The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- ChowNow Launches As A Food Ordering Platform For Restaurants On Facebook And iOS
- Talk Radio Startup Stitcher Adds An Election Center
- Foursquare Biz Dev VP Tristan Walker Leaves Company, Heads To Andreessen Horowitz As EIR
- ShareBuds: One Headphone Jack, Four Ear Buds, Music For Everyone
- Harvard, MIT Will Bring Classes To The Masses With Their ‘edX’ Online Learning Initiative
- LTE BlackBerry PlayBook Coming This Year, Says RIM CEO
- DIY Mobile Website Creator bMobilized Raises $1.5M Series A, Prepares To Take On DudaMobile
- Vungle Hustles Its Way Into $2M All-Star Seed Round For Mobile App Video Trailers Network
- Next-Generation Publishing Platform Hyperink Wants To Transform Blogs Into Books
- Weebly Adds Slick iOS App To Its Quietly Huge Web Site Creation Business
- TalentSplash Is A Social Network For Finding Or Becoming The Next Lady Gaga
- New iPad Ship Time Improves To 3-5 Days At Apple.com
- Down, Not Out: Nokia Goes On The Offensive With 11 Lawsuits Against HTC, RIM And ViewSonic Covering 45 Patents
- Thanks To A ‘Conflict Of Interest,’ Target Said To Stop Selling Amazon’s Kindle
- Twilio Rising: Microsoft Inks Deal To Offer Voice, Messaging APIs To ‘Tens Of Thousands’ Of Azure Developers
- Yahoo Launches Online Marketing Dashboard For Small Businesses
- Berlin-based Orderbird Gets $3.5M For Its iOS-Based Restaurant Ordering Solution
- Jive Debuts New App Integrations, Universal Web Access For Social Network For Businesses
- The Weather Channel’s Revamped Website Goes Social, Tells You When It Will Rain
- Russian Classified Giant’s $75M From Accel Shows It’s 1999 In Emerging Economies
| ChowNow Launches As A Food Ordering Platform For Restaurants On Facebook And iOS Posted: 02 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT  There are plenty of companies and startups that want to disrupt the food ordering space including Seamless, GrubHub and others. A new competitor is entering the space today. ChowNow is an online ordering platform built for mobile and Facebook, and aims to provide restaurants with an easy way to offer online ordering to customers via either their Facebook page, branded mobile apps for iPhone and iPad or their existing web site. Unlike the two giants in the food ordering space, Seamless and GrubHub, which offer one site where you can find local restaurants and order; ChowNow isn’t a centralized platform for all restaurants. With ChowNow’s offering, restaurants can individually customize and brand their ordering apps. ChowNow is actually betting on Facebook as a destination for consumers to order food. Via the startup’s Facebook Ordering App, restaurants can take orders directly through their Facebook page. The startup says that because more than 70 percent of U.S. restaurants have a Facebook presence, and potential customers are flocking to the social network for engagement; Facebook makes sense as a possible destination. Restaurants can also create branded iPhone and iPad apps and can take orders through their existing website via an ordering widget. Additionally, ChowNow is offering restaurants a wireless tablet to receive orders and communicate back to the customer when it will be ready. The Android tablets are connected to Sprint's 4G network and thus do not require the restaurant to supply anything but a wall outlet. ChowNow is available for a monthly subscription fee of $89. Christopher Webb, CEO of ChowNow, tells us that many restaurants simply can't afford to not have a mobile and social presence but also can’t afford to pay thousands to create these platforms. Webb adds that the startup’s team are former employees from OpenTable and Seamless. ChowNow, which was part of incubator Launchpad LA, recently closed a seed round of $1 million from GRP Partners, Launchpad LA, James Bailey and angel investors.
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| Talk Radio Startup Stitcher Adds An Election Center Posted: 02 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT  As the Republican primaries wrap up and we head into the Obama vs. Romney stage of the presidential campaign, Stitcher has updated its talk radio app with an Election Center where anyone can track the latest political news. It seems pretty natural for any news-focused app to add an election center, but CEO Noah Shanok says it’s a particularly good fit for Stitcher’s audience, of which 70 percent has engaged with news and political content. In the Election Center, you follow updates from different news sources like Slate, CBS News, and Marketplace. You can also follow official channels from each of the presidential candidates. Shanok says the campaigns see Stitcher as a big opportunity: “They understand that this is the year of mobile.” Will that translate into exclusive content for Stitcher? Shanok says it’s too early to know. The company is also using the Election Center to test out some new technology. Every piece of content is automatically transcribed and analyzed, then used to create a list of trending topics across all of Stitcher’s election content. So you can see what the current hot topics are, look at how many times they’ve been mentioned, and then dive into a specific piece of related content. Shanok says we can expect to see trending topics expand outside the Election Center to other types of Stitcher content too. For now, the Stitcher app is focused on national issues and, in particular, the presidential race, but Shanok says he’s also interested in looking at state and local issues — it just won’t happen this year.
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| Foursquare Biz Dev VP Tristan Walker Leaves Company, Heads To Andreessen Horowitz As EIR Posted: 02 May 2012 08:48 AM PDT  One of Foursquare’s earliest and best-known employees, Tristan Walker, Foursquare’s Business Development VP, is leaving the company and is headed over to Andreessen Horowitz where he will take a position as “Entrepreneur in Residence.” The update was posted to his personal blog just moments ago. Walker has led partnerships between Foursquare and several high-profile brands, including MTV, Bravo, CNN, the New York Times, the NBA, Starbucks and others, all of which helped to establish the service as a notable contender in the social networking space as well as a household name. Writes Walker on his blog about the change:
Walker has a great story about how he ended up at Foursquare – he wasn’t recruited, he actually reached out to them. In fact, he emailed CEO Dennis Crowley about ten times before Crowley responded. After meeting up in NYC, they hit it off, and a month later, Walker landed the Biz Dev position. In an early interview back in 2010, Walker says that he wanted to work at Foursquare because he was so passionate about the company. “I was just so inspired by what these guys were doing,” said Walker. “It was just Dennis and Naveen at the time, they had just hired Harry, and I was already an admirer of what Dennis did with Dodgeball and the product there.”
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| ShareBuds: One Headphone Jack, Four Ear Buds, Music For Everyone Posted: 02 May 2012 08:44 AM PDT  We’ve all been there. You’re listening to a song on your iPod (or iPhone or whatever) as you walk up to meet your friend and you want them to hear it, too. You pop your right earbud into their ear and bop along awkwardly together. But is your friend really enjoying the music? Are you? The song is only half as good as it should be, which is exactly why ShareBuds exist. They are a a pair of headphone sets that connect under one 3.5mm headphone jack. So the idea is that you can plug into your mp3 player, or really anything with a 3.5mm audio-output jack and listen along with a friend. The sound quality on them isn’t amazing or anything, but they solve a problem. I can think of at least ten examples where ShareBuds would have come in handy. One would be the time that my boss John took me on a road trip with his family to visit startups in DC. His kids, Kasper and Milla, were in the back and wanted to watch Netflix. Meanwhile, John was listening to his own music in the front seat, and I had my own music in my headphones. Luckily, we had a set of ShareBuds for the kids to pop in and get their Tangled on. Or, remember that one time that Jim and Pam from The Office had their “first date?” They had dinner on the roof, and then as they left, Pam asked to listen to Jim’s music. They shared — one earbud per person. But wouldn’t it be cute if, at that pivotal moment, they could both listen to his song at its full potential? Of course, you can always hop over to Amazon and buy a 3.5mm splitter for $1.50.
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| Harvard, MIT Will Bring Classes To The Masses With Their ‘edX’ Online Learning Initiative Posted: 02 May 2012 08:40 AM PDT Distance learners rejoice! Harvard University and MIT jointly announced their new non-profit edX online learning initiative in Cambridge earlier today, which aims to both enhance on-campus teaching and make courses from both schools available to people around the world for free. “This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press,” said Anant Agarwal, newly-installed president of edX. Despite both schools chipping in $30 million a piece (not to mention a chunk of their respective staffs), edX is an independent entity with Agarwal reporting to the organization’s own board. Beyond just offering Harvard and MIT courses to scores of avid learners worldwide, the two schools plan to build up the open-source MITx platform which itself was only announced at the end of last year. The goal is to make the platform available other to institutions as well, so they too can jump in and offer their own content. It’s still early days for the platform though, so no additional partners have been announced just yet. Still, MITx provides quite the framework to begin with. Rather than just providing videos of lectures and scanned class handouts, MITx takes things a step further further with “embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning.” Access to these online courses will be free to anyone with an Internet connection, though the issue of monetization quickly came up during the event’s Q&A period. “The drive is not to make money,” said MIT Provost Rafael Reif. “That said, we intend to find a way to support those activities. There are several approaches we are considering, and we don’t want this project to become a drain on the budgets of MIT or Harvard.” EdX president/professor Agarwal noted that in the prototype class MITx class he taught, students who passed the course received a free certificate to commemorate their achievement. That should soon change though, as a FAQ posted to MITNews points out that the two schools are considering charging a “nominal fee” for those certificates when a student proves their mastery of a subject. AllThingsD reports that the first slew of EdX courses will go live this fall, but it seems as though Harvard may be looking to start a little sooner than that. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard is considering launching their first EdX courses this summer, with classes in computer science, social science, and the humanities expected to round out that first online term. Agarwal went on to say that the more online educators there were, the better off the world would be, and there’s little question at this point that edtech space will continue picking up steam. Online education startup Coursera announced just weeks ago that their own distance learning platform would soon play host to courses from Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, and the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, StraighterLine also recently announced that they raised $10 million in funding for their plan to offer general requirement courses online (and on the cheap).
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| LTE BlackBerry PlayBook Coming This Year, Says RIM CEO Posted: 02 May 2012 08:39 AM PDT  RIM is keeping the PlayBook party going. While speaking at a BlackBerry World breakfast with RIM CEO Thorsten Heins stated the company plans to launch an LTE-enabled PlayBook by the end of the year. However, the CEO didn’t detail the projected release date, price or available wireless carrier. This is a smart move for RIM. Rather than spending the time and resources producing another tablet, RIM is instead concentrating efforts on making sure upcoming software works on existing hardware. During a recent trip Rim’s Waterloo campus, the company made it clear to TechCrunch that it is very much committed to bringing BlackBerry 10 to the PlayBook. The PlayBook has actually aged quite well. The computing hardware and screen is still competitive to current tablets on the market. BlackBerry 10 would likely make existing PlayBook owners very happy although by the time the OS hits later this year, companies and consumers might shy away from the older tablet. But as long as the 4G PlayBook isn’t tied to a two-year contract like other carrier-sold tablets, RIM might be able to sell several to those still addicted to their crackberrys.
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| DIY Mobile Website Creator bMobilized Raises $1.5M Series A, Prepares To Take On DudaMobile Posted: 02 May 2012 08:23 AM PDT  NY-based mobile web startup bMobilized, which bills itself as a competitor to the well-heeled new Google partner DudaMobile, has just closed its Series A round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. The funding was raised from two early stage European VC firms, Alliance Venture and Investinor. Like DudaMobile, bMobilized is focused on enabling SMBs to convert their existing websites into HTML5-enabled mobile sites that work on any device, OS, or web browser. According to CEO Ben Seslija, nine out of every ten small business websites don’t have mobile versions of their sites today – and yet, Americans are poised to spend an estimated $115 billion in goods and services on mobile devices by 2015. So yes, there’s clear market need for services operating in this space. As for bMobilized, its core offering is a lot like DudaMobile’s, competing feature-by-feature with many of DudaMobile’s key advantages, including automatic sync, templating, speed, customizable widgets and more. bMobilized says it uses 300 different algorithms to identify and analyze the different parts of the website, and then coverts that site to a mobile-friendly version in under 30 seconds. Also offered are over 30 features designed to improve the mobile experience, including things like a contact bar, maps, social sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn), support for a product promo window on the homepage, and more. That contact bar is especially helpful, as it can be customized with widgets like “click-to-call,” “click-to-email,” “click-to-SMS” and more, which allows visitors to instantly connect with the business they’re researching. Support for ad products is available, too, including text, image and video ads from Google AdWords, QR Code, and in-app ads. And again, like DudaMobile, the mobile sites automatically sync with the company’s main website when changes are made. Pricing is competitive with DudaMobile’s product, for the most part. Although DudaMobile offers a free level of service, bMobilized’s monthly fees of either $5/month or $9/month (with support) are comparable to DudaMobile’s $9/mo. middle-of-the-road plan. So why choose one over the other? Well, obviously each company thinks their own offering is the better choice. Seslija just says customers should try out bMobilized for themselves to be convinced. bMobilized, now a team of fourteen, was founded in 2005 in Oslo, Norway, but only relocated to NYC in 2010. Prior to this round, bMobilized had taken investment from European and U.S. firms, Tomas AS, Magnus Invest AS (the personal investment company for Birger Magnus, bMobilized chairman), Spring Capital, Redwood Partners, and Ignitas AS.
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| Vungle Hustles Its Way Into $2M All-Star Seed Round For Mobile App Video Trailers Network Posted: 02 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Vungle, a new company that wants to help mobile developers market their apps through video “trailers,” has just raised an enormous $2 million seed round from the who’s who of Silicon Valley. The round includes Google Ventures, AOL Ventures [Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL], Crosslink Capital, as well as several notable angels like SV Angel’s Ron Conway, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, SoftTech VC’s Charles Hudson, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper. “Much like the same way a movie trailer might entice people to watch a film, we think a video trailer might encourage people to download an application,” explains Vungle co-founder Zain Jaffer of the company’s product. The problem Vungle wants to solve for app developers, is two-fold: getting that video made, and then getting it seen by prospective users. Vungle has created a process where it can produce a high-quality, 15-second video of an app in action using screen capturing tech, and best of all, it can generate the final product within 24 hours. The app “trailer,” so to speak, is filmed in HD and offers professional voiceovers of the action displayed. The other part to Vungle’s service is its in-app video platform. Functioning like an ad network, participating app developers will display the videos for other apps within their own apps, and others will do the same for them. The idea is that users will find the video trailers more interesting than a simple banner ad, for example, and will be encouraged to try out the new app or game being advertised. Developers can also opt-in to show these trailers in their apps as another way to monetize their content, even if they’re not participating with ad spend of their own. Maynard Webb, former board member at AdMob and founder of Webb Investment Network, raves about the service, saying that when he saw the technology, it was one of those ‘aha moments’ for him. “They have figured out a way to create high-quality video trailers at scale and an accessible cost – and integrate them into applications for maximum downloads, analytics, and monetization. This company could win big in the exploding mobile applications space,” Webb says, “and that’s why we’re putting our money on Vungle.” Vungle was created by two young Brits, Zain Jaffer and Jack Smith, who have a reputation now as something of hustlers. While that typically has somewhat of negative connotation, people seem to mean this in a good way. These guys read TechCrunch’s post about the AngelPad incubator and then hustled their way in by buying hyperlocal, targeted search and Facebook ads to reach AngelPad founder Thomas Korte and his friends (!). The ads said that they had an urgent message, and if you knew Thomas Korte, then click here to send him an email. The landing page, of course, included Vungle’s video pitch. After dozens of people emailed Korte about the ads’ appearance (do you know these guys?), he took their call, asking them to please take the ads down. Like now. Despite the heavy-handed tactics, the ads did their job. The guys snagged the last spot in AngelPad, flew to San Francisco, slept in the boardroom for a bit, and proceeded to pitch investors everywhere from elevators to their own homes. While I’m sure most investors hope that all founders won’t adopt the same (slightly crazy!) ad-targeting tactics, when the product is good enough, a little hustle can seemingly pay off. (Heck, these guys almost hustled their way into two TechCrunch posts – the funding announcement and a TCTV interview, but we talked amongst ourselves and discovered that they were pitching multiple writers simultaneously. Still, way to get on the radar guys!) Currently, Vungle’s product is only in its alpha stage, and is being tested with a handful of developers. A wider beta rollout is expected for June. Pricing has yet to be determined, but for now, the founders tell me that they’re not thinking of offering the video trailer creation offering as a standalone service. Interested developers can register for Vungle here. Below, an example trailer.
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| Next-Generation Publishing Platform Hyperink Wants To Transform Blogs Into Books Posted: 02 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT  YC company Hyperink, a next-generation digital book publishing platform, is debuting a new service which helps bloggers create short books from their existing content. As we’ve reported in the past, Hyperink wants to disrupt the book publishing world. The startup’s digital book publishing platform and full-service agency will help any aspiring author write, design, publish, market, and sell a book without any up-front fees. Hyperink wants to represent the long-tail of book demand. Hyperink’s books production costs are under $1,000 on average, and are published in under a month. And also offers higher royalty rates, and give authors up to 50 percent of their earnings (many publishers give authors around 25 percent). With the “Blog To Books” program, Hyperink assigns a staff editor to curate a blogger’s posts, structure them into a narrative format, and then create a book in PDF, epub, and mobi formats. This book is then published to Hyperink’s marketplace, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and Kobo (iBooks are coming soon). Hyperink has developed a set of marketing tools for the blogger too (e.g., a widget to include on their blog) and can also update the book over time, too, based on new content. So far, Hyperink has already done this with a few bloggers including Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal, and investor Brad Feld of Feld Thoughts. Both books are on track to make tens of thousands of dollars this year, says Hyperink. Of course, Amazon also offers a short-form publishing platform via Kindle Single’s but Hyperink CEO Kevin Gao says that while the lengths are similar the startup is focused around curation as opposed to just publishing original content with “Blog to Books.” Basically, the blogger writes a forward, and editors will copy-edit and fact check all blog posts and suggest titles. He adds that not every blog will have enough compelling content for a short book; but he does feel that there is a definite opportunity for thought leaders to package their blog posts into readable formats off the web. Hyperink has raised $1.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, SVAngel, Lerer Ventures, Launch Capital, Cyriac Roeding, Jack Abraham and others
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| Weebly Adds Slick iOS App To Its Quietly Huge Web Site Creation Business Posted: 02 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT  I keep hearing rumors about the ridiculous amounts of money that Weebly is making. But the San Francisco company, which provides a set of tools for small businesses and other organizations to easily create their own web sites, has only scoffed at the nine-figure amounts I’ve thrown at them. Instead, they’ve shared something else — a new mobile app that lets new users quickly create their own sites, or existing folks manage what they have going. In a series of quick swipes, it lets you get through naming a site, upload images, choosing a theme, and publishing your first post. If you want to get fancier, you can also take photos and alter them with a set of filters, or shoot videos to publish. The admin interface lets users manage multiple sites, and comes with some of the core features from its home site, including comment moderation, and form creation for surveys, contact lists and submissions (which will all also work on mobile). The free app is available (here) for iPhone now and Android later, cofounders Dan Veltri and David Rusenko tell me. Language support is currently available for English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese and Dutch. Web-savvy folks may not realize it, but many organizations still lack a strong online and mobile presence. For example, Frederic recently covered an industry study showing that 95% of independent restaurants don’t have a mobile site, and only 40% have online menus. Yes, there are a number of other companies out there that let people set up their own sites. But Tumblr is more of a social network, Facebook and Twitter accounts are more about getting distribution than providing a full set of features, and heavier-duty blog platforms like WordPress require more work to set up and maintain. Weebly’s main competitors are companies like Wix and Webs.com — or, rather, the lack of awareness among categories of users like those poor independent web site owners. It’s making big inroads, though, which is why I keep hearing those revenue rumors. Since launching in 2007, it has gained 11 million registered users (people who have set up web sites), and accounts for around 2% of all sites on the web. Traffic is around 75 million unique visitors a month. Its net promoter score — an industry calculation of how likely users are to recommend a service to others — is an unusually high 80%. Its revenues, which come from special features like e-commerce stores, have made the company profitable since January of 2009, the cofounders tell me from their awesome new offices downtown — and “very profitable” today.
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| TalentSplash Is A Social Network For Finding Or Becoming The Next Lady Gaga Posted: 02 May 2012 07:01 AM PDT  I live in New York City, and feel lucky for it. Every day I meet a waitress, bartender, receptionist, or Occupy Wall Street protestor who dreams of greatness. They aren’t really waitresses or receptionists; they’re creatives just waiting to see their name in lights. But the ladder to the top is a creaky, weak old thing that few survive. And so was born TalentSplash. It’s a social network for talent, at its core, with three main purposes. First, artists of any kind, whether it be comedians, writers, actors, singers, film-makers, etc., can post their work to TalentSplash to be discovered and build up an audience. This includes video postings for performers, as well as photo and text posts. Artists can even post info about upcoming events they may be coordinating or featured in, or sell their guitars, photographs, or other gear. But it’s more than a launch pad. There’s a network here, which allows agents, businesses, casting directors, or really anyone on the hunt for fresh new talent, to post listings for various gigs and comb through the different artists on the site to see who fits the look they’re going for. Of course, these two functionalities turn the site into a type of job board for creatives, but the thing about creatives is that they need a real-life audience (a fan base, if you will) in order to build up their resume. That’s where you come in. The average Joe can hop over to TalentSplash to discover the hottest new band or an up-and-coming star, and watch their career form from the very beginning. Stardom is a difficult feat to achieve, as is launching a new social network. But TalentSplash seems confident that untapped artists need a dedicated, niche network to display their talent, and the site completes that task well. Sign-up is free, so if you dream of making it to the big time, or simply want to check out the next Beyonce, head on over to TalentSplash.com and check it out. Click to view slideshow.
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| New iPad Ship Time Improves To 3-5 Days At Apple.com Posted: 02 May 2012 06:44 AM PDT  The new iPad is nearly two months old and it’s still not available for immediate shipping from Apple. However, the wait time just improved to less than a week. Apple.com now lists all the new iPad variations with just a 3-5 day wait time. Happy days. “[We're] selling as fast as we can make them,” said Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said on last week’s earnings call. The iPad is clearly a hit and up until now, buyers had to wait one or two weeks when purchasing from Apple’s online store. Unfortunately buyers in overseas markets will still have to wait more than a week. U.S. buyers have other options besides Apple.com, though. Best Buy, Target and Walmart stock and sell the new iPad within their brick and mortar stores but a quick online search reveals that the stores have a limited amount of stock as well. The Apple Store is also a good bet. This is par for the course. It generally takes several months for the iPad and iPhone demand to dip down to realistic supply levels. Until that happens, buying one often requires patience and blinders. Yeah, Best Buy might have a whole warehouse full of Android tabs available to take home immediately, but trust me, the iPad is worth the wait.
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| Posted: 02 May 2012 06:25 AM PDT  As Nokia continues to try to turn itself around as a mobile phone business, it is also playing on the offense in the legal game: today it announced that it has filed fresh round of patent suits — 11 in all — against HTC, RIM and Viewsonic across courts in the U.S. and Germany, covering some 45 patents, all told. The suits go to show that a company like Nokia has a lot more arsenal in its stores to fight against competitors as it struggles win business with consumers. The fact that it has so many patents among its assets also means that there is significantly more value to this company than just its handset business. These cases also represent new, legal patent ground in two ways that indicate Nokia is getting more aggressive in litigation (perhaps in inverse variation to its other fortunes):
Nokia says the patents concern “proprietary innovations” in hardware capabilities that involve dual function antennas, power management and multimode radios. Software features including app stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption and retrieval of email attachments on a mobile device are also included in the list. Nokia says that it owns about 10,000 patent families. Recent research from Chetan Sharma noted that makes Nokia one of the biggest patent holders of all in mobile — although the rate at which it’s putting claims on to IP has slowed significantly as the company has cut costs and hunkered down for growth: It looks like there are 11 separate cases in this latest patent dispute:
In the meantime, Nokia has had another depressing quarter in terms of its own results, an in terms of how well its competitors did. Nokia declined in almost every metric in its Q1 earnings two weeks ago, with sales falling by $4 billion to $9.2 billion and smartphone sales down by more than fifty percent both in terms of units and revenue. It has lost out to Samsung, by most accounts, as the world’s leading phone vendor, with smartphones increasingly looking like a two-horse race between Samsung and Apple. Ironically, the two companies also getting the short end of the competitive stick against Apple and Samsung are none other than HTC and RIM. Full statement below
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| Thanks To A ‘Conflict Of Interest,’ Target Said To Stop Selling Amazon’s Kindle Posted: 02 May 2012 06:24 AM PDT  If you were planning to swing by your local Target to buy a Kindle some time soon, you may want to add a little pep to your step. An inside source told The Verge that Amazon’s line of Kindle e-readers and tablets would soon disappear from Target’s store shelves, due to an unspecified “conflict of interest.” Sales of Amazon’s hardware hasn’t dried up just yet though — that same source sent along an internal memo that points to May 13 (i.e. Mothers Day) as the point after which store stock would no longer be replenished. Though there’s no official word on why the split is taking place, the rationale behind it must be a doozy. After all, Target was tapped as the first brick-and-mortar retailer to offer Amazon’s e-readers and has been slinging Kindles for just over two years now (even ahead of more gadget-friendly stores like Best Buy). Before that, Target also spent a long time leaning on Amazon to power their e-commerce offerings — from 2001 to 2011, to be more specific. It’s also worth noting that Target referred to the Kindle Fire as their best selling tablet during Black Friday 2011, a factoid that Amazon placed front and center in their exultory press release. So what gives? As it turns out, Apple may have a hand in this situation — The Verge notes that Apple recently inked a deal with the red-tinted retailer to launch 25 mini-stores within existing Target locations. Somehow, that doesn’t strike me as being the deciding factor, especially considering that Apple and Amazon (not to mention Kobo and Barnes and Noble) products have managed to co-exist just fine on Target’s shelves for years. Still, the possibility exists that Amazon bristled at the notion of Apple products getting more visibility than theirs despite Amazon’s considerable history with Target. I’ve reached out to both Target and Amazon for an official comment, but neither could comment at time of writing.
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| Posted: 02 May 2012 06:02 AM PDT  A potentially big move forward for cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio — and an intriguing development for Microsoft, given its would-be ownership of Skype: Twilio and Microsoft have formed a strategic alliance to offer Twilio’s APIs to developers on the Windows Azure platform. The offering will cover both Twilio’s voice and messaging services, and Twilio is sweetening the deal by giving developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes when they sign up. Windows Azure — Microsoft’s cloud platform for building and deploying web, mobile, enterprise and other apps — is playing an increasing role in the company’s bigger strategy to target developers — and make sure that they don’t all keep opting for a competing service from Amazon, EC2. Microsoft has a hurdle ahead of it: as pointed out by Wired last week, Azure is “the world’s most misunderstood cloud.” (Poor Microsoft!) The Twilio features are useful in that they, too, are cloud-based and do not require consumers/end users to have any applications or clients downloaded to use them. (That’s one way Twilio is differentiated from Skype.) Features available via Twilio include interactive voice response, mobile app distribution via SMS, call automation or two-factor authentication. As more applications and the servicing of them move to the cloud, I think we’re going to see a much bigger emphasis on solutions that deliver functionality without too many strings attached. Microsoft seems to think so, too: "We’ve seen the innovation happening around Twilio, and we want to make it as easy as possible for Windows Azure developers to build great apps that use Twilio's communications platform and take advantage of Windows Azure's scalability, reliability and flexibility,” Scott Guthrie, corporate VP, Microsoft, said in a statement. The move is the next chapter in the expansion of Twilio’s business. Last week the company announced that it hired a new, full-time, European marketing director — James Parton, who got poached from Telefonica — in order to build out its relationships and business on that side of the pond. Twilio’s VoIP API is already used by companies like eBay, Airbnb and Hulu, as well as many smaller developers, to add voice and text services into their consumer apps. 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. [Image: Sean MacEntee, Flickr]
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| Yahoo Launches Online Marketing Dashboard For Small Businesses Posted: 02 May 2012 05:30 AM PDT  You may not know this but Yahoo still operates a product called Yahoo Small Business, which provides SMBs and sites with web hosting, domain name registration, web site design templates, e-commerce solutions and more. In fact, Yahoo says that it has helped millions of businesses get online and grow their presence on the web. Today, the company is debuting a new marketing dashboard to give users additional insight into online reputation, web metrics and more. As the company explains, the new tool allows small businesses to analyze website metrics and maintain accurate and comprehensive business listings across the Web. For example, the dashboard enables social media monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, including on Yelp, Yahoo and others. The dashboard also includes online reputation management, pulling information and reviews from up to 8,000 sources such as Facebook and Twitter. Users can access website performance metrics from various sources including Google Analytics. And the dashboard provides email marketing, SEO, and SEM campaign tracking. The marketing dashboard also has a number of paid features, including a suped up version of its reputation management functionality, email campaign tracking, and more. It should be interesting to see if Yahoo Small Business will survive new CEO Scott Thompson’s plans to cut 50 Yahoo properties.
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| Berlin-based Orderbird Gets $3.5M For Its iOS-Based Restaurant Ordering Solution Posted: 02 May 2012 05:23 AM PDT  As NFC continues to see growing adoption, we are still noticing mobile payment solutions that don’t use the technology picking up more traction — and funding: one of the latest comes from Germany, where a Berlin-based company called Orderbird has picked up a €2.7 million ($3.5 million) round for a service that lets restaurants use iOS devices to take customer’s food orders, send them to the kitchen and act as a “cash register” to process the payments at the end. The round was led by Alstin, a holding company headed by German financier Carsten Maschmeyer, who invested €2.4 million, with another €300,000 coming from angels and existing strategic investors backing Orderbird. (They include Lars Kamp, Carlo Kölzer and Tom Köhl.) The company has raised €3.2 million ($4.2 million) since opening for business in February 2011. The funding for Orderbird comes at the same time that companies like Square and PayPal, with its Here service, continue to make inroads with their own non-NFC-based mobile payments services. And the food services side of the equation has seen an equally big push, with Just-Eat earlier this week raising $64 million for its online takeout aggregation service. A service like Orderbird could become a likely partner for a company like PayPal, which offers the payment piece for merchants but little in the way of customized services to make that payment integrated with other functions. And given that PayPal has not yet expanded Here to Europe, partnering with a company building up relationships and a customer base here could be a useful way for PayPal to make a quick entry. Jakob Schreyer, the founder and CEO of Orderbird, says there are already 300 paying customers using Orderbird in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where the service integrates with products from companies like Epsom and Matrix POS (another strategic investor), which are already widely used in point-of-sale services. He says the company plans to use the funds to extend that to further European markets like the UK, as well as to start making moves into the U.S. later this year. Orderbird is hoping that its payment solution, which has been specifically tailored to the restaurant trade — featuring ways of customizing menus and offering other tags that are typical for food ordering, as well as an analytics tool that lets a restaurateur look at all the data that gets collected through the system — will help it compete in a crowded market all competing for the same piece of business from the multibillion-dollar food service industry. In the U.S. it will face significant competition from the likes of the mobile payment consortium Isis, as well as solutions more specifically aimed at the same restaurant sector Orderbird is targeting, such as POSLavu, among others. That’s where the funding will also come in handy, in the form of beefing up the product and business to get more competitive advantage. Schreyer says Orderbird plans to hire more engineers and sales people as it looks to expand the kinds of services it offers through its platform. Future products that Orderbird is currently trialling include services that let users order their own food (instead of via a waiter), either in the restaurant itself or as a pre-order ahead of visiting the venture to pick it up.
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| Jive Debuts New App Integrations, Universal Web Access For Social Network For Businesses Posted: 02 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT  Social enterprise company Jive is debuting a number of new features for its social network for businesses today. The company is also announcing its Try Jive, a free 30-day trial for customers. Jive is one of the giants on the social enterprise space. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive's software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured, internal social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, social networking features and more. Via a new plugin, users can now integrate Jive Anywhere, which allows users to search their Jive networks and access information from their browser. So within a web-based CRM product, you could look up deal discussion and documents in your Jive network without having to leave the page. Jive is also debuting a more integrated App experience, which allows users to integrate data from third-party apps into the Jive platform. For example, the new app from Box brings Box folders and files directly into Jive discussions so customers can see and collaborate on Box documents while creating and viewing content in Jive. Other improvements to Jive’s platforms include more intelligent search, as well as Jive for Teams, a new group collaboration solution for teams of 25 to 250,000 people. Jive also recently launched a dedicated social intranet product for the enterprise and a new customer service software.
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| The Weather Channel’s Revamped Website Goes Social, Tells You When It Will Rain Posted: 02 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT  Today, The Weather Channel celebrates its 30th birthday. It will officially feel old at concerts and hot new night clubs. To mark the occasion, the company has revamped their website, weather.com, to keep up with the times. Weather is a very information-based vertical — there isn’t a whole lot one can do to spruce it up. But TWC is looking to personalize the experience as much as possible. That said, you’ll notice the redesign as soon as you visit the site. Information on your area will be displayed immediately at the top of the page, along with an ever-changing background that reflects the conditions in your area. For example, if it’s rainy where you woke up this morning, the background of the home page will be grey and rainy. If its a clear night, you’ll see a dark background with stars. But obviously it goes much further than that. Weather affects our every plan, even if it’s indoors, so the ability to “Love” or “Ugh!” the weather is only a natural progression as social networking completely takes over our lives. I spoke to the Weather Channel’s Cameron Clayton, EVP of digital products, who explained that “hating” or “disliking” is a bit harsh. But you should feel free to “Ugh!” the crap out of a cold, rainy day. Along with this social integration comes the ability to see what other people in your area are saying about the weather courtesy of new trending keyword graphics from Twitter. This feature only pulls from people in your area to tell you how your neighborhood feels today about the weather. The content on the home page will also change as the site learns your personal interests. So if you like to barbeque on the weekends, information and stories on your weekend weather will be more prominently displayed to make sure your plans don’t get ruined. Speaking of raining on a parade, the new weather.com can predict the future. Well, it can at least predict when it’s going to rain, and better yet, when it’s going to stop raining. TWC made it very clear that no one is doing this but the Weather Channel. Another important new feature is the social emergency broadcast system. When you see a severe weather alert on the site, you can instantly share it with your social networks to keep friends and family in the loop about your safety. Soon enough, the site will also allow you to monitor any severe weather alerts that may be affecting others in your social networks, so you can clue them in if they aren’t already prepared. The redesign comes in conjunction with the recent release of the TWC iPad app, and it would seem as though the company is revamping across all channels to prepare for our highly digital future.
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| Russian Classified Giant’s $75M From Accel Shows It’s 1999 In Emerging Economies Posted: 02 May 2012 04:14 AM PDT  Avito.ru, the biggest online classified ads site in Russia, has secured a fresh $75 million round of funding from Accel Partners’ London office. Founded in 2008, Avito has so far landed $101 million from Accel, Baring Vostok Private Equity, Kinnevik, and Northzone. The capital will be used for expansion and hiring. Russia’s classifieds ads business has plenty of room for growth because – guess what, kids – it's basically 1999 out there in Russia. And this large emerging market is playing through all those businesses models we know and love from back in the good ‘ol days. Expect more of this. Avito is particularly interesting because, apart from being Russia’s only real classifieds site, it’s also a huge player across the significant categories of retail, real estate agencies and auto ads. It’s free to place an ad but optional extras like advanced search or highlighted ads are paid for. It has 30 million unique users per month, while around six million items go up each month. Avito reckons by the end of this year the value of all items traded will pass 3 percent of Russia’s GDP. That’s the kind of growth Accel is buying into. Accel’s Sonali de Rycker told me: “The real growth in Russia is because people are coming online in the regions now, not just Moscow. When people come online for the first time they first discover what they can buy – and that’s goods and services.” Thus, classifieds maps to that growth. It’s my view that we will see many more fundings of sites and services like Avito in emerging markets over the next year. While the developed world debates whether there is a bubble in companies like Instagram, the real hyper-growth is playing out, out there in BRICs land.
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