It was a couple of months ago that BiteHunter.com beta-launched itself as an aggregator for dining deals. Easily described as a “Kayak for restaurants,” BiteHunter is designed to help users locate dining deals, a problem which has been been addressed quite well for verticals such as travel, but quite poorly for dining, at least on an aggregated basis.
Today BiteHunter is announcing a new iPhone app (iTunes Link) that expands its dining deal search across the US, from the initial markets of New York, San Francisco and Chicago.
The uniqueness of BiteHunter is the real-timeliness of the deal data it exposes. By this I mean, that BiteHunter scours real-time sources such as a restaurant’s Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook accounts, as well as Groupon, LivingSocial and newsletters, to bring users the freshest deal info. Compare this against, say Yelp, which restaurants seem to use more as a business card rather than a customer engagement medium.
BiteHunter’s new iPhone app has nicely designed search and discoverability features built-in. Deals can be searched for, or discovered on a map. Filtering can be applied to cuisine, price, distance, and type of deal. Alongside the deal info, BiteHunter also provides restaurant information, related deals, reviews, photos and menus. Users can even reserve tables with the app.
A feature I really like is that the app alternates tabs depending on the time of day. So the Lunch tab will become Happy Hours, and Dinner as the day progresses.
There’s no question that BiteHunter brings value to users, however, the big challenge, as always for these types of services, is customer acquisition.
While he’s no Steve Jobs, Cupertino Mayor Gilbert Wong has his unique charm. In a press conference today responding to yesterday’s amazing Steve Jobs pitch, Wong said emphatically, “Cupertino is ready for this” referring to the 150 acre “Mothership” Apple campus that Jobs wants ready to house over 12K employees by 2015 (if everything goes as planned).
“There is no chance that we’re saying no,” insisted Wong, who started his life with Apple IIs and Apple II +s, “The Mothership has landed in Cupertino.”
In his statement Wong referred to the fact that his daughter attends the same middle school as Jobs did as a boy, but insisted that no preferential treatment was given to Apple in this decision, “Every time that we have a large company that has a large sales tax produced we are very accommodating to that company.”
Wow, an unabashed “Yes,” and Jobs didn’t even have to include free Wifi! But seriously, how would you react?
Custom men’s clothing company J. Hilburn is expanding its product line to suits today and raised a $5 million C round from Bridgescale Partners and existing investor Battery Ventures. That brings the total capital invested in the Dallas startup to $12 million. The funds will be used to accelerate its development of new products and as working capital for clothing inventory.
J. Hilburn started out with men’s dress shirts, but soon expanded to pants, sweaters, and more casual wear. The company takes a unique hybrid approach to sales, employing a direct sales force of 1,000 “style advisers” who visit customers at their homes or offices for consultations and fittings. That sales army is growing fast. At the beginning of the year, there were only 625 style advisers. More recently, the company launched online sales, which makes it easier to move that relationship can move from offline to online.
The company acts as both manufacturer and retailer, cutting out middle layers of retail distribution and the related markups. J. Hilburn’s suits, for instance, will be manufactured in Portugal in the same factory where Armani and Zegna suits are made, with the same fabrics. But instead of paying $1,700 for a Zegna suit, a similar J. Hilburn suit will cost about $800.
The company is growing at a nice clip. “We are running 20% ahead on plan,” says CEO Hil Davis. The plan was to hit $20 million in sales this year, up from $8 million last year. Now, Davis expects revenues to be between $20 million and $25 million.
The average sales per customer is also going up. Davis expects the average to be between $500 and $600 per customer this year, up from $400 in 2010, $323 in 2009, and $212 in 2008. The company has an iPad app in the works designed as point-of-sale system for the style advisers to help them sell even more. As a special promotion, anyone who registers online today will get a $20 credit.
It looks like Coupons.com just became the Airbnb of mega-million dollar raises at billion dollar valuations. Today, Coupons.com, the largest provider of digital coupons, announced that it has received a $200 million investment from a group of institutional investors, including several mutual funds. The company has thus far declined to disclose the names of the investors. The sizable investment comes at a supposed $1 billion valuation, and sources close to Coupons.com (who declined to be named) said that the valuation is based on $100 million in expected revenues for 2011, roughly double those of the prior year. This is likely all a part of gearing up for a potential IPO sometime in 2012.
The hefty infusion of institutional capital is aimed at furthering the company's goal of bringing coupons online, as digital coupons currently represent the fastest growing segment of the coupon industry. According to the company, more than 332 billion coupons were distributed in 2010. As the print publishing industry continues to fall on hard times, the company is aiming at an industry wide transformation as shoppers look for digital ways to save.
To meet the growing demand in the coupon industry, and to presumably give Groupon a potential reason to look over its shoulder, Coupons.com plans to hire 100 employees in 2011, enabling the company to grow its staff by over 30 percent in just six months. Those new hires will primarily be focused in engineering, sales and client-marketing, the company said.
The company also plans to use its new capital to make strategic acquisitions, building on its prior acquisitions of Free State Labs, the developers of Grocery IQ, an shopping list app for mobile. As of right now, Coupons.com claims to be the largest provider of digital coupons (and the 43rd largest website in the U.S.), its network spanning thousands of sites, including retailers, publishers, consumer electronics, shopping cards, and apps.
Founded in 1998, Coupons.com, which counts companies like A&P, Clorox, General Mills, Kelloggs, Walgreens, and Safeway as its clients, has become a resource for manufacturers looking to add coupons to digital media strategies, like Facebook fan pages, corporate websites, email campaigns, and more.
One of the easiest ways to “go green” is to start paying your bills online — to cut out that papery middle man. Of course, the paperless revolution seems to be taking longer than expected to sweep the world by storm. Partly, this seems to be due to habit and partly due to concerns over security, privacy, and ease of access. Thankfully, doxo provides users with a cloud-based digital file cabinet that acts as a single unifying resource for all your transactional records, like bills, statements, and benefits, etc. and can notify you of bills via email or SMS.
Today, the startup is introducing doxo Mobile, an app that enables users to safeguard their important financial, household, and personal documents, to travel paper-free, accessing the information anywhere, anytime.
doxo’s mobile app lets consumers connect directly with providers to receive bills, and coming soon, to pay bills for multiple providers from a smartphone — from a single account, with a single password. On the flip side, for providers, doxo allows them multiple access points from which to communicate with their customers when they’re on the go, or at their desktop, enabling companies of all sizes to simplify customer interaction.
Other cool features of doxo’s digital file cabinet? Daily deal vouchers can be stored from multiple sites all in one place, as well as travel portfolios, insurance policies, marriage licenses, and more. You can also store your passwords and important account numbers on the mobile app, too.
And for business, doxo’s eFile cabinet allows companies to increase paperless adoption without having to rely on expensive software. doxo Mobile will initially be available only on the iPhone, but the company says that apps for Android and other platforms are to follow. To get the new doxo Mobile app, check it out here.
doxo raised a $10 million in a series B round in February, which was led by Sigma Partners, with previous investors Mohr Davidow and Bezos Expeditions participating — all while the service was invite-only. This round brought total funding to $15 million and allowed doxo to go live with its mobile service today. Once doxo adds its pay-from-anywhere mobile feature, this app will without a doubt come in handy.
And hey, both the web service and the iPhone app are free. All because doxo saves businesses money on paper. (And the $15 million in funding doesn’t hurt either.)
A research firm focused on clean energy and green innovation, the Cleantech Group, launched its i3 Platform today— and it’s something like a paid Crunchbase, with a dash of Alltop and Gartner, for green tech ventures.
The product became privately available to some of Cleantech Group’s clients in late May. Now, some of the i3 Platform is available for free public use via Research.cleantech.com. Free users get basic search and brief— as in one sentence— company profiles.
Paid subscribers to i3, however, get access to detailed company profiles, complete search results, market mapping tools (see: image below) regular Industry Insights and quarterly investment reports from the Cleantech Group.
The product is meant to help the firm’s clients see how green tech players are connecting, and what relationships have led to the successful commercialization of energy, and environmental problem-solving technologies.
The i3 Platform is populated with Cleantech Group’s new and archived research about: investments, acquisitions, companies and their inter-connectedness in the cleantech space. Cleantech Group also invites entrepreneurs to submit to or update their company profiles within the i3 system.
Any user-submitted content that it publishes via i3 will be verified and edited by Cleantech Group analysts, said the firm’s chief executive officer Sheeraz Haji. He calls this not user-generated, but “structured contributed content.”
On its submissions page, i3 requires users to disclose whether or not they are seeking funding, currently. Could the i3 Platform become a kind of specialized AngelList? Haji said it’s not in the cards:
“We have always connected fund seekers with prospective investors by providing good visibility, and information across the board. Our customers can log in and search for which companies in the system are raising capital, maybe in this state or that region, or in these sectors or subsectors of cleantech. We're not building that to take a piece of equity or to get a transaction fee, though.”
[Ed's note: Crunchbase is TechCrunch's open database of technology ventures, investors, products and deals. It includes user generated content, data and graphics, research from our staff and contributors, and aggregated news links from valid sources online. Any researchers and developers can use the Crunchbase API to access our data, and use it in their systems. Cleantech Group is not doing so yet, but has expressed some interest.]
Education-focused startup OpenStudy is a platform for “massively multi-player study groups.” What this means is that students who are studying the same subject like math or writing can ask and answer questions on OpenStudy, which uses Facebook Connect to let users interact and learn collaboratively through profiles and group chat.
OpenStudy aims to make education fun by providing users with gamification (yeah I know how terrible using this word is, but I make an exception for things education-related) elements like medals and achievements for completing actions like answering a question quickly or answering more than ten questions. You can also fan people you’d like to follow, giving users incentive to engage and contribute.
“We want OpenStudy profiles to become like LinkedIn for education,” says Marketing Manager Jon Birdsong, ”An accurate and evolving representation of your academic persona. We want our students to become heroes to their peers – and we want to make sure everyone knows when they are.”
Having just come out of beta in February OpenStudy now has 40,000 registered students in over 1,500 schools in 143 countries. There are 20,000 questions being asked monthly in the math group alone.
And the institutions that have forked over cash to support OpenStudy are impressive: the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Georgia Research Alliance and the Gates foundation. Most recently the startup partnered up with MIT OpenCourseWare to let students work together on over 65 courses.
Future plans for the startup include adding even more gamification features like referring questions to Facebook Friends, a groups function (“teams”) and the widgetization of OpenStudy profile credentials so users can add them to other sites. “We want our students to become heroes to their peers – and we want to make sure everyone knows when they are,” Birdsong explains.
Here’s a video of CEO Chris Sprague demoing the platform, below.
Amid all the big announcements at this year’s WWDC keynote, there was an undercurrent that was subtle, but important.
“It just works.” Steve Jobs kept saying this over and over again on stage. When Jobs does this, it’s never an accident. It’s a message.
And it’s a message that was underscored by another word. “Automatically.” Jobs must have said it a couple dozen times during the keynote.
So what is the message?
Though Apple stumbled out of the gate with MobileMe, and it never really took off (due to a steep $99 annual price point), Apple is now going all-in with their cloud strategy. But they’re not doing it by simply tacking on cloud storage to their existing arsenal of products. They’re attempting to redefine what the “cloud” is.
At one point during the keynote, Jobs noted that some people think of the cloud as a hard disk in the sky where you put files in and then take them out. He even took a small shot at red-hot Dropbox. But as Apple sees it, the cloud is something much more. “The truth is on the cloud,” is how Jobs put it.
John Gruber correctly called that iCloud is essentially the new iTunes. That is, it moves the digital hub from the desktop computer to the cloud. But Apple is aiming beyond even that.
With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic.
Compare this to Google, the company perhaps most associated with the cloud. Google’s approach has been to make the cloud more accessible to existing PC users. They’re doing this by extending familiar concepts. Google Docs is Microsoft Office, but in the cloud. Your main point of interaction is a file system, but in the cloud. Gmail is Outlook, but in the cloud. Etc.
Meanwhile, another company now largely associated with the cloud, Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee. But it takes developers to build something on top of it to give users a product to use. Some are great. But many again just extend the idea of the cloud as a remote hard drive.
While the fundamentals are the same, Apple’s approach to the concept of the cloud is the opposite of their competitors. Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. When Jobs gave a brief glimpse of their new North Carolina datacenter that is the centerpiece of iCloud, he only noted that it was full of “stuff” — “expensive stuff,” he quipped.
The diagrams Jobs showed on stage as to how iCloud works were as simplified as possible. Had it not been announced at a developers conference, I’m not sure Apple would have even done those. Instead, the focus would have been even more on the demos. You’re working on a document in Pages on your iPad, you move over to Pages on your Mac, and there it is. It even remembers where you were last editing. You download a song to your iPhone, you pick up your iPad, there it is.
It all just works.
And that speaks to the larger game here. Apple has been going out of their way to avoid using the word “syncing” with regard to iCloud. That implies that files exist in one place and need to be moved. But again, even that’s too technical for the story Apple is weaving. With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — but an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices.
The truth is that they exist on your machine, then in the iCloud — again, the “truth” — in a cycle. But you don’t need to know any of that. They just exist. Who cares where as long as they’re right there on all your devices when you need them?
Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there.
That also speaks to a key difference between Apple and their competitors. With MobileMe, Apple put a fairly heavy emphasis on the web component. They spent months working and reworking on beautiful web apps for the service. During the iCloud keynote, there was no mention of a web component. For what it’s worth, we’ve heard that the MobileMe apps on me.com will be altered to work with iCloud apps, but that may be a ways off. And that will certainly not be the primary emphasis. The primary emphasis will on the cross-device native apps with iCloud magic.
That’s the opposite of Google’s approach — at least their Chrome/Chrome OS approach. That product is only about the web. That’s where everything exists, and syncing also happens automatically thanks to that. In a weird twist, in that regard, Chrome OS is perhaps the closest thing to Apple’s iCloud vision. When you boot up a Chromebook and enter your password, everything appears. Again, like magic.
With Chrome OS, everything is always there because everything only exists in the cloud. But Google has been bending over backwards to tack on a file management system to Chrome OS. That weakens their cloud argument, in my view. But again, their aim is to ease the transition of current PC users to the cloud.
But Google’s position is especially odd because they have Android as well. Yes, cloud syncing is a big component of that OS as well, and has been for a while. But it’s the Google approach. It’s files, and uploading, and syncing. Some of it is automatic, some is not. It requires some thought. It sort of just works — as long as you know what you’re doing.
And the truth is that this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. Apple is saying they shouldn’t care. It all just works.
Google seems to be aiming more for users who understand current computing paradigms and want to transition that knowledge to the future of computing, the cloud. Power users, if you will. Many of the people reading this post are in this camp. But there are many more who are not.
Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. Google wants the users to be able to see that fabric if they choose to, and in many ways, encourages it as sort of a safety net in the transition to the cloud.
It is two different approaches to the same thing, the cloud. And Apple doesn’t believe that Google can match them even if they wanted to because they don’t have complete control of their ecosystem in the same way that Apple does. “They can never make this so it just works,” Jobs stated at one point.
In Apple’s core vision, there are three types of products that must seamlessly work with one another: phones, tablets, and the recently “demoted” PC. With Android, Google is currently only strong in phones. Tablets aren’t taking off for them yet. And there is no PC presence — well, beyond the web, which again runs into the Chrome OS bifurcation problem.
With that in mind, it may end up being Apple that helps transition users to the cloud, instead of Google despite their emphasis on PC norms.
“You know, if the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software in them is their soul,” Jobs said on Monday. Apple is now more clearly than ever betting that will not be web software, but native software backed invisibly by the web. Google’s position is decidedly less clear. With the existence of Chrome OS and Android, they’re currently betting on both. That dichotomy screams anything but “it just works.”
Guerillapps, a social game maker, debuted a cool new Facebook game at Disrupt NYC that is adding a new spin to green games. What’s more, from what I can tell, Trash Tycoon is the first “upcycling” game to hit the Facebook platform. But what is this “upcycling”, you ask? Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials into new products of better quality and higher environmental value, so when gamers play Trash Tycoon, they take on the role of recycling entrepreneurs responsible for doing just that.
Gamers become the stewards of their city, a la Sim City, fighting litter and trash wherever it rears its ugly head. Players earn game money and points by collecting trash and upcycling it to create new products out of trash, just like its sponsor TerraCycle does in the real, green world.
Guerillapps, which recently received a $500K in seed funding from Rhodium, will be keeping Trash Tycoon in private beta until later this month, but TechCrunch readers can get an early taste of the game here.
One of the many cool parts about Trash Tycoon is that it’s trying to separate its game from the traditional Facebook social game model by adding synchronous play, offering realtime multiplayer, so that users can communicate and collaborate in realtime during play, banding together with friends to attack their city’s trash heaps.
Trash Tycoon is also putting an interesting spin on its revenue model, offering seamless inclusion for green brands right in the gameplay. This may sound slightly off-putting, after all, who wants to play a game with brand logos stamped on every object? But Trash Tycoon’s brand integration isn’t offensive: The energy items players need to collect may be branded products, as will the factories players build to recycle waste. But these brand tie-ins have real world justification. The piece of gum you collect might be Wrigley’s, and so on.
“Users won’t notice any brands in the game, as we integrate the same real world dynamics of TerraCycle brands in the game in attempt to avoid things like banners, or in-your-face branded items, for example”, said Guerillapps Co-founder and CEO Raviv Turner.
And the great thing about Trash Tycoon’s brand integration is that it’s enabled by TerraCycle's business model. Just as TerraCycle works with major partners to run packaging reclamation programs, which pay schools and other community groups to collect the sponsors’ packaging to later be upcycled into items that bear the sponsor’s brand, this process is mirrored in Trash Tycoon.
For Guerillapps, it’s not just about offering a game-ified product or game-ified approach to green behavior and upcycling, it’s about creating a playable social game that incorporates reality into the virtual world. Waste Management built a Facebook game to teach users how to use its interactive recycling kiosks last year, but the game still hasn’t taken off (only 6,400 montly active users), and Guerillapps hopes that by incorporating brands and real world concepts like recycling and upcycling organically into the game, as opposed to a game-ified, education-entertainment gameplay experience, the player will learn but do so with greater enjoyment.
To build a more playable game, Guerillapps brought on two veteran game designers Greg Costikyan and Naomi Clark (who has consulted and developed concepts for clients and publishers including PBS, Disney, Fisher Price, Wizards of the Coast, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Major League Baseball) are responsible for Trash Tycoon’s design and gameplay. So you know this isn’t just another Facebook game ported from another medium or whipped off in 24 hours.
Trash Tycoon also donates 10 percent of revenues from its virtual currency to CarbonFund.org and plans to later introduce a “Play to Offset” icon, so that if you, say, order an Amtrak train ticket, or buy a flight ticket online, CarbonFund partners will present the “Play to Offset” icon so users can go play Trash Tycoon and offset their carbon footprint, instead of just paying with a credit card.
Signing up for Twitter at South by Southwest 2007, I can remember those feelings of “Wow, this is going to be big.” That instant feeling of knowing you’re seeing the future and the world doesn’t even have a clue yet. It’d be years before my friends would finally take the leap and get their own Twitter accounts (even if I knew Twitter usernames in 2007 were like domain names in 1995).
There have been other services I've though would be big, but only one other time in the past four years have I been awe-struck. That other moment was earlier this year (SXSW 2011) when Foursquare unveiled v3 with the “Explore” functionality—I knew that was a life-changer. I’ve dug Foursquare since the early days, but this third version is where it became obvious that every person in the world would benefit from using this service.
The third magical “wow” moment just happened this week, and it’s Turntable.fm. The early adopting tech elites are eating this site up, just as they did Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and others. Barring some awful interference, this app is going to break big and change things.
I’m an avid music listener. I crave new music and love discovering new music before most anyone has heard of it, just as I love discovering new startups before anyone has heard of them. When I find a new song or band that I think is awesome, I love sharing it with my friends (and anyone who will listen). What has been missing is the social aspect of being able to share in the listening experience of a song with my friends. So far, I’ve only been able to do this if we’re physically together (at my house or in my car, typically).
I don't think I was alone in wishing for a service where I could hit play on a song and any friends I can grab online could share in the experience of listening to the song together—and (text) chat about the song in realtime. For years I have had to resort to non-realtime methods of emailing a song link to friends, which typically doesn’t get listened too, because they aren’t necessarily in a situation where they can listen when they see my email. And when they are in a situation to listen, my email isn’t top-of-mind—so I get zilch feedback from them in the “heat of the moment” when I’m dying to play them the song, right this freaking minute.
Turntable is a game changer. When Stickybits didn’t take off the way they hoped, Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen pitched existing investors ($1.9mm raised) this idea and ran with it. Erick was the first to write about Turntable when he stumbled into a room with Chris Sacca and Hunter Walk spinning tunes, but in summary the concept is what I just explained. You join via Facebook; for controlling growth, you must have a friend on Facebook that is already a user of the service at the moment. After logging in, you browse the different music rooms or create your own. If there’s an open DJ spot (five maximum to a room), you click "Play music" and your avatar transports to the stage. Queue up some songs—they have an extensive library or you can upload your own. Songs played in the room rotate evenly between the DJs. Listeners in the room can then “awesome” a song (and their head starts to bob, and the DJ gets a point) or they can “lame” a song. As users earn more points, they unlock different avatars. Listeners can also add the song to iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, or their Turntable queue.
The only issue I thought Turntable had was needing to deal with the record labels, but it appears they are licensing the streaming catalog thru MediaNet. Turntable does possibly open up some exposure by allowing users to upload their own tracks, but it seems those (maybe) are only accessible to be played by the uploading user.
As soon as you DJ your first song, you’re addicted. Just as you crave to be retweeted or replied to on Twitter, and just as you crave to have something liked or commented on in Facebook, you crave to have people chat about your song or start bobbing their heads in Turntable. Usage is super sticky—you hang around because you want to play your next track and you’re curious what’s going to play next.
Listening to music has never been this fun. Turntable is also a great discovery tool since everyone is curating all-the-songs-in-the-world to share the very best they’ve ever heard… with you. Oh, and do you remember chat rooms? They’re back. I haven’t used one since the 90s and now I’m non-stop chatting in these Turntable chat rooms and meeting people.
Pandora has some competition. Granted, you can be assured when you play a station on Pandora that the tunes will stay in the same vibe you chose—and if you’re in a work environment, you might want to ensure NSFW tracks don’t play. Pandora lacks the social listening aspect of Turntable though and if there’s only one station playing in your office, Turntable gets everyone’s songs in rotation.
Turntable just introduced a killer feature this morning, the “fan” feature—it’s basically like Twitter’s “follow” feature. When you become a “fan” of another user, you are notified by email whenever that user starts DJing on Turntable. When I know my friend is in a room DJing, I’m likely to join them. The Turntable roadmap has plans for an iPhone app so that not only can you DJ and listen on the road, but at parties with friends you’ll be able to all share the DJ responsibilities.
If MySpace was smart and given a new leash by News Corp, they’d be buying Turntable right now—it would breathe new life into their social network. Turntable doesn’t need them though—the only question is how long they can keep things on the down-low.
Disrupt NYC has wrapped and tickets are already on sale for our next Disrupt, which we are incredibly excited to be bringing back to San Francisco this September. However, before we start revealing what we have in store for this fall, we wanted to recap everything that went down in New York one last time. There were too many good things that happened, many of which we know some of you have missed since we keep getting questions about it. Therefore, we wanted to go over our favorite moments, some funny quotes, a few surprises, and a few more highlights for each day we were in New York City. For today, we wanted to recap our incredibly popular Hackathon and show you a couple videos you may have missed of Startup Alley.
Pier 94 was packed with hundreds of brilliant individuals a couple weekends ago in New York City. They stayed up hours upon hours coding, hacking, and networking furiously. It was our biggest Hackathon to date. We had around 500 participants from around the world, getting by on determination, excitement, snacks, and Red Bull.
As the Hackathon started, we had the chance to walk around and meet the participants. One of the earlier ones that stuck out in our mind was Jake Essman, an adorable 14-year-old self taught hacker, who was urged by his mom to join. Coding since he was ten, Jake said that coding is just a hobby and his career aspirations lie in the field of medicine. Even though Jake wants to be a doctor, we thought he made an incredibly inspirational hacker.
After the Hackathon concluded, we had the chance to sit down with him and his team, Buyby, after their Hackathon presentation. Watch what Jake and his team had to say in the video below.
Another highlight for us was when we ran into Steve Martocci, co-founder of Hackathon alumni GroupMe. We got the chance to ask Steve about his thoughts on how to maximize the Hackathon experience. He said, "Don't listen to me.. talk, go, and build something… Focus on what you're good at, and solve a real world problem. Do as little work as you can – it gets stressful – use the tools that you have (like Twilio) to make it happen." And after the Hackathon? First, "Sleep." Then, use the tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt, to "Walk the floor, show people what you did… [and] get decent exposure to investors."
Pretty solid advice from an alumni who has gone on to raise $10.6 million since their Hackathon debut last year. To catch more on what he said, check out the video below.
As the hackers brainstormed and coded on whatever they could find, we were lucky enough to capture some of our favorite pictures.
To start things off, we found a few hackers taking some time to release pent-up coding aggression by pitching toys against the wall…
We saw many adult beverages being gulped down…
Twitter was blowing up with funny Hackathon quotes….
We caught some hackers taking a break outside in the New York air…
and we saw glimpses of code on whatever materials the hackers could find..
All in all, the Hackathon was an ultimate success. For a more in-depth look into the NYC Hackathon, make sure you check out our Flickr page for more pictures, live videos of the Hackathon plus the winning presentations here, and the full list of winners here.
After the Hackathon concluded, the Disrupt conference and Startup Alley began. Startup Alley lasted the whole three days during the Disrupt conference and we have some of our favorite footage of the enormous, captivating hall below.
Startups from all over gathered at Pier 94 to show off their companies and products. Our very own Rip Empson took some time to walk around the alley and talk to the startups that caught his eye. For footage of what he found, check out the video below. We’re curious, which startup in Startup Alley was your favorite?
John Biggs and Matt Burns from CrunchGear also got involved and interviewed some of their favorite startups. See if you can find the diamonds in the rough by watching the video below.
There were many other moments in Startup Alley that we encourage you to check out when you can. To view all of the pictures, be sure to go to our Flickr page and for more footage and interviews from all of the companies at Startup Alley, be sure to go to our video page and watch them here.
As always, a huge thank you goes out to our sponsors and partners for making all of this possible. Thank you to Palantir for giving $1,000 of Amazon Web Services to the company with Best Data Integration during the Hackathon, which went to Who Data. And to TokBox for giving a 16GB Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for best use of the OpenTok API (the device will be released June 8) to Movie Wars.
Thank you to Red Bull, for not only providing the never-ending caffeine, but for also previewing the hacks from their upcoming Creation Event in NYC on July 10th.
A special mention to the team at AllStateBanners.com for making us look good in New York City.
And to Giovanni Cabrese and Themendous for the original TechCrunch Disrupt sculpture, which you can see at top.
If you would like to attend Disrupt SF this September, extra early bird tickets are on sale now.
If you’d like to become a foundational part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo.
We had a pleasant morning checking out the Sony and Nintendo booths, getting hands-on with a few launch games and feeling up the hardware. The device really is remarkably light; you’d expect such a powerhouse to be heavy and bulky, but it’s quite petite. Unfortunately the units there were all tethered, and all their untethered units were broken. Just block out the cords with your hand and it’s almost the same.
Wow. Fusion-io, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, just upped the final price of its IPO to $19 per share, after increasing the range yesterday to $16 to $18 per share from $13 to $15 per share. At $19 per share, the company is valued at $1.47 billion dollars with 77,809,084 shares outstanding at the time of offering.
The company, which will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "FIO” tomorrow morning, is offering a total of 10,755,607 shares in its IPO and aiming to raise as much as $254.6 million. Another 1,544,393 shares are being offered by selling stockholders. In addition, the underwriters have an option to purchase up to an additional 1,845,000 shares from Fusion-io on the same terms and conditions.
Fusion-io's enterprise flash-based drives help store data in smaller devices and is known for being an incredibly fast data storage solution. Facebook is a client of Fusion-io, which has raised $110 million from Meritech Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Triangle Peak Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
While the IPO market has been heating up for tech companies of late, it’s still unclear whether Fusion-io will have a strong showing on the public markets long-term. In the nine months that ended March 31 (its fiscal year ends June 30), revenue quintupled to $125.5 million and gross profit quadrupled to $65.7 million. But as Dow Jones notes, 10 clients account for 91% of the company’s revenue and Facebook alone generated 47% of Fusion-io’s revenue in the past nine months.
As we saw with LinkedIn, the company’s stock opened high level ($83 per share), but fell in the weeks after, popped on first day of trading but have subsequently dropped to $75.91 per share.
“Building on someone else’s platform is a good idea, if you have your eyes wide open,” investor Fred Wilson told a packed room of entrepreneurs on Monday night at an Internet Week event in New York City. He was answering a question about whether or not it’s a good idea for startups to build on another company’s platform, and we caught his response in the video above.
Wilson knows a lot about this subject. He sits on Twitter’s board and a year ago wrote a blog post warning startups in the Twitter ecosystem ti stop “filling holes.” Twitter then proceeded to fill those holes itself by buying or building various clients and other services, and is still filling them to this day (its new pictures feature is a case in point).
While this issue has created a lot of angst in the developer community, Wilson is very straightforward about it. “You should expect eventually the platforms you are building on to do something against your interest. One day you may wake up and discover that platform is competing with you, and that sucks.” He encourages his own portfolio companies to avoid being in that situation, and to create direct relationships with their customers. Ironically, the one exception that proves this rule, Zynga with Facebook, is also one of Wilson’s investments. Watch the video, he gives some good advice to startups on how to use other platforms to their benefit without becoming dependent on them.
Another topic off discussion that night was startup valuations, which we captured in the video below. Wilson is still not saying the “bubble” word, but notes, “It’s not the most attractive time to be making investments.” Chris Dixon of Founder Collective and David Lee of SV Angel agree, but they are all still investing. The danger, they warn, is that entrepreneurs might take money at too high a valuation now and a few years down the road face a down-round if they don’t meet investors’ outsized expectations.
But Wilson notes that as investors they are benefiting from the high valuations because all the startups they invested in a few years ago are now worth that much more. He disagrees with Michael’s ffirst Blubble post in which he points out that VCs are talking up the bubble in order to talk down valuations because “it is not in our interest to talk down valuations.” It is, however, “just irresponsible.”
If you enjoy these videos, you can also hear what these three investors have to say about the uselessness of software patents.
Talk about a happy birthday. SnapGuide, a stealthy mobile startup founded by Daniel Raffel and Steve Krulewitz, has raised a funding round totaling over $2 million. The round just closed today — which also happens to be Raffel’s birthday.
Leading the round is Index Ventures (Mike Volpi will be taking a board seat), with participation from Atlas Ventures (Jeff Fagnan) and a number of angels including Dave Morin, Gary Clayton, SV Angel, and our own Michael Arrington.
So what exactly is SnapGuide? Aside from the name, there isn’t much to go by on the company’s homepage, which has the tagline “show and tell made mobile”. But we did get a bit more information.
In particular, Clayton’s investment is interesting — he’s the Chief Creative Officer over at Nuance, which is known for its powerful voice recognition software. Raffel isn’t sharing much about the company at this point, but he did confirm that SnapGuide’s apps include significant voice recognition capabilities.
Raffel is best for being one of the original creators of Yahoo Pipes, and Krulewitz was on Google’s Chrome team working on Sync — both left their jobs last summer and began working on this project in February.
The SF-based company is hiring.
Disclosure: As mentioned before, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is investing in SnapGuide. You can find his investment policy here.
Last year, Twitter held the first Chirp, a large developer conference in San Francisco akin to Facebook’s f8, Google’s I/O, and Apple’s WWDC. Everyone assumed this would become an annual thing. Then they decided not to do one this year. And that’s too bad, because this may be the most important year to have one as much of ecosystem is questioning Twitter’s intentions for their platform.
But the lack of an official conference isn’t stopping some developers. They’ve decided to organize their own developers conference for the Twitter ecosystem. The Twitter Developers Summit will take place this July 26, in San Francisco, an invite informs us.
So who’s participating?
HootSuite, keepstream, KLOUT, CoTweet, and Bottlenose are all on the banner. More will likely come. One name not anywhere to be seen: Twitter. We’ve reached out to the company to see if they plan to participate at all, but as of right now, they’re clearly not involved.
EngageDigital, the company behind the event writes on their site:
The Twitter Developer Summit takes place July 26, 2011 in San Francisco. The Twitter developer ecosystem is changing rapidly, and with the cancellation of Chirp, our Twitter Developer Summit is the best place for twitter-focused developers (from startups to Fortune 500) to network with like minded developers and discuss best practices: what is working today, what is changing, and what to expect tomorrow.
Sounds like Twitter would almost be necessary to comment on a lot of that, no?
Another company nowhere to be seen: UberMedia. Twitter’s nemesis would also seem like a natural fit here if Twitter itself isn’t participating. This is pure (juicy) speculation, but perhaps they weren’t invited yet in the hope that Twitter will agree to participate.
Meanwhile, Twitter has been hosting smaller events for developers, such as the one related to the newly announced iOS integration. That event was actually supposed to be tonight but has been changed to tomorrow night.
According to Twitter PR rep Carolyn Penner, Twitter has started rolling out its new photo feature to a small subset of users outside of employees. Our own @alexia is one of the lucky users to get the service first. The feature was live for employees as of last week, but it is hitting the rest of Twitter users starting this week.
As we reported last week, the new feature allows users to upload photos, which show up in your timeline. The feature is located next to “add your location” in the Tweet UI (see screenshot below) and you’ll be able to upload a photo as you Tweet on Twitter.com and eventually via mobile clients.
Twitter is partnering with Photobucket to host these photos but you don't need a Photobucket account to use it. And photos are only visible on Twitter, and not on Photobucket’s image sharing site. Beneath every photo is a “powered by Photobucket” note. And if you click on a photo in a user’s stream who you are not following, Twitter will show you this message, “This Tweet is from someone you’re not following. The media they’re mentioning could be anything, even something you might find offensive” with an option to display the photo.
Mechanical engineering community GrabCAD is announcing $1.1 million in seed funding today, from Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture, Next View Ventures and angels John McEleney, Alex Ott, Angus Davis and Jon Stevenson.
Founded in 2009, GrabCAD is like an oDesk or an eLance specifically for mechanical engineers, with the added benefit of offering a free CAD model library. Boston-based and with a development team in Estonia, the platform helps connect over 7,500 mechanical engineers with the manufacturers and product development companies that need them. The company has tripled the number of engineers in its community in the past month.
Co-founder Hardi Meybaum plans on using the money for expansion and hiring, ” Our plan is to be the biggest mechanical engineering team in the world.”
When asked what the deal is with all the Estonia-hype lately, Maybaum said that it primarily stems from Skype’s recent Microsoft acquisition, “Skype has played a big role in this, about half of our [Estonia's] companies are ex-Skype employees.” Case in point: Half of the GrabCAD team also used to work for Skype.
Eco-Fashion is definitely more than just a fad. More and more consumers are looking to purchase eco-friendly and natural products in the fashion, beauty, personal care and toys industries. Enter LovingEco, a recently launched flash sales site which is essentially a Gilt Groupe for eco-fashion and natural goods.
LovingEco, which was founded by Justine Lassoff and Melinda Moore, features daily sales on discounted eco-friendly, natural items. For example, one of today’s sales is for organic cotton clothing. Another sale features handbags that are made from inner tubes collected at local truck stops.
Similar to OneKingsLane and Gilt, LovingEco features ‘tastemaker pics,’ where celebrities and environmental experts curate their favorite products from the sales. The site also features a V-Wall for the community to share their donations and eco-friendly content.
And LovingEco takes sales a step further and donates 3 percent of net proceeds from each purchase to a 'tastemaker charity' to help support a social or environmental cause.
LovingEco, which faces competition from Pure Citizen, has raised a seed round of funding from angel investors that include Allen Debevoise; CEO of Machinima; Emily Della Maggiora, VP of comScore Marketing Solutions; Douglas Abel, former VP at Sapient; and Jackie Wilga, SVP Marketing at Live Nation Entertainment.
Are you tired of paying for games? Me too. But the fact is that they tend to cost money, and that’s that. But that used to be the case for TV, and now we watch our favorite shows for free on Hulu and other services. Why shouldn’t we be able to play games using a similar ad-supported model? This is the question being asked by online game marketplace GamersGate, which launched back in 2009 as an alternative to established services Steam and DirectDownload.
Creating a free-to-play platform for modern games seems to present a plethora of problems, but of course other free services have presented similar problems and worked out fine. GamersGate isn’t giving up too many details yet, but here’s what we know. Continue reading…
As I aimed to convey in my “Day In The Life Of A Liveblogger” post back in March, liveblogging a big ol’ event can be… interesting. When you’ve got tens of thousands of people tuned in and waiting for news the very instant it breaks, issues that might otherwise seem trivial can bring your entire operation to a grinding halt.
Such was the case on Monday, while MG and I liveblogged Apple’s WWDC 2011 Keynote. One little thing — or, more accurately, lots of one-little-things that came together into one big bastard of a little thing — nearly wrecked it. And it’s sort of Google’s fault.
First, a bit of background: back in May, Google held their annual I/O conference at the Moscone center in San Francisco. Every year, Google gives attendees a gift or two for coming out — and this year, they went all out. They started by giving everyone 10.1″ Galaxy Tablets — then they announced that everyone who showed up would be getting one of Google’s fancy new Chromebook laptops in the mail. When folks went to go pick up up their Galaxy Tabs, however, there was one more surprise: a Verizon 4G Hotspot, complete with an LTE SIM good for 3 months of service. Hurray!
So, what the hell does this have to do with WWDC?
Jump forward a month to the WWDC keynote. We’re about 1/3 of the way through — so far, so good. Last year’s Keynote was plagued with WiFi issues so bad that they resulted in cataclysmic on-stage demo failures. The issues, it’s thought (or at least, so said Steve on stage), were caused by the number of MiFis and other portable WiFi hotspots being used in the room — a circumstance which Penny Arcade summed up rather aptly. Fortunately, Apple put a ridiculous amount of effort into their network this year, so the WiFi was pleasantly speedy and seemingly rock solid.
Until it wasn’t.
Somewhere around the 40% mark, the WiFi suddenly started crawling. It still worked… just at sub-56k speeds. Wuh-oh. When you’re trying to upload high res images and blast out quotes as they leave the speaker’s lips, thats not okay. At that second, it seemed like every reporter in the room had the same idea: Hotspot time! People reached into their coat pockets and laptop bags, and the little Hotspot status lights flickered into view all around me.
Now, for those who don’t spend their days caring about boring stuff like how WiFi works, just know this: the more WiFi spots you have in the same area, the harder it is to actually use any of those WiFi spots. Think of a router like a crazy shouting person. If there’s just one crazy shouting person, you might be able to figure out what they’re saying. Throw in another crazy shouting person, and it gets more difficult. Throw in 10 more, all speaking in different pitches and different languages, and it’s nigh impossible to pluck out a single intelligible word.
Those 56k speeds we had before? Obliterated, with each page request now resulting in an immediate browser error. The WiFi status indicator in my taskbar starts shuffling around as it searches for signal amongst the noise, and the guy next to me turns to check if he’s alone on this island of disconnection.
We’re somewhere around the 2-minutes-without-connectivity mark at this point. While I let my laptop try to work its issues out for itself, I pop onto my iPhone — in worst case scenarios, I can usually still liveblog, one tiny keystroke at a time, from that. I jump into the WiFi screen just for kicks, and this is what I see:
Each of those “Verizon SCH-LC11″ WiFi access points? Those are Verizon 4G Hotspots.
The very same Verizon 4G hotspots that Google gave out at I/O.
At the very same convention center. To many of the same people who were sitting in this audience.
Of all the hotspots I was picking up, almost every single one bared the name that marked them as I/O swag. There were dozens of them. That screenshot only shows a few, but there must have been at least 30 — and that’s just what was within signal reach of my chair in the auditorium. And, based on the grumbling and cursing going on all around us, no one could connect to any of them. A billion little boxes, collectively canceling out everyone else’s ability to connect to their own little boxes — and, in turn, canceling out everyone else’s ability to connect to the primary WiFi network. I’ve spoken to others who were seated elsewhere in the auditorium — outside of the corner of the theater where Apple ushered the media — and all of them said their WiFi held strong and hasty throughout. Only in this little corner, crammed with a mountain of crazy-shouting-people boxes, did things go dark.
Fortunately, MG’s stars aligned in such a way (or his chair was just in that perfect spot) that he’s able to pull down juuuuuust enough bandwidth to fire off an update or two, mostly masking the fact that we’re having any technical difficulties. Then magic happened.
I don’t know if Apple summoned some sort of WiFi God to come down and smite away the hotspots one by one, or if people collectively realized they were just making their own problems worse — but over the course of about 2 minutes, the number of “Verizon SCH-LC11″ clones dwindled. As it hit single digits, the primary WiFi network found its way through the noise. After nearly 8 minutes of scrambling for every bit of bandwidth we could scrounge (and playing off the whole thing quite undetectably, I must say), things were back up and running.
Whether Google knew it or not (and I’m highly doubtful that they did… though they did make sure to give out the hotspots on the last day of their own conference, after all of their big announcements were well over), their nice little parting gifts would act as itty-bitty Trojan Horses at WWDC, bombarding the airwaves and knocking much of the reporting crowd offline for a time.
If someone at Google actually did plan this: Good job, you friggin’ evil genius.
On Thursday night, 60,000 people will fill up Central Park to watch the Black Eyed Peas in concert. Tickets are sold out, but you can watch it here streamed live in glorious 360-degree vision at 7PM ET. The Black Eyed Peas first used the 360-degree cameras in their iPhone app that puts you inside a music video, but this will be the first time they will try it live. The concert will be filmed and streamed using 360-degree cameras from Immersive Media. This will be the first time a major music concert is streamed live in 360-degrees.
The cameras used are an advanced version of what Google uses to capture its Street View, except this shoots video instead of still photos. They use 11 cameras built into a sphere, shooting simultaneously, and stitching together all the different shots, encoding it, and streaming it with a 2-second latency. Viewers will be able to pan around and control the angle.
The concert will be broadcast by Livestream and all proceeds will benefit the Robin Hood Foundation, which fights poverty in New York City by partnering with the most effective non-profits that invest in schools, homeless shelters, job training programs and more. Last year Robin Hood distributed $110 million to other non-profits (donate here).
Earlier this year, we heard about how startup Manilla has plans to disrupt online bill management. Today the company is fully launching its service, which has been in close beta for the past three months, to the public with new partnerships with Citi Cards, Duke Energy and others.
Manilla, which was incubated and backed by Hearst, is a free web-based service that helps consumers better manage all of their household accounts, including financial, utilities, subscriptions and travel rewards programs, in place online. It’s sort of like Mint.com for your bills.
Manilla will send users text and/or email reminders to pay bills and will keep an unlimited storage of account documents. And Manilla promises that it takes minutes to set up all of your accounts through the platforms.
With the launch today, Manilla allows you integrate accounts from four major categories: finance, household/bills, magazine subscriptions and travel rewards programs. In these categories, Manilla can integrate with over 500 services at national and local levels. Partners include Citi Cards, Comcast, and Duke Energy.
Netflix is great. I feel like I have to say that, now that it’s the single largest source of Internet traffic in North America. But, really, Netflix annoys me. I’m cheap, so I’ve opted for the streaming-only service, but the selection stinks, and I spend most of my time debating whether I should upgrade to the DVD service. And now that I’ve been rating movies for years, its recommendation system has become more refined, but I’m being told by Netflix that I should “discover” some movie featuring The Rock that I’d really rather not discover.
Like many others, I supplement my movie and TV consumption with Amazon Instant, Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, and more. The problem is, the experience is fragmenting. When I’m looking for a specific movie, I have to go search each of these services individually, and when I’m looking to discover new movies, I generally fall back on Netflix, but the recommendation system is often found lacking.
This is why I’ll be turning to Matcha to help reduce the pain, the woes, the heartbreak. Matcha, a startup launching in beta today, is bringing both the social graph to movie and TV recommendations and aggregating the millions of movies, TV shows, and clips floating around the Web for an enhanced search and discovery experience.
Matcha pulls in your video subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and more — along with Facebook — to give you relevant recommendations for video content that you’ll actually enjoy. And you can click to watch right from the page.
Traditional recommendation engines that use collaborative filtering (users who liked “X” movie will like “Y” movie) have been around for awhile now, but results are often generic and superficial, often missing the personalization experience we’ve come to expect. When applied to video, which some would argue is social by nature, recommendations from those we know and trust is almost always preferable.
On the flip side, relying on friends for social recommendations only tells half the story. But with their powers combined, recommendations become more powerful and more personalized. After a year of algorithmic tinkering, Matcha has created a technology that relies both on users social graphs as well as traditional methods to provide a more augmented search and discovery mechanism.
In practice, this means that Matcha offers deep indexing of long-form online video sites (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, etc) as well as indexing of crowdsourced video sites like YouTube. It also tracks online activity, collecting usage and preference data from YouTube and Facebook “likes”, what you’ve shared, and what you’ve watched on over 100 video sites that Matcha indexes.
Matcha then serves you recommendations in a fairly intuitive UI that offers “Top Picks” based on its social recommendation engine, as well as a timeline-based “Friends Feed” that shows what your friends are watching (and liking) in realtime. Users can also visit friends’ profiles to see what video content they’re consuming.
And because Matcha indexes over 100 video sites, users can search for specific movies, TV shows, or clips, which alleviates the pain of having to search individual sites for that obscure movie not offered by Netflix streaming. The search function also integrates with the social graph so that results will include content from your friends.
While co-founders Paul Petrick, Guy Piekarz, and Ilan Ben Zeev have built what appears to be a great service, it won’t be around for very long unless it finds a way to make money. The team is still defining the optimal revenue model, but it looks like display or in-video advertising might be in Matcha’s future. I think we’re all pretty tired of in-video advertising, though, so I’d prefer to see telegraphed “featured recommendations” — or paid recommendations — instead of a slew of video advertising, but maybe that’s just me.
TechCrunch readers can get an early taste of Matcha’s service by signing up for the beta here. Check it out, and let us know what you think.
Music streaming service Spotify (more convenient than piracy!), long enjoyed in Europe and long longed for in the U.S., may finally finally have its ducks in a row. If a number of interdependent deals come together, the service may soon be available to U.S. users, Facebook Music might finally become a reality, and a new round of venture capital may be injected into the company.
As usual, it all hinges on the music labels.
For years Spotify has promised a U.S. launch that would include a free version of the product like they have in Europe. Promises for a U.S. launch were made almost since Spotify first appeared in 2008. But we had to learn to be patient as a never ending stream of “coming soon” promises failed to become reality.
Still, Americans want to believe. They want to believe so badly that way too many people immediately accepted Paul Carr’s April Fool’s blog post that a U.S. launch was imminent as true. And many Europeans were also duped by the notion that Spotify would have to close down European operations to fund that U.S. launch. Spotify even had to send out a few Tweets to people to make sure they knew it wasn’t true. Good times.
Spotify almost came to the U.S. in early 2010. Google and Spotify were in deep negotiations to launch in the U.S. via Android. Later that year we learned that the companies were also talking about a billion dollar acquisition, but the deal fell through over label deals and a walk away fee.
Spotify trudged on. And started talking to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, long looking for a solution to Facebook’s music problem, was already a Spotify fan.
Fast Forward To Today
Spotify is pulling off a hat trick. They have a pending deal with Facebook to finally launch the service in the U.S. And they have a pending venture capital deal with DST and Kleiner Perkins that will value the company at $1 billion or more.
Both of those “pendings” require the successful completion of U.S. music label negotiations. The labels finally agree, it triggers the Facebook deal and the venture capital deal and Spotify will finally fulfill that promise.
For years we’ve heard that those music label deals are coming. “Just a few weeks away,” is something sources have told me more times than I can count. But now, say many sources, it’s really happening. Perhaps even within the next, well, few weeks. And this time, it’s for reals (maybe).
VantagePoint Capital Partners, a global cleantech fund focused on energy and efficiency, today revealed that former Best Buy executive Kal Patel is joining the firm as partner. Patel is expected to grow VPCP’s “European presence,” and lead its international “strategic partnerships” according to a press statement from the fund.
At Best Buy, Patel worked as executive vice president and president of the comapny’s Asia regional business. He lead a major acquisition of a Chinese company, worked on building Best Buy’s business in transportation, mobility, health and home energy management, and helped run the Best Buy Capital Alpha Fund.
VantagePoint Capital Partners has investments in over 30 energy and efficiency businesses including BrightSource Energy, Genomatica, Tesla Motors, Solazyme, Bridgelux and Switch Lighting. Yesterday, the fund announced its series d investment in Liquid Robotics– a Hawaiian company that makes wave-powered, unmanned marine vehicles.
One of the best parts of the iPad 2 is the colorful, magical smart cover that comes as a peripheral. Lift the cover and your iPad turns on, drop it and it goes to sleep. It’s kind of addictive. But what if someone actually built an app around that fidgety behavior?
Well, Evernote just did. It’s called Evernote Peek, a free app for the iPad 2 that is designed around the smart cover. It is the first smart cover app, and it may even make you smarter.
Evernote Peek is a simple Q&A quiz app. You lift the cover a little and to see a question like “How fast does light travel?” or “Who was the fifth President of the United States”? Then lift the cover a little more to see the answer. Yup, people are going to be killing a lot of time in coffee shops with this app.
The general trivia questions don’t't really have anything to do with the main Evernote apps, other than the fact that it reinforces its slogan, “Remember Everything.” But you can also connect the app to your own Evernote notebooks and turn them into study guides. Your note titles become the clues and the text of the notes becomes the answers.
It’s time for another day of live video down here at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Today we’ll be covering the massive South Hall, where we’ll find the big publishing houses showing off their latest. But first, we’re dropping by the Sony booth (signal permitting) to spend a little time with the Playstation Vita, their powerful new handheld. After that, a quick tour of the Nintendo booth, then it’s off to South Hall to see what’s what.
Right inside the door is EA, and then there’s Activision, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and a couple dozen other publishers who are just aching to demo their new games. We’re going live just a few minutes past 10 (once we’re past the crush at the door), so point your browsers towards the CrunchGear front page and let the liveness stream. Remember, you can always contact us by tweeting with hashtag #e3crunchgear!
Angst! Raised Eyebrows! Distinct feelings of discomfort!
So go the reactions to a feature on Facebook that uses facial recognition technology to help users tag their photos. It has people so upset, in fact, that it’s just sparked a probe from European Union privacy regulators.
The uproar revolves around a feature that’s been around since December, so the technology itself isn’t particularly new. But regulators are only getting upset about it now after a Sophos report pointed out that Facebook has recently turned the setting on by default, apparently continuing the social network’s habit of encroaching on user privacy without asking for permission.
Except this time, the complaints seem to be about issues that aren’t new — and humans are still very much involved in deciding who gets tagged.
First, let’s run through exactly what the feature does.
When you upload photos to Facebook, you’re prompted to tag your friends in those photos — your friends will then be notified about the photos they’re tagged in, and depending on their privacy settings other people may be able to see them as well. This feature is relatively ancient in Facebook terms, and is actually one of the key reasons why the site got popular on college campuses (and later, with everyone else) in the first place. Facebook easily has more photos than all of the other photo hosting sites combined, and as of last December people were creating 100 million tags per day.
But while tagging is hugely popular, it’s also a pain. For a long time you had to do every single tag manually — click a face, type in the person’s name, repeat for each face, and click onwards to the next photo, where you get to do it all again. It’s tiresome.
Which is where Facebook’s facial recognition comes in.
The first feature that incorporated this technology made it easier to tag the same person in multiple photos. Say, for example, you were at a friend’s birthday party and the same eight people showed up in each photo. Using facial recognition, Facebook can ask you to identify each of those friends once, and then automatically tag them throughout the rest of the photo album.
The more advanced facial recognition feature, which launched in December, goes one step further: instead of initially asking you to identify each of your friends’ faces, it looks at your Facebook friends to see if any of them seems like a likely match. You then confirm those suggested tags (each possible match shows a thumbnail that you can ‘X’ out), and have to do a lot less clicking.
That’s it. We’re not talking about a sinister site-wide facial recognition feature that will let your boss find incriminating photos of you taken at a bachelor party. It just makes tagging less tedious. And no, it is not fully automated.
Which brings us back to the privacy issue.
Here’s a quote from Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, taken from the Bloomberg article on the EU probe.
"Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people's prior consent and it can't be activated by default," said Lommel. Such automatic tagging "can bear a lot of risks for users" and the group of European data protection officials will "clarify to Facebook that this can't happen like this."
Now, Lommel has a point: if you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, you do not get to approve that tag before it shows up in your ‘Tagged Photos’ album or in friends’ News Feeds — you have to detag photos after the fact.
But this is how Facebook Photos have always worked (in fact, it’s how all of their features work, which is why you can be tagged in groups you’ve never heard of, or at places you’d rather not be tagged in). And, as Facebook always points out, if you’re worried about it, you can hide tagged photos from other users using the site’s privacy options.
In other words, it isn’t a new issue, and it isn’t related to facial recognition at all. Your friends have always been able to tag you in photos without your prior consent. Sure, these features make it easier to do so, but presumably they’re not going to suddenly start tagging you in incriminating photos just because it takes fewer clicks.
To reiterate: the EU may conclude that Facebook users should be able to pre-approve their tags, and I don’t necessarily think that would be a bad thing (I’m sick of tag spam, for one). But conflating this with the spookiness of facial recognition seems like a mistake — we should save that outcry for when companies really do start doing creepy things with the technology.
Rebtel considers itself to be one of the biggest threats to the Skype empire, so I was interested in learning from the company’s CEO, Andreas Bernstrom, how they felt about Microsoft acquiring their main rival for $8.5 billion in cash.
Unsurprisingly, Bernstrom said the acquisition ‘validated the market’ but he also had some more interesting things to say, mainly about VoIP and mobile telephony in general, and how financially sound the Rebtel business currently is.
For your background, Rebtel was founded in 2006, quickly raising $20 million in its first round of venture capital from investors like Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures. The company routes international calls made from from any mobile phone or landline to local numbers to minimize the cost of calling someone abroad.
Since their Series A round back in 2006, the company hasn’t raised a dime of outside capital, because, as Bernstrom says, they simply didn’t need to. In 2009, the company booked $18 million in revenues, more than doubling that amount the year after ($40 million).
Today, with a staff of roughly 60 employees, Rebtel boasts an annual revenue rate of $60 million and is profitable. For your comparison, VoIP company fring was founded earlier than Rebtel and currently has an annual revenue rate around $10 million.
To scale the business faster and ride the momentum in the VoIP space following the Skype acquisition, Rebtel is now considering raising more financing and has even loosely explored the possibility of taking the company public in the future.
Rebtel is banking on VoIP companies like Skype not iterating fast enough on providing services for smartphones users. Skype does offer mobile applications, but it has been rather slow in launching and improving them. Bernstrom points out that when the Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype closes, Rebtel will be the world’s largest independent mobile voip provider with more than 11 million mobile users and offering its services in over 200 countries.
Bernstrom has a lot of respect for companies like Viber and the speed at which their mobile applications have gone viral, but posits that the dependence of its users on WiFi and 3G connections will make for a poor user experience.
What Rebtel aims to do is “offer the best of all worlds in a seamless integration”.
“VoIP is essentially an improved fixed line service. Mobile VoIP, however, has not been cracked due to the limitations of the data network. The next 12-18 months will determine who the winners are”, said Bernstrom.
Online ad spending keeps ramping up thanks to an upswing in display advertising. A new forecast from eMarketer puts online ad spending at $31.3 billion this year, up 20 percent. That is double the 10.5 percent growth rate it put out last December for 2011. The new forecast shows online ad spending reaching nearly $50 billion in 2015.
What is driving this growth is display advertising. Brand-friendly ad formats such as banner ads, sponsorships, and video ads are all growing even faster than search. This year, video ad spending is estimated to grow 52 percent, sponsorships are growing 26 percent, and banner ad dollars will increase an estimated 22 percent, while search will grow 20 percent. When you add it all together, eMarketer predicts that display ad spending will surpass search by 2015.
Here’s how that $31.3 billion is estimated to break down in 2011:
I have a confession to make. I’m a fan of live bands, but what with one thing or another, I just don’t get to see enough. I signed up to all the obvious sites to get emails about upcoming gigs. I don’t read their emails. I’ve scrobbled and playlisted and put in my preferences multiple times on numerous sites. Do I go back to visit? No. What I’ve been waiting for is an app which you can pull out in front of friends when they say “Yeah, let’s go and see [band name]…” on the spur of the moment.
But no apps on the iPhone have got substantial traction for concert discovery. Ticketmaster/LiveNations’ app is only in the US, only presents Ticketmaster concerts and iLike’s ‘local concerts’ app has been in life-support mode since they were acquired by MySpace. The odd thing is movie discover apps like Flixster have had 30 million downloads
Remember Ericsson? Yeah, they used to make mobile phones on their own. Then they realised they couldn’t compete against Nokia, Motorola and the rest, and spun out their mobile division to hook up with Sony, who also realised that they were getting squeezed. Sony Ericcson mobile has trundled along for a few years and are even coming out with handheld mashups like the Xperia Play. But the mothership of Ericsson itself has largely turned into a telecoms and services company. Today, however they are doing something unusually disruptive.
Ericsson Money is launching across seven European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Sweden) and allows anyone to send and receive money via mobile. Eventually there will be a commission fee for sending money but for a limited time it’s free.
Startup ServiceMax, a company that develops SaaS field service software, has raised $14 million in new funding led by Mayfield Fund with Trinity Ventures, Emergence Capital and Salesforce.com also participating in the round. To date, the company has raised $26 million.
As field service software, ServiceMax essentially helps manage other company’s equipment at their sites. ServiceMax software automates workforce optimization, advanced scheduling and dispatch, parts logistics, inventory and depot repair, and installed base entitlements. ServiceMax is being used currently by 60 different customers including DuPont. And the company reports 380 percent year-over-year growth in first quarter 2011.
Built on top of Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, ServiceMax has gained considerable support from Salesforce. The technology giant participated on both of ServiceMax’s funding rounds and the startup features an app on Salesforce Chatter’s app marketplace ChatterExchange.
ServiceMax also recently released an iPad app that gives service agents a mobile solution.
There are about a million Tweets a day with the word “I Want,” and now there is a mobile photo sharing app that can capture all those things people want and share them with the world. The iPhone app is called Want!, the site is Want.it, and the concept is simple: you take a picture of things you want, give it a description, and share it with friends.
The app can broadcast your wants to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr. It pulls in locations from Facebook and tags from your description. “We want it to be a tool for quickly window shopping the world,” says co_founder and CEO Gene DeRose, who gives me a demo in the video above. You can take pictures of anything you desire: a beautiful watch, a shirt your friend is wearing, a plate of ribs, a nap, a day at the beach. It’s a mobile “like” button. “Like is kind of meh,” says DeRose, “it is kind of meta and that is great. But want is more actionable. It has a possible end in commerce.”
The app lets you follow other people and their wants, and organizes wants by tags such as music, book, car, wine, design, cool, beer, and so on. The app shows the most popular wants as well as a feed of the wants of the people you are following. In addition to people, you can also follow tags, venues, and neighborhoods. Want pulls in location data from Foursquare. Since everything is geo-tagged, you can also see wants nearby. Or if you are at a certain store or restaurant, you can see the most wanted items. Every user generates their own personal catalog of things that they want, and the app can generate most wanted lists across different vectors: location, person, tag.
DeRose was CEO of research firm Jupiter Communications between 1995 and 2002, where a young Dennis Crowley once worked for him. DeRose then went on to found House Party, which helps brands sponsor social gatherings. His co-founder Michael Satow founded MarketXT, which was the first after-hours stock market for retail investors in the 1990s. He was also the CEO of JDS Pharmaceuticals and Mirror Worlds (which is in a $625 million patent dispute with Apple). DeRose and Satow co-founded Skymarker, the New York-based parent company of Want.it, with $300,000 out of their on pockets.
We’ve previously written about CapLinked, the LinkedIn-meets-SalesForce for private investing, which was founded by former PayPal marketing exec Eric Jackson and funded by a number of well known members of the PayPal mafia.
Entrepreneurs use CapLinked to raise capital and sell or buy assets, manage and contact investor prospects, centralize document flow on a secure platform and connect with new investors, advisors and companies. Investors can use CapLinked to manage deals, build public profiles and connect with promising startups.
The new "Suggestions" feature allows CapLinked users to send out invitations for deals, recommendations or other business opportunities through LinkedIn's messaging system that are then delivered as LinkedIn notifications.
The "Suggestions" tool's inherent value to users resides in its ability to intelligently identify the full scope of someone's LinkedIn connections, and match you to your connections that may be able to help you, based on your profile on CapLinked. For now, the suggestions feature only works with direct connections on LinkedIn.
Jackson reports that the company has grown 350 percent this year and has approximately 10,000 users, representing 4,000 companies and 3,700 investors. The 320 deals currently on CapLinked represent nearly $1.5 billion of deal volume on the site.
Eventually CapLinked plans to add a Facebook suggestions tool as well, says Jackson.
Twitter has just announced a partnership with movie studio Paramount to offer Twitter users access to sneak preview showings of the studio’s new movie SUPER 8 for on Thursday, June 9, in advance of the film’s scheduled nationwide release on Friday, June 10.
Twitter says this is the first partnership where twitter is hosting movie sneak previews. To promote the sneak previews, the companies have designated the hashtag #Super8Secret, which Paramount has also sponsored as a Promoted Trend, which gives users a direct link to buy tickets to the advanced previews. At select theatres, some Super 8 Sneak Preview moviegoers will be treated to a free popcorn (with a concession purchase) at each show.
Twitter and Paramount previously released the movie’s exclusive trailer premiere via Twitter.
While the announcement is reminiscent of Twitter’s failed EarlyBird coupons and discounts program, it’s unclear what the benefit is for the user with the “Tweet Movie Sneak Preview”. There were no sneak previews available in Chicago (where I live) when I clicked on the Super-8 twitter link. Plus, the free popcorn offer is contingent on you spending other money for concessions. This seems more like an advertising relationship that’s trying to disguise itself as a deal for moviegoers.
Buuteeq, a digital marketing SaaS for independent hotels, has raised $3.5 million in Series funding led by Mike Galgon, Geoff Entress with Benaroya Capital and other angel investors participating in the round. The investment bring the company’s total funding to $5 million.
Buuteeq, which we previously covered here, gives boutique hotels a cost effective way to build and maintain a consumer-facing user-friendly Web site, manage Facebook pages and mobile sites, SEO and more.
Founded by former Microsoft execs Forest Key and Adam Brownstein, Buuteeq focuses on helping independent hotels around the world expand their reach and marketing capabilities. Since launching in January of this year, the company has helped digitize inns, bed & breakfasts and other independent hotels in 10 countries.
Fixed annual subscriptions for Buuteeq run from a free Facebook-only solution, up through comprehensive packages for $3,000 to $15,000 USD per year depending on features. While today’s version of Buuteeq focuses on content management and social, the startup plans to add advertising capabilities and customer relationship management features in the next version of the service. Buuteeq plans to use the new funding towards product development, international expansion and sales and marketing.
Private equity firm Spectrum Equity has acquired from ARAMARK a minority stake in SeamlessWeb, which offers an online and mobile food ordering service, for $50 million. Following the transaction, SeamlessWeb's operations will be separated from those of ARAMARK.
SeamlessWeb CEO Jonathan Zabusky posits that the transaction enables the company to pursue accelerated expansion and product innovation, as well as ‘opportunistic’ acquisitions.
SeamlessWeb's digital marketplace promotes, markets and connects local restaurants with business and consumer customers across multiple platforms.
Its restaurant network includes over 7,000 restaurants in 27 cities globally, including New York, London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the company claims over one million individuals have ordered through the platform to date.
Originally founded in 1999, the company says managed volume growth has is projected to exceed $400 million this year.
Spectrum Equity was founded in 1994 and has raised six investment funds, representing $4.7 billion of private equity capital, to date. Prior investments include Demand Media, SurveyMonkey, NetQuote and Ancestry.com.
Facebook has contributed to the Arab Spring, people getting arrested for jokes, you name it.
Now one Facebok user has taken the social network to heart – or rather to her body. A woman in the Netherlands has had 152 profile images of her Facebook friends tattooed onto her arm.
You Tube user Suzyj87 now has a permanent collection of her friends right to hand, as it were. Who need a smartphone?
This really is the stuff of Sci-Fi movies: Build a computer program that can see as the human eye does. Based on the principles of the human visual cortex, Cortexica Vision Systems claims to have done just that. The London startup, which was spun out of Imperial College London in February 2009 after six and a half years of research to understand how humans see and two years building algorithms to accurately mimic human visual recognition, today releases its VisualSearch API, which has been in private Beta for a while. It's aimed at brands who want to "directly engage with consumers" via their mobile device while bypassing the need to use QR codes or other barcodes or more traditional text search.
With over 24 million views for a single episode, there’s every chance you’re already discovered Simon’s Cat. You might, however, be less familiar with Simon Tofield, the eponymous owner responsible for bringing his pet’s animated adventures to YouTube.
Unlike many online video producers who struggle to monitize even huge audiences, Simon has built an increasingly lucrative business by leveraging his creation into a series of bestselling books, a comic strip in a national newspaper – plus a line of t-shirts and other Cat-themed merchandise. So successful is the business, that Tofield has hired a full time brand manager to handle the commercial and technical challenges of a growing animation studio.
Partly because it’s always interesting to hear how online creative people make money from their work, but mainly because I’m a huge fan of Simon’s Cat, I connected with Tofield and brand manager Mike Cook via Skype to chat about the business of content, the challenge of online copyright and whether their audience is made up of terrifying cat people.
Video below (sorry about the appalling sound, and awful framing – this is what happens when I try to record a Skype call without asking the TCTV team for help).
Ah, the marvel that is our tips inbox. Just landed: an email from luxury fashion label VONROSEN, bringing forth the revelation that Apple head honcho Steve Jobs was wearing one of their cashmere sweaters on stage at WWDC 2011 earlier this week (and later when he asked the Cupertino city council for space to park his spaceship or something).
The email came straight from Dr. David Frederik von Rosen-von Hoewel, the label’s CEO, and it went something like this (slightly redacted):
Dear Techcrunch-Team,
Many Apple fans around the world are wondering which sweaters Steve Jobs wears.
We just wanted to let you know that at the WWDC 2011 on Monday he was wearing our VONROSEN Sweater.
Please feel free to contact me for any further information you might need.
Best regards, David von Rosen
So there you have it. To the legions of Apple fans around the globe who were missing out on this critical piece of information about your highness: that was a VONROSEN sweater.
Now that I’ve got you all giddy, let me stomp on your excitement right away: reportedly due to the “large number of inquiries”, VONROSEN’s system is currently unable to take further orders.
Yeah like you’d spend $616 on a sweater instead of treating yourself to that extra iPad 2.
Virsto Software, a virtual machines storage company, has raised $12 million in Series B venture capital funding led by InterWest Partners with August Capital and Canaan Partners also participating in the round. This investment brings Virsto’s total funding to $19 million.
Virsto develops an hypervisor-based storage solution that can anticipate the evolving demands, barriers and opportunities native to server virtualization. Virsto One is architected to be storage- and hypervisor-agnostic and allows users to virtualize storage-intensive workloads, maximize consolidation of server and storage hardware, reduce storage management complexity and eventually reduce overall storage costs.
Virsto says that its software helps enterprise, private and public cloud customers reap the benefits of server and desktop virtualization, increasing performance while lowering storage costs.
In addition, Virsto is also announcing its acquisition of EvoStor, a company that specializes in storage virtualization technology for VMware environments. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The funding will be used to drive new growth, product development and expand partnerships.
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A research firm focused on clean energy and green innovation, the 
Amid all the big announcements at this year’s WWDC keynote, there was an undercurrent that was subtle, but important.
We had a pleasant morning checking out the Sony and Nintendo booths, getting hands-on with a few launch games and feeling up the hardware. The device really is remarkably light; you’d expect such a powerhouse to be heavy and bulky, but it’s quite petite. Unfortunately the units there were all tethered, and all their untethered units were broken. Just block out the cords with your hand and it’s almost the same.
Wow. 
Last year, Twitter held 
According to Twitter PR rep Carolyn Penner, Twitter has 
Mechanical engineering community 
Eco-Fashion is definitely more than just a fad. More and more consumers are looking to purchase eco-friendly and natural products in the fashion, beauty, personal care and toys industries. Enter 
Are you tired of paying for games? Me too. But the fact is that they tend to cost money, and that’s that. But that used to be the case for TV, and now we watch our favorite shows for free on Hulu and other services. Why shouldn’t we be able to play games using a similar ad-supported model? This is the question being asked by online game marketplace 
Music streaming service 
At 
Angst! Raised Eyebrows! Distinct feelings of discomfort!
I have a confession to make. I’m a fan of live bands, but what with one thing or another, I just don’t get to see enough. I signed up to all the obvious sites to get emails about upcoming gigs. I don’t read their emails. I’ve scrobbled and playlisted and put in my preferences multiple times on numerous sites. Do I go back to visit? No. What I’ve been waiting for is an app which you can pull out in front of friends when they say “Yeah, let’s go and see [band name]…” on the spur of the moment. 
Remember Ericsson? Yeah, they used to make mobile phones on their own. Then they realised they couldn’t compete against Nokia, Motorola and the rest, and spun out their mobile division to hook up with Sony, who also realised that they were getting squeezed. Sony Ericcson mobile has trundled along for a few years and are even coming out with handheld mashups like the Xperia Play. But the mothership of Ericsson itself has largely turned into a telecoms and services company. Today, however they are doing something unusually disruptive.
Startup 
We’ve previously 
Twitter has just 
Facebook has contributed to the Arab Spring, people getting 
This really is the stuff of Sci-Fi movies: Build a computer program that can see as the human eye does. Based on the principles of the human visual cortex, 
With over 24 million views for 
Just love your article.I do always look over your website for new articles.I am recently working on an app spotify to mp3 thats going awesome and special thanks to you :)
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