tech now |
- Breather Founder Explains How On-demand Rooms Could Unlock Cities With An App [TCTV]
- U.K. Security Agency Also Tapped Into The NSA's Prism Surveillance Program
- Instafeed Lets Instagram Addicts Create Custom Photo Feeds
- LaunchRock Aims To Cover All Your Launching Needs With App Deals, Video Production, And More
- Obama Is An Open Government Pioneer, Spymaster Dataholic
- Valkee, The Profitable Startup That Shines Lights Through Your Ears, Raises $9.7M
- Amazon Continues Arming Its Legion Of Self-Publishers With Storyteller Launch
- Larry Harvey And JP Barlow On Burning Man's Sharing Economy, And Our Tech Future [TCTV]
- In Response To PRISM, Anonymous Leaks DoD Documents
- Apple And Sony Reach Agreement, Giving iRadio Full Record Label Support, Report Claims
- GamePop Adds iPad And iPhone Game Support, Giving The Console Access To iOS Exclusives
- Call-filtering App WhosCall Now Available To Help iPhone Users Avoid Spam Calls
- Taking A Different Tack With In-Store Offers, Trialpay Grows Its Mobile Revenue By 85% Quarter-Over-Quarter
- As Competition Heats Up, Uber Plans To Lower Fares On UberX Rides By 25% In San Francisco
- VivaKi Partners With Nativo For Native Ad Campaigns
- LightInTheBox's Shares Surge 22% To $11.61 As Etailer Launches 2013′s First Chinese IPO In U.S.
- U.S. Government: Reports About PRISM Contain “Numerous Inaccuracies”
- Who The NSA Follows, On Twitter
- President Obama Visiting Silicon Valley Tonight, As Reports Of NSA's Tech Spying Come To Light
- Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL And Apple Deny Participation In NSA PRISM Surveillance Program
| Breather Founder Explains How On-demand Rooms Could Unlock Cities With An App [TCTV] Posted: 07 Jun 2013 09:18 AM PDT  Breather is a new startup billed as a sort of “Zipcar for rooms". Announced at the LeWeb conference in London and due to launch later this year, it’s closed $1.5 million in funding from Canadian VC Real Ventures, along with Gary Vaynerchuk, Loic Le Meur, Mike Walsh and others. The idea is to have network of well kept rooms – sort of mini business lounges – which a user can unlock with a smartphone app. That’s it. The idea is to create rooms where people can chill out, rest or get work done in peace and quiet. To literally take a breather. The spaces will have a couch, a desk, Wi-Fi, and electrical outlets. Breather will arrange for the rooms to be cleaned and maintained. If the room gets trashed or a user does something disallowed (use your imagination) they are banned. But if they are a good customer they get special privileges, like gifting their friends ‘Breather time’. The startup has partnered with Lockitron, makers of a lock that enables you to lock/unlock a door with your phone. Like Zipcar, you can pay-per-use or on a subscription basis. Of course, it would appeal to travellers or business people but also to the rising number of global nomads. And this will also appeal to real estate companies that have rooms in buildings which are burning cash but bringing nothing in. Founder Julien Smith – a former journalist – says he hopes to unlock aspects of a city that people rarely get to seer use. He estimates rental fees will be around $20 per hour when the company launches fully later this year. After New York City where will be a slow national roll out, and other cities in the pipeline, like London. |
| U.K. Security Agency Also Tapped Into The NSA's Prism Surveillance Program Posted: 07 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT  Prism already looked like a pretty far-reaching program, but a new report claims the NSA also gave at least one foreign security agency access to this system. According to a report in the Guardian, the NSA provided the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) with access to Prism since at least June 2010. The U.S. has now acknowledged that Prism exists, though Google, Apple and all of the other companies named in the original leak continue to say that they are not giving the U.S. government “direct access” to their servers, as the leak claims. The U.S.’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper yesterday argued that the program only exists to spy on foreign citizens, but it seems clear that no matter the intentions, the program was far more wide-reaching that this. The U.K. GCHQ, the report claims, generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism in the first half of 2012. It’s unclear if the organization had full access to Prism. The Guardian’s report suggest that it was “able to receive material from a bespoke part of the programme to suit British interests.” So far, we haven’t heard about any additional U.S. allies who received access to this data, but if the NSA provided the U.K. with a direct line into Prism and the aim of the program was indeed to spy on foreign citizens, it wouldn’t come as a huge surprise if others had access, too. |
| Instafeed Lets Instagram Addicts Create Custom Photo Feeds Posted: 07 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT  Want to check out Instagrams from celebrities, artists, brands, or specific topics without cluttering your main feed? Instafeed’s free iOS app lets you build and browse custom feeds of Instagram accounts or enjoy pre-curated feeds in a bunch of categories. It demonstrates how Instagram is more than an app. It’s a platform that lets developers fill in gaps in its user experience. Instafeed comes by way of Appiphany, a year-old startup co-founded and funded with $200,000 by Fahad Al Saud. He’s one of the princes of Saudi Arabia, a former Facebook employee, and a friend of Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom from college at Stanford. Al Saud and his two teammates Ranier Gadduang and Daniel Corsaro started Appiphany as a super-lean startup designed to exploit holes in top mobile experiences. It’s first app PicTag made it easy to search your camera roll, and now it’s building on Instagram. Gadduang tells me “We see Instagram as a great platform for creating content, but in terms of consuming content there’s a little bit left on the table. You either follow someone or you don’t. It’s binary, and you can only discover content through people you follow or the popular page.” Instafeed provides another way to interact. It lets you search for Instagram users and add them to custom feeds you can read. It’s like Twitter Lists or Facebook Friends Lists for Instagram, offering an alternative browsing experience to your main feed. For example, I follow a lot of acquaintances and artists on Instagram, so I built a Best Friends Instafeed list to give me a stream of people I care most about. Sometimes I just want pretty pictures, so I made a list called True Artists. It’s filled with Instagram virtuosos I find inspiring on occasion, but whose frequent posts I don’t want drowning out everyone else I follow. To get you started, Instafeed offers pre-curated lists of the best content creators in areas like food, pets, and fashion. There’s also lists of active celebrity ‘grammers, pro sports teams, and “Beauties & Bombshells”. You can pick and choose accounts from these to check out, but oddly you can’t just “subscribe all” and read an entire curated feed. One extra feature that comes in handy is the ability to repost any photo you see in Instafeed to your own followers. Clutter is an inherent problem with unfiltered feeds like Instagram or Twitter. As an app, Instafeed’s solution gets the job done well. But as a startup, Appiphany is skating on thin ice. Instagram could release a list creation feature at any time, essentially steamrolling Instafeed. If the app grew massively popular and became a serious competitor for engagement, Instagram could also shut off its API access. This all makes Instafeed’s future uncertain. Yet at present the startup is focused solely on growth, it’s a free app so it’s not making any money, and Gadduang said he hadn’t thought much about how it would monetize down the line. That’s going to make it tough to raise additional funding from outside investors, which Gadduang says it’s looking to do. Users therefore might be weary of spending too much time meticulously curated custom feeds. For now, though, Instafeed is a solid download for Instagram power users. We’re all becoming phonetographers, and Instafeed lets you explore what the world is seeing. |
| LaunchRock Aims To Cover All Your Launching Needs With App Deals, Video Production, And More Posted: 07 Jun 2013 08:26 AM PDT  LaunchRock is a startup that helps other companies launch — it’s best-known for putting up landing pages where beta users can sign up. Now, co-founder and CEO Jameson Detweiler said he’s “doubling down” on helping companies launch. That might seem like an obvious step given the startup’s name, but Detweiler said LaunchRock’s previous expansion efforts have been around “post-launch stuff,” focusing particularly on customer acquisition throughout a startup’s lifecycle. That approach turned out to be more challenging than expected, Detweiler said, and meanwhile, there are many unaddressed needs when it comes to just getting a company off the ground. The ultimate aim is to provide access to the full range of products and services that a company might need during that early period. “Getting a product out there and getting people to use it is where most companies die,” he said. “We want to help bridge that gap.” So today, LaunchRock has added two big sections to its website. The first is the LaunchRock App Store — it’s a curated list of discounts and free trials on products that could be useful for a new company. It covers areas like developer tools, branding and design, and legal and financial services. For example, you could sign up for professional web hosting from BlueHost for $3.95 a month, or get 25 percent off the silver and gold plans from A/B testing service Optimizely. Naturally, Detweiler plans to expand the store over time. There’s a link where other service providers can ask to participate, and eventually, he said the App Store could also turn into a beta testing channel, where new businesses can try out cool new tools while they’re still in the beta phase. The other new section is LaunchRock Build. Conceptually, it’s similar to the App Store — it’s offering services that a new company might need. However, instead of offering general deals for products, LaunchRock Build tries to help customers find the specific people who can help address a specific need. That includes areas like advertising, crowdfunding, and mobile app design and development. These services will be provided from folks in the company’s “network of talent” — though LaunchRock is tackling at least one of the services, explainer video production, itself. Detweiler didn’t want to get into too many details about how LaunchRock plans to expand the network, but he did say it has a “fairly non-traditional business structure” and that it’s “looking at some things behind-the-scenes” that should help it scale more efficiently. |
| Obama Is An Open Government Pioneer, Spymaster Dataholic Posted: 07 Jun 2013 08:24 AM PDT  Love him or hate him, President Obama is no hypocrite: he’s been as fiercely innovative at encouraging citizen input to improve governance as he has been in secretly stealing Americans’ private information. Transparent budget spending, crowdsourcing government waste, unprecedented spending on polls, collecting school performance metrics, and rewarding civic app designers have co-existed with a massive expansion in Internet snooping and big-data spying. In short, Obama is a philosophically consistent dataholic — a policy that other innovative/civil liberty-ignoring political leaders, such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have proudly championed. Many were quick to label Obama a hypocrite after a string of expose’s detailing the National Security Agency’s massive phone and Internet spying apparatus, “It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed,” wrote The New York Times editorial board in an uncharacteristically scathing OpEd. Or, in the blogging equivalent of our Aol cousins at Huffington Post, “GEORGE W. OBAMA”. But, before we brand Obama as some power-hungry George W. look-alike, it’s worth noting that Obama has given extraordinary resources to so-called “open government”, building digital platforms that encourage citizens to monitor, influence, and design public programs.
And, on the Spying side
And, for good measure, the amount his administration has spent on polling has spiked 40% over his predecessor’s ($4.4M vs. $3.1M). In short, Obama holds the quite philosophically consistent position that more information is better; nor is he alone. New York City’s Michael Bloomberg has arguably opened up more government data than any state in the union, turned abandoned payphones into Wi-Fi-hotspots, and encouraged civic hackers to design streamlined public services; he’s also admitted he’s perfectly fine with greater drone spying. In an information age, we’re witnessing a new information-hungry politician. There is, apparently, a cost for those who love the inspiring direct democracy of broad digital civic engagement. The question we must ask ourselves is if an open government champion is worth the cost of spying. |
| Valkee, The Profitable Startup That Shines Lights Through Your Ears, Raises $9.7M Posted: 07 Jun 2013 08:05 AM PDT  Valkee, the Finnish company that built a contraption that shines lights through your ear canals to treat seasonal affective disorder, closed $9.7 million in funding from current and new investors. Beyond the ones that were already revealed last year like Finland’s Lifeline Ventures, Esther Dyson, Jaiku and Ditto co-founder Jyri Engestrom and former EA EVP Kristian Segerstrale, the company isn’t sharing the identities of its new investors. While Valkee’s product does sound a bit wacky, it’s backed by research from the company’s co-founder Juuso Nissila. While studying the circadian rhythms of birds up in the way, way north of Finland in Oulo, he found that there were light-sensitive proteins on the surface of these animals’ brains that could help regulate their sleep schedules. He wondered if the same photo-sensitivity could be found in human brains. He partnered with a longtime Nokia researcher Antti Auino and built the Valkee, which looks like an MP3 player with a set of fancy headphones attached to it. The earbuds actually have a pair of lights attached to them that run for 12-minute sessions at a time. The idea is that by shining light into sensitive areas of the brain, it will stimulate a special OPN3 protein in parts of the brain that help regulate serotonin, melatonin and dopamine production. They started selling the product back in 2010 under Europe’s CE Class II medical device certification and have their biggest customer bases in German-speaking Europe, Scandinavia and Japan. They’re using the funding to expand to other markets while expanding existing clinical trials for applications in treating jetlag, cognitive performance and depression. Given that it’s such a controversial product, Valkee has tried to be relatively open to both praise and criticism with its presence on Facebook. The company has so far published two clinical trials for seasonal affective disorder using 13 patients in an open trial and 89 patients in a controlled trial. |
| Amazon Continues Arming Its Legion Of Self-Publishers With Storyteller Launch Posted: 07 Jun 2013 07:48 AM PDT  Amazon has been nothing short of experimental in its quest to compete and dominate in the streaming video space. Today, the company takes it a step further with the introduction of the Amazon Storyteller, a program that lets script writers turn their works into full story boards. The program, which is still in beta, is a free web tool that lets writers not only build out their work into story board form, including characters and dialogue, but it lets users share that work with others to collaborate. Here’s how it works: Authors can scan a movie script that they’ve already uploaded to Amazon Studios, the creative production arm of Amazon. Storyteller then locates the scenes, locations and characters from scene descriptions and automatically “casts” them from a huge library of characters, props and backgrounds. This way, without any imagery whatsoever, writers can still see a visual representation of their script. The writers then have the option to change the details of the storyboard, by adding additional vehicles or props, captions, or messing with the positioning and/or facial expression of the characters. So what’s in it for Amazon? Well, in order to use the Storyteller software, users must upload their works to Amazon Studios. This means that, whether the project is public or private, Amazon has the right to review it, option it, and extend that option to develop it into a real life TV series or movie. Amazon Studios already sources work from writers to be made into complete productions, but the Storyteller should bring a new crop of writers into the fold. If you’re interested in using Amazon Storyteller, head on over here and get started. |
| Larry Harvey And JP Barlow On Burning Man's Sharing Economy, And Our Tech Future [TCTV] Posted: 07 Jun 2013 07:37 AM PDT  Larry Harvey is the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, while John Perry Barlow is a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We caught up with both men at Le Web London to discuss some of the intellectual underpinnings of startup entreprepreneurship have parallels with Burning Man in what might be their first ever joint interview. As Barlow points out in the video, early computer culture and the Psychedelia movement grew up alongside each other. There was a “revolutionary zeal in the notion of intellectual empowerment” in Psychedelia which found common cause in tech culture. During the discussion Harvey points out that Burning Man builds an ephemeral city once a year and bans commercial transactions. Instead, they have pioneered a gift economy which matches much of the “gifting” economics online startups today. JP Barlow believes we’re returning to a gift economy that actually existed long ago, in former human societies. The ‘scarcity’ economic model which drives much of business today has problems in a new age of potentially limitless space online. Indeed, points out Barlow, we keep getting encouraged to create scarcity. “I have an artist friend who’s agent invited him to fake his own death to increase the value of his art!” he jokes. But the collaborative art created at Burning Man is not commercial in the same way, and at the same time it mirrors the world of collaboration online today. The radical self expression at Burning Man also has parallels in the way Silicon Valley approaches startup culture. Entrepreneurs throw themselves at a problem without knowing if they will succeed, and indeed it’s likely they will fail. In the same way, the art created at Burning Man can work or it can fail. As Harvey says: “If the unknown isn’t present then art withers”. It’s a phrase that would sound familiar to many entrepreneurs dealing daily with the unknown, but felling all the more driven to create something. Are they optimistic about a future filled with things like Google Glass? Both men feel the march of technology itself is not a concern, it’s – in a word – how we “deal with fear”. “Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander… It’s just an extension of humanity,” says Barlow. “You can [also] increase your ability to see inside that which is trying to look inside you.” Harvey believes the often bad reactions to technologies like Google Glass and fears about a future surveillance society are mainly down to irrational, primordial fears. “We’re caught between fight and flight. I guess we have to go forward,” he says. Watch to the end for a marvellous story Harvey tells to illustrate this… [Thanks to Chris Leydon for the camera work.] |
| In Response To PRISM, Anonymous Leaks DoD Documents Posted: 07 Jun 2013 07:24 AM PDT  Following news of the NSA’s data-mining program which taps into Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple servers, among others, the network of internet activists known as Anonymous have released a collection documents online which detail the existence of an “intelligence-sharing network.” The documents are dated around 2008 – which, according to reports, was shortly after the PRISM program took off with its first partners (Microsoft in 2007, followed by Yahoo in 2008). The leak from Anonymous was first reported by the Inquirer. The documents were released on the privacy-focused information sharing site Pastebin, often used by Anonymous for its online missives. Along with links to the files themselves, the group has penned another of its rallying cries/press releases about the “documents ‘they’ do not want you to see,” proclaiming, “let these people know, that we will not be silenced…” and so on. Anonymous says the documents show that NSA is spying on Americans and those in 35 other countries worldwide. The file linked to is purportedly authored by the U.S. Department of Defense, and it details the department’s Global Information Grid (GIG). A cursory glance at the documents doesn’t seem to indicate there’s much new information in them, as related to the ongoing press coverage of the PRISM program as it stands now – the names of major tech companies like Yahoo or Microsoft are not mentioned, for example, nor is there a direct reference to “PRISM.” However, the files do provide some information related to the DoD’s plans for “GIG,” or Global Information Grid – a file-sharing network meant to “facilitate widespread sharing of trusted information and rapid adaptation of forces to changing mission needs.” Specifically, the files refer to increasing “NetOps capabilities,” which are mean to make GIG “a more effective weapon to meet changing mission needs and to support operations in the cyberspace domain.” Though the documents themselves may not be a big reveal the way that the news of PRISM itself was, their release is a reminder that in the information age, data collection can go both ways. Update: Removing reference to these documents as being “classified,” as we cannot prove that is the case. |
| Apple And Sony Reach Agreement, Giving iRadio Full Record Label Support, Report Claims Posted: 07 Jun 2013 06:44 AM PDT  Apple’s rumored iRadio support has just scored a major win, signing up remaining holdout Sony Music according to a new report from AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka. This follows reports earlier this week that talks had successfully resulted in arrangements with Warner Bros. and Universal, which should mean Apple is in a good position to be able to launch its streaming radio service soon, possibly as early as next week at WWDC. Recent reports suggested that Apple has been negotiating aggressively with labels in order to get them on board with the service, which is rumored to resemble Pandora and offer free, ad-supported listening to iOS users. The reason for the sudden renewal in talks, which had previously hit a brick wall according to earlier rumors, is that Apple wanted to be able to announce the new service at WWDC on Monday. Kafka says we “should expect” to hear about the service at the event via official announcement, which could occur during Apple’s WWDC keynote happening at 10 AM Pacific, which we’ll be reporting from live. Apple is said to still have some potential hiccups in the way, according to the report, including landing an arrangement between Sony/ATV, the publishing part of Sony’s music business. But it was apparently closer to a deal with that group than it was with Sony Music, which Kafka says is probably a good indication Apple will work through that minor barrier as well. An iRadio announcement would be well-timed, given the recent launch of Google’s own All Access music service for the Play store. But Apple’s offering also sounds like a very different kind of service, with perhaps more in common with the kind of DMCA streaming radio service offered by companies like 7digital. The big appeal of the service, for both Apple and for its record label partners, might be that the company can use it to drive even more iTunes direct music sales, by integrating the service closely with Apple’s traditional digital downloads-driven music store, and with other offerings like the iTunes Match digital locker service. |
| GamePop Adds iPad And iPhone Game Support, Giving The Console Access To iOS Exclusives Posted: 07 Jun 2013 06:15 AM PDT  BlueStacks is hoping to take the clear early consumer interest in a home gaming console built with mobile technologies and make that into big business, and today it’s announcing what could become a huge advantage for its GamePop console over other similar offerings. GamePop will support iPhone and iPad apps at launch, in addition to Android titles, making the first such device to tap into Apple’s rich app ecosystem. As part of this expansion, GamePop is also announcing its first partner on the iOS side today: Subatomic Studios. Subatomic is the studio behind Fieldrunners, the tower defense game that was one of the iPhone’s first true defining hits. Fieldrunners has since expanded to a number of different platforms, including the PlayStation Store, Android and more, but BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma explained in an interview that in the case where a title is available on both Android and iOS, GamePop will offer the version which is considered the flagship for the title. And while Subatomic is just the first announced partner bringing iOS software to the GamePop, there are many more partnerships in the works And all of the iOS titles will be included free with the cost of the $6.99 per month subscription, alongside Android titles, to make up the 500 titles BlueStacks is aiming to provide to subscribers as part of their package. Like with Android titles, BlueStacks will be looking to procure high-quality iOS games, and Sharma points to Fieldrunners as a perfect example, since it’s a $2.99 game at regular price when purchased through the App Store. Any iOS titles will also be able to bring in-app purchases to the GamePop, though they’ll be handled through one of leading third-party in-app purchase API providers on Android rather than through Apple. To get iOS games running on the GamePop, the use a new proprietary technology pioneered by BlueStacks called “Looking Glass,” which is somewhat similar to the type of virtualization that the company does when bringing Android titles to Windows 8, for instance, but with some crucial differences.. But Rosen also notes that this isn’t something that’s using Apple APIs or is in any way in danger of running afoul of that company’s rules regarding iOS software. “From a technology perspective, it uses virtualitzation, but it’s a different kind of virtualization than what we use for example for our PC products,” he said. “This is more API-level virtualization. We don’t use any of Apple’s bits – the developer just gives us the app and we make sure that it’ll run on GamePop.” Nor does GamePop’s method of bringing mobile software designed for Apple devices result in any kind of sacrifices when it comes to performance or quality of experience. Since the virtualization happens at a very basic level, the GamePop is essentially doing the same heavy lifting as the iPhone or iPad hardware, but doesn’t need to do any additional work, the way it would if it were virtualizing in the same way that Parallels does with Windows on an OS X computer, for instance. “In iOS the app makes a call and says, for example, ‘draw a menu for me,’ and in GamePop the app would make the same call and we’d be drawing the menu for them,” he said. “At this point, iOS and Android are so similar from an API perspective that it’s feasible to do this. So there’s no difference in terms of performance, and in fact developers on iOS follow such good guidelines that getting them on GamePop is relatively straightforward.” The change to GamePop not only gives it access to a broader library of software from which to choose its core group of titles, but it also means that GamePop isn’t just another Android-based home gaming console in the tradition of OUYA and GameStick. Now, it’s a different beast entirely, and one with a crucial competitive advantage over and above its subscription-based revenue model. GamePop is currently on sale for the introductory price of ‘free’ through June, with the $6.99 per month subscription, and will retail for $129 after that. |
| Call-filtering App WhosCall Now Available To Help iPhone Users Avoid Spam Calls Posted: 07 Jun 2013 06:11 AM PDT  With over 600 million phone numbers in its database, WhosCall allows users around the world ID incoming calls and texts, even if those numbers aren’t already stored in their contacts list. Originally built for Android, the app is now available for the iPhone. According to its developer, Taipei-based startup Gogolook, WhosCall’s Android version has been downloaded over 3 million times around the world and IDs and blocks over 10 million unwelcome calls per month. The iPhone release is targeted for release in Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan. The new iOS version features reverse number search, the ability to create a blacklist of unwelcome callers and a call guard database, or a list of numbers that have been identified through user feedback and WhosCall’s algorithms as potentially malicious. WhosCall’s database of phone numbers was initially gathered from public sources like the Yellow Pages and the Google Place API, while others were added as more people began to use the app and report unwanted callers. “Crowdsourcing has become the major way we get malicious numbers for our blacklist database,” says Jeff Kuo, the CEO and co-founder of Gogolook. Based in Taipei, Gogolook was officially founded in April 2012, but first started three years ago as the project of three friends who started working together part-time to develop Android apps, says Kuo. One app was designed for real estate salespeople to get real-time information, while the other was the first version of WhosCall. During WhosCall’s first year on the market, it rapidly gained traction around the world, including in the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Middle Eastern countries like Saudia Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt. The success of WhosCall enabled its developers to launch Gogolook, which now has 10 employees. The startup has raised about $500,000 in angel funding and is backed by Trinity VC. The iOS version of WhosCall is available at an early-bird price of $0.99 through the weekend. Afterward, it will be sold for $4.99. |
| Posted: 07 Jun 2013 05:47 AM PDT  The same week as its old rival Tapjoy restructured with layoffs, Trialpay says it has quietly grown mobile revenue 85 percent over the last quarter by giving gamers offers they can redeem offline in stores. The company, which helped social game developers monetize through subscription and other product offers, has shifted toward the Android and iOS platforms over the last year. They add that May mobile revenues should be double April’s in-take. Angelos didn’t say what base mobile revenues were growing from, but he did say that the company’s overall revenue is up from where it was two years ago. Instead of veering toward incentivized installs or rich video ads in games like many other competitors, Trialpay instead went for a product that tracks in-store promotions via credit and debit cards. A gamer can earn extra premium virtual currency by buying everyday items like coffee or clothing. “You can walk into a store, buy a burger and all you have to do is swipe your credit card while we track that purchase via a payment network,” said co-founder Terry Angelos. Trialpay has picked up about half of the top 10 game developers, according to PocketGamer’s annual list, and on the marketing side, they’ve picked up local food chains like Buca di Beppo. “Our business is following a similar trajectory as Facebook and Kabam,” Angelos said. “We were originally 100% web-based like Facebook and now we’re seeing our business gravitate toward mobile platforms.” Facebook said about 30 percent of its revenues came from mobile advertising, up from virtually nothing a year earlier. Like on the Facebook platform, Angelos said the company avoided a lot of the riskier strategies. They were originally picked up as Facebook’s official partner for offers after rivals aggressively pushed lower-quality lead generation offers. Then when other players shifted to mobile platform, Trialpay migrated a lot more slowly — for better and worse. For one, it meant that their mobile traction has only really picked up in the last quarter, while others have grabbed market share over the last two years. But on the other hand, moving later helped the company avoid some of the early missteps around incentivized downloads. In 2011, the practice of giving gamers virtual currency in exchange for downloading other apps was banned on iOS because Apple felt it was too manipulative of chart rankings. “We’ve avoided the whole incentivized category on iOS. That’s been highly contentious stuff that Apple has banned,” Angelos said. “We’re pretty happy that the market seems to be self-correcting.” Trialpay has raised more than $55 million from Greylock, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Visa and T. Rowe Price. Through the whole Facebook-to-mobile transition, the company has kept its headcount relatively even at 120 people. |
| As Competition Heats Up, Uber Plans To Lower Fares On UberX Rides By 25% In San Francisco Posted: 07 Jun 2013 12:35 AM PDT  Uber is planning an aggressive strike against mounting competition in the on-demand transportation market, as it will lower fares for its low-cost UberX service by as much as 25 percent in San Francisco. According to multiple drivers, UberX could see those fare reductions take hold as early as next week, as the company seeks to steal business from peer-to-peer ride services like Lyft and SideCar. Update: The reduction in fares is expected to go into effect on June 12. And, as far as we know, the lower prices will only apply to rides in San Francisco. The move to lower fares comes as Uber is facing more competition from taxi e-hail apps and services that use drivers who aren’t commercially licensed. In its home market of San Francisco, Lyft, SideCar, and new entrant InstantCab all offer an alternative by connecting passengers with community drivers who have a car and the spare time, under the guise of ride sharing. Lyft, in particular, has been growing fairly quickly, serving more than 30,000 rides per week just one year into offering its ride sharing service to the public. It’s also raised a huge, $60 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz which it plans to use to fund expansion throughout the U.S. and international markets. Uber has raised about $50 million since being founded in 2009, but it has a much longer history of generating revenue and is in many more markets. With lower-priced competition mounting, Uber has also gotten into the so-called ride-sharing business, first in California, but with plans to extend the lower-cost service into new markets. While the low-cost UberX service was first launched with commercially licensed drivers in hybrid vehicles, earlier this year Uber announced that it would also offer peer-to-peer, or ride sharing services on that platform as well. While expanding into new markets, Uber has also been aggressively trying to recruit drivers from its competition. It’s gone so far as to hire a mobile billboard to drive around San Francisco, urging Lyft drivers to “Shave the ‘Stache” — that is, to shed the pink mustaches that adorn Lyft cars — and join its platform instead. Uber may have previously sought to steal drivers away from its competition, but now it’s going after their customers. When the new fares go into effect, it won’t be the first time Uber has done so — the company lowered UberX rates by 10 percent when it first introduced the idea of community drivers. And over Memorial Day weekend, it reduced fares by 25 percent in the Bay Area, in a seeming reversal of its surge pricing during high-demand periods. That could have been seen as a test run for a more permanent price reduction. While Lyft and SideCar have been entering new cities with their ride-sharing service, Uber has an early lead in most markets. In addition to the San Francisco Bay Area, Uber offers black car services in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Paris, Berlin, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Diego, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Denver, London, Melbourne, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Phoenix, Stockholm, Sydney, Baltimore, Detroit, Milan, Sacramento, and Singapore. Representatives from Uber could not be reached for comment. |
| VivaKi Partners With Nativo For Native Ad Campaigns Posted: 06 Jun 2013 09:01 PM PDT  Native advertising startup Nativo and VivaKi, a tech-focused agency within ad giant Publicis, announced today that they’ve formed a strategic partnership. Basically, VivaKi will be using Nativo technology to run campaigns for Publicis clients. The partnership is another sign that the ad industry is becoming interested in native advertising (a loose term that basically covers sponsored posts and other ads that match the format of the surrounding content) generally and Nativo particularly. Rishad Tobaccowala, VivaKi’s chief strategy and innovation officer, told me that this is part of the agency’s interest in “next-generation storytelling.” He suggested it’s a counterbalance to the digital advertisers’ focus on technology and automation: “A lot of the industry is working on how to get the plumbing right, but you can get the plumbing right and find that you don’t have the poetry.” The “poetry” side is where ad agencies come in, and it’s also why native advertising is important — “native is a way to tell stories.” As for why VivaKi is partnering with Nativo in particular, Tobaccowala said that the big challenge with native has been achieving scale. Nativo solves that problem by allowing advertisers to run campaigns with multiple publishers, and the ad is automatically formatted to match the layout of each site. (Nativo CEO Justin Choi demonstrated the technology for me last week, showing me how Nativo can identify the different elements of a piece of content, then use that knowledge to reassemble an advertiser’s content in the same format.) Nativo can also run automatic A/B tests so that the most effective headline is used on each site. The two companies have a relationship that started before the formal partnership, even before Nativo changed its name from PostRelease earlier this year, Tobaccowala said. They’re also connected through Greycroft Partners, which invested in Nativo and where Tobaccowala is an advisor. Nativo says it has already run campaigns adding up to hundreds of millions of impressions, with click-through rates that are 5 to 20 times higher than standard display ads. |
| LightInTheBox's Shares Surge 22% To $11.61 As Etailer Launches 2013′s First Chinese IPO In U.S. Posted: 06 Jun 2013 07:48 PM PDT  Online e-commerce site LightInTheBox became the first Chinese company to hold its IPO in the U.S. this year. Trading under the ticker LITB, shares rose 22.2% to $11.61 during the stock’s first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, raising a total of $79 million. LightInTheBox’s strong debut also boosted shares of other Chinese tech stocks, including fellow online retailer Vipshop, which rose almost 3% to $29.46. Shares of search giant Baidu climbed 3.9% to $4.15, while travel agency Ctrip.com International jumped 6.3% to $32.91. Based in Beijing and founded in 2007 by a team including former Google China CSO Alan Guo, LightInTheBox is a global sourcing platform that sells goods from Chinese suppliers to retailers. The company says it has 2.5 million users and made $200 million in net revenues in 2012. Its site is available in 17 languages and covers more than 80% of global Internet users. In 2012, LightInTheBox ranked number one in terms of revenue generated from customers outside of China among all China-based retails sites that source products from third-party manufacturers. Its investors have included Zhenfund, GSR Ventures, Ceyuan Ventures and TrustBridge Partners. LightInTheBox’s IPO came 15 months after Vipshop’s listing in March 2012. Vipshop has done well since its IPO, with its stock price almost quadrupling from its debut of $6.50. LightInTheBox aimed to raise up to $100 million in its IPO and set its opening price at $9.50 per share. Credit Suisse and Stifel acted as joint bookrunners and Pacific Crest Securities, Oppenheimer & Co. and China Renaissance Securities were co-managers of the offering. Investors and analysts are keeping an eye on LightInTheBox’s performance on the stock market after a tough year for Chinese IPOs due to concerns over accounting and governance practices, stymied economic growth in China and concerns that Chinese companies are overvalued. Only two Chinese tech companies had IPOs last year: Vipshop and social gaming platform YY. |
| U.S. Government: Reports About PRISM Contain “Numerous Inaccuracies” Posted: 06 Jun 2013 07:29 PM PDT  After the flurry of reports about the NSA’s alleged PRISM surveillance program earlier today, the U.S.’s Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper just released an official statement. According to Clapper, “The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies.” Clapper argues that Section 702 is meant to “facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the United States.” It is not meant to be used to “intentionally” target any U.S. citizens (though the statement leaves a door open for an admittance of “unintentional” spying). Given the outright denials of all the tech firms accused of participating in this program, including Google, Facebook and Apple, it remains unclear if the accusation that these companies knew about the program is one of the “inaccuracies.” Here is the full statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:
Update: ODNI also just sent us the following statement in addition to the previous one:
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| Who The NSA Follows, On Twitter Posted: 06 Jun 2013 06:25 PM PDT  It’s not a surprise that our phone calls are being tracked by the U.S. government. It’s not a surprise that our Facebook and Google and PalTalk accounts might be as well. What is a surprise is that the only legit-seeming NSA Twitter account I can find (this one is poetically a squatter) only follows seven accounts. INI Carnegie Mellon @inicmu Betrayed by all its M*shable reading, perhaps the NSA did not include Twitter in its PRISM program because the NSA does not know how to use Twitter? Disclosure: TechCrunch parent company Aol has been accused of being part of PRISM and allowing the NSA to directly access and collect data from its servers. If this is the case (only Aol and PalTalk have not denied being a part of the program in some way), can someone from the NSA please complete Josh Constine’s SBC training? Thanks. |
| President Obama Visiting Silicon Valley Tonight, As Reports Of NSA's Tech Spying Come To Light Posted: 06 Jun 2013 05:50 PM PDT  President Obama’s official schedule indicates that he is currently aboard Air Force One and en route to the San Francisco Bay Area for private events being held tonight with some of Silicon Valley’s most elite players. The president’s visit comes within hours of massive new revelations about the United States National Security Agency’s reported collection of personal user data from Verizon as well as from the servers of Internet giants including Facebook, Google, Apple, and others (a number of those companies are denying any involvement in providing data.) The trip to the Bay Area, which will last less than 24 hours and was apparently scheduled long before the NSA news broke, is primarily a fundraising junket (on Friday, President Obama will head to Southern California to meet with the President of China.) Local ABC affiliate KGO reported this morning that the president’s first stop after his plane touches down at approximately 6:00 PM Pacific Time will be the home of Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and his wife Marci:
After that, the president will go to Vinod Khosla’s home in Portola Valley, where a $32,400 per person dinner will be held. Topics there will reportedly include “things like immigration, climate change and gun violence prevention,” according to the plans laid out in arranging the event. But given the latest news and how it’s absolutely dominating the discussions in the tech world right now, it seems inevitable that tonight’s conversations will go a bit off-topic from those planned talking points. Image of Air Force One at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California via NASA.gov |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 04:53 PM PDT  The Washington Post today reported that Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company) and Yahoo participated in the so-called PRISM program which provided the NSA with what looks like virtually direct access to their servers and their users’ data. We have now reached out to all of these companies and all of them have categorically denied that they are participating. These denials are especially odd given that a number of publications, including USA Today, are now citing source that confirm the existence of this program. According to these reports, PRISM is not aimed at U.S. citizens or any person in the United States. Here is what we got so far: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.” "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data." Apple Apple gave this the statement to AllThingsD: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order." Microsoft "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it." Yahoo “Yahoo! takes users’ privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.” Dropbox “We've seen reports that Dropbox might be asked to participate in a government program called PRISM. We are not part of any such program and remain committed to protecting our users' privacy.” Paltalk “We have not heard of PRISM. Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users’ data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers.” AOL “We do not have any knowledge of the Prism program. We do not disclose user information to government agencies without a court order, subpoena or formal legal process, nor do we provide any government agency with access to our servers.” We will update this post as we hear from the other companies named in the documents. |
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