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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Content Wars – Could Meltwater-Versus-AP And UK Papers Spill Over?

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:20 AM PST

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You’ll recall the battles between the RIAA and the technology industry over music licensing. Well something similar as been going on regarding how newspaper content is licensed to commercial clippings agencies, and it’s blowing up on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Associated Press today filed suit against Meltwater News for copyright infringement and misappropriation of its breaking news content. The complaint, filed in a New York federal court, alleges that Meltwater U.S. Holding Inc. and its Meltwater News Service, a news clipping service, have been illegally selling unlicensed AP content that competes directly with AP and its customers.

Meanwhile in the UK, there’s been a ruling today which has relevance for how links to newspapers are shared online.

Sony To Offer NFC Authenticated Power Outlets

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:08 AM PST

burnt_outlet

Sony is working on a new technology that authenticates devices via the power outlet, allowing for a few interesting applications. The system, based on the Japanese Felica standard, would allow authenticated power usage, power management for cafes and offices, as well as payments for power use. The system could authenticate with the power outlet via a chip inside the laptop or device or through a smartcard that user waves at the outlet.

According to the press release, the system will allow building and home owners to control power use from a central location and ensure people aren’t using power willy nilly.

This technology is definitely something we will soon see in modern buildings, at least in terms of energy maintenance. It may feel freaky to log in your power outlet, but if it keeps us from sucking down too many jiggawatts, we’ll probably all need to get on board.

via TheVerge



500 Startups Alum LaunchBit Launches Its Email Ad Network

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:02 AM PST

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Advertising in email newsletters is an old idea, but the founders of LaunchBit, a startup that’s leaving closed beta testing today, say things haven’t changed since the ’90s.

The biggest problem? When you advertise in newsletters, you blindly send the same ad to everyone on the list.

“There’s no targeting or tailoring to specific individuals and little-to-no analytics to track how the campaign did,” says co-founder Elizabeth Yin. “This also means that advertisers would often have to pay a lot of money for a single large list before knowing it worked. So, if you wanted to test lots of newsletters, you’d have to spend tens of thousands of dollars before you had a chance to think about iterating copy and improve the campaign. Most companies don’t have this kind of budget just to test.”

Yin used to be a marketing manager at Google, and she says the LaunchBit experience is similar to Google AdWords. You create your ads, identify the demographics of the audience that you want to reach, and choose the cost-per-click (CPC) price that you’re willing to pay. Then, Yin says, “Your ad wins a certain number of impressions in multiple newsletters, ensuring that you reach your target demographic and allowing you to get your campaign in multiple newsletters with a ‘normal-sized ad budget.’” Publishers meanwhile, get to see the ad and the CPC bid and reject the ones they don’t like.

She also says LaunchBit is focused on “value and aesthetics,” giving advertisers analytics to understand the effectiveness of their ads and only accepting high-quality publishers and advertisers.

LaunchBit is a graduate of the 500 Startups incubator program. The ad network has been in private beta testing and has limited its ads to the software industry. The early results are promising, Yin says — ads in the best newsletters consistently see clickthrough rates between 1 and 10 percent, and that one campaign saw CTRs as high as 18 percent.

In addition to leaving the closed beta, LaunchBit is also announcing that it will now running campaigns in any industry, and it’s also integrating with email newsletter service MailChimp.

Barry Diller Wants To “Transform Television” With Aereo, A DVR In The Cloud

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 08:47 AM PST

Aereo

Barry Diller always enjoys riling the media industry from which he sprang. A few minutes ago at a press conference at IAC headquarters in New York City, Diller introduced a new startup IAC is backing called Aereo that is building a DVR in the cloud that broadcasts live TV to your iPad, computer, or TV.  Diller has always believed that Internet TV would be a healthy counterweight to “media concentration” as media companies increasingly want “to protect that closed system.”

The problem with Internet TV so far, says Diller, is that “there wasn’t a lot to watch” other than “cats swinging from chandeliers.” And other hardware solutions presented the problem of more boxes in the living room. “Who wants another remote, box, wires?” asks Diller. “Everyone already has enough of all that stuff.”

But he sees Aereo as a way “to transform television and how you receive it.” The way it works is it actually sends live broadcast TV to your computer or iPad. Aereo builds boxes the size small refrigerators with arrays of tiny TV antennas inside. Each of those antennas can be programmed and deliver broadcast video over the Internet to viewers . And this is how the company gets around legal barriers, it is just tuning into live TV. This is a similar approach in concept to what Slingbox did, but instead of tuning into your own TV, it tunes into a TV antenna in the cloud.

The iPad app looks like a program guide with DVR functionality. So you can record any show available on the system, but only broadcast stations like ABC, NBC, and FOX are available at launch. Cable channels aren’t available. The other limitation is that the service will be capacity constrained. It needs one tiny antenna per user in order to stream TV to them.

Aereo is launching live today in New York City. The service is invite only and will cost $12 a month for a virtual DVR with a dual tuner and 40 hours of storage.

Lover.ly Raises $500K To Be An Online, Visual Inspiration Engine For Weddings

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 08:30 AM PST

Lover.ly

Lover.ly, an inspiration engine and Pinterest-like startup for weddings, has raised $500,000 from Joanne Wilson, Michael Edwards, Michael Yavonditte, Charles Smith, Anu Duggal, Jordan Levy, and Rick Webb.

Launched in the Fall of 2011, Lover.ly is a centralized place that helps brides discover and save wedding ideas. The site is designed to help brides, vendors, and wedding enthusiasts find inspiration (from wedding blogs), people to hire, and things to buy. Similar to Pinterest, the site allows users to curate board of ideas and make them public for users to view and draw inspiration. Currently, the site has an archive of over 130,000 images organized by editors and its community of users. Lover.ly offers both editor-curated inspiration boards (i.e. bridesmaid dresses for beach weddings, honeymoon ideas) as well as user-generated boards.

Indexing all of these images is done via Loverl.y’s proprietary tagging system that adds anywhere from 4 to 20 tags per image identifying color, style, season, location, and objects in the images (i.e. photographer, planner, dress designer, floral, dessert, rentals, venue). Users can search for ideas by category and subcategory.

The startup was founded by Kellee Khalil, who while helping plan her sister’s wedding was overwhelmed and frustrated that there were no tools search, save, organize, and share visual inspirations for the event. Thus, the idea for Lover.ly was born.

As mentioned above, the site is similar in a lot of ways to Pinterest. But Khalil says that she believes Lover.ly can be distinctive because the site is the reverse of Pinterest. She explains that it can be difficult to sift through all the information and content on Pinterest and Lover.ly is a more niche, centralized place for all things wedding.

Walnuts Launches Its Facebook Scrapbook Maker Just In Time For V-Day

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 08:23 AM PST

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Oh crap, it’s Valentine’s Day. Did you just remember, too, courtesy of that clever Google Doodle? The blogosphere will be filled today with last-minute gift ideas and other such ephemera related to this mushy holiday, and while I’m refusing the V-Day pitches as a general rule, there is a startup announcing its launch today that’s actually kind of fun. The company is called Walnuts, and it’s a Facebook app that can automatically build you a digital or printed book of your best Facebook photos and status updates, or even those belonging to a Facebook friend. Last-minute gift idea? Yeah, sure. But not a bad gift the other 364 days of the year, either.

The idea for a printed out book featuring your Facebook data is hardly novel. (See, for example, MySocialMemories, Yearbound, egobook, BookofFame, etc., to name just a few.). However, the Walnuts book has a couple of special features. For starters, unlike many of the Facebook photobooks, it doesn’t just support building albums out of your own data – you can also enter in a friend’s name to build them a book instead. Of course, you’ll need to be Facebook friends with the person in question in order for this to work.

After entering in the required info, the book is automatically created for you, using either your top status updates and photos (those that have the most likes, comments, etc.) or you can specify a particular photo album or albums to use instead. Any content you don’t want can be “X”ed out from the book after it’s done.

The resulting book has the appearance of a hand-written journal, as opposed to a more professional, typewritten creation. This is by design, says founder Helen Spaull. “Another photobook I was playing with came up with sort of impersonal content, like ’63% of your friends are male.’ It’s infographics,” she lamented, “It’s not human, it’s a little bit soulless. As a customer, I want the most human, most valuable content on each page. I don’t really want to know about the word I used most often…I see [Walnuts] as more like a scrapbook.”

With its handwritten font and support for pulling in things like photos’ comments, that is the resulting feel for the app’s creation. But it’s still very much a work in progress. I’d like to be able to re-arrange the content on the page, or pick out specific friends’ tags or status updates’ by keyword to determine what gets featured. These sorts of things may be implemented further down the road, says Spaull.

In the near future, a forthcoming version of the app will allow you to customize who’s included in the “Hall of Fame” section (which shows all your Facebook friends’ profile photos in the beginning of the book), the ability to add or remove individual status updates instead of just the status update pages themselves, and other sorts of customizations.

The book is available in softcover ($9.90 med., $12.90 lrg.) or hardcover ($19.90), but can be shared in its digital format via Facebook post for free. Remember: it’s the thought that counts! (Also, have you seen what roses are selling for today? Yikes.)

Walnuts has under $100K in seed funding at present through a single investor.

Samsung Galaxy Note Review: Initial Impressions (Video)

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 08:13 AM PST

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Even if it isn’t my favorite new device, I’m glad to see the Galaxy Note bring something totally different to the mobile table. At first glance you’d think it was a tablet, especially when you set it next to a “regular” phone, but you’d soon realize the Note has a 4G LTE radio tucked inside to let you phone home.

Unfortunately, you might look a little crazy with that huge thing up to your face. I found that it was really difficult to get comfortable with the device, never feeling like I had complete control over it as I would with a smaller phone. On the other hand, the mobile video experience offered by the Note can’t really be beat thanks to that stunning 5.3-inch 1280×800 HD Super AMOLED display.

AT&T’s 4G LTE didn’t give me any trouble in NYC, and I didn’t see any particularly disheartening performance. But I will say that I can’t stand TouchWiz. Samsung makes amazing hardware, and I’ll admit that a few features of its UI are helpful, but in the end TouchWiz really bogs phones down.

To be clear, the Note’s 8-megapixel camera is faster than most Samsung devices, but that doesn’t mean it’ll beat out the iPhone 4S or even certain Moto handsets. Still, it gets the job done.

As far as the S-Pen is concerned, I have mixed feelings. I can see this being useful for anyone who draws or jots down notes a lot, like a graphic artist or a mom perhaps. But past that, it seems like a gimmicky feature that won’t get much use after the first few days — a novelty.

Don’t get me wrong. S-Pen performance was absolutely wonderful. There were a few lags, and missed marks, but it was still a much better stylus experience than I’ve had before. You can tell that a lot of time and energy went into making the S-Pen as functional and smooth as possible. But that doesn’t mean I need it.

As I said, adding a personal touch to photos or sending someone a handwritten note via mobile can be really cool. But that’s it. It won’t change the way I interact with my phone (touch is much more comfortable), and I don’t see myself getting in the habit of taking down notes or doodling. Some people, likely the ones I mentioned before, will see this as a godsend. But to each his own, right?

The Samsung Galaxy Note is already available for pre-order at AT&T, and if you place your pre-order before February 16, your phone will arrive on the 17th. It’s available in Carbon Blue and Ceramic White, and there are plenty of cool carrying cases and accessories that go along with it should you choose to go all in.



An Answer To Apple: Inkling Creates First Industrial Publishing Platform For Interactive eBooks

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 08:10 AM PST

A little less than a month ago, Apple held an education-focused event in which it announced the launch of iBooks 2, a move the company said it was making in an effort to “reinvent the textbook” by allowing users to purchase and download textbooks to their iPads. The new app enables the transformation of those expensive, heavy textbooks into lightweight interactive, digital textbooks, at $15 a pop. The accompanying iBooks Author allows teachers and amateur publishers to create interactive textbooks themselves.

As Apple pointed out at the event, education has long been in its DNA. Steve Jobs himself had long wanted to disrupt the textbook industry, but the problem is that it’s hard to convince schools to adopt $500 Apple devices without a slew of affordable content to go along with it. The process of creating textbooks, from writing to editing to publishing is slow; it can take years for textbooks (and updates) to be approved by publishers. By enabling anyone to create their own textbooks, Apple attempted to cut the buearacracy at the knees; it may not be a perfect solution, but it was a savvy end-around maneuver to create a workable solution.

In the end, the move certainly has the potential to upset the way textbooks are adopted. And, while some said that this was another example of Apple’s “Walled Garden,” it’s much more likely that Apple doesn’t actually care about whose content it’s serving, as long as it can sell more iPads. It doesn’t want to make or sell textbooks, it wants to create indispensable use-cases for its iPads.

If anyone has insight into Apple’s educational efforts, it would be Inkling Co-founder and CEO, Matthew MacInnis, who was responsible for Apple’s expansion into educational markets in Asia and later a senior manager of all Apple’s international education efforts. In late 2009, MacInnis left Apple to co-found Inkling with the mission to help textbook publishers convert their content into digitized, interactive versions, going beyond static rehashing of text, thanks to the opportunities created by new, mobile means of consumption, like the iPad.

MacInnis tells us that the team set out to build a publishing platform that would redefine digital media, starting with reinventing the textbook. But in doing so, they’ve discovered that to reinvent books, they’ve had to go back to ground zero and re-imagine the entire printing process itself. Desktop publishing has been around for decades, but to do it right, MacInnis said that they quickly became acutely aware that this required them to reset the type, so to speak.

Adobe’s InDesign has long been the de facto standard for formatting and laying out publications, magazines, newspapers, textbooks, and so on. While the process that goes into producing publications and textbooks is innately collaborative, it remains a complicated, convoluted, and time consuming process. The author writes the manuscript, the illustrators create images separately, everything has to be scanned, upped to the server, whereupon it’s outsourced to India, aggregated into PDFs, sent back to publishers for a read-over, back to India for changes, and so on and so forth. A year later, they have a finished product.

While iBooks looked to solve this problem, really the main use case for its Author tool is for teachers who want to publish books for their classrooms — those who aren’t looking to even sell it in the first place. In a sense, it’s like GarageBand or Keynote for quick textbook publishing, not so much a scalable model that works for the entire industry.

At least this is the motivation behind the “software environment” Inkling is officially unveiling today, called Inkling Habitat. The startup’s new platform targets the other end of the spectrum from iBooks: Professional publishers, giving them an industrial, or enterprise, platform that includes everything they need to create and publish interactive content for both the iPad and HTML5-based web content. No desktop software, and no constraints of the printed page.

In other words, Habitat enables publishers to “deploy standards-based content,” which includes guided tours, 3-D exhibits, interactive quizzes, and high def video. The coolest part? Habitat allows everything to be instantly published (and updated!) in a few clicks. With its new infrastructure, Inkling wants to change how interactive content is built, giving textbook publishers the tools to scale interactive publishing. (And perhaps make it into a viable, yet more affordable business?)

Inkling claims that Habitat is the “first integrated publishing environment” built for professional publishers. It allows publishers to push updates to every target platform once, while automatically customizing layouts for each device. Everything lives in the cloud, so that teams of editors, authors, and production partners can collaborate on textbook (or digital publishing) projects from around the world. Using the collaborative cloud, team members can see the same thing as their counterparts in India, staying in sync throughout the process.

Habitat also boasts an object-oriented content structure, in other words, the platform is semantic, and “content is treated like software, shifting the industry from a page-based model to a software-based model.” Among the platform’s other features, Habitat includes automated error reporting, as it scans the content every time it’s published to make sure it all works, automatically finding broken links, missing files, etc. Habitat also automatically saves every version of the entire project, every time, from start to finish, which means that editors can rollback changes at any point during the process — all the way back to the beginning. This is huge.

Inkling has, to date, published over 100 eTexts, and it is today announcing that two of the companies that have helped Inkling create these texts, Aptara and Innodata, will be expanding production on the startup’s platform. This means that, for example, Aptara will be extending its full-service “Design & Production Center” to all publishers, and its creative designers, media specialists, etc. will be working as an extension of publishers’ in-house teams — helping to increase the speed at which books are digitized.

Open Air Publishing, a New York-based startup that creates digital-first books has created three books on Inkling using Habitat. At the outset, Habitat will only be available to select publishing partners, and the platform will be opened more broadly this spring. (Interested readers can register for the Early Adopter Program here.)

Inkling has raised upwards of $17 million to date, from investors like Sequoia, Kapor Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, and Felicis Ventures.

Delivery App Postmates Offers A Last-Minute Valentine’s Gift

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 08:08 AM PST

Postmates_Valentines_Web_front

Yes, there are going to be a lot of startups trying to capitalize on Valentine’s Day. Postmates, however, has the advantage of doing something cool — something that involves free chocolate.

When the app launched last year at TechCrunch Disrupt, the coverage described it as the “Uber of packages.” On its face, the comparison might sound a little silly (at least, it did to me) but in the same way that Uber works because town car drivers often have downtime, Postmates is trying to take advantage of the fact that couriers and bike messengers aren’t always scheduled to make deliveries, and can instead take last-minute delivery requests via the Postmates app.

To try to get a little Valentine’s Day love, and also to help Bay Area residents give a nice surprise to their sweeties, Postmates is giving away 250 boxes of Christopher Elbow artisanal chocolate, delivered for free. Just download the Postmates app, enter “VALENTINES” as a promo code, then your location and your Valentine’s address, and finally “#valentines” as a description. The promotion will run until all 250 boxes are gone, and it starts … now.

Postmates service is currently available San Francisco, South San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley. More details about the promotion are available here.

No Name, No Email, No Problem: nFluence Media Raises $3M For Anonymous Deal-Targeting Tech

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 07:11 AM PST

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Seattle and London-based nFluence Media emerged from two years of stealth mode to announce it has raised $3 million for a deal-targeting technology whose first application will be a daily deal aggregating iPhone app, due out later this month. However, the company is not necessarily just another player in the overly crowded “daily deals” space. Instead, the technology being funded here is an anonymous self-profiling system that can expand into other verticals, including future uses with mobile carriers, cable/satellite TV operators and shopping mall owners.

The new round was led by Voyager Capital (Bill McAleer) with contributions from 17 angels in the Alliance of Angels. Along with the news, comes the announcement that Tom Huseby will be chairman of the board at nFluence. Huseby and nFluence co-founder Brian Roundtree (CTO) know each other from previous collaborations at SnapIn, where Roundtree was CTO. That company was later acquired by Nuance Media for $235M back in 2008. nFluence’s other co-founder and CEO is Henry Lawson, also the Chairman of MediaEquals and Cogniti.

The forthcoming iPhone app called dealBoard, due out in February, will be unique in the deal aggregating space because it will allow users to build a consumer profile without submitting any personal information. That means no names, no email addresses, no zip codes and no phone numbers. To build up consumers’ preferences, the app’s users will be walked through the company’s proprietary “brand sorter” technology, which from the sounds of it, makes detailing your preferences about shopping behaviors and interests into something more akin to a game than a traditional quiz.

The idea that you could receive daily deals without opting in to deal spam will appeal to the more privacy-minded and those who simply want a better way to access deals.  Imagine: no more unwanted emails about “spa packages” and “25% off kiteboarding lessons” which you delete on arrival. Hooray! But to be clear, information about you is being collected, including that which you voluntarily share, location info, your phone’s OS, browser and unique ID, your likes and dislikes, demographic info, etc. – it’s just not being linked to your personal information and identity.

“People don’t like most email and marketing and rightfully so,” says CEO Henry Lawson, “they are inundated with unwanted, mistargeted or stalker-like ads, offers and messages. With our technology, we’re able to return control of a consumer’s profile to the person it belongs to, the consumer, not some technology black box.”

nFluence isn’t the only company to think to aggregate and target deals – that’s both Yipit’s and Google Offers’ game plan, too. The difference is that those competitors aren’t targeting the offers anonymously as nFluence plans to.

The dealBoard mobile application is said to pull in over 35,000 offers, including those from retailers and deal providers like Groupon, LivingSocial and Gilt Groupe. For obvious reasons, no emails will be sent – the offers appear within the app only, according to user preferences. More details as to the specifics of how this technology will work will be available alongside the new app’s launch.

In the future, nFluence Media plans to expand the technology to other companies that want to target consumers, but who don’t need to collect personally identifiable information to do so.

Meanwhile In Europe … (Runtastic, TechCrunch Baltics, SecretSales, Cabify, Soup.me)

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 06:58 AM PST

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Here's a roundup of recent stories on TechCrunch Europe:

— Mobile sports and fitness app Runtastic is moving beyond software, announcing a hardware line as well as its expansion to the United States.

— In the UK, private sales club SecretSales has raised £6.3 million in funding to double down on its expansion in the country.

— TCEU Editor Mike Butcher traveled to Latvia for the first TechCrunch Baltics meetup, learned more about the tech scene in the country as well as that in Lithuania and Estonia, and saw some interesting startups.

— Soup.me, which helps creative people aggregate and display their digital lives, has raised $530,000 in funding from Vienna, Austria-based SpeedInvest. I’m still kind of confused about what the (invite-only) service is supposed to do.

— Founded in Juy 2011, on-demand car ordering service provider Cabify – which I likened to the ‘Uber of Europe’ – is starting to gain momentum in its hometown (Madrid, Spain), but plans to expand to 15 more European cities in 2012.

Motorola’s First Ice Cream Sandwich Handset Smiles For The Camera

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 06:55 AM PST

MotorolaIntel

Motorola’s latest handsets have been pretty impressive. The Razr and Razr Maxx, in particular, are excellent handsets. But it would seem that the (almost) freshly acquired company has no intentions of resting on its laurels.

Rather than sticking with its usual OMAP-powered devices, Motorola has slapped an Intel Medfield chip on to this anonymous device. And lest we forget, Ice Cream Sandwich is finally coming along for the ride. (It sure does pay off to be under Google’s wing, doesn’t it?)

Based on the renders, it would appear that Motorola is also changing up its design language yet again. With the Razr, things took on more of a boxey look, but maintained the classic Moto hump along the back. However, this unnamed device is in more of a teardrop shape, nixing the hump altogether and instead getting thinner and thinner as we move down the phone.

Pocketnow reports that the big selling feature on this phone will be its camera, which should supposedly boast instant-on and 15 frame-per-second burst mode. That sounds delightful alongside Moto’s stellar camera app.

A new version of MotoBlur should also be in tow (undoubtedly smearing the beauty of ICS), and is expected to first debut at Mobile World Congress in a couple weeks.

Further details are sparse, but we’ll but sure to clue you in once we know more.



WorldDesk Launches Dropbox-powered Way To Access Your Desktop

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 06:46 AM PST

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It would appear Dropbox is building a pretty wide ecosystem around its service and the latest today is an integration with WorldDesk. Who are they? Well they provide desktop virtualisation software, and they’ve just launched a beta cloud-based desktop delivery platform leveraging Dropbox.

Right now WorldDesk lets you access your “desktop” (whatever that is these days) from any device,allowing access to your applications and personalised desktop from your physical machine. Using WorldDesk, you could use a simple USB drive, or access your desktop from a smartphone, for instance.

Amazon To Open 1 Million-Square-Foot, $90 Million Fulfillment Center In Delaware

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 06:34 AM PST

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Amazon is opening a 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center in Middletown, Delaware, which is the e-commerce giant’s second facility in the state. Amazon says that the new center will create 850 full-time jobs, and will cost $90 million.

Amazon's fulfillment centers enables the company and third-party merchants to store inventory and fulfill orders. The Middletown center joins Amazon’s New Castle fulfillment facility, which was opened in 1997. Amazon says that the New Castle center currently employs “hundreds of full-time workers,” but it sounds like the new facility will be larger. The Middletown facility is expected to be complete this fall.

In December, the Delaware Economic Development Office awarded the company $3.47 million from the Delaware Strategic Fund to support the expansion, of which $2.12 million will help create new jobs at the site. The fund will also contribute to the company's infrastructure investment, equal to 3 percent of the total capital expenditures, or a maximum of $1.35 million. A separate grant for up to $4 million from the Delaware New Jobs Infrastructure Fund will be used to build extensions of public roads to serve the project, improve traffic flow and provide access to additional properties for future economic development. Amazon will also benefit from a real estate tax abatement from the town of Middletown for the next 10 years.

Amazon has been ramping up the development of its fulfillment centers over the past year. In 2011, the e-commerce company opened 15 new centers worldwide. As of last July, Amazon had roughly 65 centers worldwide. And this year, the company opened a new center in India and in South Carolina.

Nimble 2.0 Looks To Give SMBs A CRM Platform That Actually Does Social Right

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 05:49 AM PST

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There are few aspects of growing a business that are easy. But when you think about the big picture, one of the most significant challenges — besides hiring attractive, productive interns — is customer acquisition. Not every business scales like Facebook; many have to fight tooth-and-nail for every client, sell their firstborn, do whatever it takes. And once those customers are on board, the most successful companies make it a point to listen to them, hear their feedback, iterate, tweaking the user experience of their business/service/platform until the cows come home if that’s what’s required.

Sure, there’s something to be said for the “ask forgiveness not permission” strategy, but the recent PR fiascos of Airbnb and Path prove, if anything, that prioritizing transparency and communication with customers can save you from a lot of headaches.

That’s why CRM platforms exist — or should exist. To help businesses acquire new customers, and open up communication channels to help keep customers and companies engaged. And we’re not just talking enterprise.

Jon Ferrara, the Founder and CEO of Nimble thinks that most current CRM systems are broken, Salesforce.com among them. Ferrara is also the founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for over $100 million in the early 2000s, and two years ago, he returned to the still-stumbling CRM arena to try to get social right — with Nimble.

The social revolution having taken hold, businesses have come to realize that the best way to become a part of their customers’ conversations is to be where that conversation is taking place (in realtime) — on social media channels like the Twitters. When it comes to social CRM, few have been more gung-ho about its importance than Salesforce.com, which has adapted its cloud to tap into social networking channels in an effort to enable its enterprise customers to strengthen relationships with their users via social media. Hence Chatter and Radian6.

The “socialization” and “consumerization” of enterprise is very definitely taking place, but enterprise is more tectonic in its transitions to new models, than, say, SMBs, which have the advantage of being more nimble and flexible. But, to really nail social, businesses can’t just stack social functionality onto legacy CRM platforms, they have to build social into their infrastructure from the ground up. That’s what Ferrara has been doing with Nimble, smartly opting against going toe-to-toe with enterprise clouds like Salesforce, and instead targeting the CRM-underserved crowd of SMBs and startups.

When we first covered Nimble’s launch at DEMO a year ago, one could already see the potential appeal of the service, as it was offering a social relationship manager that enabled individuals to easily connect their contacts, calendars, and communications. Integrating with email, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Nimble pulled them into one, unifying platform that allows users to, say, receive an email from a particular person and pull up previous conversations with that person from any platform, social or otherwise.

Whereas old-school CRM systems stick to sales lead forecasting and management platforms that require users to BCC and CC messages, duplicate activities to link them to contacts, etc., Nimble offered the ability to automatically connect your conversations and activities — emails, social conversations, and calendars — to the people you’re having them with. Rocket science? No. But still not really done well yet.

So Nimble started with a free service that was aimed largely at individual users and has since been expanding on that model to offer functionality tailored more to B2B interactions with some simple sales and marketing add-ons. This move is culminating with the launch of Nimble 2.0 today, an upgrade that makes it increasingly clear that Nimble is making a platform play, with broad strokes to build an all-in-one CRM platform that actually helps businesses increase their social engagement.

What does that mean? Well, for starters, Nimble now offers unified social notifications all in one place. In the old model, businesses (and individuals) are stuck having to switch between windows, tabs, or apps to stay on top of their messages, notifications, likes, and requests on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Nimble puts your business’ social accounts into one stream, allowing you to follow, respond, engage from a single dashboard.

And, to give your business’ marketing and sales teams an idea of where to start engaging each day, Nimble now sends out an email “full of engagement opportunities” — in other words, a hit list of the most important news from your social networks, like friends, colleagues and social media connections changing jobs, your upcoming meetings, and, yes, even birthday notifications. The idea is to present businesses (and individuals) with a whole new slew of opportunities to reach out to customers and contacts for some organic engagement. This is great because it’s one piece of answering the question — “who should I be talking to that I’m not?” — important to both busy/lazy networkers as well as sales/marketing teams.

Nimble now also helps businesses take greater advantage of their Facebook Pages by enabling them to easily create contact records for each customer, tying their business community to contact records in Nimble, allowing communication management across social channels as well as the ability to associate tasks and deals with each person. (The startup has also added Google+ integration to round out its social network roster, on top of Gmail, IMAP accounts, Twitter, FB, FB Pages, and LinkedIn.)

At its heart a sales platform, Nimble is all about contact lists, and making those contact lists more dynamic and likely to push leads. Thus Nimble 2.0 brings a new, redesigned user interface to bear on your contact lists, allowing you to pull together related messages, activities, and deals, or add custom fields and tabs to contacts to support the collection and storage of your industry data as well as targeting communications to particular contacts.

In terms of privacy, Nimble 2.0 offers users the ability to decide which of their connected email or social media messages get shared with their colleagues, or marketing teams, and which stay private.

But perhaps most importantly, beyond unified social notifications, the platform is now offering some more key, third-party services, as it now integrates with online form builder, WuFoo, to create forms, link web visitors to those forms, or embed them on their sites; with MailChimp‘s scalable email marketing platform; and HubSpot’s inbound marketing software that enables users to track their leads, assigning a point system to the lead generation and conversion process to let users see how close their leads are to make a purchase.

In these latter features, it’s easy to see how Nimble could become increasingly appealing to SMBs and startups. The all-in-one platform that allows you to send and manage email, track and manage tasks, calendars, and contacts, as well as getting on top of our increasingly messy (and frequent) social media communications — this is all huge. Throw that on top of a cloud infrastructure and add a UI that doesn’t burn your eyeballs, you’re cooking with oil.

Sure, the basic stuff has a clear use case/benefits for individuals alone, but with its HubSpot/WuFoo integration, businesses get tools to manage (and close the loop on) their marketing initiatives. There’s still a lot to be done here, and when Nimble finalizes its “planned integrations” with Get Satisfaction, Yammer, Zendesk, Assistly, Quickbooks, and Freshbooks, the value prop will only get higher.

With all these features I’ve thrown at you, it may seem more confusing than it is. In playing around with the platform, I’ve been impressed with its simplicity and user-friendliness. It’s pretty intuitive, and it learns more about you as you go. To that point, Nimble now has over 30K registered users from more than 2,800 companies. According to the Nimble CEO, the average user now spends 3 hours a day managing business contacts, and the company has signed up over 250 resellers worldwide. Not bad for a SaaS B2B app that (according to Ferrara) hasn’t spent anything on marketing.

The Founder has spent the better part of two years building the service, sinking $2 million of his own money into it, and adding 20 engineers over that time. In January, Nimble raised $1 million in seed capital from Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Dharmesh Shah, and Google Ventures. And, now, with Nimble beginning to be an actual platform, the team is starting to raise a series A (which we hear could be in the $5 to $10 million range).

You should always be wary of pollyanna bloggers, as blind optimism is never good for the ecosystem, but, still, my Spidey sense is telling me that Nimble is really onto something here and that, if it can hurry up and open some APIs (and maybe an app store) to let developers build apps for the platform and, in turn, can quickly (but meaningfully) integrate with marketing, tracking, and analytics tools that take the load off SMBs and help them run operations smoothly and more effectively, this could be a big business. Of course, I’ve been wrong before.

Note: Nimble is offering TechCrunch readers 90 days of free access to its “Business Version” (i.e. paid service), which the first 200 readers can access by following this link.

For more, check out Nimble at home here.

What do think, readers?

New Photo Technology Lets You Get Rid Of The People You Don’t Love

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 05:48 AM PST

No, silly, this isn’t about murder – it’s a program to remove people from a photo! Scalado has created a photo-taking system that allows you to selectively remove people in a photo. How does it work? It basically interpolates the “clean” version of the scene by watching the moving, live objects. It’s not rocket science, but it’s pretty cool.

They’ll be showing a working version at MWC in Barcelona this year – a major telecom event – and it should launch for iOS and Android soon. Quoth the press release:

Scalado, a world-leading provider of high-performance imaging technologies, applications and services for the mobile industry, have today announced the release of a new revolutionizing product named Remove. Remove is a technology that automatically highlights and removes any unwanted object from a captured photo. It is the world's first Object removal software to be released on a mobile device.

I think maybe I’ll use this to remove my friends from crowded scenes so they can stop mucking up my pictures.

Product Page



Need a Job? Learn Linux

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 04:01 AM PST

linux-talent-in-demand

The Linux Foundation today posted their first ever Linux Jobs Report, created in conjunction with tech job site Dice.com. The report examines the current demand for Linux talent, and identifies a few interesting trends.

Of the 2,300 survey respondents, eight in ten said that hiring Linux talent is a priority in 2012, and more than half of firms surveyed said that they’re increasing Linux hires relative to jobs created in other skill areas.

To understand what is driving this demand, we asked what has changed in their organizations to prompt this hiring activity. The results paint an optimistic picture about company growth and the use of Linux to support it. Forty-nine percent say their company is growing, which is creating the need for additional Linux-focused team members, while another 48 percent say that they are increasing their use of Linux and need in-house talent to support it. And 30 percent say that Linux has become core to their business and they need to increase participation in the Linux community through new hires.

Of the firms surveyed for the report, 67% indicate that they’re looking for Linux developers, and 55% are looking for Linux system administrators. Most are looking for Linux talent with three to five years of experience.

According to the Linux Jobs Report, Linux professionals are reaping substantial rewards for their expertise. While the industry average salary raise for technology professionals was only 2%, “Linux professionals saw a five percent increase, year-over-year, in their pay.” Additionally, Linux pros are earning larger bonus payouts, too.

While Linux talent may be in demand, finding that talent is presenting no small challenge to companies. According to the report “85 percent say finding Linux talent is somewhat to very difficult, making Linux professionals some of the most sought talent in 2012.”

As a full-time Linux sysadmin and long-time member of the worldwide open source community, I’d like to share some suggestions with hiring managers and recruiters looking for Linux talent.

First and foremost, engage your local Linux community! There is almost certainly a Local User Group in your area. Reach out to them. Attend their meetings. Encourage your employees to attend their meetings. Offer to host their meetings in your conference rooms. As the organizer for my own LUG, I’m always looking for new venues for our meetings, and I warmly welcome presentation suggestions from local businesses using Linux. Your local LUG is a terrific source of knowledge and talent: build a meaningful relationship with them.

Second, get involved with regional conferences. Sponsor events like the Ohio LinuxFest, Northeast Linux Fest, or LinuxFest Northwest. Find one reasonably close to you, and provide financial sponsorship to them. Make it known that your organization uses Linux, and promote the relationship you previously established with your local LUG. Make it clear to the community that you’re not poaching talent, but rewarding skilled people with meaningful open source jobs.

Third, give back to the community. I know it’s hard for giant corporations to be willing to share much, but try to identify things that you do that you can share with the open source community. Whether it’s code you’ve developed in-house, or documentation on how you glue various open source projects together to solve problems: find a way to share it. It can be as simple as a giving a presentation to your LUG (or regional Linux conference) or setting up an open source blog at your organization.

Fourth, when considering people for Linux employment, look beyond their professional experience. There’s so much that can be done with Linux by people in their free time. Maybe your candidates don’t have much specific professional Linux experience listed on their resumes. Do they have a GitHub account, by chance? What sorts of projects have they forked, or better yet created? Do they cite presentations they’ve delivered to LUGs or conferences? Do you recognize their name from your LUG’s mailing list? There is so much more to open source skill development than traditional job experience.

And of course, all of the above matters for folks looking for jobs, too! Do you participate in your LUG? Do you help solve problems on the mailing list? Do you present on things you’ve done? Does your resume include a link to your GitHub account? Last fall I gave a presentation entitled “Real World Job Skills the Free Software Way” which looked at this very issue.

As a long-time Linux professional, I’m delighted to see that my technology preference is in strong demand.

ComScore Posts $3.3 Million Q4 Loss – Hit Hard By Nielsen Patent War

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 03:40 AM PST

comscore

Digital audience measurement company comScore this morning reported its earnings for Q4 and full year 2011. Last quarter, comScore says it achieved record revenue of $62.6 million, a 22 percent increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

However, comScore posted a net loss of $3.3 million, or a loss of $0.10 per share, for the quarter. The reason for the – unexpected – loss isn’t hard to find: the company says it includes $7.8 million in costs related to litigation with Nielsen and the related settlement.

For your background: Nielsen originally filed suit against its rival in March 2011, accusing comScore of infringing five patents it owns that relate to measuring and displaying online content.

Looking at full-year results, the impact of the patent-related litigation is even more apparent: comScore says the GAAP losses for 2011 ($15.8 million, or $0.49 per share) include costs of $16.5 million related to its litigation and subsequent settlement with Nielsen.

Costly feud indeed, though we should note Nielsen also acquired approximately $19 million in comScore restricted common stock as part of the settlement agreement.

Fourth quarter revenue was also negatively impacted by approximately $600,000 due to the effects of foreign exchange fluctuations, comScore adds.

Daily Crunch: Jacket

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 01:00 AM PST

Pearltrees Raises $6.7M For Its “Collaborative Interest Graph”

Posted: 13 Feb 2012 11:00 PM PST

pearltrees discover

Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding.

The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. Meanwhile, Pearltrees is using that data to determine how different topics and bookmarks are related, and allows users to find new pearls (related to whatever topic they’re exploring) through its “related interests” button.

Following the lead from Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank, Pearltrees has named its technology TreeRank. In essence, it’s offering its own version of the “interest graph”, a goal that many startups are chasing. In the funding press release, CEO Patrice Lamothe says Pearltrees “leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web.”

Pearltrees launched in December 2009, and the company says it has been growing consistently at 15 percent per month, and that users have now created 15 million pearls which were assembled into 2 million trees. The startup reached 1 million unique visitors adding up to 30 million pageviews last month. Lamothe tells me that the company’s goals for 2012 include continued multi-platform development (it’s already available on the Web and for the iPad, with an iPhone app coming soon), an API, and beginning the move to HTML5.

Previous investor Groupe Accueil led the new round.
Posted by Ateev at 10:57 PM

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