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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
- @didierh dude.
- RT @ripemp: This is amazing. BearCrunch. RT @ryanlawler So this happened. RT @elinblesener: Only at TC http://t.co/16vpxnq1Im cc: @ripempMay 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @mager: She said yes!!! http://t.co/PT4Pt6RjiCMay 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @JoshConstine: Kim Dotcom Claims He Invented Two-Factor Authentication, Has A Patent To Prove It http://t.co/mouRjk5TOZ the court jester…May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Secure your Twitter account ASAP! http://t.co/5Q1xyWV6pC via @techcrunch
- [x]Turbines.May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @fredericl: RT @drew: Google X Acquires Makani Power And Its Airborne Wind Turbines http://t.co/X9ZziGNRx2 tip @TechmemeMay 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- How does @JLo say "GIF" ?????May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Google X Acquires Makani Power And Its Airborne Wind Turbines http://t.co/aP9888XlO9 by @fredericlMay 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @ryanlawler: Vine app adds option to follow @vineapp on Twitter, fixes thumbnail issue, & addresses incorrect avatar bug in latest updat…May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @MartinSFP yes. i think your sources are correct. they did indeed...eat the bison. [BISON]
- RT @BloombergNews: Bison-loving billionaires creating nature preserve the size of Connecticut | http://t.co/CNkAgbohFtMay 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @ekai: and @rdio! RT @ScottBeale The new Daft Punk album Random Access Memories is now available on @Spotify.May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @ScottBeale: The new Daft Punk album Random Access Memories is now available on @Spotify.May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Photos
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Checkins
- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
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- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
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- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
- Moscone West800 Howard St
- Starbucks3790 S El Camino Real
- Starbucks3790 S El Camino Real
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Google+
- Drew on Google+
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Posts
New Tumblr is nice on android.
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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- Sept 2012 - PresentCommunity Director / TechCrunch
- 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
- May 23, 13
The HTC First, the only smartphone to come pre-installed with Facebook Home, is no longer coming to the United Kingdom.
At least not right now, anyway.
The device was originally set to launch with local network operators EE and Orange this summer, but Facebook has reportedly decided to cancel all pre-orders and shipments until further notice, due to “customer feedback” following its availability in the United States.
“Following customer feedback, Facebook has decided to focus on adding new customization features to Facebook Home over the coming months,” a statement sent to Engadget by EE reads. ”While they are working to make a better Facebook Home experience, they have recommended holding off launching the HTC First in the United Kingdom, and so we will shortly be contacting those who registered their interest with us to let them know of this decision.”
It continues: “Rest assured, we remain committed to bringing our customers the latest mobile experiences, and we will continue to build on our strong relationship with Facebook so as to offer customers new opportunities in the future.”
It’s a huge blow for Facebook Home. The service, which combines an interactive lockscreen experience with its new cross-platform Chat Heads messaging service, was met with a rather mixed reaction when it was unveiled earlier this year.
The service is available to a large number of Android users to install as a custom app launcher, but it doesn’t come with all of the functionality found on the HTC First. This is because the hardware was designed from the ground-up to take advantage of the software, thereby allowing Facebook to dive a little deeper into the Android operating system.
There have been rumors that the HTC First isn’t selling very well in the United States, but this hasn’t been confirmed with any concrete sales figures. Regardless, the statement from EE shows that at least in Facebook’s eyes, the dedicated smartphone isn’t ready to be sold to the British public.
“We’ve listened to feedback from users on their experience using Home. While many people love it, we’ve heard a lot of great feedback about how to make Home substantially better,” a spokesperson for Facebook told The Verge.
“As a result we’re focusing the next few months on adding customization features that address the feedback we received. While we focus on making Home better, we are going to limit supporting new devices and think it makes a lot of sense for EE and Orange to hold off deploying the HTC First in Europe.”
By putting the breaks on a wider release, Facebook will give itself some time to improve Facebook Home and fix any glaring problems. It’s a sensible move, given that it’s vital both HTC and Facebook make a good first impression with new users.
- May 23, 13
Today Mailbox, the quite popular email client that landed first on iPhone, announced the release of an iPad version of its app.
The move is hardly surprising, but it does continue the Mailbox story, one that saw the firm launch to mass impact, and then exit to Dropbox for a reportedly nine-figure sum.
TNW met with Mailbox at its new home in the Dropbox offices – try the bacon, it’s excellent – to see the new app. What will become immediately apparent to you provided that you are familiar with the iPhone version of the service is that the iPad build is remarkably similar.
For reference, here’s Mailbox on your phone:
And here is the iPad application:
It’s the same app, with a reading screen appended to the right side. Other visual effects present in the iPhone version persist in the iPad edition, such as swiping to sort emails, and the color scheme.
Frankly, it’s a great move. The core reason that Mailbox took off as it did was that its design, and user experience were incredible. Those success are repeated in the iPad app by not changing them. In testing, it takes under a minute to become fully comfortable on the new app if you are already a Mailbox user.
It is in fact so stripped down, that you cannot use it in any view but landscape. I suspect the app will be both well received, and highly used.
Mailbox: What’s Next
While I had their ear, I walked with Mailbox’s co-founder Gentry Underwood about its future plans, current growth, and the move to Dropbox. Regarding when it will arrive on the Android platform, the company demurred to comment, stating that it doesn’t comment on release schedules. Though the line was delivered with a knowing smile; they have heard that question before.
How has growth been since it was acquired? The service says that it is “excited” by the rate that new people are singing up, and by “the frequency that they stick around.” No hard numbers, however, it will share.
The reason is actually somewhat interesting: Underwood told me that it doesn’t want to get into a position in which it is optimizing for user numbers, and not user experience. The company, instead of trumpeting user levels, merely wants to “build a great user experience,” and then “get that to as many people as possible.”
If you are a fan of priority inbox, or Gmail’s labels, the company knows that you want that support inside of its product. When? No comment. Underwood did inform me that it is not complete; more, at some point, is coming.
How well has Mailbox fit into the Dropbox family? The fair analogy it seems is that Mailbox fits inside of Dropbox as Instagram has slotted into Facebook. Not too much product pressure, but instead a focus on keeping up what made the service so popular to begin with.
In Underwood’s words, both Dropbox and Mailbox both want to “take the friction out of work.”
Finally, and just for fun: Mailbox brought a mere 14 people to Dropbox. It’s core team is now 16. Now you know.
Top Image Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
- May 23, 13
Red hot payments startup Square is invading Asia after it announced that its service has launched in Japan, which becomes its third market worldwide in addition to the US and Canada.
The company — which counts Starbucks among its investors — will be supported by Sumitomo Mitsui Card Corporation, the same firm that co-launched Visa in the country. Square has long been linked with a launch in Japan (TNW has heard whispers of an early-stage recruitment drive and domain name acquisition since December 2012) and the expansion makes a lot of sense given the relative maturity of mobile payments among consumers in the country.
The Japanese service will be the same as in North America, taking a 3.25 percent of the cut of transactions across its platform with no contract or additional fees.
Square is by no means the first overseas firm to launch a payment solution in Japan. Arch-rival PayPal partnered with SoftBank back in 2011, creating a joint venture to manage its PayPal Here service, while a range of domestic players, including local e-commerce giant Rakuten, are involved in the space.
Jack Dorsey, Square CEO and co-founder, has had much success in Japan already with Twitter, and he’s optimistic on continuing that with his other startup:
I am honored to introduce Square to a country with a rich history of design, innovation and tradition. Square shares the same values and attention to detail in our products. Our tools are made to enable business owners to create a delightful, seamless experience for their customers. I look forward to Square assisting in Japan’s continued economic growth and entrepreneurship opportunities.
The timing of the news is particularly interesting since it comes off the back of news of the departure of Vice President of Partnerships Alex Petrov and Vice President of International Alyssa Cutright which was revealed yesterday.
Cutright, who departed in March, had been responsible for the company’s first international expansion into Canada. The dismissal of Petrov was more bewildering since he was hired from PayPal at the beginning of May, and left without actually starting at Square.
Square’s absence from Europe is all the more marked following its entrance into Asia, but that hasn’t stopped the local payments in Europe scene from blossoming. Startups like Rocket Internet-backed Payleven, Sweden’s iZettle and SumUp in Germany have raised significant funding, introduced requisite Chip & PIN solutions and are expanding across the continent at pace.
Ever the advocate of his companies’ services, Dorsey — who earlier teased a significant news announcement via Twitter — posted a Vine to mark the occasion.
- May 22, 13
Google on Wednesday announced that Raytown, Missouri will receive the company’s Fiber Internet service. Just like for the last few expansions, Google says it doesn’t have an estimate for when the service will be available in the city, merely noting it “will be awhile before we can hook up Raytown residents.”
Before it can bring Fiber to Raytown, Google needs to plan, engineer, and build the necessary infrastructure. Today’s news is merely confirmation for the city’s citizens that they will one day get access to significantly faster Internet: when exactly that will happen is unknown, and there is definitely months of work still ahead.
The Raytown Board of Aldermen yesterday held a meeting to finalize the Google Fiber agreement, among other discussions. The city council meeting had the following section on its agenda (PDF):
SECOND Reading: Bill No. 6312-13, Section V-A. AN ORDINANCE AUTHORIZING AND
APPROVING A NETWORK COOPERATION & SERVICE AGREEMENT AND RELATED
AGREEMENTS WITH GOOGLE FIBER Missouri, LLC. Point of Contact: Tom Cole, Economic
Development Administrator.After Raytown voted to bring the service to its community, Google made the announcement. This month alone, Fiber has been announced to be coming to Shawnee, Grandview, and Gladstone.
What all of these cities have in common is that they can get the technology rather easily thanks to their close proximity to Kansas City, the very first Fiber city. Raytown is located just south east of Kansas City:
Google first announced Fiber was coming to Kansas City in July 2012. The company was quiet regarding other locations for Missourinths, but as of late there have been a slew of announcements, and today’s brings the total to 10, in addition to Kansas City, Kansas: Kansas City, Missouri; Kansas City North, Missouri; Kansas City South, Missouri; Westwood, Kansas; Westwood Hills, Kansas; Mission Woods, Kansas; Olathe, Kansas; Shawnee, Kansas; Grandview, Missouri; and Gladstone, Missouri.
In April, Austin, Texas was named as the second large city to get Fiber, quickly followed by Provo, Utah less than two weeks later. These cities are likely to get their own expansions to surrounding city suburbs.
Top Image credit: Spike Mafford
- May 22, 13
Following changes to its homepage design, profile layout, and recently a mobile app revamp, LinkedIn is rolling out another new change to its service today – a new navigation bar.
The professional social network has been stepping up efforts to simplify its desktop and mobile experience, and the new navigation bar is aimed at helping its users with productivity, according to a blog post on LinkedIn.
The menu of tabs has been simplified to only display links that are of most value to users, while the search bar has been moved front and center. Settings and account options are in the upper right-hand corner – hover over your profile picture to get a drop down menu. (See the new navigation bar above, the old below.)
All English-speaking members of LinkedIn will get the new navigation bar over the next month, the social network says.
LinkedIn hit more than 200 million users earlier this year, and recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Just this month, it also passed 20 million registered users in India, its second largest market behind the US.
However, the social network recently lowered its forecast for second-quarter growth, an indication that its growth may be slowing.
Image Credit: Justin Sullivan via Getty Images
- May 22, 13
Samsung co-CEO Shin Jong-kyu told media last week that he expected the Galaxy S4 to pass 10 million channel sales this week, and that has proven to be true as the electronics giant announced the milestone today. That feat makes it the company’s fastest selling phone ever.
The Galaxy S4 was released at the end of April thus, by hitting 10 million sales already, it has reached the milestone 20 times faster than its predecessor — the Galaxy S3 — which took two months.
Samsung’s Galaxy range actually passed 100 million sales to date (again, this is channel sales, so sales to retailers and operators rather than consumers) in January this year. That news coincided, rather nicely, with the Galaxy S3 clocking up 40 million channel sales within 7 months of its launch.
Yet, despite the impressive figures, Apple’s iPhone is in a league of its own when it comes to sales records. Consumer (not channel) sales of the iPhone 5 topped five million during the first weekend following its release, while the same device logged two million sales in China the weekend after its launch.
At this point it isn’t clear what new devices the Galaxy S4 will come up against. Apple is rumored to be planning to launch a new version of the iPhone later this year, which would become its main contender. Going on today’s announcement, competition from the likes of the well-regard HTC One has not cut into demand for Samsung’s flagship device.
The Galaxy S4 has a premium 5-inch 1080p display, set at an impressive 441 ppi. Under the hood is a quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A15 processor, bumped up by an additional quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7 chipset. The phone has enjoyed a monumental marketing campaign both before and after its launch, starting with a number of teaser videos that included Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd during the Superbowl, as well as this little chap leading up to the launch event in New York.
The Broadway-style unveiling in the Big Apple drew some criticism from the press, but it was without doubt one of Samsung’s grandest and most high-profile media events. Billboard and television advertisements have since swamped a number of major cities, giving the Galaxy S4 the best possible chance at retail.
Related: Confirmed: Samsung buys 10% stake in Korean handset maker Pantech for $48 million
Headline image via Greg Wood / Getty Images
- May 22, 13
Yelp and its review service have once again come under fire, this time over stories where business owners claim that reviews are “too self-centered and not trustworthy” and that it hides reviews. It looks like the company has had enough and is firing back at its critics, saying that the claims are not, and never has been, true.
In a blog post, Yelp’s Vice President of Communications & Public Affair Vince Sollitto, offered up what he says is evidence that contradicts the claims reported to the media. To be clear, the allegations that he hopes to debunk involve some believing that Yelp “manipulates reviews and ratings to reward advertisers or punish non-advertisers.”
Sollitto cites a Harvard Business School study as evidence that supports Yelp’s belief that it doesn’t penalize non-advertisers. Based on that specific study, it shows that the company doesn’t favor advertisers, at least by selective filtering.
In a Los Angeles Times article, journalist Sandy Banks reports that this is the complete opposite case. The story cites a local tutoring firm that received a one-star rating from a single complaint, but allegedly the positive reviews weren’t accounted for. The firm’s owner said that he was approached by Yelp to advertise, but business declined to avoid drawing attention to its one-star rating:
The salesperson claimed she couldn’t do anything directly, but would let the relevant department know. Suddenly, the negative review was gone and some positive reviews got through.
It’s near difficult, or even impossible for us to discern whether a particular rating was influenced through that interaction — anything else is pure supposition.
But Yelp believes that it has further proof to back up its defense, coming from the legal system. Sollitto cites a 2011 decision that dismissed a class action lawsuit brought up by unhappy business owners. In that instance, Yelp faced the extortion claims over its advertising practices and ratings.
In his last point, Sollitto says that Yelp’s position is on solid footing thanks to a Google search — yes, you’ve read that correctly. Quite candidly, he writes:
Want to see if businesses that advertise on Yelp really do get “special treatment?” Feel free to do your own version of a simple Google test like this [site:yelp.com/biz “Yelp sponsor” AND “rude staff”] by inserting your own negative phrases in the last set of quotation marks. The words “Yelp Sponsor” only appear on pages of advertisers, which begs the question: if these Yelp advertisers get a special “Delete” button for negative reviews, why in the world aren’t they using it? (Hint: because it doesn’t exist.) Nor is there any rational incentive for a Yelp sales team member to jeopardize his or her career by pitching a product that can’t be delivered because it doesn’t exist.
Sollitto says that people believe that Yelp is doing something nefarious because it uses an automated software service to protect users from businesses trying to “game the system”. He acknowledges that only a small minority of companies try to write or buy favorable reviews, but anti-gaming measures are still required. However, he admits that out of the more than 39 million reviews Yelp receives, some are perfectly legitimate and do get caught up in the filter.
While not a perfect system, Sollitto believes that it’s an acceptable price to pay to prevent the service from becoming a place with dishonest reviews and ratings.
Photo credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
- May 22, 13
Earlier Today, Twitter announced its Lead Generation product, making it easy for anyone to post offers to Twitter and have people claim them without having to leave Twitter.com.
Shortly after, a job ad posted to Twitter, with the ability to apply for the position without leaving Twitter.com was brought to our attention.
We believe it’s the first job listing to allows candidates to apply for the role without having to venture anywhere but the tweet page itself. We’ve attempted to get absolute confirmation from Twitter but the company’s response was “this isn’t something we can help you with.” Given the fact that Twitter’s Lead Generation features only launched a few hours ago, I think it’s fair to say this is the first.
Check out a screenshot of the job posting below and the link to it here. We woud have embedded the tweet but it seems the lead generation section isn’t a part of embedded tweets just yet.
Note: clicking “find out more” will send your email address to Demonware, the company hiring, and Zartis, the recruitment software company behind the listing itself (Disclosure: Zartis is the company behind our TNW Job Board).
Expect to see many many more of these. And as more appear, expect job hunters to include links to their CV in their Twitter profile, as well as more information about their skills, interests and passions.
Update:
Zartis CEO John Dennehy has reported back to us to say “”I can tell you without any doubt: we’ve got a better response to the Twitter ad tonight than anything we’ve ever seen.” Given the fact that this is something of a novelty, it’s hardly surprising. But a sign of its potential as a recruitment platform? Perhaps.
Image Credit / ThinkStock
- May 22, 13
Twitter unveiled today a new security measure it hopes will better protect user accounts from hacking and unauthorized entries. Called login verification, once enabled, users will be prompted to verify their phone number and email address to confirm their identity.
In light of the recent phishing scams, hacks, and takeovers by either Anonymous or the Syrian Electronic Army, Twitter has started to take measures to ensure user data and privacy is ensured. While acknowledging that most login attempts come from “genuine account owners”, there are those that Twitter hears from that have been compromised from password leaks.
This feature is beginning to roll out today so if you don’t see it right away, be patient. I checked my Twitter account settings at the time of publishing this story and I didn’t see this feature. For those users that have it enabled, users can go to their Account Settings page and check the box next to “Require a verification code when I sign in.”
Just like with Google’s authentication protocol, when a user logs in, they will be prompted to enter in a six digit code that will be sent to their phone via SMS.
Twitter cautions users to not think of this as a guarantee that accounts will never again be hacked. Rather, it says that a strong password is also needed to help keep accounts secure.
From a technical standpoint, the company says:
This release is built on top of Twitter via SMS, so we need to be able to send a text to your phone before you can enroll in login verification (which may not work with some cell phone providers). However, much of the server-side engineering work required to ship this feature has cleared the way for us to deliver more account security enhancements in the future.
Last April, Twitter was reportedly beginning to test two-factor authentication on its platform. At the time, a company spokesperson said it didn’t have anything to announce. With the release of login verification, Twitter joins companies like Evernote and Cloudflare who have implemented the security measure in their service.
Photo credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
- May 22, 13
Photo-sharing app Piictu announced today that it’s joining forces with Kandu, a mystery startup owned by Betaworks, and will be closing its own service as a result by the end of the month.
A blog post published by the Piictu team says that Betaworks “shares our vision and ideals of how technology is a catalyst for a better and richer world.” However, the partnership means that the Piictu app will no longer be available to users as of May 31.
“From the entire team we want to thank you for the great energy, trust and support you have brought to the community and we look forward to bringing you more fun, exciting and heartfelt products in the future,” the team added.
We’re excited to announce Piictu is joining Kandu, a betaworks company! Read more on piictu.com
— piictu (@piictu) May 22, 2013
If you’re a diehard fan of the service, however, all is not lost. Piictu says that users will be able to download all of the photographs that they’ve uploaded through the service until June 7.
Simply email piics@piictu.com using the same email address used during the registration process, and then specify which email address you would like them sent to. It’ll take a few days, but Piictu will then send though a file of some description with all of your photographs.
We covered Piictu all the way back in November 2011, when the fledgling startup was graduating from TechStars’ accelerator program in New York City. Rather like Instagram, users were encouraged to upload photos and give them a caption, before watching the flood of photo interactions and responses from other users.
It’s unclear whether this move is a simple partnership or part of a wider acquisition, but there will undoubtedly be a significant group of users who will be sad to see Piictu close.
We’ve reached out to both parties to understand the reasons behind this move and will update this article if and when we hear back.
Image Credit: Shutterstock/Brian A Jackson
- May 22, 13
I know, I know, the ‘Y is an Airbnb for X’ thing is a horse that’s been beaten to death already, and then some. Still, it happens to be an adequate way to describe Cookening, a brand new online marketplace for home-cooked meals that is making its debut today.
In essence, Cookening invites travellers to eat at local’s homes in the places they visit. The French startup is starting up in France (haha), targeting all foreigners who make their way to the République.
Kicking off with French hosts only (after six months of private alpha testing) makes sense for Paris-based Cookening though, as co-founder Cédric Giorgi explained to me.
After all, France is ranked as the top tourist destination in the world – ahead of the United States – and it is famous for its cuisine.
How does Cookening work?
Basically, Cookening enables people to invite travellers into their homes to share an authentic local meal, with a pinch of culture to boot.
For hosts, Cookening provides a way to establish an online profile and a ‘table’ page showing pictures of his or her favourite dishes, and set a contribution price for guests.
Cookening adds 20 percent on top of that price as a commission.
Foreigners (which can be vacationers but also expats or business travellers) can visit the Cookening marketplace to select a table and connect with hosts to set up a meeting for a joint meal.
Payment is made via Cookening, and hosts only receive the money the day after the shared meal. Giorgi didn’t spell out the reasons for this, but I assume it’s a good way to ensure a trustful relationship between the parties and also helps avoid some of the awkwardness associated with coughing up dough for a meal in someone’s home on the spot.
It’s worth noting that Cookening is far from the only startup trying to become the ‘Airbnb for local food experiences’. Indeed, there are quite a few moving into the same direction, in particular Kitchen.ly, Melba, HomeDine, Super Marmite, Spotsupper and NewGusto.
There’s even a – quite interesting – Quora thread on the topic: “Will “Airbnb for food” be a successful business model?”
That said, Cookening is one of the first to come out of Europe.
Anyway, Giorgi pitches the new venture thusly:
“The moment we spend eating a meal with others is, by essence, a moment of sharing. Cookening wants to amplify that moment by creating a new moment of sharing around gastronomy between foreigners.
With a jeopardized economy, but also social isolation that has increased in the last few years, people want to go back to simple and authentic experiences, to conviviality. Sharing a meal in a warm atmosphere with foreigners meets exactly this need.”
After France, Cookening aims to go global.
Fancy Cookening?
As a current expat in Spain and frequent business traveller, I honestly think this is a great idea, and not just for foodies.
In the same way Airbnb makes me book fewer hotels as time progresses, I can totally see myself using Cookening or similar services to share authentic meals with locals rather than dining at the first random restaurant around the corner on my own.
I can also totally see people who like cooking but often only prepare food for themselves for whatever reason, signing up as hosts to share meals with foreigners and exchange culture with others.
Sébastien Guignot, co-founder and CTO of Cookening, put it this way:
“While we want to make Cookening a major player in the collaborative economy space, our main objective is to facilitate meetings between people from different cultures, with love for good food as a binder.
We want to connect people around food.”
Seriously, would you agree Cookening is on to something here?
Image credit: Thinkstock
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Posts
- May 23, 13
TaskRabbit, the San Francisco startup that has made a name for itself by helping people connect with odd jobs, is now a place where you can find a real job too.
Today TaskRabbit is launching a new set of tools in its three-month-old TaskRabbit for Business portal that are designed to help companies hire ongoing temporary workers for jobs that will span over multiple days, weeks, or months.
The TaskRabbit for Business portal launched in early March at South By Southwest, with the aim of helping companies there bring on staffers to help out over the course of the several-week festival. Since then, TaskRabbit for Business ahs emerged as the company’s fastest-growing segment of users, chief revenue officer Anne Raimondi told me in an interview this week, with 16,000 businesses signing up since it was announced in February.
With the newly expanded features, now businesses in all nine markets throughout the US where TaskRabbit is active can use TaskRabbit for Business to bring on a TaskRabbit as a W-2 employee working more than 15 hours per week. TaskRabbit, which will take a 26 percent commission on all W-2 classified jobs (normal tasks charge a 20 percent fee), will handle all compliance paperwork, including payroll taxes, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance necessary for W-2 workers. Traditional temp agencies typically take a 40 to 60 percent commission, Raimondi says.
It’s a big launch for the 65-person TaskRabbit that puts it squarely into competition with a new set of companies — the temp hiring industry is estimated to be worth some $230 billion annually and is dominated by huge global firms such as Adecco and Manpower. But in a way, it’s a very natural evolution for TaskRabbit, chief revenue officer Anne Raimondi said in an interview this week.
“We built this out because it was the single biggest ask from our business users. Customers were already trying to do it on the site,” Raimondi said. “They’d tell us about how the quality of the people on TaskRabbit is so good, and how they’re familiar with the process it takes to find them and bring them on. But the pieces that were missing were behind the scenes — paperwork processing, tax compliance, W2s, workers compensation, payroll, unemployment insurance, time sheeting.”
Temp jobs will appear in the same stream as regular tasks on the TaskRabbit dashboard, but with a small icon of a briefcase to designate that they’re for ongoing positions. There are some small changes with how errand runners, or “TaskRabbits,” will display interest in the positions — pulling in more detailed resume information from LinkedIn, writing a cover letter, and the like. At the moment there are 11,000 people enlisted as TaskRabbits on the platform.
Small business task posting already accounts for 30 percent of the company’s sales, despite being a minority of the company’s users, Raimondi said. It stands to reason that making it easier for companies to do more things through TaskRabbit could allow the company to capture a bigger slice of the cash that goes back and forth in the business world. With enterprise hotter than ever, it’s no surprise to see startups that have made their names on the consumer front home in on the enterprise world as well. This could be a big boost for TaskRabbit’s revenue, if it all works out well.
- May 23, 13
Remember how over a year ago, everyone was all excited about the forthcoming Pinterest API? CEO Ben Silbermann even teased its release in a March 2012 email to Pinterest users detailing a Terms of Service change. And API documentation even once popped up on the site, only later to lead to a 404? Well, don’t get all excited again, but the API documentation has returned…um, sorta.*
This week, when Pinterest announced support for more pin types (product, recipe, and movie pins) as well as a new Pin It button that works in mobile apps, it also launched a developer site at developers.pinterest.com. The company says the site will be the home to some of the existing documentation and resources that had previously lived on the Pinterest Business site, as well as the new information on the pins and the mobile Pin It button.
“Over time, as more tools become available to third parties, we will continue to post resources on this site,” a Pinterest spokesperson says.
New tools like that long-awaited API, perhaps?
Though not directly linked on the site itself, an easy guess at the URL structure led to this – http://developers.pinterest.com/api/ - a section which contains some half-written (if that) documentation about the Pinterest API. Details are limited, but the site speaks of a restful, JSON API and offers a couple of sections with very little additional info. (See screenshot below).
Previously, the company had been asking developers interested in an API to fill out the form here to “be one of the first to know when it’s ready.” However, several very interested developers tell us that they have yet to hear from Pinterest about the API or even the new Developer site itself, in fact.
* Of course, after asking Pinterest about this page, it disappeared. (The API page now redirects to the main Developers site). Sorry you can’t see it for yourself.
“We are still working on finishing up this page. It is currently not linked to from anywhere else on the site,” the spokesperson says. “We’re still working on some kinks and want to make all of the content and what’s available is great before releasing.”
This isn’t the first time API docs appeared on Pinterest’s homepage before disappearing, so this appearance alone doesn’t guarantee a timeframe for its arrival. But it’s promising.
Plus, Pinterest’s recent launch of richer pins and mobile buttons shows that the company is now moving forward with its plans to turn Pinterest into a platform. And an API is a necessary part of that longer-term goal, in order to enable developers to build rich, third-party apps on top of Pinterest’s service.
- May 23, 13
JustFab, the subscription-based fashion commerce site, is putting the $109 million that it has raised so far to use: today it is announcing the acquisition of The Fab Shoes, a European e-commerce shoe club in France and Spain, to build out its global operations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal will give JustFab a stronger foothold in the European market: it already has operations in Germany, where it has a European HQ in Berlin, as well as in the UK; now it will be adding France and Spain, with the integrated site coming in July 2013. Growth in Europe has been coming at a fast pace for the company so far. In 2012, JustFab did $2 million in sales, CEO Adam Goldenberg tells TechCrunch. “This year we are on track to exceed $30 million.” The Fab Shoes has slightly more than 500,000 users; combining that with the 1.5 million across Germany and the UK, JustFab will now have over 2 million members, with 15 million worldwide.
Call it a funny coincidence, but this isn’t the first acquisition JustFab has made of a would-be competitor with the word “Fab” in its name. Earlier this year, the company acquired FabKids to spearhead a move into children’s fashion. “We have a running joke that whoever is called ‘Fab’, we’ll buy them,” says CEO Adam Goldenberg. (And indeed that may not extend to the biggest Fab of all, Fab.com, which apparently is now raising a $250 million round at a $1 billion valuation.)
More seriously, Goldenberg says that his company is not singularly focused on buying up so-called “clones” of its own service. Taking a lesson from some of the challenges companies like Groupon have had digesting large, inorganic acquisitions to scale up their services — from what we understand Groupon has yet to migrate many of its extensive global assets on to a single common platform with the U.S. operation — JustFab has a different approach.
As Goldenberg describes it, the company’s M&A policy is based on acquiring smaller businesses that complement JustFab’s and are also built on the same subscription model. This means that they can be easily integrated into the bigger company’s infrastructure.
There is another reason for this: it’s increasingly a challenge for e-commerce fashion companies these days to raise money, with much of it going instead to those that have proven to have the most scale. “This is part of the reason why we raised such a big round last year,” Goldenberg noted. The Fab Shoes, founded in early 2012, was raising financing — or trying to — when JustFab came knocking.
“Scale and infrastructure are key if you want to grow quickly in the fashion business,” said Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes, in a statement. “While The Fab Shoes has had a lot of early success, we are thrilled to take our core business to the next level. With JustFab, we can provide our existing members and potential new customers with excellent styles, quality and service for an outstanding shopping experience.”
“We met Pablo and Xisco” — Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes and Xisco de la Calle, its COO — “and we decided this would be a great talent acquisition as well.” De la Calle will become the VP of operations for JustFab Europe, while Pablo becomes General Manager for France and Spain, overseeing 12 employees in Barcelona and Paris.
While some have waved a red flag over subscription-commerce sites — the implication being that they are not transparent enough about how they charge users on a regular basis — Goldenberg is insistent that this is a model that works well and is a hit with its customers, and investors. “There is a subscription commerce funding craze right now,” he says. “But because it is so low-cost you have to have the scale to make the economics of it work. We have millions of satisfied customers.”
- May 23, 13
Twitter today made the latest push in its bid to cozy up to Madison Avenue and the world of big-budget advertising, by tapping more into the kind of mainstream mediums where advertisers like to spend their money. Today the big focus is TV and your living room. In New York, the company announced Twitter Amplify, a way of bringing real-time video into the site, with initial partners including the broadcasters BBC America, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel. And it also announced TV ad targeting, one of the first fruits of the company’s acquisition of BlueFin Labs.
Twitter ad targeting works like this: an advertiser or media buyer uses a special dashboard that Twitter has created for the service, which lets a brand monitor when an ad has aired on TV. Through this, the campaign manager can then send out Promoted Tweets that coordinate with them. They synchronise, Twitter says, using “video fingerprinting technology to automatically detect when and where a brand’s commercials are running on TV, without requiring that advertiser to do any manual tracking or upload media plan details,” Michael Fleischman, one of the co-founders of BlueFin Labs, and now a product manager for Twitter, notes in a blog post.
Through this, the advertiser is able to measure how socially responsive people are to the TV campaigns and vice versa. Using Twitter handles and hashtags on the TV ads will be how those advertisers shuttle people to the social network.
Twitter says it will be able to determine where and when an ad ran on TV, as well as track those who have subsequently tweeted about the ad and the TV program that it ran against. “We believe a user engaged enough with a TV show to tweet about it very likely saw the commercials as well,” the company notes on its blog.
The company is banking on a crucial stat as the leap of faith that this will all work: it says 64 percent of mobile-centric users on Twitter use it in front of the TV at home.
For now Twitter’s targeting service will be available only in the U.S.
Broadcasting clips
Meanwhile, the instream broadcasting clips that are part of Twitter Amplify, starting with BBC America, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel, will be very closely tied to ads and video directly on the platform. This is something that Twitter has already been doing with partnerships with, for example, the NBA, where a video also features a link to an ad:
What’s interesting is that it looks like Twitter will be limiting use of this new kind of Twitter card to paying users, with Glenn Brown, director of promoted content and sponsorships, noting that they will be “powered by Promoted Tweets.” The idea appears to be that rather than replacing the TV experience (not yet at least!) these in-stream videos will be used as “spectacular, timely content that rounds out their TV experience or reminds them to tune in.” In other words, ways of getting people to the TV with teaser clips rather than simply offering them a way of seeing what they want on Twitter and cutting out the tube altogether.
Speaking at the New York event, CEO Dick Costolo talked about how the company has made advertising a more “frictionless” experience because of its emphasis of real-time updates. It’s clear that adding more broadcasting-like experiences into Twitter will further that concept.
The company during its event also threw in some fun ad-land perks: a Q&A session with Glee actress Jane Lynch and a Tweeting vending machine churning out swag.
Twitter has been making increasingly strong moves this year to get its platform to be more ad-friendly (and revenue-friendly). That kicked off in February with the launch of an advertising API so that larger advertisers can better manage their campaigns on Twitter; an improved advertising analytics dashboard; and Google AdWords-style keyword targeting (TC coverage here, here and here). Just earlier this week the company also unveiled the official launch of Lead Generation Cards, something Twitter had been testing for a while already, which lets advertisers include actions like requests for more information that users can get automatically by clicking a button in an advertising tweet. (You can see how this last one also sets the stage for Twitter making the leap into commerce, with one-click purchasing.)
While Twitter has not provided any official public guidance on how much it expects to make in advertising this year or in the future, there has been a lot of speculation about the number because many expect Twitter to go public, with a likely date in late 2013 or 2014, according to observers. A report from eMarketer in March noted that it was raising forecasts for the company to $583 million in 2013 and $950 million in ad sales in 2014, 60% coming from mobile.
The stats that Twitter’s president of global revenue, Adam Bain, provided last year shows just how much the company has grown over the last year. Bain noted at the time that Twitter had 140M+ active users; now that figure is estimated to be closer to 300 million.
Bain also had noted that 55% of users access Twitter on mobile, with 40% growth quarter over quarter, and that among Twitter’s active users, only some 60% actually tweet, but all of them “listen.” And in a sign that Twitter was always going to figure out a better way of leveraging ads on the platform, even a year ago, some 79% of people on the site were already following brands.
More to come.
Image: Jim Prosser
- May 23, 13
Another day, another acquisition by Yahoo.
Yahoo said this morning it’s acquired PlayerScale, a California-based startup that makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming. Financial details haven’t been disclosed.
PlayerScale, which was self-funded and cash-flow positive as of this past January, was founded in 2011. According to a VentureBeat article also from January, the company had a staff of 14. It’s not clear yet how many staff are involved and will be joining Yahoo — we’ve reached out for details and will update this with any information we receive.
The four-year-old PlayerScale says its platform now has more than 150 million players, which marks significant growth from just this past January when our own Anthony Ha reported the platform had crossed the 100 million user line. For now this does not look like a straight acqui-hire situation, as both Yahoo and PlayerScale say the gaming platform will remain active post-acquisition and continue to be developed.
Here is a statement provided by Yahoo PR:
“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide. We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”
And here is PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen‘s blog post on the deal:
“Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!
Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.
We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.
Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.
- Jesper Jensen”
- May 23, 13
The Fedora Project has been supporting Raspberry Pi, the diminutive $35 computer, for some time. Today they’re making the Pidora “remix” of the core Fedora distribution available. Like the Raspbian distribution of Debian, Pidora is compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi.
Pidora offers a couple of interesting little additions to your standard Fedora desktop experience. The reduced oomph of the RPi means that the full-blown GNOME desktop is replaced with the lighter-weight XFCE. Pidora also offers an easy-to-use headless mode for folks running without a monitor. If you attach speakers to your RPi, it’ll helpfully say out loud what it’s IP address is. Clever trick.
The Pidora build was performed at Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology, where they’ve been working with Fedora ARMv5tel/armv7hl build farms for the last couple of years. That experience was directly responsible for Pidora, since the RPi uses the ARMv6 architecture with a dedicated FPU, which is not strictly part of the ARMv6 spec.
According to CDOT’s Chris Tyler, there were three main challenges to getting Pidora out the door:
- Ordering the build — sequencing the initial build of over 10K source packages that have complex and sometimes circular dependency chains can be challenging.
- ARMv6-specific issues — armv5 and armv7 are the most common targets for ARM builds. Some packages make incorrect assumption or are missing code for armv6.
- Native building — Fedora has a native-build philosophy, which requires that package builds be performed on a system capable of executing the compiled code.
Tyler shared some additional details of why Pidora is an interesting option for Raspberry Pi owners:
Pidora contains a number of Raspberry Pi-specific Python modules and native libraries, such as WiringPi, bcm2835, and python-rpi.gpio. The kernel is also compiled to expose the Raspberry Pi interfaces such as I2C, SPI, serial, and GPIO, and several of these can be accessed with /sys file interfaces (even from bash) without using any special libraries or modules. In addition, Pidora contains Raspberry Pi-specific utilities and libraries for access to the Broadcom Videocore IV GPU.
I’ve only just recently acquired an RPi, and last night I installed Pidora onto an SD card. I was off to the races with no trouble at all.
The Fedora folks have a long history of giving out USB sticks with Fedora pre-loaded. I suspect we’ll soon start seeing SD cards pre-loaded with Pidora being handed out at conferences and events.
- May 23, 13
Paper by FiftyThree is one of the most beautiful digital products on the market today.
The immersive drawing app for tablets has won Apple’s Design Award, a Crunchie, and was most recently honored at Time Inc.’s 10 NYC Startups To Watch party. So how do you build on that kind of success?
Well, according to the founders, Paper is but the first product in a series of creative tools. The team is thinking pretty seriously about what comes next, and it seems as though a stylus is where things are headed.
“The human hand has evolved to use tools,” said co-founder Georg Petchnigg. “You have wrists to do fine-detailed work, so the idea of a stylus is really interesting to us. It’s something that we’re thinking about because we want to deliver the best creation experience on tablets, so a stylus is right at the forefront of that.”
Currently, FiftyThree recommends customers on its website buy a stylus, linking to an Amazon stylus page as well as promoting the Pogo Connect.
But new products aren’t the only concern at FiftyThree. The team is also constantly thinking about how to reach a broader audience. As co-founder Julian Walker put it, “everyone out there is creative.”
That said, the company recently launched a new stream of content called Made With Paper, to help users get inspiration from other works created in the app. This is just a first step in building out more social, community-based features that will not only attract new users but keep loyal ones engaged.
- May 23, 13
More signs today the HTC First might also be the last smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed: UK carrier EE confirmed today that the first Facebook Home phone won’t be launching in the UK soon as planned, as Facebook has decided to concentrate its efforts on making improvements to the Home software before looking to add international markets. EE says it will soon be contacting customers who already used its pre-order system to express interest in the First to let them know about the delay, which is indefinite in length.
Here’s the full statement direct from EE:
Following customer feedback, Facebook has decided to focus on adding new customisation features to Facebook Home over the coming months. While they are working to make a better Facebook Home experience, they have recommended holding off launching the HTC First in the UK, and so we will shortly be contacting those who registered their interest with us to let them know of this decision.
Rest assured, we remain committed to bringing our customers the latest mobile experiences, and we will continue to build on our strong relationship with Facebook so as to offer customers new opportunities in the future.
We’ve also received a near-identical statement from Orange in France, where customers were also able to register their interest, so this isn’t limited to just the UK.
This is not great news for either Facebook or HTC. We’ve seen reports that Facebook Home has been performing poorly as a download, and that the First isn’t selling well in the U.S. Home currently has a 2.5 cumulative average rating in the Google Play store, and AT&T is reportedly in the process of discontinuing the HTC First, though we’ve not heard definitely either way if that’s the final word as of yet.
A so-called “Facebook Phone” under-performing is nothing new; the HTC Status did almost just as poorly, lasting only 36 days before AT&T started considering a swing of the axe.
As of press time, there’s still a button on the Facebook Home splash page that directs you to a page where you can express interest in a pre-order, but presumably that will come down as the carriers move to reflect this change in their own pages and alert customers of the change in the First’s status.
Update: Facebook has povided the following official statement regarding its decision, which mirrors those issued by EE and Orange France:
We’ve listened to feedback from users on their experience using Home. While many people love it, we’ve heard a lot of great feedback about how to make Home substantially better. As a result we’re focusing the next few months on adding customization features that address the feedback we received. While we focus on making Home better, we are going to limit supporting new devices and think it makes a lot of sense for EE and Orange to hold off deploying the HTC First in Europe.
- May 23, 13
Nextdoor, the company that lets people create private social networks accessible only to their local neighbors, has launched its first native mobile app for iOS, Nextdoor for the iPhone.
The launch comes amidst an apparently strong period of growth for the San Francisco-based Nextdoor. In an interview this week, CEO Nirav Tolia said that Nextdoor now has private networks created for 12,600 neighborhoods across all 50 states, which is more than 50 percent up from just three months ago when Nextdoor had some 8,000 neighborhoods created on its system and a significant boost from late March when it crossed the 10,000 neighborhood line.
The launch should also be a welcome debut for Nextdoor’s users, as up until now 30 percent of visits to Nextdoor.com have been coming through mobmile browsers, with 30 percent of new user invitations occurring through a mobile browser as well. “A mobile app was our number one requested feature and has been for past year,” Tolia said. The company is currently working on an Android app that should be released at some point in the next few months.
In our phone interview, Tolia said that the mobile launch could be a “game changer” for Nextdoor’s usage, from being aware of urgent issues such as crime (like Alexia’s jog-discouraging local robbery) and natural disasters to more everyday neighborhood fare like lost pets. “When you have a camera and an instant content delivery device in your hand, all of these things become better,” Tolia said. You can also use the app to easily private message your neighbors.
Nextdoor, which first launched in 2011, has raised $40.2 million in funding from a heavy-hitting list of venture capital firms including Greylock Partners, Benchmark, DAG Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Allen & Company, Pinnacle Ventures, along with new investors Bezos Expeditions and Google Ventures. The company has around 50 staff.
Here are some screenshots of Nextdoor for iPhone (click to enlarge):
- May 23, 13
Becoming an investor is easier than it’s ever been, and yet the vast majority of people today aren’t making individual investments. To help get more people investing, Loyal3 has built a platform enabling consumers to invest in companies without paying transaction or management fees. And to meet that goal, the company has raised more money in an effort to democratize stock ownership.
Loyal3 brought on another $18 million in Series C financing, which was led by DNS-L3, an entity controlled by the business interests of Michael Pucker and Gigi Pritzker Pucker. Additional investors include former Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Loyal3 Chairman and CEO Barry Schneider, both existing investors in the company. Altogether, it’s now raised $45 million to make investing easy and accessible for regular investors.
Despite falling transaction and management fees, as well as wider availability of online tools for investing in stocks, only about 18 percent of people in the U.S. have made individual investments, according to Schneider. Part of the reason for that is the costs involved with making stock purchases, but part of it is also connected to the ease of use — or lack thereof — on most online trading platforms.
Loyal3 seeks to change that, by enabling its users to easily invest in brands that they know and recognize. It allows investors to purchase as little as $10 in stock for the top 50 brands on Facebook, as well as some other brands that the company works with.
Rather than having its users sort through various tickers or search for public companies themselves, Loyal3 provides visitors to its platform with the logos of brands they can invest in. Once they choose a brand they have an affinity for, it takes about three clicks to actually put money into those companies.
Being the curious dude I am, I tested out the platform for myself, putting $10 into a company I have an affinity for — AB InBev.* Sure enough, the process was drop-dead simple, even for someone like me, who tends to think he’s too dumb and poor to make individual investments.
And that is the point: Loyal3 makes it easy enough and cheap enough for basically anyone to buy stock. With a ridiculously low minimum purchase price and a simple purchasing interface, the company makes stock ownership accessible to pretty much anyone. In addition to individual purchases, individuals can choose to schedule monthly transactions to be automatically deducted from their bank accounts. There’s a minimum of $10 per investment, but a maximum of $2,500 per stock per month.
How can it provide this fee-free service? Loyal3 does it by getting brands to pay whatever transaction fees are associated with the trades. For them, giving common investors ownership is another form of brand marketing, and it creates greater affinity between the purchaser and the company itself. According to Schneider, people spend more, refer their friends more, and shop more often with companies they have direct ownership in.
From a capital markets perspective, the program also brings incremental demand for participating companies’ stock. While it won’t necessarily move markets, in the long term this type of program could help stabilize the price of certain stocks. Loyal3 doesn’t allow stock shorting, and it doesn’t lend shares to speculative investors who wish to short certain stocks. Schneider says it also provides a lower cost way for companies to manage retail shareholders.
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* I would have invested my $10 in a tech company like Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, or Google, but that would have been a HUGE CONFLICT OF INTEREST. - May 23, 13
The biggest names in technology have normally been unflinching champions for the rights of same-sex couples. Yet, they were conspicuously silent this week as the Senate rejected the right for American same-sex couples to petition for visas for their foreign-born partners.
“I take the Republican sponsors of this important legislation at their word that they will abandon their own efforts if discrimination is removed from our immigration system,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy after pulling a provision for foreign-born gay partners after Republicans threatened to abandon support for the fragile comprehensive immigration reform bill.
High-skilled immigration reform has been priority No. 1 for leaders in the technology industry who have aggressively lobbied for more immigrant scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. Despite near unanimous support for more high-skilled immigrants, disagreements over border security, undocumented workers, and (now) gay rights have threatened reform for any part of the immigration system.
“I’m a politician. That means I have chosen my life’s work in the constraints of the system to accomplish as much good as I can. I accept the tough choices, the painful but necessary imperfection of compromise, which is a part of our system of government,” admitted Senator Chuck Schumer, who voted for the compromised draft in the influential Judiciary Committee, which is charged with crafting the law.
But, the battle for immigration reform is far from over and the technology community still has time to prove it’s morally strong enough not to sacrifice the rights of one group for another.
In the past, they’ve been big supporters of same-sex rights. Apple, Facebook, and a laundry list of other companies sent an unequivocal affidavit to the Supreme Court on why gay rights are essential to competing in a global economy, where many of our national competitors are more supportive of their gay employees.
Google, almost every year, unleashes a full-fledged social media campaign to stoke grassroots support of state amendments legalizing same-sex marriage (watch one adorable video below).
Indeed, the temptation to compromise on civil rights progress is not new to the United States. In the 19th century, abolitionist and feminist leaders erupted in vicious internal struggles over whether black abolitionists should also support female equality at the risk of their own causes. Eventually, black rights hero Frederick Douglass was persuaded by icononic feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that we should not choose between the rights of groups for political expediency.
“I have never yet been able to find one consideration, one argument, or suggestion in favor of man’s right to participate in civil government which did not equally apply to the right of woman,” Douglass said, after years of debate.
The 21st century civil rights struggles face the same dilemma. If supporters claim to the be on the “right side of history”, then we should recognize that well-intentioned piecemeal civil rights for political expediency has historically been the most biting form of bigotry.
The tech community I know and love is not a culture of moral compromisers. This is your moment. Speak up.
[Image Credit: SlapUpsideTheHead]
- May 23, 13
Being behind in a market sucks, and it’s understandable to want to lash out at the top dog, as Microsoft has shown it’s willing to do with Google in search and email, and now with Apple in tablet computers. A brand new Windows 8 ad pits the iPad against Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet, in an attempt to show how much more versatile the Asus VivoTab is vs. the iOS device.
Microsoft uses Siri’s voice (which isn’t difficult, given that it’s a fairly generic computer-generated female tone) to highlight what the Windows 8 tablet can do that the iPad can’t, including things like live tiles (it took me a couple views to figure out what “I don’t update like that” even meant), Windows Snap multitasking, and… PowerPoint. Then finally we get a price comparison, showing the much cheaper price tag for the Asus.
The problem is that not only is the Siri construct weak and her actual lines poorly written, but the abilities Microsoft chooses to highlight show exactly why it doesn’t “get” the tablet market. People aren’t looking for multitasking PowerPoint slide deck-creating machines; they have computers for that.
The closing bit here is maybe the worst part; showing that Apple’s iPad can easily provide a remarkably realistic experience for playing Chopsticks on the screen is not the way to trash your competition, especially if you noticeably can’t offer up an equivalent experience on your own hardware. Apple uses that in its own ads for a reason, and that’s to highlight the magical, delightful experiences users can have on its device. Countering that with a bunch of sober (though admittedly useful) features isn’t the way to turn the tide back in your favor.
An earlier version of this post mistakenly identified the Asus VivoTab in this ad as a Surface.
- May 23, 13
Sometimes, when a truly innovative startup is acquired by a larger company, innovation slows to a crawl. And other times, when an acquisition happens, a company gets the backup and investment it needs to keep on innovating. It seems like that latter case is true for Mailbox, which, two months after being acquired by Dropbox, is now ready to release its iPad app to the world.
Mailbox has been working on the app since well before the acquisition, testing out various form factors and iterations in an effort to get it just right. In a video interview last week, Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood showed us the app, explaining how the company reformatted its features specifically for the larger screen of the iPad. For one thing, the app works only in landscape mode, with a list of messages that have yet to be read on the left-hand side, and a preview pane so that users can read emails in full on the right.
“The iPad is an interesting design challenge,” Underwood told me. “It sits halfway between a mobile device and a laptop. Sometimes we use them like luxuriously large phones and other times we use them almost as laptop replacements.” As a result, that changes what people do with their email client.
“Our goal was to create an experience that was as fast and fluid for processing mail as you might do on a phone — so very quickly being able to go through and triage your messages like you can on Mailbox for iPhone,” he said. “But also, leaving enough real estate for those times when you might have a keyboard up… and you’re actually trying to use your iPad as you might use a laptop to actually get through messages in a more intentional way.”
The goal for Mailbox was to try to find a marriage between those situations that satisfied both conditions. To do that, Mailbox took advantage of the greater screen real estate to give users a greater view into the mail that they had to get through. It starts with landscape mode, which brings in both the ability to see which messages you have yet to read through, while also being able to view entire emails at once.
“A large number of people use these [devices] as laptop replacements, particularly people on the road a lot who want to take advantage of the lighter weight, the longer battery life, no need to plug it in during the day,” Underwood said. “For those people, we wanted to create an experience that was as good, or better, than they might find on their own laptops.”
To replicate the experience of those so-called road warriors, Underwood even went without a laptop for a while, living only with his mobile phone and tablet, as a way to “build empathy” for the mobile-only email user. While testing it for himself was helpful, Mailbox also relied on the Dropbox testing community to get feedback for the iPad app before release as well.
What the company learned was that just because it had more screen to work with, that didn’t mean it should add unnecessary clutter. Notably, next to the email list and the preview pane, Mailbox doesn’t also give a window into all of the different folders that you can pre-sort items into. Underwood said that the team had tested that out, but found the experience ultimately too busy. So, like the iPhone app, the iPad app hides the list of folders.
“We spent a fair amount of time trying to create an experience that was consistent with what people are used to today,” he said. Even so, the new app takes advantage of the bigger screen to enable longer-form composition, whether that means using the built-in touch-screen keyboard, or some sort of Bluetooth-enabled iPad accessory designed to make composing on the device even easier.
This is the first major release that Mailbox has had since its acquisition by Dropbox. Being part of the larger company means more infrastructure support, and Mailbox has hired a few new faces in engineering since the acquisition. Some of the other advantages include being able to take advantage of Dropbox’s support team, as well as its recruiting, operations, and administrative infrastructure.
While it’s great that Mailbox now has an app for iPhone and iPad, there are still other platforms for it to conquer. What comes next? Android? Desktop?
“We don’t really speak about the specific order of the future [road map], but I will say that people ask us often for an Android app. We hear often requests for a desktop app as well. We’re going as fast as we can to get Mailbox on as many device and get support for as many email providers as we can,” Underwood told me.
Great non-answer, Gentry! For all you non-iPhone or -iPad users, hold your horses while they work to get the app on more devices. In the meantime, check out the video and demo above to get a look at what you can expect from Mailbox for iPad — that is, if you haven’t downloaded it already.
- May 23, 13
WibiData, the enterprise data management startup co-founded by Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball, has raised $15 million in a Series B funding led by Canaan Partners with participation from existing investors, including NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.
Canaan Partners partner Ross Fubini has joined the WibiData board. NEA Partner Jon Sakoda will continue to serve on the board as well. This brings the company’s funding to over $20 million.
Simply put, WibiData builds large-scale data applications for companies. WibiData wants to help companies manage and analyze complex business data about users so you can predict how they are going to interact with the product in the future. Data such as email records, web histories and other interactions cannot be easily analyzed together, but WibiData aims to solve this problem. Specifically, the technology can be used for personalization for a number of web companies, including consumer web, e-commerce and gaming companies.
Bisciglia explains to us that the focus of the startup is connecting the models that data scientists build on backend of large online businesses in realtime to front end applications.
The company’s client base counts Wikipedia, Rich Relevance, Opower, and Atlassian. For example, Wikipedia has used WibiData to better understand their contributor community, such as analyzing revision histories, understanding individual areas of expertise, and identifying trends in contribution patterns. Another retail Big Data Application suite allows organizations to personalize content, improve search relevancy, deliver targeted recommendations and integrate anomaly detection directly into application channels across the web, mobile devices and in store.
On the backend, Cloudera leverages Apache Hadoop to manage and analyze large amounts of data. Bisciglia has in-depth experience with the technology as the founder of Cloudera, a developer and commercial distributor of Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the worldʼs largest and most popular web sites. Prior to Cloudera, Bisciglia was a senior engineer at Google where he founded and led Google’s Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, which provides Google hosted computational resources to facilitate education and research to universities around the world.
WibiData applications, says Bisiglia, are based on the open source Kiji.
Canaan Partners’ Fubini explains the firm’s investment in the company: “Christophe and the team have been at the vanguard of the Hadoop movement, providing unparalleled insight into the resources involved deploying Hadoop across Fortune 500 companies…WibiData’s Big Data Applications will be essential in delivering on the promise that Big Data offers enterprises.”
As for what the new funding will be used for, Bisiglia says that Wibidata, which now counts several large enterprises as customers, will be used towards major expansion. The company will be hiring more staff in sales, marketing, product and engineering and will likely triple in size in the coming year.
It comes of no surprise that investors and doubling down on the enterprise data space. And with Bisiglia as a founder, VCs are betting that he’ll be able to build another successful data and infrastructure company.
- May 23, 13
Social networking and messaging firm Imo.im has an interesting new take on social networking, and it’s raised money to get more people on board! The funding was led by co-founder Georges Harik, who also just happened to be one of Google’s first 10 employees, and therefore is swimming in money.
The funding of Imo.im is designed to help it become a sort of next-generation social network. Today’s social networks are too focused on connecting you with people from work and high school and college. To your annoying neighbors and their pets. But the truth is, why would you just want to talk to people you already know?
This is the 21st century. Get with it. The new social network is all about finding new people you haven’t been introduced to and annoying them with your stupid status updates and teenage-and-pregnant baby pictures.
And so Imo.im, which started out as a platform for communicating with people on various messaging services but has evolved to become a social network in and of itself. Until recently, that was based on a “Meet New People” feature, but now users will be able to try to get to know one another with the addition of a thing called “broadcasts.”
With the Broadcasts feed, users will be given a channel to easily discover new people, information, and topics based on their own interests. Since Imo.im will learn about those interests in the least creepy way possible, it’ll be able to suggest people to you without you even having to make an explicit ask about things you have in common. They’ll be able to take and share photos into that feed, which will be broadcast out to other users.
- May 23, 13
Although the majority of Shazam‘s over 93 million U.S. users still use the app on their smartphones to identify, tag and share the songs they’re “hearing,” a growing chunk of that user base – around 10 million in the U.S. last year – has used Shazam to identify TV programs and ads. Today, the company aims to better serve this audience with the release of a new, universal iOS application which introduces a number of new features, including the ability to have the “shazaming” process run automatically in the background.
This feature, called “Auto-Tagging,” is the standout in today’s release. Before, users had to kick off the tagging option by tapping on the screen, then waiting while Shazam listened and then identified the sounds they were hearing, whether that was music, a TV show or a TV ad. While that’s still how things will work on the smartphone version, the updated iPad app now offers a more passive experience, designed for those using the app as a second screen while watching TV.
Notably, the feature will not be switched on by default.
Instead, after downloading the updated version, users will be walked through a brief tutorial that explains what Auto-Tagging is all about, then allowing users to switch it on, if desired. If they do so, the app will run in the background, listening for anything it can identify, and loading those items into a carousel at the top of its homescreen.
From here, users can interact with the content much as before – sharing it on social media, buying the song, show or movie from iTunes or Amazon, or in the case of TV shows, learning more about the cast and episode, viewing a playlist of songs in the broadcast, or heading off to sites like Wikipedia, IMDb, the official website and/or store, and more.
Some TV shows will work continue to work with the company to offer enhanced experiences, like “American Idol” had done in the past, and “The Voice” is doing now. These experiences are generally offered to TV show producers for free, with the stipulation that they have to promote Shazam on air.
However, the Fiat Brand and Fox Broadcasting Company are sponsoring the new app for the first three months after today’s debut, which is a paid relationship.
“Auto-tagging sets us apart from the industry,” explains Shazam’s EVP of Marketing, David Jones of the app’s big new feature. “The whole idea is that Shazam was already lightning fast and couldn’t be easier – it was press one button and, in a couple of seconds, you got the answers. We just one-upped ourselves. We got rid of that step,” he adds.
The company started working with television content as far back as 2010, and slowly began to build up its database with several dozen TV shows. It enabled “Shazaming” of many major events, including the Grammys, Super Bowl, and MLB games. Then, in September 2012, Shazam announced the app could now tag any show on any channel.
Today, the app supports 160 channels of live or DVR’d TV, including all nationwide programming and most nationwide TV ads as well – even the ones which have not been Shazam-optimized by those paying to run ad campaigns. To date, over 150 brands have run over 250 TV ad campaigns, leading to a “double-digit millions” revenue stream run rate, that is “doubling every quarter,” says Jones. “It’s a ‘green field’ situation. We can grow this as fast as we can move,” he says.
Meanwhile, he notes his company’s second screen competitors are struggling to get a couple of million downloads. (To be clear, he means apps used to ID content on TV. SoundHound is a Shazam competitor with over 100 million users, but its focus is on music.)
Though auto-tagging is the biggest of today’s new features, the updated app will also offer a revamped user experience on iPad which includes a way to view songs and TV shows trending around the U.S., as well as popular songs around the world. The social features which previously let users see what their friends are tagging so they could comment on that, are also now available on iPad, as are the full screen “LyricPlay” lyrics for music.
And Shazam has extended its relationship with Rdio, now allowing subscribers to hear a song in its entirety, instead of just a preview. Users can also sign up for trials, and Shazam will earn affiliate income for those who convert to paying customers. Jones declined to go into the details of the two companies’ specific deal, here, though.
With now over 300 million users worldwide, 93 million in the U.S, plus $300 million in music sales last year, and double-digits millions more in TV ad sales, the company is leading the pack of listening companions and second screen apps today. The updated iOS app will help it progress even further, and an Android tablet app is now in the works, as well.
- May 23, 13
After the aesthetic elegance of Dots, prepare for another injection of minimalist puzzle game beauty. Blip Blup is the new game from London-based design house and app studio ustwo — maker of Whale Trail, a mobile game that snagged an e-book deal, plus a raft of other interesting apps including most recently Rando (random photo-sharing) and Honk (visual messaging).
Blip Blup has just launched on iOS for iPhone and iPad, either free with ads, or $1.99 ad free. It’s also available free with ads on Android (upgradable to ad-free via in-app purchase). The basic gameplay involves triggering pulses of light so that they fill in all the empty space in each level. Light pulses can be blocked by walls, and won’t travel around corners but will travel diagonally. There are also other elements introduced as your progress, such as arrows that force the direction of the light and explosive tiles to avoid. The fewer light pulses (blips) you use to fill in a level, the higher your score.
The first thing that stands out about Blip Blup is that ustwo has gone for a minimalist, abstract design aesthetic, rather than a skeumorphic look and feel — despite apparently experimenting with the latter. Too much realism just didn’t fit the puzzle gameplay, says ustwo. “Getting to the final treatment was an exercise in finding a balance between our love for beautiful design as a studio and simple graphics that allow the puzzle-solving to be centre-stage,” it explains in a blog.
“Skeuomorphic design in this instance would have stifled the complex puzzle solving nature of Blip Blup,” adds ustwo co-founder Matt Miller. “The puzzle and the solution needed to be at the front and centre stage with nothing getting in the way of that focus. We believe in the core gameplay of Blip Blup and feel that the minimal design supports that without overwhelming it with unnecessary graphics.”
Miller says Blip Blup is designed specifically to appeal to people who are also interested in visual design, and who therefore might not be turned on by traditional gaming aesthetics. “Over the past decade and as a direct result of mobile app-based gaming, gamers have increased in terms of numbers and diversity. This shift has meant that creators, who previously had to appeal to large and ‘safe’ audiences, can instead cater to more specific and targeted audiences. For example appealing to players who are interested in interacting with great visual design, rather than those who prefer cartoon characters and fantasy locations,” he tells TechCrunch.
“Minimalist design in game visuals presents interesting challenges. In a way, you are reducing your available visual toolset, to a few essential tools. But with these tools, you still need to convey success and failure, important objects, objects that are on or off, and so on. The mass audience definitely reacts favourably to matching shiny gems together, or seeing projectiles strike a tower of glass and wood blocks. But there’s an audience out there that love the cleanliness of a grid, or the satisfaction of filling an abstract space completely with colour even more.”
“We see visual design and interaction design as one area in gaming and this means we can ultimately create new experiences and potentially speak to a new audience,” he adds.
Blip Blub’s minimalist design certainly brings to mind betaworks’ Dots (not least because ustwo wanted to call it just Blip, before realising that name had been taken), which also recently caught our eye. Or even Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity. But with so many mobile games still opting for a cartoon aesthetic — a la Angry Birds — taking a different tack by stripping back the visuals feels refreshing — likely making these puzzlers stand out more than they would have on gameplay alone. It also seems to echo the wider digital design trend that’s been flattening graphics and decluttering visuals all over the web and mobile, doing away with realistic bells and whistles and replacing them with plain blocks of colour to allow shapes to shine through.
Blip Blub doesn’t feel entirely flat — the light pulses move via subtle colour gradations — but it’s certainly minimalistic. Its look is complemented by an ambient soundtrack that weaves in gameplay actions, with each light pulse adding a few more notes to the soundscape. (In fact ustwo says the sound is “50% of the Blip Blup experience”.) The overall effect is reflective, meditative and very relaxing. This would be a great game to play to destress after a hard day.
The slow, relaxed paced is matched by the gradual gameplay progression, with basic tutorial puzzles leading you step by step to proper levels and from there turning the screw to up the difficulty by adding new elements to the mix. There are 120+ puzzles in the free game distributed across nine levels, and 140+ across 10 levels in the paid game.
- May 23, 13
Jawfish Games, a Seattle-based startup run by a former professional poker player and the engineering team that built the Fult Tilt Poker site, launched a gaming platform that can host more than 100,000 simultaneous players in real-time tournaments across iOS, Android and the web.While asynchronous, turn-based games have done well on mobile platforms and Facebook over the last five years, pure, real-time multiplayer games haven’t caught on as quickly partially because data connections haven’t been fast enough and because a game developer would need a critical mass of players to match them synchronously.
But Jawfish, which has raised $3.65 million in funding from firms like Founders Fund’s angel fund, Right Side Capital and other angels, says it has built a platform to do just that. Their platform can support more than 100,000 simultaneous players and host 1 million tournaments for less than $10 in bandwidth.
They initially came out with a few games in partnership with Seattle’s Big Fish Games, but now they’re bringing out more of their own titles.
Because Jawfish’s CEO Phil Gordon is a championship professional poker career who has hosted The World Series of Poker and published five books on the game, the company is doing a poker game (of course). The poker game is designed to have the look and feel of a broadcasted game with Gordon’s running commentary throughout play.
They’ve also launched a basic word search game, called Jawfish Words, that lets players compete on the getting the highest scores, finding the longest words or the most diagonals. There more obscure goals too, like finding the most words with a single vowel. They launched that game last month through a partnership with Amazon. The company has pointed out some promising stats: the average player spends 21 minutes and plays 10.7 tournaments a day. Each tournament is about 60 to 90 seconds long.
They plan to building out a suite of classic games, from casual to casino titles that make use of the platform. “Basically what we’re looking to do is to take games that people know and love and reinvent them for multiplayer real-time tournaments,” Gordon said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do across a wide spectrum of games.”
While Jawfish hasn’t opened its platform up to third-party developers, there are other gaming networks that add multi-player mode to indie titles that are blowing up. Nextpeer, an Israeli startup, went from having just a few games in its network to well over 1,000 developers in the last several months.
“Barring a top 10-kind of franchise wanting to use our platform for multiplayer mode, it’s incredibly unlikely that we’re going to work with other studios,” Gordon said. “Certainly not for anything but the top tier. We know that our platform is the only one of its kind in the world and we think that it’s in our interest to keep the platform close to the vest and develop our own games.”
- May 23, 13
No, we still don’t have any word from Amazon on where it stands with a smartphone, but it’s definitely making its mobile ambitions clear anyway. Today, the e-commerce giant took two more steps in its strategy to scale up its Kindle Fire tablet business. It announced that it will now sell the two higher-end versions of the device, the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, in 170 countries. And it also said that its Amazon Appstore will now be available in 200 countries.
Pre-orders in 170 countries begins today with the first models shipping out June 13, priced at the local equivalents of $284 for the 8.9″ model and $214 for the 7″ model.
Up to now, the Android-based Appstore, which works both on Amazon’s Fire tablet range but also other Android devices, has only been live in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China and Japan, with Brazil next in line. It makes sense that Amazon will have opened it up at the same time as it’s ramping up its Fire tablet distribution.
“We are thrilled to be expanding the reach of our global app distribution to nearly 200 countries,” said Mike George, VP of Apps and Games at Amazon, in a statement. “By further expanding the distribution of apps to millions of customers around the world, we are continuing to make it easy for customers to enjoy their Amazon apps on Kindle Fire and any Android device.”
Amazon will be kicking off with a couple of free games — a tradition of Amazon’s when it opens up a new store front to focus on some bestsellers. In this case, it will be “Fruit Ninja” and “Cut the Rope: Experiments,” which will be free respectively on May 23 and May 24.
On a more long-tail note, it’s important for Amazon to make its Appstore as globally available as possible as a way of enticing more developers to the platform. In addition to giving them the promise of wide audiences, Amazon has also turned on features like in-app payments, subscriptions and even its own virtual currency, Amazon Coins, to give developers more flexibility in how they make money on its plaform (and, taking a page from Apple’s book, tie them and users further into the Amazon ecosystem in the process). It comes also on the heels of the company previewing the global Appstore availability in April, when it began to invite developers to start submitting their apps.
The company, as usual with Amazon, has remained tight-lipped on how many tablets it has sold since launching the Kindle Fire range in 2011. Today, however, Dave Limp, VP, Amazon Kindle, noted that the Kindle Fire HD (the 7″ model) has been the company’s “#1 best-selling item in the world” since being launched.
Although the HD is available with an optional LTE component in the U.S. it looks like this rollout is WiFi-only: to improve range and service, it comes with dual-band Wi-Fi capability for both 2.4 GHz network and 5 GHz network services. As with other Kindle Fire products, the two models going on sale today will work with Amazon’s existing and wide range of content, including apps, films, TV, games and 300+ books “exclusive to the Kindle Store.”
The move comes two months after Amazon dropped the price on the bigger two tablets, with an 8.9″ screen, to $269. At that time, it started selling it in Europe and Japan.
To date, Amazon has been selling the two HD tablets in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan. For a company like Amazon, which operates on a basis of competition-beating prices and low margins, it’s important for it to add as much scale as it can to its operation, so expanding Fire HD sales globally is an essential part of that strategy.
- May 23, 13
Mobile payment platform Square has announced that it is now publicly available in Japan, its first country outside of North America. The iPhone is very popular in Japan, making it a potentially strong crossover market for Square, which first launched on iOS before also becoming available on Android.
The move is a bold one for Square, considering that Japan is already a mature market for mobile payments, which were pioneered there by NTT docomo and KDDI. PayPal, Square’s main rival, already has a foothold in Japan, where its partners include mobile operator Softbank. Square’s advantage there may be CEO and founder Jack Dorsey’s emphasis on the platform’s aesthetics. In fact, Dorsey stated that Square’s priority on design influenced the company’s decision to make Japan its first stop in Asia.
“I am honored to introduce Square to a country with a rich history of design, innovation and tradition. Square shares the same values and attention to detail in our products,” said Dorsey.
Square’s association with the iPhone will also help it in Japan, where Apple’s smartphone is still beating out Android devices. According to data from Kantar, iPhones make up 66% of sales there, compared to Android’s 32% share.
The company has taken a slow-and-steady approach to its international expansion, stating that it has no “specific timeline” for Square’s deployment in other countries. Its first step outside the U.S. when it launched in Canada in October. At that time, there was much speculation that Asia would be the next target in Square’s international expansion strategy.
While it’s taken its time tackling global markets, Square has recently launched several new features that shows it is growing increasingly serious about positioning its payment services as a rival to PayPal’s dominance. Earlier this week, the beta version of Square Cash, which enables payments to be sent by email, surfaced. Square also recently hired the former Google SMB of global sales and operations, Francoise Brougher, to serve as their business lead. Brougher will help Square with customer support and partnerships, in addition to growing out the company internationally.
Square has partnered with Sumitomo Mitsui Card Corporation (SMCC), the company that introduced Visa to Japan.
The Square Reader allows businesses to accept credit card payments from mobile devices for a transaction fee of 3.25% per swipe.
