Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Home Swapping Startup CasaHop Raises $1.2 Million From First Round, Lerer Ventures, Betaworks, And Others

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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New York City-based CasaHop aims to be the go-to place for home swapping on the web, and it’s signed up a pretty impressive lineup of investors. The company just raised a $1.2 million seed round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Lerer Ventures, Betaworks, hotelier Andre Balazs (who owns The Standard and The Mercer), MTV co-founder and Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, TechStars managing director David Tisch, One Laptop per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte, 24/7 Real Media and Tacoda co-founder Dave Morgan, and Moat and WGI Group co-founder Jonah Goodhart.

The idea behind CasaHop is to democratize home sharing, and use technology to help people find places to stay and learn more about the places that they’re visiting. There’s something about being able to drop into each others’ lives and travel like a local that’s appealing, but few sites have specialized in the experience. Paul Berry, the ex-CTO of HuffPo and partner in SoHo Tech Labs, where CasaHop was incubated, has done a number of home swaps over the years, but believes it could be made easier.

So now there’s CasaHop to facilitate the process. For now, the team is looking to push out product early and iterate along the way. It’s still early on, but the startup is already looking to add new features. While the site is mostly focused on connecting people with each other to exchange home now, Berry said the team is looking to roll out travel clubs and build more community features for the site.

It’s also looking to increase its visibility — and that’s where its investors and advisors come in. Berry told me this morning that choosing the right investors was just as important as getting the cash to help incubate the idea. Balazs, for instance, is a luminary in the travel and hospitality field, and Pittman has been instrumental in building huge consumer brands.

CasaHop is just one of a few startups to come out of Soho Tech Labs, which was founded by the likes of Ken Lerer, Eric Hippeau, Jonah Peretti, Eric Ashman, Berry and Greg Coleman. Ben Regenspan, another HuffPo alum, is the CTO of CasaHop, which now has about 14 employees in total.



Children’s Stories App MeMeTales Comes To Android, Offers Free Books All Summer

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 08:16 AM PDT

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MeMeTales, a super-cute (and guilt-free!) children’s books application arrives on Android today, following its iOS release and public debut at 500 Startups’ demo day last October. Originally from Seattle, now a San Francisco-based operation, the company was founded by husband and wife team Maya Bisineer and Pree Kolari, and offers a library of picture books designed for preschool and elementary-aged kids and their parents.

Through partnerships with publishers like PBSKids, HarperCollins, Little Pickle Press, Shen’s Books and others, the platform includes access to a variety of quality books to choose from, but unlike other e-book libraries for kids, it also “gamifies” the experience for the young readers.

In MeMeTales, kids earn points and stickers for reading books and get to unlock book-related games, when available. Parents are kept in the loop and notified of their child’s progress, as the kid racks up the rewards, too. For publishers, MeMeTales is also offering an online publishing platform that allows them to share their books with the MeMeTales community.

Since its launch, founder Maya Bisineer tells us that MeMeTales has reached 81,000 app downloads, 37,000 registered users, and has seen nearly 400,000 complete book reads through the app. They also saw an average of 1,800 complete book reads per day in the past week. Plus, says Bisineer, over 20% of the app’s users return the app daily. All good metrics for a relatively new, education-focused app.

Becoming a connoisseur of these type of apps myself, I enjoy the stories and illustrations in MeMeTales quite a bit, but the actual reading experience still needs a little work. The nav bar remains when reading, font choice is kind of boring, and sometimes the font overlays the picture (on iPhone, that is – it looks better on iPad). I love the more immersive feel of something like Farfaria, for example. But MeMeTales is young and improving.

Alongside the Android launch, the company is updating its iOS app as well, and is partnering with PBSKids and several children’s publishers on Readathon 2012, a special summer reading initiative. The company will be giving kids access to free books and learning materials from its publishing partners every week for six weeks during the summer. (Normally, MeMeTales sells the books it offers, after the first 20 which are free at sign-up).

“We are big believers that technology, combined with community can push the envelope on making a real difference. We really hope we can inspire other app developers to look beyond being ‘just an app,’” says Bisineer. “We have built technology that makes it possible for publishers to let kids ‘borrow’ their books for free via the app and website during the Readathon,” she explains, describing how the summer reading program works. “At the end of the week, the books go right back into the store for people to purchase,”

In addition, for every child who joins the Readathon, MeMeTales is donating a meal to a hungry child via FoodForEducation.org. (They’ve reached 1,256 meals donated so far.) The goal is to donate 10,000 meals if they reach 10,000 readers or 100,000 book reads. The Readathon curriculum has also been integrated into several existing preschools, summer camps and weekly Mommy and Me Storytimes across the U.S., says Bisineer.

The company raised $100,000 from 500 Startups and others last year, and is looking to raise another round in the upcoming months. Bisineer says they have a couple of investors committed, but nothing they can announce publicly at this time. You download the mobile app here on iOS or the newly launched Android app here.

Louis C.K. Sells Show Tickets On His Own Website

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 08:09 AM PDT

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Comedian Louis C.K. is using the Internet to his advantage by selling tickets to his upcoming shows online, cutting out the ticket sales systems entirely. He’s also implementing a system to cancel scalped tickets. Each ticket will cost $45 after tax. He explains his vision this way:

By selling the tickets exclusively on my site, I’ve cut the ticket charges way down and absorbed them into the ticket price. To buy a ticket, you join NOTHING. Just use your credit card and buy the damn thing. opt in to the email list if you want, and you’ll only get emails from me.
Also, you’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). this is something I intend to enforce. There are some other rules you may find annoying but they are meant to prevent someone who has no intention of seeing the show from buying the ticket and just flipping it for twice the price from a thousand miles away.

C.K. has already sold shows on his own website (inspiring others to follow suit) so this makes perfect sense. “Doing things this way means I’m making less than I would have made if I did a standard tour, using the usual very excellent but expensive ticketing service. In some cities I’ve had to play smaller venues and do more shows. But I like doing more shows and about a year ago I reached a place where I realized I am making enough money doing comedy so the next thing that interested me is bringing your price down,” C.K. wrote. “Either way, I still make a whole lot more than my grandfather who taught math and raised chickens in Michigan.”

You can buy tickets right here. Sadly NYC is already sold out, but I figure Louis C.K. will soon start selling personal audiences at his apartment in Manhattan for $60 where he tells your fortune like some mad-eyed Rasputin.

Nook Tablets And Nook Color Get Graphic Novels From DC, New Zoom View Feature

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 08:07 AM PDT

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Owners of the Nook Tablet and Nook Color (plus Android tablets with the Nook app) will now be able to catch up on the adventures of Superman, Batman, Sandman, and other characters published by DC Entertainment. Barnes & Noble announced today that more than 100 of DC’s graphic novels are available through Nook Comics.

To facilitate the reading experience, Barnes & Noble also says it’s adding a new feature called Zoom View, allowing readers to zoom in on a particular panel, then read the graphic novel panel-by-panel. This will probably sound familiar to users of ComiXology and affiliated apps on the iPad, where the Guided View experience has gone a long way towards making comics pages readable on smaller screens.

Marvel and Barnes & Noble made a similar partnership announcement for Nook Tablets last fall. Collectively, these announcements suggest that the Nook is making steps to catch up with other devices (the Kindle being the bigger competitor, but the iPad being the trendsetter when it comes to digital comics) as a comics reading experience.

In the case of DC, the news also means that the publisher has gotten over its dispute with Barnes & Noble from last fall. DC had announced that it was offering 100 graphic novels exclusively on the Kindle Fire, prompting Barnes & Noble to pull those titles from the shelves of its physical stores, claiming, “we will not stock physical books in our stores if we are not offered the available digital format.” Well, now they’re being offered the digital format.

Those 100 Nook titles will include a number of graphic novels collecting the first storylines from The New 52, the initiative that DC launched last fall to reboot all of its characters (and also to take a more aggressive approach to digital distribution). Other titles include Watchmen, All Star Superman Vol. 1 and 2, and The Sandman Vol. 1-10.

Mobile Video Sharing Startup Klip Launches Its ‘Best-Looking App Yet’ On Android Devices

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT

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Klip is one of those mobile video-sharing apps — you know, the ones that let you take a video with your phone and upload it to an app to share it with people who have the app. And then, if it’s really awesome you share with other people, like on Facebook and Twitter. There’s a lot of ‘em right now, with Socialcam and Viddy tops among them — at least on iOS. But no one’s really offering the same functionality on Android, which is why Klip is really excited about its latest release, which brings its app to users of Android mobile phones.

Launched last September, Klip’s iOS app has done pretty well, attracting millions of downloads. But the number one request among users was to make the app available for Android, so that its existing users could share videos with their friends. The Klip Android app, which goes live today, will bring in all the features that the startup’s iPhone users enjoy and make them available to those with Samsung and HTC and Motorola-type devices.

It offers up the ability to share your videos with friends on the app, tweet them out or put them on your Facebook wall. But it’s also about connecting with the community, following — and being followed — by people you don’t necessarily know, and publishing videos out to the broader group. The new app allows Klip users to preview videos on the device before posting them, as well as being able to scrub through videos and see preview thumbnails.

Klip developed the app not just because getting it on Android devices opens up a huge new market, but because it hopes to take advantage of a number of Android features not available for the iPhone. That includes, among other things, more processing power, larger displays, and LTE connectivity. All of that means higher-quality graphics, as Klip took advantage of a 50 percent increase in the number of pixels for its Android app and increased thumbnail size accordingly.

The Klip app works on Android versions 2.3 (Gingerbread) and above, meaning it can be used on more than 70 percent of Android mobile phones. Meanwhile, competitors are still working on getting their own video apps on Android. In fact, Android has a dearth of video production or editing apps in general. One reason for that — or so I’ve heard from mobile developers — is that unlike iOS, which has integrated video processing built in, the Android ecosystem is a hodgepodge of different manufacturers and device capabilities with no good way to power video manipulation. Klip gets around this because it does all its video rendering in the cloud.

Klip has raised a total of $10 million since its founding, with Benchmark Capital, Matrix Partners and founder Alain Rossmann putting money in. The company has fewer than 20 employees, including personnel from Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and Apple.

The Day After Its $1.2B Purchase By Microsoft, Yammer Goes Down, And Up Again

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 07:52 AM PDT

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Murphy’s Law — or some jaded users might just call it Yammer’s law: One day after Yammer announced that it got bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion, the enterprise social networking site has gone down. It’s been down for at least an hour already and is covering several geographies, from what we can see. Update: it is back up now.

The crash will not do any favors to Microsoft, which plans to integrate the company into its Microsoft Office division to be part of a wider, integrated social and cloud push from the Redmond, Washington software giant.

I’m in London and have been noticing the spinning wheel for about an hour, although Eric in San Francisco tells me he’s seen his Yammer go up and down in that time. The “Down For Everyone Or Just Me” site also agrees:

We’re reaching out to Yammer to find out what is going on.

For those who are regular users of the Yammer closed-enterprise social network, this may be familiar territory: the site has had some downtime issues before, although this one has to be the crash with the best (worst) timing of them all.

While Microsoft’s purchase of Yammer brings to it another way for the company to enhance enterprise communications — and fits in well with other past acquisitions like Skype — the deal also potentially brings in millions of existing Yammer users that Microsoft can link into more of its existing cloud-based collaboration services. Reliability issues like these, however, damage that proposition.

Some of the responses from Twitter:

One user wonders if Yammer’s crash has to do with extra-high traffic to the site today, although this didn’t seem to be a problem yesterday when the news was first announced.

Update: The site is back up; we’re trying to find out what happened to bring it down.

Microsoft Gives In-Depth Tour Of Windows Phone 7.8′s Supercharged Start Screen

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 07:09 AM PDT

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Microsoft revealed Windows Phone 7.8 last week. The system update got a bit of stage time details were still a bit lite. The Windows Phone team posted the video above and it should clear up some confusion around the new Start Screen.

Windows 8 brings a host of new features, but most are hidden from the user, involving the platform’s kernel. For better or worse, the biggest visible change involves the Start Screen that will feature re-sizable tiles. But current Windows Phone will not be able to jump on the Windows Phone 8 bandwagon due to hardware requirements. And so, to likely prevent an angry mob of users, Microsoft is bringing the new Start Screen to current phones through the Windows Phone 7.8 update.



ZTE Aims For Apple, Samsung With Lofty 2012 Smartphone Sales Goal

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 07:08 AM PDT

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ZTE isn’t a name we hear a lot over in the States, but the company plans to change all that. Head of mobile strategy Ryu Chienhao claims that ZTE plans on selling 35 million smartphones this year, with hopes to become the number 3 smartphone and mobile phone vendor in the world by 2015.

Last year, the company shipped 15 million smartphones with a heavy focus on Asia. To reach 35 million, ZTE will not only need to expand outside of China but also build more premium products to compete in the U.S. mobile landscape. The forthcoming “Grand” series should help with that, though the recently announced Grand X LTE is only headed to Europe and Asia Pacific.

IDC research pegs ZTE as No. 4 in general mobile phone sales (which includes smartphones), giving the company a 4.8 percent marketshare with 19.8 million mobile phones shipped in Q1 2012.

To give you a little context, Apple sold 17.7 million iPhones between Sept. 25 and Dec. 1, 2011. And Samsung, who has more than a few hot-selling flagships, expects that its Samsung Galaxy S III will hit 10 million sales by July. Clearly, competition is stiff between the number 1 and number 2 smartphone vendors here in the States, so ZTE has quite a bit of work cut out.

At the same time, the mobile landscape is ever-changing, and another mobile powerhouse is more than welcome into the ring.

Scott Harrison Of Charity:Water [TCTV]

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 07:07 AM PDT

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Charity: Water has become something of a phenomenon in recent years. We spoke to founder Scott Harrison about the unusual amount of support he’s gotten from the tech community, in part due to entrepreneurs like Sean Parker and Michael Birch becoming involved. We spoke to him during the F.ounders conference at the Nasdaq in New York.

New Relic Now Tracks Fastest Apps & Industries, Lets You Compare Your Speed To The Competition

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 07:05 AM PDT

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This probably won’t come as a surprise, but people are impatient. Naturally, this means that your customers are impatient. So, for websites and applications, speed and performance are critical. For example: An Aberdeen Research Group study found that, on average, one second of lag-time can translate into a 7 percent decrease in conversions and $2.5 million in lost revenue each year.

New Relic, one of a number of startups that has emerged in the last 5 years to address the costly, patchwork BS of old-school enterprise monitoring solutions, gives developers an easy, cloud-based way to keep tabs on their apps in realtime — without breaking the bank.

Of course, while any old monitoring and analytics service might bring that measurable 5 to 10 percent performance boost, what does it matter if your apps are still tortoises compared to your competitors? Today, New Relic is launching a tool that aims to give businesses some of that comparative insight, report card-style. The App Speed Index shows New Relic users how their performance compares to that of 25,000 other companies — in 14 industry-specific categories — to help them avoid losing millions to the speedier competition.

While there are plenty of performance monitoring, segmentation, and speed optimization tools out there, New Relic thinks that it has a (Big Data) size advantage. The key to the Speed Index comes from the fact that it collects over 55 billion performance metrics and monitors 1.5 billion page loads for its 25,000+ customers and their 500,000 app instances. Essentially, this means New Relic is collecting, storing, and analyzing 3.5 terabytes of data every day.

In truth, most companies are monitoring and optimizing speed in a relative vacuum, but using that 3.5 terabytes of daily data, the Index gives managers and developers specific insight into user experience, measuring performance improvements over time — in the context of their own industry.

As New Relic explained in a blog post this morning, the tool enables its customers to compare their apps to Peer Groups of similar apps, whether they be eCommerce, SaaS, gaming, or consumer web. After classifying their app, users can view their percentile rank within their peer group “for end user and application response times, error rates, and application availability.” All touch points that presumably matter to your business.

In this way, users will see how much faster you have to be to measure up to the rest of the pack. And, in the spirit of incentivization through public benchmarking, the startup has launched a “living infographic,” which ranks peer groups by performance and availability.

The page lists the fastest apps monitored by New Relic and displays them in a public leaderboard, updated daily. Whether you call it gamification or humiliation, the Index allows users to see just who the Joneses are and what they have to do to keep up with ‘em. The idea being that they’ll be eager to become conspicuous consumers.

Companies can opt-in to participating in the index, or not. So, to incentivize companies who might be thinking, “wait, if I can see their data, they can see mine…” New Relic gives them the option of whether or not to share, and in the event they do, their data is kept anonymous. So, when a user opts-in, they make end-user response time, server-side response time, error rate, downtime, etc. available to be compared, and as their blog post says, “others in your Peer Group have done the same, but you'll never know exactly who they are.”

The resulting rankings allow admins and managers more granular comparisons between the front-end and back-end performance of their apps and New Relic’s 20K+ users. Those participating receive access to a dashboard that compares these different touch points (speed, responsiveness, etc.) with that of others in their industry group, along with an over-arching percentile ranking.

At launch, the Index shows that, out of the 820+ apps that have opted-in to the App Speed Index, Mirror Slots takes first place, with Argos in second and Intuit’s Live Community in third. As for eCommerce, InSales ranks as the speediest, followed by Shopify and Fotolia.

Accompanying the launch of its Speed Index, New Relic is also launching custom dashboards for personalized business metrics and correlative info so that users can see how shopping cart abandonment relates to changes in app performance, for example. The custom dashboards are drag-and-drop, too, which means there’s no coding required.

This last part is only available to users with Pro accounts, however, which runs at about $150/month. More on pricing here. While its new features help it stand out and may prove appealing to new users, New Relic does face (at least nominal) competition of its own from startups like Mixpanel, AppDynamics, and Crittercism — to name a few. Though, with four years experience and $34.5 million in funding under its belt, New Relic’s APM solution has plenty of traction — and fuel left to burn.

For more on Index and Custom Dashboards, see New Relic’s blog post.

Mobile Payments Platform ZooZ Partners With MobiCart, Ready To Raise Series A

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 07:04 AM PDT

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ZooZ, an in-app mobile payment system that supports credit cards, PayPal and carrier billing, just made a move that will introduce its service to 10,000 different merchants. The company is partnering with MobiCart, a platform that allows anyone to create m-commerce applications on iOS and Android. MobiCart already supports around 40 different shopping carts within its mobile storefronts, and is now adding ZooZ to the lineup.

In addition, ZooZ CEO Oren Levy says the company is planning to come to the U.S. and is preparing to raise its Series A.

Levy says that ZooZ will be splitting its operation, currently based in Israel, and will relocate some of its 10-person staff to the U.S. The location – even West Coast or East Coast – has not yet been decided, but he will be out here next month scouting for office space (and likely, talking with investors).

While the name doesn’t necessarily imply trust and security (“ZooZ” sounds like some virtual reward you would collect in a mobile game. “Beat the boss to earn 10 ZooZ”), the mobile payments service is actually trying to bring the same level of security to mobile that exists in the world of the desktop-based web.

“Despite the fact that there’s a lot of m-commerce going on, there’s a lack of uniformity in checkout schemes,” explains Levy. “Each app creates it own checkout, its own colors and you don’t know how secure it is.” On the desktop, you’ll see things like the VeriSign seal that assures shoppers that the checkout process is verified to be safe. This doesn’t exist on mobile. Not coincidentally, ZooZ’s CTO and co-founder Ronen Morecki is ex-VeriSign (he was a VP of R&D over there) and knows a thing or two about security and fraud detection.

The problem with the lack of security means users aren’t converting and there’s a high cart abandonment rate. So ZooZ introduced an in-app SDK that developers can implement with three lines of code in order to start accepting payments within their app. A seal at the bottom of the checkout tells mobile shoppers that the process is secure. The SDK also helps developers who don’t want to establish their own merchant accounts in order to accept credit cards, and just want a drop-in toolkit for doing that. The SDK currently supports iOS, Android, and more recently, HTML5. Plans to extend the payment options (now carrier billing, cc’s, and PayPal) to Amazon and Google Wallet are also in the works. And, as you may expect, ZooZ makes its money through transaction fees (2.8% + $0.19 for each successful transaction).

Since ZooZ’s launch in March, over 1,500 developers have signed up, about 50% of which are on iOS and the other half on Android. Assuming ZooZ can raise the necessary funding, the plan is to connect the platform with as many different types of e-wallets/payment options as possible, and make the SDK smartly location-based. That is, it would detect where users are physically located to show them only the payment options supported in their region.

More info on ZooZ and developer downloads are here.

Faster, Flash-Friendly Firefox 14 For Android Graduates From Beta

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 06:37 AM PDT

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When Mozilla first pushed their latest beta version of Firefox into the Google Play Store last month, it raised a few eyebrows thanks to its dramatic redesign and its claims of “significant” performance enhancements. Now that new version of Firefox (version 14, if you’re keeping track) has cast off its beta trappings, but is it worth your time?

The name of Mozilla's game with their latest mobile version of Firefox is performance. Users who took the plunge with Firefox for Android in the early days (and even the not-so-early days) were left with a novel browsing experience that could often be marred by downright slow performance.

"It was a solid product if you were on a high end phone but it was a problem for anything less than that," said Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Firefox Engineering. "We decided to rebuild it with performance as the focus, and rip apart anything that was slow." The Android version of Firefox 14 actually went to beta before the desktop version did because the team was concerned about nailing down performance on as many Android devices as they could.

Their effort is certainly apparent in the final product — unlike the previous version (which would black out the screen on my Galaxy Nexus for a few seconds before displaying the homepage), Firefox 14 springs to life nearly instantaneously after tapping its icon. Loading pages is generally quicker to boot (though still not as downright quick as Chrome), and swiping down through long pages of content is perceptibly smoother than the version that preceded it.

But Firefox's performance on new devices is only part of the equation. I took the new build for a spin on something decidedly less robust — the Gingerbread-powered Samsung Galaxy Player 3.6, which sports a single-core 1GHz processor. As you would expect, the experience is decidedly less buttery thanks to some pokey hardware, but FF14 still managed to outperform the device's stock browser in terms of page loading speed and general usability. It's bound to be a welcome change for users with older or less powerful devices looking for a way to cruise the web with a bit more panache.

Firefox 14 is also notable for its inclusion of Flash support, a move that may seem a bit puzzling considering the group's focus on open web standards like HTML5. Still, it's hard to deny that there's still gobs of Flash content peppering the web, and a member of Mozilla's mobile team mentioned that it took "a bunch of engineering work" to get things working properly across the multiple versions of Android that Firefox 14 plays well with. It goes without saying that running Flash content on an Android device has never really been the most pleasant experience, but it's here and it works if you feel as though your life is somehow less meaningful without it.

To sweeten the pot for existing Firefox users, the bookmark syncing Firefox Sync feature still allows users to access bookmarks, browser histories, saved passwords, and tabs stored on different devices.

Mozilla has also completely revamped their original mobile UI in favor of one that places much more emphasis on the address bar. It took a ton of getting used to but I was fan of Mozilla's original concept, one that had users swiping to the left and right to access a list view of their other browser tabs and a control panel for bookmarking and navigating back and forward through webpages. Now all that functionality is crammed into a smaller area, and naturally some changes had to be made.

Perhaps most frustrating is the fact that the reload button has been relegated to a life hidden away from plain sight. In order to reload a page, users now have to tap the menu button first in order to find the option, something that seems terribly odd since it used to live right inside the address bar. Not all of the design tweaks are questionable, as the tab view button nestled next to the address bar displays a running total of how many tabs are open — tapping that button also displays those tabs as real-time thumbnails.

At this point though, Firefox for Android also lacks a few features that have become widely used in rival browsers. The ability to request the desktop version of a page (as seen in the stock ICS browser and Chrome's Android beta) immediately comes to mind because of how often I need to use it, though Mozilla's mobile team confirmed that the feature would appear in a new release sometime this summer. As such, it becomes clear that Firefox isn't going to be for everyone — fans of sheer performance have Chrome (though Nightingale says that he'd put Firefox 14 against Chrome anyday), and browsers like Dolphin offer features like gesture-based navigation and voice control to wow their users.

But in the end, Mozilla doesn't view this as a contest. Rivals like Chrome and Dolphin bring different browsing experiences to the table, and Nightingale noted that the cross-pollination of features and ideas will only strengthen the choices users have when it comes to exploring the web. That’s what Mozilla is really after here, and with Firefox 14 they’re doing their part to contribute to a better web.

"We hope that other browsers will copy the things we build,” he remarked. “That's a success criteria for us."

Wallaby Combines All Your Credit Cards Into One, Makes Sure You Earn The Most Rewards

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 06:30 AM PDT

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Wallaby, which is launching its beta today, reminds me a bit of banking startup Simple. Just like Simple automatically manages your finances for you and automatically shuffles your money between the most lucrative debit and savings accounts, Wallaby combines all of your existing credit cards onto one card and then decides which of your credit card accounts to route your transactions to based on where you can get the most frequent flyer miles or cashback bonuses.

Wallaby, which is backed MuckerLab, an accelerator in Santa Monica, CA, provides you with a single physical credit card and digital wallet. First you register all your physical cards with Wallaby and then, when you want to pay for gas, for example, it will automatically use the card that gives you triple miles for gas purchases. Later, when you use the card at a restaurant, it will automatically route payments to the rewards card in your digital wallet that gives you a 5% cashback bonus in restaurants.

Besides the automatic mode, users can also designate which percentage of their spending should go to which card. A companion mobile app will allow users to change their preferences anytime.

The company says that almost 90% of U.S. consumers now carry rewards cards and most people find these credit card rewards programs confusing. Wallaby, on the other hand, says founder and CEO Matthew Goldman, makes it “easy for people to earn the most rewards by channeling spending toward the best card for each transaction, making sure each consumer gets the most from their credit cards’ annual fees.”

I’ve seen a few design studies and products that aim to do something similar, but I’m not aware of another product that combines a physical card with the intelligent backend that Wallaby promises.

There are obviously pros and cons to using credit cards to begin with, but if you do use credit cards – especially ones that come with frequent flyer or cashback rewards – Wallaby is probably worth a look.

The first 1,000 users to sign up for the company’s beta, by the way, will receive a lifetime membership benefit and the next 5,000 users will get a free card for 12 months. New users beyond these first beta users will receive six months of free service. After that, Wallaby will cost $50 per year.

Clever bSafe Panic Alarm App Launches In U.S. With Free Offer To New Yorkers

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 06:22 AM PDT

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The market for ‘panic alarm’ apps on smartphones is littered with simple apps which just make a lot of noise if you get attacked, but not much else. This is a mistake.

Smartphones have cameras, microphones, and can broadcast their location – basically everything you need to turn the phone into the ultimate safety device. So it’s surprising that so few startups are addressing this area. One that has been around since 2011 out of Denmark is PanicGuard. The app will sound an alarm, SMS someone, start recording video and track your location. But it’s expensive ($6 a month), and is failing to scale outside the UK/Europe. Its main competitor is the bSafe app on iOS and Android from the startup called Bipper.

This has now launched a major push into the U.S. with both a free and paid-for model, and a way of using it for more everyday safety. It’s this business model which has seen it become the most downloaded mobile safety app in Europe to date, with over 100,000 downloads.

New York residents can try out the premium version of the bSafe app free for three months. Afterwards, or if they live anywhere else in the U.S., the service costs $2 per month or $20 yearly. It’s good timing – New York has seen an alarming 400% spike in violent crime in some parts of the city in the last year. This week bSafe launches a partnership with chain stores 7-Eleven and Narvesen.

Now live on the U.S. iOS store and Android store, bSafe is pretty sophisticated. It not only alerts your friends, but also secures evidence and broadcasts a time-stamped video recording to them and sends them a map with your location. A user decides whether the siren and video should be activated when the alarm is pushed, meaning it works in ‘stealth mode’ for situations where someone wants to get help without alerting, for example, an abusive partner.

But this is not just an emergency app, as it contains several features to ensure the users’ everyday safety. These include the ability to allow you to invite friends to follow you home with live GPS tracking, broadcast just one location, and a ‘Fake Call’ feature makes the phone ring like a real phone call to help the user get out of an uncomfortable situation.

Interestingly bSafe also allows for co-branding with partners wanting to offer additional services for their customers. Thus we understand Bipper is now in discussions with some major telcos and insurance companies after raising seed funding from Innovation Norway.

Founder Silje Vallestad has now moved to the U.S. to fund-raise a Series A round to take the service global.

Facebook’s Hidden “Like” Isn’t Just Good For Mobile Developers, It’s Good For Facebook

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 06:11 AM PDT

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Last week’s announcement from Facebook about the new ability for app developers to integrate a hidden, built-in “Like” button in their mobile applications seemed to fly under the radar. Not that it wasn’t duly covered by tech press: it was. But the deeper implications seemed to have been summed up under the banner of “this is great news for app developers”-type sentiment. It is, of course. App developers who smartly leverage Facebook integration can achieve impressive growth, even if it’s a bit manufactured at times. But more importantly, the move is great for Facebook. It has managed to introduce a toolkit that allows developers to weave Facebook’s data collection capabilities deep into the fabric of the future Internet - that is, the world of mobile apps.

First, some background. Smartphone adoption is growing at an incredible rate. Over half of the U.S.’s mobile population now owns a smartphone. Worldwide, the potential addressable markets are huge: China has 122 million users who could afford an iPhone or Android. The U.S. has 91 million, India 75 million, Japan 65 million and Brazil 34 million.

According to KPCB’s Mary Meeker, global mobile Internet traffic is also rapidly growing, and has now reached about 10% of all Internet traffic. 71% of the revenue in mobile is coming from apps, but only 29% from ads (and only 1% of U.S. ad spend currently goes to mobile). But Meeker believes that it’s only a matter of time before mobile monetization catches up.

These numbers are important to provide context. Namely, that we’re shifting into the post-PC era, a time when the way we interact with the web, with online services, and with technology as a whole, is changing. The PC era was defined by a computer in every home and then a web browser. Later, with “web 2.0,” there came a group of online applications that provided richer interactions than the static pages of the past. Meanwhile, information discovery and retrieval in the PC era evolved from online directories to search. It’s now poised to evolve yet again.

Google was – and, still is – an incredible innovation. Billions of webpages, and it knows which ones we want to see first. However, our reliance on Google.com’s search has the potential to fade somewhat in the post-PC era. A blank box, type in text, hit enter, read results, see related ads? Mobile users will operate differently. We will query up data from within an un-indexed web – the web of apps. Movie showtimes? Weather? News? Friends’ updates? Yes, this information is available on the web, but users will find the details they need by launching apps, or talking to virtual assistants like Siri who then launch the apps for them. So how does an advertising-focused company – Facebook or Google –  surface a user’s intentions and interests in this app era, outside of explicit search queries? It starts to track you in the apps, of course.

Facebook’s Open Graph, an arguably bigger player in the mobile-first future, allows Facebook to record what people are doing, and then infer what they like and what they would then want to know, based on those actions. You “played” a song in Spotify, you “read” an article, e.g. Then you clearly like Lady Gaga or reading about Politics. Right? Well, maybe. That’s a fascinating data set of user behavior, but there’s still something to be said for the explicit “Like.” It holds a different meaning. It means you not only saw/read/interacted with the content, as the Open Graph actions indicate, but you also approve/agree/support/feel good about it.

But the Facebook “Like,” still relatively new in the grand scheme of things, has already become synonymous with “market to me in my News Feed.” The decision to press the seemingly innocuous thumbs up now holds a meaning that even less technical folks have come to understand. It’s the modern equivalent of “add my name to your email distribution list.” (So far we’ve come, so little has changed.)

That’s why the “hidden” like is so interesting. It’s integrated seamlessly into the application. You’re not “Liking” a Facebook Page, you’re “Liking” an Instagram photo. And it’s not a thumbs up icon – it’s a little heart…or whatever else the developer sees fit to use. The point being: it looks like part of the app itself. It will become impossible to tell (without reading all the pop-up disclaimers and EULAs – and who does?) which in-app actions will live within the app and which populate Facebook. And that’s the idea. That’s how they getcha.

Another reason why the hidden Like is important: it allows for data collection surrounding apps’ more passive users. If you believe in the 1% rule, content creators only account for 1% of a community. Not everyone will read, watch, post, create, etc., as the Open Graph actions allow for. But a fair number will still interact – i.e., “Like” – the content others are creating in the apps. And the hidden like allows that data to be tracked.

In a (not-so-distant?) future, you can see where this is headed, in terms of advertising. A user “Likes” Instagram photos of beaches and sunsets. The user then sees ads for vacations and cruises on Facebook. A user “Likes” a friend’s Starbucks check-in in Foursquare, but has never “Liked” Starbucks’ fan page on Facebook. Now Starbucks knows to show them ads and deals. It’s the re-creation of the tracking cookie’s capabilities in a “web” where people surf mobile applications, not websites. And what could it become? The possibilities are mind-boggling. You “Like” photos of beaches, you launch a travel app to book plane tickets for a work trip and find Caribbean vacation packages are now on sale. Coincidence, or “Like” tracking? You may not know, but what’s even better, is that you may not care.

Huddle Takes Its Enterprise Collaboration Tech To Tablets With First-Ever iPad App

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 06:05 AM PDT

Huddle for iPad

Huddle, the London- and San Francisco-based company that makes enterprise cloud collaboration software for the enterprise, this morning rolled out its first-ever native iPad app.

Huddle for iPad has the features you’ve probably come to expect from the best of such apps: Automatic syncing with your desktop Huddle account, the capability to have online and offline access to certain documents, email integration, and integration with other relevant apps such as Google QuickOffice and Fileboard.

According to Huddle co-founders Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Huddle for iPad is a response to just how common it has become for people to use iPads for work purposes. The mobile worker population is estimated to reach some 1.3 billion by 2015 according to analysis firm IDC, so bringing Huddle to as many mobile devices as possible certainly makes sense.

We sat down with Mitchell and McLoughlin here in our San Francisco TechCrunch TV studio to hear more about the iPad debut, how Huddle is growing with its latest $24 million Series C funding round, their thoughts on the Microsoft/Yammer deal and the larger enterprise collaboration landscape, and more. Check it out:

Brightcove Open Sources App Cloud, Bets Big On Dual-Screen Apps For Apple TV

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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It was just a year ago that video distribution specialist Brightcove announced it was entering a new market, with a cloud-based product for quickly building multiplatform mobile applications called App Cloud. Well at this year’s annual Play conference, Brightcove will make App Cloud available for free with an open source license. It’s also making a set of tools available that it hopes will push forward the dual-screen applications market.

Brightcove’s App Cloud is basically like a WYSIWYG editor for app development, designed to allow developers to roll out rich apps for both iOS and Android mobile phones and tablets with a minimum amount of actual programming required. App Cloud provides templates to get developers up and running quickly, but which can also be customized with native code. Once built, App Cloud also contains Brightcove’s Workshop debugging tool, so that users can test and preview apps natively on the device and make changes in real-time, before submitting to the App Store or Google Play.

The new free version of Brightcove’s App Cloud is being made available with an open source SDK, to enable developers to build, test, and debug an unlimited number of apps on their devices. They can compile them, and make them available for Apple iOS and Google Android devices.

It’s more or less a freemium model for app building. With App Cloud Core you can build and release as many apps as you want. But if you want features like real-time analytics, push notifications, and native ads, you can upgrade to App Cloud Pro for $99 a month. And for those who need an even more robust feature set, there’s an enterprise version for high-volume apps with custom pricing plans based upon usage.

In addition to open sourcing App Cloud, it’s also pushing one particular feature set, which could change the way we watch TV. Its App Cloud Dual-Screen Solution for Apple TV uses a set of APIs that will allow tablet and mobile users to have a truly integrated second screen experience. By leveraging Apple’s AirPlay technology, App Cloud users can create applications that use the mobile device as the search and navigation, while the Apple TV plays back video.

While developers today can already build robust dual-screen apps that connect the iPad or iPhone and Apple TV, few apps actually take advantage of the capability. Brightcove’s Dual-Screen solution simplifies the creation of these apps, enabling a whole new level of interactivity for app makers to unlock. It also has the potential to shift viewership habits. Today, most TV apps think of the mobile phone or tablet as the “second screen,” but with these dual-screen apps, Brightcove CMO Jeff Whatcott says it’s the mobile device which is the first screen, since it is being used to control the experience, and it is also where all the program information appears.

Hail A Fellow Human, Not A Taxi With “SideCar” – The New P2P Uber

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 05:59 AM PDT

SideCar App Logo

You need a ride, someone else has a car and could use the cash, SideCar is the app that will bring you together. New instant peer-to-peer rideshare-finding app SideCar turns anyone into a taxi / Uber driver, and it’s supposedly legal because you technically volunteer to pay at the end. Today it emerges from beta for iOS and Android in its first city, San Francisco.

Punch in your location and destination and soon a civilian SideCar driver agrees to take you. Plus, thanks to background checks and a rating system (which we grill CEO Sunil Paul about in a video interview below), you might be less likely to be murdered than in a traditional cab or meeting anyone on Craigslist. SV Angel, Lerer, Ventures, and Mark Pincus are all investors, because they see how SideCar could rethink transportation, and make it so you never buy another car.

While you might immediately think of SideCar as going up against Uber, Paul tells me “The way we think about competition is  someone saying ‘I’ll just drive’ is #1, and #2 is ‘I’ll jet go out the street and raise my hand’. Further down the line is ‘I’ll call Uber.’”

The fact is that many cities (welcome to San Francisco) just don’t have enough taxis or adequate public transportation, but more and more, people don’t want to waste money on car payments, gas, insurance, and parking. SideCar hopes you’d rather pay that money to other citizens who already own a vehicle.

When you book a ride, SideCar shows the average amount people have paid their drivers for a similar trip. When you reach your destination, an in-app slider lets you volunteer to pay more or less. And not everyone’s a scrooge. In the 10,000 rides during its four-month private beta, Paul says “the vast majority of people do pay something”, and SideCar gets a 20% cut.

Those cuts could add up quick if SideCar can solve its primary problem: awareness. It needs people registering as drivers and asking for rides. But it has help from some well connected seed investors, which include Spring Ventures, where Sunil Paul is a partner, Huron River Ventures, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, First Step Fund, Jeff Clarke, Lisa Gansky, Robert Goldberg, Jared Kopf, Konstantin Othmer, Mark Pincus, Martin Roscheisen, Josh Silverman, and Thomas Varghese.

It will also have to compete with more established transportation alternatives like peer-to-peer car rental services RelayRides and Getaround where you drive yourself, as well as centralized carsharers like Zipcar and City CarShare. You know, ones where you aren’t locked in a metal box with someone you don’t know.

Another big roadblock? “We’re concerned about regulation. Regulation can be used the incumbents to slow down innovation and we’ve seen that repeatedly. Airbnb experienced that with hotel lobby. Long-term I think that’s a key obstacle” Paul tells me. Luckily, Paul has been trying to turn ridesharing into a business for over a decade, and has helped pass legislation in California to keep it legal.

While it might seem a bit odd at first, I found SideCar to be almost as quick at finding me a ride as paying a professional limo driver and much cheaper. Depending on your generosity, it can also be a lot less expensive than a taxi. I still thought a trip from SF to Menlo Park was a little steep. It was fascinating booking a driver, giving him a heads up about what I wanted to pay, and haggling on the phone with him, even though I could have just stiffed him at the end.

SideCar could produce some awkwardly silent drives, but then again, you might make a new friend. It’s certainly rewriting the social contract between passenger and chauffeur. While a random guy’s SUV won’t have the same classy feel as a Lincoln Towncar, SideCar lets you preview the vehicle you’re driving in, so If you have a couch to haul you might be able to score a pickup truck or minivan to deliver you.

As we get into in the video interview below, one thing stopping SideCar is fear. People might not immediately trust a random person enough to get in their car. The Skout dating app sexual assaults come to mind. But Paul explains:

“We have multiple layers of safety. You have to have a valid credit card. As a driver we put you through multiple screens — background check for past criminal activity,  license verification, insurance verification. We do interviews with drivers, and we train the drivers.  

Both [the driver and passenger] can rate each other. We’ve also got a rating system and investigate bad ratings. We’ve kicked out several drivers and at least a few passengers.  And there’s the ETA mechanism, so when you’re hanging out with your girlfriend or sister and she orders a SideCar, she can send you a link that shows you where the car is as it makes its journey. We have to do what we can to build a safe environment knowing that bad things do happen.

I want to build a service that I could put my sister into, my girlfriend into, my kids into and not have to worry about it.”

I’ve talked to some venture capitalists that won’t touch anything that might have “the Skout problem” as they think it only takes one tragedy to derail a peer to peer business. Yet despite all the worries, tons of people get into taxis driven by strangers with few problems. Paul believes “we’ve been able to use collaborative tools to create better encyclopedias, more diverse news sources, 38,000 people are staying in Airbnbs each night. We think we could enable the community to crowdsource their own transportation network.”

If SideCar can convince the world it’s safe, it could massively disrupt the auto industry, reduce traffic and carbon emissions, and bring people closer to their community. The stakes are high, and Paul’s gamble is with other people’s lives, but the roads have looked the same for far too long.

SideCar is now available for iOS and Android, but currently only has drivers in San Francisco.

Vizio Announces The Co-Star, A $99 Google TV Box With OnLive Gaming Built In

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 05:24 AM PDT

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Watch out, Sony, Vizio is chasing your tail. Just yesterday Sony revealed its latest Google TV hardware, a $199 remake of the company’s first GTV products. And now today, Vizio took to the wires and announced its first player in the Google TV game, the $99 Co-Star.

The Co-Star is a serious contender in this game, too. The product boasts all the Google TV functionality along with additional baked-in apps such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, iHeartRadio, and for the first time on a Google TV box, OnLive. With OnLive gamers can demo, watch and actually play games through the cloud gaming service. Plus, all this is available for $100 less than Sony charges.

“Our focus to deliver the best consumer experience continues with today’s announcement of the Co-Star, which delivers a superior smart TV interface that anyone can add to their existing HDTV,” Matt McRae, VIZIO’s Chief Technology Officer said in a released statement. “We combined the powerful features of Google TV™ with an intuitive and easy to use interface, giving users the power to enjoy an entire world of entertainment.”

The Co-Star ships with a dual-sided Bluetooth remote (OnLive’s wireless controllers use Bluetooth) with one side featuring a number pad and touchpad with a QWERTY keypad on the other side. The box also sports 802.11n and USB connectivity options.

Vizio hasn’t yet detailed the expected ship date yet although pre-orders begin next month.

With Half A Billion Video Recommendations Daily, Taboola Gets $10 Million From Marker

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT

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Over the last several years, Taboola has quietly emerged to offer video recommendations on a number of top publisher websites in the U.S. Now it’s setting its sites on international growth and a whole set of new devices that it can make recommendations on. To expand those capabilities, Taboola has raised a $10 million Series C round led by Marker LLC, a New York City-based fund founded by Rick Scanlon and Thomas Pompidou. The round also includes existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners and WGI Group, and brings total funding to $25 million.

Taboola provides a platform that publishers can use to recommend videos on their sites. It frequently appears as a widget that shows a series of three-to-five thumbnails users can click through to watch videos related to whatever they are currently reading or watching. Those videos can come from the publisher’s own site, or can include related content from Taboola’s network of content creators.

By showing related videos from other sources, Taboola allows publishers to provide a greater inventory of video to choose from than just the assets they have on hand. And for video creators, it gives them a new source of distribution and greater monetization opportunities, since ad revenue is shared by the content creator and publisher, with Taboola taking a cut as well.

The startup has signed up a pretty impressive list of publishers using its service, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Hearst, and Gannet, among others. With more than 300 publishers in total using its product, it’s now recommending more than half a billion videos per day, served to more than 130 million users each month.

Taboola, which is headquartered in New York City but has R&D offices in Israel, currently has 40 employees. But it’s looking to double that over the next year, as it plans to expand internationally, and also begin offering recommendations on a whole new set of devices. On the international front, it’s already secured partners in markets such as Germany, England, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, France, and Poland, but is looking to add more.

And while its primary focus has been on the web to date, Taboola is very quickly expanding to provide recommendations on a whole mess of new devices. To do so, it’s built out APIs for iOS and Android devices, as well as for Microsoft’s new Xbox Live interface. Importantly, publishers have all the same analytics and controls that they have for its web product.
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