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Amiando Founder Departs After Earn-Out, As Eventbrite Eyes-Up European Growth
On The Heels Of Its Funding, Yext Gets A New Interface And Review Monitoring
U.S. Sen. Schumer Asks Google And Apple About Their “Spy Planes” – Afraid They’ll Catch Sunbathers
VHX Raises $1.25 Million From Lerer Ventures And Angels To Democratize Video Distribution Online
Tencent Acquires Minority Stake In Epic Games, Maker of Infinity Blade, Unreal Engine
Ex-Googlers Launch MightyText, An iMessage For Android Users
They Work! Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Desktop Ads
Watch Out Pandora, Spotify Just Introduced A Free, Streaming Radio Service In The U.S.
Facebook And GE’s Newest App, HealthyShare, Points To How Open Graph Can Go Beyond The Web
Square Ventures Beyond Payments With Debut Of Customer Loyalty Punchcard Program
Second Screen App Yap.TV Gets Even More Social With Facebook Open Graph Integration
Mensch Launches Menshn For US Elections — A New Platform For Realtime Topical Chat
Ten Week-Old Llustre Is Acquired by Fab.com After A Blistering European Roll-Up
ImpulseSave Wants To Make Saving Money A Habit, Opens Doors To The Public
Eucalyptus Systems Aims For Private Cloud Dominance
Hands On With The Sonos Sub
Stanford Teams Up With Piazza, Apple To Bring Social Features To Its iTunes U iOS Development Class
FB’s Biggest Ecommerce Platform Payvment Lets Its 165K Sellers Easily Buy Taste Graph-Targeted Ads
Evernote By The Numbers: 34M Users, 1.4M Paying, And The Relative Merits Of Different Platforms
Burst Raises $3.5 Million For Private, Family-Friendly Photo And Video Sharing App

Amiando Founder Departs After Earn-Out, As Eventbrite Eyes-Up European Growth

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 09:21 AM PDT

Well, that’s that. Prominent German entrepreneur Felix Haas, who started ticketing company Amiando and sold it to XING (Germany’s LinkedIn), has finished his earn-out period and is, as the phrase goes, out of here. Speaking exclusively to TechCrunch from Le Web London, he said “I’m going to fly planes for a bit. Then I’ll decide what to do.” (Haas flies light aircraft for fun).

In his stead comes Norbert Stockman, a seasoned manager in the ticketing industry, who becomes the new MD, and Julian de Grahl, currently a VP at XING.

Haas leaves in September with the other founders Dennis von Ferenczy, Sebastian Bärhold and Armin Bauer also off to “seek new challenges.”

It’s not amazingly auspicious timing for Amiando as the US-based Eventbrite has been scaling up in Europe recently. We understand Julia Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite is currently in London searching for a UK MD for their European office of 10 people and counting.

However, Amiando still has over 100,000 event organisers worldwide, including Facebook, BMW, UNESCO, Telefónica O2 – and the annual Le Web conference among them.

Meanwhile Haas, who has dabbled in Angel investing in the last few months, says he is probably going to avoid becoming a full-time Angel and stay in the ‘serial entrepreneur’ category.

On The Heels Of Its Funding, Yext Gets A New Interface And Review Monitoring

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 09:10 AM PDT

Last week Yext, a service that helps businesses synchronize their listings across the Web, announced a $27 million round of funding. (We heard it was at a $270 million valuation.) Today, it’s launching a new version of that service, aptly dubbed “The Next Yext.”

Co-founder and CEO Howard Lerman says there are three main additions to the new version of Yext. First, there’s a new overview screen, which includes counters showing the total number of listing updates for a business, as well as suggestions for expanding their profiles.

Second, there are new multi-location features that should make Yext more useful for large enterprise customers. For example, if one company acquires another company and wants to change the name on all the new stores, it doesn’t have to update the information on every store individually. Instead, it can select all the stores that it wants to change, or even upload a spreadsheet with all the new locations.

Lastly, Yext has added a feature for monitoring the reviews that appear on all the listing sites that it’s integrated with. That means a business can see new reviews as they appear, and also drill down on specific review topics. So if you introduced a new item on the menu, you don’t have to visit every user review site to see what people think — you can just search for that menu item on Yext and see the score it received, averaged across every site. This feels like a slightly new direction for Yext, but Lerman says that as a company that’s already connected to a businesses’ listings, Yext was well-positioned to do it, especially since it already offers traffic and click data on listings. He adds that Yext doesn’t provide any tools for influencing those reviews.

“That’s not our strategy,” he says. “We just want to help you synchronize your local business listings and be aware of what’s going on with them.”

The new version is launching for all Yext customers today. You can watch a (long-ish) demo video below. In it, Lerman also offers a big vision for what Yext can become — in the same way that Facebook reinvented and updated the yearbook, he’s hoping to do the same to the phone book.

U.S. Sen. Schumer Asks Google And Apple About Their “Spy Planes” – Afraid They’ll Catch Sunbathers

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 09:10 AM PDT

Google Earth Hacks - Google Map of Sunbathing person in Berlin

As Google and Apple step up their mapping efforts, they are apparently raising some eyebrows in Washington. Today, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer wrote a letter to Google’s CEO Larry Page and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. In this letter, he asks the them about their “highly sensitive photography equipment.” In order to avoid that his constituents in Buffalo have to worry about Google and Apple catching them barbecuing on their back deck, Schumer is asking the two companies to include a number of privacy and security provisions. Schumer is also worried that criminals and terrorists could use these detailed images to “create more complete schematic maps of the power and water grids in the United States.” In a statement that accompanied the letter, Schumer also said that he was afraid the technology could be “strong enough to see through windows and even catch sun bathers in back yards.”

Specifically, Schumer is asking the two companies for three security and privacy provisions:

Provide notification to communities as to when you plan to conduct mapping
Automatically blur photos of individuals who are captured, and give property owners the right to opt-out of having the company map their homes
Put protocols in place with law enforcement and local municipalities to ensure that sensitive infrastructure details are blurred from published maps

Until now, says Schumer, the quality of the imagery available in Google Maps and Google Earth wasn’t good enough to warrant these measures. Now, however, as the two companies are ramping up their efforts to create detailed 3D maps (Google says its 3D maps will cover the residencies of over 300 million people by the end of the year), it’s time to start worrying about these issues.

With their “military-grade” equipment, Apple’s and Google’s ‘spy planes’ will also be able to display details of security sensitive sites (Google, it’s worth noting, already blurs quite a few military installations and other sensitive sites around the world).

“It's imperative,” says Schumer, “that these companies disclose their plans for protecting privacy of both individuals and sensitive infrastructure, their publication intentions, and their plans for including public consent in the mapping process." Just like with Street View in Germany, Schumer would also like Google and Apple to give homeowners the ability to blur their houses on the companies’ maps.

In a statement to Talking Points Memo’s Carl Franzen, Google said that its 3D maps won’t offer any significantly higher resolution than its current maps. "We appreciate the Senator's concerns and we look forward to meeting with him to demonstrate how the imagery used to develop our 3D models is similar to what's already publicly available in 2D mapping products. We currently don't blur aerial imagery because the resolution isn't sharp enough for it to be a concern."

Here is a copy of the full letter to Google and Apple:

Dear Apple and Google,

I write today over the recent revelations that your companies are using highly sensitive photography equipment to take pictures of cities and towns across the country for your respective mapping products. These disclosures are potentially troubling, and I request that the privacy and security of Americans remain your top priority as you deploy new mapping and imaging capability.

It has been reported that some of these sensitive cameras can take pictures of objects up to four inches wide. I fear that this clarity may allow your mapping programs to take detailed pictures of people in intimate locations such as around a pool or in someone's backyard. People on Long Island or in Buffalo have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they decide to have a barbeque on their back deck and would prefer to retain the option of deciding whether they should be photographed on their property. They should not fear that your planes will be overhead taking detailed pictures of their private events.

Detailed photographs could also provide criminals and terrorists with detailed views of sensitive utilities. On current online maps, many power lines, power sub stations, and reservoir access points are visible only at low resolutions. However, if highly detailed images become available, criminals could create more complete schematic maps of the power and water grids in the United States. With the vast amount of infrastructure across the country, it would be impossible to secure every location.

Therefore, I request that your mapping programs include three separate privacy and security provisions:

1) Provide notification to communities as to when you plan to conduct mapping

2) Automatically blur photos of individuals who are captured, and give property owners the right to opt-out of having the company map their homes

3) Put protocols in place with law enforcement and local municipalities to ensure that sensitive infrastructure details are blurred from published maps

I hope that you would be willing to work with my office on this very important issue and ensure the security and privacy of all Americans.

Image credit: Google Earth Hacks

VHX Raises $1.25 Million From Lerer Ventures And Angels To Democratize Video Distribution Online

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 09:00 AM PDT

For years, independent video producers have waited for the time when it would finally make economic sense for them to cut out the middle man and distribute their content directly to their fans. Then a funny thing happened: Louis CK sold an hour-long comedy special online for just $5, DRM-free — and it was a huge hit. Since then, a few others — like fellow comedians Aziz Ansari and the indie producers behind Indie Game: The Movie — have decided to try their hands at the same model, forgoing traditional delivery platforms and going straight to the consumer.

It’s a trend that is slowly gaining steam, and one that New York City- and San Francisco-based startup VHX is looking to take advantage of. To that end, it’s raised a seed round of $1.25 million, which was led by Lerer Ventures and included participation from Bedrocket Media Ventures, indie film producer Keith Calder, Buzzfeed co-founder John S. Johnson, WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, MTV founder and Clear Channel CEO Robert Pittman, and Chris Sacca.

Early last year, longtime collaborators Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson launched VHX.tv, a site for discovering cool new videos online and sharing them with friends. But lately the two have been working on a whole different side of the video distribution business, providing a platform that helps independent artists to connect directly with fans and sell them content.

The result has been the release of a couple of high-profile videos that VHX powered: The first was Aziz Ansari’s comedy special Dangerously Delicious, which was sold for $5 directly on the comedian’s website. VHX followed that up with the online release of Indie Game: The Movie, which was made available for $9.99.

In both cases, VHX allowed customers to stream the movie at any time, or to download the video in multiple formats DRM-free. That’s a big contrast to selling on platforms like iTunes or Amazon, which have onerous pricing schemes and put all sorts of DRM and restrictions on videos sold through their platforms. And that’s not even mentioning the user experience, which makes all movies look like they’re being sold by iTunes or Amazon. VHX hopes to provide an alternative, Wilkinson told me by phone, by allowing content owners to create beautiful, highly branded user experiences of their own.

“Before, the Internet was where you went if you couldn’t get a distribution deal,” Wilkinson said. But now, “creators are realizing that they no longer need the distributors to reach an audience… Creators are coming around and realizing that people are really happy to open their wallets.”

According to Wilkinson, that awareness means that VHX has a lot more projects in the pipeline — which is why the startup has raised funding. It’s got a designer, but it’s looking to hire a few more employees to improve the tools it provides to independents to allow them to sell their content. In the meantime, it’s going to continue working closely with creators to help them put their content online and make it available, without having to nab a big TV or studio deal.

Tencent Acquires Minority Stake In Epic Games, Maker of Infinity Blade, Unreal Engine

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 08:53 AM PDT

Chinese social networking giant Tencent took a minority stake in Epic Games, the maker of the very high-end Unreal gaming engine and smash hit mobile game Infinity Blade. It’s yet another toe in Western waters for the Shenzhen-based company, which boasts more than 700 million users on its platform in mainland China. Last year, Tencent acquired Los Angeles’ Riot Games.

Tencent didn’t disclose how much it paid for the stake in Epic. We had heard from multiple sources that they were competing with Warner Brothers over the deal. Tencent says that Epic will continue to operate independently and the deal should close in about one month.

Epic is the make of the Unreal gaming engine, which is used in super, high-end console-based franchises like Mass Effect and Gears of War. Its studio Chair Entertainment is also behind Infinity Blade, which is an almost console quality iOS game that broke records and topped the charts through the Christmas season.

Ex-Googlers Launch MightyText, An iMessage For Android Users

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 08:29 AM PDT

During their lengthy careers at Google in both senior technical and product management roles, Maneesh Arora and Amit Sangani were able to geek out on products like AdSense, AdWords, and the now-defunct Google Health. Arora tells us that, while his time at Google was defined by smart people and ambitious ideas like these, in development there was often a tendency to “over engineer” without thinking about “the average user.” He said that, while Google employees always had Gchat open and used Google Voice (or Wave while it was still alive), none of these products were able to effectively address the true value prop of communication tools for a mainstream audience: Syncing. Especially when it comes to texting.

Arora says simply, “To me, it makes no sense that I have to have my phone in front of me to communicate … If I leave it in another room, or in the car, or at home, I essentially have to retrieve it to see who’s calling or to receive incoming texts.” So, Arora and Sangani set out on a mission to give Android users the ability to view and reply to text messages no matter what device they happened to be using. After several months of beta testing, the pair are today officially launching MightyText — an app that aims to give Android users their own version of Apple’s iMessage.

MightyText has been in beta since last August and available solely as a Chrome extension. However, the Chrome extension found some solid early adoption, attracting over 250K users, who were sending more than 2 million messages every day. What’s more, Arora says that at the current run rate they are on target to hit one billion messages.

The co-founders used this early validation to raise $650K in seed funding last fall from a bunch of notable names, including First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, Scott and Cyan Banister, ex-Google PM Director Rich Chen, Guitar Hero creator Kai Huang, Chegg founder Aayush Phumbra, and several others.

But, as a Chrome extension, MightyText had a fairly limited use case, so today, the co-founders are launching their new web app, which lets any Android user send and receive SMSes from virtually any device. While the co-founders have been describing their apps as “Gmail meets iMessage,” Arora thinks that MightyText has the potential to be more “open” and powerful than iMessage, which really only works between Apple users. Instead, MightyText lets Android users sent text to anyone they would normally text, whether they be on Android, iPhone, Blackberry, or even a feature phone.

So, in allowing users to SMS, MMS and make calls anytime, and from anywhere, it’s not hard to see the initial value prop for MightyText. But what’s important to note is that the app syncs with your existing Android number, which means you don’t have to get a new one — unlike Google Voice. (Huzzah!) And since MightyText lives in the cloud (and in your browser), it organizes all your texts, picture messages and calls, allowing you to search and store them securely for as long as needed. Much in the same way that Gmail (et al) organizes (using the term loosely), categorizes, and allows you to search through you email.

Because it hooks into your cell number and is essentially allowing you remote access to your phone from any device, the upside for MightyText is that it doesn’t have to take on any of the costs of SMS itself, which can be a big burden for SMS apps.

The other side of this, Arora says, is a benefit for the umpteen different carriers using Android. If users send text messages in third-party apps, by way of data or WiFi, carriers don’t get to make money on your SMSes, but, because MightyText keeps messaging confined to their network, these companies are likely going to be more inclined to partner with the startup down the road. (Especially if an API shows up down the road, hint, hint.)

The other thing to consider, Arora tells us, is that there are about 300 million Android devices in use today, which are collectively sending over seven trillion SMSes per year. While people are increasingly spending time on their computers and tablets at home and at work, they still can’t send or receive SMS on those devices.

But, with MightyText, users don’t have to change their behavior or get their friends to install the app to get value. They can just text from their phone as they normally would, with the added benefit of being able to push those messages to any computer, tablet, or phone — in the U.S. or international.

The other use case here that one might not pick out initially both shows the value of MightyText’s app and is just hilarious. Employers and teachers, to name a few, may not be excited to hear this, but Arora says that they’ve received scores of emails and messages from students and employees thanking them for finally building an app that allows them to text from their computer. Why? Well, generally speaking, it’s not a good idea to be found — while in class or in a meeting at the office — hovered over your phone, texting away like you don’t have a care in the world.

But, because MightyText allows you to use your own Android number to text from your laptop or iPad (and how many Android users do you know who also own an iPad?), your subterfuge is much more likely to go unnoticed. In fact, Arora even showed me a message to the team from a lawyer, who said that, thanks to MightyText, he was able to sit in court(!) and text plea negotiations back and forth with the prosecutor without taking out his phone or drawing the ire of the judge. Now that’s utility! (If it turns out that an unintended consequence of MightyText is the acceleration of the legal process, it’s going to be difficult to attach a price tag to MightyText that doesn’t involve the word “billions.” Not to mention that the startup will also be hearing from my lawyers. But in a good way.)

So, when Apple brings iMessage — and this same kind of functionality — to Macs this summer, Android users might otherwise have had to suffer silently while their friends gloat over cross-Apple-device messaging and ask Siri how to tie their shoes from their iPads. But, thankfully, MightyText gives Android users a come-back, which we all know they’ve been trying out in the TechCrunch comment section for months.

For more, find MightyText at home here.

Updating

They Work! Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Desktop Ads

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 08:03 AM PDT

How will Facebook monetize mobile? Its organic-seeming Sponsored Stories ad format may be the answer. Mobile Sponsored Stories are getting over 13 times the click-through rates and earn 11.2 times the money per impression (eCPM) on mobile compared to all of Facebook’s desktop ads, and 1.93 times the CTR and 2.65 times the eCPM of Sponsored Stories on the web in the two weeks since Facebook began selling them separate from web ads.

The data comes from new studies by TBG Digital, AdParlor, and Spruce Media, three of Facebook’s biggest Ads API partners that help brands buy ads. Since Sponsored Stories slip into content feeds so seamlessly, Facebook may actually be better equipped to handle the shift to mobile advertising than other web-first tech companies. Let’s check out the early proof.

Much of the doubt surrounding Facebook’s IPO came from evidence that the social network’s user base was shifting away from the web to mobile, where Facebook only began testing ads in February. On the web users are shown up to seven ads per page and some spend big sums on social games, but on mobile they’re only shown a couple of ads per day and few pay for games on Facebook’s HTML5 gaming platform.

Fears about Facebook’s mobile future are partly to blame for its share price sinking from its $38 opening to around $31.50 today. But earlier this month, Facebook began allowing advertisers to specify that they wanted their ads only shown on mobile, and now the world is getting its first deep look at how Facebook mobile ads perform. The results could make investors more optimistic.

TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.” Here’s the results of two data sets shared exclusively with TechCrunch plus more confirmations from the ad industry.

Facebook Ads Performance: Mobile vs Web

According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.

Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.

And look at Facebook’s desktop ads as a whole, including both Sponsored Stories and the traditional sidebars ads. They’re getting just 0.083% CTR at a $0.88 CPC earning Facebook an eCPM of only $0.74, so mobile Sponsored Stories have 13.7X the CTR and earn Facebook 11.2x as much as its combined desktop ad offering.

Meanwhile, a quick look at a campaign in the tends of thousands of dollars by AdParlor showed that mobile ads have a CTR of 0.821% while traditional Facebook ad campaigns that mostly show up in the web sidebar with some presence in the web and mobile news feed had a CTR of regular ads have a CTR of just 0.032%. That’s a 25x better CTR on mobile. The campaign at gaining new fans for a Facebook page, and while the click-to-fan conversion rate on mobile was slightly worse – 55% on mobile versus 72% across placements – the improved in CTR makes up for it many times over.

Other sources in the ad industry confirm the high performance of Facebook mobile ads. Another Ads API giant Spruce Media told MediaPost that its tests with Facebook mobile sponsored stories have seen click-through rates from .8% to 1.7%, the same range as TBG Digital and AdParlor. This doesn’t seem like users are just clicking the relatively new, three month old ad units out of curiosity. It looks like users are actually perceiving them as content, and are clicking through to learn more about the Pages and apps their friends interact with.

Cracking The Code For Mobile Ads

Attaining such a high click-through rate for mobile Sponsored Stories is game-changing for Facebook, because there’s simply not as much room for it or any service to advertise on mobile.

There’s no space for an ads sidebar and if far too many ads are injected into the content feed, users could get angry and stop browsing. But the impressively high CTR and eCPM mean Facebook doesn’t have to show too many Sponsored Stories to make a ton of money off of them.

And advertisers are lining up to buy them, says AdParlor CEO Hussein Fazal, “By allowing advertisers to show ads only on mobile – Facebook is definitely going to be able to generate more revenue. We have seen a ton of interest from advertisers who want to advertise just on mobile.”

Other social sites like Google+ and Twitter don’t have the scale, social graph, or on-site activity to serve Sponsored Stories that are as effective as Facebook’s. While Twitter and G+’s interest graph can power accurate ad targeting, only Facebook know who your closest friends are thanks to photo tags, wall posts, messages, and more. Its massive time-on-site also produces lots of interactions with brands and local businesses that can be turned into Sponsored Stories ads.

And Facebook is just getting started. Sources say it’s working on a hyper-local mobile ad targeting product that could serve extremely relevant local business ads to users within a few hundred feet of a brick and mortar store. Thanks to the new Facebook Exchange real-time bidding system, Facebook could drive up CPC or CPM prices by getting advertisers to compete to reach specific mobile users, including ones who’ve been retargeted after visiting sites that indicate purchase intent.

Legality is one of the last hurdles to the success of Sponsored Stories. Facebook settled a class-action lawsuit in California last week for using people’s likenesses in ads. It doesn’t currently offer an opt out for Sponsored Stories, but may eventually have to. Still, the setting would likely be buried deep enough to avoid too many people turning the offer the money-maker.

In the last two weeks, Facebook’s stock price has climbed nearly 20%, regaining a big chunk of what it lost since the IPO. Those who bought in at the bottom are looking wiser now. High mobile Sponsored Story CTRs indicate at least some users don’t hate the ads, and wouldn’t rebel if they see more.

Now Facebook has to strike the right balance of how many mobile ads to show. If it succeeds, it could walk the tightrope of the shift to mobile, end up a very rich company on the other side, and generate the returns that so many have hoped for.

Watch Out Pandora, Spotify Just Introduced A Free, Streaming Radio Service In The U.S.

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 07:51 AM PDT

Music streaming service Spotify is rolling out a new feature for U.S. users today, which looks like a direct swipe at Pandora: it’s introducing a free mobile radio service. The update is only available in the iOS versions of the app at present (iPhone and iPad), but gives free users access to unlimited music from Spotify’s catalog of 16 million songs.

The feature provides a different way to listen to Spotify, which before was very much about mirroring the iTunes-like experience via cloud-streamed music. You would locate songs you liked and organize them into playlists, for example, as opposed to the more passive “I’m just listening” feeling that radio music apps (like Pandora, Slacker Radio, etc.) offer. To be fair, Spotify isn’t the first music-on-demand service to do “radio” – in fact, it’s trailing some of its competition here, including not only Slacker (Premium) but also Spotify competitors Rhapsody, Rdio, and MOG. But Spotify is a top cloud-streaming service here in the U.S., so the change will have impact.

The company says that you’ll now be able to create limitless streaming radio stations from single songs, playlists, albums or artists and you can create an unlimited number of these stations. You can also build stations off your friends’ shared playlists, which is a plus. Then, as you listen, tracks you like can be saved to your Spotify playlists so you can find the songs later on. And very much like Pandora, you can “like” tracks while they’re playing to hear similar music.

Currently, free users will hear ads to support the radio feature, and Spotify has signed up some big brands, including McDonalds, Macy’s Chevrolet, Taco Bell, Red Bull, Verizon Wireless, Warner Bros., Durex, Heineken, Red Stag, Jim Beam and Lipton Iced Tea. Premium radio users will have an ad-free experience, however. In addition, premium subscribers outside the U.S. will also have the option to use the radio feature.

Spotify now has 18 million users, including over 3 million paying subscribers worldwide, and over 10 million active users worldwide. It doesn’t break out U.S. numbers, though.

The update is being released now, and will arrive on other platforms, including Android, soon.

Facebook And GE’s Newest App, HealthyShare, Points To How Open Graph Can Go Beyond The Web

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 07:33 AM PDT

The Open Graph has proven to be a major tool for Facebook to extend its reach beyond its own social network into the wider Internet, and today comes news of an app that could just be the first sign of how that might even go even further than that. Today the company launched a new app called HealthyShare — a place for Facebook users to set health goals for others and help each other reach them. Developed in partnership with GE, the app is playing off the focus on fitness with this summer’s Olympics, and represents a moment for a brand to make an Olympics mark on the Facebook platform — even as Facebook is not allowing sponsorship into its own official Olympics portal.

The app, once installed, lets users mark their progress along some of the more popular categories of health and fitness usage. They including walking and how that impacts cholesterol; eating where you can trade one bad habit for a good one; workout routines with contributions from Kevin Durant, Michael Johnson, Alex Morgan and Summer Sanders. Entries in the app get shared on a user’s timeline, and then that user’s Facebook friends can join in on a particular goal or provide encouragement.

If this sounds a bit like Quantified Self, it is — except that there is no hardware involved in the process. Not yet, anyway.

“To us, health’s not going anywhere,” says Linda Boff, executive director of global digital marketing of GE. “We’re starting with what we’re talking about today, around wellness, fitness and the Olympics, but the partnership here is one we see growing and expanding beyond wellness and fitness. This is very interesting to us. There’s nothing to talk about now, but it is very much on our radar.”

Moves like underscore how with developments in technology the Open Graph could take Facebook into picking up information from much more than just the internet in its great big data collection effort.

The effort with Facebook and GE also points to how Facebook is using its Sponsored Stories format to promote activity in other parts of its platform. It will use Sponsored Stories, Boff says, to make sure “the right people get exposed to the app and find it useful. We’re a believer in the power of Sponsored Stories.” GE is also looking at TV ads to promote the app as well.

Beyond Facebook, GE has had a longstanding commitment to health already, Boff notes. “We have 300,000 employeess and making sure they’re healthy.” But also, the company a few years back launched HealthyImagination, a portal for its heath activities (which is also promoting the app) aimed at the health sector. “The primary-care hospital is our customer. We are raising levels of engagement, early prevention and early diganosis. It’s really core to how we think and why we came together with Facebook to do this.”

A counterpoint to this is that some people could be shy about sharing information around their health, or feel embarrassed that they can’t run five miles or that they go to the gym every day. But given that it can be a lonely business tracking and supporting fitness goals, and that this is often a reason that people’s persistence in fitness falls by the wayside, Facebook is a good place to make that more social, and launching this around the time of the Olympics is a timely moment to attract the masses. You can see how it can extend to other areas that Facebook is already also touching, from charity donations to organ donation.

Square Ventures Beyond Payments With Debut Of Customer Loyalty Punchcard Program

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 07:01 AM PDT

Mobile payments startup Square is introducing a heavily requested feature today with the launch of a customer loyalty punchcard program. New digital loyalty cards will be included in the updates to both the Square Register iPad app and the Pay with Square mobile application.

With the updates, Square customers will receive a digital version of the traditional paper-based punchcard for each Square merchant they frequent. Merchants, in return, will be able to better track their loyal customers and will be able to entice them to come in with special offers or discounts.

The program includes some features designed to attract new customers to the business, too, with the introduction of “first-visit” specials. These could include things like a percent off or a freebie, for example. And, as customers frequent Square merchants, they will be able to track those visits on an in-app punch card to see how far they’re progressing towards the next deal.

On the merchants’ side, there are in-app reporting mechanisms and the ability to configure the dollar amount and discounts on for items, as targeted towards the loyal customers.

There are also tools that will allow merchants to see detailed analytics on their sales, even broken down by hour, day or week. That ability to drill down into sales by hour in particular will be useful for merchants who use Square at places like farmer’s markets or other fixed locations with a high volume. It will let them see which hours have the busiest traffic, allowing them to staff and schedule accordingly. Another new item with today’s update are improved inventory management features which now offer an inventory library where items can be categorized for easy access and sorting.

Square says that since its Register app launched in March, Register merchants are five times more active on a weekly basis than those who are just using the card reader app, and they see twice as much revenue. That’s not necessarily a metric that vouches for the app’s ability to produce, however, but is a reflection of the type of merchant who would need the more robust system the iPad app provides.

Of course, today’s biggest news is the introduction of the loyalty program. To be fair, there were ways to use Square for loyalty before, but the process was far more manual. With the more feature-rich and automated program, Square is now in competition with several other new digital loyalty players including Belly, Punchcard, Cardify, and more. The difference between Square and loyalty-only plays is that while Square’s feature set may be more minimal in comparison, it’s already tied to the merchant’s payments processing infrastructure, which makes tracking loyalty more frictionless as it’s not as reliant on customer actions or input at the point-of-sale (tap to pay, barcode scanning, e.g.). That alone could give Square’s program a leg up in adoption.

Second Screen App Yap.TV Gets Even More Social With Facebook Open Graph Integration

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Yap.TV launched in late 2010 in an effort to help capture the growing audience of users who tune in to TV with their iPads and mobile phones open in front of them. Since then, it’s held its own in a pretty crowded market of second-screen apps. But the latest version of the Yap.TV app could give it a boost, through a deep integration with Facebook that will allow users to see what TV shows their friends are watching and to connect with other users who share common interests.

Once users log in to Yap.TV via Facebook Connect, the app imports all their Facebook TV “likes” and those of their friends as well. They can then compare their interests in various TV shows with their friends from directly within the app, and create a favorites list with show times from their own likes. They can see how many comments and shares different pieces of content have gotten, and can share, comment, or like them as well.

One of the main new features in the app is a “feed” that is provided on the main level of the app, which provides users with a personalized stream of content related to shows that they’ve liked on Facebook. It also has been added to yap.TV show pages to display related content inside the app.

Another big new change is the ability to see which friends are currently online, either on the yap.TV app, or on Facebook, thanks to the new Facebook detection feature. They can also chat with those friends, directly from within the app itself.

Of course, Yap.TV still has a lot of competition, from the likes of apps like Miso, GetGlue, and a bunch of others. Plus then there’s Zeebox, from former BBC iPlayer CTO Anthony Rose, which hasn’t even launched in the U.S. yet. It’s still too early to declare a winner, but that just means that there’s still a whole lot of shakeout left for social TV and second-screen apps.

Mensch Launches Menshn For US Elections — A New Platform For Realtime Topical Chat

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 07:00 AM PDT

The rise of social media has been like the emergence of a new and powerful drug. But the the Facebook newsfeed and Twitter stream, despite being addictive, don’t really serve the needs of people who want to keep a conversation on one topic. Have you tried following a decent conversation on a hashtag? Yeah, that. And the old fashioned topic-based bulletin boards are just not real-time enough and too anonymous.

One person who knows this more than most is high profile UK MP Louise Mensch, who has masterfully used twitter both to propel her political views (at 60,000 followers she is in the top 10 of all UK MPs) but has also felt the full backlash of the Twitter trolls. It was experiences like this which got her thinking late last year – why not create a platform where we can still have open conversations but stay on topic, still in real-time? Thus Menshn is launched today: a full-blown social platform for “talking on topic” in a realtime, social manner where – Mensch hopes – quality will out.

And this is no trivial project. Mensch has teamed up with a former digital guru for Labour under Tony Blair, Luke Bozier, who has built the technical platform for Menshn. Initially the site launches in the US-only. Try to access it from the UK and all you will see is a holding page. Something which is going to frustrate a few UK politics junkies.

Instead, Menshn is going to be initially aimed at the massive topic of conversation around the US elections.

“I had a brainwave over Christmas about Twitter hashtags and the frustration of following one topic, especially in politics,” Mensch told me in an exclusive interview.

“Then I got my husband on Twitter [Peter Mensch is the manager of heavy metal band Metallica, among others] and although he liked following people in the music industry and what they had to say, he hated the mundane tweets about people having breakfast. He wanted something on topic.”

Mensch pitched the idea of of a sort of ”topic-based Twittter’ to Bozier and Menshn was born. They decided to focus on politics first, and then expand to other topics.

Menshn will launch in the UK just before the London Olympics. After that new categories will be added based on demand – this will avoid the problem of low-quality, spam-filled topics being set up.

After being given early access I realised I’d seen something similar. Live blogger sometimes use Scribble Live, and Menshn has that live, collaborative feel to it. However, in design terms it is far and away better looking.

So far there are just three topics. The US elections, a chat room for Obama’s campaign and one for Romney’s. You can donate to the Obama or Romney campaigns and popular or trending areas of the site get prominence on the home page.

More channels will be rolled out later. “We’ll have a nomination process and meet the demand for channels,” says Mensch.

The user experience is Twitter-like in its simplicity.

You go into topic and can contribute to a live chat. User can rate another user “up” (you can’t rate people down), thus creating social capital for the best talkers on the site. There’s a system for reporting/flagging bad or rude contributors for moderation but Bozier and Mensch say they will be avoiding getting into the heavy moderation game. And right now they are only a team of two anyway.

‘Gamificiation’ is present in the platform. The top 5% of the most highly rated rated posts on the site will be automatically seen by everyone in the chat room. You get 1 point for each ‘rate’ on one of your “menshns”, 5 points if someone subscribes to you, 5 points when you ‘favourite’ a room, 10 points for each friend you invite to the site, and there will be random bonus points every Friday.

Private mode is available allowing only people you follow to see your activity.

And unlike when you join Twitter and have to work out who it is you want to follow, when you join Menshn, your account automatically follows 100 of the most highly rated people on a topic so you get to see a “stream” immediately.

Again, unlike Twitter, there is no Retweet function or ‘mentions’. Instead you are encouraged to contribute properly – though there is a messaging system similar to Direct Messages on Twitter. You also do not have to be ‘in a room’ to post into that topic.

It gets more interesting when you see what can be done on Menshn in terms of a personal account, and what might be done with brands.

For starters, users get their own personal room (the feature can be enabled or disabled), so people can talk about YOU (if you want). This might come in handy for Mensh’s surgeries, she jests. BUt the most likely application will be for high profile people and celebrities.

More interestingly, a brand like Starbucks might be able to get Menshn.com/Starbucks and have a live realtime conversation around their brand, without needing to deal with the madness of Twitter. This is not announced yet but Mensch and Bozier made it clear it’s something they are thinking about.

There’s also the possibility for place-based live chat around, say a city, or media brands like the X-Factor, music artists, you name it.

“We’re launching this with the faith that there is a giant gap to fill in topic-based social media,” Mensh tells me.

But it’s also potentially a good business. “Mensch Bozier Ltd” has been created to run the new company, and, says Mensch, venture capitalists they have talked to are talking a keen interest in whether the site will take off.

Certainly Louise Mensch’s high profile amongst the UK press will help it’s profile here in the UK.

But to start out with a huge topic of discussion such as the US elections is probably very smart in terms of Menshn’s potential as a platform.

Will we be “Menshn-ing” conversation in the future, as well as Tweeting each other? We’re about to find out.

Ten Week-Old Llustre Is Acquired by Fab.com After A Blistering European Roll-Up

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 06:31 AM PDT

Online design sales site Fab.com has acquired Llustre, a similar but much smaller UK design store. The latter company was billed as a “trusted guide” to discovering good design, combined with flash-based sales (up to 70% off the recommended retail price). It now becomes Fab UK.

The company was launched in November of 2011, but it only launched ten weeks ago — so it’s one of the fastest UK exits in recent history. Sources say the deal took less than a month to complete. Although terms were undisclosed we understand this was an all share deal. The team of twenty-four now joins Fab.

The company had raised £1 million (just over $1.5 million) from Oleg Tscheltzo (Founder of Fotolia.com), Hussein Kanji, Rob Kniaz, Tom Hulme (Design Director at IDEO), Kirill Makharinsky (CEO Ostrovok), John Earner (GM Playﬁsh) and Sir Peter Bazalgette (media guru formally with Endemol).

Llustre was founded by Vivienne Bearman a former senior studio producer at Playfish acquired by Electronic Arts (who becomes VP Product and Ops, Fab UK) and Tracy Dorée a former VC with MMC Ventures (who becomes Fab UK’s MD / VP Marketing).

The European home ware and furniture market online is worth £130bn but only 10% of this sector is bought online versus 30% to 40% in women's fashion. Fab will happily cater to that growing market.

The move comes as Fab — which has 5 million members, is working with over 5,000 designers and has sold 1.8 million products — celebrates its first birthday, and it means it now reaches 20 markets in Europe. Fab has already rolled up its German clones Casacanda and the Fashionstake site in the United States. It’s got access to a million members in Europe now.

Llustre had reached just over 50,000 members in Europe before its acquisition.

Fab’s Maria Molland will now be Fab’s Chief European Officer. She previously ran global businesses and new ventures for Thomson Reuters.

Jason Goldbreg, CEO of Fab, told us Europe was on pace to become 20% of its revenue or of $140m globally.

He said they now have 5 million members worldwide, a fifth of which are in Europe — “And we didn’t exist five months ago in Europe,” he added.

Speaking about Llustre he said “We were really impressed with Tracy, Viv and their team. And We’re gradually also going to start planting seeds outside the US/Eurozone towards developing countries.”

Tracy Doree said “We’re really excited — Fab is the only management team that do things as quickly as Llustre, so we are kick-starting integration and we’re operating like a global team already. Fab already has a great team.”

Vivienne Bearman said “Fab.com have really been leading the social commerce revolution and we are so thrilled to bring that to the UK – Fab is going to change the way the world shops and we get to be part of that!”

ImpulseSave Wants To Make Saving Money A Habit, Opens Doors To The Public

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 06:20 AM PDT

Companies and brands are always getting better at find ways to tempt people out of their money, and sometimes the siren call of those shiny new things are just too much to resist.

Massachusetts-based ImpulseSave has been helping to combat those urges for a few months now by trying to make saving money as frictionless and as gratifying as buying something. Now that service is poised to reach a larger audience, as the company has just announced that ImpulseSave is exiting its long-running private beta.

"People have this hardwired response to gather things, and we want to use it for good," co-founder and CEO Phil Fremont-Smith said.

Of course, that's much easier said than done. He feels that other personal finance products and services on the market are too focused on getting their users to stick to budgets and deny themselves things they want — in essence, they're about getting users to change their behavior. While that's arguably a good thing in the long term, ImpulseSave doesn't aim to fix people. Rather, ImpulseSave wants to replace one form of immediate gratification with another.

Here's how the service works. When a user goes to create a new ImpulseSave account, they're also creating a new savings account with ImpulseSave's partner, Massachusetts-based Leader Bank. Once that onboarding process is done, they're asked to create a few goals that they would like to save money towards — think paying off student loans or funding a big family trip. From there users can set up an Auto Save, which transfers a set amount of money from their checking accounts to their ImpulseSave accounts at regular intervals.

Though some people may be wary of creating a completely separate savings account, that strikes me as one of the most crucial parts of the service. ImpulseSave makes it simple to dump all of a user's saved funds back into their checking accounts if necessary, but taking that money out of a person's normal cash flow means that it's just that more difficult to spend on a whim. Some people may have the self-control to abstain from dipping into their savings to fund a questionable purchase, but that extra barrier could be enough to give a person pause before splurging on something new.

Should a user be struck with the urge to buy something when they know they shouldn't, users can either use the recently-released app or fire off an SMS to transfer more money into their ImpulseSave accounts. In exchange, they'll get a congratulatory pat on the back for making a smart move, in addition to a breakdown of how much closer to their goal that latest transaction put them.

"We're marketing a user's own goals back to them," Fremont-Smith says.

It's his hope that the satisfaction of making the right decision will be enough to offset the potential (and often short-lived) delight of buying something new. There's a strong social element at play as well, as users can comment on other people's savings transactions (though sharing those transactions is completely optional).

Relatively speaking, it's still early days for the company — Fremont-Smith came up with the concept during the middle of 2011, and linked up with his technical co-founder John Mileham not long after that. For now, ImpulseSave gets most of their revenue in the form of commissions from Leader Bank for the savings accounts they open, but Fremont Smith and his small team have been looking at opening their service up to companies and brands for new promotions as a way for them to get in front of users while remaining on their side.

Now that they're out of beta, the ImpulseSave team is hard at work on a handful of new features to make users even more aware of their financial situation — coming down the pipeline is a geolocation feature to warn users as they enter certain stores (or "danger zones"), as well as a browser extension to help users stay honest as they poke around online.

Eucalyptus Systems Aims For Private Cloud Dominance

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 06:15 AM PDT

Marten Mickos is working on a joke. He has the opening line — “An app guy, an ops guy, and a VMware sales guy walk into a bar…” — but he hasn’t figured out what the punchline is, yet. Mickos is the former CEO of MySQL AB. Today he’s the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, developers of private infrastructure as a service solutions, and he thinks about “The Cloud” a lot.

Eucalyptus Systems is releasing version 3.1 of their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) product today, with a number of new features, improved installation options, and a renewed commitment to open source. According to Mickos, the cloud itself should be the product. It should be wholly integrated with existing technologies, and as easily upgraded as any other product. It is, in short, a whole new way of thinking about computing.

There is no shortage of IaaS solutions available today. Each of them is trying to do basically two things: 1) attract your attention, and 2) be fully compatible with Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus has a leg up on the competition for item 2 with Amazon’s recent blessing of their product as the IaaS to use when you want a private cloud.

This partnership has yielded two specific things for Eucalyptus, according to Mickos: Amazon reviews Eucalyptus’s work to ensure API compatibility (a benefit not available to any other IaaS product), and Amazon and Eucalyptus approach customers together to sell “The Cloud”. For those customers that need public and private cloud solutions, this tag team approach is a huge win. And for everyone else, it secures in their minds that Eucalyptus is the product to choose whenever they do decide to implement a private cloud.

“At MySQL, we were the disruptors of the old. At Eucalyptus, we’re the innovators of the new,” Mickos told me. He pointed out a number of features of the new Eucalyptus release to underscore this point: service and platform level high availability, FastStart templates to speed proof of concept deployments, and a more holistic approach to documentation and user interface.

Whereas many IaaS solutions are trying to be one-size-fits-all solutions for both public and private cloud configurations, Eucalyptus is focusing strictly on private cloud. They focus on API compatibility with Amazon, and, according to Mickos, have worked tirelessly to ensure that upgrades are effortless. They conduct nearly half a million unit tests internally, and their euTester product allows their customers to build their own test cases.

“We have a huge lead over others for hybrid cloud,” Mickos said. I’ve long been skeptical of the promise of hybrid clouds — the notion that you can easily move workloads from some private cloud to Amazon Web Services and back again — so I asked Mickos how many of their customers were actually using Eucalyptus for that feature. He admitted that currently it’s a very small number, but almost all of their customers demand the feature. According to Mickos, most customers aren’t ready to dabble with hybrid clouds just yet, but they want to know that they have a solution in place for that purpose when the time comes.

I asked Mickos who he considered to be their primary competitors. He quickly rattled off VMware vCloud Director and Cloud Stack, but left out any mention of OpenStack. This caught my attention, since every Linux distribution is working to bundle OpenStack-powered cloud solutions into their product catalog. Mickos’s opinion is that OpenStack is shaping up to be a great public cloud platform, but he’s not seeing a lot of private cloud traction from it.

Like OpenStack, though, Eucalyptus is free software. You can grab it from GitHub and use it today, without paying a dime to Eucalyptus Systems. Mickos is no stranger to open source business models, though; and Eucalyptus Systems has raised $55 million in funding.

As for his unfinished joke, Mickos says traditional “ops” people approach “The Cloud” the same way they do every problem: they identify a number of packages to combine into a menu to provide to their customers. Mickos suggests that this group is largely focused on the hardware they use, rather then benefits of “The Cloud”.

The VMware camp, says Mickos, looks to put “The Cloud” on top of their existing product portfolio. This is largely a marketing effort, rather than an engineering effort. Despite VMware’s recent dabblings with open source (see Cloud Foundry and Serengeti as examples), VMware’s primary interest is in selling VMware solutions.

Obviously, Eucalyptus is what Mickos considers the “app guy” in his joke. Hopefully Mickos can find a good punchline soon.

Hands On With The Sonos Sub

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 06:09 AM PDT

The Sonos Sub, not to be confused with the Five-Dollar Footlong, is a subwoofer that works wirelessly with the Sonos family of devices and adds considerable bass to any Sonos CONNECT:AMP, PLAY:5, or PLAY:3 device. It is a substantial device with two force-canceling speakers that outputs down to 25 Hz.

At $699 this isn’t your run-of-the-mill audio purchase. However, the difference in sound reproduction with and without the Sub is quite striking.

I have dual PLAY:5s pumping out audio in my living room and I thought they were more than sufficient for my needs. However, after adding the Sub I noticed a fuller range of sound as the PLAY:5s took over on the high end and Sub was able to add bass. The difference, as they say, is night and day.

The Sub is full of subtle menace. A center hole is lined by grey plastic while the casing is piano black and almost featureless. You can play it standing up or lying down and the only branding is the Sonos logo on the top. A power cable is all you need to keep this thing running so it could feasibly be in any spot in the house.

All told, this is an impressive piece of hardware. Audiophile it isn’t, but in terms of convenience, sound field, and fidelity you could do much worse.

There are some caveats, however. You’re obviously dealing with brand lock-in so be sure you like and use your Sonos gear before picking this up. Also remember that this will sit alongside your other audio hardware like a glossy black monolith. Two subs in one room – one for the Sonos and one for the home theatre – might make for a headache.

The Sub is available today at Sonos.com and is well worth considering of you’re a certified Sonosphile.

Product Page

Stanford Teams Up With Piazza, Apple To Bring Social Features To Its iTunes U iOS Development Class

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT

With over 700 million downloads, Apple’s iTunes U has been a massive success, but unlike other new online learning services like Udacity or Codecademy, it’s missing a social component where students can ask questions and learn from each other. Apple, Stanford University and the Palo Alto-based startup Piazza have now teamed up to bring Piazza’s social learning platform for students, TAs and professors to the next session of Stanford’s highly popular iOS development class on iTunes U. This is a first for iTunes U and Piazza and Stanford worked closely with Apple to get a link to the course’s Piazza site embedded in iTunes U.

As Piazza’s founder and CEO Pooja Sankar told me last week, there has clearly been a trend towards making more and more educational content available online. There is also plenty of software out there that helps teachers create content and manage their students. What’s been lacking, though, in her view, is a tool that creates engagement around this content. “Learning,” she said, “is severely hampered by this.”

With Piazza, though, students can ask each other questions (both under their real name and anonymously) and discuss what’s happening in a class in real time and use a wiki-like site to edit responses. It’s important to stress that Piazza is more than just a message board. The service, for example, distinguishes between responses from students, which they can edit together, and responses from teachers, which they can also collaborate on. Students can also see how many of their classmates are online at the same time.

So far, Piazza has raised about $6 million in funding and the company currently has 11 employees. Sankar started working on the product in 2010 and launched her first small beta tests at Stanford in January 2011. At that time, about 4,000 students used the system. Today, she told me, the service is being used by closer to 250,000 students at universities around the world.

Stanford’s iOS class saw over 10 million downloads for individual lecture videos so far, making it one of the most popular online courses around. The collaboration with Piazza, sais Brent Izutsu, the program manager for iTunes U at Stanford, will hopefully enhance learning and unleash some of the “enormous potential for collaboration and community-building though Q&A and problem-solving with friends from across the globe.”

Registration for the next session of the course is opening today and will remain open until July 6. The course itself will run from June 25 to August 27. As an extra incentive to register early, the first 1,000 students to register will be eligible to have the apps they create as their final project for the class evaluated for “special showcasing on Stanford’s iTunes U site.”

FB’s Biggest Ecommerce Platform Payvment Lets Its 165K Sellers Easily Buy Taste Graph-Targeted Ads

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 05:59 AM PDT

The “Taste Graph” is Payvment‘s secret weapon. Facebook’s top ecommerce platform has spent two years finding out what Facebook users Like and buy, and starting today its 165,000 merchants can use it to auto-target ad campaigns. See many businesses don’t have know how to A/B test, target, or manage Facebook ad bids, but now they just set their total budget, and Payvment pre-populates creative from their store, optimizes bids, and show ads to people interested in similar products.

The result is ad campaigns that get 25% better click through rates than those bought through Facebook’s self-serve platform. By making Facebook ads easier and more effective for the massive long-tail of small businesses, Payvment will boost Facebook’s revenu and take a cut for itself.

Facebook ads are tough for small businesses because they either need huge budgets upwards of $10,000 a month to pay for a enterprise level Ads API tool or service, or they have to go it alone in the manual self-serve tool that makes efficient data-driven testing almost impossible. That’s why a Payvment survey found that 60% of the sellers who use its tools to set up ecommerce stores on their Facebook Pages had never used Facebook ads.

That’s why Payvment spent the last year and part of its $7.5 million in funding from Blue Run Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and 500 Startups to build its “one-click Facebook ad buying service”. It takes all the heavy-lifting out of running serious Facebook ad campaigns so merchants can focus on running their stores while still paying to bring in qualified new customers.

Payvment’s CEO Christian Taylor exclaims “We’re going to be the the one to kick down the door to small businesses using Facebook ads!”

Merchants select a product they want to advertise, and Payvment grabs one of the already-uploaded photos, the product description, and intelligently creates a Facebook ad complete with image, headline, and copy. It analyzes the merchant’s store and who have Liked, bought, browsed that product, finds people who’ve interacted with similar products on its other stores, and shows them the ad.

By leveraging this taste graph, ad viewers are much more likely to make a purchase. Store owners can then track their campaign performance in an analytics dashboard. In exchange for the service, Payvment takes a small percentage of a merchant’s total ad spend.

Facebook should be thankful. Payvment is effectively solving a gaping hole in its ad offering for small businesses. Taylor tells me “If you look at the history of AdSense and AdWords, the majority of spend is by small businesses. Sheryl came from Google. Facebook knows [how important] small business will be to ad spend.”

While hundreds of big brands spend millions on ad campaigns, hundreds of thousands of small businesses buying thousand-dollar campaigns can add up. Facebook needs the sum to grow its revenue and satisfy investors, and Payvment is ready to lay the groundwork.

Evernote By The Numbers: 34M Users, 1.4M Paying, And The Relative Merits Of Different Platforms

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 05:47 AM PDT

Phil Libin, the CEO of note taking app Evernote, is sitting on a $1 billion valuation and plans for an IPO, and while it may be a while yet before it follows through on going public , today at LeWeb in London he revealed new numbers for just how much the service is getting used, and how much money different platforms are bringing into the pot.

He said that the company now has 34 million users overall across all platforms — mobile and web — with the number of paying users now at 1.4 million: that’s a significant rise on the 25 million overall and 1 million paying users Evernote last reported as recently as May, when it announced its $70 million round.

He then did something a little atypical for a startup,which can be cagey about how much money it makes when the chief aim is to scale as much as possible. He talked about average revenues per user, on an annual basis, based on different platforms. It goes like this:

MOBILE
Android: $1.06
Windows Phone 7: $1.44
iPhone: $1.79
Blackberry: $2.01
iPad: $2.18

DESKTOP
Desktop web $1.81
Windows PC $2.33
Mac OS $3.16

Libin notes that he thinks that when there are fewer users the average revenues are higher, but also it may be because of the higher amount of enterprise users on platforms like RIM’s. “There are very few users on the BlackBerry platform, but they do pay,” he said.

He also notes that some developers report higher revenues for iPhone users, possibly because they do more with mobile ads around them. Evernote’s business model, he says, is about making the initial experience as inexpensive and easy to access as possible and then providing opportunities to charge in the app for extra features.

“Our philosophy is to let people buy extras as easily as they can,” he said, and in-app purchases are fine by them. “We don't begrudge Apple their 30 percent because it's more frictionless. People complain that in-app stuff is expensive but when you think about the massive marketing and discoverability you get from the app store, you should think of it as the transacion stuff plus marketing.”

The iPad, meanwhile, is proving yet again that it is a sticky and attractive platform for consuming content. A survey we covered yesterday from the OPA also reached a similar conclusion with respect to paid content engagement on the tablet, with 61 percent of all tablet users saying they pay for apps and other services.

He points out that Apple users are the most valuable at the moment for Evernote. Counting total user numbers and revenues, Apple platforms work out to the single biggest category. So that plays out in development, too: “It's about half and half,” he said. “Half of our effort goes into Apple and half goes into everything else.”

He also gave some details on how the newer apps, Food, Hello and Skitch, are performing:

Food $6.73
Skitch $8.44
Hello $9.22

“Food users are the most engaged,” he said. The fact that Evernote is making such healthy revenues out of their vertical efforts could be a good sign of more of these being developed and rolled out in the months ahead. “Moving fast to offer multiple apps has paid off for us,” he notes.

He also noted that revenues from the 10 most-used third party apps is $9.53, collectively.

The role of mobile, for a company built first on a mobile app, remains strong: at the moment 75 percent of all new users are coming on via mobile, with the remaining 25 percent from desktop.

Libin, who has talked many times of wanting to build a company that is sustainable for the next 100 years, says that he wants this to translate into an actual product: a service to sell storage for 100 years, where users can designate others to access it as well. He is unfazed that in that time something better than Evernote might come along. “If someone makes a great product better than Evernote they deserve to win but I've not seen that yet,” he said.

Looking ahead, given how well the Food app has done, Libin wants to take some of that effectiveness and move it into new apps, specifically around photos. That’s not to say he wants to make the “next Instagram” but to incorporate more image capabilities into more places: “We're working on making the experience better for photos. We want to use evernote for informational documents, but then with food, you can see us moving into a whole new set of products away from productivity and more into lifestyle,” he said at LeWeb. “For specific, beautiful and information-rich aspects of your life, we will provide a way to keep memories and experiences more. Expect more apps for that in the months ahead.”

[Image: Erno Hannick, Instagram]

Burst Raises $3.5 Million For Private, Family-Friendly Photo And Video Sharing App

Posted: 19 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT

When it rains, it pours. Another new arrival in the private social networking space is Burst, a mobile video and photo sharing solution designed for families- or really, for anyone interested in an efficient way to privately share media recorded on your mobile phone.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Bryant McBride, Boston-based Burst offers a handful of unique features for sharing clips from your child’s soccer game or school play, for example. And it even works for sharing things with “dear old dad” (OK, my dad) who’s still struggling to figure out his new-fangled smartphone, and wishes you’d just send him an email already.

First, a little background. Burst CEO McBride admits that he’s not your typical startup founder, “I’m not a 25-year old kid in a garage,” he laughs. He’s a 47-year old dad who helped grow and sell four companies: Myteam.com, where he was SVP Operations, Vision Sports and Entertainment Partners (founder and CEO), which was acquired by The Active Network in 2005; Football Scouts, Inc., which sold to ESPN where it later became ESPN Insider; and Sports Technologies, Inc. whose FanNation property was sold to Sports Illustrated/Time Warner. Prior to his entrepreneurial activities, he worked as VP of Biz Dev at the NHL.

So, given McBride’s interests, it’s no surprise that with Burst, he was inspired by thinking about the neighborhood sports angle. 50 million kids play sports in the U.S., he says, and parents record a lot of footage of that. But Burst isn’t just for the soccer mom/dad set, it’s for anyone who wants to send out photos or videos privately with minimal effort.

The app works as a camera replacement, and does a few nifty things that make it less painful to use. For example, it auto-titles the recordings based on what’s on your phone’s calendar for that day and time. (E.g., the app prompts you, is this “Joey’s soccer match?” and you can accept or reject). It also saves you the step of uploading, because by the time the video finishes recording, it has already been saved to the cloud. And the company also took a smart approach to permissioning and authentication, allowing you to “un-Burst” (remove access to) any photo or video after it’s been shared. It’s like SnapChat for grown-ups, perhaps.

Another feature, which is going to be helpful to me personally I have to admit, is that photos and videos recorded via Burst can be sent out via SMS or email – and the recipient doesn’t have to have the app to view them or save them. That solves the typical app adoption problem – no need to use the app, grandma, here’s the content! However, the shared content isn’t accessible indefinitely by recipients, unless they download the app. (Incentive!)

There are a number of features in the works, which are undisclosed for now, but will be interesting. Burst is also currently a free app, with tentative plans to go freemium in the future. In tests, the app worked fairly well for recording video, but the video import process from the camera roll (on iOS) was a bit slow and neglected to import the audio. That said, the app is very new and is a work in progress. It’s still worth keeping an eye on this.

Burst.it is backed by $3.45 million in funding from the angel investors that have been with McBride for around 10 years now. The funding was led by Tom DiBenedetto, part-owner of the Boston Red Sox and Owner of AS Roma of the Italian Series A league; Fay Vincent, Former Commissioner of MLB; Jesse Itzler, Co-Founder of Marquis Jets and serial entrepreneur, as well as individual investors and a strategic media investor whose identity is not public at present.

Burst is available for iPhone or Android here.