places like Peru and Argentina to a new price point, with bags that cost around $160 instead of around $900. That’s enabled by, you guessed it, technology — Cuyana is online only, and has structured its own supply chain to be much faster than typical luxury retail brands. “We are able to pass those savings on to the customer,” Gallardo says. The strategy so far is working quite well. Since launching last year, Cuyana has seen 30 percent of its customers return for a second or third purchase, with only a one percent rate of returning items. Pinterest has been a huge marketing channel for the brand. “Often when you see a beautiful product on Pinterest, you click through and you end up on a really expensive luxury brand,” Gallardo said. “With us, people click through and see a price they can actually afford.” Another nice thing is how Cuyana focuses on the story behind where each product is made. The company’s website can be browsed by region, and the visitor can really delve into the process behind the manufacturing of each object, whether it’s a pair of earrings in Turkey or a scarf made in Peru. It’s refreshing to see this kind of transparency from e-commerce brands such as Cuyana and Everlane, after years of traditional retailers often trying their best to hide the often shameful details on how their products are made. |
| Video Discovery Startup Showyou Launches Channel Platform, Unveils A Revenue Model Posted: 06 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT  We’ve been following video discovery startup Showyou since its very earliest days. The company has created an app which makes it easier for video viewers on a mobile phone or tablet to find new content, and share it with friends. Now Showyou wants to use the app and the audience that it’s built up to give video creators and curators a way to build their own channels and monetize them. So the company has built the Showyou Channels, which will allow anyone to create and distribute their own collections of videos. Oh yeah, and also to monetize them. Showyou Channels will enable a new level of personalization within the app, allowing owners to create a (somewhat) customized channel page with a choice of background, featured image, and the like. The channel feature will also provide analytics around what videos people are viewing within a channel, and how much. Oh, did I mention that it will also allow channel owners to run ads in those channels? That will take the form of promoted videos, which basically run as interstitials within a playlist. The will also be bumpers available for those who like bumpers. From the viewer side, Showyou Channels will provide a new way to discover content. The new, updated app works by making channels a core part of the experience. Whenever a user clicks on a video that is part of a channel, they will not only see that video, but will be taken within that channel itself and streamed a playlist of videos from it. Anyone will be able to make a channel of videos, but Showyou’s hope is that it will be able to get content creators themselves to build channels as a way to distribute their videos. While Showyou won’t host the videos itself — it’ll pull them in from YouTube, Vimeo, or platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala — acting as a new distribution outlet for those content owners. Channels will be rolled out under a freemium model, where anyone is free to build them, but Showyou will charge for additional features. That pricing starts as low as $5 a month, for a certain number of views and access to ad features, but scales up for those (like big media companies) who might want to have multiple channels. |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 08:28 AM PDT  BlackBerry Messenger is reportedly coming to iOS and Android on June 27, according to a tweet from T-Mobile UK’s official account today. The tweet was accompanied by a picture of BBM in action on a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. We knew it was coming, since BlackBerry announced it would be arriving “this summer” back in May, and that it would be free on both platforms and require either iOS 6 or higher, or Android Ice Cream Sandwich or greater.
BBM on other platforms will initially offer just messaging, but BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said in the service’s announcement that they’ll be adding more features over time, including screen sharing, BBM voice and the new BBM Channels. Making BBM an independent product is a dramatic, bold step for the company, given that it is often cited as a key competitive advantage that BlackBerry still maintains over its rivals, but the company is clearly keen to look at survival strategies that go beyond making a comeback as a smartphone maker. BBM isn’t the only fish in the sea anymore, however, as there is now an amazing bounty of mobile messaging platforms to choose from on iOS, Android and even BlackBerry that offer similar functionality. In fact, in a worst case scenario, it’s easy to see BBM launching on iOS and Android as giving license to disaffected users to leave for what they perceive as greener pastures, while taking their network and social contacts with them. Still, this is a calculated risk, and BlackBerry must see a very clear and present upside to opening up its platform beyond BB OS. It definitely has the network volume, which is generally the goal of pre-monetization startups launching similar products, so we’ll see where it takes things from here. We’ve reached out to BlackBerry for direct confirmation, and will update this story if we hear back with more information. Update: Business Insider says this date is “incorrect” according to its own sources close to the company. We’re still waiting to hear bak from our own sources with any additional info. Update 2: BlackBerry has responded with a reaffirmation that they haven’t yet announced an official date, but T-Mobile UK still hasn’t retracted, removed or added more context to its tweet (update within the update: and now the T-Mobile UK tweet has been deleted):
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| Aiming To Be A One-Stop Shop For Social Marketing, Brand Networks Raises $68M In Its First Funding Posted: 06 Jun 2013 08:18 AM PDT  Brand Networks, a company offering tools for brands to market themselves on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and elsewhere, has raised $68 million in its first round of funding. Founded in 2006, Brand Networks has been bootstrapped and profitable until now, said co-founder and CEO Jamie Tedford — with revenue growing by more than 100 percent every year since 2010. So why raise funding? Tedford said that with all the activity in social marketing — particularly all the big acquisitions — Brand Networks was left as one of the last big independents. As a result, he’s been getting a lot of interest from both potential acquirers and potential investors. “We very quickly determined that we feel, to steal a phrase from Facebook, that we’re only 1 percent finished,” Tedford said. So the team decided to take on a big investment in order to pursue the larger opportunity, which includes expanding globally while continuing to improve the product. Brnad Networks’ continued independence will provide a competitive advantage, Tedford added, because it can “go deeper with a smaller set of customers, versus to build a one-size-fits-all solution for big, medium, and small markets.” The funding comes from private equity firm AEA Investors, which is taking two board seats and has also appointed Kurt Holstein, a former P&G executive and COO of digital agency Rosetta, as an independent board member. In addition to announcing the funding, Brand Networks is launching what it calls its Social Marketing Stack. Tedford noted that the company is one of very few to receive all four Preferred Marketing Developer badges from Facebook, covering the four main areas of its product — social publishing, social apps, social analytics, and social advertising. Tedford said that there are a number of “point providers” that tackle one of those areas, but for a company to address all of their social marketing needs, they’d normally have to work with multiple services, which can be particularly challenging from a data perspective. With the Social Marketing Stack, Brand Networks is highlighting the fact that it can address all four needs in one place, and it’s also launching a unified dashboard for accessing each set of tools from one place. Brand Networks didn’t start out as a social marketing platform (not surprising since it started seven years ago), but Tedford said social makes up most of the company’s business now. At the same time, he said that the term is no longer limited to campaigns and pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, but also encompasses building websites and mobile apps that integrate social in crucial ways. “We’re on the verge of not necessarily talking about social in a vacuum,” Tedford said. |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 08:02 AM PDT  Is there room for another social network for book lovers, now that the biggest, Goodreads, has been snatched up by the largest online retailer (and Kindle maker) Amazon? Slice thinks so. Today, the mobile receipt tracking service backed by Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed, Floodgate and others is expanding into a new vertical, with the debut of its second application, Slice Bookshelf. Like the company’s flagship application, the new service also takes advantage of Slice’s proprietary email-scanning technology which it previously leveraged to give users insight into their purchasing behavior and alert them to upcoming shipments and deliveries. That application isn’t going away, says Slice CEO Scott Brady, this is just an area the company wanted to dig into deeper. Brady declined to disclose Slice’s download numbers of active users, but noted that in the less than 18 months it’s been on the market, the app has categorized around 75 million purchases, equating to $2.5 billion in consumer spending. Today, the company licenses its technology to other applications on both web and mobile, and is also now entering into discussions with bigger brands looking to better understand customers’ buying behavior and trends. “If you think about the power that companies like Amazon have, in terms of the real high-resolution they have about customers, we can effectively achieve that same resolution across hundreds of thousands of merchants,” Brady explains of how Slice data can be used. The new Slice Bookshelf service could also help Amazon’s competitors looking to take on the bookseller giant with similar technology to Amazon’s own recommendations engine – that is, of course, if Slice Bookshelf can achieve enough traction to make its data valuable. On that front, Slice Bookshelf at least has a shot. Unlike Goodreads, whose book indexing and categorization technology heavily relies on manual input, with Slice Bookshelf the process is automatic. Users simply connect their email inboxes to the service, and it does the work of building your library of books – e-book or otherwise – based on a history of your purchases. For current (or lapsed) Goodreads users, the option to import your books from the now Amazon-owned service is available, too. In addition, you can connect Slice Bookshelf to Facebook, where it adds books you’ve liked on Facebook, connects you with Facebook friends who share your reading interests, and even enables book lending requests through the social network. But Brady insists that the goal here is not to steal marketshare from Goodreads, despite the similarities between the two services. “I’m not sure that using this product would make you not want to use Goodreads,” he says. “Goodreads is great if you really want to research a book, or talk about an author with a book coming out. What we’ve tried to do is create a much lighter experience, a more social experience around books that maybe you’d want to use more often. But if you really wanted to go deep, there are many websites you could go to.” So Goodreads for the masses, maybe? Slice Bookshelf was built from the ground up on the Facebook platform, in an effort to make the service inherently social, as opposed to having social sharing tacked on as an afterthought. By doing so, it not only uses your Facebook profile data as noted above, it can also help you discover who among your network is a reader like you. “We weren’t sure whether or not ‘friends’ represents the same correlation of books that you may like as well, so we spent a lot of time integrating some very interesting technology that exposes who are the friends that you have that actually have very common interests,” Brady says. The service uses responsive ratings – by asking you if you love, like, or hate a book, it finds others who have rated those books in the same way. But this system can also help users figure out who in your network may want to discuss a book, too – someone who loves “Life of Pi” for example, could have an interesting debate with someone who claims to hate it. With Slice Bookshelf now taking advantage of the startup’s core technology, the question is whether or not Slice will be taking on other verticals like movies or music in the future. Though that’s not something the company is ruling out, its next step is actually to beef up its main application Slice with more “Google Now”-like predictive capabilities instead. Having already been one of the first to use the concept of inbox-scanning technology to help unearth hidden data trends, Brady says it’s time to evolve that concept further, and the company plans to upgrade Slice with new features and core capabilities soon. In the meantime, Slice Bookshelf is available as a web-only (but generally mobile-optimized) service to start, with plans to debut native apps in the future. |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Comedy Central has released a standalone app for watching and discovering awesome stand-up comedians. The app, called CC:Standup, has more than 6,000 videos from 700 comedians. That will allow stand-up fans not just to find hilarious clips from their favorite comedians, but to find others that they might not have known about. The app takes advantage of a huge library of stand-up content that Comedy Central has stored in its vaults. After years of collecting various stand-up specials, the company was able to find a way to give access to all the best clips from all the best comedians. (And let’s face it, some that are probably not so good, just because there are so many. Law of averages and all that.) Ben Hurst, VP of Mobile and Emerging Platforms at Comedy Central, told me that the app is just one way that Comedy Central is trying to expand its brand and engage with millennials. Although why it would want to do that, I really don’t know. “Standup in particular is a huge part of our legacy,” Hurst said, “and this is an exciting standalone extension of the Comedy Central brand.” When you first open the app, you’re greeted with a curated playlist of standup material. Which is fun and all, and it includes lots of awesome jokes from people you probably already know — like Daniel Tosh or Louis C.K. — but the key to the whole app is being able to really dig deep and find jokes you’ve never heard and comedians you’ve never heard of. To that end, the app has a search page that will let you search for individual comedians and let you just watch all their content. But it also has a discover field, which makes connections between various jokesters with the same kind of humor that you might also like. There’s even a recommendation engine so that learns from your viewing behavior and can carefully tailor a playlist to tickle your funny bone. Or try to. I mean, how smart or funny can a computer algorithm actually be, anyway. Anyway, the best part of the app is that it’s free. Although, you’ll have to watch some ads along with those videos. Sucks, I know! But come on, otherwise it’s free. Comedy Central gotta make money somehow. |
| ‘Uber For Local Home Services' Provider ClubLocal Launches In The Bay Area Posted: 06 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Uber pioneered the market for on-demand, one-click rides from your mobile phone, and over the past few years we’ve seen a ton of ‘Uber for X’ startups pop up in different categories. One of the newest is ClubLocal, which provides on-demand access to home service professionals. The service is launching in the San Francisco Bay Area today, after a successful trial in Dallas. ClubLocal works by connecting users with qualified, pre-vetted home service professionals, without having to search Yelp or the phone book or whatever people use these days when they need a plumber or an HVAC technician. It’s already signed up professionals from several different segments of the market, including Plumbing, Handyman, Electrical, Heating and Air Conditioning, Appliance Repair, and Mobile Auto Detailing. Users can request someone from any of those segments, specify the job that they need done, the time that they’ll be available, and ClubLocal will send a qualified professional to take care of things. Even better than providing instant access to those services without having to worry about doing their own search or scouring ratings, ClubLocal has done the work of negotiating rates with those professionals — so there will never be any sticker schock when a job gets done. Customers pay ClubLocal for the services rendered, and then it passed on money to the service providers, who are technically sub-contractors for it. The hope is that by simplifying the process of connecting users with service providers, it’ll be able to provide them with more work than they would have had on their own. ClubLocal has also built the back end of the service to make it easy for service providers, giving them an online calendar to note upcoming jobs and availability. It also provides all service providers with an iPad, with which they can accept jobs, let customers know they’re en route, and even process payments. While ClubLocal has already pre-vetted its service providers, both with a background check and individual interviews, the company has a rating system and will continually evaluate service providers based on customer feedback. All service providers are checked for the appropriate licenses, and insured. There are a number of services which already exist to try to connect customers with service providers — likesay Angie’s List, Red Beacon, and even, in some cases, TaskRabbit. But none of them provide the drop-dead simple order flow or pre-negotiated prices for services. It also handles all customer service with customers, who can rate the service providers who worked with them. Launched originally in Dallas in July 2012, the service has had more than 3,000 jobs completed in that market. ClubLocal is a division of ReachLocal, a nationwide (and public) marketing and lead-gen firm which specializes in helping local businesses find new customers. In that way, ClubLocal is kind of the flip side of its legacy business, helping consumers to quickly and easily book home services without having to do a ton of research. |
| France's Netatmo Raises $5.8M To Extend The Reach Of Its Connected Weather Station Posted: 06 Jun 2013 07:51 AM PDT  Paris-based Internet of Things startup Netatmo, which makes personal weather station and air quality sensor devices (as seen in the video above) for use with Android and iOS apps, has just closed a €4.5 million ($5.8 million) funding round. It plans to use the funding to launch new connected devices in the second half of this year, including additional indoor air modules (to be announced this month), and also rain and wind meters. Investors in the round — Netatmo’s first external funding — include Iris Capital, FSN PME, which is the French National Fund for Digital Society, along with Pascal Cagni, Non Executive Director of Vivendi SA and Kingfisher PLC and former Vice-President & General Manager of Apple Europe, Middle East, India and Africa. Netatmo launched its consumer focused weather station monitoring device last fall. The device allows users to track outdoor weather conditions and environmental conditions indoors — such as air quality and CO2 level — and monitor and chart that data via the corresponding apps. Although Netatmo is not breaking out device sales data yet, it says its weather stations are currently monitoring the environment in more than 105 countries. ”After a few months on the market, demand continues to grow, and we are experiencing significant increases in sales,” Netatmo CEO Fred Potter noted in a statement. ”Our new financial partners will allow us to pursue further innovations, develop new devices and expand our distribution channels and territories,” Netatmo said it plans to focus on development and operations throughout Europe, Asia and the U.S., with the goal to expand its headcount as it ramps up the business this year. Commenting on the funding in a statement, Pascal Cagni added: ”The Internet of Things is the next step in the rise of an even more connected digital world… Thanks to Netatmo's talented teams and ability to integrate advanced software with state-of-the-art hardware, this company is built to play a leading role in that revolution.” |
| Social Video Network Keek Passes 45M Users, Adding Over 24M Users Since Vine's Launch Posted: 06 Jun 2013 07:39 AM PDT  Toronto-based social video network Keek has seen some tremendous growth recently, adding on 24 million users in just four months to bring its network to a total reach of 45 million registered members. The platform’s growth is perhaps most interesting in that nearly half of it has taken place since the launch of Twitter’s Vine video-focused mobile social networking app. Vine, if you recall, just recently announced that it has managed to rack up 13 million users on iOS, the only platform where it had been available since late January, prior to its launch on Android this week. That means that Keek has added almost double the number of users that Vine has managed in the past few months, a fact which has not escaped the notice of Keek founder and CEO Isaac Raichyk. “Our growth has accelerated during the same period that Vine’s been active,” he said. “We believe the next couple of years is when social video will rule, and we’re definitely leading the space.” If anything, it seems like Vine’s launch has raised the profile of social video in general, which might be contributing to the rapid growth of Keek’s user base, though there are other factors also at work according to Raichyk. It’s worth noting that Vine so far is on only two platforms, with one just launched, while Keek is on Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and the desktop, with a Windows Phone client likely in the works as well. Still, Keek’s recent growth is impressive, and to Raichyk at least, it looks like the user community is generally more willing to adopt mobile social video tools than it has been in the past. “It seems that there was a tipping point,” he said, explaining the driving factors behind the recent uptick. “We’re very focused on making it easy to communicate via social video, we built a whole brand to encourage social interaction. It seems that in different geographic areas, concentration just keeps growing, and at some point you just have enough content, the community is large enough for things to tip and take off.” One of the contributing factors behind Keek’s growth that Raichyk had mentioned in the past when discussing his company’s recent $18 million funding round has been celebrity support, but it’s still only accounting for a fraction of the service’s engagement. Around 20 percent of the total Keeks viewed come from celebrities, and the rest of the growth is still bottom-up, the way it has been since the service’s launch. Last time I wrote about Keek I suggested that video sharing on mobile had yet to achieve an “Instagram” moment. Now, helped along by Vine, and with this tremendous recent growth in interest in Keek, it seems like that moment may have arrived. Besides the 45 million users, Keek has also seen over 667 million visits, offered up 12 billion page views, with 18 million total videos posted and 2.2 billion playbacks of said videos. With both userbase and engagement on the rise, this might be social video’s time to shine. |
| Box Wants To Help Enterprise App Developers Make Money Via New Monetization Program, Box $rev Posted: 06 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT  In the consumer mobile app world, developers have a number of platforms including iOS, and Android, from which they can not only find users but also monetize and make money. Connecting with social networks like Facebook can help for distribution, and you can sell your app in Apple’s App Store and Google Play or make money via ads. But in the enterprise world, this is a challenge that any mobile or web app developer faces. Today, cloud storage company Box is hoping to solve this problem for developers by debuting Box $rev, a new program for developers to monetize their applications on the Box platform. “This is really about how we can drive value for both developers and users,” explains CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie. He says that enterprise apps do not monetize well in the App Store or other mobile app platforms, and this is going to provide a way for enterprise app developers who are building off of Box to actually make revenue from users interacting with their apps. “This is the easiest way for enterprise app developers to make money,” claims Levie. With Box $rev, developers are paid when a Box Business or Enterprise customer uses a third-party app that’s integrated with Box. Box $rev, via a new SDK developers must use, will measure customer interactions with third-party apps integrated on Box and compensate developers based on that usage. Based on usage, developers can be paid up to 15 percent of the Box seat price ( which can range from $10 per month upwards) per user. If an entire organization with 10,000 seats downloads a specific app, that could be meaningful revenue for the developers. It also provides a way for Box to see which apps its users are interacting with the most. "We're rewriting the rules when it comes to supporting the next generation of enterprise app developers," says Levie. Box $rev is launching today with ten inaugural Box OneCloud partners including CloudOn, Notability, Documents by Readdle, PDFExpert, iAnnotate, Genius Scan, CamScanner, Outline+, GoodNotes and SmartOffice. Over time, Box $rev will expand to a broader set of programs and capabilities, the company explains. Box is also releasing new SDKs for Android and IOS that add the ability for users to select Box files through a secure file picker with only a few lines of code. Box has also added built-in SSO support to easily manage enterprise identity. At the heart of what Box is doing is trying to create a broader economy around its API and developer ecosystem. Box $rev could be a super interesting way to not only attract more developers to build off of Box, but also gain additional insight into how its business and enterprise users are interacting with additional functions and apps leveraging the cloud storage platforms. Today, the Box OneCloud ecosystem includes more than 500 app integrations, including drchrono, SmartOffice and Documents by Readdle. And 43% of the Fortune 500 are using apps from Box OneCloud today. |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 06:35 AM PDT  Lango, the U.S. mobile picture-messaging app formerly known as Zlango and backed by Benchmark and DAG ventures to the tune of $20 million in total (raising $6m in its most recent round), is sharpening its focus on its target U.S. market by launching topical pop culture emoji and weekly packs of retro icons. Eight to 10 new textable emoji/icons will be released each week, plus retro icons on Thursdays, for users to download. The new emoji will be based on “current conversation” and gossipy trends. Whether you want to call them topical emoji, icons or stickers — the latter being the term used by app rivals such as Viber and Line for their own visual messaging content — they are basically all the same thing, albeit Lango’s emoji are being designed specifically to tap into North American pop/gossip cultural. A move it’s clearly hoping will give it a lift vs its global competitors. However Lango is not alone in this thinking here. While Japan’s Line messaging app is most famous for its kawaii characters — e.g. Moon, Brown and Cony — it employees localisation teams to produce culturally specific stickers for each market. Thereby shrinking the ability for local messaging apps to stand out. Still, you can argue that a few U.S.-flavoured stickers in a huge catalogue mostly comprised of sometimes-lost-in-translation kawaii is not the same as purely U.S.-centric emoji, released to coincide with and exploit the latest TV gossip sensations. Or that’s what Lango will be hoping anyway. Slated for upcoming release are a Game of Thrones icon on Friday — “just in time for the finale” — a Father’s Day pack next week, plus a new Duck Dynasty pack. On the retro front, icons based on classic cars and characters from throwback sitcoms like Friends are planned. This summer also expect it to release emoji based on celebrities’ babies, and a Tribute to America pack for the July 4 holiday. Here is a handful of the sort of topical emoji Lango will be offering, including characters from TV show The Voice: Click to view slideshow.Tapping topical trends is an obvious way to piggyback on the cultural zeitgeist but Lango’s retro sticker packs are also part of its user acquisition strategy, since it plans to target these at existing enthusiast communities. “We are identifying the ‘queen bees’ or populators of specific interest communities and exposing them to our content,” the company tells TechCrunch. “People who love to follow retro cars online (there are thousands of fan groups dedicated to retro cars), love the idea of creating and sending messages with Lango images.” Lango relaunched its app this March — pivoting from its prior global focus to specifically target the U.S. and also to pursue this “meme-like social sharing” instead of its past modus operandi of auto adding emoji for every word typed in a text, which sounds, well, pretty annoying. “The idea now is have each text centered upon a more descriptive emoji,” it explains. It isn’t currently breaking out user numbers for the new Lango but says some of its previous users have transferred over (it hit a million users four months after launching its original app, back in 2012). It also says more than half (60%) of its user base have come from friends inviting friends, and the vast majority (85%) of all messages sent within its platform are using its icons. As with lots of mobile messaging apps, Lango is tapping into the boom in social photo-sharing that has, in recent year, inflated Instagram and continues to produce new types of pictorial/visual messaging mediums, like SnapChat and Urturn. Lango rowing back from the global mobile messaging space is likely a measure of how competitive it has become, with tech giants including Facebook (with Messenger) and most recently Google (with Hangouts) jumping in, joining long-standing established players such as WhatsApp and fast growing newer entrants coming out of Asian including Line and WeChat. Regrouping by dialling back and focusing on one market to build a local base seems to make sense with so many giants going global. |
| H.Bloom Floral Service Preps To Launch In 5 New Cities, Starting With Boston On June 11 Posted: 06 Jun 2013 06:01 AM PDT  H.Bloom has been disrupting the land of floral gift-giving for quite some time, but the startup is ready to spread its wings and fly into new territory. According to a release, H.Bloom will be expanding into five new cities in the U.S. over the course of this summer. Currently, H.Bloom operates in New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas. New cities to join the fold include Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Miami. They’re calling it the “Summer in Bloom.” Clever. It’s been a solid year for H.Bloom. The company recently launched an iPhone app with more gift-giving options beyond floral arrangements, and 2013 also saw the introduction of H.Bloom’s Hero products on Valentines Day. The first two new markets to get service will be Boston and Atlanta, which will launch on June 11 and June 18, respectively. According to the press release, H.Bloom can expand so rapidly due to its ability to reduce spoilage to two percent, far below the industry average of 30-50 percent. The idea is that low spoilage rates can keep costs down to the end-consumer. We spoke with H.Bloom founder and CEO Bryan Burkhart who explained that the system is paying off handsomely, with H.Bloom doing $5 million in revenue in 2012. “Our ambition is to be the luxury floral brand recognized around the world. It is a massive market that has been lacking in technology innovation for some time,” said Burkhart. “We are focused on perfecting our operations as we continue to open in new markets, so that we can continue to provide a world-class product and service to our customers.” |
| 7digital Makes A Play To Be The Go-To Streaming Radio Backend As Google And Apple Services Loom Posted: 06 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  7digital, the London-based company that offers digital music store services to some of the world’s leading consumer electronics companies, including Samsung and Blackberry, as well as to smaller companies and startups like doubleTwist and Turntable.fm, is announcing the wide release of its streaming music platform for DMCA radio partners in the U.S. The new-and-improved streaming radio API from 7digital is designed to help anyone launch their own streaming radio service, one which is fully compliant with DMCA restrictions in the U.S, and which also includes all of 7digital’s extensive catalog of licensed music – a library of more than 25 million tracks and growing as of this writing. Already, 7digital offers streaming music licensing for some DMCA radio providers in the U.S., including NYC-based Turntable.fm, which also used the 7digital API to launch its new Piki service, the music-based social network it debuted late last year. Piki, along with any other app that complies to U.S. DMCA streaming radio regulations, must fit very specific conditions to offer its service, in terms of being able to skip tracks or not, how users can search for songs and artists and more. It all sounds a bit constricting, but 7digital President of North America Vickie Nauman says that in fact, they’re finding the DMCA-style radio experience is exactly what users are looking for to replicate the ease and convenience of terrestrial radio. “In the old days you drive your car and you push a button and you listen to a program that’s been streamed for you,” she said. “It’s easy, you find someone that can curate, and something that’s to your liking, and it’s such a great lean-back experience and we’ve been watching the marketplace and we feel that the partners that we have that are doing really well, combined with the need people have for a really easy way to listen to their music have led us to decide that this year we’re really going to focus on radio.” 7digital’s radio push comes at a time when streaming radio seems to be the order of the day. Google has just launched its own All Access streaming music and radio service, while Apple is said to be preparing its own iRadio service, which could potentially launch as soon as next week at WWDC. But while the space is heating up in terms of competition, Nauman believes it’s heating up in terms of interest among potential 7digital partners as well, and that represents a big opportunity. “Everyone watches what they do, and then they play their cards, and people see the products, and people say ‘Oh, well we can do that better’,” she said. “For Apple, I’m certainly a fan of the devices, and the way they incorporate hardware, software and content, and I used to work at Sonos so I have a real appreciation for the elegance of having all three of those pieces work well, but Apple is going to build things for iOS, and for iOS users, and especially as you go outside of the U.S. you realize there are a lot of other operating systems and devices in different parts of the world.” In the end, though, 7digital isn’t choosing radio streaming over and above other options. It still plans on offering its digital purchasing and download model, as well as on-demand streaming as a separate option. In fact, Nauman says that 7digital wants to offer solution that highlight how different delivery systems can work seamlessly together. There’s an option to plug its streaming radio API directly into the 7digital store, for instance, which she says should result in such a seamless shopping experience that users would be able to hear a song, purchase it as simply as if they’d liked it or given it a thumbs up, and then have it delivered automatically to their cloud locker. 7digital’s streaming radio API is designed for big companies and startups alike, and Nauman says it should be particularly helpful to startups in terms of simplifying the thorny licensing issues around music and letting companies focus on products. That leads to a dramatic increased capability in terms of go-to-market time, and lowers a huge barrier faced when starting up any media-focused enterprise. But with so many big fish in the pond, it’ll be interesting to see how eager others are to jump in. |
| SnagFilms Launches Updated Website With Social Sharing, But Just In Private Beta Posted: 06 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Indie movie distributor SnagFilms is preparing a new, more social user experience, and is ready to launch that experience in private beta. The startup’s new website, at SnagFilms.com, will launch later this summer to enable viewers to watch — and share! — free, ad-supported indie flicks with like-minded individuals. After working as a distributor for movies on a number of video-on-demand platforms, SnagFilms rolled out a platform online for watching independent films that supported primarily by advertising. Those movies are available through your typical web browser, as well as through mobile apps on iOS and Android devices. Today, SnagFilms has about 4 million viewers, who have watched thousands of independent films on its web and mobile properties. The new website is designed to get even more people on the platform and watching and sharing — at least at some point. For now, the new experience will be limited to just about 1,000 viewers. Lame, I know. But what can those lucky few people expect? Well, a bigass picture of a featured movie on the front page, for one thing. Some editorial notes. Oh yeh, and then some more editorially curated videos below the fold, also with editorial notes. The idea is to show users awesome movies that they might not know about, which are already deemed to be pretty awesome by the SnagFilms editorial crew. But that’s not all — there’s also a recommendations engine to enable users to see movies that they’ll probably like. In addition to all, that, the new SnagFilms.com is built to be a whole lot more social. That means users are gonna have profiles that others can see, and the site will keep track of what you’ve viewed and what your connections have viewed and maybe through all of that get ideas for even more free, ad-supported movies you might want to watch. All of this is opt-in, of course, with detailed privacy settings so maybe not everyone knows that you just watched Lust, Caution over and over for like, six days. In addition to just regular users, people will be able to follow critics and reviewers and generally people who have been deemed to know more about movies than they do. But if they think that they know a lot, there’s also the ability to socially share into other socially shareable networks. Anyway, hopefully since you’re a TechCrunch reader and you’re way ahead of the curve on these things, you’ll become one of the lucky 1,000. If not, don’t sweat it too much — SnagFilms.com will be available to everyone this summer, the company says. And then at some point it’ll become available on other platforms — like the company’s mobile apps. SnagFilms now has 50 employees, after raising $6 million from investors such as Ted Leonsis, New Enterprise Associates, Comcast Ventures, Terry Semel, and CNF Investments, an affiliate of Clark Enterprises. |
| There Are Two Races In The Mobile Market, Claims Flurry, And Both iOS And Android Can Win Posted: 06 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  iOS and Android aren’t necessarily competing for one mobile crown anymore, according to the latest Flurry mobile report, which shows that in the two-horse race the smartphone and mobile OS market has become, both Apple and Google’s offerings in fact have room to earn their own separate crown. Android can rule in the North, in other words, while iOS reigns over the rest of the kingdom from its iron throne. And what that means is that while Android leads in device market share, with Flurry data suggesting that Android devices on its network doubled during the past year to reach a whopping 564 million in April 2013, Apple’s iOS manages to lead in terms of total time spent in apps. And though Android once neared Apple’s numbers in this regard, new device launches like the 3rd generation iPad have ensured that Apple has since made gains on its mobile rival in engagement. Apple leads Android in time spent in apps as both a total, cumulative figure on Flurry’s network, and on a per device basis, broken down by various device types. It’s a little difficult to wrap your head around; why would the mobile OS with the largest overall share not also take the win for most time spent in apps? Flurry argues that iPhone shoppers and Android buyers were considerably different, at least at the outset of the smartphone wars, with those on iOS actively seeking out a device that could operate as a pocket computer, and Android users merely being pulled in with the tide when they go to upgrade their feature phone, thanks to price discounts and a range of available models, some as cheap as the dumb phones they’re replacing. They also suggest that Android’s fragmentation problem is causing an impediment to app development, resulting in a level of quality that isn’t up to par with software on iOS, and distribution issues, and that Apple’s larger and deeper ecosystem of quality titles starts a self-improving cycle, with devs seeing good usage on the platform, devoting more resources to encouraging growth, and receiving still higher usage as a result. Flurry’s perspective on the mobile race, and how it might actually be multiple races with winners in different contexts, is likely a more realistic and mature view than the oppositional one that’s been popular before. Android and iOS are no doubt still vying for customer attention, but ecosystem dominance and a smaller market share overall likely fit with Apple’s overall goals as a company, and vice versa for Google. The problem for competitors is making a dent in either lead, and that’s something we haven’t seen much indication will be all that possible as of yet. |
| Fitstar, The Startup Looking To Reinvent The Home Workout From The iPad, Finally Launches Posted: 06 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Fitstar, the Google Ventures and Floodgate-backed startup that’s aiming to disrupt Richard Simmons, is finally launching its home workout app with NFL player Tony Gonzalez. Mike Maser, a longtime Digg and AOL executive, came up with the idea after a long sojourn through New Zealand on his own. He thought about the workout video market and saw an opportunity to build a similar experience on the iPad that would be much more tailored and interactive. He brought on Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez to film about 60 different video exercises in a handful of days and build a basic iPad app that has been in beta for the last several months. The idea is that a great personal training experience on the iPad should start at a customized level that is comfortable for everyone from a total n00b to someone who regularly works out almost every day of the week. From there, it should be able to help people level up or keep up with a regular workout routine even when they’re traveling. Unlike DVDs and videos, which are passive, the iPad can respond to a person's changes in their workout habits. It can send reminders or offer custom combinations of exercises to meet their goals. When you sign up for Fitstar, it asks you a lot of basic information about your height, weight and age. Then it also asks you about your fitness level and whether you think a good workout is 30 minutes or an hour or longer. It then sends you through a basic workout test that’s about 10 minutes long with wall squats, elbow planks and push-ups. “When you start it up, we really try approximate how it would be to have a personal trainer with you,” Maser said. Gonzalez does the workouts in time with you while a timer shows a countdown to how much is left. A top navigation bar also gives lots of advice and tips like how you should drink lots of water. The video quality and lighting is super professional and none of the exercises require equipment. “Really, our goal was to build the next generation of the workout DVD. But we wanted to do that without any kind of equipment,” Maser said. “When you head out traveling, this can be an incredible adjunct or when you’re super constrained and you don’t have your normal yoga class, this can still help you keep in shape.” While this is the first app built on FitStar's platform, the company will offer products down the line that appeal to different demographics and have other routines. They’re not talking about any additional celebrity partners now though. They’re going with a freemium model, borrowing a page from the gaming industry. Maser’s co-founder is Dave Grijalva, who was the director of platform at Ngmoco, the mobile gaming company that DeNA bought for up to $400 million. The free version gives two 10 to 20-minute sessions per week. But there are higher tiers at anywhere from $4.99 or $11.99 per month that offer unlimited sessions, nutritional guidance and HD video. Fitstar is also opening up a store for merchandise 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. |
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