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that drew
drew olanoff is a geek. he beat cancer...by blaming it. also brained up "Social Good", Gmail4Troops, BlogAbroad, and other stuffs.
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Tweets
- pizza and i had a great date. got a little fresh with me, so i had to send it home.Jun 20, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- !!!pew.pew!!!Jun 20, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @bre: Boom!Jun 20, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @Alyssa_Milano: A look back at James Gandolfini's career http://t.co/GIUsnFMnMV h/t @KIRO7Seattle #Sopranos /via @heykim
- RT @xeni: Just heard a Segway crash behind me on Venice boardwalk. I know it's wrong but I laughed. It went like whoooom vvvvvwoooom whoooo…
- RT @CoryBooker: My condolences to the family and all those who loved James Gandolfini - a true NJ Great and NJ Original. RIP.
- Hot date tonight. With pizza. Just pizza.
- RT @JKlekamp: Holsten's honors memory of @JamesGandolfini reserves table where final scene of #TheSopranos was shot. http://t.co/JMf5xuFEra
- RT @cnnbrk: James Gandolfini, 51, of "The Sopranos," was on holiday in Italy when he died of apparent heart attack, HBO says. http://t.co/Q…
- RT @makerbot: Just announced: #MakerBot & @Stratasys merge; more power to Next Industrial Revolution, #3DPrinting; http://t.co/Gqci5QNzCRJun 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @TechCrunch: Stratasys Acquiring MakerBot, Combined Company Will Likely Dominate 3D Printing Industry http://t.co/B9Bszzr2va by @drizzledJun 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @april_conyers: OH: "Why don't we just create an Uber for everything?"Jun 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @ikarinelovesu but i'm not sure that i'm the drew you think i am :)
- @ikarinelovesu i did.
- Wired Editor Michael Copeland Joins Andreessen Horowitz To Lead New ‘Content Strategy’ http://t.co/d0MVfQQIHf via @techcrunch
- images in facebook comments. oh boy.Jun 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- if ladies were to try out bacon perfume, i'd be a willing test subject. this may or may not work.Jun 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @WarbyParker @owenthomas what they said.
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Checkins
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- Fernando's Mexican Restaurant63 37th Ave
- Starbucks3790 S El Camino Real
- AMC Loews Metreon 16135 4th St, Ste 3000
- Peet's Coffee & Tea370 4th St
- Antone's Cocktail Lounge32 37th Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- URL's at Yahoo!721 First Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D - Bean Trees Cafe701 First Ave
- Yahoo! Sunnyvale701 First Ave
- Gorilla Barbecue2145 Cabrillo Hwy
- Starbucks3790 S El Camino Real
- The Saloon1232 Grant Ave
- Bar Basic510 Brannan St
- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
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Google+
- Drew on Google+
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Posts
By Jay Rossiter, SVP, Platforms
Over the last few months, we’ve made exciting changes to some of your favorite Yahoo! products, like Flickr, Mail, Weather, the Homepage and Search. Today, I’m excited to share with you our next big push: we want to give our loyal users and new folks the…
By Marco Wirasinghe, Director of Mobile and Emerging Products
Today Apple announced the 2013 Apple Design Award Winners at WWDC, and we’re beyond thrilled that the Yahoo! Weather for iPhone app has been chosen as one of this year’s recipients.
Apple has built their legacy designing…
By Ron Bell, General Counsel, Yahoo!
We want to set the record straight about stories that Yahoo! has joined a program called PRISM through which we purportedly volunteer information about our users to the U.S. government and give federal agencies access to our user databases. These claims…
How much is a dinner with SV Angel’s co-founder and managing partner, David Lee, worth? When you put it into the context of where the money will be going, the answer should be “it’s almost priceless.” Today, I got to sit down with Lee, and a special new friend of TechCrunch
Heading To Yahoo! And No! I Can’t Do Anything About The Exclamation Mark! http://tcrn.ch/131GILJ
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Info
- Summary
My name is Drew Olanoff, and I have over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile.
I coined the phrase "Social Good" for online charitable movements, and invented the online "donation by action" charity model. I founded #BlameDrewsCancer
I pride myself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. I have worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a "Director of Community", "Community Manager" and "Technology Evangelist". I have the knack of working stories both mainstream as well as online. Bridging that gap is my passion.
I am a leader AND a team player, and strive for nothing short of success. My life motto is "failure is not an option".
Specialties: podcasting, videoblogging ,blogging, community management, social networking, technology evangelist, tech, technology, marketing, pr, outreach, customer service, social media, product development, UI, UX, mobile, user acquisition, technology trendsExperience- Jun 2013 - PresentPR Manager, Corporate Communications / Yahoo!
- May 2009 - PresentFounder / BlameDrewsCancer.com
During my personal fight with Hodgkins Lymphoma, I created a website that leveraged tweets to raise money for charity. During my treatment, I was able to:
- Participated in official LIVESTRONG events as a Global Envoy
- Appeared on both national and local news (CNN, Fox Philadelphia) to talk about our mission
- Held a 24 hour livestreamed marathon to raise money for LIVESTRONG
- Worked with Drew Carey to raise money by auctioning off the Twitter handle @drew
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Interests:travel, music, creativity, technology, gadgets, games, management, training, mentoring, leading, new media
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Tweets
- Moneyball got robbed. So gonna kick that artsy fartsy dog's ass.
- Happy anniversary @thatdrew and @Melbellie. I promise I won't tell anyone who my favorite is. If it makes you feel any better, it's close.
- Running for president.
- I'm thankful for whipped cream from @starbucks. Oh and for @Melbellie @thatdrew too. And @adrianbellie I guess.
- @Alyssa_Milano right back atcha! <3
- I'm dog tired. Long flight. But I got some bacon!
- Why does @Melbellie and @thatdrew get to pick pumpkins? I like pumpkins. Jerks.
- Sorry @thatdrew. I'm so damn cute, I make everyone want to talk to you. If it helps any, they're dumb.
- I get to fly and see @Melbellie tomorrow. Not a happy visit though :(
- Both of my parents work from home. This sucks. Can't even lick my junk in privacy anymore. I need a break. #rufflife
- Fan of @bifnaked's music even though I don't understand the words. Well, I don't understand ANY persons words really.
- I want to move to Ohio.
- Where the frig am I. What is this Ohio????
- you should feel how soft I am right now.
- sometimesmytweetsdonthavespacescuzigotnothumbs.
- oh and don't forget to do number one AND number two, even if the ground is wet. #hurricaneirene #wooftip
- to all of my furry friends out there on the right coast, please stay safe and take care of your people #hurricaneirene #woof
- come home @adrianbellie :(
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Posts
- Jun 20, 13
Business-focused social network LinkedIn is continuing to recover from a DNS error that took the site offline for an hour. The outage began when the popular service’s homepage was replaced by a domain sales page.
While the outage appears to have stopped, some users are still saying (via Twitter) that they cannot access linkedin.com, although none are seeing the incorrect page.
LinkedIn explained the outage was caused by “a DNS issue”, but provided no further details. Others have speculated that there may have been more malicious factors at play.
Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we’re continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience.
— LinkedIn (@LinkedIn) June 20, 2013
App.net co-founder Bryan Berg suggested that the service was “hijacked” with all traffic sent to a network hosted by India-based Confluence Networks. Furthermore, due to the lack of SSL security on the site, Berg says that could have meant if you visited the page “your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plain text” — potentially enabling third-parties to access user information and accounts.
However, a Hacker News user claiming to work with LinkedIn’s network operations center argued that the outage was down to a mistake from LinkedIn’s DNS provider, which accidentally pointed the website’s homepage to a domain parking page. Rather amusingly that put the linkedin.com domain up for sale.
It’s been just over one year since LinkedIn saw 6.5 million password leaked following a hack into its system, and the site can ill afford to suffer further security issues given the severity of that previous hacking.
Even if the DNS issue was down to a harmless error, the fact that the site pointed to a domain buying page for many users for a sustained period of time — combined with last year’s events — may have been enough to make many LinkedIn regulars fear the worst again.
LinkedIn has more than 225 million users worldwide. The US is its largest market, and it just passed 20 million registered members in India, its next biggest country.
We reached out to LinkedIn and Confluence Networks and will provide any additional details that the companies disclose.
Headline image via mariosundar / Flickr
- Jun 19, 13
Social discovery engine Spindle has been acquired by Twitter in an acqu-hire deal. The move will see the team leave Boston to join “the Flock” in San Francisco. The deal was first reported by All Things D. Unfortunately for users of the service, the Spindle service will be shut down starting today as the company moves to focus on “new and exciting opportunities.”
Functioning as a local discovery service, Spindle services San Francisco, New York City, and Boston. The concept was that context provided to mobile devices and social networks makes it possible to assemble a better search query for information — something far better than traditional keyword searches could. The app uses your social graph and other important signals like location and time of day to put together a smart mobile search engine.
Spindle was started by former Microsoft search engineers.
In its blog post announcing the news, the Spindle team shared that it spent the past 2.5 years trying to build a product to help answer the question “What’s happening nearby right now?” Interestingly, that’s something they very well might be able to accomplish at Twitter:
By joining forces with Twitter, we can do so much more to help you find interesting, timely, and useful information about what’s happening around you.
With Facebook, Foursquare, Path, and most major social networks capitalizing on locations and check-ins, the integration of Spindle’s team into Twitter could help the company build better location offerings. Twitter already offers users the ability to afix geotags to their tweets so that people know where they’re being sent from. Perhaps in the future users will begin receiving tweets from businesses that know they’re nearby or something to that effect?
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Photo credit: ThinkStock
- Jun 19, 13
Open source giant Red Hat today reported its first quarter financial performance for its 2014 fiscal year, including revenue of $363 million. Analysts had predicted that Red Hat would earn revenues of $360 million.
The company’s earnings per share was not disclosed, but analysts expected an EPS of $0.31. In regular trading, Red Hat was slightly down. In after hours, the company is up by 2%.
Red Hat highlighted its growing subscription revenue as a reason for it’s solid results. The company’s subscription revenue rose 19% year over year to $303 million in Q1 2014.
Last quarter, Red Hat missed estimates, but aside from that stumble, the company has seen steady revenue growth over the past year. Despite this fact, shareholders do not appear impressed; Red Hat’s stock price has declined this year and last, from highs of $60 per share to today’s $46.63.
Recently, Red Hat announced a $300 million stock buyback program. According to the company, the stock may be purchased either from the public market, or “in privately negotiated transactions.”
Image: Leonid Mamchenkov via Flickr
- Jun 19, 13
Apple today announced signing a significant deal with the Los Angeles School Board of Education that will bring $30 million worth of iPads to the school district in its initial roll out.
“Education is in Apple’s DNA and we’re thrilled to work with Los Angeles Unified public schools on this major initiative as they plan to roll out iPads to every student across 47 campuses this fall,” said Apple SVP Philip Schiller, adding that the company has placed almost 10 million iPAds in schools around the world.
LA Unified School District (LAUSD) Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Jaime Aquino noted that Apple had received unanimous approval from the school board.
“The vote is another step forward in the District’s plan to equip every one of its students with a device by 2014. When completed, the LAUSD will become the largest district in the nation to provide each of its students with the technology,” Aquino said in a statement.
It’s worth noting that the $30 million amount covers just the initial phase across 47 campuses. The LA Times reports that the contract could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple as the district works to provide every student with an iPad. LAUSD is the second largest school district in the US, behind only the New York City Department of Education.
Apple noted that the iPads will come loaded with a new app that features the Pearson Common Core System of Courses. The tablets will also include iWork, iLife, iTunes and select third-party educational apps. According to the Times, LAUSD will pay $678 per device, a premium on top of the retail price that should cover the cost of the pre-loaded software.
The contract comes as a big win for Apple, as it locks the company in as the sole vendor. Microsoft had lobbied for the district to stay open to other options, such as its Surface tablet, which it recently began offering to educational institutions at a steep discount.
Going off of the reported $678 unit price, Apple is committed to providing over 44,000 iPads. As of the previous school year, LAUSD had over 660,000 K-12 students. Hypothetically, if the district were to purchase an iPad for each of its students at the current rate, it would need to spend almost $450 million.
Apple sold 19.5 million iPads in the March quarter for $8.7 billion in revenue. In that light, the $30 million contract might seem like a relatively small amount, but exclusive access to one of the nation’s largest districts is definitely a huge step for Apple’s education efforts. If other school districts follow in LA’s footsteps, Apple could open up a huge source of recurring iPad sales that will lengthen its lead in the tablet space.
Image credit: Creatas
- Jun 19, 13
Social media data provider Gnip announced today that Chris Moody, its Chief Operating Officer and President, has been named the company’s new Chief Executive Officer. With this move, Moody succeeds Jud Valeski, who will be stepping back into the Chief Technology Officer role.
Moody had been with Gnip for the past two years and recently spent a lot of time on stage at the company’s second annual Big Boulder data conference. Valeski writes in a blog post:
Since joining, Chris has done nothing but illustrate his undying passion, dedication, and expertise in the context of Gnip. I often talk about how “discretionary energy” applies in the context of entrepreneurship, execution, and making a business actually work. The true measure of someone’s commitment to a challenge is whether or not their discretionary energy goes into it. Since even before his start date, I’ve watched Chris put every ounce of his discretionary energy into Gnip.
Prior to joining Gnip, Moody held multiple executive roles at marketing and creative talent firm Aquent. Valeski says that Moody’s experience helps to align him with “how the business is growing and scaling.”
As for Valeski, he’ll be Gnip’s new CTO. He writes that when he became CEO three years ago, he hoped to accomplish three things. The first was to build a “serious software company that met global needs”. The other two involved building a team that surpassed his experience back at Netscape and to have a business with an intense revenue stream while providing “tremendous value” to its customers. Valeski feels that all three have accomplished so now is the time for him to step back and let someone else steer the ship.
It appears the CTO role is a new position as their current executive team shows no other C-level position.
Moody’s promotion comes at a time when Gnip is experiencing some aggressive growth and integrations. In May, the company partnered with Foursquare to sell the location service’s check-in data in a manner similar to Twitter’s firehose. A month prior to that, it added Instagram, Reddit, and Bitly to its service giving businesses much more access to social media data.
Gnip isn’t the only game in town as it competes against DataSift. Both companies specialize in integrating with data service providers and resell the data to companies interested in using it for their applications or analytics.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
- Jun 19, 13
Feedly, the company offering products and services positioned as the best alternatives to Google Reader, today launched Feedly Cloud, a scalable infrastructure that serves as the backbone to Feedly as well as multiple reading applications. Best of all, Feedly Cloud also powers a new standalone Web version of Feedly (no plugins or extensions needed) that also debuts today.
Feedly Cloud is currently processing over 25 million feeds every day, crunching through billions of articles. Before Google announced Reader’s upcoming demise on July 1, Feedly had 4 million users. At the end of May, this number had tripled to 12 million users, the company shared with TNW.
Today’s announcement highlights exactly why the growth is so massive: Feedly is listening to the community. Feedly Cloud is a platform that caters to developers, publishers and bloggers, and of course end users.
Feedly Cloud offers an open API to third-party developers, over 200 of which have already requested access. Today, nine Feedly Cloud applications are launching, though the company expects many more in the coming weeks and months:
- IFTTT: the Feedly channel lets you connect your Feedly account to 63 other services (including Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail, Pocket, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.).
- Sprout Social: the social media management platform enables you to more effectively manage social channels and provide an exceptional customer experience from your browser, iOS and Android devices. You can connect your Feedly account to begin reading and posting content to your community directly from Sprout Social.
- Nextgen Reader for Windows 8 and Windows Phone: a fast, clean and beautiful reader app inspired by the Metro UI and packed with powerful features. It’s the best way to read your Feedly on your Microsoft-powered devices.
- gNewsReader for BlackBerry 10 and for Symbian/MeeGo: two elegant and versatile readers providing full Feedly support for BlackBerry and Symbian devices.
- Press: a wonderful reader for Android that is all about the reading experience. It’s designed with the purpose of making your news easier to read, and includes full offline support.
- gReader: a simple, fast and intuitive reader for Android, featuring beautiful themes, podcast support and full offline support.
- Newsify: an awesome reader for iPhone or iPad, with an amazing newspaper-like layout. It supports offline reading including image caching, and the use of multiple feedly accounts.
- Pure News Widget: a scrollable and actionable reader widget for Android, with multiples skins.
- Meneré: a Windows Desktop client to Feedly showing all items, filter them by read state, feed label and content and brings Snarl notifications.
While all these apps are great, the standalone Web version is arguably the biggest news being revealed today. It means Feedly is now available from any browser, including Opera and Internet Explorer, just like Google Reader.
Feedly says this was “one of the most requested features” and I’m not surprised. One of my personal requirements for a Google Reader alternative was that it be Web-based, so that I could access it from not just my computer, but from any device I can get a hold of.
On the desktop, Feedly’s requirements meant I needed to have an extension for Chrome, while on mobile, I needed to install an app and have either an Android or iOS device. That all changes today, and I’ll finally let myself give Feedly a shot.
Google Reader is going away in less than two weeks, and Feedly is offering a one-click migration path. Excellent timing.
Top Image Credit: Scott Rubin
- Jun 19, 13
Rdio surprised almost everyone last month when it launched Vdio, a new service for buying or renting digital copies of movies and TV shows. The company announced today that Vdio can now be accessed by anyone in the United States and the United Kingdom, ditching the requirement that forced every new user be a premium Rdio subscriber.
New users can sign-up using their Facebook account or a separate e-mail address, before perusing Vdio’s pretty diverse library of content. Unlike Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, there’s no monthly subscription to worry about. Movies and TV shows are priced on an individual basis, so there’s no ‘unlimited’ package or recurring bill to worry about.
Prices vary depending on the release – buying a film outright can be as high as £9.99 (roughly $15 USD), while renting can fall anywhere between £2.89 ($4.50 USD) and £4.49 ($7 USD).
Most movies and TV shows can be rented, although a quick glance shows that there’s a number of titles that can only be purchased from Vdio. These are then downloaded and dumped into the user’s library, accessible from the left-hand side of the screen, for the user to keep and watch whenever they please.
The setup is similar to iTunes, although in this case the service is entirely browser-based, rather being tied to a native app.
Movies and TV shows can also be added to a custom list, which Vdio calls Sets, for keeping track of favorites or titles that the user wants to watch next. Similar to collaborative playlists on Rdio and Spotify, users can also open up these lists so that anyone can add to them with their own suggestions.
It’s a useful tool if you’re using a single account as part of a large family, or want some new suggestions for those who are up on all of the latest releases. Collaborative lists can be limited to people that the user follows, or opened up to the wider public for some collaborative mayhem.
Although there’s an iPad app, Vdio doesn’t have anything like the same platform penetration of streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon Instant Video. That could change over time, but it means that for now Vdio is relying on its social features as its main differentiator.
There’s no word on yet on when Vdio will be opened up to other markets, but it can’t come soon enough. The revamped Apple TV rumors continue to circulate and this is a key period for Rdio to gain a significant foothold and presence in the market.
Image Credit: AFP/Getty Images
- Jun 19, 13
Sony has released a video on YouTube today showing new aspects of the PlayStation 4 interface and some of the practical use-cases for its next-gen video sharing and social features.
The clip, which was leaked by multiple YouTube users last week, hints at the console’s new low-power state. Similar to the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita, it allows players to resume a gameplay session or jump into the dashboard with almost no load times.
The home screen shows a large, square icon for loading whatever is in the disc tray, alongside a list of commonly used apps and games on the right-hand side. A series of tiles are then distributed underneath, showing updates to the PlayStation Store and in-game progress by other players.
There’s a degree of editing here, so it’s difficult to analyze the speed of the various interface transitions. Jumping to another player’s profile seems fairly straight-forward – this was also shown off at the original PlayStation 4 reveal event – and there’s a clear pathway to find user-uploaded videos related to the game that the player is currently in.
Pressing the PlayStation button in the middle of the controller throws the player back into the current game, similar to how the Guide Button operates on the current Xbox 360 controller.
The video later shows the player downloading a digital copy of Killzone: Shadow Fall. There’s a new tidbit here, as it gives the player two options; download the multi-player mode first, or the single-player campaign.
Downloads aren’t quite instantaneous, so it allows the consumer to prioritize which content they would like to play first. In this instance, where a friend wants the player to join their team online, it means the initial wait-time will be shortened considerably.
Players can jump back into their existing game while the new content downloads – no surprise there – and receive on-screen alerts for new messages and notifications. They’re small, but don’t appear to offer a preview of the message itself. For that, players will still need to open it up and exit their play session.
A quick glimpse at the on-screen keyboard shows that navigating between characters can be manipulated with the new controller’s built-in gyroscope. Choosing letters and symbols looks much faster this way, although we expect players will need a bit of time to adjust.
Smartphone functionality is also on offer here. Users are able to reply to messages and download new games from their device so that it’s ready when they get home.
The PlayStation 4 is shaping up to be an interesting console. The refreshed social features are subtle, but will arguably have a greater effect on the overall experience of the console and the community created for different game franchises.
- Jun 19, 13
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This post is brought to you by Sprint.
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This is part one of a two-part series looking at working smarter, remotely. Look out for part two tomorrow.
The dawn of social media changed the way that businesses do support for their customers for good. Businesses that have already transformed themselves in order to offer their wares 24/7 with the advent of e-commerce, but now they need to provide support and interaction with their customers all the time too.
Social media provides a fantastic opportunity for small and medium businesses to engage with their customers and build relationships like never before. For the first time ever, it allows a brand to have a friendly face that’s always there and they’re able to seek help from. Not only this, but it allows customers to become brand ambassadors that share promotional content for you.
It gets even better on the go, with smartphones offering the opportunity to interact with potential and existing customers wherever you are, no matter the time of day. This might be viewed as a negative thing for your personal life, but the benefits are much greater than you could imagine. Companies from a big bank like Kiwibank to Chow, a restaurant in Wellington, New Zealand, are using social media to interact with their customers and offer them help, information and sometimes to run promotions.
There are a bunch of great tools that allow you to manage your support channels on the go, so we’ve got a quick round-up of a few for you here:
Facebook Pages Manager
If your business has a Facebook presence, this is the app for you. Facebook Pages Manager allows you to manage your company profile on the go such as being able to respond to comments on your wall or to make a status update about an issue you’re having.
Not only that, but you can also quickly view statistics about your page interactions and how many likes you have, making it the ultimate tool to look after the Facebook side of things.
Facebook Pages Manager is available for Android and iPhone.
Hootsuite
Hopefully you’re already managing your business’ Twitter accounts with a tool like Hootsuite. If you’re not, Hootsuite is an application for Twitter that allows you to manage a company account better. It offers team support, so you can have multiple members of your staff to tweet from the same account (with an identifier like ^OW) as well as managing tweets for follow-up.
The mobile application for Hootsuite does much the same but gives you and your staff the power to tweet from anywhere – meaning they’re likely to help out with a quick tweet here and there when they’re not in the office.
Hootsuite is available for lots of mobile platforms, you can see if they support yours here.
Zendesk / Freshdesk
Lots of businesses — particularly online ones — provide some type of support desk service to their customers for in case they have an issue or question. This is usually where customers are referred after the social media team exhausts their ability to help.
Zendesk is one of these tools and they offer a fantastic mobile app that allows businesses to keep on top of their support ticket queues while on the go.
Another of these tools is Freshdesk, who also have a mobile application to help with support queues on the go. We’re not going to go into differences in this post, but if you’re not already using a support desk type service we would absolutely recommend checking out both Zendesk and Freshdesk.
Trello
In the late 40′s, engineers at Toyota pioneered a deceptively simple scheduling system called kanban which was based on index cards passed from one part of the plant to another. Trello brings this concept to the future, offering lists of tasks on a virtual signboard of what needs to be done and when, then allows you to assign them to people inside your organization.
You can make comments, flag jobs and color important items easily, making collaborative tasks easy to use and actually somewhat fun. It’s a great tool and works wonders for your personal life as well as your business one.
Trello has fantastic mobile applications available for iPhone and Android so you can keep being productive on the go.
Buffer
We realize you can’t always be on Twitter, so we’ve got a solution for that too. Buffer allows you to schedule tweets for times in the future so you don’t have to be in front of your keyboard every time you want to update the social media account.
If you do it right, you can even configure your business account to tweet during different time zones to get very effective reach across your customer base. Buffer is free for a limited amount of tweets, but the pro edition offers team accounts and unlimited access. Yes, Hootsuite lets you schedule tweets, but Buffer handles the hassle of making sure that they’re spread out throughout the day at times when you’re not tweeting manually.
Buffer has great mobile apps available for iOS and Android.
Tips to avoid drowning after hours
All these freedoms are great, but it’s important to make sure that you’re not stuck on your phone every time you’re out of the office, at the dinner table or trying to sleep. We recommend setting expectations with your customers, by doing things such as:
- Making a note in your Twitter bio that support requests will only be handled within certain hours of the day
- Telling your employees to only spend a certain amount of time dealing with queries during the day
- Signing out of the mobile applications after hours or even just disable audible alerts on applications such as Hootsuite
- Buffer tweets for the evening ahead of leaving the office so that it looks like the account is active when you’re off doing other things
- Refer customers to your support desk tool when out of hours so that nothing is missed
- If you’re a global business, having a roster to man the social media accounts and be ‘on duty’ allows the rest of the team to rest easier
- Configure auto-responders on tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk to inform customers who are logging tickets out of hours that they will be seen to in the morning
Moving your business into the always-on social world doesn’t have to be hard and mobile apps make it just a few steps easier. We definitely recommend jumping in head first, you won’t regret it!
Image credit: Thinkstock
- Jun 19, 13
TripAdvisor has continued its acquisition spree today by snapping up GateGuru, a mobile app that displays all of the information that a user might need on their day of travel.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s been confirmed that the GateGuru team will continue to work in New York City. Company employees will now report to Bryan Saltzburg, General Manager for New Initiatives and leader of the TripAdvisor Flights product and SeatGuru brand moving forward.
GateGuru is a robust travel app that combines all sorts of useful travel information, including holidaymakers’ itinerary and flight times, a section for information about their chosen airport – tips, amenity information, a visual map and the like – and rental car bookings through Avis.
“Flying is often an essential part of a trip and we have continually developed our suite of flights products, from the pricing and availability search on TripAdvisor, to our award-winning SeatGuru.com, with seat maps and more,” said Steve Kaufer, co-founder and CEO TripAdvisor, Inc.
“GateGuru nicely complements our existing flights products and we look forward to working with the GateGuru team as they continue to manage the GateGuru app and add great functionality to the TripAdvisor mobile experience.”
TripAdvisor acquired Wanderfly, a New York-based “travel inspiration site” last October. It then picked up Tiny Post, a mobile photo storytelling app in March this year, hinting at a renewed push to improve TravelAdvisor’s mobile presence. JetSetter, a service that notifies members of special travel deals, was then added to the list in April, rounding out the company’s rather extensive shopping list.
Image Credit: ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images
- Jun 19, 13
Facebook announced today that it has reached one million active advertisers amid growing adoption among small businesses and as bigger global brands also add Facebook ads to their mix.
Facebook director of small business Dan Levy announced the figure in a post, saying he would like to thank “the over one million businesses” who are active advertisers.
As of April 1 2013, Facebook has chalked up 1.2 billion connections between people and local businesses in the European Union, with 295 million such connections in the UK.
The company said on average there were 270 million views of local business pages in the EU in a week for the month of March, while in the UK there were 55 million such views.
Facebook also said 61 percent of its monthly active users in both the EU and the UK are connected to a local business page on the social networking service as of end-March.
Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new initiative to greatly simplify its advertising products, which would result in half of its ad units being shuttered by the end of this year. The core of the plan stemmed from feedback Facebook received from marketers, which helped the company realize that its ad products were too complicated and redundant.
Facebook also recently released an inside look at its Entity Graph, a complicated data set which maps the social network’s 100+ billion connections between people, places and interests.
Image Credit: Justin Sullivan via Getty Images
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- Jun 20, 13
Just last week, a small chunk of the tech press was surprised to find invitations for a Facebook announcement waiting in their mailbox.
“A small team has been working on a big idea,” it read.
The only other thing Facebook would say about the announcement is that they’d be showing a “new product”. No comment on what it might be, or which team it would come from. With that said, we think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect.
We’ll be live at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. where the announcement is scheduled to begin at 10 AM Pacific (12 PM Central, 1 PM Eastern, 6 PM London). We’ll be bringing you the up-to-the-second details from the event as they break and, as always, we’ll have photos and live commentary from the scene leading up to the announcement. So be sure to tune in early — say, 9:30 AM?
- Jun 20, 13
Because fashion never goes out of style, fashion portals continue to bring in the money not just from consumers looking for the next big thing — be it style or bargain, and ideally both — but also investors keen to ride the wave. The latest example is Rad, a Paris-based startup that focuses on hipster clothes and accessories and likens itself to the online equivalent of Urban Outfitters. Today, Rad is announcing €2.5 million ($3.3 million) in funding. Rad is just under one year old, but on its own steam and through viral marketing it’s already picked up 1 million users. This round of money, led by Index Ventures, is the first it has raised and Rad will use it to expand its business internationally. That will be first to the UK and Germany, and co-founder and CMO David Smadja tells us that the aim is to hit the U.S. in two years.
The funding comes in the wake of a much bigger round for a more established online fashion brand, but one that points to how hip can still mean big money: Fab earlier this week announced the closing of a $150 million round at a $1 billion valuation. And it’s still raising more.
Index, for its part, has built up a strong portfolio in online fashion, and as it were, sites that aim specifically for a more edgy look. Among the 150 companies it currently backs are biggies like Nasty Gal, Farfetch and ASOS, as well as smaller sites like The Business Of Fashion. (And yes, Index also has a lot of skin in the game with more mainstream operations like Etsy.)
“We are delighted to be partnering with the Rad team, who have proven, in their short history, that they have an innate understanding of fashion, brands and design,” says Martin Mignot from Index Ventures. “Working with ground-breaking businesses like Etsy and NastyGal has proven to us that retail is an area undergoing enormous change and Rad has a great opportunity to become a global company in this space.”
While Rad has been doing well on its own — it says it’s on track to make €15 million in sales in its first year of operations, self-funded — the extra capital will give it a boost to move into new territories and staff up.
“We are raising to accelerate our growth — hire key people, build a logistics platform, speed up acquisition through marketing, develop our production capacities,” notes Smadja. “Ideally, we would like to enter the US market in the next 2 years but right now we’re focusing on Europe, next markets being the UK and Germany.” Other co-founders include Anthony Serero (its CEO), Simon Amzalag (its CFO) and Julia Serero (its chief buyer).
While online fashion is most definitely a crowded market, it’s the smart move to look for a particular slant on the market early on. In the case of Rad, it’s the young women and sometimes men who shop at Urban Outfitters — hip but not too out there. “Our competitor would be Urban Outfitters,” Smadja says. “The direction we’re taking will set us apart in terms of offer (we focus on small brands and cool products that are difficult to find and our dynamic is much different).” The difference is that because it is online, and because Rad has adopted the private sale business model many other sites have used, particularly in early days (Fab has, for example, since dropped its invite policy), “We are competitive on prices, something that Urban can never be.”
The other key part of Rad is that it tries to work the trend among shoppers these days to opt for low prices and fast turnover in wardrobe. “We do not believe in traditional seasonality in fashion,” he says, noting that they stay away from the idea of offering 2 big collections each year. “We focus on products and because of our turn around and dynamic, we’re able to showcase hundreds of collections a year at best prices.” Whether it will be able to hold to its anti-establishment approach as it grows up will remain to be seen.
Other investors in this round included Nicolas Santi-Weil (Founding Partner at The Kooples, who will be joining the Rad board) and the New York-based Vaizra Seed Fund.
- Jun 20, 13
LinkedIn confirmed via Twitter that its site suffered an outage due to “a DNS issue.”
Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, and we’re continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience.
— LinkedIn Help (@LinkedInHelp) June 20, 2013
According to Downrightnow.com, LinkedIn’s service outage began around 6PM PST yesterday and is still continuing, though service has gradually resumed for some users.
Shortly after the outage began, App.net co-founder Bryan Berg wrote on his blog that the site’s DNS may have been hijacked–in other words, its domain name was redirected to a different IP address. In this case, LinkedIn’s traffic was re-routed to a network hosted by http://www.confluence-networks.com, which has phone numbers listed for both India and the U.S (UPDATE: the phone numbers for India have been removed, but they can still be seen in a cached version of the site). A spokesman reached at confluence-networks.com’s India number said that they are investigating why LinkedIn and Fidelity.com’s (see update below) nameservers have been redirected to their Web site.
This is potentially worrisome for LinkedIn users because, Berg writes, the site does not require SSL (secure sockets layer), which means that if you visited it over the last few hours, “your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plaintext” and a third-party may now have access to your account information.
LinkedIn users may remember that nearly 6.5 million encrypted passwords were compromised in June 2012 when they were dumped onto a Russian hacker forum. That incident occurred around the same time mobile security researchers discovered that calendar entries made on LinkedIn’s iOS apps, including sensitive information like meeting locations and passwords, were transmitted back to LinkedIn’s servers without users’ knowledge.
A spokesman for LinkedIn said: “LinkedIn is experiencing some intermittent issues due to a DNS issue. Our team is working on it right now and we hope to have the issues resolved as soon as possible.”
EDIT: A reader directed us to this comment on Hacker News noting that Fidelity.com also suffered an outage earlier today. According to WhatsMyDNS.com, several of Fidelity.com’s nameservers appear to be routed to 204.11.56.22, which is also owned by confluence-networks.com, according to whois.domaintools.com. This may mean that Fidelity and LinkedIn both pay the same company for DNS services, but it’s impossible to tell from the information available. We’ve also emailed Fidelity.com for more information.
- Jun 19, 13
Lazada, the e-commerce site founded by Rocket Internet in a bid to build the “Amazon of Southeast Asia,” announced today that it has landed another $100 million from returning investors Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kinnevik Investment AB, Summit Partners and Tengelmann Group, as well as new investor, Belgian-based family-owned investment holding company Verlinvest. This is the largest single round that Lazada has raised to date, and brings its total amount of funding raised since its launch in March 2012 to more than $236 million.
News of Lazada’s latest and biggest funding round comes just one month after Zalora, Rocket Internet’s Southeast Asia-facing fashion retail site, announced that it had also raised $100 million in a round led by many of the same investors, including Rocket Internet, Summit Partners, Kinnevik Investment AB, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The two rounds are among the largest ever for e-commerce startups in the region.
Lazada operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The site has a lot of room for growth in the region, but also a lot of catching up to do because, according to its own estimates, 99% of Southeast Asian consumers still prefer to do their shopping offline.
CEO Maximilian Bittner told Reuters that Lazada’s latest funding will be used to improve logistics and the company’s supply chain, a key factor in the the site’s growth across the region, especially since key rival Amazon announced earlier this month that it would ship some items from the U.S. to Singapore and India for free. Like Amazon, Lazada offers a mix of books, household goods, consumer electronics, toys and sports equipment. The company is also readying the launch of its iOS app, an important move because many Southeast Asian consumers bypass PCs and rely solely on their mobile devices for Internet access (Lazada already has an Android app).
Rocket Internet’s continued investment in Lazada, Zalora and its other e-commerce sites in emerging markets represent a departure from its previous strategy operating as a “clone factory” that copies high-growth online sites and then flips them for a profit–often to the very businesses cloned (for example, when Rocket Internet sold Citydeal to Groupon in 2010).
Instead, Rocket Internet is now focused on positioning itself as an e-commerce leader in emerging economies with rapidly-growing middle class consumers.
Other retail sites Rocket Internet has launched in emerging markets include fashion site Lamoda in Russia (which raised $130 million in funding earlier this month), Zappos clone Namshi in the Middle East, home furnishings site Mobly in Brazil and African retail site Jumia.
Despite its continued investment in these properties, it’s difficult to gauge how well the sites are doing because Rocket Internet does not divulge details about their performance. For example, Bittner declined to give specific details to Reuters, but told them Lazada hit the “three digit millions” of euros in gross merchandise value last month. Zalora appeared to hit some growing pains this spring when its regional operations in Taiwan were streamlined and moved to Singapore, as well as the resignation of at least two managing directors (Nadiem Makarim and Mato Peric both left the company in 2012) since its launch in March 2012. It remains to be seen whether Rocket Internet’s aggressive and expensive approach to building a global e-commerce footprint will pay off.
- Jun 19, 13
As has been written ad nauseam, we’ve seen a lot of activity in the wild and wacky world of cryptocurrency of late, thanks primarily to the tech industry’s new obsession with Bitcoin. Depending on whom you ask, digital currency like Bitcoin will either be worth nothing in 10 years, or its value will make Warren Buffet weep. It’s a polarizing topic at its very essence, but one thing is for sure: So far, venture capitalists are loving this emerging market, and startups are beginning to follow suit.
In late May, we introduced you to the Bitcoin market’s latest growth milestone: The launch of BitAngels, the first multi-city angel network and incubator dedicated exclusively to digital currency startups. Appropriately given its focus, BitAngels is a distributed network of angel investors and entrepreneurs that came together over the course of a few days in the wake of the Bitcoin 2013 Conference.
At launch, some 60 angels had joined the network and had pooled together just under $7 million in Bitcoin, which the founders planned to invest in $20K chunks, or increments thereof. While BitAngels isn’t a formal fund per se (so the Bitcoins are soft-circled, not in escrow), all involved are accredited, experienced investors, many of whom have made themselves available as advisors.
Like Bitcoin itself (or not, depending on the day), the angel network and incubator is growing like crazy. One month removed from launch, BitAngels has doubled its number of investors to 120 and has added nearly $10 million in capital to its reserves, bringing its total to just under $18 million.
Behind this steady growth, the network announced that it is has officially completed its first investment. Its first $100K investment went to BlueSeed, the “seasteading venture” that incubates startups in international waters not far off the coast of Silicon Valley. Naturally, its offshore incubator has drawn a handful of Bitcoin companies, as they aren’t subject to any regulation from Uncle Sam during their seafaring incubation.
The angel network and incubator for cryptocurrency startups is the brainchild of Engine.co founder David A. Johnston and SocialRadius CEO/Marketwire founder Michael Terpin, along with four additional founding board members Gyft CEO Vinny Lingham, Memory Dealers CEO and “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver, Tradehill CEO Jered Kenna and angel investor Sam Onat Yilmaz.
BitAngels also tells us that it is in the final stages of due diligence with three other Bitcoin startups and, although it can’t yet reveal their identities, the founders expect to fund one or more of them in the next 30 days.
For more, find BitAngels at home here.
- Jun 19, 13
Palo Alto-based ScaleIO is one of a new generation of startup storage providers that’s using intelligent software to help big companies streamline and converge their data storage operations at scale across thousands of servers. On a mission to re-imagine the very operations of enterprise data centers, the startup’s tech takes aim at the core business of storage giants like EMC and IBM. In fact, ScaleIO claims that its block storage technology offers 80 to 90 percent savings compared to the bigs.
Well, it appears that at least one of the bigs has been listening and wants the startup’s tech for its own. TechCrunch has learned today that EMC, one of the largest data storage providers in the world, has agreed to buy ScaleIO for $200 million to $300 million. The news was first reported by Avi Schneider at Israeli blog GeekTime, and as the deal is reportedly still in the final stages, according to our sources, neither EMC nor ScaleIO would offer official comment on the news when reached by TechCrunch.
While the terms of the reported deal are still unclear, if this range holds true, it’s a big win for both sides — and, following the likes of Waze, it’s another big exit for Israeli tech startups. In EMC’s case, the storage giant has been taking a turn toward a more AWS-style infrastructure, and the ScaleIO acquisition gives the company access to the startup’s “block storage,” an adaptable, multi-use data-storage technology that makes it easy to scale across thousands of servers.
In other words, ScaleIO’s software uses the hard disk on application servers to create high-performance, shared virtual storage array networks (SAN), which offer the easy scalability and elasticity of “block storage.”
With the cost of hosting coming down and the quality, speed and elasticity of cloud computing on the way up, small and medium-sized businesses have been moving to cloud hosting infrastructures (like, say AWS) at a breakneck pace. In turn, larger companies are increasingly consolidating their own clouds into massive data centers. These clusters continue to increase, resulting in all sorts of cost- and management-related headaches for the companies that manage these data centers.
That’s why EMC has been moving to a more AWS-style system and the reason why ScaleIO’s technology holds appeal for the storage provider. What’s more, with the consumerization of IT, and employees now using a wide range of consumer-friendly applications and tools at the office — not to mention bringing their own personal devices — along with the rise of the Internet of Things, infrastructure providers like EMC are going to have to be able create a bridge between connected devices and consumer and enterprise clouds, among others.
This means not only more big data and more servers, but a sort of industrial web. As data centers consolidate and startups turn to cloud hosting services, the bigs will have to adapt, offering the things clients have come to expect, such as database management, capacity planning and scalability, while maintaining uptime. Doing so in a smooth manner is becoming critical to the millions of applications, tools and businesses housed in these data centers.
For EMC, the ScaleIO acquisition follows its purchase of network storage system provider Isilon for $2.5 billion in 2010, and marks its second acquisition of an Israeli storage startup in the last 12 months. The company scooped up Flash storage pioneer ExtremeIO in May of 2012 for $430 million.
The move also represents a fairly early exit for ScaleIO, which just raised $12 million from Greylock and Norwest Venture Partners in December as part of its first round of financing. However, the startup was built by a veteran team that has designed and developed storage software apps for companies like IBM, NetApp and Xtremio, which, of course, was just acquired by EMC.
The challenge for ScaleIO, as Alex wrote in December, has been in scaling its business — one that’s largely controlled by resellers that have long-standing relationships with the big players. While ScaleIO CEO Boaz Palgi said at the time that he has had “no problem selling direct to customers,” scaling the business and selling direct will no longer be as much of a concern.
As part of its Q1 earnings in April, EMC announced that 50 percent of its storage revenue “now comes through indirect sales,” and at a $52 billion market cap and doing $22 billion in revenue, ScaleIO now has plenty of scale at which to test its mettle.
Overall, the ScaleIO acquisition represents the impact that cloud services are having on EMC. The company has faced its own challenges competing with AWS. Adding a software storage capability gives EMC a better capability to offer a service that can help it compete better with the cloud kings.
- Jun 19, 13
When we first discovered that MakerBot was looking to partner with Stratasys, I was a bit non-plussed. MakerBot, as I’ve noted before, has a certain indie cred that makes this move a bit unpalatable.
But, at the same time, it’s immensely important.
Stratasys makes expensive, industrial-quality 3D printers. They are the “big iron” of the 3D printing world. Items printed on Stratasys hardware are as solid as anything produced by, say, injection molding, and the resolution make them indispensable for engineers and designers. In short, Stratasys is making mainframes and MakerBot is making the Apple I. While I’m loath to claim that Bre Pettis is Woz (let alone Steve Jobs), he is a charismatic leader who makes 3D printing fun, something the folks at Stratasys probably could never do.
And, like Apple, MakerBot had to ramp up. By signing with Stratasys, MakerBot will be able to maintain its breakneck speed and growth. The company recently opened a 50,000-square-foot space in Brooklyn where it is assembling machines and it has office space in downtown Brooklyn overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. They have made it big with very little investment — they recently closed a $10 million round and were nosing around for more before this news — and they suffered from some severe growing pains along the way, especially in employee satisfaction. This purchase gives the company some breathing room, at the very least.
Could MakerBot have made it without selling? Possibly, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. Home 3D printing is taking off. It’s not ubiquitous, to be sure, but it’s a method to turn bits into atoms that will become increasingly important in a post manufacturing world. Sadly, VCs are still suspicious of hardware startups (but that’s changing) and MakerBot could have gotten a few infusions of cash to help them glide to cruising altitude. Now they’re already there.
Many will say that MakerBot sold out. Many will complain that the company lost open-source roots. Many will claim that there are better printers out there. None of these claims are absolutely false, to be clear, but things are not as cut and dried as we like to think. MakerBot took something simple and made it amazing. They sold when they had to, especially considering issues with quality control and support, and I trust Pettis will bring the open-source ethos to Stratasys headquarters and tell them it’s off limits. 3D printing isn’t new, just as computing wasn’t new when Apple hit the scene. MakerBot, like Apple, made it accessible.
[image via MakerBot]
- Jun 19, 13
The reveal of the Xbox One didn’t go as Microsoft hoped. Gamers loved the system, but hated the absurd restrictions placed on the games. But Microsoft listened and just today reversed its stance on some of the more ridiculous policies. Good for them. Good for us.
I mean, the outcry was hard to ignore. The memes, the tweets, the visceral anger was everywhere. Even the talking heads on nationwide morning talk shows were debating the curious DRM restrictions.
Gone is the daily Internet check. Gone is the very limited region locking. Games can now be rented and traded and passed among friends just like always. Things are essentially back to normal, for better or worse.
This move was clearly to save face and eliminate potential digs Sony and Nintendo could (and would and already did) take at the Xbox One. The last thing Microsoft needs is Sony pointing out that the PS4 doesn’t require an always-on Internet connection like the Xbox One.
Microsoft didn’t have to reverse its stance. It could have taken the potshots and rolled out, touting the Xbox One’s features alongside the forward-thinking requirements.
After all, the company has historically been pretty good about not responding to consumer feedback in a timely manner. Just look at Windows 8. Or Windows Vista. Or Xbox Live. The company has a long history of doing whatever the hell it wants.
Even with the crazy restrictions, the average consumer would have probably purchased the Xbox One anyway. Gaming forums and Twitter represent just a small (if noisy) portion of the One’s target market. And with the One launching months from now, in the midst of the holiday season, the talk would have quieted down before it hit Walmart’s shelves.
The Xbox One still requires a Kinect to always be connected, and today’s reversal removes some of the more novel features like game sharing from the system. But at least Microsoft is listening and responding quickly. That’s new. Gamers wanted to love the Xbox One but Microsoft made it impossible. Now things have gotten slightly better.
[Image via Flickr/dalvenjah]
- Jun 19, 13
Attention gamers: you win. The folks at Redmond infuriated many when it revealed that the Xbox One would come with a long list of potential caveats — there was the automated 24 hour check-in to keep the console in playable condition, and the restrictions on who you could share disc-based games with, not to mention the fact that it would shipped region-locked.
Unsurprisingly, the gaming community lashed out in a big way, and Microsoft is finally doing something about it. According to a recent mea culpa from Microsoft Interactive Entertainment President Don Mattrick, the company has suddenly decided to drop all that nonsense due to an outpouring of (largely negative) feedback.
It’s generally welcome news considering just how off-base Microsoft seemed to be with its apparently overzealous approach to DRM, but the move doesn’t come without its drawbacks. The ability to store your entire game collection (even copies of games you physically bought) in the cloud? Gone. Kotaku also reports that this late-stage change means that the Xbox One will have to be patched by players as soon as they received them.
Still, considering just how viscerally gamers reacted toward Microsoft’s policies (the image macro above is pretty mild compared what others have said), it’s frankly hard to see how the company could’ve played this any other way. Rather than standing on its own numerous merits, the Xbox One was almost immediately bogged down in important questions about how it would handle seemingly mundane actions like passing game discs among friends. What was Microsoft going to do, push the Xbox One onto store shelves knowing that a non-insignificant chunk of the gaming populace hated the thing on principle? Some would argue that’s exactly what Microsoft should’ve done, but it’s likely Microsoft felt its hand was being forced.
Of course, it didn’t help that rival Sony adroitly seized that opportunity. All Sony had to do to endear itself to legions of eager gamers at E3 was to point out just how un-Microsoft it was by sticking to a more traditional (read: hands-off) approach to managing how people play games. Between dealing with gamer rage and the looming threat of a competitor that was eager to capitalize on the Xbox One’s shortcomings, Microsoft finally wound up doing what it should’ve done far earlier in the One development process — listening to the players.
- Jun 19, 13
Twitter today acquired Spindle, an app that uses mobile devices and social networks to make a smarter localized search engine. The Spindle team will move to San Francisco and shutter the Spindle app.
Using social networks, the time of day, and your location, Spindle would show you places you may want to visit, like restaurants or stores or other points of interest.
“We’ve spent the past two-and-a-half years building a product that helps you answer the question: “What’s happening nearby right now?” Every time we’ve experimented and looked beyond local discovery, we’ve been amazed by the breadth and quality of content shared on Twitter,” the company wrote in a blog post today. “By joining forces with Twitter, we can do so much more to help you find interesting, timely and useful information about what’s happening around you.”
Spindle comes from ex-Microsoft engineers and raised $2.3 million in funding before being acquired by Twitter. The company introduced version 2.0 in March, which featured interesting Google Now-esque push notifications based on user preferences.
The Spindle team also said they will be relocating from Boston to San Francisco to join the Twitter team, and will be “sunsetting the Spindle service today to focus on these new and exciting opportunities.”
It’s not immediately clear what the Spindle team will be working on, but we obviously expect them to keep answering the question, “What’s happening nearby right now?” Combined with Twitter’s resources and social graph, the team could produce a product to rival Foursquare or Facebook’s local search.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. I reached out to Twitter for comment, who mostly pointed to Spindle’s blog post but also offered this tweet:
Welcome! “@spindle: Exciting news: Spindle has been acquired by @Twitter and joins the flock!
http://t.co/zJdccsGKto
”— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) June 19, 2013
- Jun 19, 13
Today Stratasys announced that it has acquired MakerBot, as we first reported, in a stock deal worth $403 million based on the current share value of Stratasys. The combination of the companies brings together a leader in 3D industrial printing and manufacturing, with the emerging leader in desktop 3D printing, which the companies said in a press release should help drive “faster adoption of 3D printing” across all categories.
MakerBot will continue to operate as a separate company from Stratasys as part of the deal, which is reportedly stock-for-stock transaction. It’ll be a subsidiary of Stratasys, but will serve the consumer and desktop market segment while Stratasys continues to focus on its existing industry placement.
MakerBot was founded in 2009, and has since sold over 22,000 3D printers, with its most recent model making up 11,000 of those sales coming from the Replicator 2, which it launched back in September 2012. That means traction is on the upswing in a big way, something which no doubt helped pave the way for the deal.
As for Stratasys, its name might be less familiar for regular TechCrunch readers, though it may ring a bell from when we accurately reported that acquisition talks between the two companies were ongoing earlier this month. But in terms of the history of 3D printing it’s operating in much more established space. It facilitates the printing of prototypes, concepts, components, parts and more on an industrial scale and for commercial applications. The publicly traded company merged with Object Ltd in 2012 to form one large entity, and is headquartered in both Minneapolis and Rehovot, Israel.
Stratasys has demonstrated it’s going to be aggressive about owning the 3D printing space, and the MakerBot buy is the consumer-focused piece in that puzzle. For MakerBot, it gives the startup access to Stratasys’ wealth of industry experience, as well as probably better access to new tech coming down the pipeline, a greater pool of engineering talent and more resources to put behind marketing and distribution.
MakerBot has been pretty consistent in terms of updating its hardware and software since the startup got off the ground four years ago, and released updated firmware and design software just last week to improve the quality of its printed products. The company has some competition from other, newer startups like Form Labs, whose Form 1 3D printer John recently tested out, but MakerBot already had a head start on the younger company, and Stratasys should be able to juice its growth even further.
- Jun 19, 13
Microsoft and Nokia have gotten pretty cosy over the past few years, and at the time of the announcement of the Finnish company’s decision to use Windows Phone OS to power its smartphones, many speculated it was the first overture for a coming acquisition. And that is apparently where things were headed, according to the Wall Street Journal, but the proposed deal has since fallen apart.
The WSJ says talks were taking place as soon as this month, but that they’ve collapsed to the point where they aren’t likely to get revived again, meaning a Microkia or Nokrosoft isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Talks up until that point had been very advanced, the report says, but eventually broke down because of financial difficulties faced by both MS and Nokia.
Microsoft ended the courtship, per the report. Nokia has been struggling, and the Windows Phone plan hasn’t done much to shore up its continued losses. Nokia missed analyst expectations last quarter, and posted an operating loss, though a much lower one than it reported during the year ago period. Its device sales were down both sequentially and year over year, however.
Essentially, Microsoft and Nokia were able to have an extended dating period, and Microsoft had plenty of time to see that opting for marriage wasn’t likely to turn around the fortunes of either party. In fact, neither the fact that a merger was being considered, nor the fact that it fell through, should come as any big surprise to anyone who has been watching the progress of Nokia over the past few years, and of Windows Phone as a mobile platform.
What’s left now is to see where Microsoft goes next with smartphones, and whether it opts to try to jump start things with its own project, Surface-style, or seeks out someone else like Nokia who might be able to do a better job of lighting a fire under its mobile OS.
- Jun 19, 13
Google today launched the first beta version of its Dart SDK and Editor. With this update, Google says, the SDK can now produce significantly smaller and faster JavaScript code and make it easier for Dart developers to deploy their code. The Dart Editor now features an analysis engine that’s 20 percent faster at parsing and analyzing code as you type it, making it a bit less likely that your code won’t run because of a typo.
Dart, which developers can compile to JavaScript or run in a special version of Chrome that features a built-in Dart VM, hasn’t quite caught on with developers yet, but that doesn’t mean that Google isn’t putting quite a few resources behind the project.
The Dart Editor now also features smarter code completion that is, for example, camel case aware, deletes unused optional parameters automatically after template editing is done and includes a number of other enhancements.
The Dart VM, Google says, is now up to 40 percent faster at executing certain benchmarks and even the code that’s compiled to JavaScript is up to 20 percent faster. The Dart team also says that it has greatly improved WebGL performance in Dartium, Google’s special build of Chrome with the built-in Dart VM.
It also looks like Google is working to bring its Polymer web components-based UI framework to Dart, though the team currently lists this as a “work in progress.”
You can find the full release notes here.
Other browser manufacturers haven’t shown much interest in working with Google to integrate Dart into their own browsers (Mozilla, for example, is betting on Rust, JavaScript and asm.js for performance improvements). Even Google hasn’t integrated Dart into Chrome yet, but as the language matures, it’s probably just a matter of time before the first Chrome builds with the Dart VM arrive.
- Jun 19, 13
In spite of the recent layoffs, Zynga is still picking up talent in strategic areas like social casino gaming.
The company bought a roughly 40-person team called Spooky Cool Labs full of real-money gaming talent. Based in Chicago, the Spooky Cool Labs team is made up of social and real money gaming veterans from companies such as Aristocrat, and slot machine makers like IGT (International Game Technology) and WMS Gaming. The company’s founder, Joe Kaminkow, was ranked as one of the 10 most influential people in the history of slots by Strictly Slots Magazine.
But from Spooky Cool’s website, the company looks like it had been working on non-casino titles like a Wizard of Oz city-building social game. Zynga says that access to this Wizard of Oz brand is part of the deal.
The team will stay in Chicago and work with Zynga’s San Francisco-based social casino gaming team. In another interesting twist to this deal, Kaminkow will apparently also still lead game design at Aristocrat Leisure Limited, an Australian company that’s one of the biggest slots makers in the world. He told VentureBeat back in March that he had taken a job as a senior vice president of game development at Aristocrat Leisure. Spooky Cool also had backing from the Hearst Corporation, but they didn’t disclose the amount of funding.
As Zynga grapples with how to approach mobile platforms, it has relied on one of its old standbys: Zynga Poker. At the same time, the company has made steps toward exploring how to incorporate real money into its betting games.
The company made its first real-money games live in the U.K. in April, just after the first-quarter closed. But it has yet to bring these real-money efforts to the Facebook platform or mobile in that market. In December, the company also applied for a “preliminary finding of suitability” from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, starting a process that could take more than a year.
- Jun 19, 13
Cortica, a startup developing technology for analyzing in-image content, is announcing that it has raised $6.4 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by previous investors Horizons Ventures (the firm which manages investments for Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-shing), with participation from Russian firm Mail.ru Group and other angel investors. Cortica has now raised a total of $18 million.
Founded by neuroscientists Yehoshua (Josh) Zeevi and Karina Odinaev, as well as engineer Igal Raichelgauz (the company’s CEO), Cortica says its Image2Text technology processes images based on patterns and identifies the images’ core concepts. It also says that it delivers zero false positives — in other words, it might not identify every concept associated with an image, but it will never incorrectly identify one of them.
When I spoke to Cortica last year, it was focused on using the technology for in-image advertising — if you have an accurate sense of the content of an image, you can place ads that are a good match. Advertising is still one of the use cases, Raichelgauz said, as is e-commerce, but the biggest use among the company’s initial commercial partners is visual search. The technology is now deployed across hundreds of millions of images, he added.
“The goal now is to distribute Cortica technology across multiple partners, whether those are leading publishers, leading manufacturers of devices, and so on,” Raichelgauz said.
- Jun 19, 13
Wired Senior Editor Michael Copeland is joining venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. We’ve confirmed with the VC firm that Copeland will be leading Andreessen’s new ‘content strategy.’
Prior to joining Wired, Copeland was a Senior Writer at Fortune and was previously also a Senior Writer at Business 2.0 covering the VC world. Additionally, he held editorial positions at Red Herring, the Venture Capital Journal, the Washington Post and was a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, Orange County Register, and Philadelphia Inquirer.
It’s unclear what A16Z’s content strategy is yet, and we’re told that details are still being ironed out. Additionally, Copeland will be part of the marketing team.
Clearly this is part of A16Z’s strategy of being full-service VC agency that provides more than just a check. The firm has staffed up in recruiting, marketing, financial services, business development and more. Last year, A16Z brought on former Twitter employee Elizabeth Weil as a partner on the Market Development team, as well as Wildfire-exec Tom Rikert to help lead the deal and research team on enterprise deals. The firm is staffing up with the best talent from every area of the startup and technology world.
There are a lot of directions A16Z could go with a content strategy, including creating more its own content (all of the investment partners currently blog), and also helping create content for portfolio startups.
Also worth noting, fellow VC firm Sequoia recently brought on WSJ alum Ben Worthen to lead its content efforts.
- Jun 19, 13
Twitter added new features to Tweetdeck today that makes it easier to arrange and consume various feeds.
Column headers now have “grab handles” in the top-left corner so they can quickly and easily be rearranged. If you are looking at fewer than four feeds, the selected column will now snap its left edge to the sidebar; if four or more columns are visible, the selected column will still be in the center of the screen, like before.
Finally, when you click a column icon twice, it will scroll to the top and reveal any Tweets you may have missed, a similar function to Twitter for Mac.
Tweetdeck, which Twitter acquired for $40 million in 2011, is a web, mobile, and desktop client for sorting and reading many customized Twitter feeds in a short amount of time. Twitter seems to be working hard to keep their core “power users” loyal to digesting most of their media through the service; the company redesigned Tweetdeck two weeks ago and added some “often requested features.”
Today’s updates are available now for web and Chrome, and the company says updates for Mac and Windows will “follow soon.”
- Jun 19, 13
This week on Founder Stories, I sat down with Airbnb co-founder Nate Blecharczyk. One of the things that strikes me as original to Airbnb’s founding team is that, unlike most startups I can think of, two of the co-founders are designers, and Blecharczyk, who’s a co-founder and CTO, is an engineer.
“It’s pretty unusual, and I actually attribute a lot of our success to that combination,” says Blecharczyk. “We see things very differently because of our backgrounds and we’ve discovered that’s an asset. Sometimes it takes a little longer to reconcile our perspectives, but we find that if we take the time to do that we can come up with a superior solution. One that takes into account both points of view.”
Nate continues by explaining how Airbnb has been able to bring the collaborative culture of the founding team to the rest of the company. He and I also discuss being selective about hiring, building cross-functional product teams centered around projects rather than roles within in the company, and transitioning responsibility to Facebook’s Mike Curtis who recently joined as Airbnb’s vice president of Engineering. Watch the full interview above to learn more.
Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.
- Jun 19, 13
It feels like startups are taking more and more steps to make the website creation process as easy as possible. There are companies like Weebly, which offer drag-and-drop interfaces for building websites. There’s Barley, which doesn’t require any layout work at all. And now there’s Pagevamp, which allows you to turn a Facebook Page into a website.
The company was founded by Atulya Pandey, Fred Wang and Vincent Sanchez-Gomez, three University of Pennsylvania students (now graduates) who ran a small WordPress design agency while they were in college. What they discovered, Sanchez-Gomez said, is that the process is still too complicated for many people. Facebook Pages, on the other hand, are easy to create, but they’re not particularly customizable.
“I think there are people, like my mom or my grandma, where if you said, ‘Hey, just make a WordPress site,’ they wouldn’t know what to do,” he said. “For them to make a Facebook Page is much more in the realm of possibility. And with Pagevamp, if they can do that, then they can make a website.”
I tried it out myself this morning, where I pointed Pagevamp at the TechCrunch Facebook Page and within a few seconds I had a not-terrible-looking website. (You can see a screenshot of the website, along with Pagevamp’s admin controls, below.) I could do some basic editing like choosing from different designs, but really, typing in the Facebook URL was all the effort required.
Pagevamp launched its public beta at the end of March, and Sanchez-Gomez said users from more than 80 countries have created more than 7,000 sites. You can see sample Pagevamp-created websites for an Indian nonprofit, a musician, and a restaurant. Sanchez-Gomez said it can be used by both individuals and businesses, though it needs to start from a Facebook Page, not a personal account.
Today the company is announcing that it has backing from the Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital’s student-run investment arm, which means that it has access to the fund’s mentorship and network, as well as $20,000 in funding.
Like I said, the initial websites created by Pagevamp are pretty simple, but the company plans to expand its functionality through add-ons. Right now, there are two — an add-on for managing website menus and another for adding custom pages. There are more in the pipeline, Sanchez-Gomez said, and ultimately he wants to turn Pagevamp into a platform for add-ons from third-party developers. (In fact, there’s already a developer sign-up page.)
Creating a Pagevamp site is free, but you have to pay a subscription fee if you want to publish on a non-Pagevamp domain and if you want access to the add-ons.
- Jun 19, 13
It sure doesn’t seem like many people have bought Lytro’s crazy light-field camera (the one that lets you focus your photos after you take them) — but if you’re one of those who did: go plug that thing in. Lytro has just released a firmware update that enables the camera’s dormant Wi-Fi chip, along with an iOS app that lets you wirelessly access and share your photos.
Oh, and it makes super trippy animated GIFs!
Check out the demo we shot with Lytro’s Director Of Photography, Eric Cheng:(I’ll go ahead and forgive Eric for pronouncing “GIF” with a hard G there at the end. We all know it’s pronounced like “jiff,” despite what Alexia might say.)
Even if you own a Lytro, there’s a pretty good chance you didn’t know there was a Wi-Fi chip inside. Surprise! The company hadn’t really mentioned it much until now, as it previously served no purpose. When the FCC’s teardown of the Lytro revealed the chip shortly before the device’s release a year-and-a-half ago, the company responded to inquiries about it with “Connectivity is important to us, and we’re working on it.”
The Lytro Mobile app’s main purpose is to serve as an on-the-go interface for uploading, tweaking, and sharing photos from a Lytro camera without having to hook it up to a computer. All of your photos are pulled into the application over the air, where they can be geotagged, refocused and perspective-shifted on a screen that’s a good bit more finger-friendly than the relatively tiny one found on the Lytro itself. New photos will show up in the app as you shoot them, with a transfer time of around 5 or 6 seconds. You can also peruse photos shared among the Lytro community.
The company also confirmed to us that an Android app is on the way, though they declined to pin down a date for it. A Wi-Fi-enabled syncing app for the Mac or PC, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be on their roadmap.
Plus, as mentioned, you can make totally crazy looking GIFs. Check out these total dreamboat (*cough*) examples of my big dumb head recording the above video. On the left is the parallax shifting effect; on the right is the foreground/background refocusing effect (And in the center of each is my busted-ass iPhone cable):
Once you’re on the new firmware, connecting your Lytro to your iPhone is pretty dang simple: you swipe up on the Lytro’s screen to bring up the taskbar, and hit the little Wi-Fi icon to turn your Lytro into a hotspot. You connect your iPhone to the Lytro’s Wi-Fi signal, launch the app, and you’re set.
You can find the free Lytro Mobile app for iOS here.
