The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- SendHub Crosses Messaging Platforms To Get Real Stuff Done — And Starts To Take Off
- Google TV Adds New International Apps, But It’s Still Only Available In U.S.
- Bored This Weekend? LifeCrowd Launches A Marketplace For Social Activities
- Pinterest Revamps Profile Pages: Streamlined Content, Cleaner Interface, New Board Layout
- Introducing Dotsies: The Space-Saving Font
- Meet Jean And His Brand New iPad
- FoundersCard Adds Discounts For TripIt, LegalZoom, Moo.com & More (+Invites)
- Sprint Officially Kills LightSquared Deal, Returns $65M In Prepayments
- Here Today, China Tomorrow: PayPal ‘Optimistic’ It Will Get A Domestic Payment License
- Video Site DramaFever Raises $4.5M, With Backing From YouTube Co-Founder
- Allez Les Books: France Suggests Amazon Tax To Help Independent Bookstores
- First Person In The UK To Buy The New iPad In Store Is A Startup Guy
- Twitter: An Increasingly Great Platform For Instagram
- Film Discovery Startup Prescreen Adds Netflix Founding Exec Mitch Lowe To Advisory Board
- “Social Ideation” Startup AHHHA Turns Users’ Ideas Into Real Products
- The Retina iPad Apps To Test Tonight And Tomorrow
- Dogster Gets A SAY Media Makeover
- Now At 5.6M Users, Alfresco Takes On Dropbox With New Consumer Cloud, Eyes 2013 IPO
- TaskRabbit Talks International Growth: London, Vancouver “On The Horizon” [TCTV]
- Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire Makes His First Peep After The IPO Quiet Period Ends
| SendHub Crosses Messaging Platforms To Get Real Stuff Done — And Starts To Take Off Posted: 16 Mar 2012 08:58 AM PDT  There are plenty of companies trying to create new forms of group texting or social networking. There are far fewer who are trying to offer a messaging service that crosses the web, email and mobile devices in a seamless way. Facebook is perhaps the most obvious example, but its utility is social — you might not want to use it for work, or for organizing your kids’ little league game, or for communicating with the parents of a class you’re teaching. Enter SendHub, a startup in this year’s Y Combinator class, that has already started to get some serious traction by focusing on professionals. The company offers a clean interface for creating and organizing groups of people, and communicating back and forth with them over their desired format. The result is that it has been growing fast. When Sarah Perez covered SendHub in February, the company was sending 30,000 messages a month. Now, it’s sending around that amount per week. Check out the graph below. The numbers are still small, but they’re in the right direction. YC partner Paul Graham says that its growth looks like AirBnB’s had in the early days. What types of users are causing this growth? A few big partnerships are helping, including one with Teach For America and another with the Florida Department of Education, cofounders Garrett Johnson and Ash Rust tell me. But some people are using it for social purposes as well, including a group cross-fit trainers who coordinate times to work out. And there’s a variety of folks who veer into Facebook Messaging territory by communicating with each other to keep social activities like beer crawls together. How does the app work? You’ll need to go to the web site, sign up with Facebook or Google or a new user account, then enter the information of the people you want to share with. You can do it manually, or import CSV docs from Gmail, Outlook and other email clients. You’ll also get a new local phone number (the company uses Twilio’s voice messaging platform on the backend). Then you can start writing messages and texting them out to people. Other users can also join using a keyword you choose. So a local business could invite existing customers via uploading its CSV file of them and ask new users to text in to sign up (which is how most people are joining). You get unique new phone number, and you’re asked to either add contacts manually or via a bulk importer. Users who receive the texts are also sent a link to go back and rate the message or block the sender. So if a local business starts spamming too many deals, they’ll be able to get feedback quickly. But why did the growth take off? The founder joined YC with a product in hand, but they tell me that they got a bunch of design help that has made the site easier to use for people. Other cofounders with specific technical skills have also helped them with scaling their services for new waves of users. And, they also got encouraged to focus on every single user who called in. Right now, they’re sleeping shifts so they can respond to any issues 24 hours a day. Where to next? “Email and social will be our primary focus in the short term, Rust says, but we expect voice will be an important frontier for us to develop.” We did a basic integration and we’re seeing over 3k calls a month. IM is attractive but it’s not requested nearly as much. These types of messaging apps are inherently viral, but sometimes have trouble making money as a result of too much success (see: GroupMe, Beluga). SendHub provides a set of premium features instead. If you want to go above 1000 messages a month, you’ll need to pay at least $10 a month. If you want more than three groups, larger API requests, the ability to bring your own number, phone support, or a branded profile page, you’ll need to buy more expensive options. The team still has a couple things to work out. In testing it out, the bulk importer had some trouble uploading my contact list. And the interface has some oddities, like an error message telling you that you need to type in a ten digit telephone number, that appears as you’re typing your number in. But all in all it feels right, and the engagement numbers seem to indicate that many more users will, too.
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| Google TV Adds New International Apps, But It’s Still Only Available In U.S. Posted: 16 Mar 2012 08:34 AM PDT  Google today announced another step in the build-out of its Google TV service: it is adding several new international channels in the form of apps to the Google TV platform, aimed at those who live in the U.S. but are missing content from home. Among them are a mix of entertainment and news services, including al-Jazeera, the Chinese-language PPTV, the IslamBox collection of channels, Yupp TV (another aggregator, this time of Indian content) and Japan’s Crunchyroll. But while it is going international on one level, it is not on another: still no definite dates on when Google plans to launch its service outside of the U.S. “We're looking to roll out internationally through the course of 2012,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. But no specific timings beyond that, or the specific reasons for why is has not done so yet. “We don't break out the reasons why, but we do want to make sure that users everywhere get the full experience, so we want to make sure we work towards that,” he said. He also did not specify which markets might be the first to see roll-outs of the service outside of the U.S. To get Google TV, Google currently lists two options: either buy a special Sony Internet TV, or a set-top box from Sony or Logitech that you use with your own Internet-enabled TV. Sony in January said that it didn’t expect to offer its Google-TV-enabled devices in the UK, at least, until September. That was already a delay on earlier estimates which had put it at an autumn 2011 arrival. There could be a number of reasons for the delay, from supplies to getting international rights sorted out for the video and other content. That has been one of the key issues with the international expansion of other IP video services, such as Hulu. At the moment, Google TV says it has thousands of apps for the service — basically, everything in Google Play (nee Android Market) that doesn’t require touchscreens, location or other mobile-only features — but in terms of apps that have been optimized for Google TV itself, there are 150. Today’s list in full:
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| Bored This Weekend? LifeCrowd Launches A Marketplace For Social Activities Posted: 16 Mar 2012 08:31 AM PDT  LifeCrowd, the first startup to emerge from the newly-formed TechStars Network member MuckerLab based in L.A., is today launching its marketplace for social activities into public beta. The company, which aims to provide a curated selection of quality events, happenings, classes and outings, is available now for users in San Francisco, San Diego, and all of Orange County, Calif., as well as in its original test market of L.A. Only a month and a half old, co-founder Bong Koh says the concept for LifeCrowd is very simple. “We just help you meet new people and try new activities,” he explains. “That ranges from sushi making to wine tasting to rock climbing,” he adds, “and the emphasis is on local, but also casual, intimate and social – those are the words we use to describe ourselves.” To be clear, LifeCrowd is a different type of service than something like Meetup.com, because it’s not about forming groups that meet regularly with a single focus, it’s about listing activities that are going on right now. That positions it closer to something like Eventbrite, perhaps, but the events don’t have to be as professional and structured (as many of Eventbrite’s are). For example, Koh says that some members recently organized a game of kickball using the service. Currently the session size for the events is trending towards 8 and 10 individuals – big enough to allow you to meet other people, but not too big as to be overwhelming. More importantly, the service isn’t sucking in long lists of nearby events from outside sources – they’re all being listed through members, and curated by the LifeCrowd team for quality. “When it comes to community building, you need to have a positive customer service experience,” says Koh. “We’re going to be very careful about ingesting and integrating other activities and events [from outside sources]…events are going to be curated, and hand-picked.” In other words, the event listings on the site may not be as long and thorough as those featured by your hometown paper, weekly mag, or other events guide, but that’s by design. LifeCrowd is aiming for quality over quantity. In addition to curation, LifeCrowd is also using social filtering (via Facebook) and personalization techniques to help recommend the activities that you would want to participate in. One thing I really do like about the service is that they’re partnering with volunteer organizations to list their events as well. A lot of people want to go out and volunteer, but they don’t know how, Koh explains. In early tests, this section of the site is already seeing some traction, he tells us. LifeCrowd’s other co-founders include Bong Doh Koh (Bong Dug Koh’s brother), Allyson Pizula, and Andy Wen. Advisors include eBay employee #3 Mary Lou Song, former Zynga exec Padma Rao, new Groupon VP of Consumer Products Curtis Lee, VideoEgg co-founder (now SAY Media’s) Matt Sanchez, Blackboard founder Tim Chi, and others. The team said they chose MuckerLab because of the founders’ Silicon Valley expertise as well the fact that they’re all former eBay guys, something that would prove useful as LifeCrowd is developing its own online marketplace. (For paid activities, a portion of the price goes to the service). As for expansion to other markets, that’s further down the road. “If we can nail it in these first few markets, then we’ll have something pretty exciting here,” says Koh.
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| Pinterest Revamps Profile Pages: Streamlined Content, Cleaner Interface, New Board Layout Posted: 16 Mar 2012 08:15 AM PDT  We sort of saw this coming, given the fact that Ben Silbermann said so at SXSW, but Pinterest has just revamped its profile pages. Those of you familiar with the hottest new social network will know that profile pages originally displayed all of your boards, their titles, with thumbnails of each pin in every board. It got the job done to be sure, but was also pretty simple. Today, all that changes. If you meander on over to Pinterest, where you’ll likely spend more than an hour of your life pinning, liking, and browsing in general, you’ll notice that if you click on an individual user, things look a bit different. A profile picture is displayed nice and big on the top left, and most of what you’d originally find on the left-hand side bar has now been pushed front and center. It makes the content itself the center of attention. Next to your profile picture, you’ll also find a user description and contact info, along with people you’ve repinned. On the top left, users can check out the number of boards you have, your pin count, along with likes and other activity. The boards themselves have also changed. No longer are you looking at nine little thumbnails, but rather a larger image of one of your pins, with thumbnails down below for the rest. To be honest, it reminds me a lot of Facebook Timeline profile pages. Something about the way that Pinterest is resizing pinned images, leaving some large and the others small, is subtly reminiscent of Facebook post-timeline. Designer Justin Edmunds has previous experience designing for “identity”, as is the case with profile pages, after working with Foundation, a web app that lets artists and designers create online porfolios. As previously mentioned, we have been expecting fresh profile pages since Silbermann teased them last week. But this roll out was much quicker than I’d imagined. Perhaps that iPad app we’ve heard about will show its face sooner rather than later.
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| Introducing Dotsies: The Space-Saving Font Posted: 16 Mar 2012 08:01 AM PDT  When last I met with Craig Muth it was in lovely Columbus, Ohio and he was a down-to-earth hacker working on memorize.com, a site dedicated to making the world a better place. Clearly a useful and noble pursuit. Craig moved to San Francisco a while back, and just sent me an email with details of his latest project: a space-saving font he’s calling dotsies. Dotsies characters are built from five dots which can be on or off. Capital letters are signified with a little dot above the glyph. This allows each character to consume only a single vertical row, making it essentially the perfect monospace font. At this time, dotsies is primarily for the 26 characters of the English alphabet. As Craig observes on the dotsies website, the dotsies font “is significantly more horizontally condensed than normal fonts, letting about twice as much fall within the area of your field of vision that perceives fine detail at any given time.” The website goes on:
Craziness! I asked Craig how long this took him, and how many iterations he went through to develop dotsies. He claims he’s been nurturing this idea for the better part of a decade, though only just recently put much effort into it. Of the eight or so revisions he’s gone through only two or three are what Craig would call “major revisions”. He claims to be able to read dotsies-formatted text at about 150 words per minute, which is pretty darned respectable. Craig admitted that this is primarily for writing online, though it can be manually reproduced with a slightly higher margin of error. Not content with simply improving the information density of fonts, Craig’s also developed a chorded input method for dotsies. This allows the entire alphabet to be typed using only one hand. The dotsies typing instructions make it pretty clear how this saves time and effort: “each finger never moves off of a dedicated number key (your middle finger never moves off of the ’3′ key, etc.).” Two-handed chorded input is also supported for even faster text entry. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m all for innovation. And I’m all for people looking to advance the state of the art. I’m no greybeard staunchly holding on to my Dvorak keyboard layout as the one true input mechanism despite the advent of post-PC computing. But I wonder whether a new text encoding format like dotsies is really what we need? Does it make sense to even continue to concatenate individual character symbols to compose complex concepts like “computer” or “fire-breathing dragon” or “baby in a stroller”? Should we perhaps skip characters and move straight (back) to hieroglyphics or Stephensonian mediaglyphs? Keep up the crazy innovation, Craig! It’s guys like you who aren’t afraid to push the status quo that make the world better for the rest of us.
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| Meet Jean And His Brand New iPad Posted: 16 Mar 2012 07:56 AM PDT  Meet Jean. He’s one of a few very lucky owners of the brand new iPad. And he’s thrilled. We caught up with him over at Apple’s 5th Ave flagship store in New York city, where he was standing in line waiting. Like a smart lad, he pre-ordered the device and went to pick it up right on launch day. And while thousands of people were shivering in a line that wrapped around the entire block, Jean was asleep in bed. The Frenchman arrived in line around 7:15am (doors open at 8am) and was walking down the street, iPad in hand, by 8:15am. The fact that it only took Jean an hour to get a new iPad on launch day makes me think that pre-order for pick-up is one of the best things that has ever happened to the world. Even better, Jean let us look at his new precious. This is the first time that I personally have seen the new iPad and it’s without a doubt a stunning device. The Retina display is gorgeous, to be sure. The camera is also set to be a stand-out feature. That little 5-megapixel iSight camera could make all the difference in the way people interact with their iPads. In any case, we’re very happy for Jean and every other fanboi who’s making the most of iPad day.
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| FoundersCard Adds Discounts For TripIt, LegalZoom, Moo.com & More (+Invites) Posted: 16 Mar 2012 07:25 AM PDT  FoundersCard, the service that brings executive-style perks to today’s entrepreneurs has just added a number of new benefits for its members, including a free TripIt pro account (typically worth $49), 15% off LegalZoom (to hire a lawyer online), 15% off and $30 of free credit at GroundLink (an on-demand and ride-later cab service), 20% off at business card maker Moo.com, and 5% off Virgin America. The company, which just celebrated its second birthday in January, was created by serial entrepreneur Eric Kuhn, who wanted to see company founders have access to the same types of exclusive rates, elite programs and networking opportunities that have been typically reserved for top execs at public companies. Today, the service provides members with access to exclusive events and parties, as well as year-round discounts at big hotel chains (Four Seasons, Viceroy, etc.), companies like Gilt City ($25 free credit), AT&T (10% off), Indochino Custom Suits (20% off), TaskRabbit (15% off), Seamless (10% off), Zipcar (up to 20% off), instant "Silver access" on Virgin Atlantic (and the ability to fast-track to "Gold" after buying two first class tickets), and more. As it moves into its second year, FoundersCard now has over 5,000 members, over half of which are tech company founders, and it’s now poised to head into Europe. To celebrate the new deals, FoundersCard is offering TechCrunch readers a discount. The service usually costs $495 a year, but you can use this coupon to get in for life at $295 a year: FCTECH12. To get the deal, just use the code when you sign up here.
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| Sprint Officially Kills LightSquared Deal, Returns $65M In Prepayments Posted: 16 Mar 2012 07:12 AM PDT  It only seemed like a matter of time before things got worse for LightSquared, and today the nation's third largest wireless carrier has dealt the ailing company another significant blow. With the upstart network provider unable to land FCC approval thanks to some pesky GPS interference issues, Sprint has announced that they have chosen to officially terminate their agreement with LightSquared. Sprint noted that they would still be open to future collaborations so long as LightSquared could get their wireless affairs in order. That still seems like a tall order at this point — little movement has been made on that front since the FCC revoked their conditional approval of LightSquared's network buildout earlier this year. Still, it looks like LightSquared has some fight left in them yet. As a result of the agreement, Sprint must return the $65 million given to them by LightSquared as part of the 11-year payment plan the two companies agreed upon in mid-2011. Though Sprint certainly could’ve used the cash, LightSquared arguably needs it far more — they recently had to lay off 45% of their workforce to reduce operating costs, and the company is the midst of preparing to mount a legal offensive. Politico reported earlier this week that LightSquared now has two “prominent conservative litigators” — Theodore Olson and Eugene Scalia — on retainer, which hints at a potential legal battle with the FCC in the near future. Though their specific legal strategy is still shrouded in mystery, LightSquared spokesperson Terry Neal notes that the two “have extensive experience assisting clients with significant challenges involving government agencies,” and that the company is pleased to have them on their side. Those of you itching for a good old-fashioned legal throwdown may want to keep your eyes on LightSquared — things look bad for them now, but they sure do love a fight.
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| Here Today, China Tomorrow: PayPal ‘Optimistic’ It Will Get A Domestic Payment License Posted: 16 Mar 2012 07:04 AM PDT  Hot on the heels of the launch of its new Here mobile payment dongle in the U.S., PayPal is joining the ranks of companies looking to get a piece of the action in what will, this year, become the world’s largest smartphone market: China. The company says it is “cautiously optimistic” that it will become the first non-Chinese company to get a license to process domestic electronic payments — both online and via mobile devices. This would be in addition to a business it already has in the country to process international payments. According to a report in Bloomberg, eBay-owned PayPal’s SVP for Asia, Rupert Keeley, today said that the company would look to offering its new Here card-swiping dongle in China if it gets the license. The dongle, which would move PayPal into mobile wallet services where its platform could be used at points of sale, was officially unveiled yesterday and currently works with iPhone and Android handsets. That gives Here a potentially good opening in China: IDC yesterday noted that China is due to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest smartphone market. And while the iPhone is seeing “off the charts” demand in the country, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, the market is currently being dominated by sales of Android devices (including those running on forked versions of the OS). These sell for lower price points than the iPhone — currently under $200 and soon moving to be less than $50 per handset, according to IDC. But it’s not just about point-of-sale opportunities, which is still a new area for PayPal. Most of its business today comes from straight e-commerce on the Internet and via apps. But here, too, the future seems increasingly mobile as far as China is concerned: research from OnDevice out this week found that some 38 percent of consumers in China are already accessing the Internet only via mobile devices. The e-commerce market in China in 2011 was estimated to be worth $121 billion annually, according to Barclays Capital. At the moment, it is dominated by two local players: the Alipay offering from e-commerce and Internet giant Alibaba has a 47 percent share of the market and rival Tencent’s Tenpay has 21 percent, says Analysys International.
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| Video Site DramaFever Raises $4.5M, With Backing From YouTube Co-Founder Posted: 16 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT  DramaFever wants to build a site where North American audiences can watch TV from around the world, and it has won the support of some key figures from YouTube’s past. The company just announced that it has raised $4.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by MK Capital, a firm whose portfolio also includes Movieclips and popular gaming video site Machinima. YouTube’s co-founder Steve Chen and Benjamin Ling (a product manager at Google who was YouTube’s director of partnerships, content, and platforms from 2008 to 2010) also invested, as did Stubhub founder Jeff Fluhr, GraphEffect president Stephano Kim, Wikets CEO Andy Park, and Capital IQ co-founders Randy Winn and Steve Turner. Co-founder Seung Bak says he became convinced there might be a business here when he saw the online fan communities that built up around Asian TV shows, even though they weren’t even available legally in the United States. So he made a few licensing deals (DramaFever programs are subtitled in English and can be streamed in the United States and Canada) and launched a “very simple” version of the site in August 2009. Now DramaFever has the rights to more than 400 titles from 60 media companies in seven countries. Viewers can watch the shows with ads, or pay a $10-per-month subscription fee to get rid of them. DramaFever claims to have 1.5 million monthly visitors who watch the free shows, as well as 15,000 subscribers. Right now, the programming comes from Asian countries. Bak says that for some viewers, it replaces the stack of VHS tapes purchased at an Asian supermarket. (As the child of Chinese parents, I can definitely relate to this.) At the same time, he says the shows aren’t just of interest to Asian Americans — in fact, 75 percent of DramaFever’s visitors are not of Asian descent. DramaFever has operated at or near break-even levels for most of its history. With this funding, Bak says the company can get a little more aggressive. One goal is to expand the programming beyond Asia, to include Latin American telenovelas, Bollywood movies, and more. Another is to get DramaFever on more mobile and connected TV platforms (it’s currently available on Roku, and there’s a version of the site that’s optimized for iPad). Bak positions DramaFever as part of the second wave of online video, which goes beyond the user-generated content of sites like YouTube and is more focused on bringing things like Hollywood movies and prime-time TV to the Web. Of course, that second wave has had its challenges, with sites like Netflix and Hulu struggling with rising licensing fees. Bak admits that DramaFever can’t escape those problems — “Content is definitely getting more expensive” — but it should have an easier time, since it’s opening up entirely new revenue streams for its partners, rather than competing for the same audience.
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| Allez Les Books: France Suggests Amazon Tax To Help Independent Bookstores Posted: 16 Mar 2012 04:17 AM PDT  France has developed something of a reputation in trying to tax larger companies on the Internet to use the funds to help out smaller players. The latest development in that scheme: a proposal to tax large booksellers to help French independent bookstores impacted by the rise of online giants like Amazon. This is a development on a model that has seen proposals to tax online ads from the likes of Google and the revenues made from ISPs, in order to help out media companies that have been negatively impacted by the rise of digital content. This newest tax, as described by the French daily Les Echos (slightly wonky Google translation here), would be applied not only to books sold online by companies like Amazon, but also those sold in larger physical stores, with the proceeds then going into a fund for smaller booksellers. Amazon is not the only online bookseller in France — there are some very big local players, too, like FNAC, selling a range of goods in addition to books, just like Amazon does — but it is very popular there. France is also one of the international markets where Amazon has launched its Kindle e-reader and e-books. The tax was suggested the Minister for Culture, Frederic Mitterand, as part of a longer list of 13 proposals related to the publishing industry. Other aspects of that larger proposal include more monitoring/control over how books are priced when sold by the bigger companies. Given how aggressively companies like Amazon price their books against those sold in physical stores, and given the bigger investigations being made into e-book pricing in Europe and the U.S., this could end up being a crucial area. The article also notes, however, that these suggestions are being made in the lead-up to an election, and are most likely being put out there as talking points rather than anything that would actually get implemented soon. It looks like many of the past attempts to tax Internet companies have yet to come to pass: one suggestion, back in 2010, had been to tax companies like Google that profit from online ads, to funnel the proceeds to “legitimate” content producers like music publishers. Another past suggestion had been to tax ISPs, mobile operators and commercial TV broadcasters in order to fund public broadcasters. A third was to tax ISPs to fund a center for music. Today’s news comes also at a time when President Nicholas Sarkozy has also started to raise the issue of taxing large Internet companies that profit from online advertising, as a way of getting more corporate taxes from them. Although companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook collectively make more than €3 billion annually in the country, they typically only pay about €4 million in taxes, according to one report from the Digital Economy Commission. One precedent for all these taxes that has been in effect, however, is between commercial TV broadcasters and the film industry: a portion of the revenues from the former has been going into a fund for the latter for years now.
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| First Person In The UK To Buy The New iPad In Store Is A Startup Guy Posted: 16 Mar 2012 03:27 AM PDT  A startup entrepreneur has become the first person in the UK to buy the new iPad in store, two of them in fact. Chris Leydon, GoSquared (realtime web site analytics, which competes with Chartbeat), stood in line outside PC World on Tottenham Court Road which opened at midnight. A mere 5 minutes walk away in Regent Street, Apple’s flagship UK store only opened at 8am this morning. I bet the huge queue of Mac fans outside the Apple store were more than a little annoyed… He even did an unboxing video. Update: It appears startups have realised this is a good press opportunity. Andrew Brackin was first out of the Regent street store the new iPad and just happens to be working on a startup called Amped.io. Chris showed some canny entrepreneurial skills in securing his two iPads. “I saw a rumour going around on Twitter that the PC World nearby would be opening at midnight, eight hours ahead of the Apple store. I phoned the PC World Press Office and the store itself and they confirmed.” So Chris turned up at 6pm last night to find himself the only person queuing outside the store. He then stood outside for 6 hours until the store opened. As you can see from the shots here, taken by Chris and a news crew there, he was also in line with fellow GoSquared colleague Brandon Schlenker. Well, there’s nothing like persistence to keep a startup going – and get yourself a new iPad.
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| Twitter: An Increasingly Great Platform For Instagram Posted: 16 Mar 2012 12:01 AM PDT  Twitter has been working hard over the last year to make photo sharing a core part of its product. It took over the photo-hosting role from third parties and gained deep new integration with Apple’s iOS, among other initiatives. But there’s also a big new winner coming up on top of its developer platform — mobile photo-sharing app Instagram. New stats provided to us by social photo aggregator Pixable show how this trend played out at the South By Southwest conference in Austin last weekend. The startup tracked all photos tweeted straight from Twitter or via Instagram, that contained relevant hashtags like #SXSW and #SXSWi. It found that out of the 63,000 photos uploaded, approximately two-thirds came from Twitter itself and one third via Instagram. While the study didn’t look at any other photo services that share through Twitter, the number here is still surprisingly large. Instagram, which provides easy ways to alter photos and then share them to social networks, only had around 12% of the total market as of last November. One would have expected it to have less than a third of the usage last weekend. So what’s next? SXSW is heavily attended by people from around the world who consider themselves influential early adopters. The heavy use they gave Instagram could mean they’ll be helping to evangelize the app later on. The Instagram market numbers are also likely lower than they will be soon. It is only available for iOS now, but the forthcoming Android version will open it up to many more users (people who Twitter itself already has access to). And then there’s the already strong growth on iOS, where it has nearly doubled to 27 million users from 15 million in the last six months alone. So, hopefully Twitter is comfortable having this new third-party app make such big waves in an area that it considers a core part of its product. And with that, I’ll leave you with an infographic. I may hate the things, but this one does a nice and simple job of telling the story without all the crappy clipart that many others have. [Instagram photo at the top via Matt Reyes.]
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| Film Discovery Startup Prescreen Adds Netflix Founding Exec Mitch Lowe To Advisory Board Posted: 15 Mar 2012 09:36 PM PDT  Last month, we covered the relaunch of Prescreen, a curated, on-demand video platform. The company, which was founded by ex-Groupon and Zoosk execs, launched last November with the goal of giving movie lovers an easy way to discover independent films, and, in turn, offering filmmakers and producers an alternative, online channel for marketing and distribution. Earlier this year, Prescreen added former Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment and current Blockbuster exec Tim Wesley along with film financing, sales and distribution company IM Global Founder Stewart Ford. Today, Prescreen is announcing the addition of another industry exec to its advisory board: Founding Netflix exec and former RedBox President, Mitch Lowe. Prescreen Co-founder and early Groupon executive Shawn Bercuson said that Lowe has always been “a data guy” and has already asked the team for all available data so that he can get to work finding ways to optimize customer and filmmaker experience. Lowe himself said his goal has always been to find ways to increase and expand consumer film exploration, and he saw his role at Prescreen as another great opportunity to do that. The startup raised an early $1 million round of seed financing from former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya and others, and has since been focused not only on finding premium content, but building out an advisory board of industry veterans to help guide the startup through the process of building an on-demand video business. As to Prescreen’s model, Bercuson said that the recent poor press and disappointing early domestic performance of blockbuster John Carter is further evidence that Hollywood hasn’t quite gotten it figured out yet. John Carter was one of Disney’s largest movies to date, costing $250 million to produce. These big budget movies just aren’t making what they used to, and studios are struggling to find the target audience for their movies in spite of colossal marketing spend. The major studios are beginning to produce fewer and fewer movies per year to be safe, and as a result, theaters are starved for content. So, it could get interesting if these theater chains started to approach Prescreen, as they look for a better way to find out what’s working — and what people are watching. Margin Call was a good example, which had a limited theatrical release, and had early digital distribution with Amazon and others. Because the movie was well received, it then went from four theaters to 400. Increasingly, theaters are looking to replicate this model, because they don’t want to give tons of screen space to certain films — even if they’re blockbusters — only to find out that fans weren’t that excited about it in the first place. This is where Prescreen could become a valuable tool for theaters, as the startup is planning to do more “exclusive releases” — or day-and-date and pre-theatrical releases. If Prescreen is showing early buzz and engagement with a certain film, and theaters get access to that data via the startup, they can start to make better choices about what films they’re showing and where. Because of Prescreen’s Facebook integration (more here), there’s more of an opportunity for filmmakers and distributors to discover, say, that there’s a conversation happening online around a particular film in Seattle. Theaters could then react quickly and release the film in theaters in the Seattle area. As with so many other industries, data — really social data — has the potential to disrupt the old model of content distribution and marketing. And advisors like Lowe are keen to help Prescreen lead the way.
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| “Social Ideation” Startup AHHHA Turns Users’ Ideas Into Real Products Posted: 15 Mar 2012 07:20 PM PDT  You know those random ideas for new inventions that occasionally pop into your head? The ones you never do anything with? A startup called AHHHA wants to help you turn them into actual products — and about a little more than a year after launching, its announcing the first four “AHHHAs” (i.e., “aha!” moments) that it’s commercializing. The AHHHA idea itself (that it could build a community of users willing to submit their ideas for others to refine and commercialize, in exchange for a share of the profits) strikes me as pretty out-there, so the fact that it’s led to some real products goes a long way towards expelling my initial skepticism. As for the four initial ideas, they cover a pretty broad gamut, and it sounds like that’s intentional. CEO Matt Crowe tells me they “represent the first four of many market verticals that Social Ideation works in: … 1. Consumer Products 2. Tech/Apps 3. Social Good. 4. Potentially Genius.” The ideas include the Sleeper Sleeve, a blanket/pillow that you can wrap around your arm to sleep more easily in a car or a plane (I totally want this); a scientific theory called Sutton’s Theory; a Portable Homeless Shelter; and PinPoint, an iPhone app for finding what you’re looking for at the grocery store. You can buy the Sleeper Sleeve in the AHHHA market, and watch videos profiling all four ideas and their creators on the AHHHA website. AHHHA is announcing these products as part of the launch of version 2.0 of its service. As always, users can submit their ideas, then others can refine them, or just vote them up or down. If the product makes it to market, the profits are divided between the originator, other participants, and AHHHA itself. Crowe says the originator gets 10 percent of the profit (an increase from the 1 percent that he suggested to me a year ago), AHHHA gets between 10 and 25 percent, and the rest is divided up among other participants, based on their contributions. As for the new version, it does a better job of explaining the concept to new visitors, while also making it easier to browse ideas. There’s also a market for buying AHHHA products, and integration with Creative Barcode, a system for documenting the creation and development of ideas. The first four AHHHAs were selected from more than 5,000 submissions, Crowe says.
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| The Retina iPad Apps To Test Tonight And Tomorrow Posted: 15 Mar 2012 06:57 PM PDT  The new iPad nears. Apparently Walmart will be selling them in just a few short hours, well before Apple itself does tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, the first direct-to-consumer shipments should be hitting anytime now. Long story short, a lot of people are going to be getting the new Retina display iPad over the next several hours. Unsurprisingly, the Retina-ready apps are already flowing in. When I asked Apple for a list of third-party Retina-ready apps (all of Apple’s apps are already upgraded) a few days ago for my iPad review, I was told that there would be a list ready to go for the actual launch on Friday. Sure enough, today Apple came back with an early list of apps. And they’ve pushed a new section of the App Store devoted to the new Retina apps. But I’ve also found several others that aren’t on their list yet. Below, find a list of the new apps you’ll want in order to take full advantage of the new screen. Keep in mind that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to upgrade an app to Retina-level graphics, so give developers some patience here as many of them work to roll out updates over the next several weeks. But at least it appears that the App Store won’t be as barren when it comes to Retina apps as some would have had you believe.
In addition to the ones above, Apple expects the following apps to be approved by tonight:
(Disclosure: CrunchFund, where I am a General Partner, is an investor in Redfin, one of the dozens of apps listed above. Our money clearly helped them gain an unfair Retina advantage here.)
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| Dogster Gets A SAY Media Makeover Posted: 15 Mar 2012 06:21 PM PDT  SAY Media launched a redesigned version yesterday of Dogster, its community for dog owners, as well as sister site Catster. Via email, the team gave me more details about their vision and where they go from here. SAY was created after video ad company VideoEgg acquired blogging platform Six Apart. Dogster was its first acquisition, and since then SAY been redesigning or launching sites as part of a strategy called the Clean Campaign, which emphasizes a clear editorial vision, cleaner design, and premium advertising. As for how that applies to Dogster, the site’s founder and now general manager Ted Rheingold says the old version focused mostly on reference articles, with “news” coverage that entailed “lots and lots of really cute pictures and videos.” SAY however, proposed that Dogster and Catster find a more distinct voice: “Not just tell the news but share what it means, not say what’s going on, but why we think it’s important, and not try and make everyone happy, but gives all sides to the story.” (Yes, we’re still talking about pet-related content.). “The strategy is to not win by SEO or bookmarking sites,” Rheingold says. “The strategy is to write the most meaningful, sincere, funny, helpful and whimsical pieces that will be shared, as well as bring new readers and members.” As examples of Dogster’s new approach, Rheingold pointed to “If the Characters in Downton Abbey Were Portrayed by Canine Actors, What Breeds Would They Be?” and “The Cat Litter Face Mask: It’s a Thing and We’re Trying It!” (plus a few others, but I think you get the idea). The various blogs have also been combined into more general categories like Magazine, Video, and Book Of Dog. And there’s a new weekly video program called The Dog Show. Behind the scenes, Dogster has also switched from WordPress to SAY’s Orion platform. It sounds like SAY is in the middle of converting sites to the new Clean Campaign vision. President Troy Young says that Remodelista, Serious Eats, Dogster, Catster, Food52, The Kitchn, TechDirt, xoJane, and HonestlyWTF either have Clean designs or are in the process of switching over. Next up are Cupcakes and Cashmere, ReadWriteWeb, and Gear Patrol.
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| Now At 5.6M Users, Alfresco Takes On Dropbox With New Consumer Cloud, Eyes 2013 IPO Posted: 15 Mar 2012 06:11 PM PDT  You may not have heard about Alfresco. As an open-source enterprise content management platform, the company is not exactly in the sexiest space. Not only that, but although it found some early buzz among open-source advocates, Alfresco has intentionally avoided a lot of press, choosing to fly under the radar. This is a bit surprising for a company that claims to be one of the largest open-source players out there, with 5.6 million users spread across 161,000 companies, and which saw just under $100 million in revenues in 2011. In fact, its growth has management eyeing a potential IPO in 2013 (if not before), and today, the company is pulling the trigger on a potentially big product: The Alfresco Cloud. As an enterprise-grade collaboration platform, Alfresco is turning downstream and getting into the consumer cloud game, with the hopes of nabbing some market share from Dropbox and Box.net. So, uh, where did Alfresco come from? Back in 2005, Documentum Co-founder John Newton and former COO of Business Objects John Powell pooled their collective enterprise software experience, recruited a handful of engineers from Documentum and Oracle, and founded Alfresco. If you’re familiar with consumer-facing content management systems (CMSes) like WordPress and Joomla, then you can get a sense of what enterprise content management (ECM), and by extension Alfresco, is all about. Of course, with an important distinction: Alfresco is an open-source alternative for enterprise content management, coupling the innovative potential of open source with the stability of an enterprise-grade platform. The startup went on to raise $20 million in venture funding from Accel, Mayfield and SAP Ventures by 2008, using the financing to capitalize on the market disruption being caused by open-source CMSes, which were (and are) providing an appealing, web-based alternative to document-based, enterprise applications. As cloud computing took off, open-source technologies began to see increasing adoption in enterprise, Alfresco was able to ride this wave, although it has remained largely under the radar over the past few years — in spite of some impressive growth and adoption. Today, the company claims to be the second largest open-source company in the world, after Red Hat, with 5.6 million users spread across 161,000 companies — 77 percent (about 4.3 million) of which are paying customers. To put this in context, Yammer, the enterprise social network and Silicon Valley darling (which just raised $85 million), recently announced their end-of-year stats, disclosing 4 million users and 800K paying customers. Alfresco has more than 250 channel partners worldwide, with 50 percent of its business coming from international customers (part of the reason Alfresco has remained under the radar in the U.S.), and, according to the co-founders, is seeing just under $100 million in annual revenues. Beyond that the company is reportedly seeing steady subscription growth, with a 90 percent renewal rate, and as such, is expanding its staff by 50 percent this year. It’s this growth that has led the co-founders to begin targeting an IPO at some point in 2013, if not before. It is on the heels of this momentum that the company is making a significant addition to its feature set, today launching the Alfresco Cloud. The company has been an on-premise-only solution to date, but with its new cloud offering, Alfresco doesn’t just want to be an on-premise solution ported to the cloud, it wants to launch a whole new product, streamlined and optimized for customers who want cloud products, with both a consumer-ized UI/UX that works on mobile and tablets and includes native apps for all platforms. This means that users get to use the same drag and drop upload (of any file type) functionality, with the ability to preview files in the browser, start tasks and workflows, as well as take advantage of social features, like “following” the best content creators, “liking” your favorite documents, and viewing content activity streams. Alfresco Cloud also works on any mobile device via the browser or through its free, native iPad and iPhone apps so that you can edit, annotate, and access your documents from anywhere, while taking advantage of a private, secure, enterprise-grade solution. While the cloud offers a private collaboration network for your company — and enables users to set up content sites for small teams — they can still invite company colleagues or external users — even free/public email addresses. If, for example, your team is working on a new presentation with your ad agency, you can simply set up a private site, and invite users to it with an email address. External users only have access to sites they’re invited to, and termination is easy if users get unruly. As to pricing, standard Alfresco content collaboration networks are free and include 10GB of storage and unlimited users from a single company domain. Users can also create multiple collaboration sites with free lifetime usage as long as they stay under the 10GB max. The cloud is currently in private beta, but the team plans to offer premium Team or Enterprise networks that will include more support, storage, higher file size limits, admin features, custom branding, etc. The team networks will likely start at under $10 per user, per month, and scale up from there. In the big picture, it will be really interesting to see if this has any effect on the cloud market. Both Box.net and Dropbox have received a lot of buzz over the last year, as each have quality products, teams, and leadership. Both companies also have ambitions to go beyond consumers and SMBs to attack the enterprise market, but they’re moving upstream in doing so. Alfresco on the other hand, while certainly under the radar and more international, has become one of the leaders in open-source content management. Now, they are, in a sense, consumerizing themselves, working downstream into Box.net/Dropbox territory. So, could it be that the biggest threat to Dropbox will come from upstream? Farhad Manjoo certainly thinks that there are plenty of holes left in the Dropbox model, even if it is a terrific tool. Is it true that you can only trick out a cheaper car so much before you just want to switch over to a BMW? Does Alfresco even qualify? You be the judge, but they certainly think they’re onto something, and that the consumer file-sharing clouds have something to be nervous about. For readers who want to check out Alfresco in the cloud, navigate over here, and we’ve been assured that TC readers will get to jump the front of the line. Because you’re cool like that.
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| TaskRabbit Talks International Growth: London, Vancouver “On The Horizon” [TCTV] Posted: 15 Mar 2012 05:39 PM PDT 
TechCrunch TV caught up with TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque while at SxSW to get an update on how things are going for the company. Now that the Austin launch is out of the way, Busque said, going forward TaskRabbit will work on deepening its reach in Seattle and Portland. International growth — into London and Vancouver in particular — is also “on the horizon,” and could be launched by the end of the year, she said. Watch the video interview above to get the full look at where TaskRabbit is going next, the company’s booming headcount (from 7 employees to 47 in the past year), and how life has been since she handed over the CEO title.
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| Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire Makes His First Peep After The IPO Quiet Period Ends Posted: 15 Mar 2012 05:15 PM PDT  Brightcove may not have had the sexiest IPO in the recent wave of offerings, but the company’s return so far definitely beats Zynga and Groupon’s performances since their debuts. After launching its video platform six years ago, Brightcove went public just a few weeks ago on the NASDAQ by raising $55 million. The company’s shares have climbed 80 percent since the offering to $19.86, giving the company a market capitalization of $523.8 million. We caught up with chief executive Jeremy Allaire, who is now positioning Brightcove as more than a video services provider. While the company has been known for powering video players for premium brands like The New York Times, Conde Nast and Macy’s, Brightcove is trying to find a broader base of customers with a new suite of app development services. Called App Cloud, it’s a set of tools that helps brands and media companies build apps, track engagement and layer in advertising. It means that Brightcove is now competing with a ton of app service providers like Urban Airship, which handles in-app notifications, analytics providers Flurry and Apsalar, or tools provider Appcelerator. It is a cutthroat market, but what Brightcove does have are existing relationships with premium brands and lots of experience in the software-as-a-service model. Allaire said that thousands of companies are in the developer trial for App Cloud, including organizations like the U.S. State Department and cable channel Lifetime. “We saw that this problem of content apps on devices was going to be a major problem so we built a second leg of our business on that,” he said. ”Now we’re seeing customers like broadcasters, government agencies and financial services companies.” There’s a free version for a single user. Then there’s a paid enterprise version that starts at around $15,000. Brightcove will need those extra clients to move outside of its core base of media companies, all of whom are grappling with the new economic realities of the web. The company hasn’t turned an annual profit since its inception in 2004, as it spent on marketing and research and development to grow customers. The company lost $17.3 million on $63.6 million in revenue last year. “In the last couple of years, we’ve been investing for growth and we’re a recurring revenue business,” Allaire said, pointing out that revenue grew 46 percent year-over-year in 2011. (The company’s net loss also narrowed slightly in the same time period.) Virtually all of Brightcove’s revenue comes from the video product. Allaire said the decline of Flash and the rise of HTML5 have paradoxically helped the company. (Fun point to note: Allaire helped create the Macromedia MX (Flash) platform while he was chief technology officer at Macromedia.) The problem is that with many different browser standards, it’s hard to make sure there’s good video playback across different devices. “People thought HTML5 was going to be a panacea. But the reality is that HTML5 creates a whole new level of complexity for publishers that want to work across many platforms,” he said. “It’s been one of the greatest sources of new business for us.” Facebook is also dealing with this issue, and recently released a browser test suite called Ringmark a few weeks ago to help mobile web developers check if their HTML5-based apps work on many different mobile browsers. Now with the extra capital, Brightcove plans to grow the side of its business targeting app makers and is eyeing acquisitions. ”One of the benefits of being a public company is access to capital, and we’ve raised about $60 million so it certainly should be easier to do M&A.” Allaire didn’t want to say what kinds of companies he’s targeting though. He said that filing amid a wave very high-profile IPOs wasn’t too challenging for a company of his size. “Instead of retail investors that were interested in Groupon or Yelp, we targeted mutual funds and firms that were interested in small cap software companies. We were looking for a high-quality investor base. It’s been a good process and overall, we’re happy with it.” Brightcove had raised funding from Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Allen & Company, AOL, The New York Times, Maverick Capital, IAC and Hearst Ventures. Accel and General Catalyst each owned 26.4 percent of the company before the IPO.
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