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- Oracle Acquires Social Marketer Involver As Enterprise Giants Buy Rather Than Build For Tomorrow
- Bitly Announces $15M Round Led by Khosla Ventures, Says Controversial Redesign Increased User Sign Ups
- DC City Council Shelves “Uber Amendment” Against Discounted Private Cars, Road Clears For UberX (For Now)
- Foundd Doesn’t Just Recommend Good Movies, It Finds Movies A Group Can Agree On
- News360 Revamps Its iPad App: New Look, New Home Screen, New Reading Scores
- Nielsen: Internet Ads In Q1 Grew By 12.1% While Magazines Declined 1.4%
- Can Jolla Become MeeGo’s Saviour? CEO Plans Two Smartphones Already
- Subscription Commerce Startup Love With Food Raises $645,000 To Bring Gourmet Food To The Masses
- App Developers Can Now “Print To Walgreens;” Company Outed As Aviary’s Strategic Investor
- GroupMe Branches Out Into Group Buying, Launches New “Experiences” Service Into Beta
- An Honest Discussion About Being Gay, Working In Tech, And Living In The South
- Shopify Teams Up With Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries, FUBU Founder To Help You Build A $1M eCommerce Biz
- Israel’s UppSite Raises $2.1 Million For Its Simple Website-To-App Conversion Service
- With Proview Settlement Done And Dusted, Apple’s New iPad Finally Comes To China July 20
- Nokia Bridge: Nokia’s Incubator Gives Departing Employees €25k And More To Pursue Ideas That Nokia Has Not
- JobVidi Throws Its Social Recruiting Hat In The Ring
- Now With Sound — Social Collections Platform Booklets Integrates With SoundCloud
- Deutsche Post DHL Buys IntelliAd To Ramp Up Its Adtech Business
- Ukrainian Students Win Microsoft’s Imagine Cup With Their Sign Language-To-Speech Translation Gloves
- Cleversafe Brings Storage To Hadoop-Driven Big Data Analytics
| Oracle Acquires Social Marketer Involver As Enterprise Giants Buy Rather Than Build For Tomorrow Posted: 10 Jul 2012 09:18 AM PDT  Old world online marketers must build, buy, or die, and Oracle has made its choice. Oracle has just agreed to acquire Involver, just a month after the giant bought its competing social marketing platform Vitrue. Involver will be rolled into Oracle Cloud marketing suite, and the deal is expected to close over the summer. Along with the Vitrue buy which today’s PR frames as an analytics purchase, Involver will give Oracle a powerful toolset for helping brands create custom applications as they adjust to sea change in marketing brought on by social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While we’re working on the Involver price, its investors are likely to walk away with a handsome payday, considering the $600 million price tag on Vitrue and the $689 million Salesforce recently paid for leading enterprise social marketer Buddy Media. Involver had raised $11 million through its Series C from angels as well as Bessemer Venture Partners, Western Technology Investment, and Cervin Ventures. Bringing Social Apps To OracleOne of Involver’s unique products is the Social Markup Language, a proprietary development platform for creating apps that hook deeply into today’s social networks. It lets big brands design engaging custom experiences for potential customers such as games, contests, sweepstakes, and content generators designed to imprint a company on their consciousness. A visual version of the platform released in April lets clients build apps with a drag-and-drop interface. Involver-made apps will give Oracle client brands the “owned” part of the paid-earned-owned marketing trifecta. Getting all three to work in combination is crucial to taking advantage of integrated marketing campaigns and social advertising options like Facebook Sponsored Stories — where a friend’s interaction with a brand is used as an implicit recommendation in a marketing message. For example, Oracle client brands will be able to buy “paid” Facebook ads to drive traffic to their “owned” Facebook Page hosting a custom-skinned Involver app. There users might upload a photo of themselves into a branded vacation background, and be urged to share their collaged creation with friends. The brand could then pay to have this shared content appear more frequently in the news feeds of friends through Facebook Sponsored Stories.
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| Posted: 10 Jul 2012 09:18 AM PDT  Bitly just announced that it has raised $15 million in new funding led by Khosla Ventures. Back in May, The Verge reported that bitly was raising $20 million in new funding and preparing to launch a more consumer-oriented service. At the time, a company spokesperson said the story was “not based on any facts,” but the denial was worded in a vague enough way to leave the door open for future funding news. And indeed, a couple of weeks later company launched a big redesign that placed a bigger emphasis on social bookmarking. It led to a backlash from users who criticized the redesign for deemphasizing link shortening (namely, the site’s original selling point). At the time, CEO Peter Stern told us that the criticism just came from “the vocal minority who are quick to complain about any change.” The company mentions the redesign again in its funding announcement, calling it a “huge step” toward its broader goal of becoming “the primary online service for sharing and discovering interesting content.” As evidence, it says that daily registrations for the site have increased by 300 percent. The new round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from past backers RRE Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company has now raised $28.5 million in venture funding. Here’s the full statement sent by bitly:
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| Posted: 10 Jul 2012 08:45 AM PDT  An explosive day of online and traditional campaigning appears to have worked — at least for the present. The Washington DC city council was set to approve an amendment to its far-reaching taxi legislation that would have set a floor price for private cars. But now councilwoman Mary Cheh, who had proposed the so-called “Uber Amendment,” says this morning that she is shelving it. However, reports are indicating that it could return this fall as a separate bill. No, TechCrunch has not turned into a DC politics blog (you should check out the DCist for all the gritty local details on the story, actually). This is a big issue for Uber and a wide range of other private car startups. The amendment would have required any private car company to charge at least five times the minimal price of a taxi. This would have specifically prevented Uber’s new discounted private car service, UberX, from legally operating in the city. While Uber’s original fleet is comprised of black sedans and other relatively expensive taxi alternatives, UberX runs on Priuses and other less expensive cars, and competes directly with taxis. Cheh’s amendment openly stated that the point was to restrict competition, which led many (including myself) to question the motives. DC government, and the DC taxi commission in particular, have been cited for a variety of ethical violations over the years, including concerns about the taxi lobby’s power over local offices. The commission itself went after Uber DC in January, after it launched, over dubious legal claims. Cheh, a tenured Georgetown law professor, had until recently sided with Uber, saying that it was important that DC support startups like it. But the amendment — which Uber was only able to see late yesterday — went the other way. She followed up in an email to her colleagues last night stating that she had worked out an agreement with Uber. Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick replied in a letter to the city council saying that there was no such agreement, and that the company has been consistently against pricing floors. The amendment appears likely to be removed entirely. For now, the road to DC is looking clearer for UberX (and any of the many other startups going up against it) — at least until this fall. Both emails, below. For more, be sure to check out these thoughts from Uber investor and DC cab driver’s son Shervin Pishevar. ——————- Mary Cheh: Dear Members and Staff, I want to clarify a few things about Uber. Uber is a premium car service that offers transportation in upscale vehicles and charges based on time and distance, just like a taxi. Currently, Uber operates in what is, at best, a legal gray area. However, because Uber is providing a valuable, innovative service in the District, I want to allow Uber to operate legally here. Several months ago, Uber contacted me and asked to work together to legalize services like Uber in the District. Since then, I have met with Uber many times, negotiated in good faith, and believed that I had reached an agreement with them last week. The amendment that I am proposing tomorrow would allow services such as Uber to operate legally in the District. Companies like Uber would be exempt from regulation by the Taxicab Commission so long as they provide an estimated fare, disclose rates, provide a receipt, and use sedans licensed by the Commission to operate in the District. The amendment would maintain the status quo by requiring sedans to have a $15 minimum fare and time and distance rates that are higher than taxicabs (currently, Uber has a $15 minimum fare and rates that are higher than taxicabs, so my amendment will not change these figures. See:https://www.uber.com/cities/washington-dc ). After 1 year, the amendment would allow Uber or anyone else to petition the Commission to adjust these rates as necessary. Establishing a minimum fare is important to distinguish premium sedan service from traditional taxicab service and to prevent sedans from directly competing with or undercuting taxicabs. Taxi companies want minimum fares that are much higher than what I am proposing in my amendment. However, I believe that simply preserving the status quo is appropriate and reasonable. I am deeply disappointed that Uber has decided that it no longer supports this amendment that we negotiated in good faith. The taxi industry is one that has been regulated for a very long time. If Uber wishes to operate taxis, then it is free to do so, but it should then be subject to the same regulations and requirements of taxis. I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Regards, ———– Travis Kalanick: Council members, The high level on UberDC is that our customers in the District, in So in addition to quality, we think that doing right by our DC And how about the drivers? Uber has created hundreds of driver jobs in What many of you may not realize is that Uber is a tech company with So here’s my ask. Take the ‘Minimum Fare’ language out of the Thank you for your time on this matter, and I look forward to the Travis Kalanick [Uber DC image via Cloture Club.]
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| Foundd Doesn’t Just Recommend Good Movies, It Finds Movies A Group Can Agree On Posted: 10 Jul 2012 08:24 AM PDT  Berlin-based Foundd is a new movie recommendation service launching this week, which not only finds you movies you would like to watch, but also helps a group decide on a movie they can watch together. It’s an interesting twist on the concept of personalized recommendation engines, like those created by Netflix or Amazon, for example, which seemingly presume that watching movies is a solitary experience. While that’s sometimes true, you’re just as often watching movies with family or friends…and arguing about what to watch. Married people, you know this one, I’m sure. Or anyone who watches movies with friends, each with different tastes. The way Foundd works is that it presents you with a short “getting to know you” quiz where you rate a handful movies on a one to five star scale. Then it prompts you to add your friends. If you signed up via Facebook or Twitter, you can just pick them out from the list provided. Each group watchlist can have up to five members, which seems a little limiting for larger families or groups, but I suppose it’s a start. The site feels a bit rough around the edges, and I wish it was available in app format, but it works. And the recommended movies presented in my watchlists were decent choices, from what I could tell from a first glance. It needs a “Add to Queue” button for Netflix users, though. Of course, big companies have put a lot of work into their recommendation algorithms. Netflix famously even hosted a contest which awarded developers with $1 million to improve its algorithm by 10%. Despite the improvements in this space, finding new angles and methods for better recommendations is still a hot businesses (and especially in the mobile apps space). TechCrunch recently covered Tipflare, for example, which does Netflix-like recommendations on anything. eBay acquired recommendation technology Hunch in November. A ton of companies are working on recommendations around video and movies. But the idea to match up personalized recommendations within a small group is still somewhat novel. And handy. Foundd’s technology may not be on the same level of Netflix, but that doesn’t matter, explains Foundd co-founder and CEO Lasse Clausen. “Netflix has put a lot of effort into predicting how much I'll like every one of their movies,” he says. “But as a user, I don't really care whether I'll dislike a movie with 2.3 or with 2.35 stars, that doesn't help me find a good movie. Foundd focuses on giving more accurate predictions over a smaller number of movies and those that the user will really like.” He also notes that Netflix’s recommendations are limited to its own catalog, while Foundd’s can work across multiple catalogs, and, in the future, across multiple products (games, books, internet video, apps, etc.) Founded in January out of frustration with finding anything good to watch, Clausen teamed up with Benjamin Metz, Christian Riedel, and Peter Mådel to create the service, which is currently being bootstrapped.
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| News360 Revamps Its iPad App: New Look, New Home Screen, New Reading Scores Posted: 10 Jul 2012 08:16 AM PDT  News360 is releasing a new version of its iPad app today. It’s meant to be a major revamp of the news reading app, one that CEO Roman Karachinsky tells me has been in the works since August of last year. The most noticeable change is a new look for the app. Overall, the design feels cleaner and slicker than the versions I’ve seen in the past. There’s a new home screen you can see the biggest and most relevant news in one place before diving into different categories. And when you open up a story, the article and related images are now given much more space on the screen. One nice touch is the fact that users can now treat articles as “story cubes”, which they rotate within the app to additional bring up features like social sharing and saving for offline reading. The features themselves aren’t new, but the cube interface gives the presentation a little bit of pizzazz that was previously lacking. That’s important, because as much as the many news app-makers out there like to say they’re more technologically sophisticated than Flipboard, I think they really need to keep up on design front too, especially if they’re going to compete on the iPad. (We’ve complained about News360 coming up short on the design side before.) Karachinsky says News360 is also doing more on reader personalization and feedback. One of the company’s stated goals has been to present you with stories you wouldn’t otherwise see, not just a pretty version of the links in your social stream. It’s taking that idea of keeping you better informed even further by giving you a score of one to three stars each day for your reading, based on things like time spent reading, the breadth of your reading, and how deep you go on each article. Many users will probably ignore the score, but for some, it might be nice incentive to keep going, and then a reassurance when they want to say, “Okay, I think I’ve read enough for the day.” And as readers collect more stars, News360 is collecting more data about their interests and preferences, and is personalizing its results to match. You can download the iPad app here.
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| Nielsen: Internet Ads In Q1 Grew By 12.1% While Magazines Declined 1.4% Posted: 10 Jul 2012 08:13 AM PDT  When it comes to revenue generation, online advertising may still be one of the smaller of all ad mediums, but it remains the fastest-growing. , outpacing other non-print formats like TV, radio and cinema — as well as printed advertising formats like newspapers and magazines. New numbers out today from Nielsen, covering Q1 of this year, indicate that advertisers are spending 12.1 percent more on internet ads than they were a year ago, with internet the only advertising medium that saw double-digit growth in the quarter. Of the seven categories covered in Nielsen’s Global AdView Pulse report – television, radio, outdoor, newspapers, magazines, internet and cinema — magazines were the only medium that saw a contraction in ad spend over last year, going down by 1.4 percent. All of the rest were buoyed by a rise in consumer confidence and a redoubled effort from brands to connect with the masses. In an inverse variation with Internet advertising, TV had the lowest-percentage growth of the lot, but it remained the biggest advertising revenue generator overall, Nielsen said. Nielsen did not provide any hard numbers for what these growth percentages represent, but to give you some idea of what kind of figures are in play, research from WPP’s Group M earlier this year predicted that in 2012, Internet advertising would be worth $98.2 billion worldwide, representing 16 percent of all advertising spend. In this report, Nielsen broke out how different regions were performing across the various media categories; as a general rule, it looks like developing markets are continuing to grow at a faster pace than more saturated, mature regions. That’s provided some striking contrasts in some categories: in TV ads grew by four percent in Noth America; but in the Middle East and Africa, they grew by 33.8 percent. Similarly, online spend grew nearly three times as fast in the Middle East and Africa (35.2 percent) as it did in Europe (dead-on average at 12.1 percent). Although in China we are seeing an increasing catalog of premium film content come online, for the most part, as we noted yesterday, film revenues are coming in the form of cinematic releases. No surprise, then, that cinema ad revenues are also continuing to grow really well in the region overall: they were up by 27.1 percent. Nielsen noted that this offset declines in Latin America and the Middle East. The full map with regional break-outs is here:
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| Can Jolla Become MeeGo’s Saviour? CEO Plans Two Smartphones Already Posted: 10 Jul 2012 08:04 AM PDT  It was almost a year ago in July that I jumped off the Tube at Oxford Circus in London’s West End and wended my way deep into Soho to Nokia’s chi-chi central London office. There, I sat down with a handful of other journalists to interact via live video conference with Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s legendary design guru, about their new smartphone. By this time we’d already had the Burning Platform strategy unveiled by new CEO Stephen Elop. But Ahtisaari unveiled a beautiful, MeeGo-powered smartphone, the N9, and assured the hacks that Nokia was committed to it. It even had Angry Birds! But, with Nokia in bed with Microsoft, we all knew that this would probably be the only MeeGo phone Nokia would produce. Last week Nokia released a major software upgrade for the N9, but it’s probably the last upgrade we’ll see. Even then, few people even saw a MeeGo-powered N9, basically the shell of what became the Lumia 800 and 900 devices. So what of the poor neglected Meego, the platform that barely existed? Well, Jolla Mobile – a company without even a web site yet – hopes to be its resurrection. In the last couple of days it’s emerged that much of the team inside Nokia’s MeeGo’s development have left to created actual new smartphones based on for the platform. A spokesperson has categorically denied to TechCrunch that the Jolla Mobile will get any Intellectual Property Rights from Nokia to achieve this, but, according to the CEO, we will see two – count ‘em – MeeGo phones appear this year. They are even thinking about entirely new products based on MeeGo. I managed to rack down CEO and co-founder Jussi Hurmola. Hurmola is someone who, to coin a phrase, knows his MeeGo onions. “We started at the end of last year looking at Meego and the ecosystem around it, and we just knew there could be something we could do,” he told me today via a phone interview. “We started going round talking to partners and some of the ‘heavyweights’ in the business. We understood quickly that you would need to be big to survive, and that offering only a small part of the ecosystem would be difficult.” Perhaps that’s why Jolla’s play is ambitious. It plans to build two smartphones in the next year – pretty big stuff for a startup. As Hurmola says: “We are will be making smartphones and in order to do this we’ll need an ecosystem and a platform around us. We are going for a pretty big strategy. This is our mission.” Big mission indeed. Hurmola believes Jolla Mobile could be so influential that it could in fact allow the MeeGo ecosystems to “come back” – because, he argues, it never went away. Indeed, the Meego’s heritage contains within it the original vision of creating a truly open source smartphone platform – not the faux open source that Android represents. And if anyone can do it Jolla can. Half its team has worked on MeeGo and the other half are hard-core ex-Nokians – the kinds of people who built one of the world most successful mobile companies, at least at one time… “We’re confident we can do it again” he’s says. “Jolla alone cannot do this so we are talking to big partners. We’re putting those relationships together. We want to create as big a wave as possible.” But the question is, with smartphone platforms morphing into tablets, can Jolla service these new categories as well? “We will look at products like tablets, but the market is changing so fast and the categories are being redefined. Netbooks have already disappeared and the smartphone screens are converging. We will start with a smartphone but in 6 months there could be a category for a new kind of product s that is not just a handheld or a tablet.” Hurmola says that the actual details of the devices Jolla will make can’t yet be revealed, but they want to address two markets – and that will mean two devices. One will be a ‘mass-market’ smartphone aimed at general users. But the other will be aimed at tech users to, as Hurmola says, “honour the origins of Meego, Maemo, Moblin and the others.” Let’s hope it actually makes them some money as well… MeeGo was created by Nokia in partnership with Intel and Samsung. It was the smartphone platform that might, had it come out, taken on iOS and Android. Can Jolla fulfil that promise? There are no details on the devices as yet, but Hurmola tells me that although he “can’t say much” right now, the “UI is a major thing and one of the reasons we selected Meego. With Android we can only copy — but with Meego we can introduce something brand new to the market.” Sounds intriguing… Jolla is one of the products of Nokia's Bridge project and it’s clear Jolla will have an ongoing relationship with Nokia, even it’s pretty informal. As Hurmola says” Helsinki is a pretty small place.” As the startup’s LinkedIn page says, the Jolla team is formed by directors and professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation… “Nokia created something wonderful – the world’s best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued.” Indeed, the COO is Marc Dillon, formerly principal engineer on MeeGo. Hurmola readily admits he was “the guy shouting about fragmenting the code base” when Nokia lost its way. He had worked on Symbian Maemo and finally Meego. He wasn’t going to throw all that away. It will be intriguing to see what they come up with.
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| Subscription Commerce Startup Love With Food Raises $645,000 To Bring Gourmet Food To The Masses Posted: 10 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT  500 Startups Accelerator alum Love With Food has raised a $645,000 seed round led by Homestead.com founder Justin Kitch. The round also included investors like 500 Startups, Teec Angel Fund, Great Oaks VC, Manish Poshmark.com founder Manish Chandra, Google distinguished engineer George Harik, LiveOps.com founder Douglas Feirstein, and Blue Run Ventures partner Jonathan Ebinger. Love With Food, which was part of last year’s 500 Startups fall class, provides a subscription commerce service that sends monthly boxes of curated gourmet treats to users — kind of like Birchbox for the foodie set. The startup recently lowered the price of its boxes from $14 to $10, with discounts on shipping for ordering several months or a year’s worth of goodies at once. Just six months after launch, Love With Food has managed to attract users in all 50 states around the U.S. — in fact, founder Aihui Ong says it has more subscribers in rural and suburban markets than in metropolitan centers. Why is that? Because while the fancy folks in places like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and L.A. have easy access to high-quality, gourmet treats at local markets, people in rural areas typically can’t find similar goods at their own local supermarkets. “When we ship a box of goats milk caramels to wisconsin, people are amazed,” Ong said in a recent phone conversation. Love With Food isn’t just about subscription commerce: It also provides a way for subscribers (and other visitors) to purchase food that was a part of its monthly shipments. In fact, about 15-20 percent of its monthly subscribers come back and purchase regular e-commerce goods. Love With Food does that by providing personal recommendations based on your personal taste data — using more than 50,000 data points that it’s collected since launch to determine which products people are most likely to buy. Ong said the site has grown about 3x over the past three months, in part through partnerships that it’s striking with publishers. That includes influential food and mom bloggers who help to curate (and publicize) upcomming boxes. One high-profile example is Back In Skinny Jeans‘s Stephanie Quilao, who is partnering with Love With Food for the launch of her book in September. That month, Love With Food will have a box that features gourmet snacks for before and after workouts that have been curated by the blog author.
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| App Developers Can Now “Print To Walgreens;” Company Outed As Aviary’s Strategic Investor Posted: 10 Jul 2012 07:15 AM PDT  You may have noticed a few of your favorite mobile photo sharing apps were updated last night or this morning with a new option: “print photos to Walgreens.” It’s not a coincidence, but is rather the result of the launch of Walgreens’ new developer portal which is now allowing third-party mobile developers the ability to integrate Walgreens’ in-store services within their applications. Launch partners for the deal include GroupShot, Kicksend, Pic Stitch, Pinweel, and StillShot. The company is also partnering with Aviary to help reach the startup’s 1,200 apps developers and 8 million consumers in order to increase adoption of the “print to Walgreens” feature. The partnership between Aviary and Walgreens is interesting in light of Aviary’s most recent funding round. If you’ll recall, in June, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and others invested $6 million into the company. At the time, the “other strategic investors” went unnamed. But the company’s latest Form D filing includes a new board member, Abhi Dhar, currently the CTO of Walgreens’ e-commerce division. (Strategic investor spotted!) A spokesperson for Walgreens tells us that the five mobile apps listed above are the first to implement the in-store printing technology, but the company expects the program to “grow exponentially.” Generally, statements like those are a bit off, but in this case, it’s not impossible to make that sort of claim. Developers are able to add the “print to Walgreens” function in their iOS or Android apps, using the newly introduced “QuickPrints SDK.” Given the size and scope of the photo app landscape on the top smartphone platforms, we’re talking thousands of potential partners for Walgreens. The introduction of Walgreens open API was made possible through a partnership with Pal Alto-based Apigee, which is providing the underlying platform for both the Walgreens Developer Portal and its API. Apigee, for those unfamiliar, is a provider of API management products and services, and works with companies like Comcast, GameSpy, TransUnion, Pearson, AccuWeather.com, Netflix, AT&T, Constant Contact, TrueCredit, and more. The company acquired mobile cloud platform Usergrid in the beginning of the year, specifically to beef up its capabilities on the mobile side of the API landscape. Now the question remains, who wants to print out their low-quality photos from their smartphones. (Looks around, raises hand slowly). Yes, some of us do. Although it’s kind of a shame that because the smartphone is the camera you always have around, most of my memories since the iPhone’s introduction have been recorded in a less-than-stellar format. But they’re all I’ve got. And while not every photo is worth printing out, it’s nice to have “real” photos you can share with others – like baby photos for the grandparents, for example. I’ve used a service called PicPlum for this since last year, as well as the apps from Sincerely Ink, and have more recently come across an app called MoPho, which lets you print not just photos, but to mugs, mousepads, totes and other accessories. But now more traditional consumers will have an alternative to using ship-to-home startups whose prints may be of varying quality, depending on the source, to using the photo lab from a brand name chain they already know.
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| GroupMe Branches Out Into Group Buying, Launches New “Experiences” Service Into Beta Posted: 10 Jul 2012 07:05 AM PDT  The team at GroupMe has certainly had an impressive ride so far — after winning the Disrupt NY Hackathon in 2010, they quickly locked up some funding, and were eventually acquired by Skype. So what's next for GroupMe co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci? As it turns out, they're looking to get into the group-buying game, and to that end they have just launched a new service called Experiences by GroupMe into private beta. Its goal: to simplify the process of getting people together and doing cool things in the real world. Here's how Experiences works. Upon taking a look at the Experiences site, users can select from a handful of carefully-curated events to attend with their friends. Once an experience has been chosen, that user is given a unique URL to spread around, though each experience is typically designed for a set number of participants. That user also has access to a "plan" page, which lets them keep tabs on who's attending and how much time is left before they lose the experience. It shouldn't come as a surprise to see that the service also ties in with GroupMe — when a user selects an event and friends begin locking in their spots, a GroupMe group is created for all attendees so they can stay in touch with each other through the booking process and beyond. That GroupMe group is also used to deliver notifications about new attendees, though they're also sent by email just to be safe. Perhaps the best part? Each participant in an experience has to use a credit card to fork over their share of the cost, but only has to pay when all of an event's slots are filled. Thankfully, this means the process of wrangling payments is much neater (not to mention less contentious) here than it is in meatspace. Like most other group-buying services out there, GroupMe will take a percentage of the sales from each transaction, though the team has other (secret) monetization ideas in the works too. The inspiration for Experience struck back in December 2011, at which point the team hashed out all the concepts they wanted the service to include, but the story of the service's genesis stretches back even further than that. The Experiences concept seems like a quite a stretch from the group messaging focus of the GroupMe app, but the founders look at both services as variations on a theme they’ve been clinging to since their early days — making it easier for groups do things better together. "We have the luxury of accumulated knowledge about how groups work," Hecht told me. “Experiences is a natural progression from where GroupMe started, because we’re not only helping groups communicate better, we’re helping them buy better.” For now, Experiences is only open to users in New York City — their sales, marketing, and business development teams can only do so much. The team fully expects that to change down the line though, and they've confirmed that users will eventually be able to create and share their own Experiences in due course. There's plenty more in the works for Experiences too — co-founder Martocci hinted at other potential features down the line (think event recommendations and the like), but for now the team is focused on “getting the product out there first and iterating like crazy.”
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| An Honest Discussion About Being Gay, Working In Tech, And Living In The South Posted: 10 Jul 2012 06:42 AM PDT  We didn’t get the most amazing reaction when we announced that our Southeast Mini Meetup Tour would also have a partial focus on gay rights and homophobic legislation in the south. We’re a tech blog, and we really shouldn’t be dabbling in politics or human rights. And yet, even issues that seem far removed circle back around to the tech industry, the startup scene, and the state’s economic well-being. Such is the case with the issue of discrimination against gay people in the South. So we sat down with a few gay men who are in the tech scene in Atlanta — Chip Standifer, Mark Streeter and Hai Nguyen — to learn more about their experience here. The truth is, if you’re gay and you live in the south, Atlanta is where you want to be. In fact, some refer to it as the San Francisco of the South. Yet, Chip Standifer in particular (the oldest of the trio), explained that he still probably missed out on opportunities — or had to turn them down — because of his sexual orientation. At the same time, couple Hai Nguyen and Mark Streeter, who both have radically different jobs, say they don’t feel that much discrimination at all, though that’s not to say that being out is easy. In Atlanta, there are programs in place in certain companies to help the LGBT community feel more welcome, but Mark Streeter explains that it sometimes feels forced. But there’s still a concern that the South may be missing out on some amazing technological talent because of what could be referred to as closed-mindedness. We all agreed that the best thing that can be done to make it easier for the LGBT community in the long run is for individuals to be out now. It’s obviously easier said than done, especially for those living in outskirt cities rather than the Atlanta metro area, but once someone gets to know you and respect you, it becomes much more difficult for them to hold on to any illogical hate.
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| Shopify Teams Up With Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries, FUBU Founder To Help You Build A $1M eCommerce Biz Posted: 10 Jul 2012 06:35 AM PDT  According to the Interactive Media In Retail Group, global eCommrece sales will surpass $1.25 trillion by 2013. Naturally, everyone and their mother is eager to capitalize on the growth of online commerce, as it hurdles into a new renaissance. Shopify is one of a number of startups that want to help both newcomers and old hands get a piece of the action. The startup’s platform allows individuals and businesses to set up their own online storefront in minutes, quickly adding items to sell, images, tags and group items, and integrate PayPal or other credit card payment processors. To showcase its platform and demonstrate how easy technology is making it to build a successful eCommerce business, Shopify is teaming up with four industry veterans to help aspiring entrepreneurs build a million-dollars business in just a few months. This morning, the company announced the launch of its third annual Build-A-Business competition, in which the team compete for seed funding while being mentored by 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss, FUBU founder and Shark Tank resident Daymond John, swissmiss creator Tina Roth Eisenberg, and Lean Startup author Eric Ries. To participate, all entrepreneurs have to do is come up with a product to sell — it doesn’t matter what — choose one of the four mentors, enter an existing Shopify store or create a new one (signup here) and get to building a kickass business. For entering, participants receive a free .CO domain for 12 months, $100 in Google AdWords Credits and $100 in MailChimp Credits. The competition runs from July 10th to February 28th, with the four mentor-judges offering advice and guidance along the way. At the end of the two months, the four stores that sell the most doodads or doohickeys receive a $50,000 seed investment for a 5 percent equity stake from their chosen mentor, with the investment valuing each company at $1 million. On top of that, the winners are also flown to NYC to meet the mentors and receive an additional $20K-worth of AdWords credits. Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lutke says that the competition is a great way to incentivize entrepreneurs to focus on their online storefronts. New technologies have made it easy to open an eCommerce storefront, and the competition allows businesses to learn from a group of businesses and follow the leaders forward as they learn how to build more engaging, sustainable online businesses. Past competitions, the CEO says, led to the creation of more than 4,400 new businesses, which sold over $15 million worth of products — which is both good for Shopify and participating startups. With Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries, Daymond John, and Tina Eisenberg on board this year, Lutke expects the third competition to produce the strongest companies yet. Tim Ferriss says of Shopify’s competition:
Shopify currently hosts over 25,000 active online retailers, including Gatorade, GE, Tesla Motors, LMFAO, Encyclopedia Britannica, and CrossFit, among others. The company is backed by $22 million in financing from Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Georgian Partners. Build-A-Business landing page here.
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| Israel’s UppSite Raises $2.1 Million For Its Simple Website-To-App Conversion Service Posted: 10 Jul 2012 06:19 AM PDT  There’s no shortage of services that will take your blog or your content and build an app out of it (our own Sarah Perez worked up a hefty Google Doc full of them a while back) but Israeli startup UppSite thinks theirs is a faster, simpler solution for the masses. As it turns out, they’re not the only ones who appreciate their approach. The team announced earlier this morning that they secured $2.1 million in “pre-A” funding from Israeli incubator thetime and Matomy Media. Let’s back up a moment though — here’s how UppSite works in a nutshell. Upon providing the URL of the blog or forum to be app-ified to UppSite, users can select either a free, ad-supported option, or a premium option that (among other things) allows users to receive 50% of the ad revenue, enable push notifications, and exercise greater control over the app’s design. Once you hit “submit,” UppSite takes that content and converts it into a native app for the chosen platform (only iOS and Android are supported for now), and after a staff review process, the app will be submitted to the selected App Stores on your behalf. It may not be the ideal solution for anyone who wants very granular control over their mobile experience, but then again, those people are hardly UppSite’s target audience. For quick, painless, and reasonably handsome mobile app results, UppSite is worth keeping an eye on. UppSite first appeared on our radar last year when it was still firmly in its early days, but they’ve come quite a way since then. The service officially launched at IDG’s DEMO Conference earlier this year and was selected as one of WordPress’s VIP Partners, but now the team is looking to branch out — UppSite CEO Gal Brill says that the startup plans to use the funds to open a new office right smack in the middle of the Bay Area.
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| With Proview Settlement Done And Dusted, Apple’s New iPad Finally Comes To China July 20 Posted: 10 Jul 2012 05:57 AM PDT  A little over a week after finally settling its iPad legal case against Proview to the tune of $60 million, Apple today is delivering some more good iPad news in China: it’s going to start selling the new iPad on the mainland starting July 20. The Retina-display-enhanced model will be priced starting at $499 for the 16GB model ($629 with cellular access) (3,176 yuan), $599 ($729 with cellular access) for the 32GB device and $699 for the 64GB version ($829 with cellular access). At the same time, it has reduced the price of the older iPad 2 to $399. These prices are in line with what Apple is charging for the tablets in the U.S. — although given that the per-capita income in China is significantly lower, that price will feel a lot higher to the average consumer. Still, that has not deterred people from buying Apple products so far: In its last quarterly results, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook called sales of the iPhone in the country “mind boggling.” In total the company’s revenue from China in the quarter totalled $7.9 billion, a three-fold rise over the year before. As with its previous iPad models, Apple will sell the tablets online, through authorized resellers and in its chain of Apple retail stores, with reservations for pick up beginning on July 19. It is starting its reservation system with only a three-hour window between 9am and noon every day. Previous launches of iPad and iPhone devices in China have sparked a crazy response from enthusiastic consumers, with huge crowds and aggressive scalpers causing Apple to actually halt sales at one point when it launched the iPad 2. Since then, Apple has opened more retail locations, and will have probably set up more careful systems to try to avoid the same thing happening again. It looks like the settlement of the Proview suit was the final barrier to Apple going ahead with the launch of the new iPad in China. Older models reportedly had been seized by authorities at the height of the last dispute, and whether Apple actually had an injunction on the sale of the newer model, it would have wanted to avoid a similar situation with the newer model — a situation that would have proven embarrassing and the opposite of the kind of positive hype Apple likes to have buzzing at all times.
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| Posted: 10 Jul 2012 04:20 AM PDT  Nokia may still be fighting some pretty major fires on its burning platform, but it’s also building some bridges — namely the Nokia Bridge incubator program — to help those running from the flames, with financing of up to €150,000 ($185,000) to pursue new startups, before they’ve even paid a visit to VCs and angel investors. The activities in Nokia Bridge are a small but encouraging counterpoint to the fairly-constant, grim updates on the state of the Finnish mobile company, once the world’s biggest by a long shot, and now under the gun with falling handset sales and dwindling cash reserves as it struggles to compete against the Apple/Android smartphone juggernaut. It’s understood that there are already some 100 companies in the incubator — dozens in the UK alone — although Nokia has not published a list of them anywhere. Jolla, the startup formed by ex-Nokia execs that will try to give MeeGo phones another shot, is one of them. Companies starting internal incubators is nothing new. Microsoft recently launched its Bing Fund, and Pearson has a tech incubator as well, to name two. But in the case of Nokia, the incubator has a slightly stronger sense of urgency: the Nokia Bridge helps departing employees (there are thousands of them right now potentially without jobs) start their own companies. Some of these are coming out of projects the ex-Nokians may have been pursuing when they were still at Nokia, killed off during the company’s major strategic changes over the last year and a half (eg MeeGo). Others will be something completely different. David Hall, a spokesperson for Nokia Bridge in the UK, tells me that one of the UK startups in the program is developing a wine import/export business (thinking outside the bottle! hah hah). Each ex-employee gets €25,000 ($30,800) or £20,000 in the UK, and up to four Nokians can come together for a project — meaning your startup could get a seed fund of €100,000. Andrew Cooper, program manager for Bridge in the UK, tells me that it’s more common to have single individuals rather than groups of four, at least in the UK. On top of that, each startup is eligible for further financing of up to €50,000. As with other incubators, Nokia Bridge also offers training and other support services, according to Juha-Pekka Helminen, an ex-head of strategic planning at Nokia. Hall notes that Nokia Bridge also covers other roles: “We also help with finding a new job within Nokia, as well as job placements with other companies,” he says. Nokia does not get an equity stake in these startups, and it does not transfer any intellectual property to the companies, Hall tells me. Helminen notes that there have been some examples, however, of startups getting licenses to use IPR that is not actively being used by Nokia. Examples of these, he tells me, are Sports-tracker.com and therecorporation.com. This post gives a rough translation of a report, in Finnish, on Jolla Mobile, that seems to imply the company is getting some IPR from Nokia. However, TechCrunch understands that Jolla Mobile may not be a part of that program and did not receive IPRs from Nokia. Rather, it has another arrangement with Nokia right now (for example a business relationship supporting MeeGo N9 maintenance). The Nokia Bridge program started in April 2011 and has kept a fairly low profile; Hall says that it’s going to remain in place “certainly until the end of this year,” if not longer. Here are some examples of other Bridge companies that are no longer in stealth mode. Please let us know if you are one, too, and we’ll add you to the list: TreLab (wireless network measurement and monitoring) Mobile Brain Bank (a kind of mobile-specific GitHub) Avanto Network (mobile strategy consulting) Cloudberrytec (more ex-MeeGo folks, mobile professional services) Haystacks.eu (London for kids app) Decode Global (This one, itself an incubator for mobile apps for social change, is based in Canada, with its founder, Angelique Mannella, formerly working on MeeGo in Finland. “Nokia gave me the okay to set up my company in Canada. I am one of the few that was able to receive the startup funding but not be based in Europe,” she tells me.) [Image: Boonerator, Flickr]
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| JobVidi Throws Its Social Recruiting Hat In The Ring Posted: 10 Jul 2012 03:57 AM PDT  It feels like I'm being pitched a social recruiting service at a rate of about one a week at the moment, so hot is the space right now. That would suggest at least one thing: recruitment is still broken, at least in the eyes of starry-eyed entrepreneurs. Today, JobVidi throws its hat in the ring with a new social recruitment offering that it claims makes the job-seeking process more efficient, interactive and discreet, and in doing so opens up a better stream of candidates for those recruiters who the startup hopes will pay to use the service. In some ways, JobVidi resembles a standard jobs site type offering: candidates sign up, create a CV and profile, which forms the basis of any potential job matches, while recruiters post jobs and use the tools provided to sift through and contact potential candidates. However, where things get more interesting is the way JobVidi attempts to address a number of problems that job seekers encounter when using most job sites, namely the lack of response and feedback when applying for vacancies, the need to sometimes remain anonymous so as not to alert a current employer, and the inability to test the current job market without actually applying for a new job. Sign up to JobVidi is via LinkedIn, so as to take some of the pain out of creating another CV, while candidates can add additional information that they may not feel comfortable including in their public LinkedIn profile. The company also argues that a sudden update to a user's profile on LinkedIn can alert an employer to the fact that they are thinking about leaving, which brings us to one of JobVidi's more interesting features: the ability for a candidate to remain entirely anonymous until they are ready to reveal personal details. The idea here is to widen the pool of potential candidates by respecting a candidate's privacy. "Not everybody is comfortable with their CV and personal details about themselves and the companies they work for being sent around by recruiters", says JobVidi co-founder and CEO James Brookner. To further motivate candidates, any job they do apply for through JobVidi is guaranteed a response. This could potentially be quite a big pull given that, according to the startup, candidates typically only receive a response and/or feedback for two out of every ten applications on average. “If the employer doesn't respond to you within 14 days, our system will analyse the recruiter's preferences and inform you of the outcome”, says Brookner. How valuable that algorithmic feedback will turn out to be is unclear, although any feedback is probably better than none. Finally, potential candidates can take a softer approach to job-seeking via a feature of JobVidi that enables them to test the market for their skills and experience. They do this by submitting what the startup is calling a 'Value Request' to recruiters that Brookner says will let them find out their “general marketability and financial prospects if they were to decide to move”. It's a stealthy feature — who doesn't want to see what's out there from time to time? Other features of the site, though not all of them are differentiators, include the ability for recruiters to post jobs to JobVidi from LinkedIn or Twitter (using the hashtag #jobvidi) and a matching algorithm that ensures that recruiters only see relevant candidates. The revenue model is paid subscriptions for recruiters once JobVidi leaves Beta. Along with Brookner, the startup's founders are Nabila Sadiq, Vic Daniels and Graham Morris, who come from the world of online advertising, recruitment and technology. The company, founded in February this year, is based in east London's 'Tech City', and has raised £100k in angel investment to date.
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| Now With Sound — Social Collections Platform Booklets Integrates With SoundCloud Posted: 10 Jul 2012 03:01 AM PDT  Booklets, the ‘social collections’ platform that enables users to create and share HTML5-powered collections of text, images and — now — sound, has added integration with neighbouring SoundCloud (both startups are headquartered in Berlin). In addition, a new private sharing feature has been unveiled, making it possible to share collections with select friends-only. Targeting both consumers and companies, Booklets provides a browser-based tool that makes it easy for anybody to present any kind of information in a visually attractive layout. The resulting ‘booklets’ play well with mobile devices in particular, thanks to their HTML5 underpinnings. Examples cited include “a song booklet for a band, a look book for designers, private holiday memories or a gallery catalogue”. Overall, the startup is tapping into a trend to make the Web more beautiful, thanks to the latest browser and hardware technologies which create new possibilities — think: tablets, for example — and a greater emphasis on design that in turn is driving consumer expectation. Since the service launched in private beta in April this year, users have created just over 400 collections, which are designed to be shared via QR code, SMS, URL, and through various social networks. Booklets was founded in July 2011 by Michael v. Roeder, Dominik Faber, and Paul Meinhard. It’s funded to the tune of €500k.
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| Deutsche Post DHL Buys IntelliAd To Ramp Up Its Adtech Business Posted: 10 Jul 2012 02:26 AM PDT  Some more consolidation in the adtech space: the German logistics, communications and postal giant Deutsche Post DHL has acquired IntelliAd, a German online marketing agency that specialises in optimizing search ad buys, as part of a larger strategy to make a bigger push into online advertising and marketing. Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed; we’ve contacted both companies for more details. For now, Deutsche Post says that IntelliAd will become an independent subsidiary, and that all of its 50 employees, including founders Tobias Kiessling, Wolfhart Fröhlich and Mischa Rürup, will stay on post-acquisition. While it may sound slightly put of left-field for a postal giant to be making online marketing acquisitions, this is actually right in Deutsche Post’s wheelhouse: In August 2010, it acquired ad targeting platform nugg.ad. In 2011 it bought Adcloud, an online performance marketing specialist. Deutsche Post DHL is Germany’s largest mail company, as well as the world’s largest courier and logistics company. The move to alternative revenue streams in digital looks like it has been made to provide a fuller service for companies to manage digital distribution of their services in addition to physical distribution (and possibly to lay the groundwork for a time when digital will be a more important point for distribution than physical for some of them… something we can already see happening in basic mail services). “Deutsche Post [already] provides a service for media agencies, marketers and advertisers in online advertising, to help them place ads effectively and efficiently,” said Jürgen Gerdes, a board member of German Post DHL, in a statement (patchy translation here). “With IntelliAd we’re building this position, especially in search, the fastest-growing and largest online advertising channel, and becoming an even more powerful partner for our customers.” IntelliAd was founded in 2007 and its specialty is in creating algorithms that help companies game the process of bidding in search advertising auctions, for optimal placements and pricing. Clients have included companies like Air Berlin and the mobile carrier O2, as well as performance marketing agencies. Given that Google is by far the biggest search network in Germany and elsewhere, it’s optimized to work there, but says that it works across all search engines.
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| Ukrainian Students Win Microsoft’s Imagine Cup With Their Sign Language-To-Speech Translation Gloves Posted: 10 Jul 2012 01:38 AM PDT  During an awards ceremony in Sydney today, Ukraine’s team quadSquad just won this year’s Microsoft Imagine Cup student technology competition (and $25,000) thanks to its gloves that can translate sign language into speech. The team beat out 75 other groups that made it to the worldwide finals in Australia where they had to present their projects in front of a group of judges. This was Microsoft’s 10th Imagine Cup and the event, which combines the energy of a soccer World Cup with a pitch competition for students. This year’s Imagine Cup’s theme was “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems” and most teams focused on healthcare and the environment. Japan’s team Coccolo finished second in the Software Design category with a system that can reduce energy use by having lamps talk to each other and find spots where lights can be dimmed. Team wi-GO from Portugal, which developed a Kinect-powered shopping cart that can follow disabled people through a store, finished third. During the event, Microsoft also promised to ship a Windows 8 machine to every competitor who made it to the finals after it ships the new version of its operating system in late October (no word on whether this would be a Surface, though). Next year’s event will take place in St. Petersburg. With the release of Windows 8 just around the corner, chances are next year’s event will put a stronger emphasis on Windows, but interestingly enough, there were quite a few teams that competed this year that already used Windows 8, even outside of the specialized Metro-style app category. Other winners include Germany’s Greenway, which won the Coca-Cola-sponsored Environmental Sustainability Award. Greenway aims to make traffic jams a thing of the past by building a smart navigation system that doesn’t just route drivers around traffic jams but actually coordinates traffic across entire cities. The Italian team Ingenium won the Health Awareness Award with a project that aims to bring better therapy solutions to those dealing with Autism but who don’t have easy access to therapists. While the U.S. team from Arizona State University didn’t make it into the top 20 in the flagship Software Design Competition, the U.S.’s Drexel Dragons team won the Game Design (Phone) category. You can find a full list of all the winners here.
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| Cleversafe Brings Storage To Hadoop-Driven Big Data Analytics Posted: 09 Jul 2012 10:31 PM PDT  Apache Hadoop is becoming the de facto infrastructure environment for pushing data across a distributed infrastructure to then later analyze with MapReduce in an effort to optimize web pages, personalize content or increase the effectiveness of online advertising. There’s just one problem. Hadoop is not meant as a storage environment. Metadata is kept on one server. Data is replicated three times to make sure nothing gets lost. That can get expensive when the data store is petabytes in size. And if there’s a failure on the metadata server, the replicated data can become entirely inaccessible. Further, maintaining three copies of data can lead to significant overhead and management costs. Cleversafe believes it has the answer by combining its object-storage dispersal technology with the capabilities of Hadoop, MapReduce. Cleversafe uses a technique called erasure coding. It take data and slices it into little pieces. The slices are distributed to separate disks, storage nodes and geographic locations. Once dispersed, Cleversafe’s Informational Dispersal Algorithms (IDA) constitutes the data from a subset of the slices originally stored. Here’s the twist. Cleversafe proposes that after dispersal, the data goes back into Hadoop for analysis. Hadoop does best when the data is brought to the computation. This is accomplished with the Cleversafe technique. Cleversafe CEO Chris Gladwin tells us the benefit comes in three ways:
Does this represent the next generation of big data analytics? Hadoop has inherent weaknesses in terms of its storage capabilities. It’s why it is a natural fit with storage vendors such as EMC and IBM. The difference for Cleversafe boils down to its unique erasure capabilities for building large-scale clouds such as the one it is helping develop now for Lockheed Martin to serve federal agencies. But erasure coding does have its flaws as pointed out by Wikibon’s Dave Vellante. He points out that erasure coding is math heavy and requires considerable system resources to manage:
If it can truly do all it says it can do then Cleversafe may prove a formidable player in the emerging big data land grab. But I am not so sure. There’s a reason why Amazon Web Services and Google use a commodity infrastructure. It is affordable and can be continuously optimized. As efficiencies get better, the prices go down. On AWS Map Reduce, you can lease clusters to run Hadoop, MapReduce jobs. Cleversafe has a compelling case but the methods used by AWS are an example of the benefits that come with distributed infrastructures built on very cheap hardware.
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