Tuesday, July 24, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Canadian Angel Boris Wertz Raises $15 Million To Launch Micro-VC Fund Version One Ventures

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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After years of investing his own money, Canadian angel Boris Wertz has raised $15 million and created a new fund that will enable him to make even larger investments in early-stage startups. The fund, which will be focused on consumer Internet, software-as-a-service, e-commerce, and mobile companies.

Wertz was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, which was acquired by Amazon.com back in 2008. He had been cofounder of German company JustBooks, which was later acquired by AbeBooks in 2002. Over the past several years, he’s been making investments in early-stage companies with his own money, and is also behind the GrowLab startup accelerator in Vancouver, British Columbia.

As an angel investor, Wertz had put money in more than 30 different startups with, including Chloe & Isabel, Edmodo, Flurry, GoInstant, Indiegogo, Indochino, Sparkbuy, Suite101, Wattpad, and Yapta. Altogether, he’s had six exits since he started investing, including sales to companies like Google, Twitter, Salesforce, and Groupon.

Now, after investing his own money for about four years, he’s ready to start investing with other people’s money. Wertz had previously made investments of about $50,000 to $75,000 each. With the new fund, he’ll be putting in anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 in seed and Series A funding rounds. Already, Version One has made five investments: Top Hat Monocle, Julep, Jobber, Instacanv.as, and Sunnytrail.

Version One has investment from former Yahoo president and COO Jeff Mallett, as well as more than a dozen American and Canadian Internet entrepreneurs and high-net worth individuals.



Publishers, We Need To Talk: Text From Dog Gets A Book Deal

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:49 AM PDT

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Look guys and gals in publishing, sit down. You can bring in your Coco Water. Totally. Yeah. We have some gluten-free sandwiches coming in and I promise this won’t effect summer hours. You can still not come in on Friday. Yeah, you can take off your loafers. Whatever.

Ok. I know you’re confused and hurting. Revenues are falling and ebooks are killing your old surefire model of shipping books in big boxes to big stores where they were remaindered and sent back for pulping. We had some good times. Remember all that money you made on cookbooks? Before the Epicurious app? Good times. That shit paid for your house on the Vineyard.

So look, here’s what’s up: you guys are killing yourselves. Like this. You’re paying what? Probably six figures for a book based on Text From Dog, an arguably funny Tumblr that, in book form, will sell a maximum of 5,000 copies and then disappear from the cultural Zeitgeist. I mean you wouldn’t pay some no-talent asshole to pretend to write a work of fiction and then capitalize on her name to sell some garbage, would you? Oh wait, you would. But still. Why? Why are you doing this? Stop.

I love Text From Dog. It’s great fun. But most of the fun is in visiting the website to read new texts from dog, a process I doubt very many people repeat more than once. Read a few texts from dog, chortle, maybe share, and move on. This isn’t a Dickens serialization. This is some dude who is good at faking texts from a dog.

I can see the wheels turning. “This is funny! It’s on the web! We can monetize it! People love dogs! People are stupid! This could make our quarter!” Stop.

You’re about to be flattened. Book piracy is about to smash your top shelf revenue while books like Text From Dog are going to kill any respect we once had for the big six. You guys clearly have no idea what you’re doing and you’re depending on your recent Yale-grad philosophy major Assistant Editor to bring you some hot, hot web trendz to capitalize on. Real fiction and non-fiction? Blah, that’s for old people and nerds. What the kids want to do these days is go into a book store and buy a book based on a Tumblr blog. Because kids are stupid. Also vampires. And sex.

There’s an old saying about the entertainment industry: Nobody knows anything. But you guys are particularly clueless.

You’re doing OK on the aggregate. You’ve taken to ebooks like the iPad-toting naifs you are, ensuring that all major ebook stores carry your work (except for your back catalog. Digitization is hard!) and you’re throwing, I suppose, the bookstores a bone by publishing a few surefire end-cap-able titles like Text From Dog and Shit My Dog Says and Shit My Dad Said To My Dog into the mix. Heck, put Text From Dog by the register and you’re sure to sell at least 10 to folks who think it will be a hilarious gag gift.

What really needs to happen – and won’t – is the creation of content for and by some of the thinkers of the web. And I’m not talking about another Clay Shirky book. That guy doesn’t want you anyway. I’m talking about the old, Raymond-Carver-and-Gordan-Lish back and forth with potential authors. Web writing doesn’t translate well to the long form and I know you’ve been burned before by folks who are funny on screen but suck on paper. You need to stop grabbing the low-hanging dog balls and reach for something a bit meatier. Screw the vampire anal sex fan fic. Focus on some real writing.

Focus on book trips. Focus on bringing up a famous author? Who have you really championed lately? No one. Maybe that Tiger Mother sociopath. I can name a few major authors from my generation – David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, maybe Franzen – but in the past, say decade and a half I couldn’t tell you one up and comer. Not one.

Publishing got rich on Pamela Anderson’s diet book but got famous on Faulkner. Yours is a noble tradition dating back centuries and it’s about to go away. You’re literally as useful now as the wet nurse in modern New York: sure, your services seem great, but when you think about them a little you realize how gross they are. I can publish anything, any time. I don’t need you because you offer so little and expect so much. You hitch a ride on Internet fame, make the Text From Dog dude feel really good for a while (and he should! He got a book deal!) and then look for the next flavor of the second. I got some hot Tumblrs for you if you need them. Lots are porn, but whatever. You’re livin’ on the edge.

Ok. The sandwiches got here. Yeah, I know. You’re not eating any. You’re full of Momofuku. Cool. Before you go back to your desks and then home at 2pm, can we agree that we’re going to stop turning Tumblrs into books? Anyone? Yeah, I know. Soundtracks for books sounds amazing, but can we focus? Anyone? A promise?

Fine. Go back to your desks. But take a sandwich. I’m not throwing this whole tray away.

Active Endpoints Releases New Wizard For Making Mobile Apps That Respond To Voice and Touch

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:34 AM PDT

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The next generation of application development is starting to emerge. Frameworks act as a catalyst for building applications. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is helping accelerate application development as it abstracts the stack that  developers usually have to build themselves. With integrated systems, the idea of application assembly is emerging with solutions such as IBM’s PureApplication System.

Active Endpoints symbolizes this trend with Cloud Extend Mobile. It’s a platform with a wizard like “mind map” framework that is used to build and deploy mobile apps that respond to voice and touch.

Today’s SaaS and enterprise apps are built for the PC. In Salesforce.com for example, there may be multiple pages with multiple fields that a field worker needs to fill out.  That’s unwieldly on a mobile device. Instead, a  sales person will often use a laptop or desktop to update the CRM or sales force automation system.

With Cloud Extend Mobile, a sales person can update from the field on a mobile device using voice or touch to do the inputs.

Active Endpoints is initially launching CloudExend Mobile with Salesforce.com.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say a sales person decides that she needs a quick way to update Salesforce after a sales call. She opens the CloudExtend Mobile App from the Salesforce.com App Exchange and uses it to create a mind map of what she wants to do. She can make it for herself, an associate or her team. She can add logic to it such as asking about the outcome of a meeting. For example, there could be a yes or no question such as: “Are there new opportunities?”

Once completed, the app, is deployed and can be used in the field on an iOS or Android smartphone. Users may update their meeting with the app by voice or touch.

Active Endpoints represents a new form of business process management software (BPM). It competes in the same space as Intalio and old stalwarts like IBM.

I like the app building process that comes with mind map technology. It shows how we are changing the way apps are developed. The complexity is increasingly abstracted. CEO Mark Tabor says Cloud Extend Mobile woud be a fit in a PaaS environment. I can see that, especially as we move closer to a time in which we build apps with components more than code.

I do have some reservations about Cloud Extend Mobile . Often it is the power user who uses this service the most. You need to build app libraries that anyone can use. It’s best for a well-organized team with a management who see the value and will make sure the sales workers use it. Otherwise, it’s a cool app that reminds me of mind map tools that I have used to automate Web searches and distribute photos and such to multiple places. Once you get it right, it works beautifully. It’s just a matter of getting to that point.

Redbox And Verizon Announce Their Netflix Competitor, But Leave Out Details About Pricing, Content

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:32 AM PDT

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Redbox and Verizon are getting a little bit closer to finally rolling out their streaming Netflix competitor, as the companies formally announced the new service and provided a few more details about the execs who will be running it. But the alpha launch of Redbox Instant by Verizon, as it’s being called, leaves out several important details — like for instance, how much it will cost and what content will be available through the service.

Verizon and Redbox first announced the joint venture in February, saying that they would combine forces to provide a streaming service. But other than that, few details have been announced.

The companies pulled back the curtain on the exec team today, which is being headed up by Verizon exec Shawn Strickland, who was previously president of Verizon’s New York south/east region and will be CEO of the joint venture. Other execs include Redbox’s Amy Gibby, who will be chief marketing officer; Verizon’s Joe Ambeault, who will serve as chief product officer; Verizon’s Jack Gallagher, who will be chief technology officer; Verizon’s Pete Castleton, who was named VP of business development and performance management; and Verizon’s Tina Altmann, who will serve as VP of customer operations.

All in all, mostly Verizon execs, which makes sense. The JV will lean on Redbox for branding while Verizon does the hard work of building the service and handling streaming operations.

But here’s the important thing: It’s not clear how much the service will cost, or what the service will even consist of. It’s likely that it will launch in the sub-$10 per month range, to be competitive with Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Instant Videos. And the service will be available on a wide range of streaming devices — think iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, as well as a large number of streaming boxes, game consoles and connected TVs.

There’s also no mention of what content that will be available, and it’s likely that there won’t be that many streaming titles, at least at launch. As we’ve seen with the rollout of Amazon’s Prime Instant Videos, it usually takes some time for a service of this kind to hit critical mass. Amazon launched with just 5,000 titles, which it has expanded to 18,000 over the last year and a half. Even still, it lags behind Netflix in many respects.

In many ways, the long (and continued) wait for Redbox and Verizon’s streaming service puts it at a further disadvantage, especially when you consider that it’s not just fighting against Netflix anymore: There’s Amazon Prime Instant Videos, as well as new streaming services from Dish and Comcast. While the Redbox/Verizon service will be available to non-Verizon customers, unlike those latter two services, it could have a hard time carving out a niche in the subscription VOD space.

The $99 Vizio Co-Star Google TV Box Is Now Available To Pre-Order

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:24 AM PDT

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Vizio pulled off a sort of coup with the Co-Star. This $99 Google TV box packs more features than Sony’s latest model and is half the price. Plus, I think the novel UI looks better than the standard Google TV interface. The box, which was announced last month, is now available for pre-order. It costs $99 and will ship August 14th.

The Co-Star ships with a dual-sided remote: QWERTY on one side and a touchpad on the other. A dual-core Marvell Armada 1500 powers the device. It sports the typical apps such as Netflix and Amazon, but also Onlive, which is the Co-Star’s prime attraction.

Onlive turns the Co-Star into a legitimate gaming machine. Owners simply need to pair one of the OnLive controllers to the box. From there, as long as the owner pays for the Onlive service, games are streamed to the box. And as someone who has played with Onlive since the beginning, I can attest that the service has matured from a novelty to a real thing. There is a touch of latency, but it’s hardly noticeable after a few minutes of playing. It’s almost like your mind adjusts for it.

With OnLive, a good price and Vizio’s typical stellar distribution, the Co-Star could turn out to be the star player Google TV so desperately needs.

Kiip Debuts Standalone App To Find & Redeem Rewards From Over 400 Mobile Apps & Games

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:21 AM PDT

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Kiip, the rewards-based network co-founded by former Digg employees Brian Wong, Courtney Guertin and Sequence's Amadeus Demarzi, has just arrived on mobile. And here’s a surprise – the company went Android-first with the new app. But the iOS app is in the works, and is only “a few days away” from launch, so chalk this one up to coincidental timing rather than mobile strategy.

With the new app, you’ll be able to track and redeem your rewards earned on Kiip, as well as access a list of games and apps which support the platform.

For those unfamiliar, the big idea behind Kiip (pronounced “keep”), launched back in summer 2011, is to provide real-world rewards for the achievements earned within mobile games. Instead of just getting points or badges, for example, brands get to associate themselves with a player’s momentary euphoria that comes from beating a particularly challenging level, boss, or when they complete another gaming milestone.

At launch, the network debuted with rewards in over 15 games, reaching 12 million monthly active users. By March, when the company revealed its self-serve platform for developers, it had grown to 140 apps and 30 million users, with promises of over 100 more apps in the pipeline. And as funding rumors swirled in June, the network was available in some 400 apps on iOS and Android, and its ad inventory was served within 100 million “moments” every month within the U.S. The company says that today, there are 40 brands participating in those 400+ apps.

Kiip tells us, too, that it now doles out an average of 5 rewards per second, reaching over 40 million users – that’s the same rate of rewards as seen in March, but a much larger user base. Also, it seems users are increasingly comfortable with engaging with the platform. In March, 12% would initially fill out the form for the reward, and now 18%-22% do. There’s also a 50% re-engagement rate at present, which is more than decent.

Kiip has the potential to expand beyond mobile gaming to other apps that also want to engage users in new ways, whether that’s offering them a freebie for being a regular user, a coupon associated with the app’s brand or category, or any other sort of reward.

The company just closed an $11 million Series B round this month, from Relay Ventures, with participation from previous investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and True Ventures, confirming the earlier reports that the company was raising. With the new funding, the company plans to expand beyond gaming, as well as grow its reach both in terms of its own brand as well as its international presence.

As for the iOS app, it’s in the Apple approval process queue and will be available shortly.

AOL Launches PLAY By AOL For The Kindle Fire

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:10 AM PDT

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Kindle Fire, owners? Aol, TechCrunch’s not-so-evil overlord, has a new app for you. Aol just released a retooled version of PLAY By Aol specifically for the Kindle Fire. This reskinned app is optimized for the Fire’s 7-inch 600×1024 screen. Everything from the layout to the iconography to the cover art was redone to look as good as possible on the Fire.

Like the other versions of PLAY, this music app puts the device’s on-board MP3 collection into an immersion environment. While it features a media player, the entire app is built to provide an experience not traditionally found in a simple player including social features and the ability to share songs on Twitter, Facebook, and the PLAY network. Plus, PLAY features a SHOUTcast player with access to 55,000+ stations.

Spiritual guru and AOL Mobile First Senior Director Sol Lipman said in a released statement today, "The Kindle Fire can't get much more awesome, but somehow we made beautiful babies together with PLAY. It's the best social music experience on the Fire, and I say that because I'm only mostly unbiased. Look, just stop reading and go try it.”

Aol released the Android and iOS versions of PLAY last summer. Since then the app has been downloaded 1 million times. The Kindle Fire version is the first edition of the app made specifically for a larger screen.

The app costs $.99 on the Amazon App Store or there is an ad-supported version available as well.

BandPage Unshackles From Facebook, Now Helps 500K Musicians Build Synced Sites and Widgets Too

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:02 AM PDT

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With $19 million in funding but the Timeline redesign cratering its traffic, BandPage needed to diversify beyond Facebook. So today it launches BandPage Everywhere to let musicians build websites and embeddable widgets as well as Facebook Page apps. Rather than inefficiently trying to sync content, the half million artists hosted by BandPage can now upload streaming music, photos, videos, or tour dates just once and have them pushed to all their online presences.

Since 2009, BandPage has focused 100% on building Facebook apps for musicians in need of a home after the fall of Myspace, including Rihanna, Green Day, and Selena Gomez. http://www.facebook.com/rihanna/app_178091127385?ref=ts. But that was just the opening act.

Behind The RootMusic

When BandPage started, Facebook was emerging as a powerful way to connect with and retain fans, but there were no native music features like on Myspace. ReverbNation was dabbling in Facebook apps, but BandPage (then known as RootMusic) turned up the volume.

It raised some seed funding followed by $2.3 million Series A in January 2011 and a massive $16 million Series B in August that year to build out the team and tech behind what would become a 500,000 client base and 32 million monthly visitors to the musician apps it powered. BandPage was cheap, full-featured, and beautiful.

BandPage started planning to expand outside of Facebook, where ReverbNation and Bandcamp were hosting artist websites. But then in February 2012, Facebook moved Pages onto the Timeline design, and it hit BandPage like a tour bus crash.

This removed the ability for musicians to set their BandPage app as their default landing page, and added the glossy cover image and other features that distracted visitors from the little box leading to an artist’s BandPage. In two months, BandPage lost over 90% of its traffic, plummeting from 32.1 million monthly active users and 1.5 million daily active users to just 3.3 million MAU and 130,000 DAU according to app tracking service AppData.

A Comeback Beyond Facebook

BandPage’s founder and CEO J Sider tells me: ”Timeline hit and obviously it affected our traffic, but we really looked at Facebook as a starting point. We knew that change was coming. We never expected [Facebook] to stay the same. Facebook has its own initiatives it has to go after. The sooner you understand that and don’t hope it will change back, the better off you are building a strong, independent company.”

What BandPage is now is the central hub where musicians can update their content online. From a single admin interface, artists can upload their content, build out their Facebook apps, embeddable widgets for WordPress, Tumblr, and other sites, and create full-fledged standalone sites, then sync content across them.

Creating a professional looking site takes just minutes, and is as simple as selecting a template and tabs wanted, deciding on a light or dark theme, and adding a background image. BandPage Extensions widgets for photos, videos, bio, tour dates, mailing list, and streaming music can be easily recolored and resized to fit any site’s space and style.

The tour dates widget now highlights the “nearest show” based on a viewer’s IP address, and BandPage Websites and Extensions can be instantly hooked into Facebook’s Open Graph for auto-sharing of favorite songs and event RSVPs. Interestingly, there’s no cross-web status update publishing tool. While deeper hooks into Twitter might come down the line, for now BandPage thinks musicians are best off posting feed updates one-at-a-time so they’re tailored to the formats of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other sites.

The new BandPage Everywhere features will always be free, though users can still opt to pay $2 a month for advanced social features on their websites. BandPage doesn’t offer any ecommerce options right now beyond an integration with TopSpin.

However, I suspect its plan to earn money includes tie-ins with ticketing companies like TicketFly and Ticketmaster and its own ecommerce platform for merchandise. This would help artists make more money from the BandPage while netting the startup a cut. Convincing bands to pay a monthly rate for extra features may be tough, taking a percentage of dollars it earns them could be easier on the ears and wallet.

Today’s diversification is a wise move for BandPage that shows its maturity. Sider isn’t content to burn out or fade away. Instead, his company is going back to the studio to make the musician’s life even easier, so they spend less time fiddling on their computers and more time rocking out.

StackSocial Raises Seed Funding, Launches Platform Publicly

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT

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StackSocial, a digital commerce startup that aims to match web publishers with readers, publicly launched its platform and announced an $800,000 seed round today.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the funding round was over-subscribed and came from 500 Startups, Tim Draper, Paige Craig, Siemer Ventures, Amplify, Jim Pallotta, Rick Merrill, Josh Resnick, Mark Schwartz and Jeff Lapin.

The company, part of the first batch of startups from the Los Angeles accelerator Amplify, is coming out of beta, which it launched in October. Co-founders Josh Payne and Stefan Wrobel say their platform "offers web publishers a dead-simple way to integrate relevant commerce into their sites with zero up-front investment," allowing them to "diversify their revenue sources beyond advertising while also providing added-value content to readers."

Payne and Wrobel say they have recorded over 50,000 transactions since launching and their users have saved over $7.5 million off retail by purchasing through the platform.

Analyst: iPhone 5, iPad Mini Coming In September

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 07:19 AM PDT

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Apple’s next-gen iPhone — and the much-talked about (but yet unseen) iPad mini — are some of the most hotly anticipated gadgets of the year. And according to a report by relatively on-point KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the new iPhone and iPad mini will launch in September.

Thus far, we’ve heard that the iPhone 5 will have a larger 4.08-inch display maintaining the same width as current models, at 640 pixels. TechCrunch has also confirmed — along with Reuters more recently — that the new iPhone will replace its original 30-pin connector dock with a 19-pin mini port.

The iPad mini, on the other hand, is said to be the same thickness as the iPod touch 4G, with a screen measuring 7.85-inches. He expects that iPad mini sales should hit 1.8 million units during the time its available (1-2 weeks) in Q3.

Of course, Kuo (and the rest of the world) expects Q4 numbers for both products to be ridiculously high, with iPhone projections at 55 million units and iPad estimates hitting 24 million (including both iPad mini, new iPad, and iPad 2).

Here’s Kuo’s official word:

Though shipments of iPad mini's components will start in August, the new iPad line will end production, ready for transition to a modified New iPad line. As such, component shipments will drop in August as iPad mini's components shipments growth will be offset. On a side note, the modified New iPad shares the same exterior as the original model, but contains modifications to correct its thermal dissipation problem and lower-cost components.

The September timeline is just a prediction made by this analyst, but it makes sense considering we’ve already heard that the iPhone is in production.

Amazon Finally Cracking Down On 3G Browsing Cap

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 07:18 AM PDT

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There’s a little-known stipulation in Amazon’s 3G browsing, available primarily on their e-ink devices. Ostensibly, downloading items over 3G is completely free but browsing the web using the device’s weird and slow experimental interface is capped at 50MB. Most users have never hit that cap and there haven’t been many reports of actual notifications.

That’s recently changed. One user of the Kindle Keyboard 3G noticed the message when he was browsing the web in Canada. He received a message that said he could only browse Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and the Kindle Store. Wi-Fi access was unaffected.

In the terms of use, Amazon notes:

The Experimental Web Browser is currently only available for some customers outside of the United States and may be limited to 50MB of browsing over 3G per month. This limit does not apply when customers are browsing over Wi-Fi.

This could be a reaction to folks tethering their Kindles, resulting in a tragedy of the commons effect where some users are using a piddling amount of data while others are blowing out Amazon’s allocations in a few hours.

via Digital Reader



Tenaya Capital Closes ‘Oversubscribed’ $372M Fund, Seeks A New Kayak

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 07:03 AM PDT

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Tenaya Capital, the venture fund spun out of Lehman Brothers in 2009 with a history of backing companies like Kayak, Palo Alto Networks and Zappos, has just closed its latest fund totalling $372 million — in its words, oversubscribed against an initial target of $300 million. Tenaya Capital VI is the company’s first fundraise independent of Lehman’s, with the two previous funds raised by the VCs for $300 million and $365 million.

The fund will be used to make investments in tech companies across a broad range of areas — from enterprise to consumer internet, as well as electronics and more — in their initial stages of revenue growth. Tom Banahan, the MD of Tenaya, tells me that the aim is to keep the range diverse. The average size of initial investments, typically made as a B- or C-round, will be between $5 million and $10 million. Tenaya may potentially also make earlier or later stage investment in portfolio companies, so the total amount invested in the lifetime of a company will be around $10 million to $15 million, it says.

Whatever the wider economic climate might be, right now is a still a strong time for tech. The news of this most recent fund for Tenaya comes right on the heels of August Capital closing a $550 million fund.

In terms of geographies, Banahan says that Tenaya has the option of investing up to 20 percent of the fund outside of the U.S., although it may not. The rest, he says, goes into Silicon Valley companies. It’s not for parochialism that this is the case: there are only five people at Tenaya and trying to cover too much would be “spreading ourselves too thin,” he says.

Although in the past Tenaya has invested in Wooga, the games company in Germany, for now, the main focus outside the U.S. is China. The company already has some holdings here — namely, the travel site Qunar, which Banahan calls “the Kayak of China.” He says that it’s growing so fast right now that it might be the next IPO target, although given that it’s also a main partner of Baidu, things could go in another direction.

Areas that Tenaya will focus on will follow from its past investment activities, and will cover enterprise software, consumer Internet, IT infrastructure, communications and electronics. Typically, Tenaya takes lead investor position when it makes an initial investment and likes to take board seats to act as directors or observers.

Banahan further tells me that there are certain areas that are catching their eye — and others that they are avoiding. “We have our eyes on companies in the cloud space and software-as-a-service, basically enterprise for the new generation of enterprises, looking at where the big shifts are coming,” he says.

On the other hand, in the area of consumer-facing technologies, “We probably won't do much more ecommerce because that is difficult,” he admits. “It's really hard to build another Zappos. Those guys were remarkable operators.” And mobile, it turns out, is an interesting but challenging area. “We have spent a lot of time looking at mobile and have chased a few things, but it's a heated up area, so you need to be careful. But without a doubt it is the next titanic shift.” Travel investments, he notes, are “a little easier.”

The company has played a part in some very notable startups, including Cotendo, Endeca, InfoBlox, Isilon, Kayak (which just IPO’d last week), LifeSize Communications, ( Palo Alto Networks (also IPO’d last week), PowerReviews (acquired by Bazaarvoice), travel site Qunar, Wintegra, Zappos (now part of Amazon), Eventbrite and Wooga.

Tom Banahan, MD of Tenaya, says that its strong track record with these companies drove investors in past funds to come back for more, so the need to find new partners was not huge. “Our existing limited partners in Tenaya V came back strong in Tenaya VI," he said in a statement, “which allowed us to target a small number of new limited partners.”

In total the firm has some $1 billion under management.

Microsoft .NET for Mobile Company Xamarin Gets $12 Million In Series A Funding

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Xamarin

Xamarin, makers of cross-platform frameworks for building mobile applications, today announced a $12 million round of funding from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate. This is the first round of funding for Xamarin, which develops Mono, an open source project that brings Microsoft’s .NET development framework to non-Microsoft operating systems like Android, iOS and Linux. The company also made headlines when it used a tool called Sharpen to translate all of Android 4.0′s Java code into C# and open sourced the whole thing as XobotOS.

The company was founded in May last year by Miguel de Icaza and the rest of the Mono team. Mono was originally developed at de Icaza’s previous company Ximian, which was acquired by Novell in 2003. Novell continued funding the development of Mono after the acquisition. But in December 2010 Attachmate acquired Novell. In May Novell laid off the entire Mono team. Just two weeks later de Icaza announced Xamarin.

Although Mono is free and open source, Xamarin makes money by selling enterprise licenses and support for MonoTouch (an implementation of .NET for iOS) and Mono for Android. In July 2011 Novell granted Xamarin a perpetual license for both products, which let Xamarin avoid having to rebuild the products from scratch.

Enabling developers to use .NET for mobile application development means they can re-use code from other projects, including desktop and server side applications. For a Microsoft-centric development shop this could be a huge boon if it saves developers the time of having to port code to another language like Java (for Android), Objective-C (for iOS) or JavaScript (for HTML5). That’s proven to be big business: the company claims to have over 7,500 paying customers. The license from Novell and its large customer base has enabled Xamarin to avoid having to take any outside funding until now.

Xamarin competes indirectly with companies like Appcelerator, Motoroloa’s RhoMobile and Adobe which acquired Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap (now called Apache Cordova).

Pearltrees Comes To The iPhone, Goes Beyond Bookmarking And Adds Photos, Notes, Offline Mode

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

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Few startups make it through a year without a pivot or two these days. That really can’t be said about social bookmarking service Pearltrees, however. The company has stuck pretty closely to its roadmap ever since its launch in 2009. After launching on the web, Peartrees is now available on the iPad and, starting today, on the iPhone. Ever since its launch, the company wanted to provide its users with a library of what they discover online and create a community of people based on their common interests. Until now, that mostly meant sharing bookmarks, but the new iPhone app significantly broadens this concept to also include photos and short notes. In addition, the updated universal iOS apps now also cache a user’s libraries for offline access (including the text on any website they bookmark).

While the company obviously adjusted the app’s design to accommodate the iPhone’s smaller screen, the overall look and feel hasn’t changed much. The focus is still on the highly visual interface that lets you easily organize your bookmarks, photos and notes (or “pearls” in the company’s parlance) in a mind map-like tree diagram interface.

Since the launch of the iPad app, Pearltrees has also started to put a stronger emphasis on helping users discover other relevant content on the site based on their own interest graphs. Just like the iPad app, the new iPhone app also prominently features this “discover” mode as well.

Just like the iPad app, the iPhone app shows how Pearltrees is clearly meant to be used with a touch interface. While the earlier apps, however, purely focused on saving bookmarks and collaborating around them in small teams, this new version now makes full use of the iPhone’s capabilities by adding photo sharing and note-taking features.

This version also introduces an offline mode that caches a user’s pearls on the device for offline browsing. Users can continue to edit and organize their libraries without an Internet connection and the information will be synced to the company’s servers once the device has a connection to the Internet again.

Pearltrees generally describes itself as a collaborative social library and all your actions on the service are public. There is currently no way to use the service privately.

These new features, however, would clearly also be very useful for users who don’t want to share their pictures and notes with the public. The good news is this is also a feature that’s on Pearltrees’ roadmap. Indeed, the company will likely use this feature to start monetizing this service by charging a small fee to users who want private Pearltrees.

Pearltrees says it now has about half a million active users. The company has raised just under $12 million in venture funding since its launch, including a $6.6 million round earlier this year.

Touch Publishing Platform Onswipe Moves Beyond iOS With Kindle Fire Support

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT

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Since fully launching a year ago, Onswipe has built touch-optimized experiences for iOS — starting with the iPad and, more recently, adding iPhone. Today it’s taking its first step beyond the Apple ecosystem with the launch of support for the Kindle Fire.

Onswipe’s stated goal is to deliver native app-like experiences through the mobile web. Achieving that on the Kindle Fire was particularly challenging, says CEO and co-founder Jason L. Baptiste, because it’s a relatively low-end device with an older operating system.

“We had to do a lot to optimize to provide the same level of functionality,” he tells me. “Basic CSS properties were missing and it provided a unique challenge.”

Despite the hurdles, Onswipe is now ready to bring publishers to Amazon’s tablet, and in fact it says Bonnier Corporation, Flavorwire, NewBay Media, The Investing Channel and Vibe Media are already live. Baptiste says the company now works with thousands of publishers in all, “ranging in size from long tail bloggers to top 10 ranked on Quantcast.” He adds that total pageviews are up 2,000 percent in less than a year. (Yes, it’s easy to see big percentage jumps when you’re a newly launched company, but hey, it’s better than the alternative.)

Baptiste also says we can expect to see support for other touchscreen devices in the coming months. That may mean more tablets, but as we saw with the launch of iPhone support, it could mean smartphones too.

As for making money, Onswipe is also bringing its full-page, interstitial ads to the Kindle Fire. Those ads can include features like geo-location, social sharing, and video, and the company claims they perform 50 to 100 times better than traditional banners.

The startup has raised $6 million in funding, most recently a $5 million “Series Awesome” led by Spark Capital.

Noodlecrumbs Is A Crowd-Funding Platform For Thinkers, Not Doers

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:29 AM PDT

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With successes like the Pebble smart watch, crowd-funding is becoming more and more attractive to startups. But maybe you aren’t even at the startup stage in your idea. Maybe all you have is an idea and a computer. That’s where Noodlecrumbs comes into the picture.

It’s a new type of crowd-funding for those of us who don’t quite know how much we need to make the dream a reality. In fact, Noodlecrumbs could be used by someone who doesn’t even want to build the actual product, but just wants it to be built. I have friends who pitch me ideas all the time, and I say, “sounds good, build it.” Most of the time, they say they don’t have time or don’t know how, but they’d love to use the product. That’s the perfect situation for Noodlecrumbs.

Once the idea receives some funding, organizations or companies that have the means and resources to build the product write up proposals to take over the idea. Those who have donated then get a vote for which proposal is best.

There’s obviously a fatal flaw here: that this sort of “reverse” fund-raising suggests the founder knows nothing about his or her chosen project – or at least not enough to know how much he needs. It’s kind of a Kickstarter for the catastrophically lazy – or that’s how it could be perceived.

Shukla used the example of a mashup between two of your favorite artists. Obviously, you can’t just send Lady Gaga and Gotye an email and hope for the best, but you can post about it on Noodlecrumbs and see if the rest of the world is interested, too. If enough money is sourced and interest displayed, perhaps the artists will want to collaborate for their fans.

The second concern would probably be in equity for the “founder” of the idea. It could be argued that anyone who has a truly great idea, one they fully believe in, would pursue it. But founder Sachin Shukla feels that there are plenty of people who have an idea for something they’d like to use rather than something they’d like to build and distribute. And when it’s as easy as posting the idea on a site and doing nothing more, there isn’t a huge cost associated with planting the seed.

To the point of equity, he said there may be a way to offer some equity to the “founder” in the future, but he’s still just testing the water to see what picks up.

The platform is brand new, so there’s only one project currently looking for pledges, a startup based TV show called Midas Touch. It’s already received $500 in funding, which is a good start.

So if you have a genius idea — and you don’t want to follow through with it — post it up on Noodlecrumbs. Maybe one day it’ll actually be a real thing. Or maybe not!

Click to view slideshow.


Dashlane Releases iOS App To Avoid Tedious Form-Filling On Purchases

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:23 AM PDT

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Dashlane enables consumers to login, fill out forms and checkout of a purchase faster, removing the need for repeating the process across sites. Its personal data assistant aims to speed up access to websites through password-saving and online form-filling features. But this is not a password manager: it has instant logins and support for automatic checkout on e-commerce sites. Dashlane raised a $5 million Series A back in September last year.

Today it has an iOS release out, letting users search and shop through an integrated browser on their iOS device. You can download it here.

Users can add, edit and access personal data wherever and whenever they need it, all on their iOS devices. That means there is more potential commerce, because form filling on a mobile is a pain. This makes it easier.

Dashlane, a European startup, securely stores all kinds of personal data, including passwords, IDs, payment and contact info, enabling users to complete logins and checkout forms.

With this release, Dashlane also introduces Dashlane Premium, an upgraded version of its free service. This costs $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Users who choose to forgo the paid model can also access premium features by referring friends to Dashlane and collecting points. It supports Chrome, Safari and Firefox on both Macs and PCs and Internet Explorer on PCs.

Box Debuts Windows Phone App, Qualcomm Deal As CEO Levie Says 40% Of Users Access Box’s Cloud From Mobile Devices

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:05 AM PDT

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Some good news for users of Windows Phone devices and customers of the cloud-based content sharing platform Box. The company has announced a new app for the platform — its first for a Microsoft mobile OS. With the app now available in the Windows Phone Marketplace, the relationship between the two is set to deepen in the months ahead, with Box already preparing Windows 8 support for tablets and other devices for when the new platform ships later this year. Separately, Box has announced a deal with Qualcomm offering special integration on devices running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor.

The move to offer a Windows Phone app is significant on two levels: the first is that it underscores how important mobile, and being everywhere on mobile, is for Box’s longer-term success. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, says that already 40 percent of Box’s users are accessing Box from mobile devices, with that number growing fast. “We see a huge correlation between users adopting mobile, and users adopting Box,” he tells me. The second is that, for Windows Phone (be it 7 or 8) to have any hope of taking significant market share away from Android and Apple among smartphone users, it needs to make sure that it’s delivering on content. For enterprise users, that means support for services like Box’s, among others.

The challenge is big: figures from earlier this month from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech (a WPP market research division) noted that in a recent 12-week period, Windows Phone 7 accounted for less than five percent of all handset sales in several key markets like the U.S. and UK. One exception was Germany, where WP7 accounted for just over five percent.

Adding Windows Phone to the list of Box’s supported platforms — they also include Android, iOS, and RIM’s PlayBook (note, BlackBerry is not included) — Levie says, is a natural progression of the company’s strategy to go to all places where enterprises go.

That’s not to say that Box’s customers have been clamoring for WP7 support: Levie describes Windows Phones as “still emerging” when he talks to Box’s enterprise customers. Still, he thinks that longer term, we won’t be seeing consolidation on any single platform soon. “There will be five to 10 different operating systems that people are using and will use for core business processes,” Levie observes. That leaves an opening for Microsoft and its OEM partners.

“I think of this as an investment for us for the next couple of years,” Levie explains. “People are looking for different platforms. We had to make a choice to do this now because we are starting to see more traction on this and we wanted to get out ahead of that.”

And here’s a clue as to who is Microsoft’s biggest competition at the moment for mobile enterprise users: He adds that today, by volume, Android is the most popular OS in terms of Box usage, although he says that is by virtue of Android being the world’s most popular smartphone platform. But when it comes to engaged usage on a per-user basis among Box’s paying enterprise customers, iOS is winning out, he says.

“Android by volume is the most used but we see more iOS in the enterprise,” he notes. “When you look into the enterprise customer base you see more iOS usage on both tablets and phones. The sheer magnitude of iPads means they're way ahead there.” In conversations with clients, he says that iOS rates as the “dominant environment” in about 6-7 out of every 10 businesses.

The new Windows Phone app will have all the same features as Box’s apps for other platforms. Those include the ability to make batch uploads of multiple images and videos; share files and folders as links; invite colleagues to shared folders and leave comments on files; find content with integrated search. Additionally on Windows, users will be able to pin Live Tiles to their Start screens to see updates on files by colleagues, and protect content with an application passcode lock. As with the other apps, free users get five gigabytes of free space, while enterprise get unlimited storage.

Levie says that the app was developed in close collaboration with both Microsoft and Nokia, its biggest OEM partner (and the one who has the most to lose if Windows Phone doesn’t fly). He wouldn’t comment on whether that included financial assistance of any kind except to note that the companies have a “healthy relationship” with Box. Both Microsoft and Nokia have been fairly open so far about helping finance development of apps for the Windows Phone ecosystem. “It’s been good to work with them,” he tells me.

As for the tablets, Levie says that Box will be revealing more details on that as the release of Windows 8 approaches. For that, he says Box is working not just with Nokia but with a number of other players. “Nokia is one of the strongest, though,” he told me.

Separately, Box is also announcing a partnership with Qualcomm in which it will also be offering free storage space to users of devices built with Snapdragon processors, another signal of how Box hopes to keep scaling up its customer base. The deal will mean OEMs using Qualcomm’s processors on supported platforms can preload Box’s app and offer users 50GB of free storage space — similar to the deal that Box has crafted with companies like LG. Windows 8 tablets will be among the devices that will use Snapdragon processors, Box notes.

SnappyTV Launches Self-Serve Platform, Lets Anyone Create Events And Share Real-time Video Clips

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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Social video startup SnappyTV launched last year with a platform for making clips of live videos and then sharing them on social networks. Now it’s moving beyond custom implementations and launching a platform that will allow any video publisher to enable real-time clipping and social sharing of those videos on Facebook and Twitter.

SnappyTV already works with some major TV networks and media companies, offering up tools to allow their viewers to quickly and easily share video moments with friends and followers on social networks. Using SnappyTV’s editing tools, TV networks, online video publishers, and sports leagues have published and pushed clips onto Facebook and Twitter virtually in real-time, making them instantly shareable.

With its new self-service video clipping and sharing tools, small and medium-sized companies can easily integrate the SnappyTV platform with their video delivery systems. That includes working with major live-streaming providers, as well as YouTube and video content management systems like Brightcove and Ooyala. While SnappyTV has been working with major media companies on custom implementations, now basically anyone can deploy the same technology.

That technology can be used by companies to share live video clips during live-streaming events, such as conferences or other programs. It was used during TechCrunch Disrupt, for instance, to share more than 350 clips on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

With the new product, SnappyTV has introduced three offerings, in addition to its custom enterprise services. There’s the $49 a month Express offering, which supports recording and editing of live events and social sharing. The Pro offering, which is prices at $499 a month, enables editing, scheduling and publishing to social networks, as well as importing to YouTube and content management systems like Brightcove and Ooyala. And its conferences and live events offering makes the came capabilities available to conference promoters on live streaming platforms. That costs $999 per event.



Kids Clothing Service thredUP Adds Netflix Execs As It Prepares To Scale

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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Online kids’ clothing consignment shop thredUP says its recent transition from online swap meet to clothing resale service has been working. When the company was originally founded back in 2009, the goal was to offer a platform where parents could trade boxes of used kids’ clothes directly with each other. But despite some steady but slow growth, thredUP made the shift into consignment this past March. Now parents send in clothes to the service, and receive credits to spend in the online shop. Since the change, thredUP reports 50% month-over-month growth, and says it’s now on track to sell over 100,000 items during back-to-school shopping season.

The company is also announcing the addition of a new executive, Chief Operations Officer John Voris, formerly VP of Operations Engineering at Netflix, and new board member Andy Rendich, former Chief Service and Operations Officer at Netflix.

Voris has spent over a decade on automation and process engineering at a number of companies, including also Shutterfly and Cisco. Says thredUP CEO James Reinhart,  Vorbis and Rendich are “incredible assets” who know what it takes to build “a world-class operations infrastructure on a national scale.”

“Just like Netflix, thredUP will have a massive online inventory,” Reinhart says, explaining how Voris will help the company scale. “This type of business brings unique challenges, and requires a sophisticated operations foundation. John has the experience we need to automate evaluation, itemization and distribution of used clothing, and move inventory quickly from home to home across the country.” He adds that all-around scale will continue to be a focus for the business, in addition to forthcoming improvements to search, merchandising, and personalized shopping.

Something that thredUP already has in common with Netflix is its ease-of-use. Parents don’t have to figure out the shipping for themselves – they just request a postage-paid bag in the mail. Currently, the bag is free, but the plan is to charge a $4.95 “bag deposit” which is fully refunded when the bag is returned. All you have to do is stuff the bag with all your kids’ clothes and send it back.

There are a few other stipulations to using the service, which, in my personal experience as a paying customer, weren’t overly troublesome. Clothes have to be in relatively good condition – that is, the same stuff you would try to consign, not dump at Goodwill. There are a few lower-priced brands which are rejected, as are underwear, socks and non-clothing items. I was kind of disappointed I couldn’t unload infant clothing on the service (under 12 months), but this is because demand is low, the company has found. Pricing for the clothes sold in the online store is competitive with brick-and-mortar consignment stores, and the clothes I’ve received  have been greatly above general hand-me-down quality.

In addition to the new hires and above growth numbers, Reinhart also shared a few other metrics related to its current status. There are now over 2,500 new items added to the site each day. Plus, they’re expecting this number to grow to 10,000 by year-end, and drive daily inventory turns to 5%, which is over 6x the pace of traditional retail, he says.

Curious as to traction, I asked about other numbers related to member count and inventory. While he declined to share registered users, he said that the site has just passed 110,000 visits in July, and they now have some 80,000 items in stock, 1,000 of which are sold daily. At any given time, only select items are featured when browsing the service – right now, for example, there are 42,000 items visible, he says. And currently, visitors can browse through clothes from roughly 5,000 different clothing brands at present.

Since the shift in business models in March, thredUP has received and processed 300,000 pieces of clothing and families are earning $20 to $40 per bag on average. (That’s fully stuffed, for what it’s worth – my bags have been much lighter, and worth less.) The company is also seeing 50% return rates on customer visits, which is promising.

ThredUP is available online and via mobile (which I’ve just happily discovered, despite the apps’ launch earlier this month.) ThredUP is backed by $8.62 million in funding from Trinity Ventures, Founder Collective, NextView Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, David Beisel, and others. The company has just opened a new 60,000 sq ft. distribution center in San Leandro, and is planning to expand again in 2013.
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