The Latest from TechCrunch

Netflix Doesn’t Want You To Sue Them, According To New Terms Of Service
CasaHop: HuffPost Alumni Look To Travel Sector For Their Next Viral Ambition
ScaleXtreme Debuts iPhone App To Let IT Admins Manage Data Centers On The Go
HTC, Where Innovation Is Bought (And That’s A Good Thing)
Houston, We Have Liftoff: Human BirdWings Guy Finally Enjoys The Miracle Of Human Flight
Mobile Photo Factory MoPho Adds Instagram Support, Now Offers 1-Cent Prints
An Interview With Rob Schmitz, The Reporter Who Fact-Checked Mike Daisey [TCTV]
FindTheBest Launches A Data-Driven Approach To The Classifieds
Sprint’s Galaxy Nexus To Launch On April 15?
Windows Phone Inches Past Near-Dead Symbian In U.K. Market Share
With 4 Million Videos Viewed, Social Video App Vodio Rolls Out Major Update
Google Analytics Update Connects Social Marketing With The Bottom Line
Adding 1K+ Members/Day, Behance Drops Major Redesign To Make “The Creative Graph” A Reality
More Social Travel: Tripbirds Picks Up $740k From Path’s Dave Morin, Others. Now In Public Beta
Sonos Updates PC/Mac Controller Apps With Drag-And-Drop, One Touch Party Mode
An Always-Present Recipe Box: ZipList Reaches 1M Users
FutureAdvisor Raises Funding From Sequoia To Bring Financial And Investment Advice To The Masses
Orange Publicis Fund’s First Investment: $15M For Ad Personalization Provider myThings
Egnyte Adds HTML5, Scalability To File Sharing Platform For SMBs
Averail Raises $6M To Help Enterprises Share Documents On Mobile Devices

Netflix Doesn’t Want You To Sue Them, According To New Terms Of Service

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 09:23 AM PDT

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that Netflix wants you to “Agree” to something. The company has updated its terms of service, and within the new version, there lies an interesting little tidbit that you may want to review.

From the “Arbitration Agreement”:

These Terms of Use provide that all disputes between you and Netflix will be resolved by BINDING ARBITRATION. YOU AGREE TO GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO COURT to assert or defend your rights under this contract (except for matters that may be taken to small claims court). Your rights will be determined by a NEUTRAL ARBITRATOR and NOT a judge or jury and your claims cannot be brought as a class action.

Awesome.

Generally speaking, this means that you have absolutely no right to take Netflix to court over anything, including getting some buddies together and filing a class-action lawsuit. Of course, you’ll still have the option of lodging a complaint, going to small claims court, and/or entering into binding arbitration with the company, but no gavels will be involved. (At least, I don’t think any arbitrators have gavels?)

Netflix got in some hot water last year, shelling out $9 million after the loss of a class-action suit. Virginia residents had filed a suit claiming that Netflix was holding on to their DVD and instant records two years after they had cancelled the service — a violation of a 24-year old law.

Perhaps Netflix is reacting to this huge loss, but the timing seems way late. Come to think of it, it’s a little curious why Netflix would change its terms of service now… randomly. Why not include this provision right from the start?

CasaHop: HuffPost Alumni Look To Travel Sector For Their Next Viral Ambition

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 09:12 AM PDT

Make way for another social travel startup, one with ambitions to disrupt the whole of the travel industry. A team of executives that helped build and develop the growth phenomenon that is the Huffington Post is now launching its next venture, CasaHop.

The service will start out as a house-swapping platform, but, in the words of Paul Berry, the ex-CTO of HuffPost and now partner in developer SoHo Tech Labs, the plan is for much more:

“We see this as a concrete entry into a much larger social travel play,” he says, and perhaps more: the code he and his developers are writing for CasaHop will also be used for future ventures coming out of SoHo Tech Labs, including another social startup, still in stealth, called RebelMouse.

Berry says the idea for CasaHop came out of his own house-sawpping experience. He says his family has done about 15 of them over the last few years, and they work “incredibly well.” But his use of homeexchange.com to find swaps was severely lacking: “The site is very basic. It doesn’t use a social layer at all,” he said. “They also charge quite a lot to list your house.”

House swapping on CasaHop will be free when the service goes live in the next few weeks. (For now it is open for people to start adding their home and personal profiles. To encourage sign-ups the site is giving away the chance to win free plane tickets. So far, he says, of all the people that visited and signed up for the site, 60 percent have uploaded home profiles.)

“Free” might be the thing to entice punters, but to keep them there, Berry and Co. are looking to create ways of matching up users and swaps in a way that has not been done before, using algorithms to mine social data to match up users in ways that haven’t been explored before in travel.

So it won’t be around offering your home to friends, or even friends of friends, but more nuanced ideas of finding commonalities around, say, where you attended university, what kind of job you have now, or perhaps even what music you like.

“It’s about using things like the open social graph and machine learning to find commonalities between people that are not immediately obvious,” he says. “There are a ton of clues out there that let you figure out who you can trust and why.”

Berry says that his team is drawing on experience gained at HuffPost, where they worked with the likes of Twitter and Google to figure out how to use their data to make HuffPost content go viral.

The same will go for CasaHop, with the added data gleaned from Facebook, which is currently what people need to use to register for the site — although the ability to sign in using Twitter or LinkedIn is also coming soon. That LinkedIn connection is especially interesting as a sign of how a social network largely designed around business use can be leveraged for sites that straddle consumer and business interests.

The team behind Soho Tech Labs — Ken Lerer, Eric Hippeau, Jonah Peretti, Eric Ashman, Paul Berry and Greg Coleman — are also joined by another ex-HuffPost employee, Ben Regenstan, who is the CTO of CasaHop; and a team of developers, about 15 in all, dotted around Ukraine, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Chile and India — “people in love with the business idea,” Berry says, and committed to launching as quickly as possible. “The speed with which we developed at HuffPost was an enormous part of our growth,” he said. “It’s about being clever and fast.”

So what will come after house swapping? A credit network based on indirect trades, which Berry describes as a user being able to trade with a house in Utah and earn points for a modest chateau in the South of France. (The chateau is my addition.) And, of course, travel advice. Berry’s experience of house swapping has been littered with dog-eared printouts of nice things to see in each location, and this will be about centralizing that and making it useful for all.

To make money, there will be affiliate deals for car rentals and airfare purchases, but also something around micropayments. He says he’s been inspired by OMPOP’s Draw Something, and the idea of paying incremental amounts to improve your position. (In layman’s terms it sounds like users paying a bit to help promote their homes on the site.) A service like this, he says, will only come when the site is at scale and attracting lots of traffic.

There are also some potential investors talking to the company, “big names” in the world of travel and beyond, says Berry. “It’s a great validation of what we are trying to do,” he says, all optimism at this early stage in the game. “It’s amazing how something can be totally disrupted in five years. We’ve done it with news, and now we want to do it with travel.”

ScaleXtreme Debuts iPhone App To Let IT Admins Manage Data Centers On The Go

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Enterprise company ScaleXtreme, which provides cloud-based server automation products for data centers, an iPhone app today. Basically, ScaleXtreme for the iPhone gives IT admins an on-the-go view of their physical servers, virtual machines and public cloud instances.

As we’ve written in the past, ScaleXtreme offers a simple, data center automation SaaS. The automation platform allows companies to build and control physical, virtual and public cloud servers. The company has raised $13.5 million from Accel and others.

As co-founder Nand Mulchandani explains, "Mobility is becoming a central component of any modern IT operation, and the mobile experience is going to be an important part of our product's future."

The iPhone app has much of the same monitoring functionality as the cloud-based product. The app itself gives IT admins the ability to monitor server performance and job alerts. The app will track of all your computing resources and helps you manage them efficiently. Basically, the app, which is designed as a companion to the web app, gets IT admins access to server systems from anywhere at anytime, which Mulchandani says is a pain point for IT professionals.

HTC, Where Innovation Is Bought (And That’s A Good Thing)

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT

HTC's is the Cinderella story of the mobile market — they've gone from low-key provider of Windows Mobile hardware to Android-powered smartphone titan within the span of just a few years.

Impressive as that is, HTC has done much more than just push out smartphones. In the past year alone, HTC has inked big deals with Beats Audio, Dropbox, and LogMeIn, with rumors of a potentially final MOG acquisition swirling around to boot. It's pretty clear what HTC is trying to do here: they're trying to buy an entire ecosystem for their devices, and frankly, good on them for it.

The Android end of the smartphone spectrum has always struck me as a bit more cut-throat than the rest. While Apple is content to churn out one new smartphone a year, and most Windows Phones feel very similar in use, players like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola have continually pushed out Android devices to meet every desire and fit every niche.

It's not always the best practice though, and some of these companies are starting to realize it. HTC announced late last year that they would focus their new smartphone efforts around a smaller number of "hero devices," and Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha announced they would be paring down their smartphone portfolio shortly afterward.

But great hardware is only ever part of the equation. The experience that users have with those devices is what really has the potential to turn them into manufacturer devotees, and rather than sink gobs of time, money, and manpower into building out an ecosystem around their devices, HTC is wisely letting their checkbook do the talking with their high-profile partners.

TechCrunch has covered the Beats Audio and Dropbox deals in the past, but the recently announced LogMeIn partnership strikes me as particularly savvy. Going forward, HTC devices will have a "LogMeIn Rescue applet" installed (that is, if the device's carrier gives them their blessing) that will allow their HTC tech support to remotely access and diagnostic a smartphone's particular woes. With this in place, HTC seeks to establish themselves not only as the creators of great hardware, but your supportive partner if things go unfortunately awry.

At first glance, the MOG deal seems puzzling — the Google Play Store has within it a perfectly usable music portal after all. But if MOG indeed becomes part of the company's Beats Audio division, then Beats Audio becomes more than a fancy badge and a special audio profile on a phone. It could become the music hub of choice for HTC users; why buy a track for $1.29 a song when you can access 14 million songs with one touch? And if HTC can whip up a smart pricing model (or give it away for free like all that extra Dropbox storage), well, that's one more reason to buy an HTC phone over all the others.

It may seem a bit lazy of HTC to ink deals with these companies rather than work up their own solutions, but let’s not forget that they’ve tried in the past. Anyone remember the HTC Watch service, which allowed users to stream movie directly to their handsets? It never seemed to pick up much traction on its own, but these new strategic deals together make for a compelling argument to buy HTC. I imagine that they'll want customers to come for the solid hardware, and stay for all of the benefits that HTC users are (or will be) privy to. That, more than anything else, is what will turn regular customers to dyed-in-the-wool fans and it never hurts to have a few more of those.

Houston, We Have Liftoff: Human BirdWings Guy Finally Enjoys The Miracle Of Human Flight

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 08:55 AM PDT

While I am indeed guilty of being pretty fly for a white guy, it’s never been able to help me achieve my life-long dream of actual flight. You know, in the air, like a bird. Or maybe like Superman or Captain Planet. Hence my excitement back in December when we caught wind of a mechanical engineer from the Netherlands who was pulling out all the stops to transform this dream into a reality. His name? Mr. Jarno Smeets. At the time, however, his so-called HumanBirdWings project was just in its infancy.

Smeets was busy trying to manage a successful pairing of the accelerometers of a WiiMote and an HTC Wildfire S, which would together allow him to control the outrunners on his giant, self-built wings. Gradually, the engineer honed his mechanical pinions to the point at which, in late January, he actually took flight. Well, when we say “flight,” we really mean that the motion consisted more of two or three extended hops. But, damn you, it was progress.

Today, Jarno took his wings out for a second/tenth try, and, in the process, may just have made semi-self-propelled aeronautical history. We’ll check on that, but as far as hacks go, this one is pretty high up there. Finding just the right concoction of wind velocity, speed of departure, and whispered Hail Marys, Jarno today flew over 100 meters on his self-built wings.

Move over Orville, Wilbur, and Leo Da Vinci, there’s a new birdman in town. After 8 months of hard work, research, and testing, this mechanical engineer was able to defy gravity and participate in the miracle of self-propelled, human flight.

His inspiration? Why the majestic Albatross, of course. If only Samuel Taylor were here to see this.

For more, check out Jarno’s blog, which provides a glimpse into his work.

But, without further ado, here’s Jarno in flight:

Mobile Photo Factory MoPho Adds Instagram Support, Now Offers 1-Cent Prints

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 08:47 AM PDT

MoPho, the fun mobile printing app from Penguin Digital (with the ridiculous name), is rolling an update today that may include one its hottest features yet: 1 cent Instagram prints. The app, which allows you to smack your photos onto mousepads, mugs, key chains, t-shirts, and more – sort of like a mobile CafePress shop – is adding support for Instagram today. The option now joins Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa in the selection of third-party services you can pull from.

To kick off the launch of the updated app, MoPho is offering 1 cent Instagram prints – to be clear, that’s printed out photos, not customized consumer goods. However, you can choose to decorate a number of new products with your Instagram photos, too, including things like keepsake boxes, square canvases, coasters, iPhone cases, and more. You can even make yourself some temporary tattoos from the photos. (Ha. Oh, that sunset photo on my arm? Yeah, it’s a tattoo from my Instagram collection.)

Other new product categories that have been added since MoPho’s January launch include a Tile Art with Easel, iPhone and iPad cases, various photo panels, and the above-mentioned keepsake box and canvas prints.

The super-cheap 4×4 photos are limited to the first 15,000 users (with a maximum of 10 each). Although being advertised as an Instagram promotion, it seems that you can get that price for photos from other sources, too. In addition, to get the free shipping deal, you’ll need to use the code “freeship” at checkout.

MoPho is really such a fun little app, and if you like to have the occasional printed photo laying around, there’s no reason to skip this deal. 1 cent prints and no shipping? Crazy cheap. For comparison purposes, I’m still fairly obsessed with my monthly PicPlum shipments, which now includes pay-as-you go pricing, starting at $2.50 for up to 10 photos (plus shipping). That’s not as affordable as traditional online outlets like Shutterfly, etc., but it’s easy to use – I just email the photos in. But this month, I’m going to save myself a couple of bucks and use MoPho instead.

Started in 2010, Penguin Digital is led by founder Josh Friedman and CTO Andy Minkstein (both also of PicsCliq). The company has $1 million in seed funding from N.Y. investors in a round led by Globis Capital.

The updated app is available for download from iTunes here.

An Interview With Rob Schmitz, The Reporter Who Fact-Checked Mike Daisey [TCTV]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 08:24 AM PDT

Rob Schmitz is a reporter and Marketplace Correspondent based in Shanghai, China. He has spent time in many factories – as well as a bit of time outside of the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, the same factory fabulist Mike Daisey interviewed workers he purported were 12 and 13 years old. Schmitz’s findings definitely didn’t jibe with Daisey’s and I decided to sit down for a few minutes to go over his experiences reporting on Chinese manufacturing practices and problems.

“I think the truth is pretty complicated,” he said. “Foxconn has a little over one million employees in China.” Schmitz spent time talking to employees with Daisey’s translator, Cathy, and found a whole range of problems, from low wages to, oddly enough, complaints about the food. He didn’t see much of what Daisey described, but there’s a reason: Foxconn is one of the tightest-run manufacturers in China and Taiwan. There are problems, he said, but many of these problems are being addressed and when issues arise, workers are actually beginning to strike.

The truth, as Schmitz said, is complicated, and Daisey’s fabrications sadly cloud the real and pressing safety issues found in many of China’s lesser suppliers. To go after Foxconn and Apple is an easy ploy to gain eyeballs and attention, but the real concerns happen away from the bright media glare.

FindTheBest Launches A Data-Driven Approach To The Classifieds

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 08:07 AM PDT

FindTheBest, the startup led by DoubleClick co-founder Kevin O’Connor and backed by Kleiner Perkins’ sFund, has been trying to help consumers make the right decisions by giving them more, and better-structured, data. Now the company is bringing that strategy to a new market — classified ads.

“We think classified has a lot of room for improvement,” O’Connor says. “It’s a pretty scary process, and you never quite know what you’re buying.”

What’s really missing, he argues, is context. For example, if I were to go online and try to find a used car, I’d have to do a ton of research before I had any idea of what a reasonable price is, what kind of mileage I should be looking for, and so on. That’s where FindTheBest comes in. If you do a search in its classified listings, it brings up the results in its familiar grid, displaying the basic data so you can compare (in the car example) according to price, color, mileage, and so on.

Things get a little more interesting when you click on an individual item. You can see a sample listing an Audi A4 in the screenshot above. It shows you the average price, both for that specific year and make, and on a more general level, for all 2011 sedans. (So if the price is considerably higher than average, you’d better be getting something special.) There are charts highlighting some of the key specifications. And rather than forcing you to read a poorly written, randomly structured Craigslist description, FindTheBest automatically generates the description from the data. (So it starts, “This Used 2011 Audi A4 is listed for sale at $36,988, which is $2,410 more expensive than … “) O’Connor says this is a common theme at the company: “Creating narratives that take this factual information and put it into context.”

Similarly, an apartment listing can compare the rent with similar apartments in the same city, and a job listing can compare the salary to similar jobs. Of course, none of this data can completely guarantee that you won’t get ripped off. But it puts more data in consumers’ hands, in a way that feels helpful rather than overwhelming.

For now, FindTheBest is pulling the listings from several partners, and also getting more data from public sources. Eventually, O’Connor says it will probably add an option to post a listing directly to the site.

Sprint’s Galaxy Nexus To Launch On April 15?

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 08:06 AM PDT

According to an internal Sprint source that spoke with S4GRU, the Galaxy Nexus will show up on Sprint shelves on April 15. You know, just over three months since the Verizon version launched and mere months away from the launch of Samsung’s next flagship: the Galaxy S III.

Talk about good timing.

Still, Sprint could use this phone on its network, even if the Nexus heyday has already come and gone. The Nexus line is like the Galaxy line, or the Droid line, or even the iPhone line. It’s a brand people trust, and will offer a super solid option to power users bumbling into Sprint stores.

Unfortunately, Sprint’s 4G LTE network isn’t quite ready to roll, which means that your 4G capable Sprint Galaxy Nexus will be serving up 3G speeds out of the box. But don’t fret. You can still toggle 4G LTE on in the settings, but around launch time, Sprint’s 4G network won’t really be mature enough to leave 4G on continuously. S4GRU speculates that Sprint will turn on LTE self-discovery mode in June, when the network can handle it.

If for some reason you’ve forgotten, the Galaxy Nexus sports a 4.65-inch 720p HD Super AMOLED display, a 1.2GHz dual-core OMAP processor, NFC support, and runs the latest version of Android: Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s truly a beauty, and Sprint subs are in need of something special.

[via MobileBurn]

Windows Phone Inches Past Near-Dead Symbian In U.K. Market Share

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 07:49 AM PDT

Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform seems to be picking up some steam across the pond, or so a new report from Kantar Worldpanel claims. According to their study, Symbian now only accounts for 2.4% of the UK smartphone market while the Windows Phone platform has grown from 0.5% last year to around 2.5%, barely inching ahead of Nokia's former smartphone OS of choice.

I know, a victory is a victory, but Windows Phone’s triumph has much more to do with how far Symbian has fallen in just a year. As of February 2011, Symbian could be found on 12.4% of smartphones in the UK, with its popularity tanking over the intervening months.

The dip shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — Nokia CEO Stephen Elop infamously referred to their one-time mobile OS of choice as a “burning platform" in an internal communique last year, which highlighted nicely the company’s need to revamp their smartphone efforts.

That said, it’s worth noting that Symbian isn’t dead just yet — Nokia continues to provide support for the newish Symbian Belle OS, and turned heads at this year's Mobile World Congress with the Symbian-powered PureView 808. And while new purchases of Symbian devices may dwindle, there’s still a huge number of Symbian devices floating around out there.

One could argue that Symbian and its ilk still serve a critical purpose for Nokia, one of Microsoft’s biggest Windows Phone partners — to push and maintain Nokia's prominence in developing markets where low cost is a critical factor. Nokia has owned up to this ambition, as they've mentioned more than a few times they're going after the "next billion" phone owners with product lines like the colorful Asha series.

But even in those markets, the Android influence is undeniable — market research firm IDG reported last December that Android overtook Symbian to become the most used smartphone OS in India. Android also occupies the top smartphone OS spot in China, thanks to the proliferation of low-cost hardware. Now that Microsoft has successfully inched by a rival in one market, they’ll have to buck up and make the same happen in others if they want to give Android a real run for its money.

With 4 Million Videos Viewed, Social Video App Vodio Rolls Out Major Update

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 07:29 AM PDT

Vodio, the social video viewing app for iPad which competes with ShowYou, Shelby.tv, and others, is out with a major update this morning, which brings a number of new features, including a history section, “Watch Later” functionality, a dedicated channel for viewing mobile app videos and even App Store integration that allows you to purchase the apps from the videos you watch.

The company also issued a progress report on its adoption since the iPad app’s January launch. Over 200,000 users have downloaded Vodio to date, and have viewed over 100,000 hours of video across 4 million videos.

For a refresher, Vodio has a slightly different take on the social video viewing experience than some of the competition. Where others offer a selection of video content based solely on what your friends on social networks are watching, Vodio instead uses that to bring “a dash” of personalization to its video recommendations. What that means is that in Vodio, you’ll get insight into what the crowd thinks is popular, too, not just your group of friends.

Case in point: the company says that the most shared video was the infamous KONY 2012, but that one has the same number of views as two others: The iPad 3 Concept and Invisible Mercedes.

The most watched channels currently include Buzz, Sports, Tech and Entertainment. Those also happen to be all the app’s default channels, which makes me wonder if enough of the users are exploring the channel customization options.

In the new version rolling out today (ver. 1.5), Vodio is offering App Store integration, meaning that while watching videos within the various app channels, viewers can also choose to download the apps related to the videos they’re watching directly from the App Store.

This feature goes hand-in-hand with a new channel addition which showcases videos of mobile apps, including app demo videos, app reviews, app trailers, gameplay and more. The channel is named “iPad Apps,” but it contains iPhone app videos in here, too, it should be noted. It’s also highly addictive, so fair warning. (I just downloaded a bunch of stuff, ack!)

Other new features include a “Watch Later” bookmarking option, an “Activity” view that maintains a history of your watched videos, an integrated feedback system for submitting bugs, comments and feature requests, and a “co-browsing” feature that lets you get more information about other videos while you’re watching a video play.

That latter option is great for those with short attention spans (like myself). Using the sidebar that pops out on the right, you can tap the “i” icon to get info about other recommended videos, tap the “+” to queue them for later, or tap the “play” button to switch over to the new video immediately, all while the current video still plays.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who likes to cut my video-viewing short. Vodio tells us that only 18% of users watch video to the end.

The updated app is available here in iTunes.

Google Analytics Update Connects Social Marketing With The Bottom Line

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 07:07 AM PDT

If you’ve been to a marketing conference in the past year or so, or even read an article on the subject, you’ve probably heard someone ask, “What’s the ROI on social marketing?” (Alternate version: “What’s the value of a Like or a retweet?”) That’s what the new features in Google Analytics are trying to answer.

Given the increasing importance of social marketing and social network traffic, it was probably inevitable that the Google Analytics team would add social-focused reports. However, Group Product Manger Phil Mui says the new reports take a different approach than most social analytics products, which are more focused on “listening” — counting mentions, retweets, analyzing sentiment, and so on.

“Those are important metrics for sure,” Mui says. “But how do these metrics tie to the bottom line of a business? That’s what the CEOs most of the Fortune 500 folks that we talk with want to know.”

So companies using the new social reports can tell Google the goal that they’re interested in, whether it’s making a purchase, registering a user, or just having someone click on their about page. Then Google will show you not just how many visits are coming in from social networks (and which social networks in particular), but also how many of those social visits are “converting” to that goal. Mui says the reports also examine the impact that social networks have on a company’s “upper funnel” — in other words, the harder-to-measure cases where they don’t lead directly to a conversion, but may contribute indirectly. So if someone visits your website by following a link from Twitter, then returns in a week to buy something, Google will track that too.

Google can then assign a monetary value to both these “last interaction” and “assisted” conversions. That, in turn, helps companies decide whether the money they might be putting into a social marketing campaign on Facebook or Twitter is actually paying off.

There’s also an Activity Stream tab for tracking what people are saying about your company on social networks. It works with any social network that has connected to Google’s Social Data Hub. In the future, Software Engineering Manager Ilya Grigorik (who, along with some other members of the Google Analytics team, joined Google through the acquisition of social analytics service PostRank) says that other social sites could join, but for now, the big name on the hub is, of course, Google+. (Other participants include Digg, Disqus, and Reddit.)

Speaking of Google+, it’s hard not to notice the way that the social network seems to be creeping into Google’s other products. Mui says that in this case, Google wanted to make sure it followed its famous “do no evil” policy, which means that it provides “the most transparent measurements of the various social channels whether it is Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, or Delicious.” He adds that he’s confident that as Google+ matures and grows, “it’s going to be of value to a large number of merchants and advertisers.”

Adding 1K+ Members/Day, Behance Drops Major Redesign To Make “The Creative Graph” A Reality

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:48 AM PDT

While the Web today is chock full of creative expression of every stripe, and digital media has given voice to a whole new class of amateur creatives, be they musicians, artists, or photographers, creative professionals on the other hand have long been underrepresented in the digital world. Yet, as web technologies and their distribution channels mature, diversify, and become easier to use, business opportunities for creative professionals have finally started to outpace both friction and cost. Today, creatives are building careers as freelancers or small business owners with much greater success online.

Behance launched in 2006 amidst this changing landscape with the goal of finally providing creative professionals a legitimate, professional platform on which to showcase their talents and regain control over their work. Yet, when it comes to exposure, attribution, and discovery, there’s still too much friction for creatives looking to do business online — even inside Behance. Which is why, over the last nine months, the Behance team has been working on a major redesign that aims to significantly increase the transparency and efficiency of its platform as well as the discoverability of its creatives. And today that redesign finally went live.

But before going further, it’s worth getting some background: Behance’s platform for creative professionals was designed to enable artists and designers to create multimedia portfolios and distribute them across its growing network of partner sites (of which there are now 10K), including names like LinkedIn. Though increasingly popular among creatives, the startup has largely flown under the radar in the tech community, but today’s redesign could change that.

When we last covered Behance in August, the startup had attracted over 500K users and was seeing over 20K new projects launching every week, with 1 million projects created to date. Since then, its network has nearly doubled, with traffic increasing significantly. While it’s holding back on current monthly and quarterly user numbers, Behance CEO Scott Belsky told us that the startup saw over 10 million visits to its network of sites in the last 30 days, and the network is currently growing “by thousands of members per day.” (And though Behance has boot-strapped for over six years, it is now beginning the process of raising what we hear is a substantial series A round.)

Backed by this escalating growth, Behance is looking to grow its value for creatives by becoming more efficient at an infrastructural level and by reducing friction in how their work is discovered by others. For example, prominent among the platform’s slew of new features are improved gallery browsing, activity feeds, member profiles, curated galleries, and the ability to follow other members. While Behance’s goal has always been to allow its users to showcase their talents, its new incarnation finally puts discovery mechanisms on equal ground, both among artists themselves as well as for potential employers looking for, say, a top-level graphic designer for an advertising campaign.

For example, the site’s new “Explore Tab” allows users to search the platform’s content from a number of categories, based on your personal tastes and interests. Those browsing Behance content can drill down into specific categories, like, say, graphic design, whereupon the algorithm filters out all content not produced by graphic designers. This is fairly typical for search criteria, but where it starts to stand out is in its additional granularity, as you can browse by the content that’s most viewed, most appreciated, etc. Or based on the country and city it came from, how recently it was uploaded, whether it in the last 24 hours, or the last week, etc.

On top of that, you can browse by specific tags associated with graphic design, like health, fitness, retro, or iPad, for example. Choose as few or as many as you want, click apply, and the list of graphic designers gets pared down to those who specialize in health-related retro design for the iPad.

Although I’m not sure they’ve nailed it yet, this granular search functionality has the potential to be very powerful for discovery, especially as those tags and categorizations can be applied not only to products/work, but people as well. As the company moves to create a robust, transparent LinkedIn for the creative professional, you can see how these enhanced search tools will benefit prospective employers. And not only that, but other artists and creatives with specific backgrounds or project goals looking for inspiration from others working in their specific fields. Allowing creatives to connect with each other based on the tools that they use, the schools they went to, the brands they work for, is huge.

And to that point: Behance has also updated its “Activity Feed” on user profiles to give users a visual dashboard from which they can “follow” other designers they’re interested in, taking in a realtime stream of content from those whose work they care about — a move which can increase transparency. The startup is also putting the ability to browse trusted curators front and center, as users can now more easily browse through galleries curated by Adweek, AIGA, as well as top Schools like the Rhode Island School of Design.

This last part is significant to the Behance community, because traditionally college students and young designers have shied away from interacting on the larger platform. The reason is that many of its members are designers with years of experience, and thousands of followers, which can be intimidating to someone just starting off. So, Behance has allowed the creation of school networks within its community, allowing users to share their content according to their own privacy specifications, like sharing just to their school network, for example, a la Google+. In the big picture, the idea is to create a college-level, Facebook-style social networking feel within the larger community.

Furthermore, updating its profile pages allows users to share more of their work on their page, as well as upping the level of transparency by enabling users to indicate where and when their work has been featured, integrating it into social media profiles, while project pages now show their owner’s personal information above the fold and include a fuller set of details, like tags, the tools, media, or software they used to produce the content, where they were when they produced it, and so on.

Another cool feature includes the ability for users to track their portfolio statistics, whether it be for their profile or individual projects, seeing how many times it’s been viewed, “appreciated,” and commented on.

The Behance of old had some annoying fragmentation between its .net and .com domains, but the redesign has resolved that, as Behance.com redirects to the former. The point being that today it looks like a serious technology company. It offers analytics, high level search, segmentation, and discovery, realtime activity streams, project management tools that basically allow you to upload and customize a wide variety of content without feeling like you’re working with three-year-old Drupal technology. Following and “appreciating,” along with an internal messaging system, give it the requisite modern social features.

What’s more, while it offers customizable profiles, users that don’t want to host their own sites can use Behance ProSite to build their own portfolio site that lives on its own URL, while offering some basic layout and content customization tools and the option to create additional pages, without having to write a single line of code — for $11 a month. And on top of this iSites-type CMS, Behance offers a cross-platform task management system that lets you delegate tasks, manage projects, and sync with mobile, among other things — both on free and premium plans.

This latter bit leads into Behance’s monetization structure. While, up to this point, it’s clearly been making enough from advertising and its premium CMS and task management software, one thing I noticed about the redesign is that has removed ads from the platform’s UX in a significant way.

And, to that point, Behance also offers “buy” buttons that users can place within their content to make purchasing actionable. The difference is, though, that Belsky says that the company isn’t trying to build out eCommerce functionality — there’s no universal payment mechanism or shopping cart lurking behind the curtain. The CEO tells us that the goal is to use its buy buttons to redirect commerce to other platforms creatives are already using to sell their wares, like Etsy, or Amazon. Of course, diminished advertising and no content sales commission means looking for revenue streams elsewhere.

As Behance is looking to maintain its overall focus on allowing creatives to showcase their portfolios while allowing others to discover their content, this pushes them further into the professional networking realm, and likely into LinkedIn-style monetization by way of things like corporate accounts, charging employers for access, etc. Closing a big series A will also provide that much-needed growth capital.

Obviously, the real value of this redesign is that it is now leveraging the power of deep search, social networking functionality, data-mining, and technology that can power a whole mess of websites, and thus can gain data and action-based insight into how creative professionals work. With more exposure and higher transparency resulting in better attribution, creatives stand to better grow their own personal brands.

Behind these new features and functionalities, Behance reduces the friction inherent to being a freelancer or small business in creative enterprise. And in doing so, the startup increases its value to employers as a platform by which they can easily search for and discover the right creative talent for their needs. And that, as the many companies jockeying to find the best model to match employers with job seekers shows, could be gold.

For more, check them out at home here, or on their new “about page” here.

More Social Travel: Tripbirds Picks Up $740k From Path’s Dave Morin, Others. Now In Public Beta

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:42 AM PDT

On the heels of last week’s announcement of “social” hostel booking site InBed.me picking up a $1.2m seed round, another social travel site is launching today: Tripbirds, which lets users pick up travel recommendations from friends via other social networks, is now open for business after a private beta period that saw 4,000 sign-ups and 13 million check-ins and images collected.

At the same time, it is also announcing its own seed round of $740,000 (€550,000), with participation from an impressive list of backers, including Index Ventures, Passion Capital and Creandum, as well as angel investors Andreas Ehn (an early CTO of Spotify who himself has founded his own Swedish startup, the gift-card aggregator app Wrapp), Soundcloud founders Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung, and the founder of Path, Dave Morin.

The idea of going online to get hotel recommendations is not new: sites like Tripadvisor have created flourishing businesses out of aggregating user reviews already. Neither is the idea of using friends’ recommendations to help you make a decision: sites like Gogobot do that.

What Tripbirds hopes to bring to the table is the idea of integrating several different social networks into a single stream that combines not just your contacts’ activity around particular locations, but any special recommendations that they make specifically for you, based on alerts you create around your future travel plans. These can be around good places to stay, but can also be a lot more specific, asking about, for example, great startups to visit during your next trip to Stockholm.

Given that we are increasingly using a number of different networks for different functions, the idea of services that integrate that data into a single view is smart. And is happening elsewhere, too: just yesterday Jolicloud launched Jolicloud Me, which takes photos, videos and other content from disparate cloud-based services and lets the user view them in a single place.

Right now, Tripbirds picks up location data from your Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare networks. Its CEO Tel Valentin says that it will be adding Twitter in the next month, and Tripit some time after that. And he adds that starting tomorrow, users will also see their Tripbirds activity in their Facebook streams.

One company not on Tripbirds’ list of social networks to integrate is that of one of its investors: Dave Morin’s Path. Path has yet to roll out APIs, and “and it’s not clear whether Path wants that,” says Tripbirds CEO Ted Valentin. “We’re not talking about this with Morin at all at the moment.”

Tripbirds is currently only accessible via a website, although Valentin says that the company is working on an iPhone app for the service as well.

Another interesting twist on this social media launch is that, unlike many others, it is working in a business model from the word go: it is based on hotel bookings. For each time that a user books a hotel through Tripbirds, the company gets 10 percent of the total booking price. It’s a proven model that has worked well already for Tripadvisor, Valentin points out.

He says that for now the intention is to keep those affiliate deals limited to hotels, and not expand into restaurant or other kinds of bookings: “If we can nail hotel recommendations, you don’t have to do more to have a valuable business,” he says.

Up to now, of the 4,000 users so far on the service, only 500 of those are in the U.S. but Valentin believes that this is the company’s most natural market, because of the fact that U.S. consumers are “already social.” “They already use services like Foursquare and Instagram a lot, so Tripbirds makes the most sense for them,” he says.

Sonos Updates PC/Mac Controller Apps With Drag-And-Drop, One Touch Party Mode

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:09 AM PDT

Sonos has just announced an update to their Sonos Controller software, specifically for Mac and PC. The app, which runs on Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, and Android, now comes in 12 different languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and Swedish. And that’s only the beginning.

The Mac and PC versions of the app have undergone a rather hefty makeover and now have new features. For example, Sonos software now allows for a Mini Controller on the desktop or laptop, allowing you to change songs or control the volume without leaving the app you’re working in.

The Mac/PC version of the app also offers a unified search box that will bring in results from music libraries, internet radio and various music services. Drag and drop functionality has also been added for more efficient playlist creation, along with One-Touch party mode, which lets you control the volume in all grouped rooms at once.

Of course, there’s a redesign somewhere in there too just to maintain uniformity, but I don’t see anything too staggering about the new UI to warrant a full-fledged discussion.

Android devices will also see a little update, in the form of access to the SonosNet wireless mesh network. This improves wireless connection between Sonos hardware and your Android device.

To learn more about Sonos software click here.

An Always-Present Recipe Box: ZipList Reaches 1M Users

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Startup ZipList says 1 million users have used it to find and save more than 4 million recipes.

The service launched less than a year ago. Users can search for recipes, save them, and convert them instantly into ingredient shopping lists. There’s a mobile app so you can bring your list in the store.

Founder and CEO Geoff Allen says that over time the strategy has shifted away from being a standalone site and app, and the company is now focused on working with publishers and other partners to offer recipe search and/or shopping list capabilities across the web. Publishers who add ZipList supposedly see, on average, a 15 percent increase in pageviews. The company is working with 125 partners — including Martha Stewart, The Daily Meal, and Ming Tsai — and Allen says he wants that number to increase dramatically, because ZipList’s recent growth shows that the strategy is paying off.

“The only thing that matters about a universal recipe box is that it gets used,” he says. And that means ZipList should be available anywhere people might find recipes.

These aren’t just Web partnerships, either. For example, if you’re watching the Simply Ming TV show, you can text a recipe code to ZipList and it will save the recipe in your account. Allen says the company has also signed up a yet-to-be-named print publisher for similar text and QR code capabilities. And later this week, ZipList will be officially announce integration with recipe site SimplyRecipes.

When ZipList introduces new features and pages to someone’s site, it splits the ad revenue with its partners. Allen says that as users add more recipes to their accounts, ZipList knows more about what their tastes are and their food plans, so it can deliver more targeted ads.

FutureAdvisor Raises Funding From Sequoia To Bring Financial And Investment Advice To The Masses

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Y Combinator startup FutureAdvisor has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital and angel investors Keith Rabois and Jeremy Stoppelman.

FutureAdvisor, which debuted in 2010, is an online financial advisor designed to help people get the most out of their investment portfolios. FutureAdvisor's web app provides people with personalized financial advice by recommending ways to reduce fees, maximize on tax efficiency and select the right investments.

When you integrate your financial accounts and information (via Yodlee), the startup will analyze your entire financial picture and takes these details into account by providing personalized, actionable recommendations for future investments based on age, risk tolerance as well as current and existing investment situations. FutureAdvisor provides a free platform for unlimited investment advice but also offers premium plans, with a flat annual fee ($49-$195), that allow clients to schedule personalized video consultations with financial advisors on staff to answer any specific questions they may have, as well as receive alerts and more.

FutureAdvisor will also provide data-driven analysis and recommendations to reduce portfolio fees and give you tips on how to keep your portfolio diversified with market fluctuations. In terms of retirement, the startup will answer questions such as how much you need to save per year to stay on track of your retirement goals and how much you need to save to retire comfortably.

Additionally, you can enter in data about your age and retirement goals and the FutureAdvisor algorithm provides you with options for asset allocation, how to optimize your return, and, if you currently work at Google, Microsoft or Intel, the app can tailor its advice within your 401K's limits.

Bo Lu, cofounder of FutureAdvisor explained in an interview that the startup aims to democratize the ability to find quality financial and investment advice. We want to empower the 99% of everyday investors with information they need to manage their own investments online," he said. The startup doesn’t accept commissions or charge percentage fees on gains, he adds.

FutureAdvisor faces competition from Betterment, WealthFront, and others.

Orange Publicis Fund’s First Investment: $15M For Ad Personalization Provider myThings

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Last week we learned of a new, $400 million-plus fund from mobile operator Orange, ad giant Publicis and Iris Capital Management. Today, news of its first strategic investment: myThings, an ad retargeting specialist, is getting $15 million, and will see Orange and Publicis take an equity stake in the business in the process.

The exact amount of that stake is not known but myThings’ CEO Benny Arbel says that together they will now own more than ten percent of the company. The total amount invested in myThings since launching in 2005 is now $37 million.

The investment in myThings is also a sign of how, as digital advertising continues to mature, there is an increasing emphasis on ad tech to improve engagement and effectiveness.

While Orange/Publicis/Iris are leading this round of funding, other participants included new investor Accel Partners as well as existing backers Deutsche Telekom and Carmel Ventures.

Arbel says Orange/Publicis/Iris had considered some 100 other startups before deciding on myThings. The company has been working with Orange for a year already and is extending that now to cover all of Orange’s network — the company operates portals in France, Spain and the UK that together get 30 million users per month. MyThings is now also working “closely” with Publicis on potential projects.

myThings is a digital ad company that mainly focuses on ad retargeting: those who visit online portals belonging to France Telecom, or one of the 300 other sites in the myThings network, are analysed and “tagged”. They are subsequently served display ads on others sites that are in turn more personalized based on their past browsing behavior.

As more advertisers are demanding stronger metrics for how well their online campaigns are working, those who work in areas like retargeting claim that responses increase when such technology is used to deliver more specific results.

That, in any case, is what has driven Iris and its partners to invest here. “With a market clearly heading toward performance and data-driven ad solutions, we regard myThings as a natural investment path,” said Denis Barrier, who oversaw the deal for Iris Capital.

Arbel says MyThings works with “all the major real-time bidding exchanges” and some 150 ad networks and direct publishers. He says myThings is one of the top five buyers of RTB in Europe, personalizing some one billion banners every month.

myThings, which has 100 employees spread across France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Russia, with engineering and data teams based in Tel Aviv, says that it actually became profitable last year. The new funds, he says, will be used to further develop its retargeting products and expand into new markets.

One area where there is room for growth — and something Orange would probably like to see as well — is in mobile.

MyThings currently only provides its technology on the regular web but intends to launch a mobile-web and app-friendly version of the product in Q3 of this year.

Why the delay in going to mobile? It’s still too small a business, he says: “There is still not significant enough activity in the mobile,” he says, but it is gradually picking up, with merchant partners of myThings saying that at the moment, about 15 percent of purchases on their sites are being made on mobile devices, with over 60 percent of those on tablets. “That means it’s a good time to start introducing things.”

The other kind of growth planned for the company is geographical. Arbel says that this year myThings will open offices in Scandinavia, Turkey, Japan, China and Latin America.

One other area where investment could be useful is in the technology itself. I get the point of delivering more specific ads based on what we, as consumers, are actually doing online, but I personally get a bit annoyed when I get bombarded with hotel offers after one little peek at a travel site. Perhaps that’s a sign that there is probably still some room to hone these kinds of services.

Egnyte Adds HTML5, Scalability To File Sharing Platform For SMBs

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 04:59 AM PDT

File storage and synchronization service Egnyte, is debuting a new product today, called Egnyte HybridCloud File Sharing for the Enterprise.

As we’ve written in the past, Egnyte is essentially a Dropbox or Box.net-like service that focuses primarily on helping small and medium-sized businesses sync and store their files. The startup uses a hybrid cloud solution, where businesses keep a Network-Attached Storage device linked up to their office's computers, which serves as a 'local cloud' — all files are synced and backed up on this local, network connected hardware. These Local Clouds can consist of Netgear Ready NAS devices, or VMware-based virtual appliances.

The 'local cloud' NAS is also hooked up to Egnyte's servers so any changes made between the client computers and the files on the NAS are also synced up to the web for remote access. Once these files are in the cloud, company admins can enable file sharing between employees and also to business partners, who can be given restricted access to specific files. This cloud portion also serves as a remote backup, and files can be accessed from Macs, Windows, and mobile phones.

Egnyte has made a number of improvements to its existing product, including a new simplified UI based on HTML5, allowing users to access Egnyte from any mobile device, as well as through mobile apps and the web. Users also have access to integrations with Salesforce, Google Docs and Microsoft Outlook, Avatron, QuickOffice, and GoodReader.

The startup is also debuting Egnyte Object Store, a new architecture that allows organizations to scale up to 10 million files and upwards of 10,000 concurrent users. Users can file uploads up to 1 terabyte with Egnyte's Unified FTP environment.

Additionally, Egnyte has integrated with Sophos SafeGuard to provide an end to-end security solution, including mobile device encryptions and complete control over data encryption keys.

Egnyte faces competition from Sugarsync, Box.net, Dropbox and others. But despite being in a market filled with worthy competitors, the startup has been able to accumulate over a million paid users. And the company has raised $16 million from Kleiner Perkins, Floodgate and Polaris.

Averail Raises $6M To Help Enterprises Share Documents On Mobile Devices

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 04:30 AM PDT

Stealthy startup Averail has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Foundation Capital and Storm Ventures. In addition, the company has appointed Paul Holland, General Partner at Foundation Capital, and Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director at Storm Ventures, to its Board of Directors.

While some of the details have not been released, Averail is developing a mobile content management technology that wants to help employees share enterprise documents on mobile devices. Founded by John Drewry and Rahul Sharma, the company plans to use the funds towards product development and expansion.

As Drewry explains, large companies managing sensitive data and documents face different challenges on mobile platforms than on PCs.

Drewry previously held positions at Motorola and 3Com, and co-founded mobile enterprise startup, Orative, which was acquired by Cisco in 2006. Sharma previously held senior engineering roles at Microsoft, Motorola and Sun Microsystems.

The company says that the product is currently in testing right now and will be available in the second half of 2012.