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A Story About Threading The Needle On Mobile

2013-08-25T12:51:00.001-07:00

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor toTechCrunch. As a disclaimer, he’s an employee of and a early-advisor to Swell, which is mentioned in this post. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

As some of you may know, I’ve been lucky to be a small part of the team behind Swell, a new kind of radio experience built initially for iPhone. After spending many months in stealth mode leading up to our public release at the end of June 2013, I finally gained some perspective with which to reflect on all the little product and strategic decisions the team made to deliver what is, in my (biased) view, a great version one product in a crowded, competitive, and noisyconsumer app marketplace.

About two months into the wild, we are fortunate to have received some nice feedback and organic mentions on Twitter, where much of our core audience resides. Undoubtedly, completing version one only means that we have a long way to go, things to add and mistakes to learn from, but with that said, there could be some useful lessons hidden in the tiny decisions Swell made that may help the next mobile developer down the road.

This post is an attempt to collect those decisions and analyze them with the benefit of hindsight, as well as to share them with you all. The list may start with obvious elements, but please bear with me as the decisions get more precise.

1) Platform – Mobile vs. Web: The team wanted to leverage its expertise in bringing complex technologies to mobile. Given their experience with SnapTell, that meant focusing on the latest iPhones and iOS. It may be en vogue to comment now that it’s time for Android-first, but from a technology development perspective, going that route is either too risky or too difficult for an early-stage startup that has limited resources and time. (The web is a great place to test ideas and build an audience, as well as being a tool to help hack mobile distribution, but the team didn’t feel a web player for Swell radio would deliver a “wow” experience.)

2) Searching For A Daily Active Use Case: One lesson the SnapTell team learned is that using a mobile image app for shopping wasn’t something people did every day. On mobile, the trick is to find a daily use case. The team began to focus on commuters, specifically those commuting by car and train. The idea is that if we could provide value to them during this activity, it could be a daily habit, though any solution would still compete with music, audiobooks, phone calls, terrestrial and satellite radio, and other talk-radio apps for consumers’ time.

3) Foreground vs. Background: The battle for consumer attention is fierce, and no place more fierce than the iPhone. Everyone is building apps that require our eyesight and attention. Some of us are stuck in Twitter, and others are stuck in Facebook, and it’s hard to use these apps when we are not focused and working inside them (outside of push notifications, which can be distracting). Therefore, building on the trend of more “background-related services” in applications, the team decided to focus on a consumer solution that could provide value in the background while the consumer focuses their attention in the foreground on apps like Twitter or Waze, for instance. We didn’t want to compete with these big attention-grabbing apps — we wanted to complement them.

4) Category Specification: The “News” category in the Apple App Store is densely populated. News is, indeed, a competitive category. But, people want news every day. So, instead of trying to build another news reader, the team investigated the audio news category, which still has competition but is not as crowded, relative to the readers. In this process, the team discovered that a treasure trove of quality audio content was either freely accessible through public APIs and/or buried in the world of online podcasts. This presented an opportunity to find the best content, to classify it in a new database according to a new ontology, to rank it based on a human expert’s understanding of audio content, and to remix that content to deliver to consumers a new, personalized radio experience.

5) Mobile-Specific Optimizations: The timing of this company coincided with some important opportunities presented by the advancements in cellular network technologies and mobile hardware. In order to deliver a streaming audio experience, mobile consumers would need to dip into their cellular data plans to enjoy the product. Luckily, the streaming costs for audio are quite low relative to video, and they are decreasing. The company went steps further to optimize this for users by building a smart buffering system to pull content to the client when the device is on a Wi-Fi network. A step more, the team built functionality inside the app for the consumer to allocate more client-side storage for content to listen to the audio in an offline mode style of consumption. Finally, these improvements also minimize drain on the handset battery.

6) Quality Content & Personalized Content: The company started out with a desire to build an application that would have the chance to become a mainstream consumer hit. To fulfill that promise, the team recruited an experienced audio producer from the world of radio and media to organize, classify, rate, and license the best content. The result is a valuable repository and ranking system that contains a library of audio content. On the personalization side, the team built an algorithmbased on collaborative filtering (i.e. listening and learning from the amount of people who actually listened to a piece of content) to continuously learn about the consumer’s preferences and tastes and, theoretically, become smarter over time. Inspired by what Pandora has unlocked for our musical tastes, the goal was to build a similar system for audio news and information.

7) Interface Design: It’s cliche to point out how important interaction and visual design are for consumer-level apps, but it bears repeating here, because, as more and more people transition to apps over the web, the experience becomes more like a game and, conversely, raises the stakes for providing a simple experience that doesn’t turn off or frustrate a user. The team recruited a founding designer from the gaming world to design an interface that would both be simple, novel, and fit the needs of people who are driving. That means it involves thinking about everything from Bluetooth integration to locked home-screen controls for iPhones. One of my favorite interactions is the ability to “Skip” through content by swiping cards. In regular terrestrial radio and satellite radio — and even most mobile radio apps — the user has to either turn a dial to tune their experience or search for what they may like. In our app, the “skip” is the dial.

8) Passive Over Active: Many apps get thrown into the market with a ton of features slapped on and “social” awkwardly baked in. We made a conscious decision not to do this. Instead, the company designed the application to be of high use to just one person, to offer a high-quality “single-player mode.” Furthermore, the company elected to focus on delivering content to consumers in a “lean-back” mode, like Pandora, where the user has some basic controls but essentially doesn’t have to do any work to enjoy the experience. In addition to being complex on many dimensions, many apps these days ask the user to do more work than many people have an appetite for. As a result, the radio app was designed for a user to simply hit “play” and then have relevant content delivered to them.

I’d like to underline again that all of this, in no way, implies or assumes success. And mistakes were made, indeed. It is a continual learning process, and there is a long, long way to go to keep threading the needle. Additionally, there are many decisions that couldn’t be included in this post but are no less important to the company. Here, I wanted to focus on the steps we took to conceptualize and build a mobile-first product. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, these decisions may look good, but as things were unfolding and in the moment, it just happened to be a series of seemingly small decisions that, over time, thankfully combined to form the foundation for what the Swell product experience is today.

The NSA Reportedly Bugged The UN’s New York Headquarters

2013-08-25T11:54:00.003-07:00

As tensions mount between the United States and other countries over the NSA’s once-secret spying programs, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported earlier today that the NSA has been spying on the goings-on at the United Nations’ New York headquarters for nearly a year.

Der Spiegel cites a multitude of documents that “stemmed” from security-consultant-turned-leaker Edward Snowden which purport (among other things) that the NSA first managed to crack the UN’s video conferencing system during the summer of 2012.

Some of the documents obtained by Der Spiegel speak nicely to the sort of banality those involved ascribed to their actions — “The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!),” one of them reads. In the weeks that followed the number of decrypted communications surged from 12 to 458 (and almost assuredly grew from there) and it appears that the NSA has only expanded its surveillance of extra-national bodies.

As it turns out, the UN wasn’t the only organization targeted by the NSA in this manner — still more documents obtained by Der Spiegel speak to the existence of a program called the Special Collection Service that allows the agency to monitor goings-on in 80 embassies and consulates across the globe. Also on that list of targets is the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Union, though at this point it’s unclear what exactly the NSA has managed to dig up on either of those bodies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Der Spiegel notes that SCS’s operation is a well-organized one that “has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists.”

As disconcerting as the revelation may be, this is hardly the first time the United Nations has been the stage for a bit of international espionage. British Parliament member Clare Short blew the whistle in 2004 on a UK intelligence effort that saw British agents spying on then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and The Observer published a leaked memo from a senior NSA official just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 asking staffers to increase surveillance on security counsel members and other UN officials.

The Maginot Line

2013-08-25T08:21:00.003-07:00

DEVIN COLDEWEY

posted 3 hours ago

6 Comments

I’m sorry to say that I have succumbed to something like schadenfreude. It’s not that I really enjoy what is happening these days, what with institutions of the web shutting down, basic civil rights being ignored, and all the rest. It’s just that it’s all a little poetic.

The technocracy, hoisted by its own petard – out-technocracied! We’ve been lionizing the Internet full-time for two decades (with good reason, of course) while clucking at the government’s failure to understand or adopt it. We’ve circumvented laws both just and unjust with it, hidden ourselves in its obscurity, reveled in its ubiquity, and laughed at the poor, benighted functionaries we presumed were still toiling over carbon copies and rooms full of file folders. Yet somehow with their ostensibly outdated tools and notions they were in fact subverting our little utopia at its most foundational levels.

Did you know the Greeks had a god specifically for this type of situation? Nemesis, in charge of punishing hubris, often in especially apropos ways (Narcissus, for instance). The FISA court probably set up a temple in her honor. Please fill out form 617-B, allocation for a fatted thigh, the scent of which riseth to heaven and pleaseth the gods.

But let’s cast our eye instead on more recent and confirmed history: the 1930s, on the eastern border of France. An impenetrable series of bunkers, tunnels, and garrisons built with the object of preventing a German assault. It worked wonderfully, of course — so wonderfully that the Germans decided they should go around it.

The Maginot Line is what I think of when I hear about efforts to secure electronic communications, generally via increasingly complex encryption schemes. The battle is over, everyone. Believe it or not, we lost! In fact, we were completely routed, so to speak. And yet it seems like all anyone can think of doing is shoring up defenses which hardly came into play in the first place!

PGP? People can barely manage the privacy settings on Facebook, much less a stable of random numbers and the means to deploy them. Zero-knowledge storage? Great until a court orders you to decrypt your own data (in violation of the 5th amendment, likely, but how long until a friendly precedent on that account?). Self-destructing messages? Print screen says hello, at least until someone finds a nice exploit. End to end encryption? Lovely, so you get flagged as suspicious by the NSA and all your data is stored for five years — plenty of time for them to squeeze the keys out of you or a friend (identified by metadata), at which point they breach a whole network of trust. Tor? The feds are watching exit nodes like prohibition gangbusters outside a speakeasy. 256-bit WPA2 keys? If the password isn’t “password,” “admin,” or “123456,” it’s probably written on a post-it note stuck to the goddamn router! Come on!

It’s not that these methods are technically insufficient for the their own purposes — it’s that they’re simply not practical given the actual threat: ubiquitous, flexible, and resourceful. Each one is arrayed against an idealized attack vector, and even if someone were to adopt each and every one of these worthy measures, they’re still going to get flanked.

Of course, perfect security is just a dream. But when a burglar comes through the window, do you put more locks on the door?

Better to just acknowledge that we chose to live in a dangerous neighborhood. The existing infrastructure of the Internet, from the routers and switches to the browsers and apps we use, was simply not designed with privacy or anonymity in mind.

That wasn’t a problem until the volume and importance of our electronic communications hit some crucial tipping point, at which they ceased being yet another way to get data from here to there, and became an indispensable and historically unparalleled tool for free expression. Gradually, the dissonance of these two ideas — a tool built for shouting that must be used to whisper — has become clear. This whole surveillance debacle is only the latest revelation to disturb our cozy ignorance.

We will have to live with the fact that our data is not secure for a while. Considering the towering privilege that is the Internet in the first place, it’s not too much to ask that we cope with a few cracks in the foundation. People for whom anonymity is critical, such as whistleblowers and activists, will be at risk, as they always were. Don’t forget that while the Internet is a powerful tool, it’s also a new one, and while we should value its contributions and the people whom it enabled, it is by no means an essential tool for confidential communication, or, for that matter, revolution.

But we may also have to face the idea that the savior Perfect Security may never appear to rapture us into a world of true anonymity, fountains of bitcoins, and desiccated surveillance apparati, lovingly tended by weeping spooks. I was told yesterday (by Bruce Schneier, so I trust it) that the noise pattern from a device’s antenna can be used to fingerprint it, a side effect of high-precision wireless transceivers. Metadata is leaking at the seams because our communications must be quick and precise. Our faces are registered on cameras dozens of times a day because the demand for imaging devices has made the cost of capturing and recording less than the cost of not doing so. Every defense we raise is a Maginot Line, and every sword we forge cuts both ways.

We’ve opened box after box from Pandora’s collection, and generally speaking the shrieking demons which emerged have quickly sunk their unholy teeth into industries and institutions whose devourment was long overdue. But sometimes we look down and notice bite marks on ourselves, as when we found that the Internet enables a culture of inhumanity, universal surveillance, or anarchic proliferation.

Clearly, this is one of those times. It does no good for us to pretend that the way we have crafted our world is without consequences unfavorable to ourselves, perhaps permanent ones. The rule of history is two steps forward and one step back. We have just taken a step back. Hubris, meet Nemesis.

Livewith.us Makes The Roommate Search More Social, Less Painful

2013-08-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

posted 1 hour ago

1 Comments

Looking for someone to share your apartment on Craigslist can be a huge pain — so much so, in fact, that when my roommate moved out last year, I considered leaving the room empty. Thanks to some friend-of-friend connections, it all worked out in the end, but if it hadn’t, I probably I could’ve used a service like Livewith.us.

Perhaps the first thing to say about Livewith.us is that it’s not actually trying to compete with Craigslist. Instead, its creators expect users to continue posting and finding roommate listings on Craigslist. However, when the someone finds a listing that seems like a good fit, they can apply via Livewith.us. It’s there, in the latter part of the process — the part that’s largely conducted over email — that the site should be useful.

Both tenants (the people with an apartment who are looking for a room) and applicants have profiles on the site. They can use data imported from Facebook or they can be built from scratch. Basically, these profiles take the place of the copy-paste-bio-intro-email process and the awkward Facebook search that people might perform to learn more about future roommates. Livewith.us gives you the basic social context (including a list of mutual friends) that you’re looking for without showing you their drunk photos or whatever.

Plus, there’s no process of sending messages like, “Hey, we don’t know each other but can you friend me so I can see your profile?”

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2013-08-23T12:55:00.003-07:00

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Wine Retailer NakedWines.com Savors $10 Million In New Funding

2013-08-22T07:09:00.004-07:00

CATHERINE SHU

posted 3 hours ago

5 Comments

NakedWines.com, the customer-funded online wine retailer, has raised $10 million in a third round of investment from WIV Wein International AG, a German group of direct wine-selling companies and founder shareholder. NakedWines.com will use its new funding to accelerate the company’s expansion into the U.S. and Australia.

Based in Norwich, England, NakedWines.com’s business model allows customers to sponsor independent winemakers in return for about 25% to 50% off a wine’s retail price and exclusive promotions. The site currently has 150,000 Angels (customers who fund winemakers) who have invested over $40 million in 130 winemakers around the world and ships over 10 million bottles of wine each year.

Sales grew to over $50 million in 2012, the year the company declared its maiden profit of $1.5 million (which it says was distributed to staff “as a thank you for working their nuts off.”)

Naked Wines was launched in Britain in 2008 by Rowan Gormley (the former CEO of Virgin Money and Virgin Wines) and became available to buyers in the U.S. and Australia last year.

In a statement, Gormley said: “WIV’s latest investment will really help us step up the quality of our wines in a way that our customers can taste. Winemakers don’t get the recognition or the rewards they deserve, and we want to see that change. In the restaurant industry, individual chefs have become much more famous than the restaurant. We’re helping to do the same thing for the wine business.”

Apple Seeks Patent For Skype-Style Away Status For Phone Calls, But Set Automatically

2013-08-22T07:05:00.002-07:00

In a new patent filing published by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), Apple describes a system for setting essentially an “Away/Available/Busy” style status for receiving phone calls on a smartphone device, but one that updates said status intelligently and automatically using data gathered about the device and its settings.

So the basic premise is this: Just like you can on Skype and most IM services, you’d be able to display a status to contacts that would indicate whether you’re available to field a call or not, which could avoid embarrassing moments like having your phone either ring or buzz loudly while in a meeting.

The system would take into account user preferences, determining what information it can share as set by a user, and filter inbound calls against a phone’s contact list to help preserve privacy before sharing any information. But then it could do things like send the inbound caller information about whether the user has the ringer turned on or set to vibrate, their current location, the strength of their current signal and their device’s remaining battery life.

The patent isn’t so much about letting a user set their own universal status for all inbound calls (which seems quite useful), but instead about letting them set and forget preferences around just how much they’re willing to share and with who, and letting the automated system do the rest.

This is one of a number of patents that Apple has filed detailing changes to the essential phone operations of a smartphone device, which would change the calling experience in a significant way. Combined with iMessage, you could see how Apple could further modify basic in and outbound communication experiences with inventions like these.

On the other hand, allowing your phone to automatically send out information about you would be a big pill to swallow for most in terms of privacy concerns. Apple could introduce this system, but it would be far more useful to invent a system that essentially just allows a user to set a status instant messenger style to automatically be displayed in the Contacts app of other users.

Restaurant Recommendation Service Nara Expands To Hotels

2013-08-22T07:03:00.003-07:00

Nara, a Cambridge, Mass.-based recommendation service, today announced that it is expanding its service from restaurant recommendations to also include hotels in about 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada.

Nara, which calls itself a “computational neuroscience company that analyzes and personalizes Web data,” always had the ambition to be much more than just a restaurant recommendation services, as its CEO Thomas Copeman told me when the company announced its $4 million Series A round last year. Its aim is to create a fully personalized web for its users and its current recommendation systems are essentially just a proof-of-concept for the company.

The company, which recently landed Singapore’s SingTel as its first telco customer, uses the Expedia Affiliate Network to power its online bookings engine and TripAdvisor ratings and review to give its users more information about hotels. At the core, however, Nara uses its neural networking-based recommendation engine to learn about its user’s tastes and create what the company calls a “Digital DNA” profile for each one of its users.

“From its inception, Nara.me was built to be a 21st century personal Internet portal,” said Thomas Copeman, chief executive officer and founder of Nara in a statement today. “Today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to delivering more personalized and relevant content to our users across essential consumer lifestyle categories on the web. Our initial foray into restaurants and, now, hotels is just the beginning of Nara’s capabilities. We are excited to bring the next generation of search to the hospitality, travel, and leisure markets.”

Kamcord Nabs Another $1M In Seed Funding To Help Build A Community Around Mobile Game Recordings

2013-08-22T06:59:00.001-07:00

These days it seems like mobile gaming is entering a sort of golden age — developers are getting ambitious about the experiences they want to create, and hardware has grown powerful enough to help bring those lofty visions to life in your pocket.

And all the while, a YC-backed startup calledKamcord has been working to help players record and share video of their in-game exploits. The team has already accrued just north of $1.5 million of capital, and they announced today that Kamcord has locked down another $1 million in seed funding from Tencent and InnovationWorks (among others).

But with this latest infusion of capital comes a peculiar change in direction — according to co-founder and CEO Matt Zitzmann the team is working to flesh out its SDK with social features like profiles and commenting in the hopes of turning Kamcord.com into a destination for mobile gaming content.

“We’ve seen what Twitch.tv and Machinima have been able to do and we’ve gotten a lot of email from users who just want to see more video content,” Zitzmann pointed out. “So we’re building a solution that’s more of a one-stop shop and rolling it out later this week.”

It certainly seems like a weird shift for the small San Francisco startup to take at first glance, but Zitzmann says the 11-person team has been mulling the move for a while. In its current state, players of Kamcord-enabled games can share their content through the usual spate of social channels and email. This approach has been serving the team (not to mention developers antsy for userbase expansion) pretty well so far, and Zitzmann wants amp up engagement by giving players the ability to more easily see how their remote opponents are doing too.

In the year or so since Kamcord first popped up at a Y Combinator Demo Day, Zitzmann has liked to skirt around the topic of monetization. It’s a common refrain from some early stage startups — they’ll try to focus on solely on building and proving the value of their products and chug along on the backs of seed investors until they figure out how to make their own money. With its new social push, it’s not hard to see how Kamcord may be gunning for some new revenue streams. Zitzmann noted in our conversation that he wants to build up a community of players who watch this sort of content and “provide access to those eyeballs” — perhaps a subtle nod to future ad revenue or brand interactions.

Of course, Kamcord’s new trajectory as a destination for video content all depends on its ability to convince game developers to fold the recording feature into their works. Fortunately for the time, things still seem to be going well on that front — Kamcord in-game recording has been built into over 115 games, and users have recorded one billion game sessions since the startup launched last year. I suspect the team could blow up those figures in a huge way if they ever get around to pushing out an Android version of their dev tools, which Zitzmann says is still in the works.

Omate, A Smartwatch That’s Also A Phone & Sports Tracker, Passes $100K Kickstarter Funding Goal In A Day

2013-08-22T06:56:00.002-07:00

Post-Pebble‘s $10.2 million Kickstarter record, the smartwatch launches keep on coming. Andcoming. And coming. And coming. And probably coming next month, in Samsung’s ‘Galaxy Gear’ case. The latest wrist-affixed contender to step up for a slice of smartwatch pie is called Omate TrueSmart, and is the creation of a New York based startup.

Omate Kickstarter campaigned launched yesterday — and has already blasted past the initial $100,000 funding target, with $144,000+ and counting. Not bad going for such a nascent yet crowded space.

So what’s the big deal about Omate? Notably it’s not just a smartphone accessory but includes a 3G radio so if you add a micro-SIM it can be a standalone mobile phone in its own right. Assuming you want to talk into your wrist. And even if you don’t it can function as a phone companion, using the on board Bluetooth 4.0 or Wi-Fi.

Omate also runs a relatively up-to-date version of Android, v4.2.2, skinned with a wrist-friendly UI of course, so that means four icons on the screen at once — although the platform is also open and hackable, according to its creators.

Running Android potentially means access to lots of apps — albeit, most are clearly going to need to be customised to fit its 1.54 inch screen (it’s up in the air whether Omate will have access to Google Play, at this point). The device will apparently come with a “full set of pre-qualified Android applications”, according to the listing, with no specific list as yet. Although “social media messaging” is mentioned in the listing and there’s a Facebook screenshot so that’s one heavy hint.

The Kickstarter campaign also mentions generic “sports apps”, and activity tracking is clearly a focus for Omate’s creators — likely so they can tap into the quantified health trend. The watch includes GPS — so would presumably be able to crunch basic activity data such as distance, pace etc. Add to that, it’s water-resistant (IP67) and dust-resistant so should take some rugged, outdoor use.

Also on board: a 5MP camera so you can snap up-nostril shots of yourself running to share to your social networks, presumably (Skype videocalling apparently won’t be supported).

The watch is powered by a dual-core 1.3GHz chip. Memory is 512MB with 4GB of storage, expandable by microSD up to 32GB. There’s no word on battery life if you’re actually using the watch but its 600 mAh cell is apparently good for up to 100 hours on standby. Eking decent battery life out of a wrist-mounted device remains a core challenge for smartwatches. The smartest smartwatch in the world is only going to be as useful as its useful battery life is long.

The Omate’s price tag is around the $199 mark, with all $179 early bird pledges gone and only a few remaining at the $189 level. Its makers rather ambitiously reckon they will be ready to ship the first batch to backers come October.

With $1.1M In Seed Funding, Mobile Commerce App Boxed Launches To Ship Wholesale Goods To Your Door

2013-08-22T06:52:00.003-07:00

When it comes to getting good deals on staples, it’s hard to beat going to big club retailers like Sam’s Club or Costco or whatever other retailers there are where you can buy a 64-pack of bathroom tissue for a highly discounted rate. But you know, not everyone has one of those stores just a few miles away.

A new startup called Boxed, founded by former gaming execs from places like Zynga, hopes to change that, with a mobile app for having wholesale goods delivered to your door. The app launches today, and at first will solve this problem for users on the eastern half of the U.S. with free two-day shipping for orders of $75 or more.

The idea behind the app is to save customers time by shipping the same type of goods they would get at a warehouse club to customers directly to their doors. It accomplishes that by stocking its own warehouse with the most popular items that customers tend to buy at those retail outlets. Unlike Costco, which might have 4,000 or 5,000 items in its stores, Boxed keeps about 500 SKUs available for users in its own warehouse, according to CEO and co-founder Chieh Huang.

That’s right, its own warehouse. While a number of services — like eBay Now or Google Shopping Express are working to partner with retail outlets to provide low-priced same-day shipping, Boxed is taking the contrarian approach of actually holding inventory and fulfilling shipments from its own facility. After the failure of Web 1.0 stalwarts like Kozmo.com, that’s become a no-no for the new generation of local delivery startups.

That said, Boxed isn’t promising same-day delivery, or even next-day delivery. It’s shipping wholesale staples out via regular ground mail, with the expectation that goods will arrive at their destination within two-days of shipping. That’s one of the reasons that for now, the service is only available on the east coast.

By holding its own inventory and shipping in bulk, Boxed believes it can keep margins high and offer lower prices than what one could find online elsewhere. The free shipping on orders of $75 helps, but Boxed believes it can also save its customers time. That’s because the average warehouse club trip lasts more than 100 minutes on average, while an order from its mobile app can be placed in a fraction of that time.

Boxed was founded by former Zynga execs Huang, William Fong, Christopher Cheung, and Jared Yaman, who had joined the gaming company through the acquisition of their startup Astro Ape in 2011. Now the group is looking to switch from mobile gaming to mobile commerce, with the launch of the new app.

The startup has raised a seed round of $1.1 million from ENIAC Ventures, Social Starts, and Bessemer angel group 15 Angels. Former Zynga COO David Ko is also a Boxed investor and will lead the company’s board of advisors.

Coffee Meets Bagel Takes Its Online Dating Service National With Its New iOS App

2013-08-22T06:47:00.003-07:00

Coffee Meets Bagel, an online dating site that provides a friend-of-a-friend match every day, is now making matches nationwide. Launched in New York City in 2012, the startup is also today releasing its iOS app, which includes the same features as the free web service.

Co-founder Dawoon Kang says that with the new iOS app, Coffee Meets Bagel is looking for the happy medium between traditional subscription services and newer, casual dating apps. ”We want to deliver you a very good-quality match, one that you would expect from subscription services, but with the fun of mobile apps,” Kang says.

For those unfamiliar, Coffee Meets Bagel works like this: After signing up through Facebook, you can specify such information as religion, ethnicity, height and personal details about yourself, as well as what you look for in a date. At noon each day, you then receive one match, or “bagel” as the company calls them, that has some sort of connection to you. You then have a time limit to either “Pass” or “Like.” If two people mutually like each other, they are put in touch through a private company texting line. Kang says the one-match-a-day approach is meant to keep users from feeling overwhelmed and to keep them engaged.

The service is designed to be as gamified as possible. Users earn coffee beans in the app by inviting friends, filling out information or similar actions. They can then use beans to buy special features. Sixty-five beans reveals your match’s mutual friends, 265 lets you go back to a missed match and 500 beans gives you a score and ranking. Coffee Meets Bagel also sells coffee beans, which Kang tells me are bought by 3 to 5 percent of their users.

One notable feature was Coffee Meets Bagel’s partnership with local businesses in New York City and Boston to offer free gifts to use on a first date. However, Kang says the company abandoned this in other cities in favor of quicker expansion. After New York, the startup added Boston and San Francisco and, in March, expanded to Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Now they are releasing the service to everyone.

Coffee Meets Bagel could run into some initial issues in smaller cities with fewer users, and there might be days when the app is unable to provide a bagel. Kang tells me the service has mainly expanded through word-of-mouth, which means the user base is densely connected and leaves some outliers.

“As we grow, our member base is going to become a lot more diverse,” she says. “[We'll] have to refine the algorithm very quickly … to be able to deliver a personal, relevant match.”

While the company shares some similarities with other popular dating services, Kang says most services are usually at one end of the spectrum or the other. Sites like Match.com and eHarmonyrequire browsing through strangers’ profiles, which can be very time-consuming. On the other hand, dating apps like Tinder are more geared towards quick matches and hookups.

Coffee Meets Bagel is more like Are You Interested or Hinge, which match users with people their friends might know. The difference with Coffee Meets Bagel is it slows the flood of matches, and is monetizing its free app by selling “coffee beans.”

Coffee Meets Bagel has raised $600,000 from Lightbank and has accumulated about 80,000 users. The startup has made more than 1.5 million matches, with 70 percent of members checking the service daily.

Google Exploring Location-Dependent Security Settings For Smartphone Unlock

2013-08-22T06:44:00.003-07:00

Google has a patent application published today (via Engadget) that would make the standard system of unlocking a device much more intelligent, using a smartphone’s built-in sensor to change your security settings on a sliding basis depending on where the phone finds itself. This would allow a user to make it easier to unlock a phone while in the comfort of their own home, while making it more difficult when the device is in a public place.

The invention is clearly designed to make it harder for a stranger or unwanted intruder to access your phone and its data when it may be easily lifted from your pocket or bag while in transit or at a public location like a cafe. In the end it’s a convenience feature, more than a security one, since the most secure option would be to use the most intrusion-resistant method of screen locking available at all times. But making things easier to access at home makes a lot of sense, in terms of decreasing friction and potential displeasure with the general user experience.

The patent as described also contains a provision that would allow for a third authentication method to be set for a second so-called “familiar area.” This would allow for a number of different possibilities, like setting different levels of security for home, work and the rest of the world, for instance. It’s a handy and noteworthy wrinkle in the patent app, since it could also make it possible to essentially set up a specific security profile required in professions where on-site security of data and mobile devices is paramount.

There are a lot of ways this could potentially be useful, in fact, and it’s one of those context-based features that Google seems to be focusing on with Google Now and recent updates to apps like Keep. In the future, you have a different phone depending on where you go, and that’s somethingmost of the tech giants seem to be working on.

MeeGo Startup Jolla Closes Pre-Sales Campaign For Its First Phone, Booking Orders Of Up To 50,000 Units

2013-08-21T07:30:00.003-07:00

Jolla, the Finnish startup comprised of ex-Nokians that’s building its own MeeGo-based smartphone platform and phone hardware has closed out a pre-sales campaign for thedevice it showed off in May. Thing is, it’s not saying how many phones are in this first pre-order batch — so it’s not really saying very much about the level of demand it’s seeing (or not seeing).

Update: Jolla has just sent TechCrunch a second response regarding the batch size — which suggests it may be in the tens of thousands of units range. “Although Jolla is not giving out the exact number of devices prebooked it can be said that the size of the production batch for a mobile device vendor of this size is typically 50,000 units,” a Jolla spokesperson said. Original story follows below.

Jolla’s pre-sales campaign took partial payments from buyers wanting to reserve a handset ahead of release later this year (the first device shipments are due at the start of Q4 2013). The pre-sales campaign kicked off in mid-May and was apparently closed out by mid-July, it said today — with demand coming from a mix of ”consumers and selected sales channels”. The only figure Jolla is releasing is that online pre-orders were received from 136 countries in all. So that’s a minimum of 136 phones ordered then.

Why isn’t it quantifying pre-sales figures? ‘Customer confidentiality’ is the official line according to Jolla’s Twitter feed (below) — but that really doesn’t make much sense. So it’s hard not to shake the view that it doesn’t want to confirm sales figures because they are relatively low. Competition in the modern smartphone space is fierce — so much so long time smartphone veterans, such as BlackBerry, are finding it difficult to ship devices. Having to compete with only startup resources is a huge ask (Jolla’s Sailfish OS has attracted a commitment from an alliance of investors to contribute $259 million to help it build out the ecosystem — however that financing was not committed as an upfront payment so it’s unclear how much has been contributed to date).

Still, according to analyst Juniper Research, there is an opportunity for Jolla’s Sailfish to carve out a niche for itself as one of a number of “new emerging players” in the smartphone OS space. In areport this week the analyst said that while Android and iOS will continue to dominate the global landscape over the next five years, the “smartphone OS market will see new emerging players, such as Asha, Sailfish and emerging HTML 5 based OS players begin to gain ground in niche areas”. Collectively it’s predicting these new players could capture 13% of the market by 2018.

People pre-ordering Jolla’s first handset in the pre-sales campaign were putting down a partial payment of up to €100 per device. The handset will retail for €399 ($513) in total, with shipments due to go first to European pre-orderers — and to Finnish carrier DNA, the first carrier to sign a deal to range the handset, back in November.

Specs wise, the phone has a 4.5″ display, paired with a dual-core chip. It includes 4G, 16GB internal memory plus a microSD card slot, an 8MP auto focus camera, and a user-replaceable battery. Interchangeable shells are a flagship feature, which allow the user to personalise the look and feel of the device — and which link the hardware to the software by some kind of bridging technology, likely NFC. The phone runs Jolla’s MeeGo-based Sailfish OS but will be able to run Android apps, as well as any native Sailfish apps created for it.

Jolla said today it may do a second pre-sales campaign this year — but again, isn’t providing solid confirmation at this point. ”We are delighted to see this great worldwide interest towards our very first device,” said Tomi Pienimäki, CEO of Jolla, in a statement. “For those, who missed the first opportunity, we are now doing our best to offer a second chance, a new batch of Jolla smartphones later in the autumn.”

Bing For Schools Launches, Ditching Ads And Rewarding Searches With Surface RT Tablets For Schools

2013-08-21T07:26:00.002-07:00

Microsoft previewed its Bing for Schools initiative back in June, an opt-in program for educational institutions that allows schools to sign up to offer a version of Bing to their students that drops advertisements and increases privacy protections. The Bing for Schools program launches for K through 12 schools today, and as an added bonus, using it will earn users points that their school can redeem for free Surface RT tablets.

Students, parents and anyone else who wants to contribute get credits via Microsoft’s Bing Rewards program for using the search engine, and can add those to a general pool for a specific school. Once a school hits 30,000 points, it gets a free Surface RT tablet, complete with a Touch Cover (the one with the capacitive keyboard built-in). The conversion is roughly such that about 60 users contributing to a school and using Bing as their default search engine can earn a school a Surface RT per month, which actually sounds pretty good.

Of course, the Surface RT is not the finest of all devices under the sun, and some argue that it probably shouldn’t exist to begin with. But at least they’ll do some good in schools, as opposed to sitting around on store shelves. And for Microsoft, the benefit is getting more hardware in the hands of educational institutions and students; that’s a highly attractive market to any computer or software maker.

The Bing for Schools pilot project launches today in a number of districts that have signed up to take part in the pilot project, which covers over 800,000 students going into the new school year. In addition to the benefits listed above, the program also offers automatic strict filtering of adult content, as well as lesson plans based on the Bing home page, broken up into three categories targeted at grades K-4, 5-8 and 9-12.

If you’re already Binging, you might as well sign up and support a school, no matter where you happen to be located – turning your searches for cat gifs into tech bonuses for kids is never a bad thing.

LG Exec Talks Tablet, Smartwatch, Phablet, Firefox OS And Windows Phone Plans For This Year And Next

2013-08-21T07:20:00.003-07:00

LG looks like it might be about to spread its bets around the table, according to a new interview with Bulgarian LG communications executive Dimitar Vulev. The interview from Dnevnik.bg (viaEngadget) offers up an unusually transparent look at LG’s upcoming product plans, as Vulev details what the company is working on both for the end of the year and beyond.

The comms director says that LG is keenly aware of the phablet phenomenon, as evidenced by the Optimus View and Optimus G Pro, and adds that next year there will be “an even bigger phone.” This is also seen as a transition to the company focusing on larger-screen tablet devices, including a device to be launched “probably” by the end of the year. LG had previously shuttered its tablet efforts, but Vulev says it’s time to re-enter since it’s a “growing market” that has become much larger in recent years.

Android remains the primary focus of LG’s efforts in mobile, he said, but Windows Phone devices are also in the pipeline, though likely not on tap for this year. When and if we see a Windows Phone LG smartphone make it to market depends on how Microsoft develops the OS, Vulev explained. This mirrors what LG India Managing Director Kown Soon said back in July about Windows Phone 8. LG previously made Windows Phone 7 devices, but like its tablet efforts, production was put on hold after shipment shortfalls.

LG is also working on a Firefox OS phone, diversifying its software picture even further, Vulev said. So far, the open, web standards-based Firefox OS mobile platform hasn’t really had a champion among the core, big-name smartphone OEMs, so LG releasing one in early 2014 (if Vulev’s information is correct) could really help boost its presence and visibility.

Vulev also said that LG will be releasing a smartwatch, perhaps sometime next year, to debut first in the U.S. market. It could come with a flexible display, and while he admitted that LG’s previous GD910 watch phone was not successful, he suggested that the market is much more primed now for such a product than in the past.

While most companies aren’t so candid about future unreleased products, LG’s regional execs have a history of being rather more forthright than most, so it’s likely this is a genuine peek behind the curtain. Whether it’s a smart, systematic bet on a number of different horses, or a scattershot attempt at relevance, will only be proven out by the quality of these products when they do actually arrive.

SmartThings Launches An Online And Mobile Shop For ‘Internet Of Things’ Devices

2013-08-21T07:17:00.002-07:00

SmartThings, the startup that’s all about providing a platform for managing the growing number of devices that are connected to the Internet, is looking for new ways to get customers deploying its own Internet-of-Things devices, as well as those of its partners. To do that, it’s launching an online marketplace where users can buy starter kits, as well as various individual devices and solution sets to manage different part of their homes.

The company launched its first products as part of aKickstarter campaign last September, offering up a starter kit that included a SmartThings hub and a variety of different sensors to keep track of movement and control devices in the home. The idea was to enable users to use their smartphones to enable various levels of home automation.

While it started with just a couple of devices of its own, SmartThings has always wanted to provide more of a platform for developers to build their own devices and applications. And so in the spring itopened up its platform to third-party developers, enabling them to take advantage of its developer toolkit to connect a growing number of Internet of Things devices.

There’s just one problem — even though SmartThings has done a good job of getting developers on board, finding compatible hardware could be a frustrating process. That’s because there’s no one place to find Internet of Things devices that leverage SmartThings technology… at least until now.

To provide a more accessible place to find SmartThings things, the company is rolling out an online shop that will at first feature a curated selection of goods to help consumers get up and running. At the center of the initiative are a couple of starter kits that include a SmartThings hub, which is necessary to power all the other associated gadgets.

Once consumers have the hub, they can begin adding individual devices from the store, including those made by SmartThings as well as those made by other manufacturers such as GE, Schlage, Kwikset, and Aeon but compatible with the SmartThings platform.

The Shop will also have a variety of so-called “Solution Sets” which seek to solve common problems by combining two or more sets of SmartThings devices. That includes stuff like automatically locking and unlocking doors, detecting leaks and floods, and turning appliances on or off remotely with a phone.

While curated at launch, the company hopes to make the Shop a more open experience in the future, enabling third-part developers and manufacturers to sell their own goods on the platform. Customers will be able to make purchases online through the SmartThings website, as well as through the company’s existing iOS app. A version of the Android app with the store included will also soon become available.

SmartThings has raised $3 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital, with contributions from SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund*, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, David Tisch, A-Grade Investments, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Kal Vepuri, Ryan Sarver, Jared Hecht, Steve Martocci, Emil Michael, Aaron Levie, Zorik Gordon, and Nathan Hanks.

Sugar CRM Raises $40M From Goldman Sachs To Drive Growth In Asia and International Markets

2013-08-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

SugarCRM has raised $40 million from Goldman Sachs to help finance its growth, especially in Asia where the company gets a substantial percentage of its business. The company has now raised $119 million since 2004 when it received its first $2 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The company bills itself as the open-source alternative to Salesforce.com and the other legacy giants in the market. SugarCRM offers its SaaS on its own cloud or on-premise. It also offers a private, hosted single-tenant version for customers who do not want to be on a shared infrastructure.

SugarCRM, like other providers, has put its development efforts on building a social-driven service with an emphasis on mobile. In Sugar 7, the latest version of its CRM platform, the service will feature an embedded intelligence panel, or “dashlet” on the right screen pane, which provides an up to date view of customer or client information. It also has integrated social streams and an HTML 5 platform, which the company says will allow users to rapidly filter, tag, follow, and share customer and deal activity from a single view. Sugar 7 will be generally available in October.

CEO Larry Augustin said Sugar 7 is testament to its focus on building a system of engagement, as opposed to a system of record. Systems of record are embodied in the legacy solutions for business operations that include CRM, enterprise resource planning and other core systems to manage human resources and the flow of documents. As Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group illustrated in a 2011 blog post, systems of record are complex and slow to change, but also reliable and stable. A system of engagement is loosely coupled, able to push key information to mobile devices, whenever the customer needs it. The service has to be fast and capable of providing the information needed for a sales call or any kind of customer engagement.

The international market shows particular promise for SugarCRM. That relates to the greenfield opportunities that technology companies are seeing, particularly in Asia as mobile emerges as the primary means for conducting business. That’s a trend to watch as more U.S. enterprise technology companies turn to overseas markets for expansion.

CEO Larry Augustin said in an interview yesterday that the company will continue to deepen its CRM platform. He said that’s opposed to Salesforce which increasingly is defining itself by how it delivers, not by what it delivers. Salesforce has a broad multi-tenant approach to provide a variety of ways for delivering services. Is acquisitions also demonstrate the approach to offer ways for delivering services. Foe Salesforce, it’s less about CRM and more about platforms it can leverage to push apps and a combination of services.

The $40 million investment is impressive in terms of the amount and the quality of the investor. As part of the deal, Goldman Sachs Vice President Antoine Munfa will join the board. The appointment highlights the role a company like Goldman can play in a company’s future. And that’s the big question mark, isn’t it? SugarCRM will be ten next year. At some point, investors will want to see some return. That may turn on a number of factors such as the climate for the company to do an IPO or get acquired.

PicCollage, The Sticker-Happy Collaging App, Raises $2.3M In Seed Funding And Aims To Build Out Its Social Platform

2013-08-21T07:11:00.003-07:00

The photo collaging app PicCollage has secured $2.3 million in seed round funding from 500 Startups, Floodgate Fund, Freestyle Capital, Quest Venture Partners, Sand Hill Angels, XG Ventures. PicCollage, which has maintained a spot in the App Store’s top ten photo apps since it launched in 2011 just before500 Startups Demo Day, will be adding a social platform to its editing offerings in the next month.

PicCollage is essentially a layer on top of image collection and sharing tools like Pinterest, Tumblr or Instagram. It lets users take the images they’ve so lovingly collected, remix them together, add stickers and text, and then upload to various social outlets again. To date, the app has seen 35 million downloads.

The idea is similar to Polyvore’s mood boards, but the two companies’ user behavior is noticeably different. While Polyvore users tend toward a clean, sophisticated aesthetic reminiscent of a shopping page in Elle magazine, PicCollage creations are crowded, fun, and cute. Let’s just say it: PicCollage has struck a chord with teenage girls.

It’s unsurprising, considering that collaging is perhaps the classic activity of teenage creativesoutside of journal writing. Looking on PicCollage’s homepage, you’ll find a whole lot of featured collages dedicated to One Direction and Demi Lovato’s 21st birthday.

Co-founder Ching-Mei Chen said that although the team didn’t try to target any demographic in particular when they launched, they initially expected PicCollage to attract an older audience, including mothers and grandmothers, who would use the app to make vacation and family photo collages.

Although young women make up the core base of their business, Chen said she does see PicCollage as an inspiration tool that is applicable beyond that demographic.

“Our median age is 20-year-olds and it’s 85% women. And these users are growing up and bringing [PicCollage] with them to college and to their first jobs. They’re going to be used to making PicCollages. We know that teenagers are great to have because they’re the influencers, but this goes beyond teenage fads and One Direction or Justin Bieber.”

Within the next month PicCollage will roll out a social platform in the app, allowing users to follow and ping each other and remix other users’ work.

Building out social makes every bit of sense for a creation app that feeds other social networks, and Chen said that a particular kind of social behavior is already taking place around PicCollage, in which people on other social sites give each other shout-outs through custom collages.

PicCollage monetizes on its user base with in-app sticker pack purchases in the range of $.99-$1.99. More lucrative, however, are deals on branded sticker packs. PicCollage has most recently partnered with Interscope Records to release a set of stickers using images and lines from Robin Thicke’s ubiquitous “Blurred Lines” video (you know the one).

With brand deals, PicCollage capitalizes on the deal itself, a per download fee up to a certain amount, and click-throughs to the company’s website from an in-app banner that appears after a download.

“Our key is to only do content that we feel [helps] the experience of collage making. We wouldn’t do it just for the sake of a partnership. We look for something that’s more interesting,” Chen said. “The Robin Thicke stickers make collage making more fun; it’s been really popular so far. We’ve had 300,000 downloads after a week of it being available.”

With this seed round, PicCollage will be building outs it team, particularly in development and design, Chen said. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a branch office in Taipei.

Nota Is An Ultrafine Tablet Stylus With A 3.7mm Tip So You Can Scribble Neater

2013-08-20T07:59:00.002-07:00

Hex3, the company behind a successfully Kickstarted pressure-sensitive stylus called JaJa – which got a pretty solid review from my colleague Darrell Etherington last year — has launched another stylus crowdfunding project, called Nota, that’s aimed at making scribbling on a tablet more precise.

The shtick of this latest stick is that it has a very fine tip: 3.7mm no less — which its creators claim makes it less than half the size of “most” other stylus tips. Being so thin allows for greater precision when drawing/writing vs thicker-tipped styluses owing to less distortion of the lines being formed.

Nota also has a more rigid tip than rubber-tipped alternatives, being as its tip is electrically active silicon, rather than squishy rubber to mimic a finger. Ergo, it can be more precise (and presumably doesn’t feel as draggy as some rubber styluses can).

Nota is apparently compatible with all Android and iOS tablet apps, according to its creators. And is powered by a single AAA that can last for up to six months of use.

The project has already passed its $40,000 crowdfunding funding goal with 17 days left to run. The two cheapest early bird pledge tiers have all been bagged so Nota now costs $39 or more via Kickstarter. It’s expected to be shipped to backers in January.

Online Marketing Platform SocialChorus Raises $2.5M Series A

2013-08-20T07:53:00.003-07:00

Online marketing platform SocialChorus has closed $2.5 million in Series A funding, bringing its total amount raised so far to $8 million. The San Francisco-based startup added a new investor,Windforce Ventures, in addition to receiving new funds from existing lead investor Kohlberg Ventures.

SocialChorus also announced that it has achieved more than 350% growth in new customers over the last year and added Brad Klaus, the former CEO of referral marketing platform Extole, as its new Chief Revenue Officer.

The company’s cloud-based platform has been used for over 200 advocate marketing campaigns by customers such as AT&T, Kia Motors, Peet’s, Toyota, Outback Steakhouse and Windows Phone. It recently added mobile optimization, LinkedIn integration and automated social engagement detection.

In the early days of social media marketing, companies had to find popular bloggers or other people with sizable online followings, send them a coupon code or link to a promotion and then hope for the best.

SocialChorus makes that process much easier and more effective by helping marketers identify the best potential brand advocates. Brands can then create and share promotions with advocates through SocialChorus’ online platform, which includes a dashboard that tracks user engagement and sentiment and includes data from Google Analytics and Omniture.

In turn, brand advocates can use SocialChorus’ platform to share promotions directly to their social network newsfeeds, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This makes it easy for advocates to include hashtags and links that allow SocialChorus to track how each promotion does and ensure that it is compliant with the Federal Trade Commission’s social media marketing disclosure guidelines.

“Brand marketers are quickly realizing the business potential of advocate marketing,” said Greg Shove, SocialChorus founder and CEO, in a statement. “Our customers are seeing significant increases in social engagement, earned media value and new customer acquisition. This momentum has been recognized by our investors and experienced startup executives.”

No End To Nook’s Bad News As Revenues Take A 20% Dive For Q1 2014, But New Hardware On The Way

2013-08-20T07:49:00.001-07:00

Barnes & Noble can’t stem the losses from its digital books and device division, as the Nook department saw revenues drop 20.2 percent year over year according to the company’s just-released quarterly earnings report. Nook earned $153 million, and that’s up sequentially from $108 million despite the yearly decline.

Nook hardware fared the worst, dropping 23.1 percent year over year while sales of digital content for Nook apps and devices dropped 15.8 percent. B&N partly blames the decrease in content sales on poor Nook tablet and reader sales, but also on outside factors. Specifically, B&N calls out the fact that this year there wasn’t either a Hunger Games or a 50 Shades of Grey trilogy to drive consumer content purchases. Retail was down 9.9 percent year over year, with revenues of $1 billion total, covering business from physical and online stores.

Overall, the company seemed keen to express continued support of its Nook offerings via the earnings release. Board Chairman Leonard Riggio suspended an offer he had planned to make on the company’s retail business, saying that instead B&N needs to focus on building its 10 million Nook owning customers, and to increase sales of Nook devices both in stores and online. That means Nook will continue to operate in tandem with the retail business, rather than the two divisions being split up into separate companies.

Nook Media CEO Michael P. Huseby also said in a statement that the Nook line will continue to be offered “at the best values in the marketplace,” and that “at least one” new Nook product will be coming for the holiday season, with others in development for beyond that. No mention was made of the plan revealed last time around to open up Nook development to outside OEMs, but the conference call is at 10 AM ET this morning, so we’ll update if any new information comes to light at that time.

Indiegogo Project Seeks To Drastically Improve First-Person View For Home Drone Pilots

2013-08-20T07:44:00.003-07:00

Drones are very fun, is something that I recently realized playing with a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 for the first time. But the image on the screen you see from most drone cameras is laggy, pixelated and generally sub-par, even if the camera on your drone itself is capable of recording much higher quality video. Sky Drone FPV aims to improve that, with a new crowdfunded project that will provide full streaming HD video to your tablet or smartphone of choice live from your flying robot.

Drone hobbyists are a fanatic group, and quality is important to any fanatic. The Sky Drone FPV wants to make the lived reality of flying drones more similar to the videos and photos uploaded to YouTube, which often reflect the HD capture, not the actual first person view you’ll see on a device while piloting. It promises to offer 1920×1080 full HD streams at 30 frames per second, unlimited range so long as there is cell tower coverage via 3G or LTE networks, a heads-up display (so long as you have the required circuit board) and 5 megapixel still shots. It also works with just a smartphone or tablet, and requires no additional antennas or gear.

Finally, the feed is encrypted via AES-256 encryption to prevent any spying eyes from taking a peek at your feed, and there’s an HDMI out option to connect to virtual immersion goggles, with Oculus Rift support listed as one of the company’s stretch goals for the Sky Drone FPV.

The project is designed to help wean drone hobbyists and FPV enthusiasts off of their clunky analog solutions by addressing the three big problems of current digital offerings, which include achieving low latency; performing consistently and reliably, and doing so at a cost that isn’t absurd.

Backers can reserve a Sky Drone FPV set for $349, which gets them a kit including a cellular modem, USB hub, cables, a controller, a camera and an AP cable and uBEC. The package also includes the Sky Drone FPV groundstation app, which allows you to control exactly what you see on your screen, configure your HUD and actually view the stream live from your remote-controlled flying device.

The Sky Drone FPV is currently functional on BlackBerry 10 and Playbook devices (yes, the devs used BB as a starting platform, likely because BlackBerry VP of dev relations Alec Saunders is a founding investor) but will be build for Android and iOS too, which is what the funding will help with, as well as refining the still image capture mechanic. The Hong Kong-based team aims to deliver by December, 2013, so you could be flying in glorious HD in time for the holidays.

Real Estate Startup CommonFloor Solving The Last Mile Problem By Hiring BMWs and Mercs to Chauffeur Indian Customers

2013-08-20T07:41:00.003-07:00

Indian real estate startup CommonFloor has made its first major move since raising $7.5 million investment from Accel and Tiger Global in July: it is hiring air-conditioned hatchbacks, sedans and luxury cars to ferry affluent, lethargic Indians to/from unconstructed properties. In a sense, it is bringing the mountain to Moses.

The high-end and commercial real estate website currently lists about 60,000 developments, containing about five million homes, and announced its new ‘site visit’ option would ferry customers to and from properties in the air-conditioned comfort of a sedan or hatchback. CommonFloor co-founder and CEO Sumit Jain said high-net worth customers will get the sweetest ride, being chauffeured in Mercedes and BMW vehicles (champagne optional). While this does increase the burn rate, the good will generated is clearly priceless.

“We have a wide range of properties from high-luxury to quite affordable, and they each attract different sets of buyers,” Jain said. “Someone already using a Mercedes or BMW will not want to travel in a mid-class segment car so, depending on the budget, we arrange for vehicle and convenience.”

In the initial stages, the company will pay the expense for renting the cars, available in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Delhi, but eventually Jain said they will charge the property sellers for delivering these high-value leads. There are no plans to hire flower bearers to scatter rose petals at the feed of visiting nouveau riche as they tour the estates.

Indians have plenty of reasons not to want to venture outside of their homes. In many cases it’s impossible to navigate a particular neighbourhood without already knowing where you’re supposed to be (Google Maps is only useful if you’re chasing geese). The intense climate, which recently breached 100 degrees in Delhi; the crumbling infrastructure; and chaotic traffic also make travelling between from A to B a serious ordeal — especially if you’re sitting in a lawnmower-engine powered, three-wheeler rick travelling at 10 miles an hour. Most important, however, is that the average affluent Indian’s largesse doesn’t include venturing outside of their comfort zone. They are in many ways an immovable object.

Jain said the taxi service is closing the loop between seller and buyer.

“There’s a huge information gap in this country, in terms of not finding the right information. It works in three phases. The first problem is the normal problem people face finding buyers and sellers on their platform, but once you get enough how do you get them to transact, and how does the transaction happen?”

“We’re taking buyers closer to property and not limiting ourselves to only show it on the website. We’re closing in on closing the last-mile connectivity.”

Google’s Waze Acquisition Bears First Fruit As Mobile Google Maps App Gets Real-Time Incident Reports

2013-08-20T07:38:00.005-07:00

Google acquired Waze and it seemed obvious the purchase was about making Maps better. Today, Maps did indeed get a little better thanks to an update to its mobile maps apps that introduces Waze’s real-time incident reports to Android and iOS applications.

On Waze, users can report things like accidents, cars stopped by the side of the road, construction and road closures in real-time as they drive. These reports are used to alert other Wazers to problems ahead as they happen. Users in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Switzerland, UK and the U.S. will initially have access to these features, with more regions rolling out later.

Interestingly, the Maps update is red-only; users of the Google Maps apps can’t report incidents, just see the ones reported by Wazers. Waze’s own apps get updates today, too, however, providing them a little Google love in return for their service. Google is adding Google Search to Waze’s list of providers, and also adding Google Street View and satellite imaging to Waze’s Map Editor, which should be of benefit to Waze’s community of active reporters.

This gives us a big clue about how Google is viewing Waze: it’s not going to toss the two products into a melting pot and come out with a single hybrid – it’s treating Waze almost like a community-sourced product development arm of the Maps project. So long as it also continues providing useful updates to the Waze app and its users, that could be a strategy that serves it very well in terms of providing better-informed Maps data for the general public.