Saturday, July 21, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Just Like Everything Else In The Enterprise Space, Security Is About To Be Disrupted.

Posted: 21 Jul 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by OPENDNS CEO David Ulevitch. 

Disruption doesn't happen in a vacuum, it happens in context. And there is no greater example of disruption than in the enterprise technology market right now. Much of this is largely thanks to changing enterprise landscapes (consumerization of IT, cloud apps, mobility), new sales models and innovative go-to-market strategies (SaaS, Yammer d'état, land-and-expand) that leave the entire space ripe for disruption.

We're seeing it happen right now in a number of business-critical spaces: CRM (SFDC), Storage (Box), Compute (Amazon), Collaboration (Google Docs) and others. Security, one of the largest budgeted areas in enterprise IT spend, is next.

The enterprise worker of 2012 looks wildly different than she did in 2005 (which isn't so long ago!). Today, her applications are Salesforce, Google Apps, Box, and many other cloud-based services – the latter two didn't even exist before 2005. She uses these services on myriad devices like her iPhone, iPad and laptop. Moreover, she does this from her office, her home, cafés, airport lounges and more. She is a digital nomad, fully embracing the idea that work is a thing you do, and not a place you go. Unfortunately, enterprise security missed the boat.

Much of this change has created a void that enterprise security vendors have ignored. When the work happens outside the network, on consumer devices, and the applications live in the cloud, the expensive legacy security appliances with no traffic running through them act much like the silent tree felled in the forest. This is happening, and as it turns out, this has created a massive window of opportunity for disruption.

Enterprise security today is at a crossroads. CSOs have been outflanked by the proliferation of mobile devices and cloud services, whereby many security best practices are being ignored in the interest of embracing access and collaboration. Simultaneously, the threat landscape is becoming increasingly more sophisticated and nefarious. The security market leaders (Cisco, Symantec, RSA, Checkpoint, Blue Coat, etc.) are having a hard time staying relevant as their historical "speeds and feeds" style of security ceases to address market pain. In fact, a Gartner report recently pointed out that while the overall security market is growing nicely, the share of the pie held by the big 5 security vendors is shrinking year over year, a scary thought for their long-term shareholders.

So if the paradigm of forcing all Internet traffic through an appliance at HQ doesn't make any sense when the employees are out of the office, working on personal devices the company doesn't control and using cloud applications, then what do we do? Where do we go from here? Companies have compliance, fiduciary and regulatory requirements to protect their employees, their data, and often their customers from security breaches and threats. Should every company ban iPhones? Facebook? Dropbox? Should employees be required to use a VPN to headquarters just to use Salesforce.com? None of those sound good, but there is a path forward.

First, companies need to recognize that a firewall and a VPN no longer cut it for security. To paraphrase The Matrix, there is no perimeter. Second, organizations need to embrace reality – I still see debates about whether or not employees should be allowed to "Bring Your Own Device" into work. It doesn't matter if BYOD is a right or a privilege; that's the wrong question. BYOD is a reality. Smartphones are here to stay. Cloud services are only becoming more and more entrenched.

The security company of the future will focus on how to help these new nomadic workers securely access data and how to do it while protecting employee privacy and allowing them to get work done.

So why are the legacy vendors screwed? In order for a big security company like Cisco or Blue Coat to offer a service that actually provides protection for an enterprise, across all of their machines and devices, they’d first need to have a fundamental business model shift from selling boxes to selling services. Sales goes from selling boxes to selling subscriptions. Engineering goes from shipping metal to running a 24×7 service. Finance changes revenue recognition models. Everything changes, and that's really, really hard. That’s a shift no enterprise company I know of has successfully made to date, which is why other enterprise markets are disrupted by new players like Box and Yammer – nimble startups that built cloud- and mobile-first solutions from the ground up, and aren't bound by their legacy business models.

So is this happening? Yes. Security companies that have historically owned the lion's share of the enterprise market are losing deals to newer players like ZScaler and my own company. These new companies aggressively target the big guys' banner customers and have a lower cost to serve and easier onboarding which enables them to pass a savings on to customers. Additionally, because today's threats are becoming more sophisticated and the incumbents are proving ill-equipped to provide sufficient protection, we're seeing very large companies taking chances on startups' services, a trend we haven't seen often in the past. For enterprises, it's simply a question of risk versus reward, and the risk of betting on a startup far outweighs the risk of not maintaining a secure enterprise.

Here’s what I predict that we’ll see happen: Each of the big security players will soon reveal its strategy for staying relevant. Some may go to market with some frankenhybrid cloud solution that sticks their boxes in the cloud. Some may try to build a network of their own to offer cloud-based security services. Others may stick their heads in the sand and deny that the world is changing, just as Siebel did for years as Salesforce gained increasing amounts of market share. Though, true to the nature of disruption, it's unlikely that any of those approaches will be very successful as the changes in the enterprise landscape are simply too dramatic to just iterate a product to cover. We will also see a major catalyzing event in mobile security – something on the order of magnitude of the Melissa worm, or Code Red. Something that forces companies to realize the exposure they have created by enabling such open access to their most sensitive information and requires them to quickly adapt to the new reality.

I may be the biased CEO of a security company competing with the likes of Cisco and Symantec, but industry experts are taking notice of this trend, too. Just last month Gartner, the analyst firm whose opinions dictate many tech buys in the enterprise space, published it’s Magic Quadrant for security. Websense, a current market leader with a long-standing relationship with Gartner, was – no surprise – positioned in the top right corner. But in the “threats” section about Websense, Gartner calls out just one company that critically threatens the industry giant: OpenDNS, which has no current or past financial relationship with Gartner.

Security is always a moving target, so the good news for customers is that the shift to cloud-based security solutions that operate as a true, ongoing partnership between vendor and customer will be far more effective than the one-time security appliance purchases of the past. But change is coming, and it's going to be ugly for the old guard.

Serendipity Isn’t A Use Case

Posted: 21 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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When I started formulating the idea for my current startup, Roamz, the vision for the company was serendipitous discovery of the things happening around you. I imagined that we'd say to people "Want serendipity? Great download our app" and they'd respond "Yeah sure I was just looking for some serendipity".

I quickly realized (the hard way) that you don’t leave your house in the morning hoping that you will chance upon serendipity. You have a specific intent in mind: looking for a park for your kids, a cool cafe to grab a coffee or even simply to find a traffic-free route to work. If serendipity happens to occur in other ways then that's a bonus and if not…then it is just another ordinary day.

Having discovered that serendipity on it's own isn't a strong enough motivation to open an app, we've had to figure out how to change our product to account for the way people are actually using it; as a tool to find a place they're looking for. At the same time, we didn't want people to miss out on discovering other cool things nearby that they weren't necessarily searching for.

A lot has been written about this subject since SXSW where many ambient location apps made their debut (see for example http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/522411/) . The main discussion focused on apps that help us meet other people nearby with common interests. This class of apps faces a similar problem in that finding interesting people nearby isn't a strong enough use-case in itself to get you to regularly use an app.

The potential value they add is when they send an alert to us that someone nearby is doing something interesting which you otherwise wouldn't have known about. Again, though, it has to be at a time when we are free and willing to act on it. But if the only value these apps add is an occasional notification, are people going to continue to download and use them?

It will be interesting to see how the future pans out and whether people are willing to have a bunch of single use-case serendipity apps sitting on their phone and occasionally coming to life. I believe only a handful of apps will be successful in baking in serendipity as secondary features to support a compelling primary use-case. This is where a technology like Siri could be really valuable; interfacing between multiple apps and platforms to give you interesting information when you want it:

"Jonathan, Foursquare says 3 friends are nearby at Mint Plaza, Waze says the traffic is bad today so you are better off walking downtown and I've seen your calendar is free this afternoon so should I look for a movie that you might like?"

This sounds very Minority Report but the only way we'll be able to truly nail serendipity is by coupling big data with user interaction.

Engineering Serendipity is Tough

Given serendipity is by its very nature random, in its purest form it is very difficult to engineer. Many of the current suite of apps playing in this space use notifications to come alive when they think they add value to the user (and potentially increase the chances of a user having a serendipitous experience) but all too often notifications are sent at the wrong time and add to the noise, instead of cutting through it. This is all part of the learning process for developers, and the more mistakes we make the closer we get to engineering serendipity.

The difficulty of trying to engineer serendipity by analyzing a person's digital trail is that the data exists on many separate services and platforms. Netflix has a good idea about what entertains me, my bank has a good idea of my income, where and when I shop and even my personal circumstances – the constant diaper purchases online give away that I have a baby.

Then there's Facebook which has amazing data about not only me but also the things my friends like, while Foodspotting knows the cuisine that I dig. There are very few services that have the complete picture of who I am. I'd argue that not even Facebook, Apple or Google on their own have enough data.

Even if one service had enough information to paint an accurate picture of who I am and what I'm into, there is no API to read our emotions or state of mind. Hopefully one day we'll have the data, sensors and algorithms that will perfectly be able to synthesize all of this data to engineer serendipity but that future isn't here quite yet.

The answer isn't to give up on trying to add serendipity to peoples' lives but rather help surface things that increase the chances of having a serendipitous experience based on the data we do have. What I've learnt in the process of trying to engineer serendipity is that it is tough to put forward serendipity as a primary use-case.

For an app to be compelling and sticky you need to have a strong primary use-case and bake in serendipity in other ways. For Roamz, this will be through using the iPhone's background location feature coupled with the data we have about what's going on nearby, surfacing interesting local content for the right person at the right time and at the right place.

Brooke A via Roamz

OS In The Enterprise And The Component Revolution — What Start-Ups Need To Know

Posted: 21 Jul 2012 02:00 AM PDT

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Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jason van Zyl. van Zyl is the founder of the Apache Maven project, the Plexus IoC framework and the Apache Velocity project and helped establish Codehaus, a well-respected incubation facility for open-source community projects. He currently serves on the board of the Eclipse Foundation and is CTO of Sonatype.

Jason can be reached on Twitter @jvanzyl

It's no secret that today's software is very different than it used to be.  It's often cloud-based, includes social functions, and is available to anyone, anywhere, using any type of device.   What most of us don't see is that it's not just different on the surface – it's also created and delivered in a very different way.

Today's software applications are largely built by assembling software components, most of which are open source and come from outside the organization building the final application.   More than 80 percent of a typical Java application is now assembled from publicly available open-source components and frameworks. This is a dramatic departure from the past, when software was coded, line-by-line, by engineers working inside an organization.  This new process for software creation allows developers to move much more quickly, deliver continuously, and only write code from scratch when absolutely necessary.  For businesses, this means faster time-to-market and lower costs.

We saw just how popular collaborative, open-source development has become with the historic $100 million investment by Andreessen-Horowitz in GitHub, the code sharing and social networking site for programmers.  GitHub, and other repositories like it, democratize open-source development, help young projects grow, and have fostered a vibrant, collaborative, and decentralized community that produces new software at an unprecedented rate.

So GitHub helps software producers, the developers who create components. But what about the consumers of those components – the end-user developers and organizations that build their applications using open-source components? Once code is complete and ready for mass adoption, project teams distribute their finished products via the Central Repository – a free, openly available, cloud-based repository where developers distribute their software to millions of users globally.  The Central Repository has rapidly become the go-to source for open source components and today it serves more than 7.5 billion requests per year to 60,000 organizations and is home to more than 400,000 components. Sonatype (my company) operates the Central Repository for the community, building products and information services to help software developers make better use the components they're consuming.

Why software is like a car, and what does that mean to you?

Today's software is assembled rapidly, but it has a very complex "supply chain" like that of a car manufacturer.  Like a car, the final product (an application) may contain hundreds or thousands of externally sourced components from dozens or hundreds of original suppliers. Each of these components has its own lifecycle, its own bug-fixes and feature enhancements, and its own potential risks.

Like a car, a single flawed component could cause significant problems for the user.  In the worst case, these problems could lead to security breaches, data leaks, stability and performance issues, or legal actions related to intellectual property.

That's right, believe it or not, most of the applications you use on a daily basis, and most of the applications that are the foundation of your business operations, are built using components that could put your organization at risk.

An easy example of a potential problem is in the area of security.  Recent analysis by Aspect Security, using data from the Central Repository, uncovered widespread security vulnerabilities among the most commonly used open-source components.

The unfortunate irony about component defects is that even when they're fixed, most organizations are unaware that they have a potential problem or that a fix is available.   Because the components in any given application can originate from so many different projects, and new versions are released many times a year, it's very hard for the end user to keep up.

How can all this be avoided?

Components need to be "managed" just like any other enterprise asset.  They need to be analyzed, monitored and evaluated to ensure that only the highest quality, least risky components are powering your application.   Today this can be achieved, and achieved easily, through Component Lifecycle Management (CLM) an approach which helps developers choose, use and monitor the components that have become the backbone of their apps.

CLM sheds much needed light on the process of component usage by helping developers choose the best components from the beginning, keep tabs on them as they flow through the development process, and become aware of new versions, bug fixes, or security defects.

Properly managing the use of open-source components throughout the software development lifecycle lets you and your organization focus on building and delivering the best applications possible, with components that are robust, safe and up-to-date. All this leads to peace of mind and more innovation.  And, that's why it matters more than ever to you, today.

 

500 Startups Backs First Middle Eastern Startup, Jeeran, A Yelp For The Arab World

Posted: 21 Jul 2012 01:56 AM PDT

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Earlier this year, young venture capital fund and startup accelerator 500 Startups announced some changes that indicated its intent to move beyond adolescence into adulthood, and expand its scope beyond the U.S. The firm raised a new, bigger fund, added new partners, and increase its focus on identifying and investing in talented international entrepreneurs.

Dave McClure and company have already invested in startup incubators in Mexico City and Beijing, along with taking its “Geeks On A Plane” tour to India last December. This spring, partners McClure and Christine Tsai told us that 500 Startups is redoubling its effort to build ties and make investments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East in particular. And today, beginning to walk the walk, we’ve learned that the fund has made its first investment in the Middle East — in a startup called Jeeran.

500 startups has invested in startups from over 20 companies, but Jeeran marks its first in the Arab World and what it hopes will be the first of many. And while it’s good to see the firm’s scope expanding, it wasn’t alone. Fadi Ghandour, the founder of Aramex, Rabie Ataya (founder of Middle Eastern recruitment platform Bayt.com, Accelerator Technology Holdings, Intel Capital and Seedcamp also joined as investors in Jeeran’s seed round.

Omar Koudsi, Jeeran’s co-founder (and a one-time contributor to TechCrunch) tells us that the round will be used to fuel Jeeran’s “aggressive expansion strategy,” as it looks to build a presence throughout the Middle East and Asia over the coming year.

For those unfamiliar, Jeeran is, in part, a Yelp hybrid for the Middle East. (A good short hit/review on Quora here.) The startup began with a mission to empower the Arab World by giving its people tools to generate their own local content, taking the shape as a quasi-blogging services.

It has since morphed into a local reviews site, which covers a handful of cities in the emerging world, with a current focus on Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The startup has attracted tens of thousands of reviews and hundreds of thousands of local listings in the hopes of giving local users and businesses a better way of interacting with (and promoting) destinations within their cities. Like so many others, its platform is a proponent of ye olde “social, local, mobile” approach.

Due to its context and the community-based, local nature of its core business, Jeeran also manages a sizable “offline” presence in these markets, leveraging hands-on engagement with local communities to help facilitate data and customer acquisition. In doing so, it is trying to merge offline and online communities, bringing a technique that’s become popular in the States to the emerging world and small and medium-sized businesses and public services.

For example, Koudsi tells us that the majority of the quarter of a million places now listed on Jeeran perviously had no online presence. The co-founders believe that applying the Yelp, Amazon model of online customer reviews is (and will continue to) drive consumer empowerment and engagement in the Middle East and finally give users a place to share their opinions on the local businesses they interact with daily.

Koudsi says that bringing on investors like 500 Startups and Seedcamp is huge for the startup because it will be able to leverage hundreds of international mentors to help it scale more efficiently, while improving and localizing services. In addition, Jeeran will be sending a few of its employees to train in Silicon Valley, bringing that knowledge back to MENA to share with local entrepreneurs.

For more, check out Jeeran at home here.

LessAccounting Claims They Turned Down Acquisition Offer From “Low Moral Fiber” GoDaddy

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 08:00 PM PDT

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I've found this story reads best when listening to Hulk Hogan's intro music. I've embedded a video below for your reading pleasure.

On Wednesday, I reported that GoDaddy acquired cloud-based financial management application company Outright, with all 24 employees joining GoDaddy. Now, web and mobile app developer LessEverthing tells me they turned down an offer from GoDaddy in 2009.

LessEverything's first product, LessAccounting, is small business accounting software—and an outright Outright competitor. [Pause for laughter] The company claims it has had over 30,000 sign-ups and processes billions of dollars per week.

The founders, Steve Bristol and Allan Branch, tell me GoDaddy was in the market for an online accounting application for small businesses in 2009 and LessAccounting was very high on their list. Bristol tells me financial terms were not discussed, as LessAccounting rejected the offer after a number of phone calls.

Obviously, this raises the questions: how far down the list was Outright if GoDaddy started shopping for an accounting app in 2009? And why did it take GoDaddy three years to acquire one?

Yesterday, Branch, owner of the world’s greatest facial hair, posted about GoDaddy's Outright acquisition on his company's blog.

"GoDaddy didn’t share our ethic of trying to make things easy for people, their support sucks, and they have low moral fiber," he writes. "That’s not something we want to be associated with."

Branch said he wrote the post because it "seemed like a fun post to put out there." Here's the really fun part:

"We don’t have anything against the folks at Outright, and we wish them the best. It’s just we are a firm believer in “you are who you associate with.” For those of you who feel the same or have a moral object to using Outright now that they are part of the GoDaddy family, use the coupon code “NoDaddy” for four months free of LessAccounting.com."

Translation: You seem like a really nice company, Outright. But we think your new partner sucks and we’re going to do our best to take all of your customers. How's it taste?!?The post goes on to advise users to stop using GoDaddy and switch to a different web host.

“In 2009, Go Daddy was looking at expanding its product line and had discussions with numerous companies,” GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman said in an emailed statement. “Ultimately, Go Daddy decided to not pursue an acquisition and/or partnership at that time in order to focus on our existing products. When we were introduced to the Outright team, it made sense for Go Daddy customers because Outright brings more to the table than just a SMB solution; they also have a very talented team and we knew we wanted to work with them going forward.”

Play us out, Hulk.



That’ll Fly: Kayak Closes IPO Day With Shares Up Nearly 30% And Market Cap Over $1.2B

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 07:02 PM PDT

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It’s been a long time in coming. After first filing to go public in late 2010, Kayak finally came to market today debuting as a public company on NASDAQ, trading under “KYAK.” The travel bookings company has hit its fair share of bumps along the way, thanks to unsteady market conditions, erratic earnings, and a departing CFO.

All that has been washed away over the last 48 hours (at least for the time being), as Kayak exceeded the original $21 to $25 price range it set, raising $91M and opening at $26/share this morning. Not only that, but at the close of its first day as a public company, Kayak’s shares have jumped nearly 30 percent, finally resting at $33.18.

While it’s not the $115B market cap Facebook opened with, Kayak’s first day performance gives it a market capitalization that is nothing to scoff at — and makes just a tiny bit more sense. The prospectus shows that Kayak has 38.5 million shares outstanding after its IPO, giving the company a market cap today of just about $1.27 billion. Of course, those 38.5M shares don’t include the 9M stock options that can be exercised over the years. So, if you agree with SeekingAlpha, there’s going to be some dilution and after private placement, etc., that number could rise to $41.5M, potentially raising market cap to $1.36B.

Either way, not bad for a day’s work. And not bad considering the company was posting a net loss a year ago. However, in the first quarter, Kayak turned that frown upside down, posting Q1 net income of $4.1M and grew revenue by 39 percent to $73.3M.

While it was a great day for the company, Kayak definitely still has a lot to worry about. Personally, I like Kayak a lot and use it consistently. However, I’ve also started to use Hipmunk to complement Kayak, and if I could get Hipmunk to change a few things, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to see myself switching over full-time. I’m sure some other readers may be in a similar boat.

So there’s competition from sites like Hipmunk (and potentially from companies like Superfly, which Kayak’s departed CFO now advises), or perhaps a more salient threat will come from Google. Er, Google Travel. Google bought ITA, which happens to be the same travel search provider that Kayak bases its results on. And, really, just about everyone else.

Of course, look, right now there’s not going to be huge, huge variations in the results from these different sites. Most of them use ITA, and every day there’s one less airline, so there is a limit. Granted, the next generation of travel sites will (like everything else on the Web) eventually offer a far more personalized/tailored search experience, better deals, will be more intuitive and mobile, rather than bland, desktop-first, commoditized product experiences.

But until then, this really comes down to the interface. It’s all about who can offer the fastest search and the most options/permutations for travel search in the most simple layout. These companies make money on lead-gen, but really they should look and act like smart CRM tools. And just because Google owns search, doesn’t mean it’s going to own travel search. It’s an easy case to make, but there are also all kinds of competitive advantages in not being Google, focusing purely on travel search and the experience, discovery of travel, and focusing on the mobile piece.

Sarah wrote a great summary of Kayak today, so we won’t go over the same ground again, but Kayak finally started really paying attention to its mobile products at the end of last year, updating its UI across mobile and Web, and that (along with direct booking) seems like it’s beginning to pay off.

Don’t mean to keep editorializing here, but I’m under the impression that things like travel search will continue to become more and more popular on mobile devices. That changing user behavior isn’t going to suddenly stop. So, when looking at these companies, it makes one feel crazy when one gets the impression that travel companies don’t totally get that — or that they need to be creating meaningful travel profiles for people and doing this intuitively themselves, not relying on the user to hand over their social security number et al. Mobile is already favored over desktops in international markets, and that’s where these companies are going next anyway.

It’s also tiring to see travel companies be slavish to airlines. Yes, we understand why keeping airlines happy is essential to Kayak, but until I see Delta aggregating JetBlue and American’s ticket prices and flight times and sending users off-site when they don’t have competitive offerings, airlines will continue to need sites like Kayak. Maybe that can be some incentive to start focusing more on the end user.

Anyway, that part of the rant is over. As to Kayak’s market cap? It seems pretty fair. It will probably come down a bit in the near term, because, sure, it needs to begin posting larger gains to really feel like a $1B company. But compared to other public travel sites, like TripAdvisor, it doesn’t look bad, it’s just a matter of whether it can continue growing consistently with reduced margins.

Time will tell, but still a great day for Kayak. As it was for Palo Alto (which also went public today) — read Alex’s coverage here. Oh, and also worth mentioning that a continued good showing from these two companies could go along way towards rejuvenating the IPO market, which has struggled since Facebook did a cannonball/bellyflop, removing most of the water from the pool.

Excerpt image from Nasdaq

Students Seeking Startup Workshops: Lean Startup Machine Announces Branch Scholarship

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 05:59 PM PDT

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Lean Startup Machine wants to bring some young blood to its startup workshops — on its own dime.

The new initiative is called the Branch Scholarship Program, supposedly because it was inspired by the founders of Branch, a startup that aims “to turn the Internet's monologues into dialogues” and has backing from The Obvious Corporation. Branch co-founders Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal both received scholarships from Lean Startup Machine last year, and they met for the first time at the workshop, where they decided to drop out of school and start a company.

Moving forward, Lean Startup Machine says it will be offering two scholarships to each of its next 200 events. CEO and founder Trevor Owens says “students will be chosen based on initiative they have shown to help other entrepreneurs in the community.” And since each Lean Startup Machine ticket costs $300, the company estimates that it will be giving out a total of $120,000 in scholarships.

The workshops take three days and cover the lean startup methodology. Upcoming cities on the agenda Washington, D.C., Sao Paolo, and Singapore.

You can apply for a scholarship here.

Mobile Health Developer Azumio Acquires SkyHealth, Makers Of Top-Ranked Fitness App

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 05:03 PM PDT

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As smartphone adoption increases and mobile technology becomes more powerful, it’s changing the way in which people interact with health information. The popularity of health and medical apps has begun to explode, and the amount of health data along with it, much of it thanks to those increasingly wearable and user-friendly gizmos that use smart sensors to capture and transmit all shades of biometric data. Smartphones now tap into these health devices, turning our phones into heart monitors and cancer screeners, all with the goal of helping us live longer, healthier lives.

You may not be familiar with them by name, but Azumio is one of a number of young startups tapping into this hot trend, leveraging smart mobile technology to get us making better and more informed health decisions. Thanks to the popularity of its biofeedback apps like Instant Heart Rate, Azumio has attracted 20 million downloads of its iOS and Android apps in less than two years. And today, the Palo Alto-based company is adding to that total and beginning to round out its product set by scooping up SkyHealth, the creators of Fitness Buddy, the top-ranked paid health app on iTunes.

While the terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, the eight-old SkyHealth has seen 5 million downloads thanks largely to Fitness Buddy and Glucose Buddy, its $1 fitness and diabetes trackers. As a result of this and the fact that SkyHealth was one of the early movers in health development for iOS, the startup has been able to bootstrap its way to profitability.

Azumio, on the other hand, chose to go the venture route, raising $2.5 million from Founders Fund, Accel and Felicis (to name a few) last year. The founders tell us that the deal was a combination of cash and equity, and we’ve been able to learn from other sources that in fact the deal leaned more towards equity, as this war more of an acqui-hire, with SkyHealth founder and CEO Tom Xu joining Azumio as a partner and head of product development, along with the startup’s three main developers.

For Azumio, the acquisition more than doubles its product portfolio, bringing SkyHealth’s 15 health and fitness apps to its platform, while SkyHealth now has access to a larger audience and more resources as part of the Azumio team. But, really, both teams said that they share a similar vision, and joining forces gives them a better shot at making that happen. The team wants to create a mobile health and fitness platform that gives users a complete profile of their health, using each piece in the team’s collective product suite.

In the next few weeks, the team (now at 13 people) plans to launch a fitness dashboard, which will take readings for each of their applications in an effort to give users a more complete report on their health. With SkyHealth’s additions, Azumio’s apps now span heart, stress, and sleep monitoring to fitness and glucose tracking. If Azumio opens that dashboard up to aggregate data from other health devices and apps as well, it could really be a game changer.

“The future of bringing mobile health applications to a wider audience is here, and starts by creating a single source for the best mobile health and fitness solutions,” said Xu, Azumio’s new head of product. "Consumers can now use their phone to monitor heart rate, stress level, improve workout routines and sleeping behaviors, and even control blood sugar levels. Combining forces, we think that we have the resources and experience to create a mobile health and fitness platform that can have a much wider impact.”

For more, find Azumio here.

Last Day To Purchase Extra Early Bird Tickets For Disrupt SF

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 04:09 PM PDT

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DISRUPT Extra Early Bird ticket sales end tonight at 11:59 PM PST, so buy your tickets now! If you miss the Extra Early Bird tickets, you’ll be able to buy Early Bird tickets until August 11th.

Our confirmed speaker line up includes industry luminaries like Mike Arrington, Marissa Mayer, Marc Benioff, Joel Klein, Ben Horowitz, Ron Conway, Mayor Ed Lee, and Vinod Khosla. And, you're guaranteed to be equally inspired by the speaker announcements that we're making next week.

In addition to the amazing line up of speakers, we’ve also received an incredible number of high quality applications for the Startup Battlefield. As you know, the Battlefield is at the heart of DISRUPT. Startups don’t pay money to get into the Battlefield – the cost to get in is a good idea and the drive to build it.  Participating companies have six minutes to present to a panel of the most influential investors and thought leaders in the world. The Battlefield was the launchpad for the likes of Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Red Beacon and Tripit. Joining us at DISRUPT will give you the chance to see the newest breed of innovative startups.

While the days at DISRUPT are filled with amazing sessions and speakers, the nights are filled with great after parties at some of San Francisco’s greatest night clubs. Party with the investor elite and startup geniuses as well as the world-class TechCrunch team.

Seriously, get your tickets now.

Check out some pictures from our last DISRUPT SF below. Hope to see you there!

Former Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhoury Raises $1.35M For Super-Stealthy Startup Pushd

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 03:33 PM PDT

abdur-chowdhury

Former Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhoury is working on a new, super-stealthy project called Pushd. Details are scarce, but here’s what we know: According to an SEC filing, he’s teamed up with Summize co-founder Eric Jensen and the two have raised $1.35 million for the venture, which is based in New York City.

Chowdhoury joined Twitter with the company’s 2008 acquisition of search engine Summize. He became Chief Scientist at Twitter, while Jensen became Twitter’s Tech Lead for Search and Relevance.

Last fall, MG reported that Chowdhoury, Jensen, and the rest of the Summize team left Twitter, amidst a high-profile shakeup of management at the social network. His resignation followed the departure of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, as well as several key product guys and early employees. Around the same time, early, high-profile investors Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet left Twitter’s board.

So what exactly is Pushd? It’s tough to say. The site is nothing but an email sign-up page for beta access to an unspecified service. I’ve tried reaching out to Chowdhoury for details, but so far have been unable to get ahold of him. Hopefully he’ll see this and, you know, give some more details about whatever neat stuff the team is building.

Firewall Company Palo Alto Networks Up 26% In IPO

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 03:11 PM PDT

PAN_Icon

Palo Alto Networks shares climbed 26% in its first day of trading today on the New York Stock Exchange.  Shares closed at $53, up from its $42 offering price.The company offered 6.3 million shares in trading.

The price of the share were originally offered at range of $34 to $37. It was increased to a range of $38 to $40 earlier in the week.

Palo Alto Networks has a proprietary hardware and software technology that detects data threats as they come into an enterprise environment. It’s made for the new types of attacks that come through the web in the form of malware. It is designed for all the ways people access the web, either through their laptops or their mobile devices.

It goes beyond what traditional firewalls are capable of doing. Most networking technology is meant for threats that come from basic email or web browsing. But today’s threats come in the form of botnet attacks and other modern techniques such as phishing attacks.

Here’s how the company describes what they do when a botnet attacks:

Overall, to effectively block or mitigate such attacks, any threat prevention solution needs to be comprehensive without significant performance degradation. Our next-generation firewalls combine all elements of threat prevention together (URL filtering, Vulnerability-attack protection, Spyware protection, Virus protection) at hardware-accelerated speeds and provide risk mitigation for botnet-related attacks.

Palo Alto Networks competes with providers such as Barracuda Networks and McAfee.

Ohloh Wants to Fill the Gap Left by Google Code Search

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 03:07 PM PDT

Image1 for post Black Duck Software Gets $9.5 Million To Help You Ship Better Software More Quickly

I wrote last week that GitHub is the Library of Alexandria of code. That’s not quite accurate since there are still many important open source projects hosted else where, including other repositories like Sourceforge as well as open source foundations like the Apache. Google Code Search, introduced in 2006 was meant to make it easy to search for open source code no matter where it’s stored, but Google recently pulled the plug on the service this year. The team at Black Duck hopes its recently relaunched Ohloh site will fill that gap.

Black Duck Director of Developer Marketing Dave Gruber explains that the new version of Ohloh will replace Koders, a code search engine that Black Duck has operated since before the launch of Google Code Search. Black Duck makes money through its products and services for companies that use open source, such as a code auditing service that checks to make sure that open source licenses are being followed correctly. Gruber says that while Google shut down its code search because it couldn’t monetize it, Black Duck will ultimately benefit from Ohloh’s code search by building more demand for open source.

Gruber suggests the following use cases for code search:

1. A learning tool – you can see how other people solved problems similar to yours.
2. A resource for finding open source code that you will actually use in a project.
3. As a code comparison tool.

Besides code search, Ohloh features an exhaustive directory of open source projects, complete with statistics on how often the projects are updated. Black Duck acquired the site from Geeknet (the owners of Sourceforge) in 2010.

Black Duck competes with companies such as OpenLogic, Palamida and Protecode.

43 Years Ago Today, We Walked On The Moon

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 01:52 PM PDT

Apollo_11_insignia

As lovers of technology and slaves to the news cycle, we all get caught up in the next new thing. The cynic in me notes that the 43rd anniversary of the moon landing – an occurrence that changed the course of history with a completeness and intensity that few warmongers have ever been able to induce – is just another moon landing anniversary. It isn’t the 25th or the 50th or the 100th. It’s just something that happened 43 years ago today at about 8pm UTC. In short, two men – born helpless as the rest of us – through time, training, and sheer will, were thrust into space by the greatest minds of our generation and then stepped onto a lunar soil that the New York Times reported as being fine and powdery.

Why, then, commemorate this date? Because, aside from World War II, the space race was the thing that put us firmly on the path of technological advancement we are taking today. Had we not dared when we did, at a time when our technology was woefully primitive, I wager that we would still today think the moon and the stars were out of reach.

That is why this anniversary is so important, and why it is important to remember the things the put us here. In an increasingly wired world, news flashes at us from all angles. Nothing is new, nothing is “cool,” everything is derivative. But as those first sharp bursts of electromagnetic energy passed from a camera on the moon to the waiting ears and eyes of a rapt public, this world of instant everything was born in a blaze of black and white. If we could see what men there were doing, how could we ignore that which was happening down the block or around the world?

The promise of the moon shot is great and the rewards reaped are many. There is still a ways to go. The moon shot was an important beginning and our creativity has expanded from that initial point to bring us behemoths of industry that deal primarily in ephemeral bits, new transportation technologies, and companies dedicated to recreating that first landing and going beyond its meager goals. Man may not live in a sea of tranquility on earth now, but we may one day find it within ourselves to put away fear and pettiness and politics to build a new world on top of the old.

Further Reading
NASA videos of the moon landing
The Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin
First Man

Epic Insensitivity: @NRA And @Celebboutique Cause Uproar Over Aurora Tweets

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 01:01 PM PDT

twitter-fail

Earlier today online fashion store Celeb Boutique tweeted the above in what just may be the most disturbing incident of insensitivity following last night’s tragic shooting in Aurora, Colo. But they weren’t the only ones. The National Rifle Association, apparently unaware of the news, posted this colossally ignorant tweet this morning, “Good morning, shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?”

These utterly tone deaf messages underscore the problem of hiring social media gurus who don’t maintain their basic civic obligations to follow the news.

To Celeb Boutique, the backlash was severe. Tweets with the words “disgusting,” and “idiot” began trending in my Twitter feed, immediately after the message went out. We’ve included a few more below.

The tweet was left hanging for a long time, and, since the uproar, Celeb Boutique has sent out a string of apologetic tweets (below):

The NRA, too, had its brush with stupidity (mentioned above), but was keen enough to take the tweet down and issue a statement, saying that the message was written without awareness of last night’s shooting.

This isn’t the first time a business has regretted a tweet. “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online,” wrote @KennethCole. So, note to social media marketers: keeping up with the news of the day is a requisite to your job.

As with our previous story on this topic, our hearts go out to the victims of this tragedy and their loved ones. Please respectful in the comments (and to the unfortunate PR people in this email) as we discuss the role of media in national crises.

Benchmark’s Michael Eisenberg On The Worldwide Talent Crunch And The ‘Golden Age’ For Israeli VC [TCTV]

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 12:25 PM PDT

Screen shot 2012-07-19 at 1.51.56 PM


There is a lot of talk in the San Francisco Bay Area about the difficulty tech companies are having when it comes to hiring the highly-skilled people they need to grow. But it turns out that the talent crunch isn’t just an issue here in Silicon Valley — it’s a problem that they’re feeling literally on the other side of the globe, in Israel.

So it was interesting to have the opportunity to chat about this and much more with Michael Eisenberg, a general partner at venture capital firm Benchmark Capital who helps lead the firm’s Israel operations. Eisenberg, who is based in Benchmark’s Tel Aviv office, stopped by the TechCrunch TV while visiting San Francisco this week. He has a really interesting blog called “Six Kids and a Full Time Job,” where he talks about tech, VC investing, the Israeli startup scene, and his very active family life (which now actually includes eight kids) — so it was fun to be able to hash out some of those topics with him in person.

In the video embedded above, you can hear Eisenberg talk about how the tech boom is playing out in Israel, why now is a “golden age” for Israeli venture capital, how Israeli entrepreneurs are different from their Silicon Valley counterparts, and why he doesn’t believe in the concept of “work/life balance.”

Samsung Preparing To Reveal “Newest Galaxy Device” On August 15

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:54 AM PDT

samsung headquarters

Here’s a little something to get the ol’ rumor mill churning before the weekend — Samsung has just sent out a save-the-date email for a “major” product announcement on August 15. Samsung goes on to say that the company will unveil its “newest GALAXY device,” though exactly what that’s going to be is left infuriatingly vague.

Of course, that won’t stop me from hazarding a few guesses.

The company’s long-awaited Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet seems like a strong possibility, considering that Samsung has been reportedly tinkering with its design and internals since it first popped up at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Reports from earlier in the year also pointed to a handful of Galaxy S III variants that would hit the market during the latter parts of 2012, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think there have been enough leaks to make that possibility a strong one right now.

And who could forget the possibility of a Galaxy Note 2? Rumors of a new Note handheld with a slightly larger screen have been making the rounds recently, and it’s reportedly being prepped for an August debut. Granted, the device was said to be making its official debut at the IFA trade show in Germany, but it’s possible that Samsung will be holding another event stateside to let we members of the tech press get some hands-on time. Then again, it could be something as simple as an update to their Galaxy Player line of PMPs, but I support we’ll find out soon enough.

UPDATE: 9to5Google points out that the invitation is from Samsung Electronics America and not Samsung Telecommunications America, so a phone announcement is almost certainly out.



Judge Issues Ruling: The Ellen Pao/Kleiner Perkins Case Can Continue To Play Out In Court

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:46 AM PDT

Ellen Pao

It’s been clear from the beginning that it would be a long road to a resolution in the salacious lawsuit brought against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers by one of its female partners, Ellen Pao. And as of now, it will continue to play out in the courts, and not behind closed doors.

This morning, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn ruled that Ellen Pao, the Kleiner Perkins partner who is suing the venerated Silicon Valley venture capital firm for the alleged gender discrimination and retaliation she says she encountered after complaining about sexual harassment and other purported issues at the firm, is not contractually obligated to settle her claims through arbitration as Kleiner Perkins has argued. This ruling, which has been widely expected, means that the case can move forward in the court system.

Pao’s lawyers reportedly expressed satisfaction with the ruling, while Kleiner Perkins has vowed to appeal. The firm issued this statement shortly after Judge Kahn’s ruling:

KPCB is disappointed in Judge Kahn's decision and intends to file an appeal believing it has strong arguments and precedent to move the matter to arbitration. Ms. Pao, like other partners, signed a variety of standard agreements and it is these agreements with the managing LLCs that govern her claims and require, among other things, that disputes be resolved through arbitration. We expect arbitration to be a more efficient and speedier dispute resolution process than trying a matter before a jury years down the line in the San Francisco Superior Court.

Here are other TechCrunch posts regarding the Ellen Pao/Kleiner Perkins suit:

Kayak Is Headed To Russia

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:25 AM PDT

kayak-1

Kayak is expanding into Russia, it seems. Thanks to handy news source LinkedIn (yes, really), one Mr. Andrew Verbitsky changed his profile to read “Managing Director Russia & CIS at KAYAK,” and has apparently held that position since May. The news was spotted by Quintura, which posted details to its blog, also noting that the Kayak.ru domain now forwards to Kayak.com. Verrrry interesting.

Kayak, of course, can’t officially comment, saying only that, sorry, that information was not included in its S1. Prior to now, however, the Kayak.ru domain belonged to some actual kayakers, so the change in ownership is notable.

Verbitsky previously served as an Investment Director at Fast Lane Ventures.

In Russia, Kayak would compete against travel search engines like Aviasales.ru, Skyscanner and Momondo. Meanwhile, like Google and Bing do stateside, Russian search engines and online portals Yandex and Rambler have their own travel search services available: ticket.yandex.ru and Rambler-Avia at avia.rambler.ru. Kayak would be a virtual unknown in this market.

But there’s opportunity. As Mike Butcher previously reported for TechCrunch, the Russian Internet market is booming as Internet access spreads throughout the country. Looking into a new data on the market’s size, he said:

“What’s clear is that given the total Russian Federation population is around 143 million, there is plenty of growth left to be had when around 58 million people are online in a month. That means Russia is poised to overtake the German market any time soon, if it hasn't already. That also does not include the Ukraine, which is Russian speaking, but is almost always additionally targeted by Russian Internet companies.”

E-commerce plays are doing well, too, with sites like Russia’s KupiVIP, a Gilt Groupe-type service, raising another $38 million in funding last month, and now on track to reach $300 million in revenue for the year.

Currently, Kayak operates websites in 15 countries outside of the U.S., including Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy and others. Russia isn’t currently in that list.

P.S. This news fell into our inbox yesterday, but apparently we were all so enamored with Google’s and Microsoft’s earnings, or something*. Still, this is good info to have on the day of Kayak’s public debut, right?

* Did I mention that TechCrunch is hiring?

Velti Mobile Ad Report: Israel Sees Highest App Engagement, eCPMs Are Climbing

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:17 AM PDT

velti

Velti has just released its mobile ad industry report for June. As usual, the mobile marketing company has chosen to highlight disparate factoids that it culled from the data — for example, it says that Israel is the leader in app engagement, with adults using apps for an average of 80 minutes per day. Sweden and Singapore are next on the list, while the United States is way behind, with only 38 minutes spent in apps on average.

The report also looks at trends in eCPMs, i.e., the amount paid by advertisers for every thousand impressions. There’s a lot of talk about how those numbers are lower on mobile, but at least Velti says that for the most part, eCPMs increased from May to June. In sports, average eCPMs increased 23 percent (to 76 cents), and in games they increased 20 percent (to 90 cents). However, the most lucrative categories are still weather ($1) and education (91 cents).

On the device front, iOS has claimed an increasing percentage of Velti’s ad impressions for the past few months, and the gap widened in June, with iOS accounting for 62 percent of ad impressions compared to Android’s 38 percent. (The breakdown was 59-41 last month.) And Velti says that Samsung’s Galaxy devices are seeing “slow growth”, at least in terms of ad impressions — collectively they account for less than 5 percent of impressions, compared to 31 percent for iPhones and 9 percent for iPads.

The data is based on data from Velti's Mobclix Exchange, which supposedly serves ads to more than 33,500 apps.

Facebook Acqui-Hires Mac and iOS Developer Acrylic Software

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:16 AM PDT

acrylic_ipad

Facebook just acquired Acrylic Software, a Vancouver, CA-based startup that developed two paid desktop and mobile apps: Pulp, a personalized newspaper app for Mac ($9.99) and iPad, and Wallet, an app that lets you “sync, store and secure your digital life” for Mac and iOS. Both of these apps got a good amount of press when they launched, but for the most part, the company has flown under the radar. Acrylic Software’s founder Dustin MacDonald says that Facebook did not acquire the company’s apps though and that Wallet and Pulp “will continue to remain available for download and purchase in their current form.” The team will move to San Francisco.

This announcement comes just a week after Facebook also acquired read-it-later service Spool. It’s not clear what exactly the Acrylic team will focus on at Facebook, but chances are the team will work on mobile-related products – an area Facebook could indeed use some help. With Wallet, Acrylic has a background in encryption and mobile security, though Pulp’s focus on making online content easily readable on iOS and the Mac is probably a more natural fit for Facebook.

Here is the full announcement:

I'm happy to announce today that we've packed up our small Vancouver studio and will be making the move to San Francisco in the coming weeks to join the design team at Facebook.

For the past four years, we've worked tirelessly on creating truly awesome products with a focus on innovation and great design, and I'm incredibly proud of the work we've been able to accomplish during that time. Our flagship apps, Wallet and Pulp, have been used and loved by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Building these products has been a fun and exciting ride, but the time has come to move on to newer and bigger challenges.

Facebook is an invaluable service that we all use daily, and a company I believe is one of the most innovative and important around today. After visiting late last year, I discovered that we shared many of the same core product design goals and principles, and it soon became obvious that it was a natural fit. Simply put, there's an opportunity at Facebook to have a big impact in many people's lives. More importantly, Facebook is full of extremely talented people who will be able to help realize its full potential in the years to come.

Our products and services have not been acquired by Facebook, and while there are no plans for further development on them, Wallet and Pulp will continue to remain available for download and purchase in their current form. We'll certainly be the first to let you know of any updates or changes here in the future.

A special thanks to all of our customers and supporters who have helped us grow and build the best products possible throughout the last four years. We wouldn't have been able to do it without you.

Dustin MacDonald
Acrylic Software
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