The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- AOL Autos Partners With CarWoo! To Let Users Negotiate With Local Dealerships Anonymously
- When The Boss Is Gone, Rock Out With This Automatic Party Desk
- iSpeech’s New Voice Recognition Platform Wants You Talking To Your Household Gadgets
- Microsoft Completes Its $1.2B Yammer Acquisition
- Raved Is A Social-Powered Local Recommendations App Built On Facebook & Foursquare
- Sound Of Silence: Researchers Nearly Shut Down Grum Spam Network
- Like Google Docs, But With More Conversation: Huddle Updates Its Content Sharing Platform With Social Layer
- Apple Turns To A Lottery System For The New iPad’s Launch In China
- DreamWorks Animation-Incubated Ptch Helps Users Make Beautiful, Shareable Videos
- Say Media Says Yes To $27M, Will Build Out Publishing Platform, Buy More Assets
- Thanks To GrubHub Integration, Foodspotting Gets Food Ordering
- Credit Karma’s New Credit Monitoring App For iOS Shoots Up App Store Charts
- Enterproid’s “Divide” Mobile Platform Arrives On iOS To Keep Personal And Professional Profiles Separate
- CEO Elop Hints Nokia Will Be 1st To Windows Phone 8, Weighs In On China And Android
- Wearable Computer Pioneer, Dr. Steve Mann, Releases New Photo Supporting His Assault Claim Against McDonald’s
- Highlight’s Latest Release Improves Battery Life And Gives Users More Ways To Interact With Each Other
- Gogobot Launches Its Redesigned iPhone Travel App, Hits 2M Registered Users
- Nokia Sold Just 600K Handsets In North America During The Last Quarter
- How To Apply For All Those Accelerator Programs? f6S.com Is Here To Help
- Firespotter Labs, Makers Of UberConference, Raise $15 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures
| AOL Autos Partners With CarWoo! To Let Users Negotiate With Local Dealerships Anonymously Posted: 19 Jul 2012 09:42 AM PDT  Buying a car is usually a pretty awful experience. Browsing may be fun, but once it comes time to sign on the dotted line you end up having to do a lot of research, a lot of paperwork, and it’s expensive to boot. This is what makes services like CarFax so disruptive. And today, a brand new partnership between AOL Autos and CarWoo! should also simplify the process of finding the right car for you. AOL Autos already works as a hub to let you search for vehicles based on filters. With the addition of CarWoo!’s platform, however, users will now have access to a Best Offers section of the site. Within this “Best Offers” section, users will see deals from over 10,000 local dealers. This will allow potential buyers to see prices in their specific area before walking into a dealership and trying to negotiate. The CarWoo! platform has long supported anonymous communication directly with dealerships, and now that same functionality will come to AOL Autos. This comes straight on the heels of Choose Control on the AOL Autos web site. (Editorial Note: Full disclosure, Aol owns us.)
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| When The Boss Is Gone, Rock Out With This Automatic Party Desk Posted: 19 Jul 2012 09:26 AM PDT Some folks we met in Charlotte had a mission: they wanted to win a contest (sponsored by Red Bull) for the coolest Arduino project in the land. I think they may have nailed it. The project, built by engineers and designers for Edison Nation, turns an ordinary desk into a booze-infused party zone when the clock hits five (or when you slap the Swingline stapler.) The project has been submitted to the Red Bull website and the guys could use your help getting to the top so they can head out to the 2012 Maker Faire in NYC. Sadly the Red Bull website is an absolute mess and there is no visible means of voting, but if you figure it out, give these guys a nod. It’s not every day that you see a system that can turn an office into a red-hot, robotic bar.
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| iSpeech’s New Voice Recognition Platform Wants You Talking To Your Household Gadgets Posted: 19 Jul 2012 09:21 AM PDT  Newark, NJ-based iSpeech may be best known for its DriveSafe.ly app and the mobile SDK it launched last summer, but now the company plans to bring its speech expertise to a different environment — your home. Today iSpeech announced the launch of a new voice recognition platform called (what else?) iSpeech Home for hardware manufacturers and OEMs to integrate into their household gadgetry. "Speech is the user interface of the future," said iSpeech COO Yaron Oren, who was quick to cite Siri as an influence. Oren and the iSpeech team seem to take umbrage with the complex and confusing interfaces that have a habit of appearing in household electronics. Should iSpeech's vision come to pass, users will eventually be able to issue verbal commands like "record 'Doctor Who' season premiere" to their televisions, or "turn off the lights in the dining room" to their home automation system. Sure, voice controlled home automation isn't exactly a new concept, as more than a few companies (not to mention plenty of devoted hobbyists) have put together their own solutions in recent years. The difference here is that iSpeech's platform is capable of capturing and interpreting more natural voice commands, as opposed to simply relying on a preset list. It sounds like potentially wonderful stuff, but as usual, it all comes down to adoption. If the voice recognition platform doesn't pick up any steam among OEMs and hardware manufacturers, then there goes the ball game. That said, iSpeech already seems to have made some progress on that front. According to Oren, the company has already met with nearly a dozen companies (though he wouldn't specify which ones) about iSpeech Home, all of whom are in "various stages of evaluation." Given that major consumer electronics players like Samsung and its eternal rival LG have pushed to make the living room smarter with a host of voice-recognizing televisions, it comes as little surprise that iSpeech's platform has gotten the most attention from other television manufacturers. Makers of thermostats, security systems, household appliances have also expressed their interest in the platform, and with any luck we’ll soon be chatting with our dishwashers with wreckless abandon. Be prepared for a bit of a wait though, as Oren expects to have iSpeech Home-friendly devices trickle into the market within the next 6-12 months.
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| Microsoft Completes Its $1.2B Yammer Acquisition Posted: 19 Jul 2012 09:16 AM PDT  Microsoft just announced that it has now officially completed the acquisition of Yammer, the four-year-old social networking company for enterprises. All the closing conditions have now been met and the Yammer team will now officially join the Microsoft Office Division. After weeks of rumors, the $1.2 billion acquisition was first announced in late June. According to Microsoft, the company is looking forward to “accelerating the adoption of Yammer's standalone service, and enhancing the social capabilities in Microsoft's communication and collaboration offerings.” As Microsoft announced earlier this week, the next version of Office will come with Yammer as a default part of the popular productivity suite. So far, Microsoft hasn’t fully released its plans for how exactly it plans to integrate Yammer into its wider range of enterprise-focused services. At the time of the acquisition, Yammer reportedly had around 4 million registered users and about 20% of those paid for the company’s premium services. This acquisition, as our own Colleen Taylor and Ingrid Lunden noted when the acquisition was first announced, will give Microsoft the ability to better compete with other social enterprise players, including Oracle, Salesforce and IBM. Yammer, which launched at the TechCrunch 50 conference in 2008, raised about $142 million in venture funding before the acquisition. Here is the full announcement from Microsoft:
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| Raved Is A Social-Powered Local Recommendations App Built On Facebook & Foursquare Posted: 19 Jul 2012 09:11 AM PDT  Apptera, the mobile communications and ad company backed by $30 million from Alloy, Lightspeed Ventures, and others, is today launching a second mobile app to join what had been, until now, its flagship product: the Android dialer replacement, Poptuit, which debuted around this time last year. The new app is a friend-powered recommendation engine called Raved, and it’s available first for iOS. The app works by aggregating your Facebook friends’ likes and check-ins, as well as friends’ check-ins from Foursquare, and then presents those to you in a very Pinterest-like interface. There’s a search bar at the top, so you can find places your friends have visited and liked (e.g. search for “sushi,” “coffee,” “gym,” etc.). However, the app’s default screen just shows you top recommendations from those two networks, across all categories. Apptera CEO Henry Vogel tells me that Raved was designed to fill a niche somewhere in between Yelp and Foursquare. There’s a couple of problems with online reviews (like Yelp), he says. “They’re sort of untrustworthy…and they tend to draw the extremes. There are people that really dislike a place and get motivated to write a review, or they really like a place. You have to do a lot of work shifting through the reviews, seeing how many there are, and reading them,” he says. “We think there’s an opening there in augmenting that information…with the information from the people that you know and trust.” He also points out that on social apps like Foursquare, there’s only a small percentage of users contributing content. That’s why adding Facebook to the mix helps to provide a better view of what all your friends like and recommend. On Facebook, Vogel says there are around 10-15 places that friends have liked, on average. Combined, that leads to a lot more social data the app can access and aggregate. While the interface is appealing and simple (gotta love that Pinterest grid, right?) and all the above are some valid points, it’s hard to say there’s enough here to really draw users away from Facebook, Foursquare, or other preferred local recommendation apps like Yelp, Google+ Local, AroundMe, etc. While, yes, reviews can be untrustworthy to some extent, the local business reviews apps offer far more detailed information than Raved does at present. And if you’re looking for a friend’s recommendation to put you over the top, Foursquare has enough traction now to generally suffices, even if the active user base (those checking in and writing tips) is small. However, Raved plans to grow beyond being just a Facebook/Foursquare platform app. In the future, it will include busy news feeds of place activities pulled from those platforms as well as from Twitter, and will determine whether the local business is offering a deal or discount by aggregating from a network of local offers, deal sites, and Facebook Offers. (This also points to the business model, by the way). And Vogel says that plans to integrate services like OpenTable and GrubHub are planned, too, not only to beef up the content, but also to generate affiliate revenue. Why is a cash-flow positive ad business so interested in building apps, you might ask? “We just think there’s more opportunity and we’re going where the consumers are going with smartphones,” he says. Be on the lookout for more focus on Raved in the near future from this company.
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| Sound Of Silence: Researchers Nearly Shut Down Grum Spam Network Posted: 19 Jul 2012 08:54 AM PDT  Notice anything weird about your email inbox? If you said there wasn’t as much spam lately that’s because researchers at FireEye and the venerable SpamHaus have essentially shut down the Grum botnet by marking and banning IP addresses. The botnet was responsible for 18% of the world’s spam and had lassoed 560,000 to 840,000 computers using a rootkit. After FireEye and SpamHaus published the inner workings of Grum, public pressure soon forced Dutch ISPs to shut down a major network control hub that sent commands to about 120,000 separate IPs. Then a similar server was shut down in Panama, leaving only a working server in Russia. However, as the Panama server winked out, suddenly, the hunt for Grum became a cat and mouse game as new servers popped up in the Ukraine. FireEye’s Atif Mushtaq wrote: With the shutdown of the Panamanian server, a complete segment was dead forever. This good news was soon followed by some bad news. After seeing the Panamanian server had been shut down, the bot herders moved quickly and started pointing the rest of the CnCs to new secondary servers in Ukraine. So at one point, I was thinking that all we needed was to take down one Russian server, but right in front of my eyes, the bot herders started pointing their botnet to new destinations. I must say, for a moment, I was stunned. The bot herders replaced the two Dutch servers with six new servers located in Ukraine. Ukraine has been a safe haven for bot herders in the past and shutting down any servers there has never been easy. Although the Russian and Ukrainian servers are still running, the group reduced total spam output from 120,000+ IPs to 21,000, reducing the overall spam load. It’s not over yet, but it’s a dent in the overall feed. Mushtaq closed with a message to the spammers: “Stop sending us spam. We don’t need your cheap Viagra or fake Rolex. Do something else, work in a Subway or McDonalds, or sell hotdogs, but don’t send us spam.” “Keep on dreaming of a junk-free inbox,” he wrote.
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2012 08:38 AM PDT  Huddle, the cloud collaboration company that picked up $25 million in funding in May, today is launching a significant update to its platform: it’s adding in a social communication layer to its service, so that when people share and work together on documents online, they can also talk to each other about them. The move is very much in keeping with the trend of companies like Acunote and Asana making it easier for disparate colleagues — or even those in the same office who don’t talk in person much — to be able to keep up on what others are doing; plus the second trend of putting significantly more live content into the cloud. With this new version of the platform, Huddle is working right in the center of where a lot of other enterprise-focused companies want to go. Microsoft’s purchase of Yammer, you can imagine, will likely (hopefully) be integrated into a bigger collaboration suite for businesses; and similarly you can see Google edging in a converged direction with its cloud services, too. However, while these heavy hitters continue to lag on implementing services like this, smaller Huddle has stolen a march. “The new Huddle is the first enterprise tool that brings together content, conversation and enterprise-level security, giving workers a full 360-degree view of information that is important to them,” says Alastair Mitchell, CEO, Huddle, in a statement. He notes that customers have seen the time taken to find and share information reduce by half. “Discussions are focused on specific content, knowledge is transmitted to the people that need it and the enterprise data store is enriched and available for everyone in the enterprise ecosystem. Legacy ICT systems no longer support the new ways of working and Huddle is leading a transformation in the ECM space, ensuring people have access to higher quality content, productivity is increased and costs are reduced.” Huddle’s new version is significantly pared down in terms of how it looks, with the simplified interface pointing users to view and interact with files, as well as see related discussions and metadata in one central place — the idea is to keep people from jogging from one screen to another, or one application to another — both of which can become time-consuming distractions. The company has also worked in some features that are a hat-tip to services like Yammer and Twitter, with the ability to @ mention someone to alert them to a message. Also included are version histories and audit trails to look at individual revisions on documents. Huddle says the new version of the platform is already available for all customers, which include 80 percent of the Fortune 500 and 80 percent of central UK government departments. The company’s projecting an eightfold increase in revenues this year.
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| Apple Turns To A Lottery System For The New iPad’s Launch In China Posted: 19 Jul 2012 08:34 AM PDT  The new iPad launches in China this Friday, July 20th. Big crowds are expected. But Apple is using a reservation lottery service to allow buyers to essentially reserve their place in line now. Interested buyers simply need to go to this page, select a version of the iPad and provide their government ID. After that, a lottery-like system will notify the lucky few. But this isn’t just about reducing the size of the crowds and improving customer satisfaction. Apple is using this system to fight scalpers and scammers. In the past scalpers would try to turn a profit by getting in line early, buying an iDevice and then reselling the product at a higher cost to someone in line. Of course Apple frowns upon this practice. Not only is it a bit unsavory, there’s a high chance that buyers can be scammed with a fake iPad- it’s happened before. Unscrupulous dealers are also known to try to scoop up as many units as possible and then resell them at a higher cost. As M.I.C. Gadgets reminds, Apple previously used this same lottery system for the iPhone’s Hong Kong launch. Apparently it worked to some degree of satisfaction. It’s nigh impossible to stop all the scammers, but this system seems fair enough to the early adopters while providing enough protection against the baddies. Good luck! May all the odds ever be in your favor.
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| DreamWorks Animation-Incubated Ptch Helps Users Make Beautiful, Shareable Videos Posted: 19 Jul 2012 08:03 AM PDT  With mobile video being all the rage, multiple startups have emerged to make it easier to shoot and share videos with friends. Following on this trends a small team within DreamWorks Animation has assembled to create an app called Ptch with a unique value proposition: Users create interesting, shareable videos with the app. But they can also share those videos and open them up so that others can remix and mash them up. Ptch isn’t just about taking a single video, throwing a filter on it and tossing it on the social networks, like Socialcam or Viddy. Nor is it about selecting a bunch of media and having a video automatically pieced together, like Animoto. Ptch users have to do a little work to piece together their videos. However, the results end up being much better than most other mobile video tools out there. The app is built around a really easy drag-and-drop experience to enable users to quickly piece together photos and video assets to their, um, Ptches. It works like this: Users select media from their camera roll or from networks like Instagram, Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Viddy. They can then drag and drop those assets into whatever order they like, add captions, and select from different “themes” to spice up their video. Users can even select from a wide range of licensed music to add to their Ptch. The app then does the hard work of stitching those assets together into a video, which they can share on Facebook, Twitter, or within the app itself. Ptch is the brainchild of DreamWorks Animation CTO Ed Leonard, who has taken the helm as CEO of the startup within DreamWorks. And that’s how it’s being run — like a startup. While the 20-person Ptch team includes some DreamWorks employees who bring expertise around advanced video rendering and other features, about two-third of the people working on the app were recruited from outside the film studio, from companies like Yahoo and Myspace. When demoing the app, Leonard told that Ptch was created to inspire a type of “living media,” which will allow users to remix each others videos. Users have the option of making their media available to others, who can play with their individual assets and mash them up to make new movies. The idea is in part to enable friends and people with shared experiences to tell stories with each other and re-use popular assets that define moments they were a part of. (Don’t worry, for those less adventurous, there’s always the option of “locking” videos so that people can’t mess with your media.) The app is free, and the team hopes to make money off of microtransactions, as people will pay for different themes to express themselves. There’s also the possibility of using the app for co-marketing of major events or brands using it to build campaigns around their products. That said, it’s such a small, experimental part of DreamWorks Animation right now that Leonard and team aren’t really focused on the monetization aspect — just, you know, getting the app out there and in the hands of users, and seeing what they do with it.
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| Say Media Says Yes To $27M, Will Build Out Publishing Platform, Buy More Assets Posted: 19 Jul 2012 08:03 AM PDT  Another milestone for online publishing company SAY Media, just 10 days after it had announced that Time Magazine publisher Kim Kelleher would be coming on board as president in September: today it confirmed that it has raised $27 million in funding, which it will use to make acquisitions and enhance its publishing platform. The round was led by new investors New Enterprise Associates, Shea Ventures and Correlation Ventures, and also had participation from existing investors August Capital, First Round Capital, Maveron, WPP, Focus Ventures and Neoteny. Paul Hsiao, a partner at NEA, will be joining SAY’s board. Although much smaller, SAY comes into the category of companies like (TechCrunch owner) AOL, which has looked to leverage its online expertise and ad sales business model with the ownership of online publishing assets, as well as traditional publishers have made moves into online publishing content to go after those same ad dollars. SAY’s approach is to seek out specific verticals (tech, fashion, etc.) and build up audience in these as a way of increasing the value of engagement for the brands that choose SAY for its online ad distribution. CEO Matt Sanchez describes it as “the intersection of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley” and calls it the “future of media.” “This funding round is a validation of our strategy,” he said in a statement. NEA, as background, has one of the most successful track records in the VC industry — investing in companies lie Groupon, Millennial Media, Evernote and Salesforce.com — and that in itself makes the investment eye-catching. SAY Media will be using some of its new cash injection to further what it already does by tapping more into new platforms beyond the basic web for expression — a strategy endorsed by NEA’s Hsiao: “The rapid adoption of mobile devices, video and social Web is transforming how passionate editors and global brand marketers create engaging content and community,” said Hsiao in a statement. He notes that the market for ads in this space is worth some $60 billion “as brands continue to shift ad budget from print and TV to next generation media channels.” It will also be looking at acquisitions. SAY, which was formed from the merger of Six Apart and Video Egg, has already been doing a some of that, buying sites like Remodelista, ReadWriteWeb, XOJane and Dogster; and on top of that has “exclusive partnerships” to sell ads into other sites that include Fashionista, Gear Patrol and Food52 — in all, some 500 publishing sites are in its network, totalling a global audience of 400 million. The question now, is whether those acquisitions will continue to be in the area of “traditional” blogs, or whether we will see the company following Hsiao’s “rapid adoption” of mobile and other formats to focus attention elsewhere.
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| Thanks To GrubHub Integration, Foodspotting Gets Food Ordering Posted: 19 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Foodspotting users may find that their stomachs rumble when they use the photo-heavy app to discover new dishes and restaurants. Starting today, they’ll be able to act on that rumbling with just a few taps (and without having to leave their home), because Foodspotting has added integration with GrubHub. The partnership seems like a pretty natural fit — as GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney tells us, “connecting the #1 online ordering service with the #1 social food photo site is probably the most obvious partnership that we’ve ever done.” The integration comes through the Place Pages that Foodspotting introduced in version 3.5, which already offered access to Yelp (reviews), SinglePlatform (menus), and OpenTable (reservations). Now the Pages also have an “Order Now Via GrubHub” option, which takes you to a new mobile-friendly website where you can complete your order (and it doesn’t require a login). When asked about how Foodspotting approaches these partnerships, co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski says:
Andrzejewski also says that Foodspotting is part of the GrubHub affiliate program, so she hopes to make some money from the orders, but at the same time, “our primary focus at the moment is on creating a great experience for foodseekers by observing how they interact with these integrations.” GrubHub is promising a $10 credit to the first 25 people to place orders through, so if this sounds tempting to you, you might want to hurry. The blog post announcing the integration mentions other features we might see in the future, such as dish-specific ordering. Oh, and since we’re talking about Foodspotting, the company says it has now passed 3 million downloads and 2 million photos. It’s also conducting a general survey on foodseeking behaviors, and TechCrunch readers can participate here.
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| Credit Karma’s New Credit Monitoring App For iOS Shoots Up App Store Charts Posted: 19 Jul 2012 07:36 AM PDT  Credit Karma, the online credit monitoring service backed by $3 million from SV Angel, Founders Fund and others, has shot up to become the #1 Financial app in the Apple App Store and #22 overall, only a day after its mobile debut. Like its online counterpart, Credit Karma Mobile brings credit monitoring to your iOS device, and notifies you when certain events are reported on your credit report. And yes, it’s actually free, not free*. Thanks to less-than-reputable companies which have, in the past, tricked users into signing up for "free*" credit reports which come with strings attached (i.e., monthly charges), Credit Karma has to fight the perception that “free” actually means “watch out, it’s a trap!” So to be clear, the company doesn’t monetize its service by charging users – instead, it operates as an ad-supported company by allowing banks and other financial services to target ads based on demographics and credit scores. The company doesn’t share your information without your consent, but the plan is to allow these companies to offer users discounts based on their credit scores. This would be done without sharing personally identifiable information, however – it’s similar to how Mint.com operates, to give you an idea. Disclaimers out of the way, the new iOS app offers the same type of features that users could access before using the online service, including monitoring, alerts, and a Credit Report Card, which tells you more about the various factors affecting your score. In January, CEO Kenneth Lin told us that the service had 4 million total users. He says now that the company passed the 7 million user mark last week. And that number is looking to spike again, now that they’ve gone mobile. In 8 hours, the app ranked as the fourth most popular free finance app on iOS, and, as noted above, it now ranks #1. It also reached the #27 spot overall 18 hours after launch and, as of this morning, is up to spot #22 (in the free apps list). You can download the Credit Karma for yourself here.
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT  Enterproid, the enterprise mobile computing platform company whose name literally speaks to its roots in the Android ecosystem (“Droid!”), is making a big leap today with the introduction of Divide for iOS. Divide is the product that previously allowed Android users to configure a completely separate profile on their mobile devices for business use, which includes enterprise-grade versions of email applications, a web browser, IM, and SMS. Obviously, the same level of deep integration is not possible on Apple devices, which is why Divide for iOS is bundled as a mobile app. While the integration is not the same on a technical level, the iOS app is just as easy for an end user to access as Divide’s Android counterpart. Once you launch the app, you’re presented with a personalized workspace with “apps” for mail, contacts, calendar, Facebook, Box, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and more. The system supports Exchange, Lotus Notes and Gmail and the entire workspace can sit behind a separate PIN-protected screenlock for added security. The apps, however, are not natively installed – they’re all in-app functions within the greater Divide application. But the results are the same – it’s a private workspace for managing your business data. On the I.T. side of things, admins can remotely manage this workspace, and can set it up and deploy apps to it from the cloud. And if the phone is lost or stolen, they can track, lock and wipe data from the device as well. Pricing for Divide is $5/month per user, but there’s also a free plan for individuals who just want to use the app themselves for added security, or to simply keep their personal and business emails, calendars and contacts separate. Enterproid, which was founded by former Morgan Stanley, MTV and Smule execs, raised a $11 million Series A round from Comcast Ventures, Google Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures back in October.
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| CEO Elop Hints Nokia Will Be 1st To Windows Phone 8, Weighs In On China And Android Posted: 19 Jul 2012 06:56 AM PDT  Nokia’s Q2 earnings out today reflect the big challenges for the handset maker amid what CEO Stephen Elop calls the “ferocity” of competition from Android and Apple, but here’s a clue to one interesting development: he closed off today’s analyst call with a hint that Nokia will be the first handset maker to produce a smartphone on the future Windows Phone 8 platform from Microsoft. Asked at the very end of the call if Nokia would make the first phone for Windows Phone 8, Elop would not answer directly, but said: “One signal [of what is coming] is that on the number of occasions when Windows Phone 8 has been demonstrated it has been on a Nokia device. We have a close relationship that is unlike what anyone else has with Microsoft.” The comments were made in the context of Elop defending Nokia’s relationship with Redmond. Another analyst had pointed out that while it looked from the start like a very cozy friendship, more recently Microsoft has been announcing new products in mobile, seemingly with little regard for Nokia (Surface, anyone?). Steve Ballmer has said as much himself by touting how Microsoft worked with a variety of device makers. Elop says no way: “We have established a preferred position with Microsoft in partnership — and also contractually,” (last part slightly ominously, IMO). He also noted that in fact Nokia “ourselves have been encouraging others to participate in the Windows Phone ecosystem, which needs energy, investment and hardware work because of the ‘ferocity’ of the competition with Apple and Android.” And back to that contract: “We have an important relationship and dependency on Windows Phone [but] they have a dependency on us as it relates to the location partnership.” Microsoft uses Nokia location data, which comes in large part from its $8 billion Navteq purchase. These days Nokia’s location division yields very small returns compared to devices (just €283m in net sales on a quarter that saw €7.5bn in total net sales). Other highlights from the call: Patents. Elop has said it before and he’s mentioned it here again. The company is losing a lot of money as it continues to shift its product base over to Windows Phone (and hope that eventually lots more consumers bite). So its assets are coming into play big time. The company has a patent portfolio worth about $6 billion, which will likely be used as part of his strategy of “looking at other things to generate cash.” Also included will be more real-estate sales, which you might also read as possible further plant closures. Confusion/frustration with Windows Phone 8 from Windows Phone 7 users. As you may already know, there is no upgrade path from one generation of the OS to the next. One analyst asked whether Nokia planned to “reward current Lumia purchasers with upgrades” to WP8 handsets to avoid some of that disappointment. Elop didn’t answer that directly but noted, “Owners of existing devices do have upgrades and updates coming including some WP8 features like the start screen.” He also noted that since the WP8 announcement Nokia has actually noticed an uptick in the activation of Lumia devices. He also said Nokia will continue to sell WP7 devices even after WP8 gets released and shipped. It will use this, it seems, as part of a segmentation strategy, most likely for targeting emerging markets: “You can achieve lower price points and do things [around] that.” He also, unsolicited, decided to compare the WP7/WP8 situation to Android. “The last numbers I saw [on Android] were that north of 60 percent of devices sold were three versions older than the current OS. By and large those are not upgradeable, and yet sold the right way, there is clearly some volume. It is not the case that sales change, so we have to manage the cohesion of the platform well.” On China and Nokia totally losing its leadership there to Android. Elop: “China is a unique market…where subsidized Android devices have gained a lot of momentum [at a time when] we were not in a position to offer [competing] devices with subsidies.” He mentioned the Lumia 610 — but frankly trying to stand one device up against a tidal wave of competing models seems to have only worked so far for one handset maker: Apple. On carriers and the third ecosystem after Apple and Android. “This continues to be a very strong part of the conversation all over the world. In the U.S. for example it’s coming up and it is something we will continue to use going forward.”
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2012 06:25 AM PDT  The plot thickens! Dr. Steve Mann, the human cyborg made famous by an incident in a Parisian McDonald’s, just released a new picture (above) of his altercation with a McD’s staffer. The picture clearly shows a McDonald’s employee touching Dr. Mann’s permanently installed augmented reality eye piece. This invalidates McDonald’s statement, which claims “interaction with Dr. Mann was polite and did not involve a physical altercation.” Dr. Mann stated the man struck the EyeTap, but like a side-swipe, grabbing motion rather than a direct punch to the face. Apparently, the man touching (or striking) the eye piece is the same person who eventually pushed Dr. Mann on to the street. The person in the background of the new picture later tears up (below) the letter from Mann’s doctor, explaining the device’s need and removal process. Again, like I stated yesterday, without a video of the incident, it’s hard to say which party is in the wrong but Dr. Mann’s still images tell a chilling story all by themselves. McDonald’s released a statement yesterday regarding the incident,
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT  It’s been four months since social-local-mobile* app Highlight issued a major new release, right before SXSW. That update added the ability to, well, highlight interesting people you had crossed paths with. Now, the app that was all the rage at SXSW (or maybe it wasn’t, you tell me) has used the last several months to learn from its users and issue a new update, which adds new ways for people to interact with each other. Before we get to that, though, it’s worth pointing out that the most important update to the app might be an improvement in performance and battery life — something which plagued earlier users, particularly at SXSW. Now, about those new features. Highlight’s biggest addition is probably the ability to post a thought or comment to users who are near you. While previously users were able to add a bio, the new feature lets them basically add a status update, which is then sent out as a push notification and appears at the top of their activity stream. Users can publicly reply to those status updates or “like” them, and will get notified when others respond. Users also gain the ability to post notes on their friends’ profile pages, which is one way of providing more context to others when they show up in someone’s activity feed. The way these notes tend to work, according to Highlight founder Paul Davison, is that they serve as a sort of validation for the user who’s being viewed. Kind of like you’re vouching for them or telling interesting stories about them in virtual space to users who’ve never met them. You know how the Highlight app lets you see interests that you share in common with other users? Well the new version provides more flexibility around interests — including creating unique pages for them, on which you can see other users who share those interests. While the old app used to just import the interests you’ve specified on Facebook, the new Highlight also makes it easy for users to add interests from directly within the app. It also lets users specify which interests are most important to them, which will help the app provide more relevant results. With new communication features, the app has a new activity feed and pages for its users. That will provide more flexibility for more types of content to show up — including posts near you and the like — and help users find out more about the users that are nearby. It’s also improved notification settings, giving users more granular control over when they get notified about various different events within the app. Finally, the app has improved localization, adding a number of new languages, including: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. All in all, it’s a pretty huge update, and takes Highlight well beyond just getting notifications whenever a friend or friend of a friend or someone who shares common interests is nearby. At the same time it’s been adding new features, the Highlight team has also been expanding, and now has seven employees — compared to the two who were working on the app around SXSW. It’s probably too early to tell if Highlight will live up to the huge amount of hype it received early on, but it definitely seems like it’ll be a lot more useful with the latest update. ==
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| Gogobot Launches Its Redesigned iPhone Travel App, Hits 2M Registered Users Posted: 19 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Social travel site Gogobot has been on a roll lately. Just two months ago, the company announced that it had passed 1 million registered users. Today, Gogobot announced that it now has more than 2 million users, up 100% in the past 60 days. Currently a new users signs up for the service every 15 seconds. To celebrate this milestone, the company also today announced its completely redesigned iPhone app. Gogobot 2.0 offers a number of new features, including the ability to book hotels right from the app, as well as new “explore” and “discover” tabs to find the most interesting restaurants, hotels and other venues around you. Gogobot claims it is now the #2 social travel site behind Tripadvisor. The new app, the company says, is meant to provide you with “personalized advice and tools at every phase of your journey, from discovering to sharing and from planning to booking.” According to Gogobot co-founder and CEO Travis Katz, the emphasis in designing the new app was on making it “even more social, as you can follow where your friends and those in your network are traveling and learn if they liked a destination or have specific tips.” With the new “explore” tab, for example, users can now easily find nearby hotels and restaurants around them. By default, reviews from a user’s friends are always displayed first. As we noted earlier this month, Gogobot is putting a stronger emphasis on photos these days and this is also true for the new mobile app, which now offers full-screen pictures of interesting places your friends and other travelers from around the world are visiting. Gogobot wants to be a service for both planning your trips, as well as while you are travelling and after you have returned. During your travels, you can use the app to create virtual postcards with images of the sites you visit, or just check in and share photos with your friends. The apps also gives users a “digital passport” that gets new stamps as you check in at airports when you arrive and leave. This “passport” page, says Gogobot, is also meant to help users remember the places they have been to, as it also provides users with a full rundown of all their check-ins, postcards and arrival and departure dates. Click to view slideshow.
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| Nokia Sold Just 600K Handsets In North America During The Last Quarter Posted: 19 Jul 2012 05:40 AM PDT  Ouch. Remember that time I wrote a post called “Welcome back, Nokia“? I praised Nokia for going back to its roots with the Lumia handsets, and the flagship Lumia 900 is a fantastic phone with a great build quality and even better price tag. At the time Windows Phone had just matured into a competent mobile operating system, one worthy of consideration over iOS and Android. But that was in February, and now, two financial quarters later, Nokia is struggling in the U.S. market and revealed earlier today that it shipped just 600,000 handsets in the U.S. during the last quarter. Ouch. This drop represents a 60% decline year-on-year, and doesn’t forecast sunny skies for either Nokia or Windows Phone. To put that in perspective, Nokia sold 25.3 million devices in North America in 2006, roughly working out to 486k a week. Of the 600k handsets sold over the last four months, 330,000 were of the Lumia variety. Nokia CFO, Timo Ihamuotila, broke down the numbers further during the companies financial conference call, explaining that the Lumia 900 and 610′s sales are increasing while the smaller 800 and aging 710′s are decreasing. But it’s not just North America that’s hurting. "All regions showed a significant year-on-year decline in the second quarter 2012 except for North America," Nokia stated in today’s report, "where the sharp decline in sales of Symbian devices was more than offset by sales of our Lumia devices." Nokia saw a 5% decline on total device sales worldwide during the last quarter, shipping 83.7m devices. This likely further separates Nokia from Samsung who recently took over as the worldwide leader in mobile handset sales. Unlike the other faltering giant, Nokia still has a leg to stand on. Nokia still ships more phones than every other mobile phone company besides Samsung. Despite the statement above speaking to the contrary, the Asia-Pacific reported a 17% year-over-year change, lending a bit of credibility to the wild claim that Windows Phones were outselling iPhones in China. What’s more, the company is cutting its workforce, killing non-core brands like Vertu, and investing heavily into Windows Phone. Nokia still has a chance. It ships a boatload of devices and the company is actively trimming its fat. Nokia might never be the world leader again, but there will always be a market for a quality device like the Lumia 900.
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| How To Apply For All Those Accelerator Programs? f6S.com Is Here To Help Posted: 19 Jul 2012 05:38 AM PDT  With the mushrooming in the number of accelerator programs offered globally, there’s become a rash of ‘last chance to apply’ emails hitting our in-box of late. To be frank, we could spend a lot of time on these, but I’m sure readers would prefer some real news in their feeds. Thus, to the rescue has come f6S.com, a kind of social network for founders and startups to keep track of these programs. The real advantage is that you can apply from directly in the site for many of the programs. Thus, you’ll find Springboard, Seedcamp and Ignite 100 in the UK for instance. Sean Kane is among those who spun the idea up and, along with friends and contacts, helped to build the platform out. Although he’s loath to act as spokesperson for the ‘community’ he says the site now lists around 400+ incubator and accelerator programs, as well as almost 200 offers for startups from software companies, that can be worth thousands of dollars, such as $24,000 of hosting free from Rackspace for startups. “The tools aspect f6S.com makes people lives a lot easier tracking all these. Its seems to be delivering good value and there’s a pretty big community now,” he tells me. It does appear to be pretty useful and – to be frank – if TechCrunch writers don’t have to spend their days writing about closing dates for accelerator program then frankly we think that’s a “good thing.”
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2012 05:20 AM PDT  Although it was only a month ago that Firespotter Labs CEO Craig Walker was telling us how his company (the folks behind UberConference, Nosh, NoshList and Jotly) wasn’t in urgent need of funding, today they’re announcing the close of a good-sized round – a $15 million Series B. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and saw participation from existing investor Google Ventures. For Andreessen Horowitz, the funding was mainly about getting in on recent TechCrunch Disrupt winner UberConference. It’s the latest big telephony project from Walker, the creator of GrandCentral (now Google Voice). “They were excited about the opportunity in the voice space,” Walker says of the VC firm’s interest. UberConference, which aims to offer a more modern, more useable alternative to the horror show that is conference calling today, has the potential to disrupt what Walker describes as a “sleepy but large” industry. It offers an online, attractive and visualized interface to conference calling, while simultaneously addressing a ton of everyday pain points, like not knowing who’s present, who’s talking, and who’s making all that noise?! It’s even getting rid of the tedious login process, which typically involves the use of long PINs. Although still in private beta, Walker says UberConference adoption has been going well. While declining to provide hard numbers, last month he told us there were “tens of thousands” of users and just as many on the waitlist. He adds now that repeat usage has been high and average call duration times have been trending higher than the industry average. To give you an idea, FreeConferenceCall.com revealed via SEC filing that its call times averaged 31 minutes. UberConference’s average tops that. The additional funding is going to help FireSpotter Labs speed up its time to market with a number of the things it has planned for UberConference, including mobile applications, the paid feature set, international calling, and more. Walker says they’re hoping to release all the billing components to the product sometime this summer. While UberConference is stealing the show, and Walker admits that the majority of the team’s efforts are on the voice side, FireSpotter is not abandoning Nosh or NoshList, the restaurant industry applications. “We had our millionth diner in May,” Walker says of waitlisting app NoshList, “and we’re about to hit 2 million.” 1,200 restaurants are already signed up on the service, he adds. And Jotly? “Jotly was fun,” he says. Also announced today, is news that Blake Krikorian, co-founder and former CEO of Sling Media, will now join Wesley Chan, Partner at Google Ventures, and Walker on Firespotter Labs’ board. The company is now planning a relocation to San Francisco now to aid with hiring, and plans to double its team of 15 over the course of the year.
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