Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Samsung Exec Says Galaxy S III Could Launch In April After All

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 09:41 AM PDT

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This Galaxy S III release date business is getting to be pretty ridiculous — first, all signs pointed to Samsung's newest flagship launching this April, but then company representatives killed that notion just a few days later. Now, according to a handful of new reports, it looks like an April launch window may actually be in the cards after all.

The news comes courtesy of Samsung Greater China president Kim Young-ha, who explained to a gaggle of reporters at the Samsung Forum event in Beijing that the company is considering pushing up the Galaxy S III's release date "in order to increase sales."

Apparently, the device was originally slated to be released in May, though it seems like Samsung is concerned about keeping their momentum up after the release of the Galaxy Note.

Samsung fans will probably be thrilled regardless, but I've got to wonder how much this decision hinges on the actions of Samsung's competitors. HTC, for example, is preparing to release their much-hyped One series smartphones next month, and if their recent partnerships are any indication, they’ll soon be a bigger thorn in Samsung’s side than ever before. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Samsung planned to push up the GSIII release at least partially because they wanted to steal some of HTC’s launch day thunder.

While the device's launch window is very slowly coming into focus, the actual hardware behind all this buzz is still shrouded in mystery. All of the usual unnamed sources tend to agree on a few things — everyone expects a stunning 1080p screen, a quad-core (possibly Exynos) chipset — but some outlets have claimed that the device will sport a ceramic frame, a 12MP camera, LTE support, inductive charging, and 2GB of RAM. It’s damn near impossible to sift the truth from the chaff at this point, but I guess we can all take solace in the fact that we may not need to wait as long before seeing the real deal.

MeARKET Lets You Peek At Your Friends’ Stock Portfolios

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 09:32 AM PDT

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A new startup called MeARKET wants you to play the stock market with a little help from your friends.

According to CEO Colton Daines, MeARKET is one of those startups that was built in response to a real need its founders’ lives. Nadav Gur (currently the company’s chairman) had moved to the United States to serve as an entrepreneur in residence at incubator SRI International. He wanted to start investing in the US market, but wasn’t sure where to put his money. So he thought: I’ve got some smart friends. Wouldn’t it be great if I could see their investments?

So that’s what MeARKET does. When you sign up, you enter the stocks that you own. Then you’re connected with your Facebook and LinkedIn friends, you can see their portfolios, and as they buy and sell, you get updated. After all, there’s a good chance you have friends who are keyed in to a particular industry or company, so you can tap into their knowledge for your own investments.

The big vision is to help “retail investors” (i.e, regular folks buying stocks with their own money) make better decisions, and to make the process less intimidating for people who might want to join their ranks. Even if you don’t own stocks yourself, you can still create a watchlist of stocks that you want to track.

For your own tracking, you can also enter the numer of shares that you own and the you price you purchased them at, but that doesn’t get shared. And if there are people you don’t want to share with, you can always hide your portfolio from them.

Daines argues that MeARKET taps into the social graph in a very different way than social investing sites like StockTwits and Wikinvest, because it’s not focused on discussions among professional investors and analysts, and instead about sharing knowledge with your friends. The service that was probably closest to MeARKET was Cake Financial, but it was acquired and shut down by E*TRADE in 2010.

The site is now opening up its beta test (you still need to request an invite, but everyone who requests one will be let in) today, but it has been running a private test over the last few months. Daines says that in the initial test, he’s actually seen people make investment decisions based on what they see on MeARKET. Usually, it’s not a simple “Oh, my friend bought Apple stock, so I will too” — instead, a trade will spur a larger discussion thread, and that discussion may convince someone to buy or sell.

For now, MeARKET doesn’t connect to any of your brokerage accounts. Instead, you have to enter your portfolio and trades manually. That’s a good way to avoid any privacy concerns, but makes the service a bit less convenient, and Daines says he’s thinking about adding brokerage integration.

The manual entry also means users could conceivably lie about their investments. However, since accounts are tied to your real identity and shared with your friends, it probably won’t be too common.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced “meerkat.”

Like Vanity Searches? Mention Launches Social Media Monitoring For The Rest Of Us

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 09:24 AM PDT

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Stock photo site Fotolia’s founder, Thibaud Elziere, has just invested a small amount into a new company called mention, a social media monitoring service launching today. Elziere is also a co-founder at mention, which was developed by a European team of five, based in Paris and Brussels.

While clearly a crowded space, mention is somewhat different in that it’s targeting individual users and small businesses, as opposed to the enterprise. The business model is a freemium offering, with a certain number of “mentions” free per month, then low rates ranging from $5-$9/month for additional tracking.

We’ve covered a number of social media monitoring firms in recent weeks, like Brandwatch, for example, which just raised $6 million to expand to the U.S., and we’ve tracked major moves in the space, like Salesforce’s acquisition of Radian6 last year and Visible Technologies grabbing $6 million in March 2011. We’ve also taken a look at new startups like Meltwater’s launch of Buzz Engage, Disrupt Battlefield company AlphaOutlook, and YC-backed Crowdbooster, just to name a few of the more popular stories.

But mention feels different from many of those types of businesses because it seems to be less focused on targeting big brands and more on providing individuals and smaller businesses access to lower-cost tools.

“It’s like Dropbox or Evernote,” says Elziere, “it can be used by individuals.”

Of course, the tools in question are much simpler, too. Mention doesn’t offer analytics-filled dashboards, historical tracking data, details on key influencers, or integrations with in-house systems. Instead, it merely provides a simple app for tracking what’s being said about you, your business, or any other keyword you may want to follow.

However, a small team could use the app together, as it does support the ability for one user to “assign” a task to another within the application.

The app also uses custom “anti-noise” technology that helps users to cut down on the spam. Explains Elziere, “when I look for a keyword like ‘Paris,’ for example…I would get many mentions, but I would also get mentions for ‘Paris Hilton,’ which I don’t care about.”

“Our technology uses an adaptive filter, so when you delete mentions about Paris Hilton, it will learn, and the next mention about Paris Hilton would be automatically deleted,” he adds.

Mention, which was built using newer technologies like backbone.js, node.js, Qt and Webkit, is available now as a web app, a Chrome app, as downloadable software for Windows, Mac and Linux, and will arrive on the iPhone in two weeks, with an iPad app and Android app to follow.

It supports three languages (English, French and German), but can track sources across 42 different languages, but no support for translation, unfortunately. It sources content from the usual places – blogs, websites, forums, Google News, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+  (coming this week).

Elziere says that the team is now working on beefing up the product’s features, and plans to soon add support for multiple Twitter accounts, enhanced capabilities to reply, like and comment on mentions from within the application (instead of having it open pop-up windows as it does now), support for additional sources (they’re looking into Pinterest), and more.

If you’re interested in trying out mention for yourself, you can download it here.

It Wasn’t Broke, But Pinterest Fixed It. Now Users Hate It.

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 08:31 AM PDT

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Just a few days ago, Pinterest rolled out redesigned profile pages. It wasn’t all that revolutionary — most of the profile navigation was moved to a header bar, title font for boards changed, boards themselves were transformed into featured image mosaics instead of thumbnail grids, and an “activity” feature was added.

The media (including myself) reported as expected. Pinterest is the darling of the tech world right now, and while no one said “this is the best redesign ever” within an article, the tone was generally optimistic in almost every explanation of the new profile pages.

But then came the comments.

I won’t say that every instance of user feedback was negative. From what I’ve read, maybe one in every 20 or 30 comments was enthusiastic about the redesign (that’s just an estimate). Mashable has a poll claiming that of 866 respondents, 27 percent loved the new design and 25 percent abhor it, with the rest falling somewhere in “meh” territory. But just looking at comments, people were not happy. I’d say the designer responsible, Justin Edmund, probably hasn’t had the best few days.

Now, it’s worth noting that users often hate any type of redesign. You guys went ape-shit over the TC redesign, and you may even still hate it, but for the most part that aggression subsides as users grow accustomed. Most of the time that frustration comes from the need to relearn a service, but it can extend into ugly design, too. It seems that the general rage of users only subsides when it’s the former, and not the latter, that’s the problem.

According to the commentary, Pinterest is dealing with the latter. The site isn’t any more difficult to use. In fact, Pinterest is really good at making navigation of the site entirely obvious — likely part of the reason the site has grown so successful so quickly. The redesign maintains that, but also fundamentally changes the beauty of Pinterest.

The biggest beef users seem to have is the inclusion of a featured image on boards. Users liked the grid, as it represented more of a theme than a single image, and many users spent a lot of time and energy (potentially more than an hour a day, according to comScore) curating their boards to be juuuuust right. The redesign effectively deletes that work and replaces it with a single (often cut-off) representative image with three small tiles at the bottom.

The frustration makes sense: do you want your most recent pin to represent that entire board? I don’t.

Another sore spot for users is the profile header bar. Many people think it’s a waste of space, as it forces users to scroll a bit before getting to the meat of a user’s boards. Not to mention, the old profile information wasn’t actually missing anything. Other aesthetic issues cropped up, with users noting too many different fonts, a lack of uniformity, and a generally cluttered appearance.

These are the sentiments expressed over the past few days, but in the last 48 hours or so, users are getting upset about something entirely different: Pinterest’s silence.

The company has said absolutely nothing about how users feel about the redesign, despite the fact that the Pinterest blog itself has over 400 comments, the majority of which are negative. Many are crying out for the option to choose between layouts.

It wasn’t broken, Pinterest. Why did you fix it? The service is still relatively young, even with its explosive growth, and it seems that the focus of the redesign went toward the most visually stimulating and attractive part of the site: boards.

Whether traffic is slowing or user interest is actually declining is still unknown, but Pinterest users sure have been loud about their displeasure. Hopefully, they’ll at least get the option to revert back, but Pinterest would actually have to respond before we’d know anything about that.

Wildfire Is Huge: First Stats In Years Reveal Social Marketer’s 300 Employees, 13K Customers

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 07:39 AM PDT

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Through the hard-fought battle to represent the world’s brands, social marketing platform Wildfire has stayed quiet. But today, it revealed to TechCrunch that it has 13,000 paying customers, more than any company in the space, and has grown from 7 to 300 employees since the start of 2010, making it as big as industry giant Buddy Media. It’s now ranked in the top 1% on the Glass Door chart of best places to work, and we estimate its 2011 revenues were between $35 and $45 million.

While 13,000 customers sounds impressive, many of those are low-paying monthly campaign clients. To shift more to its lucrative full social media marketing suite, Wildfire has just hired a new CMO Doug Laird, formerly of QlikTech, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle.

Wildfire’s business is helping brands market through Facebook, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn. Founded in 2008, it focused on conducting Facebook contests and sweepstakes for years, but it’s now raised $14 million and in 2011 launched a multi-function marketing suite with bigger profit potential.

2011 turned out to be a breakout year for Wildfire:

  • It grew revenue by 300 percent in 2011 while reportedly keeping margins high
  • International business grew 500% to become 24% of the company’s revenue
  • 30 of the world’s 50 most valuable brands are now customers
  • Customers include Electronic Arts, Sony, Virgin Atlantic, Target, Amazon, and even Facebook which manages over 50 of its own promotional Pages with Wildfire
  • It signed 300 new subscription clients in the last 6 months of 2011
  • It’s powered 200,000 marketing campaigns to date

CEO Victoria Ransom says Wildfire’s strength is that it works for small to medium-sized businesses as well as big brands. “It’s not an agency model. We build tools that are really intuitive” she tells me. Ransom says Wildfire is also highly scalable, as customers can make changes to their marketing presences without calling an account manager like they have to with other platforms.

Wildfire labels itself “The World's Largest Provider of Social Media Marketing Solutions” but that’s not entirely right. It’s tied with rival Buddy Media in employee count, and likely made slightly less in revenue during 2011. Buddy Media also has 900 subscription customers that pay for huge, year-long contracts.

Wildfire has built a substantial customer base but now needs to figure out how to monetize them better. It doesn’t own a Facebook ads platform — it partners with Adaptly instead, excluding it from scoring big margins on the huge Facebook ad campaigns brands buy. It also has to convince customers that it can do more than just contests, or it could be left to subsist on campaigns that bring in just $250 a pop and $5 a day.

There’s room for several big players in the social marketing space, and by not raising too much money, Wildfire keeps itself an acquisition target. The question now is whether to fight it out in the crowded space amongst Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, and others, or sell to an old world marketing company that missed the boat on social.

Social Marketing Platform PromoJam Raises $1.2M From Golden Seeds, Band Of Angels

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 07:25 AM PDT

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PromoJam, a social marketing platform for the enterprise that allows businesses to create campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Myspace, has raised $1.2 million in Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by NYC-based Golden Seeds, and included participation from Band of Angels.

The L.A.-based company, which was started in 2008 by brother and sister team Matt MacNaughton (CEO) Amanda MacNaughton (Chief Marketing Officer), has grown over the years, now having served its social promotions to over 10 million users. Some of the company’s clients include NBC Universal, Clear Channel Radio, Hearst Publications, HitFix, Rock The Vote, Expedia, Avon, Warner Brothers Music Group, BlackBerry, Paramount Pictures, The North Face, and Rihanna.

According to co-founder Amanda MacNaughton, the platform stands out from the rest because of its cross-platform capability that lets clients run promotions both online and on mobile across the various networks it supports.

“We have been building the business and our exciting client list relatively quietly,” says Amanda. And it’s true – you often hear of PromoJam in the greater context of the promotion being run, not the news about the company itself. For example, when we covered news of drummer Travis Barker and turntablist DJ-AM (Adam Goldstein), who, back in 2009, were offering their then just-released second mixtape, "Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella '09″, for free in exchange for a tweet, that came from PromoJam.

And when we covered Pearl Jam’s use of Twitter to promote their new song “Just Breathe” back in early 2010, that, too, was PromoJam’s work.

More recently, the company teamed with Junk Food Clothing and Saks Fifth Avenue on a social QR code campaign, where QR code images were used as part of a charity fundraising effort for St. Vincent Meals on Wheels Foundation.

Some ongoing promotions now include those for NBA’s Dwight Howard (Facebook and Twitter), Rock the Vote (mobile), E! Entertainment, and L.A.’s FOX 11 News.

With the platform, which is available both as a DIY solution or one that can be customized by PromoJam according to a business’s needs, PromoJam clients can create campaigns including sweepstakes, Facebook “Like” campaigns, coupon giveaways, flash sales, download promotions and more, while running those efforts simultaneously across social networks, blogs, mobile phones, via QR codes, and via SMS text messages. If the content really goes viral, PromoJam’s scalable technology can handle the heavy load, while also helping its businesses collect customers’ information, like email addresses, for example, and track related analytics.

On the back-end, the company provides real-time reporting in a dashboard that shows the number of posts, increased fans and followers, clicks, shares, emails collected and other data, including the geographic locations of the program’s participants to help businesses’ target key influencers and outreach efforts.

Amanda tells us the new investment will help the company expand the marketing software itself – specifically, PromoJam will be adding support for more social network integrations in 2012, and the company plans to grow its sales and marketing departments, too.

HP Combines Printers And PC Divisions Into The Printing and Personal Systems Group

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:43 AM PDT

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HP announced today that the two of the company’s largest divisions will be combined into one, if you will, super division. The Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) and Personal Systems Group (PSG) are joining together to be called The Printing and Personal Systems Group. This is a long time coming.

As the press release mentions, the driving force behind the change is to improve performance and increase profits. Both groups are suffering from the move to the post-PC era. HP almost spun off the PSG in the middle of 2011 and printer and ink sales are dipping down. The two groups are separately vulnerable, but together, they can pool resources and hopefully survive in this brave new world.

The new group will be lead by Todd Bradley, the former executive vice president of PSG. Vyomesh Joshi, the executive vice president of IPG, is retiring from a 31-year stay at HP.

"This combination will bring together two businesses where HP has established global leadership," said Meg Whitman, CEO of HP in a released statement today. "By providing the best in customer-focused innovation and operational efficiency, we believe we will create a winning scenario for customers, partners and shareholders."

The streamlining strategy will no doubt cost some people their jobs. Both former groups within HP were massive entities, each employing engineers to support staff. There are probably a good amount of redundant positions in the new group.

The two teams will likely employ each other’s best practices and designs. Hopefully that doesn’t mean selling massively-overpriced proprietary PC parts in the same fashion as printer ink — because, you know, printer ink is big business.

The Wild, Wild East: Windows Phone Makes Official Chinese Debut Today

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:40 AM PDT

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恭喜！Microsoft has officially launched Windows Phone in China today and while they deserve a pat on the back for making it happen, they’ve got a great wall to overcome if Windows Phone is going to be a real contender in the Chinese smartphone market.

As mentioned before, the first new Windows Phone to hit China is the HTC Eternity (or Triumph, or Titan, as it was previously known). According to Microsoft’s Windows Phone blog, the Eternity is being sold as an unlocked device complete with a “slew of popular Chinese apps” as well as a new simplified Chinese interface.

There's plenty more hardware to come though, with Nokia on deck to launch a trio of Windows Phones on the mainland next week. Though specifics are still sparse at this point, the Nokia Lumia 719 is expected to be among them. The device was first spotted in the Bluetooth SIG’s almost a month ago, and a recently leaked image reveals a device that (to no one’s surprise) looks an awful lot like a 710 with a redesigned button layout. Local manufacturer ZTE will also be throwing its hat into the ring with devices like the budget-conscious Tango, which is expected to launch later this year.

While Microsoft and their hardware partners are working to make sure the launch is a success, it’s the long game Microsoft really has to worry about. According to PC World, Microsoft Greater China CEO Simon Leung confirmed to reporters that the company aims to take Google's place atop the Chinese smartphone heap despite only accounting for only 2.8% of the market right now. To put that in perspective, Android was said to make up over 50% of the smartphone market in China last November, so Microsoft clearly has their work cut out for them.

Low-cost hardware is going to be a key driver for Windows Phone’s growth, and it seems like Leung is set on fighting Google on that front too. While flashier devices like the Eternity sport price tags in excess of ¥4,000 ($632), he says he hopes to bring prices for unlocked Windows Phone devices as low as ¥1,000 yuan ($158).

More Money For Big Data And The Cloud: OpenView Raises New $200M Fund

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:11 AM PDT

Bowl of clouds | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

There has been a bit of a landrush of late on enterprise companies focused on big data and how best to harness that in the cloud, and today sees the launch of a new fund that will fuel the growth of even more companies working in that space. OpenView Venture Partners is today announcing its third fund of $200 million, aimed at operational support for enterprises, including in areas like big-data management in the cloud, which accounts for 75 percent of OpenView’s investments to-date.

Boston-based OpenView says the fund was originally intended to be around $150 million but got oversubscribed — a testament not only to how much investment money is swirling around at the moment, but also the focus specifically on the field of enterprise services that OpenView has been championing up to now.

“Since 2006 and 2007, a lot of VCs have been focused on the shiny toy of consumer services,” says Adam Marcus, the MD of OpenView. “We have stayed true to our mission of being a B2B software [VC]. That has made it easy to raise funds for us.” OpenView will not use the fund to move into early-stage or seed investing, he says. Typically the companies OpenView funds are already bringing in a minimum of $1 million in revenues and are at their expansion stage.

Marcus says that the first investment from the fund is due to be announced next week. It will be in the identity-management space, he says, a company based out of Texas. “It’s about big data and the cloud and taking advantage of these two underlying tsunamis,” he said. “And about helping to manage the data onslaught overwhelming companies today.” It will be a new investment for OpenView.

What else is the fund interested in? Although mobile has been a hot area in consumer startups, it has been slightly more problematic at the B2B end, Marcus says. “We have a hard time finding competitive advantage and product differentiation in mobile,” he admits.

But he does point out that one good area is mobile device management and subsequent security across the network. Another is in the area of enterprise companies that help make the consumer propositions work better. That includes an investment in the API platform Mashery, which picked up $11 million from OpenView last year. “The thesis was that APIs are the new plumbing and Mashery is the leader there,” he says.

Another area that OpenView will be exploring for investment is the area of personalization and targeting software.

Funding will also be used to further OpenView’s approach of helping to build up companies that are already in its portfolio. That has included staffing them up, offering go-to-market support, market research, lead generation and in some cases even product development.

The Hong Kong Firm Behind Those Quirky Animated News Shorts Bets $5M On Red Robot Labs

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:01 AM PDT

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The Yakuza, Chinese Triads and more. There’s just so many more mafias for Benchmark-backed mobile gaming studio Red Robot Labs to infiltrate.

So the gaming company, which has made a huge bet on location, said it’s partnering with Next Media to enter Asian markets. (Yes, Next Media is the Hong Kong-based owner of that Taiwanese animation subsidiary that’s become infamous for its off-key and often totally bizarre news shorts on Tiger Woods and more.)

Next Media is investing $5 million to build titles on the company’s R2 gaming platform while Red Robot is using the deal to bring its flagship title Life is Crime to Asia. Red Robot already has more than $10 million in funding from well-known investors including Benchmark Capital, Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson, former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya and Shasta Ventures.

Chief executive Mike Ouye, who has a social gaming-heavy background with stints at Playdom and Crowdstar, says that Next Media will be the first of many developers to build on the company’s platform. Like many gaming companies, Red Robot is trying build a platform that will make it less vulnerable to the hits-based nature of the gaming industry.

Started at the beginning of 2011, Red Robot has so far tried to rethink mafia-themed role-playing games for mobile phones. Unlike other comparable mafia-themed RPGs like Storm8′s iMobsters, Funzio’s Crime City or Addmired’s iMob, Red Robot put a heavy emphasis on including location. Players can battle each other over local turf and rise up to become a regional mob boss. With gaming veteran and former EA vice president Pete Hawley as chief product officer, the game’s art also had a lot of polish compared to other titles at the time.

After launching at Penny Arcade Expo last fall, it came out with a strong start on Android and has held in the top 25 grossing on Google’s platform. On iOS, which is far more lucrative and competitive at the same time, it’s a different story. The game is in the 200s or so on the grossing lists.

A debut in Asia could change things, however. Revenue per user in markets like Japan and Korea often outstrip what a developer might see in Western countries. Life is Crime will come to Hong Kong’s market today, and then to Taiwan and Japan shortly.

And for absurdity’s sake, here are a few of Next Media’s greatest hits…. ?

Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Back Marketplace For Local Fashion Boutiques, Shoptiques

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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As an avid shopper, I tend to buy clothes, jewelry, and accessories from both big-name stores as well as smaller boutiques. But as a whole, some of my most coveted items in my closet are from local boutiques who carry designers and fashions that you would never be able to find at stores like Bloomingdale’s. But while I can peruse the boutiques of Chicago, I can’t access the smaller boutiques in New York, LA, San Francisco and other cities without visiting those areas. Until now. Enter Y Combinator startup Shoptiques, which aggregates inventory from local fashion boutiques and puts it online. The company is launching today, and announcing an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, SV Angel, Y Combinator and other angels.

At a high level, Shoptiques vets and works with local boutiques in cities across the U.S. to integrate their inventory onto the site, and then sell these items to visitors. Here’s how it works: Shoptiques will partner with a boutique and have one of its photographers (the startup works with a network of freelance photographers) to take high quality photos of the items and then upload them to Shoptiques, along with descriptions and prices.

Users can now browse collections from boutiques across the country that they would never otherwise have seen or known about. In order to qualify to be listed on the site, the boutique has to offer women’s clothes, jewelry, handbags or more that cannot be found at Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus or another larger store. As founder Olga Vidisheva tell us, the main qualification is to carry items that no one else has. She adds that around 50 percent of boutiques that apply to be on Shoptiques are rejected for this reason.

The site launches with inventory from over 25 boutiques, from Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Chicago. In terms of how Shoptiques finds these local boutiques, Vidisheva says the site has partnered with magazines like Elle and others to find interesting stores and has also received many leads via word of mouth recommendations. Currently, boutiques are organized by location, and neighborhood on the site, and the price point on items ranges from $50 to $300. You can also shop by category (bags, shoes, tops etc.).

If a customer chooses to purchase an item on the site, Shoptiques will immediately send the boutique an email with the order, and a printable FedEx label with the customer’s address. The startup handles all of the payment processing, and takes an undisclosed fee from each transaction.

The startup has been experimenting with curation as well. Shoptiques is actually putting together looks, based on current fashion trends, from items sold at various stores across the country to help customers pair clothing and accessories. Additionally, the startup has written features on boutique owners, favorite items and more.

As Vidisheva explains, many of these local boutiques don’t have an online presence and find the whole process challenging. Shoptiques takes the hassle out of creating an independent store online, setting up inventory and payments infrastructure and also helps market these stores as well. It’s similar to what Etsy has done for artisans and craftspeople.

Eventually, Shoptiques wants to expand internationally, and add many more boutiques so that it becomes a full-fledged marketplace. The concept is certainly appealing, especially to someone like myself, who likes to find and wear unique items that perhaps aren’t found at my local Saks Fifth Avenue.

TokBox SDK Brings Video Chat To iOS Apps

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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Just over a year ago, video chat startup TokBox shuttered its consumer application and began focusing exclusively on its platform strategy — using its technology to enable video chat on other websites. Today, it’s expanding that effort into mobile.

Specifically, TokBox is announcing a software development kit allowing iOS developers to add face-to-face video chat to their apps. There are other video chat apps, of course, such as Skype and Apple’s FaceTime. But the point here is to incorporate these features into broad swath of apps. CEO Ian Small says that rather than building their own video chat technology, developers can now add TokBox’s in the space of “a weekend hackathon.”

The company has been testing the SDK with more than 20 developers. small estimates that 70 percent of them are adding TokBox features to existing apps, while 30 percent of them are launching new apps where video chat is integral. There has been interest from people making everything from dating apps to games to medical services, Small says. TokBox has also released its own iOS app, TokShow, where brands and celebrities can host video chats.

For now, TokBox’s video chat features are only available on WiFi, but Small says the company already has tests running on 3G and 4G networks, and that it should be adding those capabilities in the next few months. The SDK is part of the company’s existing pricing model — the basic plan is free, then you pay for features like archiving, large-scale calls, and a service agreement with TokBox.

Stepping back from mobile, Small says that 40,000 websites and partners have used TokBox’s platform, and that he’s particularly excited to be signing up partners like American Idol and Universal Music.

“The demand for integrating face-to-face video into an online digital experience isn’t just something that cool people in the Bay or in New York City are interested in,” he says. “It’s starting to penetrate everyday applications.”

Blurtt Wants You To Express Yourself With Mobile Memes

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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A new iPhone app called Blurtt makes it easy to combine photos and text — it may not sound like a big deal, but co-founder Jeanette Cajide is pitching it as a new way to express yourself.

After all, she says there are some things that just can’t be communicated in text. (Think of a time when you sent a text message or tweeted, then someone misunderstood and you had to explain, “I was being sarcastic.”) If words aren’t going to do the trick, you can look for an image on Blurtt, which searches Flickr and Bing, or upload a picture of your own. Then you overlay a text message (of up to 100 characters) in the font and location of your choosing. If you want to share it with a friend who isn’t on Blurtt, you can also send them a link via text or email.

“Our motto is to say more with less,” Cajide says. “If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a Blurtt is worth a tiny bit more than 1,000.”

One obvious use is to create memes or wannabe memes. In fact, the app allows users to choose modify existing Blurtts to their liking, so if you’ve hit on a funny word/image combination, everyone else can immediately offer their own variant, and voila — a meme.

Yes, there are other meme generating tools out there, but Blurtt is designed specifically for mobile, making it easy to both search existing images or use your own. Its aesthetic is a little classier than most meme sites, perhaps creating room for emotions other than witty one upmanship.

There’s also TinyReview, another app for adding words to pictures. For the most part, the people I know use the app to make jokes, but as the name implies, TinyReview is actually pitching itself as an easy way to share reviews, so Cajide says she doesn’t see it as a competitor, unless it pivots.

As for making money, brands might use the app to engage with consumers, for example by holding Blurtt-creating contests.

I actually met Cajide at South by Southwest, where she demonstrated Blurtt for me. Despite the overloaded Austin cell networks, it was mostly as fast and easy-to-use as she promised. The real challenge, of course, was being clever — I actually stared at a potential Blurtt for a minute before Cajide took pity and helped me come up with the right text.

“It’s hard to force a Blurtt,” she reassured me.

The Samsung Galaxy S III Leaks Again, Is This Sammy’s iPhone 5 Fighter?

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 05:51 AM PDT

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2011 was huge for Samsung. 2012 needs to be even bigger. Last year, Samsung showed the mobile world that they could produce world-class handsets and a proper ecosystem within the confines of Android. But now, in 2012, Samsung needs to demonstrate that they have staying power. And if several recent Samsung Galaxy S III leaks are believed, the Korean company should not have any problem standing tall against Apple and the rest. This phone looks hot.

The first leak (below) appeared over the weekend. A tall phone, rounded corners, a combination of hardware and capacitive buttons and impossibly thin. The image (rendering?) seemed to come from Weber Shandwick, a PR firm known to work with Samsung. The images show a phone running a TouchWiz-ified version of Ice Cream Sandwich. The images do not confirm any of the rumored hardware specs like a 1080p display or quad-core CPU, but it’s easy to look at the pics and see the casing being made out of ceramic like the rumors state.

Today’s image is more of the same. In fact it is the same besides a slightly different ICS skin. It looks like a press image. The design line up with the previous leak, somewhat confirming that this is, in fact, the Samsung Galaxy S III.

All will be confirmed in the coming months. Samsung is rumored to launch the phone in April or May while outing more versions of the phone throughout the remainder of the year including a Note and high-resolution camera version. The Galaxy S II was a blockbuster hit last year. Can lightning strike twice? I believe so.

The NYSE Partners With Startup America; Will Loan $1.5M To Small Businesses

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 05:20 AM PDT

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The New York Stock Exchange is teaming up with The Startup America Partnership, the national campaign that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship; to launch an initiative to fund, mentor and promote startups across America. Startups can apply to receive mentorship and advice from NYSE’s listed companies through the program, and the NYSE will also be partnering with microfinance organization Accion, to provide $1.5 million in working capital for small businesses and startups to grow.

The NYSE ‘Big StartUp’ initiative will provide chosen startups with "live" and "virtual" events, learning and mentoring experiences, conferences and roundtables, webcasts, and relationship-building opportunities.

The partnership with Accion will loan (not fund) money to startups who need working capital to grow. As Scott Cutler, Executive Vice President and Co-Head of U.S. Listings and Cash Execution at the NYSE explains, ” Access to capital is important to all companies and as an exchange, we tend to be involved at the point when companies are accessing public capital, but we also want to make sure that we are creating foundations for small companies to grow and become public companies one day.”

Cutler adds that the NYSE will be leveraging public company relationships and calling on the corporate community to mentor these small businesses and startups. One recently public company, Yelp, which listed on the NYSE a few weeks ago, will be working with the exchange to help small local businesses chosen in the program with mentorship, marketing advice and more.

Startup America is chaired by Steve Case, co-founder of AOL (and disclosure: TechCrunch parent).

Chrome Briefly Becomes World’s Most Popular Browser, Thanks To Emerging Market Usage

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 04:54 AM PDT

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Google has made some significant strides getting Chrome, in relatively short time, to become one of the most popular web browsers around. Now, some numbers from StatCounter indicate that it has, for the first time — and for one day only! — become the world’s most popular PC browser, overtaking Internet Explorer.

On March 18, Chrome just edged past Internet Explorer before Microsoft’s browser quickly regained its lead. What’s interesting is that Chrome’s ascendance was due to its popularity in India, Russia and Brazil, where it topped the polls, according to the analysts.

That is in contrast to markets like the U.S., China and Germany, where StatCounter says Google’s browser is regularly in second or third place, with Firefox and IE taking the top slot.

Two other notable trends emerge out of StatCounter’s data, which is based on 15 billion page views per month (4 billion in the U.S.), covering 3 million websites:

– Chrome’s rise is almost totally at the expense of Internet Explorer: as you can see in the graph below, usage of these two is almost the mirror opposite, while the other big players — Firefox, Safari and Opera — have relatively consistent usage.

– Chrome seems to be getting used more on weekends. That likely points to the fact that in office environments, IE continues to rule the roost, while when consumers are at home, they go for Google.

This points to Chrome possibly still finding it hard to make inroads into the enterprise, although if you subscribe to the theory of “consumerization” in IT, it’s just a matter of time before that tips to Google as a browser as well.

On the other hand, it also underscores how significant emerging markets have become in terms of swaying larger global use of internet products: something that will also increasingly get reflected in how they are developed.

Update: As these stats are PC-only, I wanted to add in a bit about what StatCounter says is the latest going on in mobile. Last month, the analyst group noted that Android had finally overtaken Opera as the world’s biggest mobile browser, but in fact numbers covering the last month up to today show them to be very close, with Opera just about edging out Android. In general, mobile looks like a more competitive state of play — or more fragemented, depending on how you see things.

Semantic Recipe Search Engine Yummly Raises $6M From Unilever And Others

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 04:30 AM PDT

Yummly

Yummly, a semantic recipe search engine, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Physic Ventures and Unilever Corporate Ventures, the venture capital arm of food giant Unilever, with contributions from returning investors Harrison Metal Capital and the Harvard Commons Press, among others.

Yummly aggregates hundreds of thousands of recipes from around the web and allows you to filter results by type of food, course, and ingredient and break down recipes by diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, and sources.

You can also edit and save any recipe with ingredient substitutions and adjustments based on your preferences; Yummly will recalculate the recipe to reflect the new ingredient amounts. So if you wanted to cut a recipe down to one portion, Yummly will recalculate the ingredients you need for a smaller version of a dish.

And Yummly calculates the nutritional value for each recipe, showing you the breakdown of calories, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Users can also import and add their favorite recipes from other websites and save them in their Yummly recipe box.

The company says it is now seeing 4 million unique visitors a month, and also launched a Facebook app as well. Yummly has around 1.4 million Facebook subscribers and has seen a 75 percent uptick in Facebook referral traffic since launching the Timeline app last year. The new funding will be used for hiring and product development.

Dell Relaunches Software Community AppDeploy As Social Q&A Platform For IT Professionals, ITNinja

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 04:00 AM PDT

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Dell has been operating IT community AppDeploy since it acquired the platform’s owner Kace Networks in 2010. The site itself has been operating for 13 years, and receives around 450,000 monthly visitors per month says Dell, but growth has stalled. And Dell hadn’t invested much into the site. Today, the company is completely revamping AppDeploy and relaunching the community as ITNinja, a more social, Q&A-focused product-agnostic resource for front line IT administrators.

AppDeploy.com, which was the brainchild of Bob Kelly, was previously a forum-focused community knowledge base that was updated by IT professionals around how to deploy and automate software applications. While the community will continue to revolve around the sharing of information and answers around critical IT decisions and support, the new site ITNinja is focuses more on engagement, reputation and social interactions.

Despite the fact that visitors to AppDeploy aren’t growing, Dell says that an online survey of IT professionals sponsored by KACE in February 2012 revealed 80 percent of IT professionals engage in online communities with 70 percent of them visiting several times a week. And 95 percent of front-line professionals say they save time and do their job more efficiently by using these same online communities.

ITNinja focuses on software topics such as application deployment techniques, configuration settings, and management solutions. Users will be able to leverage the community to find answers and best practices on a range of these complex issues.

The new platform features a Q&A system (as opposed to a forum-like interface), rich content pages, personalized activity feeds, and a reputation management system to encourage use. Dell has also added a tagging system to support better navigation between topics.

In particular, the activity feed highlights users' contributions and provides a customized view of all software, topics, contributors and blogs that they follow to keep them up-to-date on the content they care about most. The reputation management system uses gamification elements to reward users with points and prizes for their contributions (past and present). Points determine one's "belt" level which is attached to their identity on the site.

Dell KACE customers will also be able to access the same information directly through the interface of their KACE Systems Management Appliance Console offering users a quick reference for common system administration tasks.

Cisco, Benchmark And Venrock Back Cloud Storage Company CTERA Networks

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 04:00 AM PDT

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CTERA Networks, a company that provides managed cloud-based storage and data protection for SMBs, has raised an undisclosed round of funding led by Venrock, with a strategic investment from Cisco Systems and participation of existing investor Benchmark Capital. Venrock partner Ray Rothrock will join CTERA's board of directors.

CTERA Networks helps bridge the gap between cloud and local storage for small to medium-sized businesses as well as large companies. The company provides solutions to cloud service providers to better serve customers, allowing them to provide cloud-based data protection and other services. Service providers and enterprises use CTERA to deliver services such as backup, cloud on-ramping, file sharing, folder synchronization, and mobile access based on the storage infrastructure of their choice.

CTERA says that it has seen seven consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth and now reaches more than 100,000 business end-users, primarily in North America and Europe. The new round of funding will be used to further accelerate the expansion of the CTERA team and towards meeting product demand.

As Developers Seek More Interactivity, PubNub Raises $4.5M For Its In-App Messaging Solution

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 03:46 AM PDT

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With the world of apps no longer in its early days, we are starting to see the emergence of a lot more services that give developers more sophisticated ways of interacting with users, and monetizing what they create. One of the more popular has been the rise of real-time messaging within apps; and today, one player in that space, PubNub, has picked up $4.5 million in funding to expand that line of business even further.

The Series A round was led by mobile-specialist VC Relay Ventures, itself just launched today as the rebranded, $150-million fund formerly known as ATP Capital (the firm that runs JLA Ventures, Clairmont Capital, and BlackBerry Partners Fund. There was also participation from TiE Angels.

PubNub, which was founded in August 2010, has seen more recently a surge in activity on its platform, which provides push-based, real-time messaging both for mobile apps as well as online — either from a publisher to many subscribers, or from subscribers to each other (acting as the ‘publishers’ in the S and P diagram above).

It currently has some 1,000 customers who use the service in apps for multiplayer games, social media services, e-commerce websites (where “live chat” has become almost a given) and in more enterprise environments around business collaboration.

And one area where it has seen particularly high usage is in events-based messaging. It has provided the platform for messaging around some of the biggies, such as the Super Bowl, the Grammys and the Oscars, and it recently passed a peak of 100,000 messages per second on its platform.

While PubNub is not a consumer-facing service in itself, you can see how it might potentially go up against those that are consumer-facing and offer a similar kind of real-time, collaborative messaging option. The one that comes to mind first is Twitter — which has long been touting how well it gets used around certain events, and has recently seen significantly more native integration on the iOS platform. And that’s not to mention other B2B companies doing the same thing as PubNub.

Given that competitive environment, it makes sense for a company like PubNub to potentially use its platform for more than just the messaging it currently provides. Indeed, you can see how the platform could be used for other kinds of interactive services, or even using the messaging as part of a wider interactive service involving, say, marketing. Interactivity is a key area for publishers looking for more ways of keeping users in their apps, and potentially making more revenue out of having them there.

One attractive thing about PubNub is that, with its small team of just 10 employees, it seems to have covered all bases early on in terms of developer environments. The company says it works with iOS, Android, JavaScript, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Node.JS, Python, and Ruby among others, and its cloud-based service works “from any point on earth.”
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