The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Dropbox For Android Update Packs Video Streaming For ICS Users, Korean Language Support
- TechCrunch Disrupt SF Is Back! Battlefield Applications Open And Tickets On Sale Now
- With A Focus On Childcare Centers, Mom Trusted Raises $1M+ For Its Early Education Marketplace
- Pixorial’s Mobile Video-Sharing App Adds Real-Time Filters To Take On Socialcam And Viddy
- Apple To Cough Up $2.2M Over Misleading Australian iPad 4G Ads
- Bad Guys, Prepare Yourself For The ReconRobotics Throwbox XT Reconnaissance Robot
- Phantom Fireworks Uses Nook Tablets To Help Customers Preview The Boom
- Eventster Brings Crowdsourced Event Discovery To iPhone & iPad
- Win 2 Free Tickets To Le Web London, Courtesy Of TechCrunch
- Panasonic CEO: We Have No Plans To Invest $630M Into Olympus
- SocialFlow Lets Marketers Double-Down On Popular Tweets With Real-Time Analytics
- Autodesk Acquires Vela Systems, Aims To Bring Construction Management Systems To Tablets
- Huawei Launches $149 Activa 4G For MetroPCS, Cleverly Avoids Competition With Its First U.S.-Bound 4G LTE Device
- Thomson Reuters Acquires Mobile Startup Apsmart To Re-invigorate Its Mobile Products
- Camera+ Turned Down Acquisitions From Adobe, Google, Twitter; Also Says “F*ck The VCs”
- FAA Chooses Office 360: Microsoft One-Ups Google In Battle For Government Cloud Market
- 500 Startups-Backed Cloud Productivity Tool 300.mg To Close Its Doors Next Week
- TaskRabbit Founder Leah Busque Takes Back The Reins, Stepping Back Into CEO Role
- Pinterest Ponders A San Francisco Home
- Creative Market Nabs $1.3M From SV Angel, CrunchFund To Become An Etsy For Digital Design
| Dropbox For Android Update Packs Video Streaming For ICS Users, Korean Language Support Posted: 08 Jun 2012 09:09 AM PDT  Hey, Ice Cream Sandwich users — if you’re a Dropbox user and somehow haven’t gotten the latest (2.1.4) update, do yourself a favor and get on it. The update is sure to please those who find the Dropbox experience to be woefully light on Hangul, as it introduces Korean language support, but there’s something even better to play with. This release sees the addition of a nifty, Ice Cream Sandwich-exclusive feature — the ability to stream videos stored within a Dropbox account. As something of a digital media hoarder, I threw a handful of big miscellaneous video files (a 500MB .avi and a 400MB .mkv, specifically) into my Dropbox account to see how well things actually worked. Thankfully just waiting for them to be stored in the cloud was the most odious part of the process — once everything was in place, it was a simple enough process to select the file from within the Dropbox app and kick back momentarily with an old episode of Top Gear. Quality, it should be noted, can sometimes take a hit in the process. The video never got to the point where I wanted to give up entirely, but those hoping that their videos will be pixel-perfect should probably just download the file(s) onto their devices instead. It goes also without saying that this probably isn’t the best thing to use if you’re on a capped data plan, though for the record, the LTE connection on my Galaxy Nexus managed to keep up just fine.
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| TechCrunch Disrupt SF Is Back! Battlefield Applications Open And Tickets On Sale Now Posted: 08 Jun 2012 09:01 AM PDT  TechCrunch Disrupt New York was a huge success this past May, but we’re not resting on our laurels. We’re planning a few great surprises for our San Francisco event in September — but first, the Startup Battlefield applications are now open. You saw some of the finalists in action on stage last month. Gtar, the iPhone guitar, has become a cultural sensation and blown through its ambitious Kickstarter campaign. UberConference, which promises to change how conference calls are done, convinced the judges that it has the best shot at building a big, disruptive business. Meanwhile, some of the other members of the Battlefield found themselves the subject of mainstream print media and even Jay Leno’s Tonight Show monologue. So are you ready to launch your company on the biggest startup launch stage? Tell us about it. Disrupt SF will be take place on September 10th through the 12th at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse. Last year, Shaker was the breakout star of the San Francisco Battlefield companies and walked away with $50,000, the coveted Disrupt Cup, and more press and headlines than they could have ever imagined. Many Battlefield companies have raised millions of dollars in funding and some have gone on to be acquired by notable companies. Are you a disruptor? Do you think your company could be the breakout star at this year's Disrupt SF? Apply now for the Disrupt Startup Battlefield here. Applications are open until 11:59pm PDT, Monday night, July 9, 2012. Of course it wouldn't be a Disrupt event without our Hackathon kicking it all off on September 8th – 9th. We hope to have hundreds of hackers from all around the world come join us to code, hack, drink, eat, and create something memorable in the 24 hour time period. Who knows, you might just be as big as these guys. Our Disrupt conference is one of the biggest conferences of the year, and we killed it last year in San Francisco. We’re back and ready to do it again.
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| With A Focus On Childcare Centers, Mom Trusted Raises $1M+ For Its Early Education Marketplace Posted: 08 Jun 2012 08:21 AM PDT  Mom Trusted, a startup describing itself as a “social marketplace for early education and care” (which for parents means it’s a killer place to find nannies, babysitters, daycare centers and preschools), has raised $1 million+ in funding. The round was led by Blumberg Capital, and saw participation from 500 Startups, Birchmere Labs, and other angels investors. The company is tackling a problem that every new parent has at some point faced – finding good childcare. It’s also helping parents connect and communicate with each other, while providing childcare centers with tools manage their outreach efforts and communication efforts with their own community of parents. The company, co-founded by Chaz Giles, formerly of Procter & Gamble, and Angela Conley (both parents themselves), has been flying under the radar a bit since its quiet launch in January 2011 in Cincinnati. Since then, Mom Trusted has slowly expanded to San Francisco, New York, then other states including Ohio, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, and Virginia. “You become a parent, and people or society just expects that you’re imbued with all this set of knowledge, like ‘oh, I now know how to do everything!‘,” explains Giles of the challenge they’re tackling. Any new parent, of course, will tell you that’s far from being the case. (Trust me, there’s a lot of googling involved with parenting.) Giles himself faced the problem that Mom Trusted now aims to solve when he was at P&G – he couldn’t find anywhere he felt comfortable leaving his daughter during the day and simply told the company he would be working from home for a while. Of course, many of us don’t have that same option, which is why Mom Trusted makes sense. Today, moms (and dads, despite it not being in the startup’s name!!) do web searches, they talk to friends and other parents…maybe they use a site like Care.com or something similar, if they’re looking for individualized care. But finding a good childcare center? Total crapshoot. On Mom Trusted, parents can search for care providers, save and share the ones they find, access the business info and read the descriptions, and see other recommendations for similar centers below the one currently being viewed. While the site considered experimenting with Yelp-like user reviews, the idea was scrapped, as reviews tend to gravitate towards the negative. Instead, it wants to provide tools to connect parents with other parents for more private communication. Today, Mom Trusted is open to all – nannies, babysitters, and centers alike – but its focus is on childcare centers. “There’s Care.com, there’s Sittercity, there’s UrbanSitter, there’s things out there that target sitters and nannies, but that’s only twenty-five percent of the market,” says Giles, explaining how Mom Trusted differentiates itself from the competition. “The rest of the market is centers. And no one has focused on solving the biggest chunk of the market because, honestly, it was the hardest to solve.” With zero marketing, the company has now helped 300,000 parents find childcare (that’s not user registrations, however – Mom Trusted doesn’t require sign-ups. But by analyzing the actions on the site, the company could tell the difference between a parents’ search and those from others). In addition, over 5,000 childcare centers have joined, claiming or establishing their profile page. The site’s listings are currently pulled in through public data sources, mainly by keeping track of business licenses in the states Mom Trusted operates in. Currently, Mom Trusted is still very much a work in progress. The social features which will allow parents to communicate and network with each other aren’t fully developed. Some regions have more activity than others, and some are lacking social groups, for example. There’s also much in the works on the childcare center side of things, in terms of building out freemium tools to help manage the centers’ marketing and outreach efforts as well as their communication with parents, via a dashboard-like backend. (More on that in the future). The Mom Trusted business model is also still in flux, but will either be a SaaS model and/or on a transaction basis. But, says Giles, the company has already generated over $40 million in revenue for childcare providers, a figure they’ve determined through surveying and sampling their userbase regarding conversions. The company’s seed round was actually closed this March, but the company has kept it quiet until now. Soon, Mom Trusted will be talking more about the tools it has created for childcare centers, but in the meantime, parents can begin using the site search and social features here.
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| Pixorial’s Mobile Video-Sharing App Adds Real-Time Filters To Take On Socialcam And Viddy Posted: 08 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT  It wasn’t too long ago that Pixorial made the jump from being an online video sharing service to rolling out its own social, mobile video applications. Now, in its race to take on the competition and try to become the “Instagram for video,” Pixorial has added a few new feature to its app, including filters that let users spice up their videos in real-time. With the new Pixorial iPhone app, users can choose from up to 17 different real-time filters to augment their videos. They include filters like Sepia, Blur, Sketch, and Grayscale, which apply the effects while the user shoots the video. While the filters are a neat way for users to differentiate their videos, it’s also a way for Pixorial to make money through in-app purchasing. The first five video filters are free, but additional filters available for purchase at the price of $1 for a pack of six. Pixorial got its start on the web, and so users of the mobile app will be able to access their video libraries from either the iPhone or their web browser. And as with other mobile video apps, there’s a social component that will allow them to send videos out to be viewed by friends on a variety of social networks and publishing platforms, including YouTube, Blogger, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. All of that is pretty standard, and I should point out that there are a ton of mobile video apps that already do real-time filters. Like Socialcam, which first introduced the capability last October. But one big differentiator Pixorial does have is that it actively encourages private sharing of videos, for when you don’t want everyone to see your toddler’s first steps or your embarrassing karaoke singing. The app’s “share to crowd” feature lets users email videos out just to individual friends and family. The email provides a private link, where users can watch video from. It’s also a pretty decent user conversion tool, since they have to sign in to view private videos. The other big upgrade in the latest version of the Pixorial app is behind the scenes, but improves the overall experience. That includes a performance upgrade that will provide wide-screen viewing of videos and faster processing of videos uploaded to the web platform. Author’s Note: So there are a whole bunch of mobile video apps, and it’s a big crowded space, and everyone’s hoping that they can catch a little bit of that Instagram magic and translate it into a big, video-based payout. Will one win out and beat all the others? Maybe… but I’m personally a little skeptical. That’s not to say that someone won’t figure out a business model behind the whole thing, but I get the feeling the winner of the social/mobile/video sweepstakes will look totally different from what we’ve seen so far.
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| Apple To Cough Up $2.2M Over Misleading Australian iPad 4G Ads Posted: 08 Jun 2012 07:36 AM PDT  Here in the States, we’re usually fine with faux-G being called 4G. T-Mobile does it with its HSPA+ service, and AT&T called its HSPA+ 4G for a long time too before it rolled out LTE. But I guess people are more picky down under, where the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had accused Apple of misleading the public with its iPad ads touting 4G service. According to The Australian, the company has now agreed to pay approximately $2.21 million to make amends, despite the fact that Apple had already agreed to refund customers who thought they would get 4G LTE service with the new iPad. See, the iPad’s LTE chip is only compatible with the 2100Mhz and 700Mhz bands. Though the 700Mhz band will be freed up for wireless devices around 2013, it’s currently tied up with television broadcasts. The only other option for 4G LTE service in Australia is Telstra, which runs on the 1800Mhz band, which the iPad can not access. To be fair, Apple makes no mention of 4G LTE on its Australian site at this time, instead referencing “ultrafast wireless.” Though, it’s unclear if that’s been changed since meeting with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Apple’s also facing a similar situation in Sweden, where a nearly identical story is playing out. The new iPad is being sold and advertised as a WiFi + 4G device despite the fact that it isn’t compatible with any of Sweden’s 4G LTE bands. Again, the 700Mhz band is used for television while the 2100Mhz band only serves up 3G wireless connectivity. Of course, $2.2 million is pocket change for Apple, but it may force the company to rethink its international advertisements.
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| Bad Guys, Prepare Yourself For The ReconRobotics Throwbox XT Reconnaissance Robot Posted: 08 Jun 2012 07:19 AM PDT  If you’re anything like me, a seasoned veteran of all things CSI, Dexter and GI Joe, you understand the value in a discreet robotic camera such as the ReconRobotics Throwbox XT Reconnaissance Robot. The presser describes the Throwbox XT as a throwable, mobile micro-robot — I’ll just say the robot is awesome. This little robot can pipe live audio and video to the good guys ready to save the day. Unfortunately the Throwbox XT isn’t coming to a Walmart near you. This little guy is meant for real work and not for keeping an eye on the cat. It’s designed to provide audio and video reconnaissance to military and SWAT teams. The robot itself only weights 1.2lbs and can survive a 120 feet throw. ReconRobots states it’s “exceptionally quiet” and thanks to an automatic infrared optical system, it can provide surveillance even in complete darkness. The capture media is feed wirelessly to the handheld Operator Control Unit II. No word on pricing or availability, but it really doesn’t matter. You probably need a DoD or NYPD credit card to order one anyway.
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| Phantom Fireworks Uses Nook Tablets To Help Customers Preview The Boom Posted: 08 Jun 2012 07:03 AM PDT  Everyone’s favorite roadside explosives purveyor, Phantom Fireworks, is now offering “firework previews” on a fleet of Nook Tablets that will be available in stores. The tablets will will allow customers to view photos and videos of the fireworks they’re buying and will streamline retail operations, allowing customer service reps to place orders at the customer’s side. The Youngstown, Ohio-based company is one of the first to use cheap, entry-level tablets on the show floor. Fans of snailnet will appreciate the method of video distribution: “All the demo videos are stored and uploaded onto a secure digital (SD) card at the Phantom Fireworks corporate office in Youngstown and shipped out to the different showrooms across the country.” This presumably reduces the need for the local sites to have a fast Internet connection. Quoth Phantom PR: “The tablets provide a fantastic tool for our customers to demo fireworks before they buy them," Kendall said. "It’s always about improving their customer experience in the showrooms. With the Nooks, we have the ability to turn customers onto Phantom products they've never experienced or purchased, which is a great thing.” This also points towards an interesting trend. Obviously Phantom Fireworks locations don’t need to look as fancified so the Nook Tablet – or a Kindle Fire, for that matter, although the sneakernet SD card swap system wouldn’t work, – is a perfect device. It’s solid, has an acceptable screen, and the floor staff look automatically cooler for using it. Coupled with their excellent Fireworks.com URL it looks like these Phantom folks are pretty darn plugged in for the second place that you visit before you go drink in your cousin’s back yard.
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| Eventster Brings Crowdsourced Event Discovery To iPhone & iPad Posted: 08 Jun 2012 06:59 AM PDT  No plans yet for the weekend? Good! Here’s something you should try then: Eventster is a new app for iPhone and iPad launching today which is tackling local event recommendations. The app pulls in 600,000 events per day across North America and Europe via the Zvents API (now a part of StubHub), offering activities like concerts, festivals, nightlife hotspots, theater showtimes, sports events, and more. As you flip through the events, you can upvote and downvote them, which, in turn, helps power the app’s recommendations. Other locals in your area will see those votes and can then quickly tell which events are trending. Plus, like any good recommendations app, Eventster learns which events you’ll like based on your previous activity. “Event discovery represents a really interesting challenge for us as entrepreneurs,” explains Tackable co-founder Luke Stangel, who helped create Eventster. “Live Nation, on average, sells just 60 percent of its available tickets each year. They did a study trying to figure out why 40 percent of their seats were empty, and found the majority of people said, ‘I would have gone to this event if I had known about it beforehand.’ For Live Nation, event discovery represents a $2.3 billion-a-year pain point,” he says. To use the app, you first sign in with Facebook, and then you can browse through the “popular” section or do a more advanced keyword search. Power users will appreciate that there are a ton of filters, too, to narrow down and sort event listings by time, distance, and category. The search screen also displays events in a more compact list for easy scrolling, and you can also see events plotted on a map (which looks great on iPad). When you find an event you like, you can bookmark it, vote on it or buy tickets, when applicable. Tackable, the company behind Eventster, was founded in late 2010 and previously raised $535,000 from MediaNews, the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country. Tackable was incubated within the San Jose Mercury News its first year, during which time it produced a photojournalism app for iPhone and a location-aware news aggregator called TapIn. But, says Stangel, “we learned a lot a while building TapIn…mostly, that people’s didn’t care about anything but events.” “We’d built this really elegant platform that put news, weather, video, events, deals, business listings and reviews on a map,” Stangel continues. “People would turn off every layer of information except events. We got 10 times more emails about events than any other feature. We knew we were tapping into something pretty powerful.” Hence, Eventster. Today, there are 6 people working on Eventster, including CEO Ed Lucero who co-founded AGENDA in 1998, which went on to raise $40 million in funding, grew to 800 people and became Asia’s largest digital marketing agency before it exited to the WPP Group in 2008. There’s also CTO Steven Woo, who was a principal engineer at Blizzard (he was in charge of Diablo II), and later co-founded his own studio, Hyboreal Games. The company is now raising its Series A.
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| Win 2 Free Tickets To Le Web London, Courtesy Of TechCrunch Posted: 08 Jun 2012 06:58 AM PDT  Well, over 1,000 tickets have been sold to Le Web London, the gigantic tech conference hitting the UK shores on June 19-20. You want to go right? Well, TechCrunch has two tickets to give away, as part of the “adopt an entrepreneur” programme backed by Silicon Valley Bank and LEPE Partners. Here’s how you win the tickets: Explain why you deserve to go to Le Web in the comments below. Convince us why, e.g. you’re a student with an amazing product or you’re the next Zuckerberg etc etc – you get the drift. (For extra points share Le Web London on your social networks, make some content/video, use the tags #leweb #lepe and #svb). We’ll pick the winners randomly from a group of the best entries. Ok, go.
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| Panasonic CEO: We Have No Plans To Invest $630M Into Olympus Posted: 08 Jun 2012 06:36 AM PDT  On Wednesday, reports circulated that Panasonic was interested in injecting a $630 million capital investment into Olympus Corp, but Panasonic CEO Fumio Ohtsubo has stepped up to squash these rumors. According to Reuters, he said that “there isn’t any” plan to invest in Olympus. This is unfortuante news for the beleaguered camera company, which is most definitely in trouble. After hiding investment losses for the past 20 years, the entire accounting scandal was uncovered in November of last year, pushing the company down a spiraling path. Olympus is teetering — even drowning — with Reuters reporting a 4.6 percent equity of total assets for shareholders, which is well below the usual 20 percent that proves financial stability. That said, the firm was looking for a strategic investor to pump some cash back into the company, with Panasonic topping the list of potential suitors. Kyodo News Agency originally reported that Panasonic was ready to spend around $630 million in capital for Olympus, but Mr. Ohtsubo said, “I don’t know where that information came from, not from us.” Other potential investors include Sony, FujiFilm, and Samsung, though it’s unclear if any of them will find Olympus’ medical business attractive enough to forget what Japanese media was calling the biggest corporate scandal in Japan since the 90′s.
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| SocialFlow Lets Marketers Double-Down On Popular Tweets With Real-Time Analytics Posted: 08 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT  SocialFlow was founded to help brands manage their messaging on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For $99 a month, it has a platform that provides a proprietary algorithms to determine when a company should send a particular message out, based on its content, and automatically Tweets it out or updates the company’s Facebook page. For social marketers, this Optimized Publisher thing it sells can be a godsend. But now SocialFlow is going a step further by helping brands determine which Tweets that have already been sent out would be good to spend money on to promote. It does so by measuring the engagement of the audience in real-time — including the number of clicks a message is receiving, the number of RTs, and the number of new followers that it has gotten — and letting the brand know if it’s a good value to promote that Tweet. If it is, an icon will show up in the dashboard’s published archive to signal they should buy, buy, buy. SocialFlow CEO Frank Speiser told me that the idea is to leverage the audience that is already built up around a message and to amplify it. “We already know it’s a resonant message, so let’s double down on that,” he said. Insert marketing speak here: In other words, it leverages a mix of earned and paid media to maximize the return of the company’s social channel. It’s just one more trick for New York City-based SocialFlow, which came out of Betaworks, and raised $7 million from Softbank, RRE Ventures, Betaworks, High Line Venture Partners, AOL Ventures, SV Angel, and some individual angels last year. And with the acquisition of other social media marketing platforms like Buddy Media and Vitrue, by Salesforce and Oracle, respectively, it seems like a good time to be in the business.
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| Autodesk Acquires Vela Systems, Aims To Bring Construction Management Systems To Tablets Posted: 08 Jun 2012 05:34 AM PDT  Autodesk took to the wires this morning to announce its acquisition of a long-standing partner, Vela Systems, which is described in the announcement as “a provider of cloud and mobile field management software for the construction industry.” It’s Autodesk’s hope that this move will better equip the company, and the whole construction industry for that matter, to better utilize cloud storage and mobile products. Terms of the transaction were not revealed. Vela Systems’ products will eventually join Autodesk’s growing collection of mobile products that focus on content creation. This builds upon Autodesk’s current Building Information Modeling products. "BIM has tremendous value in the planning and design aspects of construction projects, but if you can't get that rich data into the field, at the point of construction, you are leaving out the critical 'last 100 yards' in the process. Integrating Vela Systems and its cloud and mobile products with the Autodesk BIM portfolio transforms the business of construction, delivering valuable information to job sites anywhere in the world," said Amar Hanspal, an Autodesk Senior Vice President, Information Modeling and Platform Products Group, said in a released statement this morning. Autodesk promises that the Vela Systems addition will streamline multiple aspects of the construction process. This will reportedly be done through increasing the virtual building’s quality and fidelity, hopefully improving the overall design. By moving a lot of a construction project’s nonsense — such as inventory management, document tracking, and construction plans — to the tablet (and also the cloud), this could result in big things for everyone involved from the original architect to the eventual occupant.
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| Posted: 08 Jun 2012 05:21 AM PDT  Huawei has been relatively quiet of late. Aside from Ascend D Quad smartphone we saw announced back at MWC, the company hasn’t been very present on U.S. shores. But with LTE hitting its stride, the company has today announced its very first 4G LTE handset: the Activa 4G. MetroPCS will carry the prepaid device, which is a Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered handset. It sports a 3.5-inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen with a 5-megapixel rear camera (LED flash-enabled) and a VGA front-facing camera for video chat. “We are honored to bring our first 4G LTE device to U.S. audiences with the support of MetroPCS’ powerful and expansive network,” said EVP of Huawei Device USA Michael Chuang. “MetroPCS is committed to providing customers with advanced, flexible and affordable smartphone options through its no-annual contract services, and is the ideal partner for Huawei’s entrance into a new era for smartphones and handsets.” While Huawei is a bigger player in Asia, the company has yet to make waves here in the States in any tangible way. That said, MetroPCS seems like a good fit for this device as it won’t have as much competition from other flagship devices as it would on Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint. The Huawei Activa 4G is available now in MetroPCS stores and online for $149, which is a little high for a mid-range device, but you can make it back up by being free from a contract.
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| Thomson Reuters Acquires Mobile Startup Apsmart To Re-invigorate Its Mobile Products Posted: 08 Jun 2012 04:25 AM PDT  Nice win for DN Capital today. Apsmart, a London-based mobile platform and product development firm that was majority owned by the VC has been acquired by Thomson Reuters. Terms were not disclosed. Thomson Reuters plans to use the startup to provide its customers with mobile solutions with expert-enriched content, news and other features those suited-up Reuters users like. Reuters has been somewhat left behind in the mobile apps stakes so this acquisition should power its new direction. Founded in 2009 by Rahul Powar, creator of the first Shazam iPhone application, Apsmart has gained a reputation for data-driven apps for iOS and Android devices. Powar becomes the new head of mobile application development at Thomson Reuters. (He was formerly a lead developer at Shazam).
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| Camera+ Turned Down Acquisitions From Adobe, Google, Twitter; Also Says “F*ck The VCs” Posted: 08 Jun 2012 02:03 AM PDT  Two years ago, app developer tap tap tap launched Camera+ onto the App Store. For only a buck, users could get way more mileage out of the mobile photography experience, bringing 27 color effects and granular controls to their iPhone cameras. These features have made it one of the most popular camera apps out there. So popular, in fact, that Camera+ rang in its second birthday today with its 8 millionth download, tap tap tap founder John Casasanta said in a blog post. As part of the celebration, Casasanta reflected on his company’s journey over the past two years. In his post, he reveals that tap tap tap received a handful of acquisition offers from several notable names: “It started with Adobe, then went to Zynga (for The Heist, not really for Camera+), then Google. And most recently, Twitter.” The startup has also apparently had plenty of interest from VCs and was recently close to the finalizing its first round of financing. However, the team decided against closing the round, Casasanta says, because they “didn’t like the direction the investors were trying to push us in,” and instead chose to remain independent. In a rallying cry for all those who forgo outside investment, the founder then exposed his middle finger to the world’s venture capitalists, saying, “I've said it before and I'll say it again … f*ck the VCs!” In a post from 2008, which he links to, Casasanta outlines his quarrels with VCs, saying:
He sounds bitter, like someone who’s been scarred by a deal or two with investors turning sour, but his note of encouragement are words for all punk and indie developers to live by — although it’s probably not advisable for all to follow the same path. Clearly, there are more than a few startups that would kill to have been in the same fortunate position, and would have gladly taken the money.
The post also shares the news that tap tap tap’s development team has grown to 17, and that the next major release for Camera+ is on the way, code-named “Darkroom,” which includes some “pretty substantial” updates that have apparently been in the works for “a very long time.” Here’s some more of the founder’s comments on how Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram affected Camera+:
Find Casasanta’s blog post here. Camera+ here.
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| FAA Chooses Office 360: Microsoft One-Ups Google In Battle For Government Cloud Market Posted: 07 Jun 2012 11:37 PM PDT  In early 2011, former U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and team helped institute a “Cloud First” policy, which aimed to speed up the government’s internal adoption of cloud computing and services. Since then, many government agencies have begun moving their collaboration and productivity applications to the cloud. Today, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) became the latest to transition, awarding Computer Sciences Corp a contract worth as much as $91 million to implement its cloud productivity solution based on Microsoft Office 360, which includes messaging, calendaring, IMs and webconferencing. According to Microsoft’s statement, 60,000 FAA employees and 20,000 employees at the Department of Transportation will be migrating to Office 360. The contract, which is for one year service with an option for an additional six years, is somewhat of a big, symbolic win for Microsoft in its ongoing efforts to win control of the government cloud market. But Microsoft has to ward off plenty of competition in enterprise cloud services, namely Google, which won a big government contract with the Department of The Interior last month to implement its cloud services. Microsoft and Google have been locked in an ongoing struggle that goes back several years. Google filed a lawsuit in 2010 as part of a solicitation of the Department of the Interior’s business, which required that vendors be compliant with Microsoft’s online suite. Google claimed that the requirement was an unfair competitive advantage, and a back-and-forth began between the two companies over whether or not Google was authorized to sell to the government or not. The war over FISMA compliance came to a close last month, when Google was finally awarded the contract. As Sharon Fisher of CMS Wire pointed out last year, it’s no wonder that Google and Microsoft are ready to do battle over this market. The U.S. government is a potential goldmine for IT vendors, “with a total IT budget of some $78.5 billion” — and that was just for 2011. The adoption of Google Apps at the enterprise level has been increasing fast, and with Apple and others eating into the revenues it sees for software licensing, it clearly wants to make a big push to make up the difference in cloud services. The FAA’s decision to opt for Office 360 (though implemented by CSC) is a big win, but clearly this back-and-forth is just getting started, and they’re not the only two players eying the market. Not to over-dramatize or anything. The FAA follows the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the governments of California, Nebraska and Minnesota in moving to the cloud. For more, see Microsoft’s announcement here.
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| 500 Startups-Backed Cloud Productivity Tool 300.mg To Close Its Doors Next Week Posted: 07 Jun 2012 09:56 PM PDT  Launching its public beta in the fall of last year, 300milligrams (also known as “300.mg,”) set out to build a “priority inbox for team conversations.” The startup was one of the 34 teams in 500 Startups’ Fall 2011 batch, and, after graduating in January, spent the first half of this year iterating, trying to find its stride, some follow-on funding, and a workable business model. Alas, it seems that 300.mg was unable to find the cash it needed to press on, as TechCrunch learned today that the startup will be closing its doors next Friday, June 15th. According to an email sent to its users, the service will be officially shuttering its service on June 15th, and “all data will be deleted.” Founded by Estonian serial entrepreneurs Mark Kopfman, Anton Litvinenko, and Jevgeni Holodkov, 300.mg aimed to be a solution to the fragmentation of business apps. When we spoke to Kopfman earlier this year, he told us that many businesses have become active users of a variety of cloud services, whether it be Dropbox, Google Apps, or Salesforce. But, with the distribution across different platforms, the web, desktop, and mobile, the founders believed employees struggled to find and organize their business-critical documents, complicating collaboration. So, 300.mg offered a team communication tool that integrated with a host of cloud productivity apps, like Google Docs and Calendar, Evernote, Salesforce, Box.net, Basecamp, and Dropbox, to help them boost productivity through easier, all-in-one-place access to their documents, tasks and conversations. Through its prioritization algorithm, which is based on users’ work activity streams, 300.mg surfaced threads that are most relevant to team members. It also aggregated and prioritized the most important email notifications from connected cloud apps, as well as offering a collaboration layer over work tools to let users discuss the most important items without switching between apps. While the idea looks good on paper, enterprise social networks like Yammer have seized too much of the market, and there were just one too many moving parts for 300.mg. We’ve reached out to the team for more, and will update as soon as we hear back. In the meantime, as you’ll see in the email below, it looks like the founders have already moved onto their next startup, called Import2, a service that helps businesses migrate their data between blogging platforms like Tumblr, WordPress, and Posterous. The service will be “launching soon.” Email below:
UPDATE: Kopfman jokingly tells us that part of the startup’s decision to shutter its services was that “it was extremely hard to compete with email ” … He also said that the team is looking at this more as a “major pivot” than the end of the road. “With the new product import2.com,” he says, “we are going to continue helping businesses with their challenges in using cloud apps.”
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| TaskRabbit Founder Leah Busque Takes Back The Reins, Stepping Back Into CEO Role Posted: 07 Jun 2012 09:00 PM PDT  Leah Busque, the founder of TaskRabbit, the web and mobile marketplace for outsourcing small jobs and errands, has reassumed the role of CEO at the San Francisco-based startup. It was just this past fall that Busque handed over the chief executive title to Eric Grosse, an experienced web executive best known for co-founding Hotwire and leading it through its 2003 sale to digital conglomerate InterActiveCorp. Grosse is staying on with TaskRabbit on the company’s board of directors, where he will continue to advise on strategy and operations. Bringing Product And Engineering To The ForefrontAlthough from the outside the change may seem like a surprising shift, Busque told me in an interview at TaskRabbit’s headquarters that there are absolutely no hard feelings associated with the move. “Eric has been incredibly helpful over the past nine months, so I’m super psyched that he’s going to say on board,” she said. “His focus has been strategic planning, corporate strategy, and high level operations, and those aspects are incredibly important things he helped us set up and establish.” But it seems that the four-year-old TaskRabbit has realized that amid a growing landscape of competitors from Zaarly to Exec to Postmates, its real value proposition is not in metrics and operations — it’s in the unique flavor and experience it delivers. And it just so happens that that’s what Busque has been focusing on all along. Busque, who first conceived of TaskRabbit while working full-time as a software engineer at IBM, stepped away from being CEO in October to concentrate solely on the company’s product in a “chief product officer” role — a bid to get back to her roots in a way, she told me at the time. Since then, she said, the company’s executive team and its investors have realized that a focus on the product and engineering should be driving TaskRabbit’s core strategy overall. The Old Models Don’t Necessarily ApplyBusque is straightforward in addressing any misconceptions about why Grosse was brought on in the first place. TaskRabbit has raised nearly $25 million in venture capital, and often when big-name investors get on board they encourage younger founders to step aside and let an executive with some “grey hair” take the reins. That was not the case here, Busque said: Rather, it was she herself who thought that it was important to bring on a more experienced person in either a CEO or COO role, based on what she had learned from watching other business models. “It was my decision to do that search, and find some executive help. There was absolutely zero pressure from investors.” Over time, Busque said, she has come to realize that the old models of building a business may not apply at all to TaskRabbit. “It’s a unique business. Really, it’s a completely new industry that we’re a part of, and all of these are trends and segments that have only been around for maybe 12 months. It needs a lot of innovation, and while we’ve learned a lot with Eric’s help that has been amazing, now it’s an important time to focus on re-invigoration.” It’s Good To Be A FounderPersonally, I think it’s fantastic news for TaskRabbit — and on a higher level, it’s just another encouraging sign for the founder community and the tech industry at large. Where maybe in the past it was more common for founders and engineers to take a backseat as their ideas grew, Busque is just the latest proof that these days, for people with both engineering training and a nice helping of product vision, the sky should really be the limit. It’ll be exciting to see how TaskRabbit continues to evolve now that she is back at the helm for good.
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| Pinterest Ponders A San Francisco Home Posted: 07 Jun 2012 08:41 PM PDT  The tech boom is causing some sort of startup musical chairs: As Twitter moves out of its office today on 795 Folsom to move into a new space at 1355 Market St. in San Francisco, our neighbor Yammer joins them, eventually moving out of its abode on the third floor of our 410 Townsend building, leaving the 30,000 square foot area open for the taking … Rumors have being flying around the building that Pinterest is interested in the space (and/or taking over most of the building), and those rumors got a little bit more backup when I personally saw Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann hanging out outside our building with a bunch of suits yesterday as I walked in to work, suits who I’m now assuming are somehow related to PMI Management, the owners of 410 Townsend. I’ve since confirmed with a good source that Pinterest is indeed moving out of its Palo Alto office at 635 High Street, and is looking at spaces both in SF and down south, with nothing finalized yet. Last time we checked, the much-buzzed about startup had around thirty employees, with many others hoping to join. It seems like the social curation startup has been busy putting the $100 million it just raised from Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten to good use talent-wise, hiring both Tim Kendall and Barry Schnitt away from Facebook with (inevitably) more big hires on the way. Now to make room for them all.
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| Creative Market Nabs $1.3M From SV Angel, CrunchFund To Become An Etsy For Digital Design Posted: 07 Jun 2012 07:32 PM PDT  Earlier this year, ColourLovers founders Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams and Darius A Monsef IV (a.k.a. Bubs) launched Creative Market in private beta to give its community of color and template-creating designers a place to sell their digital content. And, today, they’re announcing that they’ve closed a second round of funding to support the impending launch of Creative Market. (Which Monsef says is slated for the next few weeks.) The $1.3 million in new funding comes from new investors, which include SV Angel, CrunchFund, Longworth, Ludlow Ventures, and a number of YC alums, and brings the startup’s total funding to $2.3 million. Existing investors, like Atlas Ventures, Morado Ventures, 500 Startups, Seraph Group, and Zelkova Ventures also contributed to the round. For a bit of background on how they got here: In early 2011, fresh out of Y Combinator’s accelerator program, the co-founders re-launched ColourLovers as an online creative community that seeks to bring out your inner designer by allowing veterans and noobs alike to create their own colors, palettes, shapes, and patterns. Originally launching in 2005, the site has grown organically to the tune of 2 million registered users, spurred on by partnerships with Twitter, Martha Stewart, HP, and Hearst, to name a few. Yet, ever since the redesign, Monsef tells us, the founders have been looking to add a marketplace to the community, which would allow its designers to hawk their own design content — everything from icons to brushes and fonts. That’s where Creative Market and its supporting financing enter the picture. And to that point, what the founders are perhaps most excited about is the strategic investment from Threadless, the popular eCommerce platform and community of whacky t-shirt designers, that comes as a part of the round. Given the similar makeup of their end users, the partnership/investment makes sense for both companies. Now, designers and creatives will be able to go to Creative Market to buy some nifty designs and then hop over to Threadless to make their t-shirt ideas come alive, while Threadless designers will be able to sell their wares in CM’s marketplace. While ColourLovers users have shared over 5 million colors, 2 million palettes, 2 million patterns, and 160K templates, the co-founders say that their focus is now going to center on Creative Market, which they feel can make a bigger impact — and generate more revenue. ColourLovers has an engaged and active user base, and has grown steadily over its 7 year history, but it’s still only seeing about $500K in annual revenue. So, the founders are modeling their new direction — the marketplace for digital design content — on Etsy, trying to do for “mousemade goods” what the eCommerce site did for hipsters and handmade goods. After all, Etsy has been killing it, having raised nearly $100 million while doing cool things for its community — like giving female programmers $5K to go to “hacker school.” Of course, comparing the two might seem a stretch at first, considering that it’s a bit more difficult to imagine a huge market for color vectors and palettes. But, considering the fact that designers and developers are forced to go to different resources to find or buy images, fonts, filters, colors, etc., it’s kind of a no-brainer to bring each link in the design chain under one roof to create a kind of stock art marketplace for design content. Plus, ColourLovers acquired Forrst back in March, a similarly themed forum/community, where users share designs and code, get feedback from other developers, ask questions and post about design topics. The site had some cache in the community, and the combined assets give the startup a sizable inventory to begin leveraging in its new marketplace. Furthermore, since launching Creative Market in private beta, the site has seen 75K people sign up for its waiting list. As part of the beta launch, Creative Market offered a free goods page, aimed to give users a taste of what kind of digital content will be in store. Monsef says that, thus far, they’ve been seeing 100K downloads a week of those assets, which they believe is an early indication that there could be a big market for digital content. Although 99designs has taken flak from the design community, it seems ColourLovers and Forrst have more credibility, and there’s a high likelihood that designers are going to love the fact that Creative Market will give them the ability to make some extra cash from selling their digital content. Plus, the founders are also hoping to lure designers by offering them a bigger cut of sales. Compared to the typical designer-takes-30-percent model, Monsef says that Creative Market will likely offer designers at least twice that percentage. What’s more, there are currently about 40 million people using Adobe’s Creative Suite in some capacity. But, if you’re anything like me, there’s a very good chance you know at least one or two people using PhotoShop (or another Adobe product) for free. While many of those users probably didn’t pay for PhotoShop, they’re willing to make incremental purchases to buy templates or fonts for use in their design work — and that’s where Creative Market comes in. While Creative Market will be a destination site, the team is also working to launch an API in the next few months, which will allow any site to set up their own version of Creative Market, adding “buy” buttons to their own designs and wares. Along with slow load times, crappy design is a top website killer, so giving design and development teams the ability to go out and quickly buy fonts, colors, templates, and the like that have already proven successful elsewhere gives site owners a leg up and a quick, easy way to get back to focusing on product. That way, if their site fails, they can’t blame it on design. (For better and for worse.) Creative Market will launch officially in beta in the next few weeks, with a full public unveiling expected for later this summer. You can sign up early and get $5 off its digital content here.
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