The Latest from TechCrunch

(Founder Stories) Warby Parker: “Why Should A Pair Of Glasses Cost More Than An iPhone?”
The Daily Muse, The Community For Professional Women, Looks To Reinvent The Company Profile
Retickr Raises $1.5M For A Social News Reader That Learns What You Like
Here’s The Epic Borderlands 2 Launch Trailer
How To Temporarily Silence All Those Annoying Twitterers At SXSW
After Closing $3.4B Acquisition Of SuccessFactors, SAP Pushes Human Capital Management In The Cloud
UltraViolet Hits 800k Digital Media Locker Accounts, Added 50k In The Last Six Weeks
Mozilla Launching Cross-Platform App Store Later This Year, Submissions Open Next Week
With Facebook, Netflix And More, The PS Vita Is *Nearly* A Tablet Alternative
Wapple Wins Trademark Battle Over Apple
Want To Track Who Read Your Email? ToutApp’s Salesforce Integration Goes Live
Crowdsourced Wi-Fi Network Fon Passes 5 Million Hotspots Worldwide
Backed By Lerer And SV Angel, Newsle Launches To Let You Track News About Your Friends
EU Will Refer ACTA To Highest European Court
140 Proof Introduces Video To Its Social Ad Network
Yandex: Q4 Sales, Income Up Over 50% For Russia’s Search Giant
Strategic Sharing: Zipcar Leads $13.7M Investment In Campus Car-Sharing Startup Wheelz
Nokia Teases “Pure View” Imaging Ahead Of MWC
BloomReach Crunches Big Data To Deliver The Future Of SEO and SEM
InVision Raises $1.5M For Beautiful, Interactive Prototypes

(Founder Stories) Warby Parker: “Why Should A Pair Of Glasses Cost More Than An iPhone?”

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST

If you’ve ever shopped for a pair of prescription glasses, you’ve probably seen first hand how expensive a set can be. Warby Parker’s co-founders are right there with you.

Both fed-up and puzzled over paying hundreds of dollars for a product that’s been around for hundreds of years, the Warby Parker team is shaking up the eyewear industry by selling prescription glasses online, at a price tag of just $95 a pair.

Having crafted their plan during business school, the foursome launched the company two years ago this month. Three weeks after the initial pair went on sale, co-founder, Neil Blumenthal says Warby Parker hit its sales targets for the entire year and adds “we sold out of our top 15 styles in four weeks”. The company has since ramped up to 60-employees.

Two of Warby Parker’s co-founders, David Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal recently stopped by TCTV to give Founder Stories host, Chris Dixon the backstory on how the company got started.

As lifelong eyeglass wearers, Gilboa tells Dixon the group couldn’t understand why “glasses cost more than an iPhone.” After doing some research they realized “there’s a handful of companies that control the entire supply chain.” Not content to roll with the status quo, Gilboa says the team set out to change the landscape by creating “our own brand of glasses …. so we could sell the same product that normally costs $500 for $95.”

However, because their product was only available online, the team had to figure out a way for customers to try on the frames. Blumenthal says their solution was to create a “first of its kind” program “in the US where you select 5 frames, we ship it to you free of cost and you have 5 days to try them on at home, with no obligation to buy.”

Gilboa adds that this process enables customers to receive feedback from people “they trust” (versus paid sales staffers) and as an added benefit, Warby Parker receives “millions of free impressions” from users who post tryout pictures to their social networking sites.

As the interview unfolds, Gilboa and Blumenthal share plenty more insights, so sure to watch the entire video to hear more.

Past episodes for Founder Stories featuring Jeff Clavier, Cyrus Massoumi, Stephen Kaufer, Mayor Bloomberg and many other leaders are here.

Episode II of this interview is coming up.

The Daily Muse, The Community For Professional Women, Looks To Reinvent The Company Profile

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST

Job boards and company profiles on job sites can be fairly uninspiring, and bland. Usually there’s a boring description of a job, followed by a list of skills needed followed by a boring description of the company.

Enter Y Combinator-backed The Daily Muse, which is a community for professional women. Today the site is launching company profiles: a new job board that not only presents company backgrounds in a compelling way, but also aims to make job listings more interesting.

As we’ve written in the past, The Daily Muse itself is a females-focused platform providing daily content across career-oriented topics like entrepreneurship and education as well as touching upon more extracurricular pursuits like fashion and travel. The site was founded by ex-McKinsey analysts Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery, who say the company has helped 250,000 women advance their careers since launching in September and is steadily growing 30 percent month-over-month in terms of traffic.

So how is The Daily Muse going to make its company profiles and job listings more engaging than the norm? They’re going to write them themselves— each profile will be written by TDM editors. The Daily Muse researches, interviews people at these companies, then writes each profile to give visitors glimpses into the company’s culture (and available jobs).

For now, the site has company profiles for Klout, Kiva, Hipmunk, ZeroCater, and Justin.tv. Each profile contains original photography of the company’s office, interviews with various employees, a look at the company culture, a description of what the company does, links to the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages as well as job listings.

The addition of interviews with current employees is one feature that Minshew tells me is unique to the site. Potential hires can learn what life is like at the company by looking at what it’s like for real people who already work there, which most job posting sites or professional networking platforms can’t provide.

While the company profiles aren’t necessarily exclusively for a female audience, she says that the team built out the site’s features based on the career tools and job search that women would look for. Insight into how current employees felt at the company was one of the areas where women felt job search was lacking, she explains.

In the future, The Daily Muse will be building out the abilities to search for companies and jobs as more content is added. And the startup is working on a number of partnerships with college career centers to help bring younger talent to startups.

With the current talent wars taking place in the technology world, there’s no doubt that companies and startups are looking for innovative and interesting ways to recruit and attract talent. The Daily Muse is able to add a certain amount of trust to the company profile and job board by taking control of the content in these profiles and listings, and adding an employee point of view.

The Daily Muse has raised funding from Y Combinator as well as a number of undisclosed angel investors.

Retickr Raises $1.5M For A Social News Reader That Learns What You Like

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST

Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.

The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product.

Explains Retickr co-founder Brian Trautschold, “information overload is an epidemic – content is being created faster than ever before, and people can’t keep up.” But he clarifies that his startup is not a simply a news reader – it’s a big data company. “We are focusing on an algorithmic approach that we believe should be individual-centric…our API learns what people read, like or dislike, and share. As we roll personalization out, users will begin to see content catered to them, and discover news they would have missed before,” he says.

The idea for a personalized, ever-learning news reader is not a new one, but these days, it’s more common to see such things launching as iPad apps, not as desktop software. (See, for example, Evri for iPad or News360). Retickr plans to address other platforms too, including web and mobile, but started with the Mac app instead.

With the updated version of the Retickr app (ver. 2.0), which rolls out today at noon (ET) on the Mac App Store, you can now sync your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds and then incorporate those streams into “playlists” along with the news feeds from over 85,000 sites that the service crawls. This addresses one of users’ bigger complaints about the earlier version of Retickr’s product: an inability to import OPML files or sync with Google Reader. Done!

The app will appeal to the social dashboard user base (TweetDeck users, e.g.), but aims to help cut down on the noise of the real-time streams with customized controls that let you configure how fast news scrolls by. But the name “Retickr” comes from the app’s key feature: its news ticker. The ticker is reminiscent of an older product called Snackr, which I happily used until I couldn’t stand its Adobe AIR-ness any more.

A word of warning for serious RSS connoisseurs, however: Retickr took forever to import my 1,000+ Google Reader feeds. It’s unclear if this was an issue with the alpha version of the product I was using, or a serious bug that still needs to be addressed. But with a million and half now in the bank, I expect the issue to be resolved soon.

Here’s The Epic Borderlands 2 Launch Trailer

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 08:36 AM PST

Back during the heyday of CrunchGear (now known as TechCrunch/Gadgets), we couldn’t get enough of Borderlands. The game masterfully combined the game play of a FPS with the best elements of an RPG. In a scene full of Call of Duty clones Borderlands is completely novel. Gearbox just released the launch trailer for the second installment and it promises more of the same big gun, big monster madness. The game launches on September 18th. Hey Erick, I’m going to be sick that day, m’kay?

How To Temporarily Silence All Those Annoying Twitterers At SXSW

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 08:32 AM PST

For various reasons (groan) I’m not heading to SXSW this year, but then neither are millions of other people. But that won’t stop the 20,000 attendees from clogging up our Twitter feeds trying to find each other in the nearest bar, tweeting incessantly about some “awesome” panel session you are not at or generally conversing about in-jokes you weren’t there to witness.

That’s why you need a handy way of temporarily blocking those tweets or those people – or maybe even both.

Last year there was a handy browser extension that blocked SXSW tweets. This year the people behind it are now in a former YC startup, Lanyrd, and they’re at it again, this time with an improved product.

The extension blocks tweets with the hashtag for #SXSW, but this time, because Lanyrd also carries an attendee directory, the extension will block all tweets from people there. Relief!

And here it is (no need to sign in first): notatsxsw.lanyrd.com

Enjoy, people!

Meanwhile, for those who ARE going, they can see the Lanyrd guide to the conference to see the sessions their Twitter contacts are speaking at or plan to attend. They can then build up their own session plan and take it with them (saved offline) on their phone using the Lanyrd iPhone app or HTML5 mobile web app. They also get emailed a personal schedule every day during the conference.

It’s clear that Lanyrd is picking up from where Plancast failed to deliver.

For more goodies, there’s a searchable directory of SXSW attendees, list of investors, founders, you name it.

SXSW speakers can also automatically generate Moo MiniCards from the SXSW schedule data help promote their talks.

After Closing $3.4B Acquisition Of SuccessFactors, SAP Pushes Human Capital Management In The Cloud

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 08:16 AM PST

SAP dropped a whopping $3.4 billion on human capital management software company SuccessFactors back in December. Two months later, the deal has finally closed and SAP isn’t wasting any time in releasing a product roadmap for SuccessFactors now that the company is part of the SAP family.

As the New York Times reported back in December, SAP saw SuccessFactors as one entry point into the cloud. Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman told the publication at the time that “The cloud has been a small part of SAP's revenue stream, about 2 percent; the deal adds to the revenue base and shows SAP's strong commitment to the software-as-a-service business model."

Today, SAP says that SuccessFactors’ software will be combined with SAP solutions to provide a comprehensive offering to clients. SAP will continue to offer its own Human Capital Management on premise solution but will be pushing SuccessFactors’ performance, compensation, recruiting and learning management products in the cloud. The talent management components from SAP’s software will be selectively innovated on, says the company.

Basically, SAP’s existing HCM products will be the on-premise offering and SuccessFactors will be deployed in the cloud. There are currently no plans to phase out any SuccessFactors products, says SAP.

SAP explains that data and analytics will be a focus area for further innovations in both SuccessFactors and SAP’s HCM offerings. SuccessFactors software will be integrated with SAP's data analysis product HANA.

The human capital management industry is huge and big enterprise companies are betting that the cloud is the future of this space. Salesforce just announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple, and will be launching a new product and SuccessFactors-rival, Successforce. Oracle just bought talent management software company Taleo for $1.9 billion a few weeks ago. With all these companies throwing their hats in the ring, it should be interesting to see which one can emerge as the leader.

UltraViolet Hits 800k Digital Media Locker Accounts, Added 50k In The Last Six Weeks

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 08:01 AM PST

UltraViolet might sound too good to be true, but the service is growing. More Blu-ray titles are featuring the digital media option and consumers are at least trying the movie industry’s alternative to, well, piracy. iSupply just announced that there are now more than 800,000 household accounts, up from 750,000 at the beginning of 2012. But so far it seems most of those accounts are just testing the waters, as iSupply notes that the average account has 1.25 titles. That results in over 1 million digital films for UltraViolet but also paints a picture that consumers aren’t too sure about the service.

"One million may not sound like much compared to the 504 million movie discs sold in 2011," noted Tom Adams, principal analyst and director, U.S. media, for IHS stated in today’s announcement. "However, we have projected that only 19 million digital film files were sold during the entire year of 2011 by electronic sell-through (EST) vendors like iTunes, Xbox Live and Vudu. This suggests that if UV can continue to gain momentum this year, it could encourage consumers to buy more movies. Movie purchasing represents an important priority for movie studios, which have seen their film sales dwindle in the face of growing physical and digital rentals and streaming services like Netflix."

UltraViolet is the movie industry’s first major push into digital media. Rather than relying on a 3rd party like Netflix, UltraViolet is run by the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), a consortium of major Hollywood studios, CE makers, retailers and DRM vendors. These companies came together in 2008 and proposed the digital locker service now called UltraViolet that lets consumers store and share digital media. Originally these movie titles were only to be bundled with physical media but Paramount started selling UltraViolet titles seperatly late last month. With UltraViolet, consumers can watch media on up to 12 devices and share between six members of the household. Content can either be downloaded or streamed from the cloud.

So far the UltraViolet selection is still very limited. Paramount has about 60 titles from their online store. UVVU.com keeps a running list of new UltraViolet releases. But in order for people to ditch Netflix (and illegal downloads) UltraViolet needs to have content. Once again, content is king.

Now that UltraViolet has a growing user base, the next milestone should involve seeing the average amount of titles in the digital lockers increase. Sign-ups are easy (and free), retention is hard.

We interviewed DECE’s president Mitch Singer at CES where he explained UltraViolet in detail. Watch the interview below.

Mozilla Launching Cross-Platform App Store Later This Year, Submissions Open Next Week

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 07:52 AM PST

Calling all developers: if you know your way around HTML5 and JavaSrcipt and have a great idea for an app, Mozilla wants to hear from you. The web-friendly nonprofit has just announced their intention to launch a new cross-platform app market later this year, and the submission process is slated to start next week at Mobile World Congress.

The initiative ties into Mozilla's focus on developing the web as a platform for rich content, and they hope to do so by providing developers with the tools needed to create great things.

"By building the missing pieces, Mozilla is now unlocking the potential of the Web to be the platform for creating and consuming content everywhere," said Mozilla Chief of Innovation Todd Simpson.

To help their burgeoning web apps platform take shape, Mozilla has proposed a number of APIs that "advance the web as a platform.” Mozilla will also aid their web apps platform with the creation of an identity system that binds apps to users rather than their devices. Though Mozilla declined to mention how the identity system would be implemented, it’s likely we’ll see their BrowserID system rear its head once more.

While Mozilla's platform-agnostic approach means that these apps will be able to run on any HTML5-capable device, the creation of a new app store isn’t just a win for cross-platform idealogues.

Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko (B2G) team has been hard at work since last July on developing a web-oriented mobile operating system, and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich mentioned recently intimated on Twitter that Mozilla would be revealing B2G partners at MWC.

Developer support in the form of apps is critical for the major mobile platforms. Between the development of the app store and the news of potential partnership agreements, Boot To Gecko has the potential to become a viable competitor. While the blocks slowly seem to be falling into place, Mozilla has remained mum on whether or not they’ll have a B2G handset ready to check out on the MWC show floor.

With Facebook, Netflix And More, The PS Vita Is *Nearly* A Tablet Alternative

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 07:27 AM PST

I’ve enjoyed the PS Vita for a couple of weeks now. It’s a fun device, but as John describes in our review, it feels like the last of its kind. Single function devices are no longer relevant and as much as Sony tried, the Vita is still pretty much a dedicated gaming handheld.

The company launched an app store for the Vita today, which folds Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and Flickr apps into the Vita’s ecosystem. With these apps, along with the powerful hardware and 3G connectivity, the $249 Vita could be a good alternative to a traditional tablet. The only thing it’s missing is a proper web browser.

The apps work as expected. The Netflix app uses the same interface as the company’s Android and iOS apps. The app does not support streaming via a 3G network, though. Flickr is downright gorgeous on the Vita. The interface takes full advantage of the Vita’s widescreen OLED screen displaying the image on the left with the details on the right. This app works on 3G. For some reason Facebook is only available to European Vitas. U.S. owners will need to wait a bit longer.

These apps finally make the Vita slightly more than just a gaming device. They’re key to the Vita’s success, really. Today’s consumers expect a multifunction device, which, as I can attest, the Vita was not until these apps hit. In fact I was getting a tad bored with the Vita, tending to instead to pick up my iPad for a few minutes of gaming followed by some Facebooking.

You see, my gaming attention span is not what it used to be. There was a time when I played Link’s Awakening by flashlight under my bed sheets for hours. Not anymore. I can only handle a few minutes at a time before I get bored and need to move onto something else. I know I cannot be alone. The $249 Vita (or $300 for the 3G version) was a hard sell for me. But now that there are apps, it could potentially fulfill the need of a similar person who wants a gaming device but can’t give up the features of a modern tablet. The Vita already had a Google Maps app, text and voice messaging, and a photo app. If only the Vita had a quality web browser it would be nearly perfect for this demographic.

The Vita’s web browser still needs work. It renders web sites like IE 6 (read: poorly). It doesn’t support even Flash 9 and scrolling is painful because of how slow it renders. But it works in a pinch.

The Vita is a powerful little thing. It rocks a custom ARM Cortex A9 quad-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, and packs the same amount of connectivity options as an iPad. The 5-inch screen is an OLED capacitive touchscreen and then there’s a massive rear capacitive touchpad for additional controls. There’s dual analog sticks, a directional pad and traditional PlayStation controls. The Vita really is the most impressive gaming device ever made. But even with good launch titles in my opinion it was still missing something: apps.

The Vita is launching in a tough market. No other gaming device including Nintendo’s 3DS had to deal with so many competitors. The Vita must combat smartphones, tablets, the 3DS and in the coming weeks, the iPad 3, which will no doubt launch with the force of a mighty backdraft. But Sony seems to know this. The Vita’s hardware and accessories are pricey, hinting that Sony isn’t selling them at a loss. Sony probably knows the Vita won’t outsell the iPad. It doesn’t have to in order to be considered a success. As long as the Vita gets quality games, apps and new features at a steady rate, Sony will continue to make gamers happy. And that’s what it’s all about.

Wapple Wins Trademark Battle Over Apple

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 07:20 AM PST

While Apple is busy fighting Proview over the iPad trademark in China, it has lost a separate trademark battle in Europe: Wapple, the mobile web developers, have won a suit filed by Apple over its name.

The suit, originally filed in 2007, claimed that Wapple was trading on Apple's brand association and name, although Wapple had filed for a trademark on “Wapple” in 2006.

Wapple, which has been around since 2003, and incorporated in 2004 – well before the smartphone explosion – has long said that its name was wordplay on the WAP protocol, which was the main format for delivering mobile content before the rise of 3G networks and other protocols like HTML5.

The case went right up to the Intellectual Property Office in the UK, which today made the ruling in Wapple's favor in three separate filings, numbers 95786, 95787 and 95890.

Wapple’s words on the decision are ironic, going as they do against as iconic and groundbreaking a company as Apple:

"The case is a victory for truth over tactics. Self-belief is always critical when establishing and growing any technology business and even more so when you are early to market as we were," noted Anne Thomas, co-founder and COO of Wapple. "The action taken by Apple Inc. to oppose our trade mark [sic] has tested our resolve and we are delighted with this outcome."

Wapple works with a number of third parties on mobile web services and its customers include two of Apple's big competitors, Microsoft and Google. No one in Wapple’s experience, the company notes, has ever confused the two companies.

Although Apple has asserted intellectual property rights over some of the industry’s biggest players — including numerous lawsuits against Android-based developers Samsung, HTC and Motorola — it has also gone after much smaller companies, but not always with a successful effect. One case in Spain last year saw Apple losing a design patent suit against NT-K, a small Android tablet maker.

Want To Track Who Read Your Email? ToutApp’s Salesforce Integration Goes Live

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 07:14 AM PST

ToutApp, the email productivity app that emerged as part of the 500Startups Summer Accelerator program last year, is rolling out a new feature that will let users track their emails right from within Salesforce. With the update, ToutApp customers will be able to see who viewed their emails, when they were viewed, where they were viewed, what the recipient clicked on, and how long they read the email.

Creepy? OK, maybe. But for serious CRM users, it’s kind of great, too.

If you haven’t heard of ToutApp before, a little background: the startup is attempting to address one of the most woefully overlooked pain points nearly everyone deals with today: email overload. To help speed up the process of creating and responding to email, the company launched its service last year which helps users create personalized email templates (aka “canned responses”). After installation, the app digs into your email to identify the types of mass emails you send to help you build these templates.

After your templated emails are sent, you can track nearly everything that takes place with them in the recipient’s inbox: it’s the who, what, when, where and how long of email viewing. It then presents this in a live-updating feed within your preferred email client. While privacy advocates my find this a shocking invasion, I disagree. Privacy, shmivacy. There are real-world benefits to this sort of tracking across multiple industries.

In my (fantasy) world, here’s how ToutApp could improve my life dramatically: a PR person sends a pitch. I open it. Read it. Click the link. Close the link. Then return to reading more email. When the PR person doesn’t hear back, instead of sending out one of those “just circling back” emails to determine interest, they already know I read the email and followed through by viewing the URL it included. If they still had to follow up, the response wouldn’t be a time-wasting “hey, did you read my email?” email, but a more productive follow-on pitch containing different angles or information the first one had neglected to include.

Of course, that’s just one example. As a entrepreneur, you could template different pitches to journalists and investors, and then see if they were read. Salesforce users could craft templates for client emails that help them close deals. And so on.

ToutApp is designed to integrate with Gmail, CRM systems like Highrise, Batchbook, and Capsule, and has been working to support Salesforce. However, until this latest update, the Salesforce integration was limited. The startup was doing some sporadic testing, but nothing was available to the public.

But now, Salesforce users will be able to see real-time updates on when and where emails were read, what was clicked and other analytics data related to email tracking directly from within Salesforce. Templating, automatic file attachments, and performance reports are also included.

In addition, for Gmail and iOS ToutApp users, there are a few other changes rolling out today, too, including a new Email Activity Feed for real-time tracking of emails, an improved interface for ToutApp’s Gmail integration and an updated iOS app that allows you to edit templates, send messages while on the go, and view email analytics on mobile.

ToutApp was founded in 2010 by Tawheed Kader, and closed a seed round of $350,000 last summer from 500 Startups, Esther Dyson, Eric Ries, Daniel Eskapa, NYC Seed Fund, Joshua Baer, and others.

Pricing for the service is based on the size of your team, ranging from a $12/month pack allowing you to send 25 emails a day, make three Tout groups and use 10 email templates, all the way to $199/month, offering support for unlimited groups and shared templates, team-wide analytics tracking, and support for up to 25 team members. More info is available on the ToutApp website here.

Crowdsourced Wi-Fi Network Fon Passes 5 Million Hotspots Worldwide

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 06:56 AM PST

When serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavky launched Fon in late 2005, his goal was to blanket the world with easily-accessible, crowdsourced Wi-Fi. While the service hasn't quite made it everywhere yet, Fon has just announced that they now have over 5 million hotspots in operation across the globe.

It's a pretty impressive number considering that other big Wi-Fi networks like Boingo advertise "over 400,000" hotspots in their network, but it's made even more notable when you consider each of Fon's hotspots is essentially a person who decided to share their own Internet connection.

The signup process is a novel one — in order to access the full list of Fon hotspots out there, users have to share their own Internet connection first with the help a special wireless router. Non-sharers looking to get their own wireless Internet fix can take part in the fun too, but it comes at a cost — they have to pay a fee in order to access a Fon hotspot, part of which ends up with the hotspot's owner.

Much of Fon’s growth can be attributed to strategic partnerships with companies like SFR, British Telecom, and Belgacom, all of whom have folded support for Fon’s network into their consumer-facing hardware. With other partnerships in the works, Varsavky says on his blog that he expects Fon’s growth to continue unabated:

“This year, I predict that Fon will grow its number of hotspots by at least 50 percent, so there is lots of work ahead to make sure this happens.”

Backed By Lerer And SV Angel, Newsle Launches To Let You Track News About Your Friends

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 06:00 AM PST

If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?)

At conception, Newsle mostly focused its efforts on becoming an archive for interesting (older) news about friends and people you care about. (You can read Erick’s early coverage here.) But, in testing the idea with its some 10K beta users, the founders discovered that it turns out most people have friends who are in the news every single week. And this doesn’t just apply to those in the tech industry, nearly everyone has an acquaintance or five that appear in local papers, blogs, and beyond.

The startup’s beta users wanted a better way to keep track of their friends, loved ones, and contacts popping up in the news in realtime. So, Newsle has been heads-down in stealth mode for the past nine months building technology to enable this kind of news-based friend-tracking, and the new version officially launches today.

In its new garb, Newsle has basically built a massive RSS feed crawler that processes more than 100K news sources every day, culling together over 1 million articles from major media outlets, blogs, as well as local publications. The startup allows you to then pull your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts into its engine so that it can serve you a stream of news content that focuses on the people you want to stay in touch with. Users can then Facebook message or tweet the people they’re following directly from Newsle’s web interface. Or they can drill down, set more specific alerts that get sent to their inbox daily, weekly, and so on.

Users can not only follow their Facebook and LinkedIn friends, but also choose from a list of celebrities, comedians, actors, and business people, staying on top all news related to Lady Gaga. It sounds a little stalker-ish, but it’s a great tool for, say, startups looking to keep tabs on VCs, or for my many fans to keep track of my posts. (You’re welcome!) The founders tell us that they really wanted to pick up where Google Alerts leave off, focusing on friends and people we care about.

As Erick pointed out, if Newsle sounds familiar, it’s because the idea has been tried before in various incarnations, most notably Rohit Khare and Samil Ismail’s now-defunct Angstro, which eventually morphed into Knx.to to be later acq-hired by Google. Previous attempts haven’t been successful, but Newsle has a great UI to recommend it, works well, and looks snappy.

Obviously, tackling the enormous amount of news content out there on the Interwebs is no easy feat. The service will really live or die based on how relevant the content is that it serves to its users. Right now, since quite a few other TechCrunch writers are my friends on Facebook, Newsle is serving me their posts on TechCrunch, but if you’re looking for news about those people, and not written by those people, that could be a strike against. It’s no easy thing to separate the equivocating metadata or profile information that comes with bloggers’ news posts.

The founders have been hard at work creating and fine-tuning these disambiguation algorithms that allows Newsle to, among other things, distinguish between commonly occurring names in the news and those who are actually your friends. With so much content coming into its silo, that can be tricky.

But that’s where funding can come in handy. Newsle is officially announcing today that it raised $600K in seed financing from Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. The startup is using its new capital to hire engineers to help in tweaking its algorithms, and to launch mobile apps (which should be going live in the near future).

Newsle is still early in the process and hasn’t yet solidified its monetization strategy, but one can imagine that a service like this would be appealing to businesses, especially to marketers and sales people. The founders also said that they will add further local news sources as more users come on board, and they get a better sense of which particular outlets are most in demand.

While the goal has really been just to build an open-ended resource that allows people to track news about their friends, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see the startup eventually offer more targeted, subject-specific content and tracking.

For more, check out the new, new Newsle at home here, and let us know what you think.

EU Will Refer ACTA To Highest European Court

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 05:43 AM PST

The European Union says it will refer the controversial ACTA anti-piracy trade agreement to the institution’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, to check whether it complies with the EU’s fundamental rights.

EU trade chief Karel De Gucht is leading the process. He said: “We are planning to ask Europe’s highest court to assess ACTA’s compatibility with the EU’s fundamental rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression and information or that of protection… Let me be very clear: I share people’s concern for these fundamental freedoms… especially over the freedom of the Internet.”

140 Proof Introduces Video To Its Social Ad Network

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 05:30 AM PST

140 Proof, a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup.

Like the company’s existing 140-character text units, the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads (and yes, they should work on mobile). Users should be able to click and watch the video without leaving the page, rate it, and bring up a feed of all the tweets mentioning the advertiser’s hashtag.

Co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III told me via email that 140 Proof’s biggest advertisers have been asking for video ads “for a long time.” He pointed to several things that make this a good move for the company. For one, it allows brands to deliver video ads targeted at people with a specific interest, and to deliver those ads in a social stream. For another, it places the videos in the perfect context for further sharing. Manoogian even pitches this as a way to help your standard TV commercial stay relevant.

“The new video ad unit lets brands get more value out of that expensive 30-second TV commercial that lots of viewers aren’t seeing, since they’re now watching shows on Tivo or Hulu or (ahem) BitTorrent,” Manoogian says. “The social video ad unit lets brands reach those users in a context where they are already looking for ‘the next big thing’.”

The company is also sharing some numbers about its recent progress. In 2011, 140 Proof says that it increased revenue by 700 percent, that the average media buy across all customers doubled, and that it tripled its headcount. During that time, the company also raised a $2.5 million Series B from BlueRun Ventures and others. Advertisers include UPS, Nike, Victoria’s Secret, and many others.

Yandex: Q4 Sales, Income Up Over 50% For Russia’s Search Giant

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 05:26 AM PST

More news from Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, that highlights the opportunity for more growth in digital in Russia and adjacent markets. One day after announcing a new real-time search partnership with Twitter, the company is reporting Q4 earnings: sales were at $200 million with net income of $71.3 million, both representing growth respectively of 56 percent and 51 percent on the same quarter a year ago.

But although Yandex says the figures were at the high end of its guidance, revenues fell short of average analyst expectations of $207.6 million, as polled by Yahoo Finance.

Yandex noted that its share of the Russian search market is now at 60.8 percent, according to LiveInternet. That still makes it the biggest search portal in Russia, although this represents a decline over last quarter, when the company reported a 62.7 percent share of the market.

That underscores Yandex’s move to search for new platforms and mediums, and markets, to serve ads.

Those include services like adding Twitter’s real-time search. But also, like its rival Google, Yandex is putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, and has in the last several months inked search deals with Samsung for its bada devices and Microsoft for Windows Phone — where Yandex will now become the default search window for the CIS and Russia, respectively.

It has also bought its own mobile developer, SPB Software, for a price believed to be around $38 million. SPB has developed mobile payment services, games, and other mobile apps. It’s probably a big leap to think that Yandex will go the whole hog and look at making its own mobile OS, as Google has done with Android (although never discount the possibility). But in any case, SPB already works in enough areas where Yandex could potentially insert ads and power other functions, for its own services and those for third parties.

The company is also expanding outside of its traditional base of Russia and the CIS: it has launched new services like maps in Turkey, where it is currently making a big push.

While those efforts have yet to bear significant fruit for Yandex — at least not enough worth mentioning in today’s results — the company continues to see growth in its existing online advertising business:

Search engine result pages were up 36 percent from last year; and advertisers now number 173,000 – a 43 percent increase over last year – and 10 percent up on Q3. For the full year, advertisers were up by 44 percent to 270,000. The bulk of Yandex’s ad revenues are coming from its own search-based text ads, which account for 68 percent of Yandex’s revenues. But just in terms of actual growth, revenues from third-party sites actually saw bigger gains last quarter. Text based ads altogether accounted for over 80 percent of Yandex’s revenues:

Yandex said it expects that overall, Ruble-based revenue growth for 2012 will be in the range of 40-45 percent.

Strategic Sharing: Zipcar Leads $13.7M Investment In Campus Car-Sharing Startup Wheelz

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 05:19 AM PST

Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.

Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself.

The Detroit-based Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology investment firm, also participated in the round. As a result, Mark Schulz, the former President of International Operations at Ford and a founding Partner at Fontinalis, will join Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith on the startup’s Board of Directors. (Former Vice-chairman of Ernst & Young Jim Freer also joins the board.)

This adds to the $2 million in seed funding Wheelz raised pre-launch last summer, which was led by former Facebook VP and creator of the Social+Capital Partnership venture fund Chamath Palihaptiya, and included contributions from Felicis Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and an impressive list of angel investors, including Freer and Sebastien De Halleax, the founder of Playfish. Wheelz’s total funding now sits just under $16 million.

For those unfamiliar with Wheelz, you can check out our coverage of their launch back in September. But, essentially, Wheelz aims to bring P2P car-sharing to campuses with a platform that enables students to connect safely and swiftly through Facebook integration, mobile apps, and its proprietary in-car hardware system called DriveBox. The startup initially launched at Stanford and has since popped up at UC Berkeley, USC and UCLA.

Among other things recommending it, Wheelz offers a wide selection of cars (sedans, hybrids, luxury cars, convertibles, vans, SUVs, and trucks), free, 24/7 customer support and roadside assistance, and users are protected by Wheelz’s million-dollar insurance policy, without affecting the individual’s own auto insurance.

As to how it works, once a student installs DriveBox in their car (for free), and has listed their car on Wheelz, other users can rent it, unlocking the car using the company’s iPhone app or Wheelz card. What’s cool is that the owner doesn’t have to be there to hand off the keys once they’ve agreed to sharing their car, as the company provides a “Key Box,” in which owners can leave their keys. The key box also comes with a gas card, so that when gas falls below a quarter of a tank, renters fill ‘er up using the card. The owner of the car decides how much the renter pays, setting hourly, daily, and weekly prices.

It’s a cool model, and one that looks to capitalize on the fact that on campus, P2P car sharing is on the rise. In a statement today, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith said that he thinks P2P will have a big effect on the car-sharing market going forward: “We chose to make this investment because we believe that Wheelz has the right leadership, technology and business model to succeed in the emerging P2P space,” he said in a statement.

Wheelz does indeed have an experienced leadership team, as CEO Jeff Miller is a veteran of building sustainable transportation solutions, having worked for electric vehicle network provider Better Place. And co-founder and CTO Akhtar Jameel (also the architect of Wheelz's technology platform) was formerly the CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D and has held senior product and technology positions at Daimler, Better Place and Xerox PARC. (He was also awarded a Smithsonian Computer World Innovations gold medal for developing the world's first Internet-connected car back in 1997.)

But what the Zipcar CEO didn’t mention was that there’s a lot of interest in the space, and competition is heating up. General Motors funded RelayRides in a very similar move and is offering its cars to the Google Ventures-backed startup to help it expand its reach, and, of course, there’s TechCrunch Disrupt winner GetAround, which has been getting a lot of buzz and has raised $5 million from a number of high-profile investors.

Again, it’s no surprise that Zipcar wants to tap into startups focusing on colleges and universities, something it’s done itself through its universities program. Campuses are early adopters and since a lot of students don’t own (or can’t afford) cars, they get used a lot more than they do in other places. Wheelz has a good-looking platform, some great technology, so the move makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see how the car-sharing tug-of-war plays out in 2012.

For more on Wheelz, check ‘em out at home here.

Nokia Teases “Pure View” Imaging Ahead Of MWC

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 05:13 AM PST

Nokia isn’t all that great with teasers. In August the company posted a teaser for the newest version of Symbian which just so happened to include the release date in it. Today, the teaser (at least) doesn’t give away the name of the product or anything huge like that, but it’s pretty clear what Nokia is hyping right here.

Obviously the big news here is some form of camera technology. We’re promised pure detail, pure depth, and pure definition — all in all, a pure view.

Nokia is clearly trying to play this up with the snowy magic and barely visible (but also totally visible) white text. The Finnish phone maker must have an imaging flagship ready to roll at MWC. Of course, we’ll be there with eyes peeled so stay tuned on what exactly Nokia has to offer that will give us a “pure view.”

BloomReach Crunches Big Data To Deliver The Future Of SEO and SEM

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 05:01 AM PST

Are you ready for a revolution? Today, after 3 years of machine learning development in stealth, BloomReach reveals its big data solution for website relevance optimization. BloomReach is capable of boosting organic search traffic by a whopping 80%, and will flip the search engine optimization and marketing industries upside down.

With a huge problem, a team of industry rockstars backed by $16 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the patented technology capable of executing, BloomReach could become the first $10 billion enterprise marketing company, joining other core solutions like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. SEO is dead, long live big data SEO.

BloomReach’s cloud marketing platform attacks the lack of search result presence that plagues the content and products filling up the subpages of most big websites. Despite advertising, potential customers can’t find what they want or are dumped on generic, low-relevance, high-bounce rate pages. Sites could make so much more money if the could just connect what they’re already selling with the people who already want it.

Here’s how BloomReach’s core product BloomSearch fixes this. First, it crawls billions of web pages per day and analyzes your site’s user behavior, including browsing, buying, and searching activity. A semantic interpreter teases out the underlying purpose of your content by referencing it against 10 billion synonym pairs and 1 billion phrases. Content is then compared with what potential visitors are searching for on the web. Your website’s structure and content are then optimized to supply what users demand, and exposed to crawlers to score you a big increase in organic search discoverability.

For example, BloomSearch could determine that an ecommerce store sells “garden shears” but potential customers are searching for “garden scissors”. It would then add metadata and aggregated content from across your site to the “garden shears” page to make both vistors and search engine crawlers see it as relevant for “garden scissors” searches. BloomReach says it can give sites a whopping 80% increase in traffic, far beyond what most A/B testing systems or SEO consultants can provide.

The other two products BloomReach launches today maximize conversions from search advertising and social curation. BloomLift dynamically cobbles together landing pages for ads so visitors see exactly what they were hoping to buy or consume. The product can make the CPC-wasting 55% bounce rate of the average ad landing page a thing of the past.

Say you buy search keyword ads for “red sweater”. If someone searching for “red v-neck sweater” is shown your ad and clicks through, BloomReach generates a landing page of the products most relevant to their original search. It might show red scoop-neck sweaters and brown v-neck sweaters rather than just standard red sweaters. In a pilot program for an education company, BloomLift delivered 15% more conversions and a 50% increase in advertising profits.

BloomSocial crowdsources themed product pages by analyzing browsing patterns and surfacing clusters of related products. It could determine all the products people browse when they’re planning a picnic, and create special “picnic”-themed page. Visitors can then socially follow, comment on, and share products and opt to be notified of new deals.

In Fall 2008, Raj De Datta, a former Director of Product Marketing at Cisco and Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Mohr-Davidow Ventures met with Bain Capital Ventures about the idea to replace SEO. Bain Capital Ventures and angels including Chris Dixon gave Raj a $5 million Series A in February 2009 to recruit a team of geniuses capable of tackling the serious big data technology problem.

De Datta convinced world expert on machine learning Ashutosh Garg, formerly a Chief Scientist for Google who was working on his own search engine, to become CTO. Garg now has 50 approved and pending patents in online advertising, search, machine learning and bio-informatics. An $11 million series B round was secured from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners in September 2010. It’s gone towards building out the product and bringing the Mountain View-based BloomReach’s employee count to 60 with talent poached from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Bing.

The biggest threat to BloomReach will be the need to adapt to new traffic sources beyond current search, ads, and social, as well as avoiding demotion from Google PageRank. However, Palo Alto Managing Director Ajay Agarwal of investor Bain Capital Ventures tells me “judging by time and effort spent building the team and product, it would be very difficult to compete with BloomReach, plus it’s built intellectual property to protect what it’s invented.”

Over the last year, 70 big brands including Orbitz, Crate&Barrel, and Oodle Marketplace have been testing BloomReach in verticals such as ecommerce, travel, and listings (jobs, cars, real estate). While in stealth the service was already generating 52 million additional page views and 25 million extra visits to client sites per quarter. It expects to generate $145 million in incremental revenue for clients in 2012.
Luckily, those clients only pay if their site performance improves, making it a sure-fire return on investment for enterprises. Because spend so directly leads to results, big data optimization could pull spend away from every other marketing channel, especially offline advertising where impact is almost impossible to measure.

BloomReach is the single most disruptive enterprise technology I’ve seen in years. CEO and co-founder Raj De Datta breaks down the company’s value proposition like this: “There is a stream of demand that will generate money for you, would you like to tap in?” Yes, enterprise will. So don’t be surprised when the acquisition bids flood in, SEO gurus get the axe, and you start actually finding what you search for.

InVision Raises $1.5M For Beautiful, Interactive Prototypes

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 05:00 AM PST

New York City startup InVision has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to help companies answer an important question: Are we building something that people will actually want to use?

The funding comes from FirstMark Capital. Managing director Amish Jani says he was excited to invest because, for one thing, co-founders Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel are addressing a real problem that they faced. InVision came out of the pair’s web design consultancy, where they say they were frustrated by the lack of tools for creating a design prototype that actually provided a reasonable stand-in for the finished product.

There are other prototyping tools out there, but none, Valberg says, that incorporate everything that InVision tries to do well. He argues that prototypes need to look as beautiful as you want the final product to be, while also incorporating real interactions. They also need to be seen in a real context — namely, a normal web browser. So InVision customers create the screens in Adobe’s designer-friendly tools like Photoshop, then link those screens up to add basic interactivity, and they can share the prototypes through a link (which can be password-protected).

Other features include the ability to create mobile prototypes and to collaborate with other designers. You can play with a sample prototype here.

The funding announcement comes with effusive praise from several startups, including InDinero and LaunchRock — InDinero CEO Jessica Mah, for example, calls InVision the company’s “secret weapon” which has “completely changed our design process.” Jani says FirstMark’s portfolio companies were excited about the product too, and they had plenty of feature requests. At the same time, the InVision website lists some bigger companies like Google and Whole Foods as customers. Altogether, the startup says it has been used by 19,000 designers to create 118,000 screens.

In some ways, the approach that Valberg advocates, where companies run tests on multiple prototypes before writing a single line of code, runs counter to a current branch of Silicon Valley wisdom, which calls for startups to release a real product to at least a limited group of users as quickly as people. Valberg isn’t opposed to iterating based on user feedback, but he argues that it’s better to get much of that initial iteration process out of the way beforehand, before you “lose a lot of control” by making your product publicly available. Valberg also argues that InVision puts the big product decisions back into the hands of the designers, not the engineers.

“Designers are the future of product creation,” he says. “The engineers ruled at the beginning … but now the question is who can create something that’s emotionally appealing and meaningful to our lives. The ones who are best equipped to do that are the designers.”

Valberg says that InVision will become more of a platform this year, incorporating a wider range of ways to collect user feedback.