Friday, April 13, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Startup Team ManCard Spreads The Testosterone

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 09:38 AM PDT

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The first thing that popped into my mind as I interviewed Suzy Bureau about her Columbus Ohio Startup project called The ManCard was “This is all wrong. We should be shooting skeets, or tearing out drywall or fly fishing — anything but sitting in a coffee shop drinking lattes.” Despite the emasculating surroundings our conversation continued as the ebullient Ms. Bureau described the app she and her compadres built and submitted in a single weekend.

A product of StartupWeekend here in the viable Sili-Corn Valley of Columbus Ohio, the team of 5 developers, designers and marketers conceived, built and submitted the app in a span of 54 hours. They just issued an update to this 4-week-old app today.

How does this app work? You submit a picture of yourself or of your friends doing something "manly" and the greater community of people with the app vote on the masculinity of that photo. Simple enough.

I have to say, there are some pretty hilarious, over-the-top (and borderline inappropriate/NSFW) submissions.  But this is known territory for apps containing user generated content. They do have a system for flagging questionable content which is wise. I still probably wouldn’t download the app to your “corporate issued” iPhone. However, the picture of the guy shaving his beard with a machete was “safe” enough and was tops in my book.

I've seen a few other "ManCard-esque" websites and ecosystems out there, but none with a mobile app nor with a total solution quite this…elegant (is that the right word)? Clearly, a lot of UX work went into this effort.

In terms of being a startup, is this concept scalable or actually viable as a real business model? I'm not sure but it has been my experience that men have an enormous capacity and lengthy attention span for acts of immaturity.

This talent we men posses makes me wonder if there is real "influence currency" here? Are there potential suitors in bigger brands like Dos Equis, Old Spice or Redbull who could turn these acts of jackassery into brand conversions? We'll see because the team is busy drumming up sponsorships. Their first contest — a bracket-style virility competition called “March Man-ness” — was sponsored by the appropriately aligned energy drink Cajones Energy Shots.

Maybe an even better model would be a lottery? Or better yet, what if they took their "March Man-ness" bracket contest to another level and let people pay a buck or two to compete for a pool of cash. Certainly taking home a little Doh-Re-Mi could accentuate any red-blooded man's bravado accumulated by capturing daring acts of idiocy on film?

Speaking of film, perhaps a video sharing section could make the competition even more intense (and more liable from a legal standpoint).

The iOS app is available at iTunes.

Readers: What’s Your Cloud Strategy?

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 09:30 AM PDT

Clouds

I get press releases every week about some new (or old!) company and their so-called cloud solution. Some folks are clearly abusing the popularity of the “cloud” buzzword, and others are actually doing interesting things with distributed computing, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service, orchestration, and related technologies. Amazon is the prime mover on IaaS, but OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus are all making strong plays in that space. VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift are pushing open source PaaS, while services like Heroku, Engine Yard and dotCloud (among others) are pushing to be your hosted PaaS solution.

It’s not surprising that so many people are looking to differentiate their cloud solutions, and on the balance I think competition is a good thing that eventually benefits end-users. But as things stand today, it strikes me as exceedingly hard to formulate a comprehensive “cloud strategy” given the plethora of options.

If you care strongly about open source, that helps limit your options. VMware’s Cloud Foundry has been open source for quite some time, and recently celebrated its first birthday. Red Hat’s OpenShift is not yet open source, but work is underway to remedy that. Red Hat, obviously, has a long history of successfully open sourcing their work. Red Hat also recently announced that they would be a platinum member of the newly reorganized OpenStack governing board. VMware, on the other hand, is not a company with which I readily associate open source culture or success; and I don’t see a very robust ecosystem coalescing around Cloud Foundry. Hopefully that situation improves.

And there’s also Canonical, the folks behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Canonical has made a real effort to advocate for OpenStack, but their actual contributions to OpenStack don’t seem to tell the same story. Rather than focus on directly contributing to IaaS or PaaS offerings, Canonical is busy making helper products like Metal-as-a-Service and their newly announced "Any Web Service over Me" (with the righteous acronym AWESOME) which aims to provide an API abstraction layer to facilitate running workloads on Amazon’s cloud and on an OpenStack cloud.

The end result of all of this a lot of ambiguity for customers and companies looking to deploy cloud solutions. If you want a private cloud, it doesn’t seem to me that you can make a decision without first reaching a decision as to whether or not you will eventually need to use public cloud resources. If so, your choice of private cloud technology demonstrably hangs on the long-term viability of your intended public cloud target. If you think Amazon is where it’s at for public cloud, then it seems that Eucalyptus is what you build your private cloud on (unless you want to fiddle with even more technology and implement Canonical’s AWESOME). If you think Rackspace is where it’s at, then OpenStack is a more appealing choice for you. But what if you’re wrong about your choice of public cloud provider?

As such, I’m curious to learn what you — the reader — are currently doing. Have you made a technology decision? Did you go all in, or are you leaving room to shift to a different provider if need be? Did you go IaaS or PaaS? Are you a new company, or are you an established organization moving existing workloads to new platforms? Finally, I’m particularly interested to hear from folks in regulated industries — banking, health care, insurance, etc — where your decision as to where to run your applications may be predicated on legal issues.

Balsillie The Radical? New Report Shines Light On The RIM That Could Have Been

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 09:22 AM PDT

Balsillie

Once perched atop the highest peaks of the smartphone market, Waterloo-based RIM recently found themselves at a crossroads: should they push ahead on the hardware front, or give it up in favor of their more lucrative network service business?

With the more "dictatorial" Heins at the helm, RIM has pointedly chosen the latter path, but a recent report from Reuters paints a picture of what could have been.

According to the usual unnamed sources close to the situation, former RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie spent his last months at the company championing a dramatic change in strategy. Rather than keep RIM’s proprietary network a closed garden, Balsillie wanted to break from tradition and open it up to non-BlackBerry devices.

Apparently, Balsillie had brought up the notion with several domestic and international wireless carriers, each of them displaying different degrees of receptiveness. With that sort of access in place, those carriers could offer a lower tier of data plans that Reuters’s Alastair Sharp says would be "limited to social media and instant messaging" in a bid to wean customers off of their frill-free feature phones.

Frankly, it would’ve been a pretty tough sell. As beneficial as the move could have been to carriers, let’s not forget that RIM’s global network experienced a major multi-day outage late last year.

Balsillie was also said to be pushing the expansion of RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger devices onto other platforms as part of those carrier deals, which may not come as much of a surprise to long-time readers. We've seen our share of leaked images depicting BBM running on Android (which just won’t stop coming), though it’s still unknown whether or not the apps in question will ever officially see the light of day.

The company's focus on supporting other mobile platforms has been officially on the books since last year, when they announced their Mobile Fusion device management platform. Released just a few weeks ago, Mobile Fusion allows for companies and IT departments to setup and manage Android devices and iPhones as well as the usual BlackBerrys. The “if you can’t beat them, make money off them” mentality lives on, though maybe not on the scale that Balsillie had hoped for.

Alas, Balsillie is officially gone, and so are his seemingly wild-eyed plans. Thankfully for RIM, recently-installed CEO Heins seems to have a bit of that “anything goes” spirit — he noted during RIM's most recent earnings call that as part of his strategic review process, he would consider any viable option to save the company. That includes, among other things, the dramatic possibilities of licensing their mobile OS and selling the company. It's not exactly Plan A, but he’s open to all options and that’s probably the best mindset to have at this point.

That said, RIM's plan going forward is to go full-bore with a BlackBerry 10 launch later this year. Developers will get their first peek at the OS at the BlackBerry Jam conference in May, but so far RIM has managed to keep all of us in the dark about their big new gamble. I’ve said time and again that RIM’s competition will only get worse the longer it takes them to push BB10 and its corresponding hardware out the door, but they can’t afford to deliver another incomplete product again.

Coull Buys Agency To Scale Up Its Video Ad Tech In The US

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 09:16 AM PDT

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Online video advertising is white hot at the moment but a small company based out of the UK has managed to come up with an innovative model. Coull’s technology lets publishers and advertisers tag individual products within videos, making it possible to click through and buy products right from the video. Coull has been doing this for a while, though Wirewax is a new kid on the block doing something similar. The innovative part is that Coull only charges for user engagement with the video, which is unusual in a sector known for charging for anything done with the video. That means budgets get spent on results and not just impressions. Advertisers such as Nike, Renault, Unilever and Agent Provocateur are already users of Coull in Europe.

Last year Coull, the video advertising network based out of the UK, closed a large $2M angel round led by Peter Hargreaves (co-founder of Hargreaves Lansdown) who took at 10% stake. It’s since raised an additional $900,000 through new and existing investors and is today acquiring California-based RevUpNet, an established and profitable online marketing agency, for $2 million. RevUpNet is an online-based marketing agency that has strong relationships with publishers, and will act as a way for Coull to enter the U.S. market.

Although Coull has been loss making, the acquisition of RevUpNet means it will now be become profitable in Q3 of 2012.

The sole video partner of Google Affiliate Network, Coull has 383 advertisers including Dell, Sears, Puma and American Express and 52,000 publishers that includes the Telegraph, Imagine and Future Publishing.

Irfon Watkins, CEO of Coull says they expect 50% of their business to come from U.S. within the next 12 months.

Video is the fastest growing sector within online advertising, so Coull is well positioned for this growth.

Google Will Be The Official Social Platform & Livestream Provider For The 2012 Republican Convention

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 08:53 AM PDT

republican convention logo

The presidential election season in the U.S. is now in full swing and both the Democratic and Republican conventions are just a few months away. Google just announced that it will be the “official social platform and livestream provider” for the Republican convention in Tampa in August. Google promises “a convention without walls” and will use both YouTube and its Google+ social network, to provide coverage from the event.

Google says that it will livestream key events and use Google+ Hangouts to connect its users “with Republican leaders off the podium.” What’s not clear from this announcement, though, is how exactly Google plans to use its social network for this event besides using its Google+ Hangout video chat tool.

In 2008, Google also offered live streams from the Republican convention, but back then, the company partnered with Ustream.tv to offer this service. This year, the company has set up a number of tools for politicians and their campaigns to use, as well as special sites for political junkies to keep track of the nomination and election process.

Google, it seems, has also been actively courting politicians to use its Hangouts feature to engage with voters. Earlier this year, for example, President Barack Obama hosted a Google+ hangout after his State of the Union Address. Presumed Republican nominee Mitt Romney also used Google’s video chat tool during his campaign for the Republican nomination in March.

Cloud Photos Automatically Uploads Photos To Dropbox, Saves Storage Space On Your iPhone

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 08:22 AM PDT

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Well, here’s an app that’s actually practical. Cloud Photos (for iOS) is a newly launched mobile camera replacement app which automatically uploads photos to Dropbox, as soon as you snap the picture. The idea here is that you can use the app to save space on your iPhone’s disk drive, as it allows you to save photos directly to the cloud instead of the iPhone’s Camera Roll.

Within Cloud Photos, you can browse the photos stored in your Dropbox folders, which displays them as thumbnails that take up 1/40th of the space of the original, the app’s developers claim.

If you would rather just use the app as a Dropbox uploader, that’s possible too – from the app’s camera interface, you can choose to save to the Camera Roll instead, and then switch on the new “Auto Upload” feature to sync all your Camera Roll pics to Dropbox’s cloud.

That’s also a handy option since the shortcut to the camera from the iPhone’s lockscreen isn’t configurable, meaning you’ll probably still be taking a lot of pictures with the default camera app, which then end up in the Camera Roll.

The app’s co-creator Andrew Norris, who bootstrapped Cloud Photos with his brother Jonathan, says that the eventual plan is to support other services beyond Dropbox.

“The concept of the app is to be the centralized app to view and control your photos wherever they live,” Norris explains. “We started with support for Dropbox because of their user base and a very flexible API,” he says.

As someone who personally switched back from Android to the iPhone 4S myself, one of my frustrations with the iPhone’s camera/camera roll interface is the lack of built-in sharing features. Tweeting a photo is not enough, and generally, not even practical. I miss how Android phones let you share photos to just about every service imaginable without the need for a third-party app.

Cloud Photos goes a long way to address that issue. Not only does the app house all your Dropbox photos, it also pulls in photos from your Camera Roll, Photostream, and any local folders you’ve created. From any of these folders, the app’s sharing options let you share photos to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram or via email.

Plus, you can copy or move photos to other folders, or event print out the photo, if you choose.

However, the one thing you can’t do – and this is by design – is apply filters or effects to your photos. “We think the Camera filter market is pretty saturated currently,” explains Norris, “so we decided to avoid it at launch and support ‘Open In…’ which opens your photos in those other apps.” In other words, you can open photos in Cloud Photos directly in Instagram without having to leave the app.

After giving Cloud Photos access to your Camera Roll and Dropbox account upon first launch, it creates a “Photos” folder in Dropbox to save your uploads, but you can choose to save to another folder by tapping a button on the app’s camera view. The camera itself includes several controls including one to control the flash, another to switch between the front-facing and rear cameras, and even advanced controls for white balance, focus, exposure and the ability to switch on gridlines.

Photos are uploaded over Wi-Fi and 3G (configurable in the settings).

The Norris brothers, both graduated engineers, have launched app as a part of their new development company Syrp, Inc. based in Toronto, after having first spent a few years working in the corporate world.

Cloud Photos is available here for $1.99 in iTunes.

Instagram’s User Count Now At 40 Million, Saw 10 Million New Users In Last 10 Days

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 07:45 AM PDT

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Instagram received a fair amount of press over the last week. First, 10 days ago, the app launched on Android. Then news of Facebook buying the tiny startup for $1 billion was everywhere from the Drudge Report to The Daily Show. The attention resulted in explosive growth. Since the launch of its Android app, Instagram’s user base grew from 30 to 40 million. That’s over 1,000,000 new users a day.

Rakshith, the creator of gramfeed, pinged us this morning after noticing the milestone from Instagram’s API. The 40 millionth user is valentinoelbuti. It seems at the time of this post’s writing, Instagram has exactly 40,026,379 users — or rather, roughly 5% of Facebook’s active user base.

It took Facebook four years to hit 100 million users. Instagram is on track to beat that number. The photo sharing service launched in October 2010 and saw 1 million users by December. It passed 10 million users the following September. Now, in April 2012, Instagram is growing at an incredible pace with 10 million new users in essentially this month alone. If nothing else, it shows that Android’s massive user base cannot be ignored.

Sure, Instagram received a massive amount of press late last week, but it also just became available to Android’s 500 million users. The timing was perfect. The vast majority of the new users likely first heard about Instagram from the news of the Facebook acquisition and Instagram was available for download in Google Play as if it had always been there.

Facebook says Instagram will remain a standalone photo app, which is great news for its users fearing a hostile takeover. However, it’s hard to imagine Facebook not wanting to tap Instagram’s massive user base. After all, Facebook needs to recoup the $1 billion it spent buying the start-up somehow.

Push Comes To Shove: Apple Appealing Another iCloud, MobileMe Push Email Ruling To Motorola In Germany

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 07:26 AM PDT

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Another development in the ongoing fight between Apple and Motorola Mobility over patent infringements in Germany: a court has decided against Apple Inc. in a case involving its push email service on iCloud and MobileMe services in the country. This is effectively an extension of the same ruling that was originally handed down in February against Apple International, a case that Apple is appealing.

A judge in a regional court in Mannheim, where the case was heard, has ordered Apple Inc. to pay damages, according to the Wall Street Journal. The exact value has not been specified.

Apple tells us it is appealing this case, based on the same points as the earlier one. In that case, Apple is appealing because it believes the patent in question — a patent (the ’654) that Motorola originally received in the 1990s around pager technology — is invalid. A spokesperson at the time of that earlier ruling dismissed it to me as an “old pager patent.” Since this case concerns the exact same patent, it is likely that Apple will also appeal in this newest case.

However, it’s important to remember that even if it seems easy to think that it’s crazy for a pager patent to be used in this case, this is not how patent law works: many patents revolve around generic ideas, used in hypothetical scenarios, and many times these are upheld. (Whether in this case the patent is invalid, of course, is another issue.)

The statement on today’s case from Apple: “This is the same case Motorola already brought against another Apple entity and the court’s decision does not impact product availability. Our customers in Germany should have no problem finding the iPad or iPhone they want. However, we disagree with the court’s decision and plan to appeal the ruling.”

As for why there are two different cases against Apple for the same thing: Florian Mueller, who was at the trial, noted Judge Voss explained that the Cupertino claims were separated from International because it took longer to serve the complaint(s) on Apple’s U.S. parent company than it did within Europe.

The push email function in iCloud and MobileMe is no longer in use in Germany — Apple had turned off the service back in February when the original decision was made — but it will have to pay damages to Motorola Mobility for the period when the service was operational.

At the time of the original decision, a spokesperson from Apple noted that that turning off the push email service affected a small (unspecified) number of users in the country. “This ruling only impacts customers in Germany who use a Push setting to get their MobileMe and iCloud email," he said. "These customers will still receive email to their devices."

Even so, as with other decisions made against Apple or others (like Samsung and Motorola) in these patent disputes, it is negative publicity for the companies in question, and cumulatively that can have damaging effects on the brand, if not actual unit sales.

However, even in some cases, these disputes can affect sales, too. Samsung effectively missed out on selling the 10.1-inch version of its Android-based Galaxy Tab in the crucial holiday period after a series of voluntary delayed launches and then court-enforced delays around a patent dispute with Apple in Australia, a strong market for Samsung.

Separately, there was a second case raised in court today, over a radio patent that Apple claims is standard-essential (and should be licensed under “FRAND” terms) and Motorola is claiming straight infringement. That case is more serious in that it could ultimately mean injunctions on iPhone and iPad devices if it goes against Apple. That case is still ongoing.

[Image: xcode, Flickr]

IBM Acquires Sales Data And Analytics Software Company Varicent

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 06:24 AM PDT

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Big Blue has made a purchase today—IBM has acquired Varicent Software, a company that creates a sales analytics software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Varicent, which has raised $35 million in funding, analyzes sales data from businesses to help organizations to streamline compensation processes for employees, improve sales performance, and more. Varicent’s software automates and analyzes sales data across a number of sectors of an organization including the finance, sales, human resources and IT departments and can uncover trends that could lead to better sales and revenue for a company.

The company’s software is used by over 200 banks, insurance companies, retailers, information technology and telecommunications providers. Clients include SugarCRM, Reliance Standard Life Insurance, Silverpop, Tribune, and AAA Northern California. Varicent offers a software catered to larger enterprises as well as a product that focuses on smaller teams. In February, Varicent reported that 2011 revenue grew by 42%, marking the company’s best year ever in terms of sales and client acquisition.

This acquisition ties into IBM’s focus on providing in-depth analytics offerings to businesses.
IBM says that business analytics revenue for the company will reach $16 billion by 2015. The company has made a number of acquisitions in the business analytics area, including Algorithmics, Clarity Systems, Open Pages, Cognos and SPSS. And HP has made similar bets on analytics acquisitions.

From the release: The acquisition advances IBM’s efforts to drive analytics capabilities into the hands of front line employees, particularly in the area of sales where many organizations still rely on silos of data and antiquated spreadsheets to manage this vital area of their business.

Interestingly, Janet Perna a former Senior Executive from IBM, sits on Varicent’s board.

Other recent IBM purchases include Worklight, Green Hat, and Emptoris.

Braintree Wants To Make It Easier For Developers To Integrate Online Payments

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 06:05 AM PDT

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Braintree, an online payments gateway provider, is hoping to make it easier for developers to start integrating payments immediately. For background, Braintree powers and automates online and mobile payments for merchants and companies online. The company provides a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing, credit card storage, support for mobile and international payments, and PCI Compliance solutions.

Previously, developers couldn’t access Braintree’s full suite of tools until they were approved by the company. Now, Braintree has opened slightly to allow developers to create test transactions and explore the provider’s features and client libraries prior to being approved as a payments operator.

The company says that this is important because trial integrations and speed to market are crucial to online merchants. If the integration is set up, startups and companies can start accepting payments as soon as they are approved to do so, a process that usually takes several days.

Developers can begin integrating to Braintree through the "Get Started" button on the Braintree homepage. As part of the same initiative, Braintree has moved its merchant account application process online, speeding up the approval process.

Braintree's client list includes Fab.com, LivingSocial, 37signals, OpenTable, GitHub, Airbnb, Heroku, Engine Yard, Animoto, Shopify and HotelTonight. The company, which raised $34 million in funding last year from Accel, says it is processing more than $4 billion in annual credit card volume and is adding more than 100 new merchants a month.

Despite $889M In Revenue This Year, No IPO In Spotify’s Cards, But Ek Wouldn’t Say No To More Funding

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 04:53 AM PDT

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Spotify’s storming of the U.S. market last year has seen the company rack up a total of 13 million active users of its music streaming services — three million of them paying. It is projected to have revenues of $889 million this year, up 160 percent on 2011. But with that growth also comes increasing net losses, which in 2011 doubled to the tune of around $60 million.

Daniel Ek, CEO of the music streaming company, says in a candid interview with the Swedish financial paper Dagens Industri (translation here) that the question of when Spotify will show a profit is currently irrelevant. “Our focus is entirely on growth,” he told the publication. “That is priority one, two, three, four and five.”

The company, which is now expanding to more markets including Australia, has raised $189 million in funding to date, which values the company at around $4 billion. But although we have seen a rush of companies like Zynga, Groupon and soon Facebook taking financials like that to the public markets to take their businesses to the next level, Ek rules out Spotify following in their footsteps:

“We want to build this company long term,” he said. “The stock exchange is not an option for us.”

But with a valuation of $4 billion, what he has not ruled out is further investment in the company — even though the company does not need it. That might take the form of another round of financing or even a rights issue, DI notes.

“We have no need for more capital to operate the business plan we have,” he told DI. “But I have learned to always take the money [even] when you do not need the money. We work on the principle that if an investor can add strategic value and the valuation is good, we are interested.”

Ek told DI that he spends about half his time in the U.S. these days. The Stockholm operation — where his office features a big picture of Ted Nugent, among other things — is mostly focused on product development, “while working in New York is more about business.”

In a sense it is not surprising that Spotify is losing more than it is making: At the moment, the majority of the money that Spotify gets from its premium (paying) subscribers goes to the labels: some 70 percent of those revenues get paid out to rights holders, and that’s before Spotify covers its own operational costs — which can be substantial for a business focused on growth.

It’s not clear that those terms will ever swing in a way that is more favorable to middle men like Spotify offering distribution. The music industry has been very hard hit by the move to digital: in 1999, sales of recorded music were estimated at $44 billion, but today they are around one-third of that.

That’s a big fall, but Ek told DI that he believes in the next few years we’ll see revenues go back up to those 1999 levels, with companies like Spotify being the ones to capitalize on that growth.

His reasoning: Last year Lady Gaga sold 20 million albums, but in 2010 she also became the first musician to get 1 billion views of her videos on YouTube. Ek believes that Spotify can be the company to bridge that current sales reality (20 million albums) and the clear public appetite for more and more Gaga (those 1 billion YT views).

There are clearly other services (Rhapsody, MOG, iTunes and so many more) that are vying for the same consumers as Spotify, and there will be users who are happy enough to keep watching those free YouTube videos, but Ek says that when the company does manage to hook a consumer, it gets him good:

“Our secret recipe is that we have made people change their behavior and now want access to music that they share with their friends using our playlists,” he said. “The more users we have to share their playlists, the faster users build up their collections. There is constantly increasing their willingness to pay for the service. The longer you use Spotify, the more likely you are to start paying for Spotify.”

‘Stock Market For Music Hipsters’ TastemakerX Hits Beta In Time For Coachella

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 03:45 AM PDT

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Almost all currency is virtual — In that it relies on the people who are trading it to define its value. Thus we are an economy of taste by default, so it’s about time some startup owned the taste graph. TastemakerX has the potential to be that startup, with its ”stock market for bands” app allowing music snobs to build cred based on their early on talent-spotting.

Like an Empire Avenue for the rock star-obsessed, TastemakerX lets you buy and sell shares in burgeoning musicians, earning ”Notes,” or virtual currency which in turn let you buy more shares.

TastemakerX attempts to quantify and add an interface to the immense social reward we experience when we spot something first. I mean it’s almost Darwinian in a sense; the humans who could spot the ripest berries early on would be more likely to spread their genes to the next generation.

Anyways this “good taste,” whether it be in berries, or startups or fashion is merely the ability to pick a winner so to speak, and has concrete evolutionary rewards.

TastemakerX attempts to glean your musical taste by asking you questions in onboarding flow like “What’s the best music show you’ve attended?” and  ”What’s your favorite artist?” It can also pull from the music in your phone and algorithmically suggest options for investment (Pro tip: Don’t do this).

If you don’t like any of the suggested artists you can search for them manually or follow artists your friends are following. Sort of how taste spreads in real life.

This and next weekend, lovers of music will descend up on Indio, Calif to attend the three-day Coachella Valley music festival. I am here right now and my objective opinion is you have to come at least once before you die, it is amazing.

Because it is the music hipster Olympics, one byproduct of Coachella is unsung bands like “Foster the People” become cloyingly mainstream because it exposes them to lot of people who have the power to influence other people who want to know about cool bands.

Picture Y Combinator, but instead of startups it was a cohort of bands like Girls, Dawes or Felica. Or here’s the closest real life analogy I’ve got: A long time ago my friend Facebook messaged me that Gotye “Somebody I Used to Know” song, and was like “This song is going to be huge!” If only he were able to trade on that skill.

TastemakerX has three core components a) the band stock exchange b) the data play on the test graph c) a social part of the app — like Soundtracking except for bands. In its barebones form it isn’t that impressive from a UI perspective, but what excites me the most about the idea is that CEO Marc Ruxin hopes to expand it to other verticals soon.

I think it would be amazing and extremely helpful to investors if there were a TastemakerX for startups. Funny enough, Ruxin tells me when he was pitching the platform down on Sandhill, VCs would often ask him to make one for wine.

Perhaps all you really need to know is that the startup is funded by Baseline’s Steve Andersen (among others), who just had an early stage double-header with OMGPOP’s ’Draw Something’ and Instagram, and that it plans on monetizing by holding sponsored Notes and racking up partnerships with brands and events. On Sunday it will post on its own webpage which bands are currently “trading high” on Coachella.

Also, oddly enough there are a lot of tech people here in Indio; Because they’re (we’re?) the new rock stars.

3,000 TechCrunch readers who want to download the app can do so at this link, by using the promo code: “GIRLS.”

Facebook One-Ups Google With A Kind Of ‘Facebook+’: Your FB Email, Timeline Names Are Now Linked Up

Posted: 13 Apr 2012 01:29 AM PDT

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Facebook today announced a change for how people can find you on its network — a move for more consistency, but also another route to getting people to use more email in Facebook, and secure its place as the center of your web life. Facebook is now rolling out a service where the name you use in your Facebook Timeline will be the same as the name on your Facebook email account.

The update, Facebook wrote in its announcement, will be rolling out over the next few weeks. “Anyone who already selected an email address will not be affected,” Facebook noted.

It’s not clear how many of us have already linked up a Facebook email address with our Timeline page — I’ve asked Facebook if it could provide that stat to me — but this move will mean that now all of us will (whether we wanted to or not). You can check your status here.

It means that it will become a lot easier for people to use your Facebook email to contact you, and seems to go directly in the face of other web mail services, specifically Google’s Gmail. What Facebook is making a lot easier is the link up between these two. Finding a person’s Timeline on Facebook, if you know that email address, will now be super easy, and vice versa.

“Facebook+” quipped one observer on Twitter.

It’s notable that Google has yet to make its own email and social networking product, Google+, as linked-up and user-friendly. TechCrunch’s Google+ site is https://plus.google.com/103037366582313115962/ On Facebook it’s http://www.facebook.com/techcrunch

Which do you think is more catchy?

Recently Departed Magento CTO And Co-Founder: eBay Doesn’t Understand The Meaning Of Open

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 11:13 PM PDT

Magento

Last year, eBay acquired Magento, developer of an open-source e-commerce platform for around $180 million. Magento became part of X.commerce, a combined open platform business from eBay and PayPal. A year after the acquisition was announced, Magento co-founder and CTO Yoav Kutner has left eBay. While fellow Magento co-founder Roy Rubin sent Kutner off with a warm farewell, Kutner doesn’t have such nice things to say about eBay and X.commerce, according to this post on Quora.

In response to the question of why he left eBay, Kutner responded (Kutner confirmed to us that he posted this response): I will answer and give much more information over the next few weeks as to the reasons I had to leave Magento. As for now I can say that (very) short term I would not be worried about the ‘open’ part of Magento, but as I have learned eBay and the folks at X.commerce don’t really understand the meaning of open and have a hard time explaining and defining it to them selves and to others. As such, long term, it would be very interesting to see if Magento will continue to stay open in the manor the people behind Magento and I meant it to be.

The Magento e-commerce platform, basically enables merchants and brands to have control over the look, content, SEO, digital marketing and functionality of their online storefronts. Originally, Magento was a product developed and marketed by Varien, a decade-old e-commerce software and consultancy company. When eBay invested in the e-commerce platform in March 2010 was Magento effectively incorporated as a stand-alone venture. As we reported last year, there was some discontent from Magento employees around stock and equity.

Last Fall, eBay debuted X.commerce, which featured a "fabric" that stitched the eBay, PayPal, GSI Commerce and Magento platforms together with other partners to create new experiences for retailers and their customers. At the time, eBay had more than 200,000 developers building off the two platforms, plus the 450,000 Magento developers that were added via the acquisition.

Magento also launched an app store for its extensions. Developers could create applications on top of Magento, and retailers could use this functionality in their online storefronts via the app store.

We spoke to Kutner on the phone, and he reiterated that eBay is struggling with what open source means. “They are not an open source company, so defining this has been a bit of a struggle.” And while he doesn’t think eBay would discontinue Magento as an open source platform, he says eBay still has not figured out the “fabric” component of X.commerce, over a year after the acquisition

As for why he left, Kutner says the execs that coordinated the deal at eBay and PayPal were no longer with the company, and the vision of why to buy Magento and what to do with it was lost when they left. “I’m hopeful they will figure it out,” he added.

eBay released this statement when we inquired about Kutner’s views: X.commerce & Magento are fundamentally believers in open source and an open ecosystem, including our Magento Community and Enterprise editions. Beyond our ongoing efforts, we are committed to releasing a major upgrade in Magento 2 in late 2012/early 2013. Additionally, our X.commerce Fabric is generally available and is also released in an open format. “Open” for X.commerce means that source code is available to anyone to modify and customize in their environment. “Open” can also mean that beyond being able to take a copy, developers in the ecosystem can modify the primary source code and help accelerate the overall progress of Magento.

While it’s important to remember that this is just one perspective, Kutner’s account doesn’t paint a rosy picture for the state of Magento in eBay’s family or for X.commerce. Last week, it was revealed that X.commerce CTO Neal Sample was leaving eBay to join American Express. PayPal also recently lost product VP Sam Shrauger as well as Alyssa Cutright (who joined Square).

TechCrunch Giveaway: Nokia Lumia 900 #TechCrunch

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 09:40 PM PDT

(JPEG Image, 705x503 pixels)

We’ve written endless amounts of posts about it, Jordan is obviously obsessed with it, it became Amazon’s best selling phone and is simply a great smartphone.

With special thanks to Nokia, we have a brand new Lumia 900 to give away. This giveaway will last for one week, starting today, April 13th, and ending April 20th at 7:30pm PT. If you want to enter for a chance at winning this awesome new phone, all you have to do is follow the steps below. Follow them carefully, this giveaway may be a little different than you’re used to.

1) Go ahead and click on this link to sign up.

2) Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Leave us a comment below telling us why you should win

We will pick one lucky reader at random next week and contact them via email. Anyone in the U.S. is eligible.

Good luck everyone!

Fetchnotes Launches A Simple, Cloud-Based Note-Taking Service (That Twitter Users Will Love)

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 09:00 PM PDT

fetchnotes

Fetchnotes is a promising, lightweight note-taking app for list makers and idea-havers which looks deceptively simple. But that simplicity is actually one of Fetchnotes’ key selling points. It’s meant to be fast and easy to use. And although there are a ton of apps for taking notes, from robust offerings like Evernote to more limited mobile apps like the Notes app that ships on the iPhone, Fetchnotes has an interesting idea about how note-taking apps should work  - that is, they should work more like our own minds do. Thoughts come to us unbidden and we jot them down. That’s it.

Explains Fetchnotes co-founder Alex Schiff, “task management or to-do apps force you into this rigid structure about how you’re supposed to get things done or that you’re only supposed to use this for to-do’s, whereas what we’ve done is we’ve created a very flexible application that allows you to write your own use cases,” he says.

What that means in terms of Fetchnotes’ user interface, is a fast-loading app, a plus button to add a note, a blank page to type in, and a hashtag to categorize it.

Fetchnotes basically throws the idea of prioritization out the window with its apps, which work on iPhone, Android, Mac, PC and even Linux. Instead of having important items at the top or color-coded, for example, the items in your lists are hashtagged. It’s an idea that’s borrowed from Twitter, so it will make a lot of sense to those of us already working in the digital space.

And, in an update arriving in the near future (it didn’t make it in by launch, unfortunately), you’ll also be able to push notes and to-do items to other Fetchnotes users using another common Twitter-like convention: their “@username.”

So, for instance, a note reading @joesmith fix the screen on the back door #home, could send a note to your spouse’s list on their phone. Nifty!

Another innovative feature is the ability to add notes via text messaging (after first registering your phone number with the service), which opens up the app for use by non-smartphone users who still need a way to jot down their passing thoughts. You’ll also be able to phone into the service to retrieve notes, saying “fetch” then the tag, like “fetch #todo,” which will again be helpful for those whose phones can’t run apps.

The whole service is built on top of one API, so notes are immediately synced between your different client apps, whether desktop or mobile. For now, the mobile apps are smartphone-only, and don’t support Android tablets or the iPad, but that, too, will change in the future.

Also rolling out in later versions will be the obvious integrations with other third-party services to sync notes to apps like Evernote or to place appointments on your Google Calendar. The idea is that the Fetchnotes interface, because of its simplicity, would be the preferred first stop for writing down short notes, which could then be funneled to the other services you use.

Schiff co-founded Fetchnotes with Chase Lee, both current University of Michigan students. They are bootstrapping the startup from their own pockets.

Fetchnotes had previously been in private beta, but is launching publicly today on all platforms. You can download the app from the service’s homepage here.

New Daily Show App Gets High-Res Video, Still Doesn’t Let You Watch Full Episodes

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 05:58 PM PDT

Screen shot 2012-04-12 at 4.45.51 PM

Yesterday, the Daily Show featured a stellar parody yesterday of both Google’s connected, augmented reality eyeglasses (a.k.a Project Glass or, as I like to call it, “Project Sup Now, Warby Parker?”) as well as Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook. Fittingly, the show is today officially replacing its old app and is going all 2.0 with a new, upgraded and redesigned mobile app — with high-res video. Yes, as The Daily Show tweeted this afternoon, its tech and general news-related hilarity is now available on iPhone, iPad, and Android devices in an app called “The Daily Show Headlines” that — get ready for it — plays the Daily Show!

Headlines replaces the fake news show’s previous mobile app, which will soon be unsupported. The first generation app was a bit of a mess, in that it was awkward to navigate, and only offered low-quality videos and images. Headlines mitigates the pain by way of high-res videos and images, a new, easier-to-navigate layout, and video tiles.

Similar to the Daily Show’s previous app, fans can watch clips from Jon Stewart and his “Best F#@cking News Team Ever” (which barely beats out TechCrunch’s Best Awesome News Team Ever), while sorting through those video clips by popularity and “most recent”. Users can also browse through archives, view a schedule for the week’s upcoming guests and read up on their bios, visit their website, buy music/content directly, or explore random quotes from past broadcasts.

Another cool little feature is that the app enables users to set TV tune-in reminders — which you can find this in the “Guests” tab — along with the ability to jump into the show’s different segments, like “On Topic,” “The Daily Show in :60 Seconds,” and “Correspondents Explain,” all while sharing clips, videos, headlines, etc. on Facebook, Twitter, or via email.

Unfortunately, full episodes are not available in the app, and are instead only available for $2 a pop in iTunes. The app also loses one or two points for displaying pop-up ads in the footer — no word yet on whether they’ll offer an ad-free paid app — but all in all, for Daily Show fans it’s a great resource to have. Also helps that it’s free.

Find the app in iTunes here.

Google Biz Chief: Over 10M Websites Now Using Google Analytics

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 03:42 PM PDT

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It’s Google Q1 earnings day, and because we all know that you have better things to do than listen to executives dryly read prepared statements, we’re taking one for the team and keeping you in the know about the important stuff. Google beat Q1 expectations, reporting revenues of $10.65B and a net income of $2.9B. During the company’s earnings call, Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora touched on the progress of the company’s top products, in particular sharing one interesting stat about Google Analytics — that more than 10 million websites are now using Google’s cross-platform website stats service.

Google’s cloud-based web apps have continued to grow in popularity, especially among casual users and small businesses. Google Analytics has in many ways led the charge there, thanks to its ease of use and high-level dashboard that make it easy for any old Joe to track traffic across websites, social media, mobile products, and dive into marketing campaign conversion rates, etc.

According to W3, among the big analytics players, Google Analytics has about 82 percent market share and is used by more than 55 percent of the top 10,000 websites.

This time last year, the company revealed a new look for Google Analytics, adding multi-channel funnels, realtime, flow visualization, and later released a premium product as well. It continued to build on its feature set for both earlier this month, allowing users to send analytics reports to themselves or other members of the team within the suite. Users can now schedule those reports at regular intervals via email, or export a PDF.

While Arora didn’t share stats on how many of Google Analytics’ customers are paying for its premium, the team expressed that it was pleased by the progress of both its free and premium offerings.

For more, check out GA here or its blog here.

Google Play Now Accepts Paid Android App Submissions From New Seller Countries

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 03:21 PM PDT

google-play

While Google's top brass were busy dissecting the company's Q1 earnings on their scheduled conference call, it was business as usual for the rest of the company. Over on the official Android Developers blog, for example, Google announced that developers in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Israel, and Poland can now sell Android apps and in-app additions in the Google Play store (and in their native currencies to boot).

"But wait," you may say. "Developers from Israel and Mexico have been able to sell their apps for years now!" You'd be absolutely right — the Czech Republic and Poland are the only really new additions, but there was a bit of a catch for the other two.

At the time, developers in Mexico and Israel could only sell their apps through an AdSense merchant account and set prices in U.S. dollars. With this new change in place, Google now supports both countries' respective currencies. The process for Israeli or Mexican developers to make the transition seems a bit hairy though — Google outlines the whole thing here, and it involves creating a new Google account and re-registering with Google Play.

So what does this mean for you developers? Well, unless you live in one of the aforementioned countries, not a whole lot. While most of the work will have to be done by developers operating out of those locales, Google still suggests that you consider whether or not you want to set a specific price for each of those new markets instead of just letting your default price ride.

Those minor issues aside, Google now officially supports paid application sales from developers in 31 countries. It sounds pretty good until you realize that it's taken over a year and a half for Google to add these new names to the list of supported countries. I'm sure that developers in those countries will appreciate that Google has finally gotten around to them, but there are still quite a few that haven't.

A link to the post was shared by the Android Developers’ Google+ account, inspiring a litany of requests from people asking Google to support their countries as well, prompting Android Developer Relations Lead Reto Meier to apologize for the delay. Then again, Google’s always been very upfront about this sort of thing — they note in their list of seller countries that they are “unable to provide any guidance on timelines.”

Screw University, Course Hero Curates YouTube Into Free Business and Coding Classes

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 03:01 PM PDT

Course Hero

You can learn just about anything from YouTube…if you’re willing to dig through millions of videos. Luckily, Course Hero has done the work for you, offering coherent classes by hosting collections of the best educational YouTube videos and other content. The newly launched courses section of the eduTech startup’s site now has classes in entrepreneurship, business plan development, and programming in a variety of languages. Meanwhile, Course Hero offers crowdsourced study guides, tutoring, and flashcards.

Khan Academy is great, but isn’t as scalable since it create the content itself. By drawing from YouTube and other openly available education, Course Hero plans to set up courses for anything it, or you, can think of. And if the pursuit of knowledge wasn’t enough, students who complete its Entrepreneurship path can enter a business plan competition whose winner will get to pitch to Course Hero investor Ron Conway / SV Angel.

So here’s how you get schooled. Pick one of Course Hero’s learning paths, and start with the Core Classes, like Web Programming’s Intros to CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, or Business’ Intros to Microeconomics, Personal Finance, and Marketing. Each course breaks down into roughly 6 chapters of 6 concept YouTube videos, Justin.tv videos, articles, and more. Unlike Udemy‘s one-teacher-per-class approach, Course Hero courses are compiled from content by many teachers.

Rather than put you at the mercy of long-winded professors, Course Hero trims videos and articles down to their most important teachings. Along the way you’ll answer quiz questions, take tests to complete chapters, and face a final exam to finish a course and earn proficiency badges. That might sound like a lot of work, but you’ll really know the material when you’re done. You can also suggest or create your own courses.

Course Hero’s CEO and co-founder Andrew Grauer tells me he wanted to find out “what would the Internet’s version of university look like?” He commends Stanford and MIT for putting offline learning online, and  thinks Codecademy (which also crowdsources some of its programming tutorials) and Khan Academy are great at what they do. He actually hopes to get Khan videos integrated into courses. In general, though, Grauer thinks it’s too painful to find an efficient path through all this content so you can actually get a deep education in something. With many people questioning whether expensive traditional higher education is worth it, a free alternative for learning crucial career skills has big potential.

Investors see that too. The 22-employee Course Hero has raised $2.38 million from friends and family plus a seed round with SV Angel, Maveron, and angels including founders and co-founders like StubHub’s Jeff Fluhr, YouTube’s Steven Chen, Beautylish’s Nils Johnson, Altius Education’s Paul Freedman, Military.com’s Christopher Michael, and Start-up Farms’ Mark Feldman, plus Andrew’s dad and former CEO of Barclays Global Investors Fred Grauer. Facebook’s Director of Ads Gokul Rajaram is the Chairman of Course Hero’s board.

The startup has an innovative business model. Courses and flashcards are free, but the community-based tutoring Q&A and access to user generated study guides are premium. You can pay a steep $40 for a month, $95 for a year, or earn access by uploading 40 documents a month. There’s been some grumblings on the web about the price and quality of the study docs. It’s still a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for university, but I think Course Hero should reduce its rates to help it gain traction.

Over the last six months, a slew of online learning startups have turned education into a consumer product. Grauer asks “Why do I need to pay $40,000 a year when I can get the information somewhere else? There’s the credential, but is that really worth going into debt for?” He sees Course Hero and The Minerva Project as part of the next step of online education —  namely schools that don’t have crappy brands like University Of Phoenix and Cappella. It all comes back to knowledge, and the entrepreneurship and success it breeds. As Grauer says, “Education isn’t nerdy anymore.”
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