The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Crackdown On Download Bots Meant Installs For Top iOS Apps Took A Dive In March
- Samsung May Have Just Become The King Of Mobile Handsets, While S&P Downgrades Nokia To Junk
- Mobile “Edutainment” Startup Fingerprint Digital Doubles In Size With Addition Of 6 New Games
- Dan Bull’s Facebook Epic Rap Aims To Be Most-Torrented Single On Global Music Charts
- TheWhoot Co-Founders On Taking The Flakiness Out Of Social Planning
- Eventbrite Launches First Industry-Specific Ticketing Platform For Races And Walks, Endurance
- TicketLeap Introduces Seating Chart Design Tools For Ambitious Event Planners
- Skype Launches Ridiculous New Facebook App, “Humoticons”
- Intuit Acquires Marketing SaaS Company Demandforce For $423.5M In Cash
- The Open Source CEO: Jim Whitehurst
- Twilio’s European March Continues With Its First Full-Time Hire Outside The U.S. [And Telefonica Loses One]
- Q&A Site ChaCha Cancels UK Expansion After Poor User Take-Up
- Torbit’s Insight Measures The Effect Of Site Speed On Your Bounce, Conversion & Revenue
- Viddy Is Raising $30M At A $370M Valuation
- A MicroReview Of The Fantastic $9.99 MicroStylus
- SketchUp Is Google’s First Divestment In Years, And It Made A Profit
- Google’s Project Glass: An Exercise In Mediocrity?
- U.S. House Passes Controversial CISPA Cybersecurity Bill 248 To 168
- Trained By The Best: Facebook And J.C. Penney Hire Apple Design Execs
- London Olympics To Visitors: Don’t Share What You See
| Crackdown On Download Bots Meant Installs For Top iOS Apps Took A Dive In March Posted: 27 Apr 2012 09:05 AM PDT  Downloads for the top 200 free apps in the U.S. iTunes app store took a 30 percent dive in March, according to Fiksu, a Charles River Ventures-backed company that helps mobile developers find users cheaply. The culprit? Two things. One is that we’re just coming out of the very lucrative holiday season, when downloads spike and people get new phones that they’re eager to experiment with through trying tons of apps. The other may be Apple’s crackdown on download bots, or automated programs that downloads apps tens of thousands of times to help them break into the top of the charts. Fiksu says that the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps saw 4.45 million downloads per day in March, down from 6.35 million per day in February. Apple issued a warning to developers during the first week of February, telling them not to use services that explicitly manipulate the charts. "An unexpected contributing factor could be the decline in the use of robotic install tactics by app marketers responding to Apple's new policy,” said Fiksu’s chief executive Micah Adler in a statement. The crackdown has had huge implications for the types of apps that make it to the top of the charts. If you watched the charts like I did for well over a year, it was pretty common to see really strange, esoteric (and frankly, not very well-made) apps pop on the charts every single week. At the same time, very social, more utility-like apps like Instagram or Facebook would hover in the teens or twenties — or between #50 and 100. The decline of download bots has made room for apps like Viddy, Socialcam, Instagram and Draw Something to move higher on the charts. Plus, because of the way the Apple app store is designed, once an app breaks above #25 or #10, it gets a huge increase in downloads per day. Even despite the decline, the amount developers have to pay to get a good mobile app user was relatively unchanged at $1.30 from $1.31 in February. By good user, we mean one that opens an app at least three times after they downloaded it.
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| Samsung May Have Just Become The King Of Mobile Handsets, While S&P Downgrades Nokia To Junk Posted: 27 Apr 2012 08:38 AM PDT  Samsung has been, for years, slowly approaching Nokia as the world’s biggest handset maker, and today looks like the day the crown has been passed: As of last quarter, Strategy Analytics noted that Samsung shipped the most mobile devices of any single manufacturer world-wide, also taking pole position in smartphones. At the same time, Nokia not only slipped in those rankings but it also got another slap in the face, as Standard & Poor’s, the credit-rating agency, downgraded Nokia to “junk” status. The news comes on the same day that Samsung presented its Q1 earnings, in which the Korean company reported revenues of 45 trillion won ($40 billion) for the three months that ended March 31 — citing strong results in the division that includes mobile devices, with especially “brisk sales” of its GALAXY S II smartphone and newer Galaxy Note device. S&P’s downgrade for Nokia is the second credit-ratings blow to Nokia this week: Fitch also downgraded the company’s rating. S&P says Nokia is now at BB+/B with the outlook at “negative.” It’s basing this not just on the weak results this quarter but also Nokia’s guidance for Q2: “We now expect Nokia to report significantly lower margins and cash flows in 2012 than we had previously expected,” S&P said in a statement.
Nokia, once again, issued a statement reiterating its current net cash position of €4.9 billion ($6.5 billion) and determination to push ahead with its turnaround program. It’s a big contrast to the story elsewhere: While Samsung does not provide unit sales numbers in its earnings, Strategy Analytics estimates that Samsung sold 93.5 million handsets in the last quarter to Nokia’s 82.7 million, the first time that it has overtaken the Finnish handset maker. Samsung account for 25.4 percent of all sales, compared to Nokia at 22.5 percent. Apple, with its smartphone-only line up, rounds out the list at 35.1 million units shipped, or 9.5 percent of the total. All others accounted for 156.7 million devices, giving a total of 368 million mobile shipments in the quarter. In smartphones, Samsung has been even more impressive, says Strategy Analytics, effectively eating up all the share Nokia had and riding the wave of growth to pick up new users: the analysts estimate that Samsung nearly tripled its marketshare over last year, capturing 30.6 percent of the market compared to 12.2 percent a year ago. The works out to shipments of 44.5 million units, nearly four times as many as last year. The usual caveats apply: These numbers represent estimated shipments and not actual sales — although some believe these can be interchangeable. Samsung does not provide hard numbers on for shipments or sales, so that, too, can be debated. And, other analysts will produce different numbers — in this case, IHS iSuppli, as Barron’s points out, notes that while it too believes that Samsung overtook Nokia in overall mobile shipments, in smartphones Apple is still selling more. (If only Samsung would just come clean on device numbers.) In its quarterly earnings today, Samsung noted that its revenues represented growth of 22 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. Margins improved as well: they are now at 12.9 percent, up 1.9 percent on last year. That helped contribute to a 98 percent increase on operating profit, which was 5.85 trillion won ($5.2 billion) for the quarter. Samsung’s “seasonal” decreases in sales of semiconductor chips and TVs were more than offset by its performance its IT & Mobile Communications division, which includes its mobile phones business. That division made 4.27 trillion won ($3.8 billion) in operating profit. And revenues for that division were 23.33 trillion won, with most of that (18.90 trillion won; $16.7 billion) combing from mobile. Those mobile revenues were by by 86 percent over last year.
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| Mobile “Edutainment” Startup Fingerprint Digital Doubles In Size With Addition Of 6 New Games Posted: 27 Apr 2012 08:20 AM PDT  San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital, a startup building educational apps for kids as well as a parent-child communication system for iOS apps, is doubling the size of its network today with the addition of a series of six new apps from French developer Happy Blue Fish Studio. The developer has chosen Fingerprint’s in-app “Mom-Comm” system (as the company calls it) to enhance its “The Deskplorers” story-telling apps designed for ages 6 through 9. The newly added apps are focused on reading comprehension, problem solving, and foreign languages, while also taking kids through adventures in history. Fingerprint, in case you’re not up on the “what’s hot with kids” front, is a young startup which first introduced its educational-focused apps into the iTunes App Store on December 1st of last year. A few weeks later, Fingerprint was reporting having seen over 270,000 game-playing sessions for a total of over 2 million minutes played. Today, the company is reporting they’re up to 14 million minutes of play time, and the average session time has climbed up to 9 minutes. Fingerprint says the most popular time of time for gaming is between 7 AM and 9 AM then after school (4 PM to 6 PM), but the most popular days to play are Saturday and Sunday. The kids seems to have their favorite apps from Fingerprint’s collection, which includes self-developed titles like Big Kid Life Fairy Princess, Big Kid Life Veterinarian, Big Kid Life Fire Fighter (the most popular), Play Maker, and Whole Wide World. 40% of kids playing Fingeprint apps have played one of the apps more than 25 times in their first 4 weeks. For what it’s worth, my kid launches that princess app almost daily. (Don’t worry, despite the name, it’s not teaching her how to wait for some random dude to kiss her to make her life complete.) The apps, however, aren’t the most interesting thing Fingerprint is developing – it’s the built-in sharing platform (available to select third parties via an SDK) that is. This system allows kids to share their in-game progress with parents, and the adults get a news feed detailing their child’s activity. They can then leave supportive messages via audio and text for their children to receive in the game. With the newly added Deskplorers series, Fingerprint’s small collection of apps will double in size with half a dozen new apps introducing kids to knights, pirates, Egyptians, cavemen, and more. Dominique Busso, founder and CEO of Happy Blue Fish Studio, the maker of the apps, says the company was in search of a partner that could help intro the apps to the U.S. market, and selected Fingerprint because its mission aligned with their own: “to bring happiness and learning through gameplay to kids worldwide.” Fingerprint is backed by a solid team. The company was founded by Nancy MacIntyre, formerly the EVP of Products and Marketing at LeapFrog, and Brad Edelman who co-founded social gaming company PlayFirst. It also has Heather Regan, the former COO of Everloop, as VP of Product Management and Learning, and former game marketing lead at 2K Games (a division of Take Two Interactive) Phil Shpilberg as its VP of Marketing. The company has $1.4 million in venture funding.
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| Dan Bull’s Facebook Epic Rap Aims To Be Most-Torrented Single On Global Music Charts Posted: 27 Apr 2012 08:17 AM PDT This is a few days old but it’s well worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s by English rapper Dan Bull and it’s about everyone’s favorite time-waster, TheFacebook. The best part? He also does a Twitter one. Give it a listen and then download it for free to help Bull hit the record books. See, Bull is aiming to have the first torrented single in in the UK and global charts so he’s giving the tracks away on BitTorrent and asking for a small donation once you’re hooked. It’s a noble venture and the music, needless to say, is really good and it’s a wild proof-of-concept for future artists.
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| TheWhoot Co-Founders On Taking The Flakiness Out Of Social Planning Posted: 27 Apr 2012 08:05 AM PDT  Back in the day, before the cell phone, people had to be where they said they’d be. There was no such thing as flaking out, and if you did, you were just a bad person. But these days, even when we make a firm commitment, the convenience of cell phones makes it really easy to flake out at the last second. But co-founders Ryan Coyne and Will Quartner think that going out and having fun with your friends shouldn’t have to be so difficult, and thus was born TheWhoot. TheWhoot is a social planning app, available on web, iOS, and Android, that lets people choose from four simple categories to outline their nightly plans and coordinate within their social circle. You may be working, staying in, relaxing out, or partying, and once you detail your general idea for the evening, you’ll instantly get access to what all your friends are doing. It’s not like a Facebook Event, in that all plans are tossed out at 5am and new plans begin each day. The service is all about tonight, which is the first step in removing the flakes. With Facebook Events, the party next week might sound really awesome now, but it may not sound so great on the night of, after a long day’s work and a headache. Another feature available with TheWhoot is the ability to Ping. You have five Pings per night, and it allows you to reach out to users who haven’t posted their plans tonight to see what they’re up to tonight. The cool part is that you post Pings anonymously, so if you happen to be the kid who’s always trying to wrangle a group together, you don’t have to be embarrassed that you’re hitting people up all the time. New features will be added over the course of the next month, along with new forms of monetization for TheWhoot including in-app purchases to increase the Ping limit, and social analytics, which will allow users to get a feel for what the night will be like on a large scale. Think how many girls are going out tonight, or how many of your friends are relaxing as opposed to partying on a Thursday. Social planning is a tough space to tackle, but I’m excited about what TheWhoot has done thus far. Perhaps we won’t all be so flaky anymore, or maybe that’s just dreaming. Only time, and TheWhoot’s new social analytics, can tell.
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| Eventbrite Launches First Industry-Specific Ticketing Platform For Races And Walks, Endurance Posted: 27 Apr 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Online ticketing platform Eventbrite is debuting a new vertical today, called Endurance, which focuses specifically on selling tickets for races and walks, including marathons, triathlons, races, fundraising walks, and more. As you may know, Eventbrite, which has sold 57 million tickets and hosted over 500,000 events in the past year, has been used as a registration and ticketing platform for a broad range of events, from large fundraisers, festivals, tech conferences, and concerts to cooking classes and HTML workshops. But this is the first time the company has launched a dedicated, industry-specific ticketing manager for a vertical. The company says they realized there are a couple of key markets that have more advanced feature requirements, and in order to take advantage of more opportunities in these markets, the company is building an expertise in select verticals. Endurance is similar in some ways to the standard ticketing platform but has been customized based on feedback from endurance organizers and participants. This includes the ability for race organizers to sell merchandise along with registration prior to the event, and allows for easier team registration sign up and management. Race organizers can also automatically assign bib numbers as participants register for their event. Organizers can also create custom branded registration pages, access data and analytics on attendees and sales, and even accept payments at the event via Eventbrite’s new ‘At The Door,’ iPad app and credit card reader. What verticals could be next for Eventbrite? Conferences, concerts and classes are obvious choices. Expanding to vertical-specific ticketing solutions makes sense for the company to offer for compelling ticketing options, as it looks to increase sales and users. Eventbrite has making a big push towards reaching $1 billion in gross ticket sales in 2012; after doubling both the number of events on platform in 2011. We know the company is eyeing an IPO. Last year, Hartz said that Eventbrite could file to go public as early as late 2012. Eventbrite has also expanded internationally last year, opening an office in London.
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| TicketLeap Introduces Seating Chart Design Tools For Ambitious Event Planners Posted: 27 Apr 2012 07:41 AM PDT  Sure there are services to sell tickets to arenas and event spaces (not to mention parties and the like) but thus far there hasn’t been a good way to allow customers to pick their seats. TicketLeap, a ticketing website, has solved that problem. Wedding planners don’t get too excited yet: the system is mostly for folks who run bigger event spaces like halls and arenas. You can lay out your space using TicketLeap’s browser-based tools and add various features like bathrooms, Wi-Fi points, and handicapped access spots. I’ve seen a few startups in this space, including one promising one that actually allows you to create seating charts for parties and smaller events, but this is an interesting start, especially in the stagnant world of event ticketing. Seats can be color-coded according to price and all layouts are stored in the cloud for future use. Definitely handy for organizing the spectators at your next game at the old ōllamaliztli court.
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| Skype Launches Ridiculous New Facebook App, “Humoticons” Posted: 27 Apr 2012 06:49 AM PDT  Skype introduced a new Facebook app this morning, and before you get your hopes up, it’s not some amazing new way to Skype from the browser plug-in free, or kick off multi-person video chat sessions right from the News Feed. Nope. The app is this goofy, ridiculous creation called “Skype Humoticons” which lets you use your webcam to post pictures of you mimicking Skype emoticons to Facebook. Uh-huh. Ugh, it’s like they taught the marketing department how to code over there. The app loads up in a big Flash interface over on Facebook, requires that you connect to Facebook via Skype using your desktop software, and then lets you pick either a photo or video to create your “Humoticon.” If you use an existing photo of yourself for you Humoticon, the app basically draws a big, blue circle around your face and then lets you post that photo to your Facebook wall. Why? I have no idea. Obviously, to actually do anything interesting with the app, you’ll need to use your webcam to make a more animated version. Skype suggests that you snap up to five pictures to make the animated version…because a short video clip would be too hard? Not as funny? Again, no clue. In addition to posting the “Humoticon” to your Facebook Wall, you can also download the photo or copy its URL to post in an instant messaging session. And there’s a gallery where you can see those Humoticons made by friends and others, matched up to the emoticon they were mimicking. Yep, it’s kind of silly and stupid. Hey, that might just make it a great Facebook app after all!
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| Intuit Acquires Marketing SaaS Company Demandforce For $423.5M In Cash Posted: 27 Apr 2012 06:15 AM PDT  Intuit has just acquired marketing SaaS company Demandforce for $423.5 million in cash. Demandforce's SaaS application automates internet marketing and communications, so customers can focus on running their day-to-day operations. The startup, which is profitable, has thousands of customers across service verticals that include dental care, automotive repair, spas, salons, chiropractors, and others. The SaaS was designed to help customers to grow revenue, retain clients, maintain online reputation, and manage operations more effectively. Demandforce focuses primarily on small to medium sized businesses, offering email, mobile and social tools to help SMBs communicate with their customers and drive higher retention and growth in their businesses. "Demandforce sits at the sweet spot of Intuit's SMB customer base and is consistent with our goal to help our customers save time and make money," said Kiran Patel, executive vice president and general manager, Intuit Small Business Group. "With a compelling customer value proposition, SaaS model and high growth profile, Demandforce will provide opportunities to grow Intuit's customer base and revenue per customer over time." Demandforce was backed by Mike Maples, Palo Alto Ventures, and Benchmark Capital. Becnhmark partner Bill Gurley wrote an interesting note about the acquisition today, revealing that the firm didn’t even announce Benchmark's funding of the company, which he says is unprecedented. The Demandforce team always felt that the attention should be focused on the customer rather than the company., he writes. As with Instagram, Benchmark Capital is the largest institutional investor in Demandforce. Unlike Instagram, which is a consumer application and is extremely well known, Demandforce focuses on local professional businesses and has chosen to keep an intentionally low profile – a strategy that has served them well, Gurley explains. So why did Intuit buy Demandforce? Intuit sees Demandforce as a way to boost its own SMB focused business. More than 60% of Intuit’s revenue is coming from online and mobile services, which is fueled by products like TurboTax online and GoPayment. Once the transaction closes, Demandforce will become a division in Intuit's Small Business Group.
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| The Open Source CEO: Jim Whitehurst Posted: 27 Apr 2012 06:10 AM PDT  If you read the Red Hat website, you’ll find pages describing their attitude toward open source, collaboration, and more. It reads pretty much like every other marketing spiel from every company online today. There’s something different about Red Hat, though: they actually believe this stuff. Not only do they believe it, they live it every day. I spoke to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently about the open source culture at Red Hat and he told me it is a journey, not a destination. According to Whitehurst, the tenets of open source permeate all aspects of the culture at Red Hat. Whitehurst opened our conversation by stating that the last eighteen months have been a tipping point for Red Hat. According to him, they’re “no longer fighting an uphill battle for credibility.” Nowadays the conversations he’s hearing with customers focus on the issue of price versus performance, rather than whether Red Hat is a viable player in the enterprise marketplace. Red Hat’s big news is that they’ve broken a billion dollars in revenue, and are arguably the first all-open source company to do so. I’ve read some disagreement with the notion that Red Hat is a “pure play” open source company. I asked Whitehurst whether their earnings claims were just a matter of semantics: is Red Hat really a billion dollar open source software company, or a billion dollar support and services company? “We sell software,” was his immediate response. Rather than a specific, static piece of software, Red Hat sells you a subscription to their software. While the Red Hat source code is freely available, the compiled bits included in your subscription are not free. What you buy from Red Hat, says Whitehurst, is software that has been rigorously tested, known to be good, and is fully supported. According to him, the long-term support of Red Hat’s enterprise software represents 6% of the company’s overall costs. Red Hat employs “an army of engineers,” says Whitehurst, “maintaining 10 year compatibility.” The company spends even more money on engineering new solutions every year. I next asked Whitehurst “How does the open source culture affect Red Hat internally as a corporation?” Specifically, I wanted to know how have "the tenets of open source" affected management processes? This was, in many respects, the most interesting part of my conversation with him. “The traditional hierarchical org structure was developed to control, and steward fixed assets,” Whitehurst told me. The traditional hierarchies do not tend to innovate. “When information is your primary product, hierarchy isn’t the best way to drive.” To illustrate how the open source culture influences everything at Red Hat, Whitehurst told me a story about an early experience as the company’s CEO. When he started, the company had — to his mind — a rather weak mission statement. Coming from a traditional management background, Whitehurst’s first reaction was to do what CEOs all around the world do: gather the executive team, have an off-site retreat with a paid facilitator, and develop a new mission statement. This new statement would then be broadcast to the employees. “Hold on, sparky,” was effectively what his executive team told him. “You need internal buy-in,” he was told. An internal collaboration site was established — mailing list, wiki, blog — to discuss the mission statement with staffers who were passionate about that issue. Once the infrastructure was put in place, the discussion was entirely self-organized, and about 15 to 20 people really dug in. “Iterate, iterate, iterate” is how Whitehurst described the process. What was particularly interesting to him was that this ground-up process saw participation from all parts of the company: not just developers writing code but also artists and designers, UI and UX experts, and more. The end result was a mission statement that had tremendous buy-in throughout the organization, and one that didn’t have to be “sold” by management. “It takes us so much longer to make decisions because so many people are involved,” Whitehurst said. “Once a decision is made, though, we have no problems with execution.” He told me that it took him about a year to really understand “the open source way,” and another year to realize that as a leader he needed to be an internal catalyst. “Open source is not about democracy at all. It's a meritocracy,” he said. As such, his employees expect two things from him:
Whitehurst claims that this forces much more robust conversations, but leads to significantly better results. Another example of the meritocracy of open source at work at Red Hat: Whitehurst has never sent a memo. Every communication needs to support response from recipients, rather than be seen as a pronouncement from on high. At Red Hat, this takes place on one of several internal mailing lists. They’re not afraid to set up new microsites (blogs/wikis/lists) for focused participation on specific issues, either. I’ve been a participant in open source communities for more than a decade, so much of what Whitehurst shared was common sense to me. But it’s clearly not business as usual at the executive level of a billion dollar company. I asked him “Do you only hire open source "true believers" at the management level? Is there strife between "true believers" and traditional business school grads?” For a long time they tried to groom the people they hired, Whitehurst told me. He shared the anecdote of one employee who quit after their first day: “This is chaos, I can't do it,” that person said. Now more than 50% of all hires come from internal referrals. This includes all levels of the organization, from entry level through the executive level. According to Whitehurst, this helps ensure that new employees better fit the culture, and results in a lower attrition rate than seen at other tech companies. Interestingly, in the last several years only one person at the VP level has left the company, Whitehurst told me. Following up on Whitehurst’s opening remarks, I asked if Red Hat's continued growth has affected their sales strategies at all? Specifically, are new opportunities opening now that Red Hat is a billion dollar company? The short answer is “not really,” but the longer answer Whitehurst provided was that over the last couple of years Red Hat’s success has made people feel more comfortable that they’re a long-term player. This has led to a self-reinforcing cycle, the results of which are clear. Linux is displacing older proprietary UNIX systems (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris) at an incredible pace. I’ve often been curious how long it will be until the rest of open source catches up? For example, who's really threatening Oracle for traditional relational databases? Whitehurst’s answer here wasn’t quite as direct as I had hoped. He highlighted the “explosion of open source contributions from Web 2.0 companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter” as examples of people looking to solve their problems in “open source ways”. “Open source is ultimately where all companies are heading,” Whitehurst stated flatly. Companies are “going to solve problems in new ways,” rather than just commoditizing things that already exist like relational databases. The bleeding edge of innovation is driving entirely new ways to solve problems. With respect to my example about Oracle, Whitehurst pointed out the explosion of NoSQL databases and “Big Data” computing needs. It may take some time for these new solutions to trickle down into the commodity computing space, but it’ll happen eventually. My conversation with Whitehurst was thought provoking, and covered so much ground that I found myself out of time long before I was out of questions. Whitehurst indulged me with a few follow-up questions by email, which I share here in their entirety. Scott Merrill: Open source is open to anyone, but we still see it as a primarily male, Western approach. Is Red Hat making any effort to remedy that? SM: Now that Amazon has blessed Eucalyptus, do you feel any pressure to divert resources away from OpenStack? SM: How much of Red Hat’s internal IT runs on proprietary software? SM: Does Linux on the desktop make sense any more? If so, what is Red Hat doing to make it happen? SM: Where do you want to take Red Hat next? Red Hat has come an awfully long way since the company started in 1993. They’ve had their fair share of missteps, to be sure, but on the whole they’ve been remarkably successful. Their broad participation in many upstream open source projects demonstrably benefits Red Hat’s bottom line, but it also improves the state of the art for everyone. Whitehurst’s observations about open source culture and its effects on corporate culture should be instructive to everyone.
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| Posted: 27 Apr 2012 05:40 AM PDT  Twilio, developer of a VoIP API that is used by companies like eBay, Airbnb and Hulu to add voice services into their consumer apps, has been adding support for European countries as part of its expansion strategy, first the UK and then Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Poland. Now Twilio is giving that effort a bit more muscle with the appointment of its first full-time, permanent employee outside the U.S. James Parton is joining the company as its new European marketing director. His hiring is also effectively a jab at the carrier market that Twilio very much has the chance to really disrupt: Parton has been poached from Telefonica, the Spanish mobile powerhouse, where he has most recently been running developer marketing for Telefonica’s multi-regional API effort BlueVia, and before that for BlueVia’s more local precursor, Litmus at O2 UK. Parton’s experience of explaining and connecting telephony services with developers, and his existing connection with the developer community in Europe, are both essential for Twilio right now as it looks for more traction in the region. Parton will be starting officially on June 1, and will be based out of London. And Parton is also hiring more people to join him, according to a post on his blog. Specific skills mentioned are those interested in developer evangelism and customer support — which indicates that Twilio is looking to develop a full set of services more local to Europe, not just hire a bunch of sales people. No permanent replacement yet has been determined for Parton at Telefonica, but the company is now actively on the lookout to replace him. “Having done the developer work for a large company for the last five years created an itch that I needed to scratch,” Parton told TechCrunch when asked why he took the job. “I wanted to get out of the big company culture and Twilio is on a huge growth trajectory. This means a lot to me and I can’t wait to get cracking.” (Yes, he is British.) Twilio up to now has been fairly quiet in Europe as it has been getting the building blocks in place to launch a full service in the region. That’s taken longer to sort out here than in the U.S. because of that old chestnut, European fragmentation: even the process of getting VoIP lines and access requires country-by-country applications and negotiations. One of the things that has caught people’s attention up to now has been the company’s ability to pick up a lot of big customers, as well as a number of smaller developers, using its service. Parton says that while up to now Twilio has started to tap into the “long tail of developers,” he will be focused on picking up more “marquee customers” in the form of big brands and other interesting companies that the company can use as case studies to promote the use of Twilio. Parton knows all too well, from the other side of the competitive field, the challenges of trying to add disruptive and new services into the entrenched world of telecoms as a way of developing new streams of revenue — and making sure companies like Twilio don’t eat carriers’ proverbial lunch. “One of telcos’ biggest challenges is the perception issue, and trying to convince developers and startups to work with them. They have a history of over-promising and under-delivering. We overcame some of that with BlueVia but Twilio has been faster.” Twilio, he says, has been faster to cut-through because of how they’ve developed and executed on the product. “It’s super easy for developers to pick up and get started.” Twilio has to date raised $33.7 million in funding from an A-list of backers including Besssemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures and Dave McClure. Update: To be clear, Parton is the first full-time and permanent employee outside the U.S. but he’s not the very first person to work for Twilio in Europe. Stevie Graham has been a UK developer evangelist for the company on a contract basis since September 2011: that’s a link to the blog post announcing his arrival, where he refers to himself as “the first and only Twilio employee outside of the United States.” He has also been working full-time.
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| Q&A Site ChaCha Cancels UK Expansion After Poor User Take-Up Posted: 27 Apr 2012 03:46 AM PDT  Can a reasonably successful, U.S.-based mobile content brand find equal success for its English-language service in the UK? It’s a question that could have been asked on the Q&A service ChaCha, and unfortunately it looks like the company has figured out the answer the hard way. ChaCha, which launched in the UK in September 2011, has now quietly shut down operations in the country after failing to find enough people to use the service to make it cost-effective. The company alerted its Guides — the people who get paid to answer questions from users — of the change on April 19, and noted that it would be shutting up the service on the next day. Sure enough, the URL for the UK site is not longer active. ChaCha, which has been around since 2005, is primarily based around users sending questions in the form of text messages to a shortcode and receiving a text message in reply. It is one of the bigger — perhaps the biggest — Q&A sites of its kind, in March reporting 2 billion questions asked and answered, with 40 million unique users of the service. It also has an impressive funding track record. To date, it has received $75 million in backing from investors including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Qualcomm and Rho Capital Partners, among others. But this could be one case of when it’s not always best to be an early mover — or at least a lesson to early movers that they need to make sure they can change with the times, and in this case the rise of very capable smartphones. Q&A has moved on a lot, with apps like Apple’s Siri, Evi, Iris, Vlingo and others offering a similar ability to answer questions but with many more features like voice response, integration with maps and more. Ironically, one other chapter in ChaCha’s history involved the company launching a legal attack against HTC when the handset tried to launch an Android smartphone, branded ChaCha, in the U.S. (Its name eventually got changed to Status.) ChaCha, of course, has the added benefit of working on any device — not just a smartphone — but it looks like its basic business model was focused on scale that it just wasn’t getting on that product: the idea in the UK was to disrupt the Q&A space by offering users the service at the same price as a regular text message. Other services make money by using the premium SMS channel (those texts can cost up to £1.50 here). So: accepting a much thinner margin on those texts, in exchange for a higher volume of usage and potentially the promise of selling sponsorship or advertising against that. “Our mission was simply to provide quality answers at 1/15 the cost of the current competition. After months of direct advertising, branding events, marketing advice from UK leaders, and initiatives designed to help spread the word socially, we’ve found that adoption rates for new price-competitive services are quite low in the UK,” VP of operations Doug Gilmore writes in the letter. Although the letter promises that ChaCha would pay Guides any outstanding balances owed by April 20, there seem to be users that are still complaining on the MoneySavingExpert forum, on a thread about the closure, that they that they have yet to be paid. We’ve reached out to ChaCha to try to get some more details, and will update the story with whatever interesting facts that we learn. In the meantime, the letter below.
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| Torbit’s Insight Measures The Effect Of Site Speed On Your Bounce, Conversion & Revenue Posted: 26 Apr 2012 09:55 PM PDT  Anyone who runs a website, especially those who those who do the majority of their business through a web portal, know how important speedy load times are to keeping their customers engaged, on site, and happy. Of course, maintaining speed can be a tough proposition, especially for sites that serve a lot of data, or rely on a lot of moving parts or third-party integration to do business. But even so, maintaining that fluidity is paramount to providing an appealing user experience. While there are a number of sources one can turn to for website optimization, few offer both optimization along with the ability to track incoming pageviews and cross-reference their page load times with bounce rates — and most importantly — conversion rates. That’s why Torbit, a website optimization company based in Sunnyvale, has launched a new product called Insight, which gives any online business the ability to track the correlation between the speed of their website and their core business metrics. Users can view site speed using real user measurement, and drill down to see precisely where pages are hitting snags — and what’s causing those hang-ups. Torbit Insight is designed both for those looking to measure website performance for the first time, as well as those already monitoring site speed that want more accurate data. Monitoring and optimizing the front-end of your website to make it faster is important, but understanding the cause of speed issues, which users are being affected, and where matters even more. Thus, Torbit’s solution gives users access to realtime data reporting in a live map view, along with a histogram of user load times that include metrics like your median and top percentiles, and your best and worst performing URLs across your site. This allows administrators and site owners to get a more nuanced breakdown of site speed to better understand the typical experience of your average visitor. And, with samples that are all-inclusive, users can see performance data for every visitor on every page. What if you want to know if your last code deployment made your site faster or slower? Torbit enables you to view performance in real time to get a sense of how load times are changing as new features are added. Torbit operates at 1-second resolution, which gives users transparency into site performance in real time. What’s more, Torbit serves its users with customized suggestions, based on their site’s particular issues, on how to optimize sites to make their pages load faster. As its monitoring tools give you a better way to find issues with your DNS provider or to find blind spots within your team, its suggestions can help you find the best ways to fill in those blanks. Like most good measurement tools, Torbit also allows users to see how performance varies across different browsers and geographies, and correlate site speed to bounce rates, conversion rates, and revenue. Of course, these features are all well and good as long as the product itself is lightweight and easy to integrate. To address this, Insight uses a small JavaScript snippet to find the time it takes your pages to load for visitors, and itself loads asynchronously to prevent it from slowing down your site or causing issues elsewhere. In addition to its launch of Insight, Torbit also pushed a new version of its homepage, which enables users to self-serve access to Insight. The product itself is free to use off the bat, with additional features and enhancements offered in premium packages at $24 and $99 a month. (More here.) Insight adds to Torbit’s flagship product, Site Optimizer, which offers Dynamic Content Optimization to automate the front-end optimizations and, Torbit claims, double your site’s overall speed. While Torbit initially seems like it would be a direct competitor to the fast-growing TechCrunch Disrupt runner-up CloudFlare, a service that optimizes both speed and security for any and all websites. However, Torbit Co-founder Josh Fraser (who scribed a guest post for TechCrunch last year) says that he sees Insight as a complement rather than a competitor, allowing CloudFlare users to measure the speed-up and performance boost of their websites. And since Insight is JavaScript-based, it’s easy for users to use it to get a baseline measurement before turning on CloudFlare. Site Optimizer, on the other hand, is exclusively focused on enterprise customers, so while he allowed for the potential for future competition, he doesn’t see friction in the short term. As to who’s using Insight? At launch, Torbit counted sites and networks, including Wayfair, BlogTalkRadio, Storenvy, and the Cheezburger, as those using Insight to monitor web performance and conversion. Insight is definitely intended to be a “complementary” service, or gateway, to Site Optimizer, and it’s obviously a smart interplay that the TechStars founders have set up. Measure your site’s performance and conversion rates, then optimize it with their secondary product — or CloudFlare. For more on Torbit Insight, check it out here.
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| Viddy Is Raising $30M At A $370M Valuation Posted: 26 Apr 2012 09:26 PM PDT  Someone wise once said “If Instagram for video were to happen it would look nothing like Instagram” but, because it was on Twitter, I briefly saw that tweet before it got lost in the ether and now I can’t find it, dammit. But whoever said this is right (please reach out if it was you, I want to give you credit) and also didn’t tell Viddy, which for the most part looks exactly like Instagram for video. Fine. Anyways, people have been reporting all over the place about Viddy’s current insane Series B so I guess I (and you) should care. And quite honestly, I (and you) totally should really care because it’s more money than I’ve ever seen. Seriously, ever seen. Which means co-founders JJ Aguhob and Brett O’Brien might just be onto something, so … This is what I’ve got, Viddy is raising a dead serious $30 million Series B round at a $370 million valuation. I have no idea whether that is post or pre-money but whatever it is, it is really fucking ambitious, and Viddy is throwing its reported 10 million users on the table. It also means investors are hoping it’ll be a $10 billion company, or an $800 million company at the least. Okay. NEA, who I hear is shooting for these kinds of BFDs, is in, but I have no idea who else though the round is close to closing apparently. But maybe others will try after this post, right? Stupid hype cycle. I love/hate you. Two updates: This and this. Also, after a bunch of people reached out, it’s a Series B not A. My bad.
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| A MicroReview Of The Fantastic $9.99 MicroStylus Posted: 26 Apr 2012 09:00 PM PDT  This just might be the best stylus ever made. I’m completely serious. The problem with most styli is that there is never one around when needed. Besides that, the pen form factor is often not conducive for use on a small screen. But the MicroStylus, well, it’s so tiny yet functional that it’s perfect for the task. Plus it’s only $9.99 and stores neatly in a 3.5mm headphone jack. The company sent me a pair to test but there’s not much to say. It works well. You simply grasp the stick like you would a pen. A soft touch capacitive silicon tip screws into the a milled aluminum body. It’s not as accurate as a pencil on paper but your Draw Something doodles will look fantastic. The MicroStylus isn’t going to completely disrupt the stylus space. This little guy is the perfect casual use stylus for a mobile person. Sit at a desk all day? Get yourself an Adonit Jot stylus. They start at $20 and are fantastically precise. But if you find yourself needing a stylus on the go for note taking or gaming, the MicroStylus is perfect for the task. The MicroStylus is available in black or silver and $9.99 buys you one while two can be had for $15 at MicroStylus.com.
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| SketchUp Is Google’s First Divestment In Years, And It Made A Profit Posted: 26 Apr 2012 07:56 PM PDT  Google’s sale of a previously purchased arm of the company this morning, 3D modeling software SketchUp, to Trimble, is its first divestment in years, and according to sources the search giant made a profit, as it sold SketchUp for more than it bought it for back in 2006. This could signal a sea change in how Larry Page executes his vision for a leaner, more focused Google. The company frequently shuts down extraneous products, but that requires redistribution of their team members internally. If it’s now willing to sell them instead, Google could streamline around the theme of making user’s lives more convenient, while making some money at the same time. It wasn’t that SketchUp wasn’t working. It had 30 million activations since joining Google as part of @Last Software in March 2006. But it just didn’t fit with the direction Google is heading in. It’s a relatively niche product for architects and the construction industry, game developers, and filmmakers. It doesn’t fit with last year’s theme of inherently social product that could be tied to Google+, or this year’s plan to simplify everyone’s lives. So rather than sink it in the deadpool, Google sold it to someone that can actually put it to use — Trimble, a mapping, surveying, and navigation equipment company. Analysts speculated that Google paid $45 million for SketchUp in 2006. As Trimble called the acquisition of the product “immaterial”, and therefore less than 5% of its annual revenue, it couldn’t have paid more that $90 million for it. That would mean Google could have made up to $45 million in profit on the sale, though its likely closer to a few million. Early this year Google shut down its photo editor Picnik and open sourced its Android stargazing app Google Sky Map. If the company had to do it again, maybe it’d sell them off instead. This strategy of divesting successful but outlying products meshes with why we’ve heard Google didn’t buy Instagram. While initially vaguely interested in buying the photo sharing service, we hear Google walked away before talks went past the coffee table stage. That’s because buying Instagram for a high price just to fracture focus by running it independently didn’t align with Page’s game plan. I often hear that headcount bloat and disorganization in the ballooning Google disgruntles employees and makes them flee for startups. The inefficient bureaucracy, lost transition time , and expensive counter-offers it has to make to get talent to stay are running up costs for Google while slowing it down. While no one wants to see their co-workers shipped out of the Googleplex, it may be wise for Google to sell the meat instead of just trimming the fat. [Update: The SketchUp sale is not Google's first divestment ever as previously stated, but the first since 2009 when Google sold off some assets of Google Radio Automation to WideOrbit. Alexia's sources familiar with the matter missed the mark on this one.] [Additional reporting by Alexia Tsotsis and Rip Empson]
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| Google’s Project Glass: An Exercise In Mediocrity? Posted: 26 Apr 2012 05:30 PM PDT  So Google X founder Sebastian Thrun was on Charlie Rose last night showing off his latest creation, Project Glass. Which, if you haven’t seen by now, is quite possibly one of the most ambitious consumer products to come out of the Googleplex in recent memory. But until Thrun’s appearance on Rose, we didn’t actually know how the glasses would work other than the sizzle reel that was put together earlier this month. A couple of things struck me as odd, though. Thrun never actually gave any voice commands during his demo of the glasses, while in the video everything was driven by voice. But that’s not what has me worried about Project Glass. During the interview, Thrun snapped a photo of Rose and uploaded it to his Google+ account. So far, it appears to work as advertised but take a look at the image quality and tell me whether or not it’s acceptable in this day and age. It’s not, it’s terrible. But this is a much larger issue for Google and it’s one they don’t seem to be taking very seriously. At one point in Google’s history, the company we’re so beholden to actually made some really great products. Not that they were ever perfect, mind you. Google has grown complacent and comfortable with launching half baked products that they or others would eventually fix. Just look at Android, for instance. It’s still a work in progress, which is the fundamental issue with nearly every new Google product launched in the last few years. Back to my original point – the optics on those Google glasses stink. Look at what Apple has been able to accomplish with the iPhone camera, especially the 4S. If there’s one takeaway that every product manufacturer needs to learn from Steve Jobs it’s that the marriage between hardware and software will always reign supreme. Sony is unable to replicate the iPhone 4S’s image quality in any of their smartphones with the same optics. The same could be said for Nokia’s Lumia 900 and its Carl Zeiss 8-megapixel camera, which, by the way, is advertised in commercials. Even HTC is making an effort to improve the optics on their devices with software tweaks and they seem to be working. The Titan II, for instance, has a pretty killer camera. But I digress. Early on in the interview, Thrun admits that he likes taking photos and proved that Glass works. But at what point do you stop trying and innovating just because it works? Glass has serious potential, whether it’s in the medical field for the handicapped or supplanting the Bluetooth headset wearing fashionistas but Thrun and his team have a long road ahead of them if this first public demo is any indication. Be excellent again, Google. That’s all we ask.
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| U.S. House Passes Controversial CISPA Cybersecurity Bill 248 To 168 Posted: 26 Apr 2012 05:30 PM PDT  This afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) by a vote of 248 to 168. Unlike SOPA, which focused on copyright violations, CISPA wants to give Internet companies and the U.S. government the tools to protect and defend themselves against cyber attacks by sharing information with each other. Critics, however, argued that this information sharing would be happening with very little oversight and would put Americans’ privacy rights at risk. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), an outspoken critic of the bill, argued that the bill would “waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cybersecurity. Allowing the military and NSA to spy on Americans on American soil goes against every principle this country was founded on.” Even though this bill has now passed the House, chances are that it will not get through the Senate. On Tuesday, the White House issued a statement condemning the bill and on Wednesday, President Obama threatened to veto the legislation because it “fails to provide authorities to ensure that the nation's core critical infrastructure is protected while repealing important provisions" of long-established privacy law. Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that the current version of this bill is basically a major violation of established privacy rights and would allow companies to hand anything and everything you do and say online over to the government in the name of “cybersecurity.” Proponents of the bill, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), argue that the bill is "needed to prepare for countries like Iran and North Korea so that they don't do something catastrophic to our networks here in America." An earlier provision in the bill that would have given Homeland Security more authority to monitor the Internet was dropped before the bill (PDF) passed. In return, though, a number of last-minute amendments, including one that expands the list of reasons for which shared information can be used. While the bill still allows for Internet companies to hand over confidential customer information to U.S. security and intelligence agencies, as well as local low enforcement services, it is worth noting that it does not require them to do so. You can read a full version of the bill here (PDF).
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| Trained By The Best: Facebook And J.C. Penney Hire Apple Design Execs Posted: 26 Apr 2012 04:35 PM PDT  So, in case you haven’t heard, Apple is doing pretty well. Things are different now without Steve at the helm, but change isn’t always bad. Although George Colony, taking the contrarian approach, would like to disagree. Today, we’ve gotten word that Apple Senior Art Director Sharon Hwang, who headed the graphics design team, has left Apple to join Facebook’s product design team. Though it looks like Hwang joined Facebook last month, the Facebook Design Team officially announced her hiring today on their Facebook page. Prior to joining Facebook and Apple, the designer was the Art Director at Stockholm Design Lab for two and a half years, and prior to that was a graphic designer at Pentagram. We’ve also learned today that Benjamin Fay, Apple’s Senior Director of Retail Real Estate, Design and Development has left the company and will be headed to J.C. Penney. Fay has been at Apple for eight years, working as the head of retail store design and planning. The former senior director is the second senior Apple executive for leave for J.C. Penney in the last 6 months. Fay will report to J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson, who it just so happens left Apple for J.C. Penney in November. Johnson was the former Senior VP of Retail Operations at Apple, and both he and Fay had a lot to do with making the Apple Store, well, the Apple Store. Fay will join J.C. Penney as the EVP of real estate, store design and development. According to a statement released by J.C. Penney, Fay will be leading the design of the company’s new retail stores, assisting Johnson as part of an initiative in which the company will “create an entirely new interface for retail.” Obviously big things to come for J.C. Penney retail, with their new look being led by two of the guys most closely behind the design and expansion of Apple Stores across the world.
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| London Olympics To Visitors: Don’t Share What You See Posted: 26 Apr 2012 04:16 PM PDT  Don’t copy that pole vault! According to the London 2012 Olympic “conditions for ticket holders,” you are not allowed to take pictures or video of the events nor are you allowed to “exploit” any video on social networks. Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally, and may not exploit images, video and/or sound recordings for commercial purposes under any circumstances, whether on the internet or otherwise, or make them available to third parties for commercial purposes. This means no Instagrams, no Tweetpics, no Facebooking (“OMG OLYMPICS!!”), and no nothing. In short, you shouldn’t tell anyone you went to the Olympics. According to Petapixel, UK photographers are already being hassled for taking photos of the Olympic “city” from public places, which suggests perhaps that London should spring for a geodesic dome to cover the proceedings in mystery and smash cameras of errant Tweeters. Perhaps there’s a reason Orwell set 1984 in London.
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