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Thursday, August 9, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

4moms Raises $20 Million For Its Gadgetized Baby Gear

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 09:02 AM PDT

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4moms, the small Pittsburgh-based company that’s re-imagining the baby products industry by incorporating robotics, electronics, and innovative engineering into things like strollers, infant seats and playpens, has raised $20 million from Bain Capital Ventures. The firm also has investments in Toys R’ Us (Babies R’ Us) and Gymboree, so there’s the opportunity for some knowledge-sharing and marketing opportunities here, it seems.

As for the 4moms products, in case you haven’t seen them – well, they’re pretty crazy. TechCrunch’s gadgets team has been going hands-on with these things for years, and doling out compliments like “the coolest gadget I have ever seen since the original TiVo…and it’s just a damn stroller.” Seriously, these things almost make you want to pump out babies (or more babies) just to try them out. Well, almost.

What makes the 4moms products so different? For starters, they’re not your typical baby products – they’re basically gadgets. This Origami stroller opens and closes with the tap of a button, for example.

This playpen works with one firm push.

If you don’t have kids, you may not realize exactly how impressive some of this technology is. True story: my husband and I had to google “how to set up a playpen” on our first attempt. We had to watch a YouTube video to figure it out, I’m embarrassed to admit. Another time, we forgot to set it up for the sitters (ahem, grandparents) in advance, and later found out they just let the kid stay up until 1 AM because she had nowhere she could get comfortable sleeping. Let me just tell you, the fallout from her sleep deprivation is not something I’d wish on anyone. Ever. So, yay: someone is working on building better versions of all this stuff, and making products that anyone could use.

That being said, there are some downsides to the 4moms products. The stroller is still a bit hefty, for example. But the bigger concern for some parents will be the price. These products are seriously high-end. A good chunk of the baby-making demographic can’t afford to spend nearly $900 on a stroller. But then again, maybe the grandparents owe us one?

Zachary Bogue And Matt Ocko Launch Data Collective, An Early Stage Fund For Big Data Startups

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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Founders Den co-founder and angel investor Zachary Bogue has joined forces with seasoned big data VC Matt Ocko, Metamarkets founder Michael Driscoll and Prismatic CEO Bradford Cross to launch Data Collective, the world’s first Big Data-only early stage investment fund.

The two Data Collective managing partners, who are currently raising fund number two, tell me that the timing is right for a fund committed exclusively to Big Data companies, as the barriers to entry in launching these sorts of startups are only getting lower.

Data Collective has already made 46 investments from its first fund, which it calls “comparable with other seed and early stage funds” (Ocko and Bogue wouldn’t reveal fund size.)

These investments include Kaggle, a startup that compels engineers to compete against each other in order to solve “hard problems,” and Continuuity, Parse, Pushd and Citus Data. The partners are currently in the middle of successfully raising their second fund.

“We see Big Data as the same rich and long-term opportunity that ‘IT’ was broadly in the 1970s and early 1980s when great VC funds (e.g, KPCB, Sequoia) developed their core IT investment practices,” Ocko tells me, “It’s driving the same kind of multi-hundred-billion dollar economic transformation.”

He goes on, “If we and other investors in this space do our jobs, in 15 years the terms ‘IT’ and ‘Big Data’ are pretty much synonymous.”

Data Collective prides itself on its deeply technical core team, and the Big Data chops of its extended group of 35 equity partners, who, while Data Collective wouldn’t reveal specific names, all work or have worked at companies like Akmai, Zynga, LinkedIn, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce, Twitter, IBM, Citrix, Airbnb and VMware.

The fund views its portfolio startups as fulfilling one of the three layers of the “Big Data stack”:

1. The enabling infrastructure level (the storage, security, and management systems necessary to deal with petabytes of data across thousands of machines and millions of interested parties) ;

2. Analytics (the software tools and services necessary to get intelligent , accurate, and actionable analysis out of petabytes of data in minutes instead of weeks) ; and

3. The top layer of applications and services that use the innovations of the first two layers to transform vertical markets (e.g, lending at disruptively low APRs, discount travel that works for both the airline and the passenger, improving hiring outcomes while empowering employees to more actively manage their careers and job satisfaction, transforming medical research by watching a person or even a plant’s genome express itself from day to day).

“Data Collective are enthusiastic, smart and well-connected investors who never say no to any request,” says Kaggle founder Anthony Goldbloom on why he’s happy with their investment, “We're particularly grateful to them because they introduced us to our Chief Revenue Officer, a position that would otherwise have been difficult to fill.. When we first moved to San Francisco, they helped us find office space, introduced us to investors and worked with us on architecting a successful Series A.”

With a two decade track record of 40 material exits and significant up-rounds between the two managing partners, Bogue and Ocko are uniquely qualified to help data storage, security and analytics tech. ”We’ve been working on Big Data since before it was a term,” Ocko says.

Following App.net’s Reboot, Smore Introduces App Flyers For DIY Mobile App Marketing

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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Smore, a startup which lets anyone quickly build attractive, single-page websites which it calls flyers, is rolling out a new version of its service today to specifically targets mobile app developers. Called simply “app flyers,” theses mini, customized websites can be built in seconds by pulling in data from the App Store itself, then allowing users to tweak the design using a handful of built-in styles.

“Most apps are not built by these huge companies that have a ton of money to spend on marketing,” says Smore co-founder Gilad Avidan of the new offering. “Most apps are small or micro businesses – and these people need help getting the word out.”

Smore, a TechStars Seattle 2011 alum, launched into public beta this April, and now has over 10,000 users on its service, who have produced 8,000 flyers. Combined, the network has seen 100,000 unique pageviews per month, with flyers averaging around 100 views each.

What makes Smore different from other DIY website builders, is not only that it focuses on the one-page, promotional websites, but that it’s thinking about the needs of marketers – or rather, those who have to do their own marketing.

“With Smore, because we have these cool promotion tools, our users average much higher views than anywhere else,” says Avidan. “The flyers work very well with social, and you can send them in email – and they look really cool in email as well. They work on mobile. They’re SEO optimized. All that stuff really makes a difference,” he says.

Like its flagship service, the new app flyers also include built-in analytics, and support Google Analytics integration. Plans to beef up the basic analytics are in development, as are plans to roll out even more promotional tools through integration of various APIs and new partnerships.

For example, the company wants to point its users to other useful tools, like email marketing services or event listings providers. It also plans to expand to new verticals, like music and education, and it plans to support flyer creation for sellers on eBay and Etsy, among other things.

Avidan says the new Smore app flyers will help fill the vacuum that’s been left in the wake of App.net founder Dalton Caldwell’s decision to shift his company’s focus away  from those About.me pages for apps in order to build a paid Twitter-like service. “This vacuum is not just starting now with this pivot,” says Avidan. “It’s probably safe to say that for the last few months, they haven’t really been doing anything for their market.”  He also notes that there are several DIY website builders out there, but Smore’s key selling point is not just its design, it’s the focus on bringing professional marketing tools to everyone.

The service is will always be available as a freemium product, with things like multiple flyers, better analytics, and more tools available as paid features further down the line.

App developers can begin building their own flyers here, for free.

Note: Image is an example only, not a customer. 

Wantworthy Is Wanted: The “Instapaper For Shopping” Raises $1 Million From RRE, Google Ventures And Others

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Wantworthy_Logo

Wantworthy, a 2011 TechStars NYC grad offering an online shopping tool for tracking everything you want to buy in one place, has just raised a $1 million in seed funding. RRE Ventures led the round, and Google Ventures, Quotidian Ventures, and several NYC-area angels also participated.

Although on the surface the company might appear to be competitive with Pinterest, various bookmarking tools, or even Amazon’s Universal Wish List utility, for example, Wantworthy has a bigger vision. The long-term goal is not just to be a place where you collect things you want to purchase, it will also tell you when to buy them.

CEO Lauren McDevitt says she came up with the idea because she was an avid online shopper. “I was constantly finding products I liked, but wasn’t ready to buy in the moment,” she says. “The whole process was kind of a mess. I’d have a whole bunch of tabs open. I’d try to bookmark the links – which obviously wasn’t very efficient. I wanted a tool that would help me keep all the products I wanted when I shopped online in one simple list.”

Some might say that’s what Pinterest is being used for these days, but co-founder Josh Wais explains the two services are actually quite different once you scratch the surface. Most users on Pinterest are not saving things from outside the site, he says, they’re using Pinterest for discovery instead. This changes the nature of what people tend to save. “They save aspirational stuff,” he says. “What we see with Wantworthy – some of our top stores are Forever 21, ModCloth, Urban Outfitters – it’s real shopping.”

Another big difference is that the lists on Wantworthy are private by default, and the sharing functions – which will arrive next week – are also completely different. “We didn’t want to slap on some cheesy social model,” says McDevitt. “We looked at the way people were organically using Wantworthy, and we found they were sharing links with maybe five to ten closest friends and bookmarking them. We wanted to foster that experience,” she says.

With the sharing features, it’s not about repinning or reposting links. Users instead can invite their friends to give feedback. In addition to support for comments, the items will have three buttons which friends can click: “must buy,” “like it,” and “meh.”

What’s even more exciting (at least to heavy shoppers) is what the team is working on next: price alerts. With this feature, expected out later this fall, Wantworthy will alert users to when prices change. And that’s not necessarily implying a drop or when an item goes on sale, but any change. Further down the road, the company will work with individual retailers to alert users to inventory level changes, such as when something is running out of stock, for example. And it will help retailers connect with their customers through offers and promotions, to encourage them to move from “thinking about buying” something to actually buying it.

The site launched into beta following its debut at TechStars NYC’s demo day in October, so it’s too soon for them to talk user numbers, the founders tell me. However, they will talk engagement numbers, which indicate that at least its earliest adopters are fairly active. Users save, on average, 12.5 items per week, and conversions are “orders of magnitude” higher than the industry average of 2%-3% (which Wantworthy tracks via its current affiliate model). The top products saved tend to be apparel, accessories, home goods, and beauty products, which also speaks to a certain kind of shopper – yes, generally women.

With the additional funding, the focus will be on developing the new features sooner than later, through the additional of two or three more engineers.

Y Combinator-Backed ReelSurfer Launches To Let You Clip And Share Video From Any Website

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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Many businesses begin with a simple, and then nagging, frustration. For Christian Yang and Neil Joglekar, it began with Entourage. Well, after Entourage. In college, as big fans of the show, they found themselves continually searching for clips of their favorite one-liners or the best scenes so that they could share them with friends. Naturally, after numerous fruitless searches, they quickly grew frustrated by the inability to find and share their favorite clips.

So, in 2008, Yang and Joglekar founded ReelSurfer out of their Stanford dorm room, developing technology to allow people to sift through the mountains of video content on the Web to find that elusive 30-second clip. Today, ReelSurfer is officially launching in public beta and, in turn, the startup is announcing that it has joined the summer batch of Y Combinator startups.

Since moving out of their dorm, the co-founders have been boot-strapping, testing and iterating on their product as part of a multi-year-long private beta. ReelSurfer set out to solve the problem of finding the right video clips online, which, using YouTube as an example, can often be a fool’s errand. So the co-founders developed technology to convert long-form video into 30-second clips, allowing users to then save, share and buy that content.

Initially, ReelSurfer took shape as a white-label solution, providing its video search and processing capabilities to universities and media networks, for example, enabling them to create a centralized hub for their digital video content, along with archiving (and organizing) news or classroom footage for future use.

The startup has since built an impressive roster of advisors, which include William Fay (the executive producer of 300, The Hangover and Independence Day), Yahoo Senior Director Anand Chandrasekaran, Carl Rosendahl (founder of PDI, which sold to DreamWorks and the executive producer of Antz) and Morphlabs Biz Dev VP Margo Drakos.

As part of its public launch today, the Menlo Park-based startup now allows anyone and everyone to clip and share any video from any website. To clip a video, users enter the video URL on ReelSurfer’s website or use their bookmarklet. From there, users can combine and organize clips into reels and share them with friends.

But why would you want to make clips, you ask? Joglekar says that, in the end, the whole point of sharing video is to have someone watch it, but the sad truth about our attention spans is that videos lose half their audience if they’re longer than 15 seconds. So, by keeping it short, you increase your chances of becoming a video star.

As to ReelSurfer’s own intended audience: The co-founder sees the platform having appeal to, say, friends who want to trade one liners from movies, or a bride who wants to share her wedding vows, Kickstarter clips, or maybe colleagues swapping cat videos.

As part of its launch, the startup is also adding advanced profiles so that users can link their reel collections to one central page, as well as built-in clip commenting.

For more, ReelSurfer’s homepage here.

(Founder Stories) Aereo’s Chet Kanojia Urges Entrepreneurs To “Go For The Difficult Problems” [TCTV]

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 08:41 AM PDT

Aereo Part I out-tc_upload.mp4

In the latest installment of Chris Dixon’s Founder Stories, the Hunch co-founder sits down with Chet Kanojia, the founder and CEO of the controversial startup, Aereo. In attempting to bring together over-the-air television with the Internet, the company has drawn the ire of the big broadcast networks, like NBC, ABC, CBS, all of whom are convinced that Aereo is violating copyright law.

Aereo takes content beamed over the free airwaves and redistributes the broadcasters’ signals to Internet-connected devices using mini-antennae stored in data centers. Unlike cable companies, Aereo doesn’t pay retransmission fees for the copyrighted content, arguing it doesn’t have to.

As the two continue their conversation in the video above, topics flow away from the controversy. Kanojia talks to Dixon about how he has grown as a leader, what he was doing before Aereo and wraps the interview by urging entrepreneurs to “go for the difficult problems.”

Make sure to watch the clip for additional insights and watch part I of this interview here.

Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring the founders of TripAdvisor, Kayak, Warby Parker, Kickstarter, ZocDoc and many other companies are here.

With More Than A Million Answers Posted, Video Q&A Site VYou Redesigns To Focus On Discovery

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 08:15 AM PDT

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VYou launched a year and a half ago to let users ask each other questions, with answers posted by video. Since then, it’s and rolled out an iPhone app for answering questions on the go and attracted a fair number of celebrities to answer questions through its platform. (Hello, Oprah!) It’s also received more than a million video responses to date.

VYou’s been great at building its community to date and letting users interact with each other. Users could see a feed of videos from the people they were following, ask and answer questions of each other and the like. The thing it’s not been so great at is helping users to search the whole site’s content and find interesting users or groups of users they might not know about. With that in mind, VYou just launched a major site overhaul designed to make it easier for users to find users and answers to interesting questions.

One of the ways that VYou is doing that is by showcasing popular videos on the home screen. So you’ve got the obvious celebrity contributions (Hello Oprah on my home screen!), as well as those that the community found interesting. There’s also a running feed of public questions on the left side of the screen, letting anyone jump in and answer.

VYou has also redefined its search functionality in a big way. For one thing, there’s a big old search function at the top of the screen, letting you search for answers from individual users (or groups!), and refine the search by topic. So if you searched for “Deepak Chopra talking about love” you’re met with a whole wall of videos with him talking about that. It also works for groups, so you can do a search of NYC Ballet Dancers, for instance. Or if you just wanted to know what the whole community thinks about a certain subject, you could just search for it, leaving it open the everyone.

In addition to searching for content by group, users will now be able to ask questions of a group. So rather than asking a ballet-related question to the global community, you can pose the question just to members of that group.

VYou founder Steve Spurgat tells me that the site has pretty high engagement and a good return rate for users, but that most viewers will get stuck on a single user’s page and just watch multiple answers from that one user. The new design, and the groupings of users are meant to help nudge them to check out other users. Speaking of, have we mentioned Oprah? Other celebrities to recently join include TechCrunch nemesis Arianna Huffington, designer Nicole Miller, author Cheryl Strayed, Senator Chuck Grassley, and Congressman Keith Ellison.

VYou has raised $3 million in funding from RRE Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, High Peaks Ventures, Broadway Video Ventures, Kevin Wall, David Tisch, and Rick Webb. The company, which is based in New York City, now has 12 employees.

Winston Is Siri’s Older, More Distinguished Colleague Who Tells You The News And Weather

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 08:12 AM PDT

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Two lads working with DreamIt Ventures, Aaron Ting and Jarod Stewart, have built something called Winston. Winston is a conversational assistant that deals in information. He will wake you up with a morning briefing about the current news and weather as well as notes from your social feed. Think of it as one of those windows in sci-fi movies that light up in the morning and give the hero the bad news that he/she is wanted by the intergalactic police.

“Winston is a marriage of Conversational Interface and Flipboard-style web content cohesion; we think this combination is really different and extremely compelling,” said Ting.

The company received $25,000 from DreamIt and just opened a $500,000 note.

“We were thinking about Smart TVs, and realized that even if you put a really sophisticated web browser on a Smart TV, a lot of your online social addictions and news addictions are lean-forward, text-heavy experiences that you wouldn’t want to consume from your couch. So we decided to build an app that could take all of this text-heavy content and turn it into an audiovisual newscast – an experience that you can listen to and watch.”

Interaction with Winston is fairly limited. Think of it as calling your assistant into the room and asking for a rundown of the day’s happenings. You’ll learn various bits of information without having to squint at your phone and you can enable Winston while driving or before bed.

“Winston will brighten your mornings with a beautiful audiovisual news briefing. During the day, you'll be able to drive safely while staying tuned to your social updates using Winston's 'eyes-free' mode,” said Ting.

The app is currently in its relative infancy but you can try it out at GetWinston.com.

Japanese 3D-Printing Company Creates Models Of Your Live Fetus

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:32 AM PDT

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If ultrasonic baby pictures aren’t enough, how about a resin-cast 3D model of your live fetus floating in clear lucite? An Ebisu health clinic, Hiro-o Ladies, is working with a 3D printer called Fasotec to create Tenshi no Katachi – Shape Of An Angel – so the entire family can see what that squirt is doing in your womb.

A company representative waxed all things baby love: “We actually got three expectant mothers to try this out. They said it felt great to see how their babies looked before birth, and to be able to actually hold the inside of their own body. They also enjoyed looking at the model after giving birth, thinking, ‘This is how my baby looked inside me’ and recalling how it felt to be pregnant.”

The service costs 100,000 yen (about $1300) and uses a dual-resin extruder to make the baby part and the solidified amniotic part at the same time. You can build the baby in multiple sizes and shapes and you can, using 3D imaging, focus on the whole body or just the face. You can even get little cellphone fobs with your baby floating inside of them. Seriously.

via Daddytypes

Fanboys, Grab Your Credit Cards: Original Factory-Sealed iPhone Goes Up On eBay For $10,000

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:23 AM PDT

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Apparently $10,000 is the going rate for a factory-sealed first-gen iPhone. At least, that’s according to two sellers on eBay, who have recently listed the historic device on the bidding site.

I would usually say that most electronics shouldn’t be seen as collectors items, as they only lose value over time and aren’t pivotal enough during their lifespan to warrant a resurgence in value. Yet, the original iPhone is a different story.

This is a device that changed the course of the future. The App Store itself, though not present on the original iPhone, has changed the entire tech industry. Plus, the first iPhone was the very first time we had a usable version of the Internet in our pockets. So yeah, the original iPhone is a big deal.

There have been no bids on either unit, though both come from seemingly trustworthy sellers. Samsonbible is a top-rated seller with 100% feedback, and phsledge also has 100% feedback. Plus, the pictures look totally legit, as even the box is still wrapped tightly in plastic.

Here’s the seller listing:

STUNNING RARE COLLECTORS CHOICE APPLE iPHONE 1ST GENERATION 8GB AND FACTORY SEALED..!!! YOU ARE SEEING A PIECE OF HISTORY..!!!! THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE COLLECTORS SHOW PIECE..!!!! THIS WOULD BE A CROWN JEWEL FOR ANY COLLECTION..!!!! AMAZING FACTORY SEALED BOX..!!! UNOPENED AND THE COLLECTORS DREAM APPLE iPHONE..!!!!!!
THIS IS OFFERED FOR A LIMITED TIME….. !!!!!!! HAPPY BIDDING…!!!!

So, if you have $10,000 lying around and have held on to all of the previous iPhones (or plan on collecting them), hop on over to eBay and check it out. This well may be your only chance — the original iPhone is no longer available for sale.

And even if you can’t afford it, it’s always fun to check out the specs compared to what we’re seeing these days.

[Hat tip to iDownloadBlog for spotting the listing]

The 32GB 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook Is Now Available From Canadian Carriers For $550

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:19 AM PDT

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RIM announced the 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook earlier this month and it’s finally available from several Canadian carriers. The LTE tablet is slightly upgraded from its WiFi-only counterpart with a 1.5GHz CPU and 32GB storage option, but the main difference is the new LTE radio.

The 7-inch PlayBook is a pretty little package and the operating system is finally a contender. The tablet might have a chance if RIM was in a position to price the PlayBook competitively.

The LTE PlayBook is expensive. It’s available through Bell and Rogers for $350 with a three-year contract (lengthy contracts are normal in Canada). The 32GB LTE PlayBook is also available through TELUS without a contract for $550.

RIM is a tough situation. With its dire financial situation, RIM cannot aggressively price the 4G PlayBook. It likely cannot take a loss on the hardware sales hence the above market pricing. RIM has yet to announce the 4G PlayBook’s US price or release date.

Another Day, Another Samsung Denial Of RIM Acquisition And Licensing Rumors

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:14 AM PDT

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Sorry RIM, it looks like yesterday’s stock bump may be all you get out of these acquisition rumors.

After a note from Jefferies analyst Peter Misek recently pointed to the possibility of Samsung licensing RIM’s nascent BlackBerry 10 platform, Reuters reported earlier today that the Korean electronics giant confirmed that it hasn’t considered either a licensing deal or a full-on buyout.

If this all sounds more than a little familiar, that’s because nearly the exact same sequence of events took place earlier this year.

BGR reported in back January that Samsung was strongly considering a RIM acquisition, though Samsung was quick to shoot that notion down. Then, in March, the two companies were said to be engaged in licensing talks, with Samsung supposedly considering a minority investment in the beleaguered Canadian company. Naturally, that deal was never heard from again.

This time, the RIM/Samsung rumblings began shortly after The Telegraph published an interview with RIM CEO Thorsten Heins in which he alluded (once again) to the possibility of licensing BlackBerry 10 to some capable handset manufacturers.

"You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it's a BlackBerry or it's something else being built on the BlackBerry platform,” he said. “We're investigating this and it's way too early to get into any details.”

While Heins doesn’t mention Samsung explicitly, The Telegraph does, noting that the next BlackBerry smartphone could be built by “Samsung or Sony.” Soon afterward, analyst Misek tried to make that connection more explicit by releasing a note to investors mentioning that the Korean electronics giant would be the company most interested in licensing BlackBerry 10.

To be fair, Samsung tying up with RIM isn’t the most outlandish notion out there — the potential deal probably wouldn’t have made as many headlines as it had if it wasn’t at least somewhat plausible. RIM would get a much-needed shot in the arm when it comes to BlackBerry hardware (from a company that has nailed the sexy, all-touch form factor no less), while Samsung could increase its role in the enterprise market as well as reducing its reliance on Google. For now though, the fabled deal looks like it will remain just that.

Daily Deals For Moms: Plum District Debuts iPhone App, Local Loyalty Program To Follow

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:03 AM PDT

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Plum District, the mom-focused deals site backed by $30 million in funding from General Catalyst, KPCB and Comcast Ventures, is now available as a mobile app. The company is today launching its iPhone application which will allow users to browse offers on their phone, purchase them with one click and the redeem them at local and online stores. An Android version will soon follow.

The app’s debut follows Plum District’s acquisition of a mobile loyalty platform called Chatterfly back in December, which the company said at the time would soon be used to expand the relationship between moms and local merchants.

Chatterfly had previously offered a digital loyalty program, which rewarded users for making purchases in stores, but also for sharing their experiences on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Google+. However, the Plum District iPhone currently forgoes the loyalty angle for a more traditional “deals and offers” type of interface. But the loyalty program is now in development, as is a forthcoming “flash sales” feature. There will also be a philanthropic component in later versions, which will encourage moms to donate to local charities.

In the app that’s available today, there’s a list of the available deals and a “purse” where you can track unused, redeemed or “all” deals. The deals can also be shared via email or Facebook. To promote the app’s launch, users are being given 20% off their first purchase (August 13-15 only).

Before creating the app, the company surveyed 1 million of its members to find out what they were interested in. Over 70% told the company they wanted to shop on the phone and wanted an easier way to find local businesses. 46% used shopping apps and 28% used apps to find nearby stores. Charles Yim, Plum District’s Head of Mobile (and former CEO of Chatterfly) said that the Plum District website, prior to today’s app launch, was already seeing around 25% of its traffic from mobile devices.

Yim also tells me that Plum District now has 1.3 million members, which is up from the 1 million it had in December, and it’s now on track to reach 2 million members by year-end.

You can download the new app here in iTunes.

Video Discovery Startup Fanhattan Adds Amazon Prime Videos To Its iPad App

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Fanhattan loves Amazon

Just a week or so ago, video discovery startup Fanhattan rolled out a new version of its app that includes the ability to add a personalized watchlist, as well as a whole bunch of new content partners, including NBC, HBO, The CW, and Cinemax. Not content to stop there, Fanhattan has just added another big new partner: Amazon Prime.

The very newest version of the Fanhattan app allows users to search across Amazon Prime titles, so they can see movies on that service alongside Netflix, iTunes, and other iPad video apps. It didn’t take long for Amazon’s library to become part of Fanhattan’s index — it was just last week that the Amazon Prime app made its way to the iPad. Amazon launched its Prime Instant Video service, which offers up more than 18,000 titles of video content as part of users’ $79 Prime subscription, which also gives them free two-day shipping on many items.

The addition of Amazon Prime brings the total number of content partners up to 15, and not only increases the number of titles available through Fanhattan’s video discovery service, but also provides another place to watch them. Since Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes in particular have a fair amount of overlap in their libraries, the new content partner provides additional variety for those who prefer its app features, or who maybe don’t have a Netflix account, but do pay for Prime.

And for Amazon, being part of Fanhattan provides one more way for viewers to search through its titles and find something they might like. Fanhattan provides a search and discovery mechanism that provides recommendations based on other titles that they’ve liked, as well as social connections, highlighting movies and TV shows that their friends have also enjoyed. It also provides a watchlist, which will let users tag movies to save and watch later.

Stamped Founder Robby Stein On Launching Version 2.0 And Roping Celebrity Investors

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 06:55 AM PDT

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Stamped has been a busy little startup. The company just launched version 2.0 of the app, letting people take action on the things their friends have suggested through a stamp of approval. This is thanks in large part to a massive funding round from various celebrities and companies including Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, and the New York Times Company.

But what does it take to rope in big-name investors like that? According to founder Robby Stein, “a shared vision.”

Robby has recently been frustrated with the media outlets and others who lump Stamped in with a lot of other apps that let you “rate everything.” He believes Stamped isn’t about 1 to 5 stars, which is certainly true, but by adding in functionality to listen to the song your friend stamped or make a reservation at a restaurant stamped by your boss, the app is separating itself further and further from those other apps.

But there’s also the issue of bringing on celebrities and companies to stamp real-world places, items, etc. For example, Columbia Records is one of the funding partners, and has an artist using the app. But part of the beauty of the app is that it brings word of mouth, possibly the most powerful marketing tool known to man, into the digital world. By allowing “brands” to stamp things, it seems as though the power of word of mouth might be diluted.

But according to Stein, there aren’t any plans to have “brands” (per se) stamp inside the app, but rather individuals. “If someone is stamping things that aren’t genuine, it will be quickly obvious and users will stop following them,” said Stein. “It’s the same type of behavior you see on Twitter and Instagram, and it’ll kind of take care of itself somewhat naturally.”

Offbeatr Is A Kickstarter For Your Fantasies

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 06:39 AM PDT

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Whether you’re into nude Canadian elk-dancing or Honda tailpipe sniffing, our sexual peccadilloes are all unique. That’s why there’s Offbeatr [NSFW. Seriously. Chill]. Described as a “kickstarter for porn,” the site allows you to support super SEXXXY porn projects that could include a movie on Japanese squid porn or an up-close look at MILF clog-dancing and shape-note singing.

Ben Tao and Eric Lai founded the site. Tao was a product manager for Yellowpages.com and Lai worked for Boeing. They founded another startup called ExtraLunchMoney.com which was a sales system for HOTTT amateur content. They also run a podcast where they interview porn folks.

Finding funding was hard. “We’ve bootstrapped the business from personal savings and have been making money since we launched. As you can imagine seed and angel funding for adult businesses, even if you are doing innovative things, isn’t easy to come by. So we knew from day one we had to make money in order to survive. That being said we still like to try the ‘mainstream’ tech ways of getting money. I think we’re on our 3rd rejection from Y Combinator and even have been rejected by every Los Angeles startup incubator (and there’s like a billion of them!),” said Tao. Finally, they started working with the LA Startup Club.

The boys are relatively alone in their efforts to build crowdfunding for PR()N.

“The big thing is there are no serious players in the space for adult crowdfunding. The big guys like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo don’t allow adult projects and honestly never will. Not only are their communities not suitable for adults, but they can’t because of their payment processing,” said Tao.

Fundable projects include paying for a redesign of Cherry.tv and some kind of cross-cultural SEXXXchange between Japan and the rest of the world. If I had my druthers, they’d support my personal HOTTT FANTASY and offer a full XXX remake of Spies Like Us with Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase (and I don’t mean body doubles, I want them in their full flabby glory) completely nude all the time.

Tao is essentially trying to keep porn alive. The site is fairly handsome and they’ve just launched so there’s no telling if this idea will take off, but good on these lads for trying.


“People talk about all the money that you can make in porn, but after attending numerous industry shows, talking with studio heads, and interviewing actors and actresses we realized it’s not what people think at all. The proliferation of free content has taken its toll on the industry no different than their mainstream counterparts. What’s worse though is that adult industry is a ghetto where your options for monetizing content are extremely limited,” he said. “For Offbeatr it’s about going directly to the fans and supporters and engaging them in the process and giving content creators access to capital they previously never had access to. By getting this capital the industry will start to innovate and take more risks with business models, products they make, and how they reach out to their customers.”

Amazon Confirms Cloud Player, Its Would-Be iTunes Killer, Now Works On Sonos, More Devices Coming Later This Year

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 06:32 AM PDT

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At the end of July, Amazon updated its Cloud Player to be in fighting form as an iTunes killer, with a load of new audio features like Scan and Match technology and licensing deals with a number of labels. And at the time, Amazon said that Sonos support would be “coming soon.” Today, that functionality has arrived, with the Cloud Player now working on the Sonos Wireless HiFi System.

This will mean that users who store music in Amazon’s Cloud Player will now be able to stream that music over Sonos’ kit. Amazon says it will be adding more support for more devices later this year. Roku is likely to be next in line, judging from this — although an Amazon spokesperson would not confirm to TechCrunch when the exact date might be.

With Cloud Player now able to stream over Kindle Fire, Android devices, iOS Apple devices, Mac and PC computers, and now Sonos, Amazon has ramped up the ubiquity of its music service one more notch. The move gives Amazon the ability to snag in further users, to add to the “millions” it says are already using the Cloud Player.

“Our goal is to enable customers to enjoy all their music, wherever they are, and on any device. Launching on Sonos today is an important part of that strategy, as our customers have been asking us to add Sonos to the list of compatible Cloud Player devices ever since we first launched Cloud Player," said Steve Boom, vice president of Digital Music for Amazon, said in a statement. “We will continue to add support for more devices and platforms later this year."

Amazon has been aggressive in its attempt to wrest some market share away from Apple, whose iTunes remains the market leader for digital music sales. The cloud-based Amazon service lets users buy music from its own library of 20 million tracks, as well as import music as well from iTunes and their CDs, but importing comes under Amazon’s freemium model: All Amazon purchases plus the first 250 imported songs are stored for free. However, customers must pay $24.99 a year to import and store up to 250,000 tracks beyond that first 250.

Meanwhile, for Sonos, this is another example of how the wireless HiFi company is building up its own usefulness. The company already allows for streaming of a user’s iTunes library, as well as their Spotify collections and a variety of radio stations, among other music sources.


Pulse Comes To The Web (With A Little Help From Microsoft)

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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Pulse, the popular news reading app for iOS and Android, is finally available on the web. The service, which launched two years ago and now has over 15 million users, only focused on mobile platforms until now. Its users, as the company’s CEO Akshay Kothari told me last week, have long been asking for a web version, but the team decided to focus on adding more publishing partners and getting the mobile experience right before tackling the web. Now, however, after nine months of development and with a little help from Microsoft, the Pulse team feels that its web app is ready to launch.

Pulse For The Web

Kothari told me that he “wanted to make sure that the quality of the experience remained in line with what Pulse create on mobile.” For a company that was always so focused on mobile, that was quite an interesting challenge. In Kothari’s view, iOS and Android are also relatively easy to develop for compared to the web where the large variety of browsers, operating system and add a lot more complexity compared to tightly controlled platforms like iOS and even Android.

In terms of the web app’s feature set, Pulse pretty much offers the same features as on mobile. Because your data on all the different platforms always stays in sync, you can easily start using the web version and see all your regular news sources right after you sign in for the first time. The web app, says Pulse, is “designed for discovery” and while it’s still a very visual experience, Pulse did away with the row layout it uses in its mobile apps. Instead, your list of sources is now on the left and stories appear in a beautiful dynamic grid layout. The design is responsive, so the layout will automatically adapt itself to the size of your browser windows.

Pulse And Microsoft

To do all of this, Pulse got a little help from Microsoft (and also worked with the designers at Pixel Lab). Microsoft decided that Pulse would make for a great app to demo the advanced web features of IE10 on Windows 8. The company also helped Pulse optimize the web app for tablets and other touch-enabled devices. Kothari gave me a demo of Pulse running in the chromeless version of IE10 in Metro on a Windows 8 tablet last week and it’s indeed a very compelling product there, too, with fluid animations and the ability to use complex multi-touch swipe gestures to control the app. On a Windows tablet, it just takes a swipe to switch between stories, a two-finger swipe opens up the reading list and the standard pinch gesture closes an article. Despite these optimizations, though, Pulse still works in every other modern browser, too.

As Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer Ryan Gavin notes today, “to date, touch in a browser environment has been pretty limited. Basic swipe and click commands are really it, constrained by a browser platform that essentially only supports elementary gestures. The net result is touch has become second class citizen when you browse the web on your favorite device.” Given Microsoft’s focus on touch with Windows 8, though, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company chose a highly visual app like Pulse to highlight the power of its platform.

Mobile Discovery App Trover Gets Lists And Smarter Search, Engagement Up 300% Since Last Year

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 06:00 AM PDT

App Store - Trover

Mobile discovery app Trover has always been a bit under the radar, despite having a very compelling product and high-profile investors like General Catalyst Partners, Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital. The service, which is available for iOS and Android, just completed its latest round of feature updates that brought lists, full-screen browsing and better search to the app, moving it more toward being an entertainment app and not just a visual directory service. In addition, Trover today announced that, after it started to add some of these new features over the last few weeks, its visitors now average 27 page views per session. That’s a 35% increase over last month and a 300% increase compared to a year ago. On average, its users now open the app 2-3 times per week.

Since launching the lists feature a few weeks ago, the number of new lists created each day has now doubled, says the company. At the same time, the number of photos added to these lists by the service’s users has tripled.

When it launched, our own Leena Rao described Trover as “Yelp meets Instagram meets Foursquare because the combination of observation, location, as well as high-quality photo content.” For the most part, that’s still true today and if anything, the new full-screen browsing mode now does an even better job at highlighting images from Trover’s users.

In many ways, Trover’s experience seems to be similar to that of other travel/discovery related services like, for example, Gogobot. Its users aren’t just browsing the site when they are in a location and looking for something interesting to do. Instead, a lot of the engagement on these services is driven by users who are simply curious about a place they may one day visit.

"The Trover addiction doesn't begin with a restaurant question or travel plan, it’s based on the daily joy of browsing places and discoveries others have found," said Jason Karas, CEO of Trover in a canned statement. "But the things people find and remember on Trover increasingly serve as a personal guide when they're looking for something new to see, do or eat. Trover is more interesting and social than apps dedicated to dining or travel planning, and that keeps people coming back in between outings."

Akamai: Global Average Broadband Speeds Up By 25%, U.S. Up 29% To 6.7 Mbps

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 05:06 AM PDT

akamai state of the internet earth

Globally, the speed for broadband connections is steadily on the rise: according to Akamai’s Q1 2012 State of the Internet report, it’s now at 2.6Mbps, compared to 2.3Mbps in the last quarter, and a rise of 25% on a year ago and a reversal of the 14% decline of last quarter. South Korea continues to remain the connection king, with an average connection speed of 15.7Mbps. The U.S., meanwhile, doesn’t make it into the top-10 countries (it’s ranked 12th) but at least it’s speeding up: it is now at 6.7Mbps, up by 29% on last year and 17% from the previous quarter.

But as broadband continues to improve, so do attacks. Akamai notes in its study that attack traffic is on the rise, concentrating in particular regions and ports, with Asia Pacific, led by China, accounting for 42 percent of attack traffic originating from Asia Pacific; and the top 10 ports for attack traffic accounting for 77% of all attacks (up from 62% last quarter).

After Asia Pacific, Europe accounted for 35% of all attack traffic originations, while North and South America accounted for 21%. Africa represented less than 1.5% of attacks. However, although the Americas appear to account for less attack traffic, in fact the U.S. ranked second to China on an individual country basis, with 11% of all attacks; China accounted for 16%.

Other notable figures:

The Internet continues to grow: Akamai notes that it registered 666 million unique IP addresses from 238 countries and regions connecting to the Akamai Intelligent Platform in Q1 2012, a six percent increase over Q4 2011 and 14 percent increase compared to Q1 last year. More growth is happening in smaller countries than in larger ones. In the wake of the global launch of IPv6, Akamai says that the number of unique IP addresses from the top 10 connecting countries was at 66%, but that this is down by about one percent on the quarter before. China, Brazil, Italy and Russia are all growing at rates of 20%.

Broadband high and low: Akamai’s seeing enough growth at higher broadband speeds that it’s now breaking out progress in this area. It notes the number of countries where people are using broadband at speeds of 10Mbps or higher is now at 10%, a rise of 19% on last quarter. South Korea, being the world’s broadband leader, has high-speed broadband penetration of 53%. Japan is at 37%, Hong Kong is at 28%, Latvia is at 26% and the Netherlands is at 24% penetration for high-speed broadband.  Overall, 125 countries are seeing increases in speed over last year, Akamai notes, with only 10 countries seeing declines. Given the speeds below, you can see why Google’s fiber project is so compelling and has so many people excited at what it might bring next.

Mobile broadband: Germany takes the crown for fastest mobile broadband at 6Mbps. Worldwide some 65 carriers had speeds greater than 1Mbps. Interestingly, only three carriers analysed had connection speeds below 500kbps, meaning those carriers that are upgrading to mobile broadband seem to be doing it in a largely unified mass, with less speed fragmentation than we’re seeing in the area of fixed broadband. Akamai doesn’t name and shame the slowest providers — or say who the best ones are.

As for how we are using mobile broadband, this graphic that Akamai presents of the last five years shows just how much data is growing with respect to voice usage:

Attack traffic by ports points to Conficker Worm rising again: Akamai notes that Port 445, used for Microsoft-DS, accounted for a disproportionate 42% of all attack traffic, up from 25% in the previous quarter. It notes that Port 445 is associated with the Conficker worm.

It appears that this increase was largely attributable to significant growth in the percentage of attacks targeting Port 445 (42 percent of observed attack traffic), after seeing declines over the prior several quarters. As has been noted in past reports, Port 445 is associated with the Conficker worm. It was the most attacked port in seven of the top 10 countries generating attack traffic, Akamai notes. Attacks on web-based applications, represented by Port 80, actually decreased by three percentage points globally, but that was the second-most targeted port in the U.S., Germany and Brazil, Akamai notes.
Posted by Ateev at 10:01 PM

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