The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- A Very Giveaway Fourth: Win One Of Four 7-inch Samsung Galaxy 2 Tablets From Rebtel
- Tudo Bem? Disrupt SF to Feature Both Israeli AND Brazilian Pavilions, Vamos?!
- Failed Anti-Oatmeal Lawyer Says “Mission Accomplished”
- Happy Independence Day: SOPA’s Cousin ACTA Fails To Make The Vote In Europe, But Is This Really The End?
- Late, Expensive And Probably Redundant: YouView Finally Launches UK Digital TV Service
- TextMaster Rolls Out API For Its Copywriting, Translation And Proofreading Platform
- MOVE Guides Secures Seed Funding To Revolutionise International Relocations
- Sorry IBM – A Big Box Is Not A Platform As A Service
- Song Pop Hits 2 Million Daily Active Users, Many Of Them Probably Flirting
- FunnyJunk Attorney Charles Carreon Drops Lawsuit Against Oatmeal Creator
- The Next Microsoft — Updating Its Branding And Messaging In Three Days
- Cofounderly Is A Couples App For Founders. Yes, Really.
- Lynx2Games Lets You Pass Along Used Games For Fun And Profit. Mostly Profit.
- Facebook News Feed Is Getting Faster, So I Made It This Tramp Stamp
- Triposo: Ex-Googlers Raise $3.5M From InterWest To Put Social (& Traditional) Travel Guides To Shame
- Single Dad Building Sequel To “Jetpack” Video Game He Built As A Teenager
- Rumor: Twitter To Acquire Sense Networks To Better Target Local Ads
- Can Someone Send TechCrunch’s Fax Number To Vanity Fair?
- Little “Want” Button Code Foreshadows Big Things For Facebook Ecommerce
- Please Welcome Alex Williams, Greg Ferenstein, Christine Ying And TechCrunch Interns Billy Gallagher And Natalie Swope
| A Very Giveaway Fourth: Win One Of Four 7-inch Samsung Galaxy 2 Tablets From Rebtel Posted: 04 Jul 2012 08:02 AM PDT  The charming folks at Rebtel wanted you and yours to have a great July 4th (even if you’re British, South African, Chinese, or any other nationality that doesn’t celebrate the Fourth). That said, they’re offering four 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2 tablets with $100 in calling credit from Rebtel. Fireworks! To win, please comment below with a statement on what freedom means to you in at least 1,000 words. We’ll pick the best one this Friday. Please note: we use horrible, horrible Facebook comments so check your Facebook messages AND these comments for notification of winning since I keep messaging people on Facebook and they don’t respond. If you want to play it safe, email contest@techcrunch.com with your entry, as well. The last step isn’t mandatory. You can download their Rebtel app here and good luck. Note: The essay doesn’t have to be 1,000 words but watch how many people didn’t read this far.
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| Tudo Bem? Disrupt SF to Feature Both Israeli AND Brazilian Pavilions, Vamos?! Posted: 04 Jul 2012 07:44 AM PDT  It was at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2011 where a fine tradition began, namely, the Israeli Pavilion. No less than 20 early-stage Israeli startups flew-in from Israel to demo and network themselves to the bone for three non-stop days. The inaugural Pavilion was such a success, we decided to have another one at the past Disrupt in NYC. It too was a huge success with yet another 20 Israeli startups hitting the Big Apple disrupt-style. So we thought to ourselves, ‘Hey, you know what rhymes with Pavilion? Brazilian!’ That’s right, at the upcoming Disrupt in San Francisco we’re not only going to have our staple Israeli Pavilion, we’re going to have one for Brazilian startups as well! Why Brazil? Being the sixth largest economy, with a total population of ~200M, half of which is middle class, there’s lots of pie to be had in practically every vertical you can name. It’s no surprise then that the last couple of years in Brazil have been a boon for the country’s local Internet economy. Examples range from PeixeUrbano, Brazil’s Groupon, to Baby.com.br, Brazil’s Diapers.com. International investors, including my firm have not let these facts go unnoticed. Even Sequoia is rumored to be opening a Brazilian office. With a massive market opportunity and a growing startup ecosystem, the time seemed right to welcome Brazil to Disrupt with open arms. Why is TechCrunch doing this you ask? As TechCrunch 40/50/Disrupt became key networking events for International startups, we noticed that the high cost of flights, hotels, food, not to mention participation, were prohibitive to the lesser-funded startups. The Pavilion packages are TechCrunch’s way to extend a helping hand. What exactly are the Pavilions? They’re basically extensions of the Startup Alley that include:
Note that only startups with less than $2M in funding and are less than two years old are eligible to participate. Also, Pavilion startups are not eligible to be voted for as the daily ‘Crowd Favorite’ (that goes up to present on the Battlefield stage). Also, if you are interested in sponsoring either Pavilion or have any questions about participation, email me at: roi@initial.vc
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| Failed Anti-Oatmeal Lawyer Says “Mission Accomplished” Posted: 04 Jul 2012 06:58 AM PDT  In what appears to be a final burst of notoriety-seeking and odd behavior, Funnyjunk’s crack lawyer, Charles Carreon, told Ars that he had won because now he was “famous” and “notorious”. “Mission accomplished,” he said, apparently without irony or self-awareness. The Oatmeal’s lawyers at the EFF wrote: “I think he [Carreon] recognized that the lawsuit was not going anywhere, we filed a brief that outlined in tremendous detail why he was on the wrong side of the law.” It’s my undying hope that this doesn’t encourage others in the doldrums of their career to take on visible web presences in order to get a little Google juice. Clearly it’s worked – to a degree – as his website is high atop a list of news stories about case. Any sane web 3.0 entrepreneur looking to hire a lawyer in 2020 may be a bit put off by watching their representative bully a cartoonist.
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| Posted: 04 Jul 2012 05:08 AM PDT  A big day today for those who have been opposed to measures like SOPA that are aimed at stronger, government-imposed measures to define and prevent counterfeiting and copyright infringement on the internet: the European Parliament has rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), by a nearly-unanimous margin of 478 votes against to 39 in favor. The rejection means that the European countries that have signed the treaty may have been overruled in putting it into ratified effect; and the lack of global agreement could also make it hard to enforce ACTA in other countries where it has been approved but not yet ratified: these include Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the U.S. The news today comes in the wake of waves of Europeans writing to their representatives and protesting against the measures, which would have extended the enforcement rights of governments in the name of counterfeiting and copyright infringement: included would be stronger fines and criminalization of people who bypassed DRM, among other measures. But although some are trumpeting today’s vote as a sign that ACTA is dead, there are still some questions over whether that is really the case. Last week, Techdirt reported that Karel De Gucht, the EU commissioner with responsibility for the treaty, said that he would push ACTA through the courts even if it didn’t pass by a vote today: “If you decide for a negative vote before the European Court rules, let me tell you that the Commission will nonetheless continue to pursue the current procedure before the Court, as we are entitled to do. A negative vote will not stop the proceedings before the Court of Justice,” he said in a speech. Indeed, ACTA supporters, perhaps chastened by the protests and subsequent failure of SOPA in the U.S., seem to be leaving little to chance here. For today, at least, celebrations are ensuing: Dave Lee, a reporter for the BBC, noted via Twitter that some Parliamentarians were openly celebrating the defeat: Loz Kaye, the lead of the Pirate Party, a major critic of the treaty, noted in a statement that today’s vote was ”a triumph of democracy over special interests and shady back-room deals.”
While we have to wait and see whether De Gucht could make good on his promise of pushing through ACTA anyway, we will also have to watch how ACTA is approached in the U.S. now: decisions made in Washington may really represent either the final nail in the coffin, or a new life support, to ACTA.
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| Late, Expensive And Probably Redundant: YouView Finally Launches UK Digital TV Service Posted: 04 Jul 2012 03:41 AM PDT  Two years after it was meant to go live, and with a list of backers that includes the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Arqiva, BT and TalkTalk, YouView today finally crashed the UK TV party. Available by the end of July with a selection of major retailers, the service is based around an all-in-one set-top box that you can use without a subscription, which includes 100 digital TV and radio channels, catch-up and on-demand services, as well as the ability to record programs. But with a price tag that will begin at £299 ($469) without the required broadband thrown in, and competing against a host of existing services, is this a case of too-little, too-late? At the launch event earlier today, Lord Alan Sugar — a self-made entrepreneur in the UK who is the star of the UK edition of “The Apprentice” — called the event “a great moment in British television,” but some of the reactions online have been quite to the contrary: The service will first launch as a standalone product selling at major retailers like John Lewis, Dixons, Comet, Currys and Richer Sounds — as well as Amazon and the supermarket giant Tesco. The price for the set-top box is likely to go down when BT and TalkTalk, two of the investors in the service, start to bundle it with their own broadband offerings — where it will be part of a subscription package, much like carriers do with mobile devices. The service sounds good enough, but for a set-top box pay TV service, it’s hard to see why consumers would choose this over something like Sky’s, Virgin’s or BT’s existing TV offerings, which already come bundled with broadband and offer all of these features and more. YouView first came to life years ago as Project Canvas, a hopeful-looking joint venture between broadcasters, infrastructure players and broadband service providers to offer digital TV and on-demand services that would have, at the time, been a disruptive and probably welcome presence against the dominant pay-TV players Sky and Virgin. However, regulatory and technical hitches, coupled with other delays and management changes, have been an almost constant presence on the project from the start. In all, it has been estimated that the project will cost £115 million ($180 million) over four years from April 2010. (Some might argue that this, in fact, was the problem: not nearly enough money put into this to create something truly groundbreaking.) Fast forwarding to 2012 and the final launch of the product, the whole industry has moved on: not only are there more pay-TV providers out there (including BT itself with its Vision service) but the existing services have become a lot more encompassing — for example BBC’s catch-up service iPlayer can be accessed via Virgin and BT’s services. On top of that, there are a host of other ways to get your TV fix now via OTT plays from Netflix, Amazon/LoveFilm, Google and more. Moreover, YouView’s basic offering — 100 digital TV and radio channels, seven day catch-up and on demand programmes from the content libraries of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 — lacks something else that has been the clincher for many a household prepared to invest in pay-TV in the UK: exclusive content rights, specifically around sport. (Although the lesson of ITV Digital was that even this does not guarantee success.) And yet, and yet… even if the initial signs do not look good, there is still some potential for how this might develop. YouView says it has had “interest” from over 300 potential content partners — with the “formal enrollment process” for them to join the platform also launched today. (Why YouView didn’t get these potential partners on board before launch, however, is not clear.) Richard Halton, CEO, points out that in a trial of the service covering 2,000 homes, the feedback has been “very encouraging.” “It confirms that YouView is easy to set up and use and different to what has gone before,” he said. “In many ways we've only just begun.” Time will tell if YouView’s beginning was actually it’s end, too.
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| TextMaster Rolls Out API For Its Copywriting, Translation And Proofreading Platform Posted: 04 Jul 2012 03:06 AM PDT  It's not a spelling mistake, it's a typo. That's my line and I'm sticking to it. But what if proofreading, along with copywriting and translation, could be offered akin to a Software-as-a-Service, API included? That's the ambitious aim of TextMaster which this week uncloaked its technology stack to enable third-parties to start building apps that integrate the full functionality of its service. TextMaster offers a platform for content creators to crowdsource their copywriting, translation and proofreading needs via its community of 'professionals' who have each gone through a quality vetting process and are paid per-word. One way to think of the service is a Mechanical Turk for a very specific niche, while the bigger vision is to disrupt the respective copywriting, translation and proofreading industries. As an example, the translation industry is thought to be a $20B market. To that end, some of TextMaster's competitors include Greatcontent, and Textbroker (copywriting), Wordy (proofreading), and Gengo (translation), which already offers an API. Launched six months ago, TextMaster says that its platform has processed 6.5 million words by over 22,000 translators, copywriters, and proofreaders for more than 2,000 customers, while those doing the work tend to be journalists, writers, teachers and students. Its customers range from e-commerce companies, bloggers, advertising and communication agencies, and editors. "Potentially any company can need our services to translate a website or to write a brochure or a newsletter", says co-founder and CEO Benoît Laurent. But of course, with an API that existing apps and new ones can tap into, that customer base could grow significantly, presuming there is developer interest. The types of apps that Laurent envisages include integration with blogging platforms like WordPress, Dotclear, Typepad, etc., or an email client. In addition, the company is soon to release an iPhone 'dictaphone' app that will offer transcription of audio files "within minutes", which takes the startup into a whole different space. The company is also in contact with "many global platforms", says Laurent, such as e-commerce, and vacation rental sites, in order to remove the language barrier to using these services. To date, TextMaster is available in 8 languages and 5 countries: France, Germany, USA, UK and Spain. The Brussels-headquartered company was founded in June 2011 by Benoît Laurent (CEO), Alexandre Ponsin (CTO), Thibaud Elzière (Product & Strategy) and Quentin Nickmans (Advisor).
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| MOVE Guides Secures Seed Funding To Revolutionise International Relocations Posted: 04 Jul 2012 01:43 AM PDT  MOVE Guides, which competes with Moveline (a TechStars company), is about moving people and families for work internationally – business relocation in other words. The market is – according to MOVE Guides – worth more than £40bn annually. That means that if expats were a country, that country would be one of the most wealthy and mobile in the world – international business moves are rarely done on the cheap. So today MOVE Guides announces it’s raised £400,000 seed funding – all while founder Brynne Herbert successfully completed her MBA at London Business School. Not bad. The round was led by Kevin Eyres (ex-LinkedIn MD, Europe). Others who participated include Sherry Coutu, Sean Park (Zoopla, MyBuilder, Anthemis, etc.), Dale Murray (co-founder of pay-as-you-go technology company, Omega Logic), Alex Viall (co-founder of Complinet), Tom Hulme of IDEO and others. The site launches today in private alpha for those granted access codes (we’ll try to get some for readers, watch this space). It comes on the heels of June's launch of Moveline, a Tech Stars portfolio company offering price comparison for US domestic shipping. MOVE Guides differs from Moveline in that it offers a few more services, end-to-end-management and focus on the international market. Being based out of London, one of the world’s most international cities, helps. Herbert says the startups wil focus on London inbound moves and worldwide removals, and plans a Series A in 15-18 months for international expansion for full moves to/from other cities. Brynne , an American-born, former finance professional, has lived in six cities and speaks four languages. She was inspired to do the startup after her own experiences. "I arrived in the UK to a short-term let without hot water or internet. And I couldn't get a bank account or mobile phone without a permanent address," she says. "In a moment of frustration, I asked my husband why it was so hard to organize moving and so easy to organize travel. And he said, I should change it." We’ll see…
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| Sorry IBM – A Big Box Is Not A Platform As A Service Posted: 04 Jul 2012 01:29 AM PDT  In April, IBM rolled out a big new machine called IBM PureApplication Systems, a member of the PureSystems technology family. At the time, I called IBM out for calling it a “PaaS in a Box.” It reminded me of Larry Ellison calling Oracle’s hardware a “cloud-in-a-box” back in 2010. Well, IBM is continuing its PaaS washing. Krishnan Subramanian just tweeted about a new IBM post that went up today that’s titled:”Open 24x7x365: The IBM open PaaS and private cloud platform.” Pure Systems technology is IBM's version of a converged infrastructure. It's designed for implementation inside an enterprise data center. It's a big box technology with converged compute, storage and networking. It's based on patterns technology, meaning knowledge about all aspects of building. deploying and managing applications is hardened into the expert integrated system. Patterns come from the knowledge developed through customer engagements and IBM's vast experience in building out data centers. It combines development and virtualization environments into one box. It gives the customer optimization, consolidation, a central place for apps to run with the elasticity that "cloud" provides. In yesterday’s post, IBM’s Michael Maximilien describes it as follows:
This view is counter to the definition of a PaaS. A true PaaS is a cloud computing service that removes the complexity required for developers to build their own software stacks. As Wikipedia points out, the provider provides the networks, servers and storage. In April, Krishnan pointed out why it makes no sense to call PureSystems a PaaS. Think if you wanted to develop a new cloud centric app. Would you need a powerful integrated solution like PureSystems? No. You’d want to deploy across a distributed environment. Instead, IBM Pure Systems is suitable for consolidating data centers and running legacy apps. But to call it a PaaS is a real stretch.
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| Song Pop Hits 2 Million Daily Active Users, Many Of Them Probably Flirting Posted: 03 Jul 2012 07:45 PM PDT  Call it the way we flirt now. Facebook games like Song Pop and Draw Something and apps like Pair are discovering novel ways to get you to A little over a month since its late May launch, breakout app Song Pop has hit 2 million daily active users, CEO Mathieu Nouzareth tells me. Though the game shows around 1.9 million daily active users on AppData, Nouzareth reveals that the real number is over 2 million because many people actually log in via their independent Song Pop accounts on iOS and Android. For context, hit Angry Birds Friends is presently at 3.3 million daily active users. True, the startup has had a fortuitous thumbs up from Zuckerberg, and then was the subject of a surprisingly conceptual post about simulated synchronous gameplay from Arrington. “You can’t get more lucky than getting your startup featured on Facebook founder’s status update!” wrote one commenter. Well, a gushing post on the personal blog of TechCrunch founder and angel investor Arrington surely can’t hurt. So what’s driving Song Pop’s success? Well the feature that Arrington calls “simulated synchronous gameplay” turns out to be exceptionally good for online flirting, both sexually and not sexually (like in a friendship way guys!), the game play equivalent of Pair’s ThumbKiss. Draw Something in particular offered, through the act of drawing and guessing, a way for users to open up and bond through the app’s facilitated creativity. While Song Pop is indeed a little less personal, it also has lower barriers to entry than Draw Something. It offers up five songs in universally known genres like Ultimate 90s, Classic Rap and Love Songs which users race each other in order to recognize first. Song Pop in it’s current version is great for smalltalk. It sets up a defined protocol, structure and plan for human interaction. And musical taste is something that humans love to talk about “Oh I hate Kanye!”,”I only listen to indie rock” or “I lurvvvved Pat Benatar!!!” In fact, someone came up to me at a party this weekend and brought up the one (!) game I had played with him first thing. “We are at the crossroads of the Interest graph and the social graph [with Music],” Nouzareth says, “The game is different based on how old you are. And it brings back memories.” Whatever the unique confluence of elements is here, the game is so addicting that many hardcore fans theorize that mobile users are able to answer quicker, which also amps up user engagement. For what it’s worth I’m now playing all my games via mobile. The app is currently the number one free Music app in the App Store, and the number 15th in Gaming. How does Nouzareth think that Song Pop parent company FreshPlanet will avoid the fate of OMGPop with Draw Something, which saw a rapid, much publicized decline in user engagement post-peak and after its acquisition from Zynga, with no second hit in sight? The competitive element. “Draw Something in terms of traffic is an amazing success,” he says, “But our game is competitive, based on concrete achievements. Even casual gamers like some kind of competition.” Nouzareth says that he’ll keep ramping up that aspect of the game, including adding new types of playlists and PowerUps (“cheats” to score more points). He also wants to keep building features around Song Pop’s social aspects including a chat system where people can further interact with one another. A premium version of the game with longer clips and more challenges came out today. In my opinion, the game, which monetizes through in-app purchases, has a real chance at becoming the kind of game that goes beyond gaming. Perhaps it could turn into micro-dating service for people who already knew each other? Other than becoming another Rovio or having Zynga buy it for scale, one has to really think outside the box to see into Song Pop’s future. For now Nouzareth is emboldened that the game is driving over 100k of those daily users to iTunes in order to buy songs. Find a way to sustain this momentum, while the iron is hot.
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| FunnyJunk Attorney Charles Carreon Drops Lawsuit Against Oatmeal Creator Posted: 03 Jul 2012 07:24 PM PDT  Charles Carreon, the attorney with the the infamous lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, has withdrawn the suit. The news was announced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which also posted Inman’s “notice of voluntary dismissal“. (I would embed the document below, but there’s basically no text, aside from “plaintiff dismisses the action.”) The EFF was representing Inman in the lawsuit, and the announcement included this statement from Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl:
The dispute originated after Carreon, representing the website FunnyJunk, sued Inman over a year-old blog post where he criticized FunnyJunk for hosting copies of his cartoons without links or credit. Carreon asked for $20,000 in damages and demanded that Inman remove all mention of FunnyJunk from his website. Instead, Inman posted Carreon’s letter, drew a cartoon depicting Carreon’s mother having sex with a bear, and raised $20,000 on Indiegogo for the National Wildlife Fund and the American Cancer Society. Then things got weird, with Carreon suing Inman on his own behalf, and asking the court to hold up the charitable donations because of the tax write off that Inman would supposedly earn. As I noted earlier, the Carreon’s most recent filing does not include an explanation for his withdrawal. Meanwhile, the contact page of his website has been disabled, allegedly due to “security attacks instigated by Matt Inman”, so we can only speculate as to why his reasonings and future plans. It may be, as the EFF says, that Carreon decided that he has no case. It may also be that he was finally tired of the barrage of insults and criticism — as you can imagine, none of this (plus the fact that Inman has a formidable online presence) made him very popular.
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| The Next Microsoft — Updating Its Branding And Messaging In Three Days Posted: 03 Jul 2012 06:47 PM PDT  A very smart project is underway by a 21-year-old design student in Los Angeles. The goal: update Microsoft’s branding and messaging in three days. Judging by the reaction, Andrew Kim has hit a tap root of opinions out there. So far, there are more than 188 comments on Hacker News about his speculative design project. Microsoft is that company we love to hate but so want to make better. It’s evident in Kim’s initial posts that he, too, wants Microsoft to be something , something better. First, though, he makes a disclaimer that in itself is a reminder of the classic warning messages we grew up seeing on Marlboro ads and billboards. (See it in the fine print below) Kim’s spec redesign starts by setting the tone. Microsoft is corporate and conservative. It’s outdated. Gaming and Kinect represent the company. That in itself is interesting. Microsoft’s DNA is in the enterprise. Its Office products set the tone for the age of the IT empire. Not anymore — that’s the past. He contrasts Microsoft to Apple and Google. He says Apple is about design and engineering. It’s huge and controlling. It’s friendly and easy to use. He writes: “Google is the search engine, right?” Ha! “Don’t be evil,” he writes. It’s a “great place to work,” round out his descriptions. For Kim, Microsoft needs to counter Apple and Google’s friendly advertising with bold branding that shows it represents the future.”Be science fiction.” Funny, Kim sees Microsoft as square when it should be slate. Does he know about Microsoft’s former “Slate,” brand? Regardless, Kim’s branding is modern. It’s flexible. And it’s not Windows. Windows is over. It’s outdated. It represents the past. Windows Phone and Surface are hindered by the Windows brand. Here’s what he visions instead. I like it. It is more modern — fitting of a younger generation. Most of all, I love this initiative. It’s how the modern enterprise will be shaped. Out in the open, where we share our talents, critiques and ideas. Steve Ballmer, are you listening?
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| Cofounderly Is A Couples App For Founders. Yes, Really. Posted: 03 Jul 2012 06:14 PM PDT  You’ve probably heard plenty of comparisons between founding a startup with someone and being in a relationship (heck, there’s even a service called FounderDating). Well, TheIceBreak has taken those comparisons to heart with a new iPhone app called Cofounderly. When I describe this as a couples app for co-founders, I mean that pretty literally. TheIceBreak previously launched an app where couples can answer icebreaker questions (the responses are shared with the general community), post private messages to each other, and get scored on the quality of their relationship. When TheIceBreak co-founder Christina Brodbeck was looking at the app’s user data, she saw that there were co-founders actually using the app to communicate. And hey, it kind of makes sense — Broderick says she sees her co-founder more often than she sees her boyfriend. So TheIceBreak team took the functionality of the couples app and created new content tailored for startup co-founders. Instead of asking “Do you think it’s more important for a couple to be friends or lovers?” and suggesting “Do an outdoor activity together,” Cofounderly offers questions like, “Which one is a higher priority for startups — retention or growth? Why?” and offers suggestions like “Come up with & serve a company-themed cocktail.” (I also suspect that when co-founders share photos, they’re less dirty than they are in the couples app. I could be wrong on that one.) One drawback of Cofounderly’s roots — it only works for two-person founding teams right now. But do you really need an app to communicate to with your co-founder? I mean, aren’t you guys probably talking a lot already? Brodbeck says that Cofounderly is supposed to encourage real-world conversations, rather than replace them. Ultimately, she says the app should be “leading to more in-depth, in-person conversations.” Even though this is just a side project, it does suggest that the couples app model might be more broadly applicable. In fact, Brodbeck says that TheIceBreak is also looking at investigating partnerships with media brands, creating apps that allow them to interact with their community. It’s like a partner app, “except your partner is the brand.” You can download Cofounderly here.
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| Lynx2Games Lets You Pass Along Used Games For Fun And Profit. Mostly Profit. Posted: 03 Jul 2012 05:09 PM PDT  A website called Lynx2Games.com has a new approach to buying and sharing that could help consumers avoid paying full price for video games. When people buy a game on the site, they’re buying them in pairs — there’s a “borrower” and a “buyer” (friends can make a purchase together, or Lynx2Games can match up consumers interested in the same product). The borrower pays 25 percent and gets the game for the first three weeks, then they ship it to the buyer, who pays 75 percent and then gets to keep the game indefinitely. The average new console game costs $60, so that breaks down to $15/$45. If you just want to play the game once, you can probably do that, and you pay less money than you would to rent (Redbox charges $2 per day, for example). And if you don’t care about getting the game right away, you can get it slightly later and slightly used for a 25 percent discount. Lynx2Games is the latest service from startup LynxSquare. Co-founder and CEO Zul Momin says this kind of trading is happening already, when a customer buys a game then sells it back to a retailer like Game Stop when they’re finished. Usually the retailer makes most of the money on the deal (because it buys the game for a fraction of the initial cost, then sells it for near full price), with the first and second buyer only seeing small savings. Lynx2Games takes the reseller out of the equation. LynxSquare is applying this model to several different products — the company plans to re-launch Lynx2Books, Lynx2Movies, and Lynx2Music in the six weeks. It emerged from the Austin Technology Incubator and has raised $750,000 from incubators. It’s a cool model, but I wondered if it would become obsolete in a few years, as more and more games, books, movies, and music are consumed digitally. Momin says the secondary video game market is a $2 billion industry, so there’s no immediate threat. As for the long-term, he plans to launch a digital sharing product in 2013.
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| Facebook News Feed Is Getting Faster, So I Made It This Tramp Stamp Posted: 03 Jul 2012 05:01 PM PDT  Facebook’s news feed is so slow to give you the goods, you could almost call it prude. But you’re about to get lucky. Now the feed will load faster, as it will be pulling in fewer stories to start so you can get browsing immediately, Facebook just told us. Plus, if you don't want to see every little move your friends make, there's a new "Hide Ticker" button in the top right of the web home page. But the real hotness is still bottled up. My sources say Facebook is about to release a much faster version of its mobile apps that will load the urgent elements first so it’s more snappy. That'll be nice considering that whenever I launch my Facebook app currently, it's like I’ve drunk a bottle of cough syrup and gone into some sort of slow-motion trance. Nick Bilton of the New York Times was one of the first to catch wind of the the supercharged app and he squeezed some details from a few nameless Facebook engineers, so it seems surely on the way. Considering the flack Facebook’s been getting for the laggy iOS app, you know, possibly the most popular app in the world, I think it’s high-time it got a bit sleeker. For today, though, we’ve got this little speed boost. Previously Facebook may have been needlessly loading too many stories before it let us see the first one. But now you’ll be able to look, Like, and comment as soon as a couple updates are there. So go ahead, take the 12 seconds while you wait in line for coffee to get a little news feed sugar. Page admins be warned, your Facebook news feed reach metrics may suddenly sag because fewer stories get loaded, but really your metrics are just more accurate now since only people who actually see your posts will be counted. So why’s a little more speed a big deal? Because Facebook is now showing Sponsored Story ads in the mobile news feed and they’re working, considering they get clicked 13 times more often than Facebook’s desktop ads. If Facebook can make its mobile app feel like you’re some slick social ninja nimbly maneuvering through the feed, you’ll visit more, scroll through more posts, and see more ads. (And if you’re wondering about this post’s featured image, at first I was trying to convey that Facebook is becoming some fast-soaring firebird. But I accidentally created a Facebook tramp stamp tattoo and ran with it.)
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| Triposo: Ex-Googlers Raise $3.5M From InterWest To Put Social (& Traditional) Travel Guides To Shame Posted: 03 Jul 2012 04:56 PM PDT  Last fall, ex-Googlers Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga launched a new mobile travel platform called Triposo, which aimed to bring a little PageRank order to an unruly ocean of travel content in service of a greater good: Giving us, the end user, more relevant, personalized travel recommendations. Because there’s already a mess of public destination and travel information in databases like Wikitravel and Open Street Maps, rather than become another player in the brimming social travel space, Triposo took an algorithmic approach to travel recs. This approach allows it to come up with relevant suggestions no matter where you are, with little effort required from the end users, making for what the founders call a “lean-back travel experience.” So, even though models, users and money have favored the social approach, Triposo has attracted nearly two million downloads (and has attracted fairly high ratings) of its travel guides on iOS and Android since launch. This early traction has also been appealing to investors, with the latest interest coming in the form of a $3.5 million series A round led by Keval Desai of InterWest Partners. [The startup's Form D filing, which was filed today, actually says that they've raised $4.2 million of a potential $5.3 million offered, but the co-founders tell us that the $700K includes the convertible note from a prior round, meaning the total raised as of today is $3.5 million.] InterWest is the sole (return) investor in the startup’s latest round, which will see Desai joining the startup’s board of directors. The InterWest partner was also behind the firm’s recent investment in Gojee, which Billy covered yesterday. Both investments can be seen as part of the investor’s thought-provoking understanding of the evolution of the Web: That it’s moving from “a need-driven utility medium to a discovery-driven entertainment medium with room for multiple winners.” (More here.) In a way, this helps answer the question of why, if search (Google) is looking to improve relevance and personalization by serving socially-authenticated results and much of the attention in travel revolves around friendsourced, social graph-based models, one would choose to invest in (or use) a tool that eschews friends for algorithms. Obviously, Google results will remain a mix of both, even as social gets more play, and there’s no reason Triposo can’t add social layers on top of what they’re building. Plus, as Desai says, as the audience grows and our behaviors change, there’s going to be room for multiple winners — at least, that’s the idea. For Triposo, the new investment adds to the $700K in seed funding it had raised to date from late-joining CrunchFund, Chris Sacca, Taher Haveliwala and Google Wave Co-founder and Google Maps Lead Engineer Lars Rasmussen — to name a few. The round brings Triposo’s total investment to $4.2 million. Co-founder and COO Richard Osinga tells us that Triposo will use its new capital to expand its team, specifically in the engineering department, and to move into its new headquarters in Berlin. The team also just revealed a new and improved iOS app, which, in Osinga’s words turn Triposo into a “self-starter” — a travel guide that actively offers suggestions as to where users should go next. As users move about the country (and world), the app adjusts to location, the time of day, the weather, and the hours of local businesses in your vicinity, tailoring recommendations for destinations and adventures based on that realtime data. Pretty cool. While the app represents a big step forward for travel guides, it’s still a work in progress, and the co-founders tell us that they’re now developing a big “version 2″ of the app, which they hope to launch around the first of August. Stay tuned for more on that — assuming, of course, it doesn’t suck. I’ve avoided rehashing the specifics of how Triposo’s algorithmic model works (so you can read more on it here), but it’s definitely an interesting point of differentiation in comparison to the friend-sourced and social authentication of travel sites like Gogobot, Trippy, and Tripping. (Though really the ones that stand to lose are traditional travel publishers, like Lonely Planet.) Not only that, but the better it can adjust to real world cues (location, weather, etc.) and serve useful recommendations accordingly, the more Triposo will stand out from the field. Utility + relevance + entertainment = happy travelers. More on Triposo here.
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| Single Dad Building Sequel To “Jetpack” Video Game He Built As A Teenager Posted: 03 Jul 2012 04:35 PM PDT  "Look for Jetpack 2 in 1995." The message carried on the 1993 2D video game "Jetpack," created by 16-year old Adam Pedersen and distributed by Software Creations on floppy disk, pledged an updated sequel to fans in a couple of years. 19 years later, Pedersen, now a single dad, is belatedly working to deliver on that promise. He has taken to Kickstarter in an attempt to raise $40,000 by the end of July for "Jetpack 2." Pedersen tells me that, as a sixteen year-old, he was a big fan of "Lode Runner," "Jumpman," and "Boulder Dash" and wanted to make a game like those. "A game that I would enjoy playing," he describes, his voice filled with excitement. In 1997, after Software Creations had gone out of business, Pedersen put the game online. By 2003 it had reached over a million downloads. After fighting with chronic fatigue and other health problems that kept him from building a sequel, Pedersen was ready to build a revamped game in 2008. He took it to major distributors. Most passed on the sequel. One deal came close but then fell through. Pedersen decided to bypass distributors and work part-time on "Jetpack 2." In 2010, he left his job working with the Obama campaign at Blue State Digital to work full-time on the game. But that was before the rise of Kickstarter: Now he is using the popular crowdfunding service to raise funds so that he doesn't have to put the project on hold again. Pedersen says he resorted to Kickstarter because he couldn’t afford to keep working full-time on the game and support his family without an income. He says he also needs funding to pay for "an artist and level enhancers to give the game more polish." Pedersen told me if he doesn't hit the $40,000 benchmark, he will most likely do another Kickstarter with a lower goal and scale back some of his graphic goals and enhancements. Backers can donate increments from $15 to $5,000 with varying rewards. The base pledge will get you a copy of the game for immediate download when it is released and a few other small rewards. $50 will earn you a personalized "easter egg" that the character collects. For an affordable $5,000, Pedersen will make you into the game's evil scientist nemesis. "I'll distort your voice, and my artist will make a cartoon animation of your face, along with evil scientist hair," he writes on Kickstarer. At the time of publication, Jetpack2 had 51 backers and had only raised $1,810. So if you've got five large lying around, you still have time to grab the lone evil scientist spot. Will you play Jetpack 2? What other classic games would you like to see brought up to 2012 standards? Let us know in the comments.
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| Rumor: Twitter To Acquire Sense Networks To Better Target Local Ads Posted: 03 Jul 2012 03:50 PM PDT  A good source tells me that Twitter is set to make its sixth acquisition of 2012 with NY-based Sense Networks. Terms of the deal are still under wraps but it is expected to go through this month. Twitter declined to comment. Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and in 2006 launched MacroSense, which the company says “turns massive amounts of mobile location data into actionable, predictive behavioral data.” What that means is Sense not only collects location data from mobile devices when shared but also takes that data and creates a unique behavioral user profile to serve ads that users would find useful. In other words, Twitter may soon have a way to really monetize its targeted local ads. And users will finally get relevant local ads. The below video is simply called “location data simulation” with no other descriptive info attached but appears to be a visual representation of what the company does for the layman.
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| Can Someone Send TechCrunch’s Fax Number To Vanity Fair? Posted: 03 Jul 2012 02:52 PM PDT  Vanity Fair is one of my all-time favorite magazines — it publishes loads of incredibly well-written stories about fascinating topics and people. Its regular features, like My Stuff and the Proust Questionnaire, are always entertaining. So, I was pretty excited to get an email from one of Vanity Fair‘s publicists this morning, offering an advance copy of a story that will run in the August issue. Written by Kurt Eichenwald, the piece is promised to be an unflinching deep dive into the past ten years at Microsoft while Steve Ballmer has been at the helm — specifically, I’m told, Eichenwald uncovers the stifling bureaucracy and “astonishingly foolish management decisions” that have held Microsoft back while Apple ascended to dizzying heights in the eyes of global consumers and the stock market. It sounds like a doozy. People have already begun Tweeting and blogging about the teaser that was published today on Vanity Fair‘s website. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the full piece. So I emailed the publicist back within minutes: Yes, yes, yes, please send the entire thing over! This was the response: Now, that’s a question I certainly never thought I’d encounter from someone pitching a story to TechCrunch — unless we were being punk’d once again, or perhaps if it was a piece that required crazy sensitive court documents or something. Who faxes anymore? OK, besides Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour (maybe it is a Condé Nast thing.) Anyway, it struck me as so funny I had to forward the thread along to my colleagues. They responded in kind: The thing is, I would have fired up TechCrunch HQ’s fax machine if I could have. But like many reporters often do, I’m working remotely today (right now I’m about halfway through a 5-hour flight, with another 2-hour flight to go after that one. In-flight Internet for the win.) Faxing is just not going to happen. I explained this to the publicist, and asked if she could perhaps use her own fax machine to scan the document, which she could then send along to me as a PDF attachment. I pretty much provided step-by-step instructions. That was five hours ago, and I haven’t heard back yet. But I still really wanted to read this thing! So, I earnestly took to TechCrunch’s internal Yammer to ask if one of my coworkers could please figure out what our fax machine number is, receive the document, scan it, and send it to me. No one was up for it, but I did get assigned a different story idea: Now I’m following the orders of my editor. Well, actually, two of my editors. I’m not sure that there is a big takeaway here, but it is amusing — and also maddening. The whole thing is just ironic, or at least Alanic: The distribution of an apparently awesome article about one company’s old-fashioned business habits and suffocating bureaucracy is slowed down by the old-fashioned business habits and suffocating bureaucracy of the company that published it. It’s also a sign of how far new technology still has to go before it becomes really mainstream. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, it is also a slow news day.) So. I still want to read all about the Ballmer dirt. I want to write a post with a scathing excerpt and tell all the TechCrunch readers out there to run and pick up a Vanity Fair, pop some popcorn, and read all about it themselves. But at this rate, I might just have to wait until it comes out on the newsstand myself. Image of fax machine credited to Michael A. Keller/Uniphoto via Britannica.com
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| Little “Want” Button Code Foreshadows Big Things For Facebook Ecommerce Posted: 03 Jul 2012 02:40 PM PDT  Last week, developer Tom Waddington uncovered Facebook code that points to the creation of a “Want” button — a plugin that potentially points to a new kind of commercial innovation being developed by Facebook itself, different from “want” buttons already being developed by third parties (one example here), and partially working but only within Facebook’s Graph API tester. He’s continued to dig around and today has presented us with some of his latest finds: looking deeper into Facebook’s code, he found more references that point to how Facebook might be thinking about how users can share purchasing information with each other. The presence of a “Want” button and these related commercial actions point to ways that Facebook can continue developing other streams for revenue-generation to complement what it is doing in advertising and existing commercial services, such as in-app purchases. Playing around with the Want action, Waddington focused on the object of the Want action, called “ogproduct”. “I think they’re using ogproduct while testing – it’ll move to product when [if] it goes live,” he says. While looking around in the ogproduct code, Waddington found code for a “product.purchased” action, with options underneath for a donation, message, product, and game_item. While Inside Facebook has pointed out how the Want button would be useful for indicating purchasing intent, versus the more general “Like” button — and subsequently enabling more targeted ads against Wants — these newer details potentially give a clue as to what kinds of purchases Facebook could enable, and allow to share on your timeline. Donations could be about charitable donations; but they could also be about group donations for purchases or events (similar to what Crowdtilt does today). Product and game_item also seem pretty straightforward. “Message” less so: could that be a way of incorporating an element of the social gifting service Karma, which Facebook bought in May? Facebook has told us, in response to the emergence of the “Want” button, ”We’re always testing new Platform features, however we have nothing new to announce.” But in addition to the kind of detail mapped out above, there are other signs that a social commerce product might be closer than you think. “It's clear that Facebook is working on a new OpenGraph representation of products. They're even calling the current Product object 'Product Old',” he writes in his blog post. “Basically, the potential for an official Facebook channel for Wants and Purchases (and game purchases) using similar methods to articles read / music listened to / videos watched stories is pretty huge,” Waddington told me later. And the more you look at those other areas, the more you can see how obvious the monetizing potential is behind them. “I’m not sure, but when Facebook Music aggregates the same songs across multiple providers, there might be scope for that in products, too.” And the presence of a tag within the “Want” button code, for “socialcommerce”, also shows that this may not just be about purchasing intent, but actual purchases, too. There is another interesting detail to add to these commercial hints: among the patents that Facebook owns or is applying for are some related to e-commerce ("Systems and methods wherein a buyer purchases products in a plurality of product categories", U.S. Patent Number 7,188,080; and "Method, computer product and apparatus for facilitating the provision of opinions to a shopper from a panel of peers", U.S. Patent Number 7,526,440). You can start to see how all this could be part of a big plan finally coming together.
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| Posted: 03 Jul 2012 02:15 PM PDT  You may have noticed some new bylines popping up these past couple of days. You’re not hallucinating! We’ve quietly made several new additions to the TechCrunch roster this summer and hiring continues to be our first priority across all departments. In addition to specialist writers like Alex Williams and Greg Ferenstein, we’ve added a couple of interns and a rockstar product manager to our team. We’re also busy with other parts of the company, adding more people to our events team, and working on important but unglamorous projects like getting the site to load faster (hallelujah). Here's the latest on the newest folks we’ve got working here, and why you might want to talk to each of them. Gregory Ferenstein is a technology journalist and educator. At TechCrunch, he writes about the intersection of technology and politics, education and any other way the Internet changes the traditional way we organize. As an educator, he has taught every age, from elementary school to college, and does academic research on curricula. He also holds a Master’s in Mathematical Behavioral Science. In his free time, he’s an avid Cross-fitter and does Capoeira, an acrobatic Brazilian martial art. Email contact here. Alex Williams is a veteran technology blogger, journalist and analyst. He led the cloud and enterprise channels at ReadWriteWeb before joining SiliconAngle, where he worked as a senior editor. As our new enterprise writer, he’ll cover the rise of the Web, mobile and the cloud as the key drivers in organizations shift to a more consumer-oriented work environment. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and has worked as journalist, blogger and producer since 1989 with various stints in marketing, community management and event development. Alex has a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and a B.A. in French Literature from the University of Denver. He got his start in journalism when he wrote about his experience as a college student playing baseball in France. Email contact here. Christine Ying is TechCrunch’s new product manager, responsible for its web products. She has worked as a software engineer, product manager and product marketer for NASA, Oracle, Visto and most recently Yahoo. There, she helped launch its iPad magazine, Livestand, and worked on Yahoo! Maps, Upcoming and other popular products. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Billy Gallagher is our editorial intern this summer, helping us to cover the Silicon Valley startup scene. He’s also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily, leading the student paper this coming fall after having been a managing editor of news for the past two volumes. He’s on track to graduate from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics in 2014. Email contact here. Natalie Swope is our intern this summer via AOL Tech. A junior at the University of California, Davis, she is majoring in computer engineering and minoring in technology management. An active blogger at reference site hackcollege.com and at her personal blog, swopeswope.com, Natalie also won the internship through her social media prowess, by collecting the most votes on her about.me page.
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