The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Y Combinator-Backed Rentobo Helps Landlords Fill Apartments Without All The Messy Paperwork
- Berkeley Study: For MBAs, Happiness Isn’t About the Money
- Box Brings Its OneCloud Platform To Android With 50 Apps
- Habbo Hotel Kids Social Network Reopens For Business Post Pedophile Scandal: Spain, Brazil, Finland First Up
- Leaked Slide Sheds New Light On RIM’s First BlackBerry 10 Devices
- A Snapshot of The Android and iOS Market in China Through One Big Developer’s Eyes
- How AOL Squandered WinAmp
- AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II To Get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Update On June 26
- Pintics’ Founders Create ShopInterest, A “Shopify For Pinterest”
- Cannon.fm Launches Local Music Streaming Radio App
- Need An Intro? Greylock-Backed Cloze Rates Your Connections
- FastPay Raises $25M To Tackle Digital Media Cash Flow
- McAfee: Sneaky Teens Surf On PCs More Than Mobile, Facebook Rules Over All Other Social Networks
- Despite Short Supply, Samsung Predicts Over 10 Million Galaxy S III Sales In July
- Google Offers And Boingo Bring Free WiFi To Manhattan This Summer
- Torrid Rate of Growth for Digital Health Funding
- Opinsy Launches Beta To Create The ‘Opinion Graph’
- LoveYourLarder Serves Up Revenue Share To Food Bloggers And Recipe Sites
- In Its Ongoing War With Netflix, Amazon’s Lovefilm Signs 20th Century Fox Deal
- HeyWire Launches BNDWGN, A Private Social Messaging App Built Around Your Interests
| Y Combinator-Backed Rentobo Helps Landlords Fill Apartments Without All The Messy Paperwork Posted: 25 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT  Looked for an apartment lately? It sucked, right? You showed up and you had to fill out an application and submit all sorts of stupid paperwork — credit check, proof of employment, utility invoice (apparently to prove that you can pay a bill, like an adult), etc. And then, if you’re lucky, your name will be pulled out of a hat amongst the other half-dozen people who applied for the same property. Well that whole process sucks for landlords and property management companies as well. After all, they’re the ones who collect all that paperwork and sort through all that data. Don’t you wish there were a better way? Thanks to Rentobo, there is. Rentobo provides a platform for landlords, listing agents, and property management firms to not only post their open units across a number of different apartment listing sites, but it gives them a way to quickly and easily get information from prospective tenants with an online application process. The team, which was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2011 class, started off originally with idea of auctioning off apartment rentals. But it quickly realized that all the infrastructure it was building would be extremely useful in just getting most apartment listings online. So it began to focus instead on what it could do to automate the process and make things easier for both landlords and tenants. For landlords, first and foremost there was the listing problem. Craigslist still looms large in most major metro areas, despite its crappy interface and lack of functionality. But then there’s Zillow, Trulia, and other sites as well. Rentobo provides a single listing interface for landlords and listing agents to post to all of those sites at once. It provides a drag-and-drog interface for adding photos to listings, so that prospective tenants know what they’re getting into before they apply. And since all pictures are stored remotely, landlords aren’t constrained by the limit on the number of photos they can upload to Craigslist. All in all, its listings are pretty gorgeous. But the listings management part of the software is kind of the easy part. Where Rentobo really excels is in reducing the amount of paperwork that changes hands, by allowing landlords to collect information from prospective tenants through online applications. Tenants could even submit information before they even see the apartment, so that there’s no paper to exchange if they do decide they want to apply for a place. Rentobo is currently free while users beta test it, but when it officially goes live, the startup plans to make money from landlords based on the number of listings they manage using the platform. It’s also working to add the ability to collect application fees, as well as streamline the process for credit checks through directly through the platform. Once those features are in place, it could also make some additional revenues based on applications it processes.
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| Berkeley Study: For MBAs, Happiness Isn’t About the Money Posted: 25 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT  “Well after the point that Facebook’s valuation passed $1B, Mark still lived in a small, crappy apartment and slept on a mattress on the floor. All he really cared about was work and he spent most of his waking hours at the office,” wrote Facebook’s first product manager, Ezra Callahan. Entrepreneurs have a peculiar habit of bucking the capitalistic expectation of easy money for long hours hunched over a laptop, leaving cushy jobs to start a risky new company, dedicating their time to charity, or simply working enough hours to make their equivalent hourly salary less-than-minimum-wage. A new longitudinal study of business students has an explanation: happiness isn’t about the money. “The joy that comes with an influx of money wanes quickly as people become accustomed to how wealth shapes their daily lives. Yet respect and admiration from one's face-to-face groups might bring sustained [Subjective Well-Being],” concludes a new Berkeley study, which finds that the respect of one’s peers is far more predictive of an MBA’s happiness after graduation than their income. Nine months after graduation, Berkeley Professor Cameron Anderson and his colleagues found, their students’ happiness couldn’t be predicted by their income, but could with responses to questions like “I am held in high regard by others” (so-called “sociometric status”). “Occupying a higher position in the local ladder thus created a sense of influence and control over one's social environment, as well as a sense of belonging and acceptance,” explain the authors. Of course, reputation is a double-edged sword: in the wrong environment, it can lead to the worst kinds of self-destructive greed. “I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it,” former Executive Director of Goldman Sachs wrote, in his angry, public exit from the banking giant, “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as "muppets," sometimes over internal e-mail.” Yet, in the right environments, such as the startup technology sector, reputation can push people to pursue innovation at the risk of a secure paycheck. As one engineer told Silicon Valley anthropologist, Anna Lee Sexanian, “A man who has not changed companies is anxious to explain why; a man who has (changed companies) perhaps several times, feels no need to justify his actions. Mobility has become the norm.” Just last year, Biz Stone and Evan Williams left their respective positions at Twitter to start a mysterious new company, Obvious, which invests in an eclectic array of social impact ventures, such as faux-meat producer, Beyond Meat. “Being able to change the game in terms of how we deliver protein to the growing human population is probably the single biggest thing anybody could do,” said Kleiner Perkins investor, Amol Deshpande. What the Berkeley study shows is that entrepreneurs who work tireless hours creating new products, or tech giants who push game-changing ideas, are sincere in their explanation that the effort isn’t about the money. But, it’s not altruism either. Rather, it’s about wanting to look at yourself in the mirror, and your friends in the eyes, and feel worthy of respect. Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, best summed up the idea with an anecdote of Abraham Lincoln:
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| Box Brings Its OneCloud Platform To Android With 50 Apps Posted: 25 Jun 2012 09:02 AM PDT  Back when Box launched its OneCloud platform for enterprise mobile apps back in March, VP of Platform Engineering Chris Yeh says that virtually all of the user comments boiled down to a single question: What about Android? So today, Box is answering the cry of forlorn Android owners by releasing OneCloud for Android. OneCloud is basically a collection of mobile apps that integrate with Box. Viewers can browse, purchase, and download apps from a gallery. Then, when you’re browsing your documents in Box, you can interact with them using the apps that you’ve installed. Yeh says that 25 percent of Box iOS users are visiting the gallery every day, and that OneCloud is already on-track to drive hundreds of thousands of dollars of app sales for developers in its first year. The most popular apps involve document editing and PDF annotation, he adds. As for Android, Yeh says it was always on the roadmap, especially since the company’s mobile user base has more Android owners than iOS. (So why start with iOS? Because of the potential of the iPad.) “In a perfect world we would have launched [Android and iOS] simultaneously, but it was a lot to bite off,” Yeh says. He adds that in some ways the experience is better on Android, specifically in allowing for a smooth transition from opening a file in Box, opening an app to edit the file, then saving that app back to the same location in Box, which he says is not as clean in iOS. There has been one big surprise, Yeh says: The relatively small overlap between OneCloud apps on iOS and Android. Initially, he expected to bring most of Box’s iOS partners into the Android platform, but he realized that many small developers only have an app on one or the other — they don’t have resources for both. So even though Box has signed up 50 launch partners to OneCloud for Android, only 11 of them are also available on iOS. This, Yeh says, is an indication of how “fragmented” the smartphone landscape has become. The Android apps include printing app Breezy, note-taker FetchNotes, and e-signature app Docusign. And with today’s release of the Box OneCloud Android SDK, their ranks should grow. (Yeh says the Box team likes to work directly with each partner, although that may become less feasible as the platform scales.)
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| Posted: 25 Jun 2012 08:48 AM PDT  Habbo Hotel, the under-21 social networking site that was forced to close down earlier this month after it was revealed that people were using it to send sexual and other illicit messages to underage users, is now open once again, TechCrunch has learned. Sulake, the Finnish company that owns Habbo Hotel, two weeks ago “muted” activity on the site as it scrambled to implement better content and safety controls and call for user feedback after an investigative report from the UK broadcaster Channel 4 revealed the extent of the problem. The mess saw VC firm Balderton walk away from its 13 percent stake in the company. Today, the site is un-muted in Finland, Spain and Brazil to test out those new controls, with further markets coming online in “coming weeks,” said a spokesperson. Paul LaFontaine, CEO of Sulake, says that Spain and Brazil are two of Habbo’s most popular in terms of active users. “This will provide a representative sample of users on which to verify the improved safety of our systems as we aim to bring other markets back online,” he said in a statement. The company has outlined a number of changes to the site — which in the past required the most basic of sign-ups to become active. Some 60 percent of users on the site are registered to be between the ages of 13 and 16. Together there were 9 million monthly unique users on the site before the scandal hit. The company has put in a much stronger algorithm to monitor for dodgy content. It only calls the algorithm “basic level” at this point but says it is working on expanding this with a “selected supplier.” And users must now complete a “responsible use test” before they are unmuted, Habbo says; this will come in the form of a questionnaire and accepting new terms and conditions for use. Once users are unmuted, they will only be on a limited service and have to work their way up through responsible interaction. In addition, there are new tracking measures on the site “to clearly tie all virtual interactions to real user identities,” the company notes. In the chatrooms, there will be more moderators around to keep conversation from getting out of hand. And users able to volunteer as “Guardians,” or in Habbo’s terminology a “virtual police force,” to prove additional community support. Those seeing dodgy content can now also hit a more clearly marked emergency button. All in all, the company is pretty humble — and does leave some questions for others that manage online kids content about what they are doing. “We are aware that this list of measures does not provide a comprehensive solution to the safety challenges faced by social gaming sites,” LaFontaine said in the statement. It’s also playing with a lot at stake here. One estimate puts Sulake’s revenues from Habbo at $50 million annually, although with the scandal and the temporary closure it remains to be seen whether users and advertisers continue to stick with the site.
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| Leaked Slide Sheds New Light On RIM’s First BlackBerry 10 Devices Posted: 25 Jun 2012 08:42 AM PDT  To say that RIM has a lot riding on their new BlackBerry 10 platform is a hell of an understatement, but to date the company has generally kept quiet on what consumers can expect from their first BlackBerry 10 devices. As anticipation builds for a launch slated for later this year, N4BB has gotten their hands on an internal slide that reveals a few new details about RIM’s first BlackBerry 10 phones. RIM CEO Thorsten Heins confirmed at this year's BlackBerry World event that the first BlackBerry 10 device to hit the market would be a touchscreen-only model, and RIM has been getting developers ready for it by doling out thousands of their Dev Alpha devices. While company representatives were quick to note that the Dev Alpha was nothing close to the touchscreen device they would eventually ship, the slide notes that the L-series BlackBerry (previously known as the London) would sport an OLED display running at the same 1280×768 resolution as the alpha hardware. That display manages to cram 356 pixels into every inch, which also confirms that the L-series device will have a 4.2-inch display panel. The slide also offers up a few details about what RIM has planned for their forthcoming keyboard-toting N-series model, perhaps most notably that the phone’s OLED display will run at 720 x 720 with a pixel density of 330 ppi. Crunching the numbers points to a screen that’s just a shade under 3.1 inches diagonal, making it the largest display to go on a more traditionally designed BlackBerry (the touch-friendly Torch series had larger 3.7-inch displays). Just when these first devices will begin to trickle out of Waterloo is still a carefully-guarded secret, but sources have told N4BB in the past that an August announcement for the first BlackBerry 10 device would be followed by an October release. Interestingly, the leak comes hot on the heels of rumors that RIM was pondering the outright sale of their handset business, something that doesn’t seem terribly outlandish considering CEO Heins’ past statements on corporate strategy. That said, The Globe and Mail reported earlier today that sources close to RIM have denounced the rumors as short-sighted and untrue.
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| A Snapshot of The Android and iOS Market in China Through One Big Developer’s Eyes Posted: 25 Jun 2012 08:36 AM PDT  Editor’s Note: Lei Zhang is the U.S. general manager for CocoaChina, which operates the largest iPhone developer community in China. The company also has a game publishing arm called Punchbox Studios, which has seen more than 70 million downloads for its hit Fishing Joy — primarily in China. The first quarter of 2012 saw smartphone shipments to China surpass shipments to the U.S. for the first time, but which devices are people in China actually using? iPhones have carved out a significant portion of the market share among Chinese smartphone users, but what about the fragmented Android market? What devices are Android users in China using? If you're thinking of expanding your mobile app into China, there are important things to consider before entering this particular market. Even though my company CocoaChina is based in China, it has had to face a number of challenges unique to the local marketplace. We've gathered some data from our own title, Fishing Joy, which garnered over 70 million downloads on iOS and Android platforms, to give you a sense of the type of results you can expect to see in China. iOS: Focus On The Newer Models Because Older Ones Barely Exist in China Apple officially entered the Chinese smartphone market with the iPhone 4, first through a partnership with China Unicom and later with China Telecom (with the iPhone 4S). Developers targeting a strictly Chinese userbase have an advantage because of the reduced number of iOS devices to worry about. By not supporting older models of iOS devices (due to their negligible presence), China-focused developers can concentrate on delivering features for high-end devices and minimize development and QA-related efforts. The following chart, based on PunchBox Studios' Fishing Joy downloads, indicates that a majority of Chinese iPhone users are on the iPhone 4 series, with very few on older hardware. We can easily see a 54 percent market share for iPhone 4 and 33 percent for iPhone 4S, with a very rapid adoption rate of the latter. Clearly, the iPhone 4 is driving Apple's smartphone strategy in China. With Apple’s long-awaited partnership with China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world, probably on its way, one should expect more impact from Cupertino in 2012, moving towards winning the largest smartphone market share globally. Android Handsets: Local Manufacturers Like Huawei Quickly Catch Up To Samsung, HTC In the Android playing field, we can clearly see the rise of domestic handset manufacturers with Android devices. We're seeing China’s domestic vendors, such as Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo, poised to drive growth by supplying carriers with customized handsets, while Samsung and Nokia will drive volume with cheaper low-end smartphones [IDG]. Local vendors have benefited from being able to offer competitively priced Android smartphones, and are hot on the heels of the top three manufacturers in the world. [Canalys] The following charts compare the top devices for a casual, all-ages game, measured by Fishing Joy's quarterly game sessions, in Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 respectively. For developers considering pre-install deals with hardware makers in China, watch out for the rapidly changing device landscape and the rise of local manufacturers. On a side note, though pre-installation is often considered the Holy Grail for app distribution, the conversion rate in the Chinese market is typically around 30 to 40 percent. Last but not least, on the tablet side iPad takes the lead with more than 50 percent of the market share, though significantly lower than its lead in the global market, with local manufacturer Lenovo taking the second spot, according to iResearch. What to Expect: New Competition From Baidu, Qihoo Chinese Internet companies are entering the competition by expanding their businesses into producing hardware. Search engine, Baidu, recently launched a low-cost smartphone that will run Baidu's own operating system. Baidu currently operates 80 percent of the search market share in China and has been working to prevent Google from getting a foothold in China. Baidu's new phone has the potential to have a big effect on China's highly competitive smartphone market. Priced at 1,000 RMB ($156.80), Baidu's phone is entering a market range fought over by hundreds of domestic phone makers. On the high-end market currently dominated by Apple, Samsung and HTC, watch out for Qihoo 360, another Internet giant winning in the the anti-virus and desktop browser market, which is partnering with Huawei to create a high-end smartphone that will battle with other established players and startups (such as Xiaomi) for cost performance. Why those sudden moves into hardware by those software giants? Qihoo 360's CEO and founder Hongyi Zhou explains, "The smartphone device has come to the point where it needs to become a mass market device like the computer; something that everyone uses, an Internet portal for everyone.” CocoaChina will be paying attention to future trends and taking note of which phones are beating the competition. Developers should keep their eyes open so they're ready to create the best apps for the phones their users are actually using.
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| Posted: 25 Jun 2012 08:24 AM PDT  It’s always nice to plop down to a big bowl of hot dog food and read about how the company you work for (ostensibly and/or on paper) squandered one of the most recognizable brands in PC history. As you’ll recall, the turn of the century was a time of great confusion. iTunes hadn’t yet rolled over the media space and these new M-P-3 files* were quite popular, yet no one knew how to play them. Enter WinAmp. Ars, to their credit, wrote an excellent exposé on WinAmp, talking to the folks who made the company what it was – and who left to allow the company to degenerate into what it is now. The creators, Rob Lord and Justin Frankel, built WinAmp as a solution to play the nascent MP3. "Winamp grew out of wanting a good, enjoyable way to listen to MP3s on a computer. It wasn't the first MP3 player, but the MP3 players around before it were hard for me to want to use,” Frankel told Digital Tools. WinAmp still exists – a Mac version has been in beta since 2011, if that tells you anything about the pace of development – and presumably there are still some die-hards and altakakas who haven’t gotten the memo. In its heyday, the app had 60 million users and when AOL acquired the company they stuck them in with another property, Spinner, and began mucking about with leadership roles and business responsibilities. In short, they bought two disparate companies (Spinner was an Internet radio startup), put them together in a room, and asked them to fight it out. Neither survived.
*As a fun aside, I remember the actual day I heard about MP3s in college. It was something like March of 1996 and I was at Carnegie Mellon. I was buying all kinds of CDs and I didn’t own an MP3 player until, I think, 2002. I was talking about music with a buddy Roy and he said “Oh, I like to rip my own music” and I wondered what that meant. “I rip it into MP3 and play it back on my computer.” “What’s MP3,” I asked. “It’s an MPEG4 audio codec,” I think he said. It was like hearing about the wheel for the first time, or fire. It was that jarring a concept.
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| AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II To Get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Update On June 26 Posted: 25 Jun 2012 08:08 AM PDT  After a moment of brief availability on Samsung’s Kies desktop software, AT&T recently pulled the Android 4.0 update for the Samsung Galaxy S II. But it would appear that the dark days are over, as AT&T has just announced on its consumer blog that Ice Cream Sandwich will indeed come to AT&T-powered Galaxy S IIs tomorrow. Android 4.0 brings with it some pretty major improvements, including Face Unlock, easier multitasking, flexible widgets (which Samsung offers anyways, but whatevs), customizable notifications, a data usage app, and Android Beam. But more importantly, this update means that Galaxy S II owners will have the latest version of the operating system around the same time the Android 4.0-packing Galaxy S III gets into consumers’ hands. You can get the update by visiting Samsung’s website and installing the Samsung Kies software on your PC. From there, just connect the device and follow instructions. If you have any trouble, this page should help.
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| Pintics’ Founders Create ShopInterest, A “Shopify For Pinterest” Posted: 25 Jun 2012 08:05 AM PDT  The same guys who built the Pinterest analytics service Pintics spent the weekend at the AngelHack Hackathon in Palo Alto working on another Pinterest-related project. This time around, the result is ShopInterest, a DIY service that lets anyone turn their Pinterest boards into an online store. Inspired by the burgeoning social shopping trend found on sites like Fab.com, for example, ShopInterest turns your curated pin collections into web shops that include an integrated shopping cart experience. It’s “Shopify for Pinterest,” the company explains. According to Francisco Guerrero, Pintics’ CEO, ShopInterest isn’t a “pivot” for Pintics – that other service is still doing well, he says, and is now tracking the analytics associated with 750,000 pins. Instead, the two services, Pintics and ShopInterest, are aimed at different audiences. “Our Pinterest analytics service targets large e-commerce companies,” Guerrero says, “but after we saw the large volume of sales generated via Pinterest, we decided to help regular users join in the fun and profits.” To get started, users will just sign in, select the boards where their products are shown, add a description, price and shipping charges, and then select how they want to get paid (PayPal or Dwolla). The rest of the setup is handled by ShopInterest itself. And it doesn’t look too shabby, either – especially considering how quickly it was built. “We’re tired, we’re hungry, we haven’t slept in the last 36 hours, but we are very happy that this side project came out looking really well,” Guerrero said on Sunday. The project, a team effort between Pintics’ co-founders Francisco Guerrero and Liang Huang, along with designer Tom Hodgins, Yisha Peng and Jianqing Sun, is not the first time a third-party has been used in an attempt to extract dollars from all the social image sharing on the site, now the third most popular social network behind Facebook and Twitter. Most notably, in February of this year, it was revealed that Pinterest itself had experimented with SkimLinks’s content monetization platform for web publishers, pulling in maybe $10,000-$20,000 per year. But word was Pinterest was less interested in the income than it was in the analytics SkimLinks provided. But the fact that Pinterest hasn’t spawned a million other efforts like this one via ShopInterest has more to do with the fact that the service still lacks a public API. (The documentation was briefly published online – details are archived here – so we know one exists, however.) To work around this issue, the Pintics team had to get a little creative. “The RSS feed is parsable and contains the basic info we need,” Guerrero notes, referring to one of the hacks involved. But, he adds, “just like everyone else, we are waiting for the full API to be made available by Pinterest to do even more features already planned.” Currently, ShopInterest is sitting behind a LaunchRock sign-up page, but you can see it in action in the video below.
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| Cannon.fm Launches Local Music Streaming Radio App Posted: 25 Jun 2012 07:30 AM PDT  In an attempt to watch their development, I’ve been keeping tabs on a small Columbus OH startup called Cannon.fm. I first talked with them several weeks ago before their product launch, and have been interviewing them occasionally, to see how they are adapting, changing, improving, revising their business model and product. That product — a streaming radio iOS app called Cannon.fm that is specifically for local musicians — launched over the weekend. How is it working out? It’s not perfect, I can’t lie, but I am still loving it. First, let me get the bugs mentioned and out of the way. One issue I have noticed is that, sporadically, two songs will play at the same time and you have to kill the app and restart to get it back to normal. I mostly noticed this bug when I was using their nifty “skip/replay” buttons (a differentiator that most free streaming services don’t offer). I would say it happened less than 5% of the time though, but needed to be mentioned (they have a fix already submitted to the iTunes store so shouldn’t be an issue going forward). Also, I noticed some occasional network connection issues. BUT… I forgive these growing pains in a bootstrapped startup, because I have been going through a most pleasant trip of nostalgia and discovery over the last week or so (using a demo version of the app). I have listened to some bands that I haven’t heard in years and discovered a few new ones…in short, I think I have experienced exactly what Cannon.fm is hoping to deliver. Let me say, Columbus Ohio is a great rock and roll town. The bars of High Street — fueled by the creative energies of the huge student body of The Ohio State University — have been a fertile crescent of musical goodness for decades. I can think of 4 or 5 rock bands that got their start here, signed big-time record deals and almost…almost hit the big time. Certainly the music was good enough. Maybe the timing was wrong. Big time or small time, those great players and fabulous bands remain local heros and important parts of the fabric of Columbus (I see Colin Gawel of Watershed a few times a week; he’s back on tour as we speak). But here’s the thing, every college town (even if it is tiny or has 1.8 million people in it, like Columbus) has this story…the fabled “rock and roll city that almost was.” That is why this app has so much potential and is a platform to spread the goodness of a scene beyond the confines of its geography. It can also help keep alive the aggregate memory of certain “scenes” in a city’s musical development. There are a lot of bands I streamed for a week or so that don’t exist anymore, but that occupy a considerable portion of the memory and experiences of my younger days. Indeed, not every band from a city can succeed at the non-local level but just because they go no further doesn’t mean all their songs suck. They can still be a great rock and roll band even if they don’t sign big contracts and that’s why I think Cannon.fm is as much an archive as a discovery tool. There is additional value in that for a lot of cities.
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| Need An Intro? Greylock-Backed Cloze Rates Your Connections Posted: 25 Jun 2012 07:08 AM PDT  Not all social network connections are created equal. My networks on Facebook and LinkedIn certainly include plenty of real friends and colleagues, but they’re mixed in with people I met once at a conference, random folks who sent me a nice note about my writing, and so on. All of that (I hope) is pretty normal, but if I need to find the meaningful messages and connections, well, it can be a headache. That’s the problem being tackled by a new startup called Cloze. Co-founders Dan Foody (CEO) and Alex Coté (CMO) say they’ve both faced this issue in previous jobs. As Foody put it, “We’ve both lived outside the four walls of our company for years,” because they’ve had sales or business development roles requiring them to work constantly with people outside their company. In those jobs, your personal network is everything, but Foody says they had become “information rich and information poor at the same time,” — so for example, if they wanted an introduction to someone, they could usually find 10 or 20 of their own connections on LinkedIn who supposedly knew the person they wanted to meet. The only problem was figuring whether these connections really knew the person in question. To solve that problem, Cloze connects with your email address and your social network accounts, then it assigns each of your relationships a score of between 0 and 100. Foody says the score looks at a number of factors in a relationship — the frequency of communication, the length of the messages, the average response time, and the balance, i.e., whether someone always sends you 10-page manifestos and you always respond with nothing more than a yes or a no. Having that score allows Cloze to do two main things, Foody says. First, it can help users prioritize their own interactions, by showing you messages you may have missed from people who are probably important to you, as indicated by a high Cloze relationship score. There are lots of other tools that try to sort through your email, and I live and die by Gmail’s Priority Inbox, but with the flood of stuff coming in, I still occasionally miss emails from my editors or from important sources. You can also start connecting with other people on Cloze, and once you do, you can see their relationship scores with everyone in their network, and they can see yours. So when you need an introduction to someone, you should get more than just a list of people who are connected to them — each of those connections should come with a score. If someone’s relationship has a low score, their introduction may not be particularly valuable. Conversely, if they have an 85 or 90, you can feel pretty confident that they’ll carry some weight. Cloze has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Greylock Partners, Kepha Partners, and NextView Ventures. It’s based in the Polaris Ventures’ Dogpatch Labs office in Cambridge.
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| FastPay Raises $25M To Tackle Digital Media Cash Flow Posted: 25 Jun 2012 07:00 AM PDT  FastPay, a startup offering credit lines to digital media companies, says it has raised $25 million in new funding. That may sound like a weirdly specific business model, but founder and CEO Jed Simon tells me via email that FastPay is solving a big problem in the online advertising industry — the fact that it can take forever to get paid. According to a survey conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau, it takes 60 days or more to get paid on 80 percent of invoices. So for example, if you’re a video syndication startup and you win a $2 million ad contract, the advertiser won’t pay you for months, and in the meantime you have to front the money for the campaign. In this situation, the best course of action may be to raise a sizable venture round, but that probably means selling a lot of the company. “In general, banks are not lending and certainly not to small businesses (under $50mil in revenues),” Simon says. “If you then factor in the relative nascency of the digital media sector and you needn’t bother apply to commercial banks — it simply isn’t going to happen. Venture debt is available to a very small subset of the ecosystem, but it’s a high friction, inflexible, slow, and costly solution — we believe we have a better product.” So instead of raising a venture round, companies can borrow from FastPay. The startup offers credit lines of up to $5 million to publishers, social media marketers, creative studios, and ad tech businesses. FastPay’s business model reflects a distaste for traditional equity financing, and its new funding does too. The money includes credit from Wells Fargo Capital Finance, plus a combination of debt and equity from SF Capital Group. Simon says that by focusing on credit rather than equity, the company is “eating our own dog food,” adding, “Our business model is predicated on offering credit to growing businesses, so in effect we raised equity to cover our core infrastructure and development and then used debt instruments to bolster our balance sheet to offer credit to our clients.” The company has now raised a total of $30 million. Neil Wolfson of SF Capital Group and Jason Kaplan of Howard Capital Management are joining the FastPay board.
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| McAfee: Sneaky Teens Surf On PCs More Than Mobile, Facebook Rules Over All Other Social Networks Posted: 25 Jun 2012 06:52 AM PDT  Going mobile may be the mantra for a lot of tech companies these days, but if they’re in the business of targeting teenagers with their services, perhaps they should think twice: over 37 percent of teens use laptops, and a further 30 percent rely on desktop machines to surf online and engage with digital content, but only 13.5 percent use smartphones and only five percent use tablets, according to a new study out today from Intel-owned security specialists McAfee. The study, covering online activity among U.S. teens, also reveals a pretty massive disconnect between parents and their kids when it comes to how the latter is using the Internet — with some big security implications within that — and the revelation that teens are not actually that rebellious compared to their adult counterparts when it comes to engaging with social media, in many cases using the same sites their parents do to communicate with each other. McAfee, working with market analysts TRU, based their results on 2,017 online interviews in the U.S. among teens ages 13-17 and parents of teens ages 13-17, with respondents split equally among the two demographics. By far, the most popular social media site among teens is Facebook, with 89.5 percent of respondents using the site. Twitter comes in second with 48.7 percent and Google+ not actually that far behind at 41.5 percent. Tumblr (33 percent of all teens), it notes, is more popular with teen girls than boys; while 4chan (23%) is showing the reverse trend: and McAfee notes that both sites are growing faster than other social networking sites. Pinterest is being used nearly as much as Myspace (20%; 18%), and it will be worth watching to see whether Myspace, which recently turned around its traffic with the introduction of Facebook’s social graph, can gain back a bit more mindshare with the younger set. In contrast — and possibly in keeping with smartphone use actually not being as popular as PCs — Foursquare and other check-in services are not so hot, with only 12.2 percent using these. McAfee describes teen usage on social networks as “stalking” rather than sharing: half of teens responding said they mostly observed others rather than posted updates about themselves. Only six percent said they shared “almost everything.” Nevertheless, they are huge social network users: 60 percent check their accounts daily, and 41 percent said they check accounts “constantly.” Another takeaway from the study is that teens appear to be getting more savvy about their online activity — perhaps in keeping with the massive increase in what there is on offer, and the fact that they are a more digitally native demographic. “This is a generation that is so comfortable with technology that they are surpassing their parents in understanding,” noted Stanley Holditch, Online Safety Expert for McAfee, in a release. The study found that 79 percent of teens said they hid their online behavior from their parents: partly to keep private what they’re actually doing online, and partly because they’re online for a lot longer than parents think. Popular activities include accessing violent content (43%); sexual topics/porn (36%; 32%); and watching pirated movies (30.7%). A whole 15% are hacking other people’s accounts. Meanwhile, teens spend about five hours a day online; while parents only think their kids spend an average of three hours a day online. McAfee found that just over 10 percent spend more than 10 hours per day online. Teens hiding what they do from parents has gone up massively since 2010, when only 45 percent said they hid their behavior, and is a disconnect when compared to what parents think: half of parents responding to the study said they knew what their teen kids did online. So what are they doing to hide their behavior? The most popular thing to do is clear browser history (53%); close browsers when parents were around (46%); deleting content (34%). Some were more sophisticated and changed their computer’s privacy settings (20%) and private browsing modes (20%) and duplicate social networking profiles (9%). [Image: Enokson, Flickr]
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| Despite Short Supply, Samsung Predicts Over 10 Million Galaxy S III Sales In July Posted: 25 Jun 2012 06:38 AM PDT  Despite the fact that the Galaxy S III supply is rather low at the moment, Samsung’s mobile boss JK Shin predicts that Galaxy S III sales will exceed 10 million in July. Neither the Samsung Galaxy S II nor the Galaxy Note were able to achieve such fast market penetration, but neither the Galaxy S II nor the Galaxy Note were the most pre-ordered Android phone in history. But that doesn’t change the fact that most users are unable to purchase or pre-order the 32GB version of the device, according to Reuters. In fact, Sprint has had to push back the launch of the device because of low supply from Samsung. “Due to overwhelming demand for the Galaxy S III worldwide, Samsung has informed us they will not be able to deliver enough inventory of Galaxy S III for Sprint to begin selling the device on June 21. We are working closely with Samsung on a delivery schedule to support our launch,” reads Sprint’s site. It’ll be interesting to see the convergence between short supply from Samsung and a brand new device from Apple. The iPhone is Samsung’s greatest threat in the mobile realm, and the company smartly gave itself a three-month (or so) head start before the next iPhone is unveiled. But with short supply surely slowing the momentum of sales, Samsung may not get everything it could out of the Galaxy S III. In either case, the GSIII will still sell just fine and surely break some new records for Samsung. Plus, Samsung went out of its way to avoid any patent litigation with Apple this time around.
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| Google Offers And Boingo Bring Free WiFi To Manhattan This Summer Posted: 25 Jun 2012 05:31 AM PDT  In a world where limits go down and pricing goes up, there’s nothing better than free connectivity. Boingo Wireless, in collaboration with Google Offers, is bringing free WiFi to over 200 locations in New York City this summer. The partnership lasts from June 25 to September 7, 2012, and if I didn’t already mention this, it’s entirely free. The WiFi service will be available in various MTA subway stations, including the A, C, E, and L at 8th Ave. and West 14th Street, The C and E at 8th Ave. and West 23rd Street, and the 1, 2, 3, F, M and L at 6th/7th Ave and West 14th Street. Free WiFi will also be available at all of Boingo’s 200 Hotzone Hotspot stations. This is just the beginning Boingo’s massive roll-out. Over the course of the year, Boingo will bring WiFi to approximately 36 subway stations. This includes Times Square, Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle. The plan outlines that in the next five years, Boingo WiFi will be available across all 270 train stations, tapping into a network of 1.6 billion annual passengers.
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| Torrid Rate of Growth for Digital Health Funding Posted: 25 Jun 2012 04:59 AM PDT  Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft's Health platform business. He's part of the White House Roundtable on Patient Access. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. After investments in digital health doubled from 2009 to 2011, the torrid pace of growth has continued in the first half of 2012. Rock Health’s founder Halle Tecco stated why they released a report at this time. “The impetus of this report was the notable growth in venture funding of digital health–so much so that we are seeing 73% more investments than the same time last year. As we strive to foster innovation and entrepreneurship within the space, we want to best characterize the landscape to paint a clear picture of where our field is going.” The following TechCrunch articles further explain the driving factors for this dramatic increase:
While there were a few $40M+ investments in the category, there was also a broad distribution of investors and investments.
The report below provides additional detail on the distribution of investments and organizations involved. The major buckets of investment include big data, home health, physician tool and sensors. The Bay Area continues to dominate funding with over $180 million in deals. Though mainstream media has been enamored with the story of what the Supreme Court will do with Obamacare, investors are voting with their wallets that the decisions made by 9 black-robed individuals is largely irrelevant to the disruptive innovators rapidly reshaping the industry landscape.
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| Opinsy Launches Beta To Create The ‘Opinion Graph’ Posted: 25 Jun 2012 04:32 AM PDT  Ankur Shah was a co-founder of the Techlightenment company which was acquired by Experian, the credit reporting service. But he’s now onto new and interesting things. That project now launches as Opinsy, a new platform which, broadly speaking, enables people to build communities and followings around their opinions, beliefs and ideas. Opinsy breaks cover as an invite only beta today. The launch is ironically timed and ‘on trend’ – we saw the launch of Menshn only last week, and Amen is the hot mobile app around strong opinions right now. Now, clearly it’s going to be hard to bring something new to this kind of party when Facebook and Twitter dominate public conversations so much. But we’ve been given a sneak preview and the site is very visual and pretty social. The idea is to visualise the people that agree or those who disagree, creating a central place for those opinions, with active discussions and to share those on social networks. Opinsy is heavily integrated into both Facebook and Twitter. Shah tells me that “We felt that places like Facebook pages and Likes weren’t, for example, the appropriate forum for global events like the Arab Spring, which needed a more focused place to express all the micro-views that took place during that immense time of change. … We’d prefer to be the YouTube of Opinions rather than a niche site of specific views. We’re about all opinions.” Sites like Pinterest and Fancy have done this for imagery and products, Opinsy will do this for opinions and beliefs says Shah. He says he plans to create the ‘opinion graph’ not the social graph. Partnerships with media companies and an iPad app are also in the cards. The team consists of about 5 people, is based out of London and is part of an ideas factory Shah is setting up called Wushi Labs.
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| LoveYourLarder Serves Up Revenue Share To Food Bloggers And Recipe Sites Posted: 25 Jun 2012 02:28 AM PDT  In its effort to position itself as the UK’s “Etsy for foodies”, LoveYourLarder has launched a revenue share scheme allowing publishers to earn money by linking to relevant products, thus supporting the smaller independent food producers that the company works with. Soft-launched in late 2010, LoveYourLarder can perhaps be best thought of as an online version of a farmer’s market, enabling foodies to discover and buy hard-to-find ingredients or “artisan” food and drink from independent producers in the UK. Hence the reference to Etsy. Since I last checked in with the company, the marketplace has grown from 70 producers to over 150 and now lists over 1,500 products, up from 500. In addition, the UK startup launched a subscription service in January called LarderBox — five site-picked items for a set monthly fee — of which it’s sold over 1,000 boxes. Commenting on the new affiliate scheme, which is specifically aimed at food bloggers and recipe sites, founder Tristan Watson says that he’s “excited about how this can help content producers earn money without having to display AdSense”, which he notes, despite Google’s best efforts, can be poorly targeted, while CPC and CPM rates are dropping. “We give each producer a 5% affiliate commission on referrals that lead to sales – so with an average order value of £25 they’ll earn around £1.25 – much better than they’ll get from AdSense”, he says. Which may well be true, but depends on whether or not the click actually leads to a purchase. But if the links are in support of a recipe, for example, then the synergy is a good one and readers will be “highly motivated to make a purchase”, says Watson. Zooming out a bit, Watson says that the food industry “has been late to adopt new technology” but sees the success of services like Housebites as well as the recent acquisition of Foodzie as evidence that there is a lot of potential to change the way consumers purchase food and, presumably, their eating habits. LoveYourLarder’s subscription service is a curious example – I recently took delivery of my first ‘LarderBox’ and while I’m enjoying the cake, honey, artisan chocolate and other gastronomic pleasures, I’m not sure I can be persuaded to commit to a serendipitous purchase of this nature every single month. The broader marketplace in which LoveYourLarder acts purely as a middle person, enabling consumers to connect directly with and buy from producers, may be a better model. But then there’s still a need for discovery, which I think is the key to growing the artisan food industry online. In terms of funding, LoveYourLarder is a graduate of the Difference Engine accelerator program, and has received a £150,000 investment from Northstar Ventures. The company says it’s in the process of raising their next funding round. LoveYourLarder’s competitors include Virtual Farmers Market, Big Barn, BuyGB and Food Ado.
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| In Its Ongoing War With Netflix, Amazon’s Lovefilm Signs 20th Century Fox Deal Posted: 25 Jun 2012 02:16 AM PDT  Amazon-owned Lovefilm, which competes with Netflix in the UK, has signed a multi-year content deal with Twentieth Century Fox, giving Lovefilm’s UK members streaming access to recent and forthcoming movies and TV series in the so-called ‘second pay window’. The move comes as the connected TV business is heating up in the UK, with Google TV finally making its way here too. The film deal will start with titles theatrically released in the UK in 2011, which will be made available to Lovefilm subscribers around March 2013. Members will also get access to Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution content such as motorcycle drama “Sons of Anarchy” and all seasons of “24″, “Prison Break”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and its spin-off “Angel”. The deal covers all of Lovefilm’s platforms including PC, Mac, Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Apple iPad and Internet-connected TV sets and Blu-ray players. It joins other deals Lovefilm has signed in the past 12 months, including agreements with Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, NBC Universal, Entertainment One, STUDIOCANAL, Disney, ABC, BBC and ITV. Back in May Lovefilm did a multi-year deal with NBCUniversal International Television Distribution, which offers members access to streaming titles from Universal Pictures during the second pay window. Amazon purchased Lovefilm back in January 2011, after holding a large minority stake in the company for some time, and has lately been been trying to wean itself off of DVD rentals like its U.S. competitor. The company now has over 2 million members in the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, and hosts over 70,000 titles, DVD, games and streaming titles combined.
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| HeyWire Launches BNDWGN, A Private Social Messaging App Built Around Your Interests Posted: 25 Jun 2012 02:00 AM PDT  BNDWGN, a new app from the makers of free texting service HeyWire, is launching what’s being called a “content messenger” service. The app is a combination of private friend-to-friend(s) chat and social media aggregation. Using BNDWGN, you can combine various streams from sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram into an interest-focused group which can be as narrowly defined as “Lady Gaga” or as broadly defined as “Tech.” And because you’re the creator of these content channels called “BNDWGNs” (say: “bandwagons”), the streams you include can extend beyond the official social media presences for the topic at hand. You can include any other things you want in these streams, like Facebook fan pages, Twitter users who share your interests, Instagram hashtags, and more. According to HeyWire CEO Meredith Flynn-Ripley, the idea for BNDWGN sprung from watching how people were using HeyWire, the company’s social communication utility. For those unfamiliar, HeyWire’s free SMS service launched back in September 2010, and allows users to text, tweet, and Facebook chat from within one app. It now has over 3 million active users monthly who spend 10 hours in the app per month, and recently hit its 2 billionth message sent. “It really was created out of the activity that we saw in HeyWire from the group messaging,” says Flynn-Ripley of BNDWGN’s creation. “We saw that groups would form around a particular topic or event, they’d talk and then the group would go away. It wouldn’t be this ongoing stream.” Another inspiration for the service was what she described as a feeling of being in “social network overload mode.” She was looking for a way to get the info she wanted by organizing it around topics. Some topics may be temporary – for example, news from a conference you want to track (like TechCrunch Disrupt, e.g.) – while others may represent longer-term interests. While its ability to aggregate from social media isn’t necessarily a new invention, BNDWGN has added an additional element to its service: private conversations. In each BNDWGN created, users can add friends who can then all message each other about the content contained within. Users can only message Facebook friends running the app, however, but content stays private unless explicitly shared to Facebook. You can also join other, public BNDWGNs submitted by the community if you’re just looking for topics to follow. The ability to publish your own BNDWGNs in this way won’t arrive until a future update, though. As new content arrives in the BNDWGNs you’re in, you’re notified via push messaging. But, as Flynn-Ripley points out, how often you receive these messages is up to you. “You can basically say ‘notify me when new content comes into the streams: never, every hour, or once a day,” she explains, “but more importantly, you can also just set it on ‘notify me when friends are chatting,’ that is, sending messages in the BNDWGN. That’s going alert me to ‘oh, something interesting is happening because a friend of mine is commenting on it,’” she says. A future release will allow you to configure the notification settings on per-BNDWGN basis. The company is now reaching out to major media brands, music, celebrities, and other companies with a large number of social media fan followers in order to create partnerships that would allow the brands to create their own official BNDWGN streams. HeyWire would then share aggregate, anonymized data with their partners detailing the trends around the content in BNDWGN – e.g., what was shared, how did people react, etc. “We see this as a new level of sentiment analysis,” says Flynn-Ripley. “When brands are in social media they know how many people like them, how many people are following them, they see what people are posting publicly on their walls…but they understand that people are consuming their media and sharing it with friends privately, and they have no insight into that.” Although HeyWire is backed by investor Lauder Partners, its founding is a little atypical in terms of tech startups. The company was founded by a merger and is now run by MediaFriends, which has $10 million in funding. But HeyWire is planning to raise funding for BNDWGN separately, and is now in the process of having conversations about a Series A. The new app is initially available for Android only. The iOS app will arrive in July.
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