The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- (Founder Stories) Warby Parker: “Less than 1% Of Eyeglasses Were Sold Online”
- Snackr For iPhone Is A “Pandora For News”
- ZipWhip Builds A Robotic Flag To Add Fun To The Disheartening, Slow Rise Of The Average Start-Up
- Klarna Execs’ Alleged Sexual Assault Case Dismissed
- Popset Makes Group Photo-Sharing Easy, Export To Facebook Even Easier
- Nokia Top Windows Phone 7 Vendor, But There’s Still Plenty Of Catching Up To Do
- Samsung Toiling Away On Bezel-less Galaxy B Smartphone?
- So Much For That: Google To Offload Its Stake In Clearwire For $47M
- Dumb Buyer Beware: Chinese State Police Seize Hundreds Of Fake Apple iPhone… Gas Stoves
- Playfire Hits A Million Users Of Its Analytics For Gamers
- Stock Chart Site TradingView Adds European Stocks and a Watch List
- Joustin’ Beaver App Maker Served A Cease & Desist Order From Justin Bieber
- Game Closure Turns Down Facebook & Zynga To Raise $12M For HTML5 Mobile Gaming
- Motorola Gets Its Way In Germany: Apple Disables Push Email In Patent Dispute, Says It’s Appealing
- Evertale, A Social Network For The Less Proactive, Gets Seed Funding From Mangrove
- Daily Crunch: Periodic
- Dropbox Can Now Automatically Sync Your Android Photos (And It Has More Up Its Sleeve)
- Votizen Raises $750k From Sean Parker, Others, To Turn Elections From Fundraising To ‘Friendraising’
- Washington Post Tests Personalized News Program
- Mayor Ed Lee Talks New Gov Tech Projects In San Francisco [Video]
| (Founder Stories) Warby Parker: “Less than 1% Of Eyeglasses Were Sold Online” Posted: 24 Feb 2012 09:10 AM PST  In episode II of Chris Dixon’s Founders Stories interview with Warby Parker’s co-founders, David Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal, the trio discuss topics spanning Warby Parker’s social responsibility efforts to the state of e-commerce. Off the bat, Gilboa tells Dixon that Warby Parker strives to be an environmentally friendly organization focused on giving back to the community. In addition to being “100% carbon neutral” Gilboa highlights Warby Parker’s “Buy a Pair, Give a Pair” initiative where Warby Parker donates a set of glasses for every set it sells. Speaking to setting up shop in Manhattan, Gilboa (who previously lived in San Francisco) says, “I was sort of brainwashed into thinking that if you wanted to launch a startup, particularly anything internet based you had to do it in the Bay area.” His views have since changed and Gilboa is now in lockstep with co-founder Blumenthal who says, “New York was the right place to be because we are a fashion brand, and New York is the fashion capital of the world.” As other New York e-commerce brands like Birchbox and Fab gain popularity, Galboa is bullish on Warby Parker’s future. He tells Dixon, “When we started looking at the eyewear industry, less than 1% of eyeglasses were sold online, but we are huge believers in the fact that eyeglasses are going to follow all these other consumer product categories and more and more of that spend is going to go online.” Before the interview wraps, Gilboa take a moment to offer advice to budding entrepreneurs. Make sure to watch the entire interview to hear everything the pair has to say. Episode I of Warby Parker’s Founder Stories interview is here. Links to Founder Stories episodes featuring BirchBox are here. Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring leaders from Reddit, KickStarter, Tumblr, TripAdvisor, ZocDoc, Charity: Water and may other startups are here.
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| Snackr For iPhone Is A “Pandora For News” Posted: 24 Feb 2012 09:08 AM PST  Snackr (no, not that Snackr!), is a new iPhone application that delivers personalized audio news in bite-sized chunks for listening to while on the go. The app offers you a “5 minute snack” of the current headlines, as well as audio streams by category, including topics like business, entertainment, tech and startups, “top news,” and others. But Snackr also has another cool feature, besides just serving up fresh audio news. The app delivers a daily greeting which tells you about the current weather, your friends’ birthdays, updates from your favorite sports teams, and more. The app, coincidentally, arrived at a time when I was becoming frustrated with information overload (a regular occurrence), and tweeted out asking for suggestions of mobile apps that could read me my RSS feeds. BuzzVoice does an OK job at this but is $3.99 and then wants $3.99 per month to keep it ad-free. I’m also not a fan of the robot voice it uses – Snackr at least has a more pleasant, British-sounding robot reading the news. The Snackr team never saw my original tweet, as it turned out, but when they reached out, the timing was perfect. Snackr is a great attempt at solving the info overload problem. As someone whose job involves keeping up with the fast-paced world of tech news, I often feel like I get behind on other news – you know, everything else that happens out there in the real world. When I finally have time to browse the news via Flipboard, or turn on the TV, or catch a little NPR, I don’t feel like I’m keeping up, exactly. I’ll catch a few stories, maybe, but it’s a hit-or-miss experience in terms of whether they were important or impactful . Snackr’s customized channels let you tune in to just the news that you actually care about, and it even lets you build your own channels from a large selection of categories like gaming, science, sports, fun, music, and more, or any combination of those. The channel editor still needs a little work, though. It doesn’t currently seem possible to delete custom channels, for example (or if it is, that setting is buried!). I also wish that Snackr would let me customize the experience even further, by selecting individual RSS feeds or news sources to build a channel. At present, it only offers these pre-packaged categories for your custom channels. That’s probably fine for most people – this is more of a power user’s request, I imagine. But overall, the app itself is simple to use. You tap to play/pause the audio stream, star to add an audio briefing to your favorites (so you can come back later and actually read the article in question), or tap the email icon to have the story sent to you. For even more automation, settings are available so you can have Snackr automatically email you your favorite stories or share those stories and your stream to Facebook. However, these were turned on by default, which I didn’t care for. I should also point out that Snackr isn’t summarizing the news, or reading the full articles – it only reads the first paragraph. “Think of this as the audio equivalent of scanning headlines,” explains Snackr co-founder Jason Tongbai. He and Snackr’s other founder, Brian Brunner, met in a class at Stanford, where Brian is now a senior. (Jason has since graduated). The company received a little bit of funding through Plug-and-Play’s “University Start-up Camp” program last summer, but is currently bootstrapping the app. Jason says the idea for Snackr came to him while he was walking to class and trying to read the news on his iPhone. “I looked ridiculous, and then I was about a hair’s breadth of getting run over by a bike. If you look around today, this behavior – as dangerous and ridiculous as it is – is becoming more and more the norm rather than the exception.” He said he wanted to make news consumption less “dangerous” (ha!) while also offering a more personalized experience. The app is still considered a “beta” even though it’s live in the App Store right now. Next week, Snackr will have a more public debut.
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| ZipWhip Builds A Robotic Flag To Add Fun To The Disheartening, Slow Rise Of The Average Start-Up Posted: 24 Feb 2012 08:48 AM PST You’re a start-up dude with carefully mussed hair. Your AWS is waiting. You’ve paid the designer. You and your family have created accounts. It’s been a mad dash. You’ve maxed out your credit cards. Your service is done. Now you wait. And wait. And wait. Lots of people have ideas, but very few ideas gain much traction, and in those first few months it’s disheartening to see your subscriber numbers inch up far too slowly for anyone’s good. Every little bit of encouragement helps. That’s why the guys at ZipWhip (a service that basically lets you sync your text messages with your desktop) created an Arduino-powered flag to alert them when they got a new customer. The service itself is ready to go and waiting, they just wanted a way to celebrate when somebody created an account. And celebrate they do, cheering wildly as the flag slowly raises like the arm of Victory high above the bloodbath that is modern start-up creation. “It's a ton of fun to see something visual happen each time we get a new user,” they wrote on their blog. They’ve also released the plans and source code in their blog post so you and yours can build a flag, say, for celebrating new Twitter followers or to signal when it’s time to change your shirt (once a day is customary, but I’ve seen once a week work fine for many start-up founders). Excelsior, ZipWhip, and may your flag fly off the freaking wall once people see this post.
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| Klarna Execs’ Alleged Sexual Assault Case Dismissed Posted: 24 Feb 2012 07:55 AM PST  Remember those two high-level executives from Swedish startup Klarna who were arrested earlier this month on sexual abuse charges? Their names are Jens Saltin and Niklas Adalberth, and they were arrested at the W Hotel in New York after allegedly molesting a 19-year-old tourist from Texas. Well after a little follow up (it’s not often that we get to call into the New York City District Attorney’s office), it would seem as though the case has been dismissed. Here’s the official statement out of the DA’s office:
Saltin and Adalberth were released on $10,000 bail after their February 4 arrest. According to the police report “defendant Adalberth straddled informant, both defendants removed informant's clothes, and defendant Adalberth grabbed informant's breast. Deponent is further informed that she did not consent to said conduct.” Shortly after, Klarna released a statement:
Since the men were charged with a felony, neither reached the point in the court process where they were asked to plead guilty or not guilty, so we still haven’t really heard their side of the story. We’ve sent out a request to Klarna for a statement and will update as soon as we hear more.
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| Popset Makes Group Photo-Sharing Easy, Export To Facebook Even Easier Posted: 24 Feb 2012 07:21 AM PST  Popset, a new mobile app from the current Winter 2012 batch of Y Combinator startups, is a way for groups of friends to privately share photos. Oh what, you’ve heard that one before? Yes, it’s true – mobile photo-sharing is a crowded space. However, there hasn’t been a de facto leader established in the particular category Popset is after: sharing photos in private groups, easy photo album creation, and support for exporting entire albums to Facebook. Each of Popset’s features may remind you somewhat of other apps, including group texting apps like Beluga and GroupMe, the earlier incarnation of Path, Batch, LiveShare, and others, but none of Popset’s competitors share the exact same feature set implemented in the exact same way. Path, for example, has moved on from only photo-sharing to become a “share everything” app. GroupMe et al. are meant more for group texting, not photo album creation and sharing. Batch lets you upload to Facebook, but it posts links to your Wall – it doesn’t export entire albums. Plus, (and personal preference alert here!), Popset has a look-and-feel that puts it ahead of much of its photo-sharing competition right out of the gate. And for what it’s worth, it has created a good mix of both utility and pleasure. The app is simple to set up, allowing you to sign in via Facebook, optionally invite friends, then jump right into creating your first album. Thanks to the app’s Facebook integration, you’ll also be able to see the photo albums shared by other Facebook friends who are Popset users, assuming those albums haven’t been set as private. After starting your album, you give it a title, click next, then, on a very easy to understand screen, you answer three key questions related to privacy: Where? (check or uncheck to have the photos geotagged), Who can add photos? (You, those in your current location, or you plus specific friends), and Who can see this album? (Public or Private). Albums, whether public, semi-public or private, work well in several scenarios, including private photo-sharing with just a few friends or family members, photo-sharing at events like weddings or parties or for sharing photos around a given topic or interest with other like-minded friends. And if you later decide to share the album on a larger social network like Facebook, exporting the entire album is an option. However, even though Popset could be used for many purposes, it’s that Facebook export option that could end up being its best feature in the long run. Uploading a lot of photos to Facebook quickly and easily is still a challenge. There are a ton of utility-type applications out there for the purpose (I often use iLoader, for example), and while they get the job done, they don’t do so with any style. And they definitely don’t have Popset’s expanded feature set that could draw you in for other tasks, too, like tweeting out links to photo albums, emailing them, or sharing them over SMS text messaging, for example. Popset still has to make some improvements though. The Facebook export option won’t support unlimited uploads until a later release (expected soon) – it only supports up to 10 photos at a time right now. The team already plans to add many other interesting features, too, like photo filters, selective photo exports, the ability to choose the album’s privacy settings on Facebook before export, syncing albums’ likes and comments to Facebook, and more. Popset was founded this spring by a team of four, Phillip Wein, Jan Senderk, Nicolas Boes, and Daniel Wagner and has YC’s $20K in funding, plus the $150,000 from StartFund which all YC companies now receive. You can grab the app here for free in iTunes.
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| Nokia Top Windows Phone 7 Vendor, But There’s Still Plenty Of Catching Up To Do Posted: 24 Feb 2012 06:41 AM PST  The Microsoft-Nokia partnership is still in its infancy, but it would seem as though that little guy is about ready to start walking. Strategy Analytics today released Q4 numbers showing that Nokia holds 33 percent of the Windows Phone 7 market share, pushing the Finnish phone giant to the top spot globally. Windows Phone 7 devices in general are up 36 percent with 2.7 million units shipped in the fourth quarter. Nokia’s slice of the pie comprises .9 million units sold. HTC, the world’s former top Windows Phone Vendor, has now fallen to number two, reports CNET. While HTC has a new strategy and is mostly focused on Android for the time being, Nokia’s ability to gobble up WP7 market share can’t come as good news to a company that’s experiencing a bit of a growth stunt. While this is a solid entry for the Nokia/Microsoft duo — and remember, Nokia’s Windows phones only made their way onto shelves in the fourth quarter — there’s still plenty of catching up to do. Apple’s numbers during the same period (which, in Apple terms, would be its first quarter) accounted for 37 million iPhones being sold. In fact, the iPhone 4S sold 4 million units in its first weekend on the market. At the same time, Nokia has been good about keeping things fresh and is expected to unveil two new devices at MWC this week, perhaps with some “Pure View” imaging features.
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| Samsung Toiling Away On Bezel-less Galaxy B Smartphone? Posted: 24 Feb 2012 06:39 AM PST  Judging by the way Samsung is trying to eliminate bezels from their products, you’d think Samsung found that extra rim of material offensive somehow. The consumer electronics titan is already working on ridding your next television from the confines of a bezel, and if a new report South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper holds true, one of their next smartphones will be the first to feature an edge-to-edge screen. Aside from a small area along the top of the device that houses a speaker and a front-facing camera, the screen on the Galaxy B is reported to cover all of the device’s face. If the bezel is indeed non-existent as the report claims, Samsung may be forced to ditch the familiar rounded-corner design they’ve become so fond of. Creating a device that’s all screen is enough of a technical challenge, so I doubt that they would go to the trouble of developing a display with rounded corners just so their design language isn’t compromised. Aside from word of that impressive screen, the MBN’s sources couldn’t deliver any additional specifications. As SlashGear points out though, it’s possible that the Galaxy B will sport one of Samsung’s new quad-core Exynos processors, which would probably propel this thing into the flagship zone. So could the Galaxy B ultimately become the oft-rumored Galaxy S III? It’s certainly possible, but for now we’ll have to wait and see — MBN’s sources point to a tentative release date in either Q2 or Q3 of this year.
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| So Much For That: Google To Offload Its Stake In Clearwire For $47M Posted: 24 Feb 2012 05:54 AM PST  As Google inches closer to completing its Motorola Mobility acquisition, it made another strategic move in its mobile plans: today it announced it would sell its 6.5 percent stake in 4G operator Clearwire, for a value of $1.60 per share, or $47 million. The sum represents a substantial discount on the share price of Clearwire, currently trading at $2.27, and a major discount on the $500 million it originally paid for the stake in 2008. The news was confirmed in an SEC filing from Clearwire as well as a letter from Google explaining the sale, and comes a day after it was reported that Google would put Dennis Woodside, its VP of ad sales in the Americas, in charge of Motorola once its $12.5 billion acquisition of the handset maker is completed. Sprint and Comcast, two other shareholders in Clearwire, are understood to have first refusal on the shares. There is no specific explanation in Google’s letter for why it is selling the shares. Clearwire, a WiMAX operator, has had a long struggle competing against bigger mobile carriers in the U.S. At first, its unique 4G selling point set it apart from the pack, but as AT&T and Verizon have launched LTE services, that WiMAX network has looked a little less new. It has needed a number of cash injections to help build out its network nationally, which has caused a lot of tension with its largest shareholder, Sprint. It has also undergone several management changes. Having Google involved in Clearwire seemed to hint at the search and mobile giant also having ambitions to do more in offering wireless services to consumers directly – and indeed that is an area where Google itself has tried to buy spectrum at auction in the past. Perhaps with the Motorola acquisition nearly completed, the company has decided now to focus more on devices and services rather than delivery.
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| Dumb Buyer Beware: Chinese State Police Seize Hundreds Of Fake Apple iPhone… Gas Stoves Posted: 24 Feb 2012 05:54 AM PST  Today I learned a gas stove branded as an iPhone cannot take Instagram pics, make phone calls and probably isn’t a real iPhone. But some consumers might not be as educated. Good thing the Chinese state police are always ready to enforce trademark infringement and recently seized 681 of the so-called iPhone gas stoves. These stoves, produced by “Apple China Limited”, would likely be a hot seller in the official Apple merchandise store, giving Apple engineers and fanboys a humorous party conversation piece. Or, for Foxconn workers, it could be a great space heater. M.I.C.gadget notes that each of the gas stoves is adorned with a green Apple logo and even has a compliance certification label. But don’t be fooled, these are not real Apple products. But they’re still better than those fake Android stoves. Right, fanboys?
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| Playfire Hits A Million Users Of Its Analytics For Gamers Posted: 24 Feb 2012 05:06 AM PST  Playfire, a social network designed entirely for console and desktop video gamers launched in 2008. That makes it one of the older social networks, but unlike others of its ilk it has not rested on its laurels. Last year they re-worked the site to run entirely on automatically tracked data. Literally speaking, users can create a profile once and forget about it, allowing the site to track all their in-game activity. Their profile then delivers to them in-game stats, custom themes, favorite genre graphs, favourite games and many other features. This week they’ve hit a new milestone with a million users. Now, that might not sound like a lot, but you have to remember that this is a different environment to the web. Playfire tracks what gamers are playing on Xbox Live, PlayStation 3 and the PC and is one of the only companies in the world to have the technology to do that. To use Playfire is very simple – you just enter your username or Xbox Live, PS3 or Steam. They then download all of the game data and track it every few hours from then on. Raptr, which has raised raised $27 million in funding, is the only other company which can do similar things. But despite raising ten times more cash than Playfire, the latter is bigger, according to Compete. In addition Raptr doesn’t have full PS3 tracking, but Playfire does. That puts them in a pretty unique spot. Playfire has raised $3.1 million from Atomico and angels including Michael Birch and William Reeve. Currently Playfire collects data on everything gamers do in games. That amounts to 800 million pieces of data. As CEO Kieran O’Neill told me: “There are so many different ways of using this to improve the lives of gamers: knowing what they like just by how often they play certain games, and using that data to find games they’ll love but haven’t heard of. We sit at the center of an industry where $50 billion is spent per year. We’ve had quite a lot of interest from games publishers and developers who are keen to work with us to use that data to build better games.” Mainly gamers like building a cross-platform timeline to show off their games and achievements, following what their friends are playing and having banter over who’s better, and getting recommendations for which game to play next. Players can be notified of new discussions, videos, news stories etc for the games they care about. They can follow friends and online buddies, and stay up to date with what their friends are playing, saying and doing. Privacy is controlled on the game console itself. Most people make it public as none of it is private or sensitive information, but it’s easy to turn it off. Playfire was founded in 2007 by Kieran O'Neill, Seb Hayes and Ben Phillips.
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| Stock Chart Site TradingView Adds European Stocks and a Watch List Posted: 24 Feb 2012 05:00 AM PST  TradingView, a social finance site that launched last September, has just been upgraded with some new features, including data on European stocks and U.S. stock futures. The site was created by trading software company MultiCharts. Charts, after all, are often at the heart of stock discussions, so TradingView is a place where those charts are front-and-center. Users can create and share charts with up-to-date data, follow and comment on other charts, and also post their charts to Twitter and embed them on other websites. Among TradingView’s new features are a watch list for tracking your most important stock prices on one screen, study templates to make it easy to add financial indicators to your chart, and color themes for adjusting the color of a chart with just one click. Asked which new features will make the biggest difference, COO Stan Bokov points to the new data and the watch list. “New data coverage makes the site useful to a lot more people from all over the world, including Canada and Europe,” he says. “Users can now see data for markets that are relevant to them. Eventually we are hoping to extend coverage to data from all over the world.” TradingView sees about 2,000 visitors per day, a number that has been growing steadily, Bokov says. And those visitors spend an average of 30 minutes on the site.
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| Joustin’ Beaver App Maker Served A Cease & Desist Order From Justin Bieber Posted: 24 Feb 2012 04:46 AM PST  A mobile game created to parody Canada’s biggest teenybopper export in years was just asking for trouble, and that’s what it’s gotten: the developers behind ‘Joustin’ Beaver,’ a mobile game available for iOS and Android devices, have been served with a cease and desist order from lawyers representing Justin Bieber. The game doesn’t use his music, but it does feature a Bieber-like beaver, named Joustin’ Beaver, who floats down a river knocking things down. It costs $0.99 to download. In a letter to developers RC3, a lawyer representing Bieber, Aaron D. Rosenberg of Myman, Greenspan, Fineman, Fox, Rosenberg & Light, LLP, says that the developer has two days to take down the game before further legal action is taken. “Please be advised, at no time has our Client, our Client's parental guardian, or our Client's designated representatives entered into an agreement with you or your related business entities, or otherwise granted permission to you or any third party, to create the App,” the Rosenberg writes. “Further, I am not aware that you made any inquiry or gesture to contact our Client's representatives to obtain such authorization. Accordingly, you have no right to utilize our Client's name, image, likeness, life story or identity in or in connection with the App.” He also points out that “Exploitation of our Client’s name, likeness, image and renowned reputation in the industry to promote, advertise and market the App falsely implies that our Client has granted you certain rights to do so which, as you know, is not the case.” Bieber has had a big presence in mobile, with a huge number of people following his exploits on Instagram, and so while all this sounds a bit ridiculous, you can see where some might possibly lead to confusion that either agreed to or had involvement with this particular game. RC3 has responded: “The game is a parody and is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Nowhere in the game is Justin Bieber's name, photo, image, or life story mentioned.” RC3 is keeping the game live for now — but those $0.99 download proceeds are going to start dwindling down fast if they don’t come up with a plan B.
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| Game Closure Turns Down Facebook & Zynga To Raise $12M For HTML5 Mobile Gaming Posted: 24 Feb 2012 04:05 AM PST  Gaming is changing fast these days, especially in the browser. Sure, social games are great and everything, but there’s always been a sense that, as browser-based technologies mature, the opportunities that present themselves will make casual social, Facebook-only gaming look crayon scrawl. Inherently, one of the best parts of gaming is that it’s inherently social, and gamers want deeper, more interactive experiences — from console to free-to-play online games. Of course, enabling deep, multiplayer experiences puts a lot of stress on the technology and the game’s engineers (coding, synchronizations, de-buggings, oh my!) — even with how far HTML5 has come, it’s still a pain in the butt and can be expensive. That’s where Game Closure entered the picture. We were the first to cover Game Closure back when they launched at the “demo day” of SSE Labs, Stanford University’s student-run startup accelerator. (Now known as StartX.) At the time, Game Closure described itself as a gaming version of Heroku and Appcelerator, but, for the uninitiated, that means that the team has built a game development environment and SDK, which makes it easy for developers to create, host, and deploy HTML5-based, cross-platform, multiplayer games – on iOS, Android, and Facebook. But what’s really cool about this, especially given where the space was as recently as a year ago, is that the development environment itself doesn’t require additional software, plugins, etc., all you need is your browser. Mobile and social gaming are already growing like weeds, so there’s an untapped market and lots revenue potential from all the new users on-boarding as those platforms scale, but there’s also a lot of fragmentation, resulting in an increasing demand (among both experienced and novice gamers) for cross-platform availability. To be successful, developers have to be there. That’s why we’ve been seeing the big players like Zynga and EA, who were once content with being one-platform wonders, not only scramble to launch on multiple platforms, but offer direct-to-consumer services, and increase their frequency at which they turn out viable, robust games. Game Closure has, in part, made that latter obstacle their top priority, and last summer they’d gotten to a point where they believed they could realize cross-platform push with all the bells and whistles in as little as four to six weeks. (For context, this is a task which typically takes developers six months to a year to do.) So, at Google I/O last summer the team launched its first game, called Popstar Defense, in about five weeks, as proof that its game development tools could be used to create a workable gaming experience, purely written in HTML5. The team has since released a few more games, with some going live, and while some of them have missed, they each represent a step closer to a more powerful gaming technology. This caught the attention of investors, and less than six months after incorporating officially as a company, Game Closure closed a seed round from an impressive list of investors, including SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Joi Ito, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, and General Catalyst Partners. In addition to investing in Game Closure’s seed round, Joi Ito, who has served on the board of DeNA, advises Zynga and Twitter, and runs the MIT Media Lab, also joined the startup as an advisor. But, we’ve heard that it’s not only investors who were interested in the startup. Quite a few of the big players are lacking in their HTML5 strategies, and Game Closure as a young company, looked like a good steal. In fact, the Game Closure CEO confirmed that the company has had “significant inbound acquisition interest” from Facebook, Zynga, GREE, Motorola, and several others. What’s more, our reliable sources close to the deal indicated that Zynga put out the highest bid, its acquisition interest pushing into the $100 million range. The team turned down these offers, choosing to go it alone. And now a year from launch, the startup has grown to a team of 26 and is adding more coin to its coffers to support its independent exploits, announcing today that it has closed a $12 million series A round, led by new investor Highland Capital Partners, with contributions from existing investors, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and CRV, bringing the startup’s total to just under $13 million. Carter tells us that they were particularly excited by the fact that Highland Capital’s participation was led by Partner Andy Miller, who has quite a bit of mobile experience to his name, having sold Quattro Wireless to Apple for $275 million, whereupon he joined the company as VP of its iADs platform, and recently left Apple to join Highland. As to what’s next, the team has recently added analytics and multi-language translation into its game development experience, and, going forward, is looking to add monetization structures to the mix. Right now it’s working with game studios to optimize their HTML5 and mobile gaming experiences, and in the future we might see them tack to a broader focus. For more, check out Game Closure at home here.
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| Motorola Gets Its Way In Germany: Apple Disables Push Email In Patent Dispute, Says It’s Appealing Posted: 24 Feb 2012 02:36 AM PST  Another development in the very long and winding road of mobile patent disputes: Apple has now had to disable the mobile push email function used through MobileMe and iCloud, after a court ruled earlier this month that Apple had infringed on a Motorola patent claiming IP on push email. A spokesperson from Apple told TechCrunch that the turn-off happened overnight, and that it will be appealing the ruling. The block was first reported by the German blog Mobiflip. As Apple did when the decision against it was first handed down earlier this month, it is once again downplaying the impact of not being able to offer push email through MobileMe and iCloud, saying that only a small number of German users will be affected: “This ruling only impacts customers in Germany who use a Push setting to get their MobileMe and iCloud email,” he said. “These customers will still receive email to their devices. Apple believes this patent is invalid and is appealing the decision.” TechCrunch understands that those who live and travel in Germany will not be able to get push email notifications on their Apple devices, but that this does not disable email altogether. There are rules that a user can still set up to check email regularly — Apple details how to do that here, on an information page it has made for users affected by this — although this will not be as instantaneous as those that are pushed. When Apple first had the ruling on the pager case handed down earlier this month, a company spokesperson dismissed Motorola’s IP as an “old pager patent” — but even so, it represents a setback for Apple, in that it shows the company is not immune to roadblocks, either, when it comes to patent litigation. Up to now, Apple has been successful at getting injunctions on Android-based Samsung tablets, both in Germany and Australia: Apple claims these rip off its designs and patents. Those cases are still in progress, and some of the injunctions have since been lifted. Apple had another hiccup in Germany this month, when it had to remove older models of the iPhone and iPad from its online store after another ruling in a separate Motorola case. That block was lifted, however, less than 24 hours later. The original ruling centered on a pager patent held by Motorola — going back to its earliest days as a mobile company, which now makes smart devices based on the Android platform and is in the process of getting acquired by Google, pending regulatory approvals still to be secured in China, Israel and Taiwan. We are also reaching out to Motorola for comment for this story.
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| Evertale, A Social Network For The Less Proactive, Gets Seed Funding From Mangrove Posted: 24 Feb 2012 02:07 AM PST  If you like the idea of charting your life in a diary, and possibly sharing that detail with others, but lack the motivation to do all that logging yourself, then this might just be the social network for you. Evertale, a service that automatically logs your activities through your mobile device, has picked up seed funding from Mangrove Capital – early backers of Skype, shopping sites Brands4Friends and KupiVIP, and a number of other European startups – and is now preparing to launch its app, which is still in beta. We are still trying to get the exact amount of the investment. The news of the funding was first noted on the Quintura blog in Russia. As we first noted when Denmark’s Evertale appeared at TC Disrupt back in September, the service works through an app on your phone – at this point, that phone has to be an Android device, although there are plans to launch on other platforms “soon”, says the company’s co-founder and CEO Francesco Patarnello – and that app essentially collects the pictures you take, the locations you visit, the calls you make and any other details you happen to enter on your device, and collates them together into a mapped view of your “path” through life. You can then edit out what you want included, and what you’d like to share with others. Evertale, with a name that sounds not a little like Evernote, may inevitably get compared to the bigger app (and its offshoots, Food and Hello). And in a way, the two are cut from the same cloth: both are created in a similar vein to be used to chart what it is that you do and think about, using your mobile to help with that. But just as equally, Evertale is also part of growing trends of automation and simplification in apps — trends that almost seem inevitable, given the demands on users’ time and, frankly, the fact that it’s not that enjoyable entering loads of data on a small touch screen. Another recent force in that trend has been the app Clear – the to-do app that does away with any buttons and text and instead relies on simple swipes to function. Launched only last week, Clear is already claiming 350,000 downloads. For a to-do app.
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| Posted: 24 Feb 2012 01:00 AM PST  Here are some of yesterday’s posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: NVIDIA Rebrands The Tegra 3′s Architecture, Wants Everyone To Now Call It A 4-Plus-1 SoC Proview Thwarted In Chinese iPad Trademark Suit, Brings Case To U.S. Shores These iOS vs. Android Flame Wars Have To Stop
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| Dropbox Can Now Automatically Sync Your Android Photos (And It Has More Up Its Sleeve) Posted: 23 Feb 2012 10:39 PM PST  Last year, Dropbox raised a whopping $250 million funding round at a valuation in the ballpark of $4 billion. The raise had been rumored for months so it didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it still raised plenty of eyebrows. Because while Dropbox is totally awesome (I use it every day), at this point people see it as a convenient way to sync their files between computers — which it already does pretty well. So what’s all the money for? Today, we’re getting our first taste of what’s next, and what cofounder and CEO Drew Houston calls Dropbox’s mission to solve all of the “hidden problems” that people have with technology, many of which we’ve simply become accustomed to dealing with. Their first solution to one of these hidden problems? Helping you keep all of your photos, from all of your devices, in one place. And to get things started, they’re launching a new version of their Desktop and Android clients that’ll automatically upload your photos to your Dropbox account. Snap a few photos on your phone, and, without having to hook up any wires, they’ll be on your computer within a minute or two. I know what you’re thinking, because it’s the first thing I said to CEO Drew Houston and Product Manager Aseem Sood: “err, don’t iCloud and Google+ already let you do this?” I’m pretty sure they saw it coming. The first thing they pointed out is that there are a lot of people out there who aren’t using either of those services. Most Dropbox users aren’t using Macs at all, so iCloud is Dropbox also does a couple of things that Google+ doesn’t: for one, it’ll automatically sync the full-sized version of your images — Google+ sync will downscale images to 2048px at their longest edge. And Dropbox can also sync any photos it detects on your PC: if you plug in a camera or SD card into your computer and it detects images, you’ll have the option of automatically adding them to your Dropbox folder. This new feature could potentially eat up a significant amount of space in your Dropbox folder, so Dropbox will also be gradually boosting the limit for free users from 2GB to 5GB (they won’t do this all at once — as you use the photo feature, you’ll be able to gradually accrue more free storage). Houston explains that the goal of this feature is to make life easier for people, not to get them to upgrade to larger Dropbox storage limits, which is why they’re offering the additional free space. It sounds great, and I’ll be enabling it immediately, but there are still some obvious areas for improvement. Images that are synced to your Dropbox account are placed in a special Photos folder, but they’re just sorted in chronological order — there isn’t any intelligence around event or location detection, for example. Another potential issue is that Dropbox doesn’t offer any tools for managing or editing these photos, so it’ll be up to you to drag them into iPhoto or another photo editing app (the best solution will likely be to make your Dropbox folder your default image folder). Houston agrees that they’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible here, so I’m sure we’ll see improvements soon. Oh, and don’t worry iOS users — Dropbox will be updating its app to include this functionality soon as well. It’s worth nothing that, while this is the first time Dropbox has baked this functionality into its official app, it’s been possible to do the same thing on Android using third-party applications that take advantage of the Dropbox API. Of course, the official app has a much bigger install base.
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| Votizen Raises $750k From Sean Parker, Others, To Turn Elections From Fundraising To ‘Friendraising’ Posted: 23 Feb 2012 10:20 PM PST  Just in time for the Presidential and general elections coming up later this year, Votizen, the social media site that helps like-minded voters get together and influence how those elections go, has raised $750,000. And while that may sound like a modest number, in true influencer fashion, it’s the backers that are going to count here. They include Sean Parker, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, A-Grade Investments (Ron Burkle), and Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter — a group whose value in raising a voting startup’s profile in an important election year could carry more currency than even actual money. This puts Votizen’s total funding at $2.25 million, including the $1.5 million Votizen raised in 2010. That will all be going to help expand Votizen’s footprint and usefulness — and its staff, particularly in the area of engineering talent. (Read more on that in the update below.) So far, Votizen says that over 480,000 voters have been connected together by its services, a base built up through the ranks of Votizen’s active members, which number around 20,000. The services can be used via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The company has also started to amass a big trove of voting data from the U.S. and is ramping up activities in line with the presidential election in 2012. We’re just about to talk with the CEO of Votizen, David Binetti, and will update this post with more detail after that. Update: Binetti says a good portion of this recent, convertible strategic round will be used to support hiring efforts, especially in the area of engineers, to expand Votizen’s 11-person team. He says that his company is in the lucky position of solving a “real problem” at the center of its business, which is attracting strong candidates who want to do something to make a difference: “There's no question startups have been quite challenged to find good talent, and that's because they're not working on real problems,” he said. “This is not just a social game. We’re helping to connect individuals to solve big problems. That's going to attract a certain kind of person and puts us in a strong position.” Some of the investor interest, he said, came from the fact that voting and elections are two areas that have yet to be truly disrupted by the Internet and social media – although there have certainly been a lot of grassroots efforts, such as the protests around SOPA/PIPA, that have demonstrated the potential. The plan, said Binetti, is not just to focus on the presidential election but to also get people engaged in the “long tail” of politics: Senate and Congressional races, and “all the way down to school boards,” as it looks to make more direct connections between people and move them away from the influence of 30-second attack ads. If all works out to plan, Votizen wants to “reduce the influence of money in politics,” he said. There is also a lot of scope for growth outside of the U.S. and when Votizen makes that move it will likely first be to other English-speaking countries such as the U.K., Canada, Australia and India, “the world’s largest democracy,” said Binetti.
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| Washington Post Tests Personalized News Program Posted: 23 Feb 2012 09:35 PM PST  If you’re tired of seeing the same news as everyone else, The Washington Post is now experimenting with personalized headlines. That experiment is called Personal Post, and it’s available at personal.washingtonpost.com, where you’ll see a river of content that you can customize. If you’re already a member at WashingtonPost.com, you can log in and the site will offer headlines tailored to match your previous activity. If not, you can choose from of The Post’s “starter streams,” like National Pulse, Washington Life, and Sports Nut. “Out of the tens of millions of readers that come to the Post every month we know that each one wants to consume a particular type of news,” says Katharine Zaleski, Executive Director of Digital News, in the Personal Post press release For a first-time user, Personal Post can seem like just another collection of articles, albeit one that focuses on a specific collection of topics. Over time, however, readers can give The Post more information about their interests, which in turn will lead to a more customized feed. If there’s an article you don’t like, you can hit a button to remove it from your stream, or to see “less of this,” or to remove the entire topic from your interests. As you’re browsing the site, articles also have a “more” button, which allows readers to say that they want to see more of a certain type of article. Personal Post uses technology from Trove, The Post’s personalized news aggregator launched last year. Last fall, The Post launched the Social Reader, an app for reading and sharing stories on Facebook, and it now has 15 million subscribers. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer Vijay Ravindran says Personal Post and Social Reader have very different aims, since Personal Post’s recommendations are completely private. What they share, however, is an aim to “help us understand the various ways readers want to consume news.” Other newspapers have also experimented with personalized content. Most notably, The Wall Street Journal is working with startup Gravity to personalize the content on part of its front page. (Gravity is also providing the personalized TechCrunch recommendations to the right of this post.) So I wondered: If the test is successful, could The Post follow suit and personalize content throughout its site? “We're not sure how an experiment like Personal Post will manifest, but this beta can help provide a clearer picture,” Zaleski tells me.
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| Mayor Ed Lee Talks New Gov Tech Projects In San Francisco [Video] Posted: 23 Feb 2012 08:01 PM PST Following San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s presentation of the city’s new government tech innovation plans last night at the TechFellow Awards, I caught up with him briefly to get a few more details. I asked questions like what his true feelings were towards the awful local taxi companies (negative) and how he’s going to take on the more recalcitrant portions of the city bureaucracy (he’s in a fighting mood). Check out the video for the full answers. A couple other notes. After my article last night, City-based open government advocate and blogger Luke Fretwell directed me to a recent post of his about many of the issues that the city has had trying to make itself more tech-friendly. Among other examples, it has moved away from using open standards towards proprietary technologies, and it has failed to provide data to developers that it should have if it were truly serious. Separately, regarding a new open data plan included in Lee’s presentation, O’Reilly Gov 2.0 blogger Alex Howard believes that the effort could manifest itself in an implementation of Socrata, a government-oriented database startup. TechCrunch hasn’t normally covered the ins and outs of open government initiatives in detail, but I personally find the topic fascinating so let me know if you’re working in the space and have news to share — eldon at techcrunch dot com.
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