Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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YC, Rock Health-Backed Agile Diagnosis Launches To Help Doctors Better Treat Their Patients

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 09:30 AM PDT

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Though the health industry has, in many respects, been slow to adopt new web and mobile technologies, it seems we may finally have reached a tipping point. This is perhaps best demonstrated by Manhattan Research’s report, which found that 72 percent of physicians owned a smartphone in 2011, with adoption potentially reaching 85 percent by the end of this year. With doctors increasingly carrying smartphones and tablets at the point of care, Borna Safabakhsh says that he is confident that the timing is right for medicine to finally take advantage of the breakthroughs in web and mobile technologies.

Safabakhsh is the co-founder and CEO of Agile Diagnosis, a Y Combinator and Rock Health-incubated startup, which is today launching a beta web and mobile platform that aims to help doctors better diagnose their patients. While this may initially sound like a next-gen WebMD, Agile Diagnosis isn’t intended to help consumers self-diagnose, although the team may get there initially, it’s just for doctors, nurses, and medical students.

To that end, Agile Diagnosis gives clinicians a central place in which they can gain realtime access to evidence and consensus-based best practices (or clinical guidelines), so that they can help diagnose their patients not just based on scientific literature, but with the help of other doctors who have correctly diagnosed the same or related symptoms, for example. This is then obviously made available through cross-platform web and mobile apps that enable doctors quick access to those guidelines at the point of care.

The startup’s CEO said that, while there are quite a few medical reference apps on the market already, most of those are “more or less an eTextbook.” So, what sets Agile Diagnosis apart is that it includes access to a full repository of quality and credible medical information not only from medical literature but doctors themselves, surfaced by its own clinical algorithms, as well as a user-friendly mobile interface and design.

That means that, visually, Agile Diagnosis’ tree format was designed to make clinical guidelines and medical information easier to digest and thus more actionable, as compared to the apps and web services that come densely-packed with text — the same format that has plagued medicine for decades.

"For the patient, this means faster and more accurate decisions,” says Dr. Scott Stern, who is both an Agile Diagnosis co-founder as well as the Assistant Dean of technology and innovation at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. “For your doctor, it means clear guidance for taking medical history and physical exams, ordering tests and labs only when necessary, and identifying pertinent results and clinical clues.”

The co-founders tell us that an estimated 50 percent of patient visits fall below the standard of care, and that one in seven patients are misdiagnosed. That’s alongside the tens of billions wasted on unnecessary testing and inappropriate treatments — in the U.S. alone. While doctors have long had access to enormous online repositories of medical journals, texts, and research, medical data has not historically been organized into a digestible format for physicians. It’s either check out WebMD or read a detailed, 70-page article — the options have been limited.

What’s more, on average, doctors only have 7 to 10 minutes per patient. That’s not a lot of time to make the right decision, and certainly not enough time to comb through medical journals. So, Agile Diagnosis’ web and mobile platforms offer doctors contextual information (along with lists of references that provide hyperlinks to primary and secondary literature) for each diagnostic and care-related decision they make, which allow them to explore alternatives to find the right solution.

Because a doctor’s process begins with the differential, Agile Diagnosis has developed a dynamic differential which updates in realtime to make them aware of the particular diagnoses that are driving decisions in the medical community. This enables physicians to hone in on the differential using evidence-based tips, including sensitivities, specificities, likelihood rations, and post-test probabilities.

All in all, Agile Diagnosis is looking to give doctors the ability to give better, more accurate care in less time, while in turn enabling patients to gain improved health and a higher quality of care, leading to fewer unnecessary tests, treatments and bad outcomes. The startup is a graduate of Y Combinator’s 2011 summer class — was thus a recipient of SV Angel and Start Fund’s joint offer of $150K in convertible debt to each member of the class — and is currently a member of Rock Health’s second batch of healthtech startups.

Agile Diagnosis’ first mobile offering is an HTML5 web app that is built for tablets (specifically for the iPad). An iPhone app is in the works and should be available later this year. The current beta is free, but the co-founders said that they plan to convert to a paid subscription model in the future.

For those doctors, nurses, and medical students interested in checking out Agile Diagnosis’ interactive visual guidelines, check them out here, and apply for access with the code “TECHCRUNCHDOC”.



RIM Releases Mobile Fusion Device Management Service, Plays Nice With iOS And Android

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 09:16 AM PDT

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The folks at RIM can see the writing on the wall — they've historically enjoyed plenty of enterprise love, but the recent "bring your own device" trend means headaches not only for RIM, but for the companies that have to manage all of them. In a move to hang on to relevance in the business market, the Waterloo company has officially released their Mobile Fusion device management platform, which aims to simplify how businesses manage a fleet of iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices.

Thoughtful readers may recall that RIM first announced their Mobile Fusion service way back in November 2011, at which point they described it as a means for IT departments to manage those myriad devices from a single web-based "control room." From their console, admins will be able to (among other things) remotely enable access to email and contacts, manage lost hardware, establish security policies, and push notifications to the user.

Interestingly, RIM has made Mobile Fusion free to download, and instead charges customers for each device managed — individual access licenses will run $99 per device, though RIM has attempted to sweeten the deal by offering the first 60 days of service free of charge. Considering that the service is focused on making external device management more cost-efficient (especially when these companies get to spend less money on tricking their employees out with company-owned devices), that free trial should give Mobile Fusion some much-needed momentum.

Mobile Fusion seems like a nifty tool to add to a IT administrator's arsenal, but it's at best a bandage over RIM's gaping wounds. Their most recent earnings call revealed some pretty dismal numbers, and their portfolio of BlackBerry 7-powered devices are getting a bit long in the tooth, especially when compared to the sorts of high-powered handsets that Mobile Fusion packs full support for. The first BB10 handsets aren’t expected to hit store shelves until later this year (developer devices not withstanding), and the competition will only be tougher by then. With Android devices continually pushing the limits of hardware and design, and another iPhone right around the corner, RIM can’t afford to put out more lackluster hardware.

With Over 30 Million Users On iOS, Instagram Finally Comes To Android

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 09:12 AM PDT

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Morning guys! It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshine-y day for Android users, namely because photo-sharing darling Instagram is now available in the Android Market. If you want to hurry up and try it out without having to read the rest of this (it’s that intuitive), you can download the app here. And go ahead and skip to Paragraph 7 if you already use Instagram on iOS, and don’t want to have to sit through a n00b explainer.

For Beginners

For those of you who are new to the entire Instagram experience, the app is pretty simple, and that’s what makes it amazing. To use Instagram just open it up and either capture a photo or choose an existing one from your photo library. Once uploaded, the app allows you to move and scale your image. After you’ve selected a composition, you can run the image through the ‘Lux’ feature by pressing the Sun icon in the far left of the next screen (Lux, similar to Camera+’s ‘Clarity,’ amps up photos by boosting their contrast).

While on this step, you can either add a border or go sans, rotate an image,  or cancel out of the navigation screen by using the icons in the app’s top navigation bar. At the bottom of the screen, you’re met with Instagram’s famous filters, including the SF-inspired Valencia, Sutro and Brannan and the one I always end up using, X-Pro. Because we are all idiosyncratic little snowflakes, everyone has their unique preferences.

Once you decide on the exact specs of the photo you’re going to post, you click on the green check mark provided, and the app’s flow allows you to input a description and a Twitter-like hashtag for search, geotag the photo, and share to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, Foursquare or via email. In addition to sharing, clicking ‘Done’ will post the item to your Instagram feed, where it will be enjoyed by your followers if you have them. You can see the photo in addition to photos from the people who you follow by clicking on the Home icon.

Clicking on the Star icon will bring you to the Instagram Popular page. I’ve never actually figured out how to get a photo to ‘Popular’ on Instagram, so if you do it please let me know. I think the trick is to have a lot of followers (Isn’t that always the trick!?) — And I’m still not convinced mere mortals can do it.

Aside from the Popular page, the main Instagram navigation screen allows you to view ‘News’ by selecting the ‘Heart Comment’ icon and your profile by selecting what looks like an ‘Index Card’ icon on the far right. This is where you can find people to follow, view all your photos in either grid or chronological list view, and edit your profile.

For Everyone

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells me that the Instagram iOS app has now hit 30 million users after about a year and a half on the market, and with Android at 500 million activations (for comparison, Apple is at something around 180 million iPhones sold, total) the startup has a real chance of hitting 100 million users across both devices soon enough to matter.

Facebook took about four years to reach its first 100 million; The idea of Instagram becoming the world’s first formidable, mobile-only social network is extremely compelling.

Systrom tells me that a major concern of his is consistency across both platforms, and that the same 13 people who built the iOS app also built Android, which can run on any camera phone with Android 2.2 or above with support for OpenGL ES 2 (a technology needed to power the Instagram filters).

“The Android app offers an extremely familiar Instagram experience when compared to the iOS app,” Systrom writes, “You'll find all the same exact filters and community as our iOS version.” iOS features like Tilt/Shift, Flickr integration and inline posting didn’t make the cut this time but will hit future versions. The app is also available in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

So what took them so long? Well, the whole “Lean Startup” mentality may have had something to do with it. “Launching on a single platform allowed us to focus on the product and the user experience,” Systrom says. “It's given us the ability to stay small and nimble, and we've been able to respond quickly to user feedback.”

The company is rumored to be raising $40 million at $500 million from the usual suspects of top-tier VC firms. Perhaps we’ll see more expansion in the future? Systrom wouldn’t comment on what platform it would launch on next, and ignored my questions about an iPad app or website.

I’m guessing the team will have their hands full with scaling Android. An early sign up page thrown up a week ago has accumulated over 430k people on its waiting list! And while Android already has apps that essentially have Instagram’s functionality, Systrom isn’t thrown by the competition, “There are plenty of clones on iOS as well – but at the end of the day it’s the community people want to be part of. We’re excited to see the community grow with even more perspectives all around the world.”

And I’m excited to have my Android user friends included. Finally. Hi Jason.

Ustream Integrates With Facebook Timeline For Sharing Live Videos With Friends

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 09:06 AM PDT

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Live video streaming website Ustream today is launching an integration with Facebook’s new Timeline user interface. This means that users will be able to share the live videos they’re watching on Ustream with their Facebook friends in real-time.

The Ustream launch is one of the first video app integrations with Timeline. Thus far, Facebook’s Timeline has been populated with other types of media: Journalism publications such as Yahoo News and the Washington Post, music through services such as Spotify, and social and lifestyle apps such as Foodspotting and Pose.

Of course, just like the articles you read and the songs you listen to, your tastes in video viewing are very personal — and not always something you’re willing to share with your entire social network of friends and acquaintances. Ustream says it has been very careful to implement strong privacy controls with the Timeline integration to make it completely clear to users what they’re sharing and when. “We have definitely made an effort to increase privacy controls, and make it very transparent to users what is being shared and what is not,” Ustream product manager Brian Mayer said in an interview this week.

For now, though, you still can’t watch Ustream videos at the same time as your friends within either Facebook or Ustream connected to Facebook (similar to how Google+ Hangouts lets you watch YouTube videos with friends at the same time and talk about it, but without the webcam aspect.) That capability is being worked on by the people at Ustream, I’m told, and should make its debut sometime in the weeks ahead: “Features that we are working on currently will let you see what your friends are watching and communicate with your friends live via our Social Stream,” a Ustream rep says.

State of the Linux Kernel 2011

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 08:15 AM PDT

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The Linux Foundation provides a vendor neutral home for long-term collaboration on the Linux kernel. They provide Linux creator Linus Torvalds and his right-hand man, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the opportunity to work full-time on Linux. And they prepare a semi-annual report on the state of the Linux kernel, which is a fascinating examination of the most successful collaborative software development project in history. The full report is quite interesting, and has a number of observations about Linux development. A couple of highlights are worth closer examination.

Almost 8,000 individual developers have contributed to the Linux kernel, and 1,000 of those have been new contributors within the last year. Interestingly, the report states that “In any given development cycle, approximately 1/3 of the developers involved contribute exactly one patch.” The top ten contributors for the last five years account for 9% of the total work on the kernel; and 20% of the work is directly attributable to the top 20 kernel developers. Ironically, Linus Torvalds doesn’t appear as a top contributor in the current report. “Linus remains an active and crucial part of the development process; his contribution cannot be measured just by the number of changes made,” the report states. Because Linus, Greg KH and other kernel maintainers “put more time into the review and management of patches from others, they write fewer patches of their own.”

The number of companies paying developers to contribute to the kernel has more than tripled since 2005. Surprisingly, Microsoft is the 17th most active corporate contributor to the Linux kernel, with 688 changes in roughly the last year. Yes, the company that felt threatened by Linux, and whose CEO famously decreed that Linux is a cancer is an active contributor to the Linux kernel. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, eh?

The average development cycle for new kernel releases is 80 days. That number has been shrinking lately, with recent releases taking less than 70 days. The rate of change for a kernel with 15 million lines of code and thousands of active developers producing stable releases in under 12 weeks works out to, on average, 4.3 patches per hour since 2005. For the 3.2 kernel, released January 4, 2012, it was 6.88 patches per hour.

As the report observes:

It is worth noting that the above figures understate the total level of activity; most patches go through a number of revisions before being accepted into the mainline kernel, and many are never accepted at all. The ability to sustain this rate of change for years is unprecedented in any previous public software project.

For those interested in a layman’s perspective on kernel development, the Linux Foundation has put together a little video that highlights the process in a nice way.

The Linux kernel has come awfully far in the last 20 years. It’s a huge collaborative project from which a growing number of companies are deriving real benefit. As such, more and more companies are spending time and money to contribute to it. It’s fun to look back at where the kernel has been, and get some perspective on where it — and the larger open source ecosystem — is heading.

The Tap Lab Raises $550K To Seed Some Hits in Location-Based Mobile Gaming

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 08:13 AM PDT

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While there have been a few sizable funding rounds for location-based mobile games, the field is still wide open. Today it gets a new contender with The Tap Lab, a Cambridge-based startup and alum of the TechStars incubator, that lets players compete to take over real-world venues.

The company is raising $550,000 funding from Harmonix co-founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, Google’s Don Dodge, Mike Dornbrook of Common Angels and other angel investors. They’re using it to fund a sequel called Tap City 2.

In the upcoming game, players will be able to do jobs at real-world places like serve virtual coffee at their Starbucks. They’ll also be able to buy virtual versions of real-world products, which will earn them points. The previous version of the game let players take over local venues, challenge others for ownership and earn virtual income and rent.

Co-founders Dave Bisceglia and Ralph Shao met while in college at Boston University and have built the company up to five people. Back in 2009, they started experimenting with prototypes for a location-based game.

“With no marketing expense, we turned Boston into a war zone with thousands of players,” Bisceglia said.

The company faces a landscape with a few well-funded competitors. Booyah raised more than $24.5 million from top-tier venture firms like Kleiner Perkins and Accel but it pivoted back and forth between Facebook and mobile platforms with varying success. It had an early Monopoly-like hit called MyTown that let players compete over real-world venues too, but the game didn’t really have staying power. So the company re-released it as a city-building sim with deep location features.

Then there’s Red Robot Labs, which is backed with more than $8.5 million from Benchmark Capital and angels like Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson. The company has been more successful on Android with its mafia-themed RPG Life is Crime and isn’t ranked as prominently on iOS, which is more competitive.

Like Red Robot Labs, Bisceglia says The Tap Lab is also building a gaming engine for the real-world. There are some successful titles in this space, but it’s hard to say that there’s an outright winner yet.

AmazonWireless Exits Beta, Now Offers Price-Matching Guarantee, $25 Worth Of Free Mobile Apps

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 07:52 AM PDT

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AmazonWireless.com, Amazon’s dedicated shopping site for cell phone and tablet buyers, is finally exiting beta today, following its launch in July of 2009. The change in status may mean nothing to regular mobile shoppers, who have long known of and used the service to compare devices, or who were attracted there when Amazon ran crazy sales – like when it listed all its Verizon phones for just a penny, for example. It has also be known to offer some impressive discounts on flagship phones, such as the $199 Galaxy Nexus and the $111.11 Droid RAZR.

But Amazon hopes to get on the radar of all mainstream users as it goes public, which has led it to launch two new benefits for customers: a price-matching guarantee and $25 worth of free mobile apps with purchase.

The company says it will guarantee the best pricing on phones with service from all major carriers. Anyone finding a lower price for the same product with the same service plan within 14 days of their Amazon purchase will be credited the difference. And if Amazon lowers its own price within 14 days, the same benefit will also apply.(Amazon doesn’t say it would automatically credit you when it lowered its own pricing, so keep your eyes peeled.)

In addition, the site is now leveraging Amazon’s other mobile storefront – Appstore for Android – in order to offer new phone and tablet buyers free mobile apps. Any customer purchasing an Android phone will be able to choose from a selection of apps made available after they download the Amazon Appstore app onto their device. The deal includes popular titles, includingMahjong Artifacts ($4.99), Shazam Encore ($4.99), Office Suite Pro ($9.99) and more.

These apps will be made available right at checkout to customers, so they can be installed immediately after launching the Amazon Appstore on their device.

The news of the public “launch”of the website comes on the heels of another report, which says Amazon is now testing its own in-app payment system for its Appstore, which would allow developers to offer both one-off purchases as well as subscriptions through apps. Combined with its efforts to popularize the Kindle Fire as the only real iPad alternative, the move to create an enticing storefront to sell its own hardware devices, plus those of others, and then tap into the growing customer base involving Android owners, has positioned Amazon to do what Google has not yet – make Android a worthwhile business, both for developers and itself alike.

Shazam Can Now Identify Your Content In As Little As A Second

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 07:35 AM PDT

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Shazam has long been described as magic. You hear a song — perhaps a brand new one or maybe one that you’ve heard a million times but never knew the name of — and all you do is simply tap one button and information on that song is delivered directly to you.

Magic.

But even magicians improve their act, which is why Shazam has today released an update that makes its content recognition even faster than it already is, with some tags appearing in as little as a second. The update will make all of Shazam’s iOS apps, including its Encore and (RED) apps, speedier in terms of content recognition, but there are a few other tweaks coming with the update.

The UI has been revamped a bit, though nothing more than aesthetic improvements pops out at me. Sharing has also been improved, to allow for personal notes or comments when sharing on Twitter or Facebook. Brazilian Portuguese, Korean and Spanish language support has been added for South America, and unlimited tagging is still on the table.

In January, Shazam launched yet another app called Shazam Player to highlight the LyricPlay feature we’ve heard so much about. I had thought that the company might be spreading itself too thin, or at the very least, losing focus on their core service. But today’s update only proves that my concern was misplaced — obviously the folks over at Shazam know that identifying a song as quickly as possible is what made Shazam great in the first place.

Click to view slideshow.


1000Memories Introduces “Shoeboxes” For More Private Photo Sharing

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT

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1000Memories, the startup behind the ShoeBox iPhone application, which lets you “scan” old photographs and post them online using your mobile phone’s camera, is now introducing a new feature to help you better organize your digital collections. The feature is called, not surprisingly, “Shoeboxes,” and it’s meant to become the digital equivalent of the actual shoeboxes you have stuffed with photos sitting in your closets.

But scanning in a shoebox’s worth of photographs using an iPhone’s camera would be highly inefficient, of course. To help speed things up, 1000Memories is also announcing a partnership with ScanCafe, allowing you to ship off your photos for offsite digitization.

This startup speaks to me, personally, because I somehow ended up with my entire family’s photo collection. I have all my parents’ photos from my childhood through graduation, as well as all the photos that once belonged to my grandmother. I actually do have shoeboxes stacked on top of shoeboxes sitting in my closet. (That’s them, to the right).

When the ShoeBox iPhone app launched, I enjoyed pulling out a few of the old photos and sharing them on Facebook, but I soon realized that there were so many photos I wanted to share, I would actually have to look into digitization services. I had just started researching this when 1000Memories’ news hit. Perfect timing. Of those services I had checked into (e.g. Digmypics, Fotobridge, ScanMyPhotos, Scandigital, and Digmypics, to name a few), ScanCafe’s pricing’s of $0.29 seemed competitive, sometimes even cheaper. However, through the 1000Memories’ partnership, it’s even lower – all packages offered are under the $0.29 rack rate and it’s just $0.22 for large volume orders (1,000 scans).

Once digitized, either through the ScanCafe service, the mobile app or even uploaded from your hard drive(s), you can organize the photos into collaborative “shoeboxes” which are shared exclusively with those you invite. Although you could share these photos on Facebook, the idea is that the Shoeboxes are a bit more private – instead of having to carefully set privacy controls on them to make sure only those people you want to have access can view them, the boxes are for your eyes only unless you deliberately add someone to them.

It also makes more sense, in my opinion, to keep some of those photos off Facebook because, frankly, no one is interested in two decades’ worth of your childhood in the form of Kodak prints, except for you and your family.

However, the focus for these new Shoeboxes doesn’t have to be the past only. Modern uses could include sharing wedding or party pictures, baby photos, vacation photos and anything else where sharing is meant to be more private. I’ve already started building my Shoeboxes in anticipation of my forthcoming digitized collections. I’d show you ‘em, but I don’t really know you that well.

1000Memories founder, Rudy Adler, is not so shy. You can see his collection above. Below, some of my less-than-private photos from Flugtag a few years ago, to give you an idea.

The new website introducing the ScanCafe service and the Shoeboxes goes live this morning on the 1000Memories homepage.

Please Don’t Let This Be What The EVO One Looks Like

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 06:33 AM PDT

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Well, I suppose it was bound to happen. Just one day before HTC and Sprint kick off their so-called collaboration event in New York City, the team at PocketNow has gotten their hands on what they claim is the first press shot of the device to be unveiled: the EVO One.

The device's supposed internals sure seem to be a treat, at least according to a tip that Android Central received a few days ago. The ICS-powered EVO One is expected to sport a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED display (which The Verge rightly notes is a slight letdown compared to the One X's Super LCD 2 panel), an LTE radio, 16GB of onboard storage, and Beats Audio support.

Their tipster also pegs the EVO One's release date as June 6, which is nearly two years to the day since Sprint and HTC officially released their first Android collaboration, the EVO 4G.

Sadly enough, the device seems to have had all the sexy sucked out of it. Sure, the specs are more than solid and early reports make Sense 4.0 out to be a much-needed improvement over older versions, but really — just look at that thing. It doesn't help that in the full image below, the device is sandwiched between the One X and the One S, two of the Taiwanese company's more handsome handsets in recent memory. HTC famously claimed last year that they would refocus their hardware efforts around a smaller number of hero devices, and while the EVO One seems to live up to the name on paper , I really think it could stand to look the part.

Gone are the screen’s rounded edges, as are the meticulously drilled speaker grille holes along the top rim of the device — it’s not a bad design, but one that doesn’t stand out at all. I'm hoping against hope that this image is some clever hoax someone whipped up to turn heads before the official unveiling, but we'll soon see if it's real or not as we'll be on the ground in New York for the event tomorrow night.

Facebook ‘Missed Irish Data Protection Deadline’, Says Consumer Group. Facebook Objects

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 06:32 AM PDT

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As Facebook has continued its rapid rise, one thing it has not been able to shake off are questions over how it deals with user data and privacy. That issue is getting revisited again today in Europe, where a consumer rights group says that Facebook has missed a deadline, set by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, to make a number of changes to comply with European data protection laws. That group is now encouraging consumers to take the fight to the next level and make formal complaints to the European Commission over the issue.

But TechCrunch understands that Facebook, whose international headquarters are located in Ireland, is working on changes that will be implemented in time for a later deadline of July 2012.

The pressure group, europe-v-facebook.org, was formed originally after a group of Austrian students filed 22 privacy violation claims against Facebook last year. At the time, the story picked up a lot of attention — partly because it captured some of the pro-privacy zeitgeist — and as a result some 40,000 more people made requests for Facebook to reveal all the data it stored on them.

Around then, the Irish DPC issued a report and set an end of March deadline for Facebook to make recommended changes to improve its data transparency. The recommendations covered areas like making language simpler for users, providing a better mechanism to see how data is used, a better flow for the sign-in process, and better access to one’s data.

But the consumer group says that as of today, Facebook has yet to make most of the changes recommended by the DPC. Facebook did reply to the 40,000 complaints, says Max Schrems, a law student and one of the group’s founding members, but did by providing a series of links that only gave users a limited amount of information — 22 of the 84 data groups that Facebook holds, according to Schrems; the Irish DPC said there needed to be a minimum of 38 by July 2012.

Schrems says that as a result several hundred people have made further complaints and it is this smaller group that he is hoping will now escalate things by writing to the EU, complaining not only about Facebook but also the failure of the DPC in Ireland to handle this correctly. (If you live in Europe and are among those who think that a little pressure can move the needle, you can follow the link to Schrems’ site to make your complaint.)

Apart from the fact that Facebook is understood to be still working through these changes — again, with a July 2012 deadline — there seems to be a bigger issue here, which is that the Irish DPC has laid out recommendations, but no legal obligations.

“There is a law for data protection, but no consequence if you break that law,” Schrems told TechCrunch.

That means that while it’s potentially bad PR for Facebook if it fails to comply, it doesn’t result in fines or any operational penalties.

"Facebook Ireland is investing a huge amount of effort to ensure we are making progress against all of the commitments we made during the audit,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We have a constant dialogue with officials working for the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, who are responsible for overseeing the work we are undertaking, to reassure them of our progress. We recently reported to them that we have implemented some of their recommendations ahead of schedule and that we expect to meet all the Q1 aspirations over the coming weeks."

Help Recreate Leisure Suit Larry For The 21st Century

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 06:22 AM PDT

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Back in the olden days of gaming, it was either feast or famine. You had simple, kiddie stuff like Super Mario Brothers or you had Flight Simulator, a game that included a manual thicker than the Chicago phone book. But what about the casual, adult gamer who wanted a fun adventure involving a little risque ribaldry? Bupkus.

Until Leisure Suit Larry from Sierra came along. And Leisure Suit Larry is coming along again.

This $500,000 Kickstarter project aims to recreate LSL using the latest in graphics technology and the original game’s author, Al Lowe, will be helping to regenerate his besuited cad. The creators, Replay Games, have gained control of the original game and they’re hoping to make a Larry for this brave new century.

Fifteen dollars gets you a digital copy of the game while $10,000 gets you:

No Free Lunch Edition: For $10,000, we'll create a memory that will last a lunchtime. You will be flown (domestic airfare only) to Seattle to enjoy lunch, dinner, or a morning-after breakfast with Leisure Suit Larry's Mommy's Baby Daddy, Mr. Al Lowe himself. He'll sign whatever you want him to sign (except IRS forms and blank checks), answer all your questions about life, tell you some dirty jokes, and, best of all, he'll do something that he's never done before in the history of the world: he'll pick up the check! We'll put you up overnight and send you back home happy, fed, and loaded down with all the goodies from the Signed Edition reward tier and below. We'll even give you the entire chocolate factory for your very own…oh, wait a minute, that's a whole different licensed property.

Get cracking, people. Those pixelated ladies of the evening won’t wait around for you forever.

Project Page

Gamification Platform BigDoor Raises $5 Million From Foundry Group

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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White label gamification platform BigDoor has raised $5 million in new funding led by existing investor Foundry Group, bringing BigDoor's total funding to $13 million.

BigDoor’s gamification platform essentially allows online publishers to add game mechanics to web interactions and engagements. BigDoor helps companies build game-like mechanics and loyalty programs into their sites or apps by enabling points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency and virtual goods.

The company’s newest product, Gamified Rewards Program, is being released today out of private beta, which allows publishers to give users rewards for engagement, such as exclusive content, unlocked powers, exclusive virtual items, as well as tangible rewards. The company says that private beta tests of the BigDoor Rewards program resulted in a threefold increase in the number of website registrations based on the rewards available.

Online publishers have three options for implementing BigDoor: Lite, Plus and Premium. Lite is a free offering for websites with fewer than 25,000 monthly visitors. Plus is a white-label and highly customized solution built for medium-sized websites with up to one million monthly visitors. For enterprise customers, BigDoor creates a fully customizable rewards program as part of the Premium package.

Besides just allowing publishers to implement game mechanics within a website, BigDoor also gives clients reports and analytics on how the program is influencing behavior and web engagement. BigDoor's dashboard focuses on four key areas of performance to track the overall health of a site including loyalty, engagement, virality, and average revenue per user. This data can be measured in hourly, daily and monthly increments. And customers can also A/B test their program via BigDoor.

BigDoor says that partners realized an average lift of 153% in user loyalty, 672% in engagement, 355X in social sharing, and 9X in average revenue per user. Customers include MLB.com, Dell, Nickelodeon, Spartz, and Wetpaint.

BigDoor faces competition from Bunchball, and Badgeville. The company recently acquired fellow competitor OneTrueFan. As we heard recently, gamification is maturing. And clearly, BigDoor’s platform is helping publishers increase user engagement.

YouTube Marketing Gets Serious: Buddy Media Lets Brands Customize Channels With Apps

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Buddy Media Customized YouTube Channel

One-hundred million views, 100 thousand subscribers, and brands still don’t have special tools for still customizing their YouTube channels. That changes today as social marketing platform Buddy Media begins letting its big brand clients deck out their YouTube channels with stylized video players and interactive apps. Twitter feeds, e-commerce storefronts, quizzes, linked banners, photo galleries and more can all be hosted on a channel.

The same way brands doubled down on Facebook Page marketing once they could host apps, I think we’re about to see a major uptick in the time and money they spend manicuring their YouTube channels. Too many captive eyeballs are going to waste.

This shift is a response YouTube‘s astounding growth in popularity. As of January it powered 4 billion video views a day, up from 3 billion per day in May 2011. Highly desired younger demographics are frequent viewers, wider broadband access is making online video easier to consume, and time that used to be spent watching television commercials is moving online. Smart brands don’t want to just have a YouTube channel, they want the best one.

Buddy Media aims to give it to them. It already handles marketing on Facebook and other platforms for 600 of the world’s biggest brands, and now is building out its YouTube integration. Previously, clients could publish and manage videos and playlists, but until now no one’s YouTube channels could host apps.

Now they can pimp out their video player with custom wrappers, buttons, and carousels of videos to play next. They can display RSS feeds of Twitter or other content, show product galleries that populate offsite shopping carts, and let users vote and see the results instantly. Eventually I expect contests and full-fledged branded games to appear on YouTube channels.

Brands still need their in-house teams or agencies to create custom backgrounds for their channels. I think Buddy Media would be wise to add drag-and-drop background templates to its suite of services. Buddy Media may be the first to offer a platform for managing custom YouTube channel apps, but I bet competitors like Vitrue, Wildfire, and Involver will quickly move into the space. Meanwhile, Twitter and Google+ pages still don’t support apps, and are going to start looking static to compared to those on YouTube and Facebook.

By allowing brands more customization flexibility, YouTube will encourage those brands to advertise for and send traffic to their channels. This meshes well with yesterday’s news that YouTube is now letting brands sponsor entire channels with display, overlay, and pre-roll ads. Brand marketing’s not about broadcasting a message anymore, it’s about engagement, and YouTube’s about to get a lot more engaging.

Goodsie Lets Small Retailers Set Up Sleek E-Commerce Storefronts

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 05:59 AM PDT

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Goodsie, a startup founded by the parent company of Flavors.me, wants to provide a simple, and relatively inexpensive way for any merchant to set up an e-commerce storefront. The platform, which launched last year, is getting an upgrade today with the release of a number of new tools that help retailers increase customer engagement and cross-platform engagement.

A new email marketing system allows retailers to send targeted campaigns to customers based on order history, purchase amount and geography. The feature gives retailers the ability to add personalization to the mix, but without having to spend massive amounts of money on data analysis. Via a drag-and-drop interface, merchants can create these email campaigns that integrate with Goodsie’s backend. Goodsie also provides a simple form for customers to sign-up for emails.

Additionally, Goodsie is debuting real-time sales analytics that allows merchants to track revenue and order volume by item, geography, referring source and sales channel (i.e., direct, Facebook Store). Sellers can also see conversion metrics for repeat purchase rates, coupon redemption, and product-level click-through rates.

These features are available via Goodsie for $40 per month and there are no limits on subscriber list size or monthly emails. The startup has also added the ability for store owners to customize the look and feel of their storefronts for mobile.

As founder Jonathan Marcus explains, many of these features are offered to enterprise-level e-commerce companies, but not to smaller merchants. Small businesses and brands are adopting Goodsie at a rapid clip, and in the last month alone Goodsie has seen a 37% increase in gross merchandise sale (seller revenue).

RR Donnelly Invests $2.5M In CoffeeTable To Bring Retail Catalogs Into The Tablet Age

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 05:58 AM PDT

Screen shot 2012-04-03 at 4.27.26 AM

RR Donnelly isn’t a name you see very often in TechCrunch, but companies don’t survive for nearly 150 years without having one eye trained on the future. With 2011 revenues at an estimated $10.6 billion, the company is one of the world’s largest commercial printers. The printing giant has been stepping up its digital investments of late, and today announced that it has invested $2.5 million in Real Value Corporation, the makers of iPad shopping app, CoffeeTable.

The Series A investment is the first tranche of a larger investment by RR Donnelly and includes an exclusive marketing relationship between the two companies. CoffeeTable will be using the infusion of institutional capital to launch new personalization and engagement features and hire developers.

For those unfamiliar, CoffeeTable is a free shopping app for the iPad that aggregates hundreds of retail catalogs to allow users to browse their products on the go, online or offline. CoffeeTable gives shoppers the ability to make purchases from their iPad through secure in-app checkout, while in turn giving retailers a suite of benchmark data and catalog analytics tools that they can use to boost their multi-channel marketing efforts.

As RR Donnelly is one of the largest printers of retail catalogs in the world, it can now leverage its existing relationship with retailers to help bring CoffeeTable access to a wide range of content from the companies whose products it aggregates, while, in turn, giving those major retailers an additional point of access into the tablet market.

CoffeeTable’s app allows users to browse full-screen images of products, with zoom functionality, adding products to a shopping cart, both online and offline. Users can subscribe to their favorite brands and have the latest catalogs delivered to their iPad from retailers that include Crate & Barrel, Lands’ End, West Elm, etc. Beyond offering quick checkout across all catalogs through its “Express Checkout,” CoffeeTable also offers giveaways, seasonal pop-up shops, and flash deals which are applied at check out.

Catalogs are collectively a $270 billion industry, and while individual retailers may offer their own tablet shopping apps, CoffeeTable brings them all together in one place, presumably offering a better shopping experience for the end user. Together, the two companies seem to be looking to establish an Amazon for retail catalogs, and with further development of analytics tools, retailers will be able to get a better sense of the mobile purchasing behavior of consumers — something many of them are lacking.

For more on CoffeeTable, check the app out at home here.

Join Wil Wheaton And Friends In A Rousing Tabletop Gaming Session

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 05:58 AM PDT

If you’re a fan of Grant Imahara, Wil Wheaton, Jenna Busch, or Sean Plott, this may be just the trick. Wheaton and Felicia Day have created a new series called Tabletop which consists of a series of gamers playing tabletop games. Is it boring, you ask? Absolutely not.

The Internet is full of self-described geeks and if you are too high and mighty to enjoy a set of cultural heroes and gamers having fun around a table in a wood-panelled basement, then you need to turn in your geek card right now. The game they’re playing, Small World, is complex and fun and the comedic repartee is pretty darn cute. Great success!

You can subscribe to the videos here and watch Wil Wheaton tweet to your childhood crushes on Twitter.

via bb



Phonedeck Lets You Control Your Cellphone Via The Cloud

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 05:55 AM PDT

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An interesting new startup bubbling since it exhibited at TechCrunch 50 in the startup battlefield last year is Phonedeck. Effectively, it’s created the cloud-based desktop for the mobile phone. That means it can track your outgoing SMS content, but also log calls (though not content). The result? A sudden realisation of you who call, how long for and a lot of other data that was previously invisible. I recall MG Seigler writing that the phone book remained the last mile into social networking. Well Phonedeck might be the bridge across that last mille and it launches into public beta today from Google Play for Android handsets.

Right now Phonedeck is an Android app, and also available for Nokia s40 phones. And iPhone and Win7 version is in the queue.

Users can curate and store all of their phone contacts, manage SMS activity, monitor usage statistics and more from a web browser.

Phone contacts are uploaded to Phonedeck's SSL encrypted cloud servers where they can be viewed and edited Facebook-like fashion, with all changes synced to the host phone. SMS can be composed, sent and received remotely, while you can see your most-contacted people, the number of calls and messages sent in a chosen time period. Based on a Freemium model, you get extra features by subscribing.

Foxconn Recruiter: We’re ‘Hiring’ For A June iPhone 5 Launch

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 05:31 AM PDT

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Come one, come all! Come build the iPhone 5!

In a conversation with TV Tokyo, a Foxconn recruiter mentions that the company is hiring more workers right now to prep for the iPhone 5 launch. “It seems like it will go on sale around June,” he said. The manufacturing giant is apparently looking to add 18,000 souls to its assembly lines to build something.

The interview was seemingly conducted at a distance with the camera filming from a good distance away. There’s a solid chance that the recruiter didn’t even know he was being interviewed nor that he has official information. It should also be noted that recruiters will generally say anything to get people in the door. Come build the iPhone 5, he could say knowing full well that this batch of inexperienced workers will be stuck making Cisco routers instead.

A June launch would return the iPhone back to its traditional summer release schedule. But again, considering the source of this information is just a random recruiter, don’t consider it official — even though true or false, this poor guy probably lost his job over the slip. [Kokatu via WBS

Self-Hosted File Sync Solution ownCloud Goes Commercial

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 05:30 AM PDT

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People love Dropbox and similar services, but companies — especially large enterprises in regulated industries — have an understandable aversion to file sync services: they allow company data on servers “out there” in the cloud, no longer under company control. ownCloud, essentially an open source, self-hosted Dropbox, has a unique advantage here as it’s strictly a software solution, not a storage provider. I mentioned ownCloud in passing when I wrote about OpenSUSE 12.1, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the project since. To make ownCloud even more attractive to businesses, a commercially supported version is being launched today at owncloud.com.

The ownCloud server does a bit more than just file storage and synchronization. It offers CalDAV and CardDAV services to synchronize calendars and address books with your mobile device. Work is also underway to make it aware of the file types being stored within it, and to provide meaningful actions based on those types: photo galleries, music playlists, and more. There’s a growing ownCloud app store to extend what the server can do. This is the power of open source: rather than relying on something like ifttt, you can have intelligent actions built right into the server you’re running.

There are currently about 400,000 users of ownCloud, with more than 40 dedicated contributors. Version 3 was released in January, and their three month development cycle means a new release should be just around the corner. One of the major features to be included in the next release will be version control for uploaded files.

I spoke to ownCloud CEO Markus Rex about the new commercial offering, and how it differs from the freely available open source version. From the server perspective, there is no difference: the commercially supported ownCloud server components are exactly the same as those in the open source version. What is different is the inclusion of desktop and mobile clients. What’s more, these clients are fully brandable by your organization. And of course, the commercial version provides email and telephone tech support, which almost always makes purchasing decisions a little easier for management. According to Rex, future plans include a robust PKI solution to allow an IT staff to deal with access control issues from a centralized enterprise perspective.

ownCloud has a partner program, in which they espouse “a partner first policy, which means that we will always involve a partner in customer opportunities as long as the customer does not insist on being served directly from ownCloud.” Almost 20 partners are currently listed in 10 countries.

In addition to the benefits of on-premise data storage, server-side apps, and a truly open source solution, ownCloud allows for some unexpected ancillary benefits. For example, Rex said that with a little tinkering (or the help of an ownCloud partner), clever admins could configure ownCloud to organize data on the storage platform that makes the most sense for it: MP3s could be shuffled off to a RAID0 JBOD pool, while documents and presentations could be placed on RAID5 enterprise SAN.

Rex blogged recently about supplanting Dropbox:

For us, it makes no sense to tilt against the DropBox windmill, they have created an amazing feature that has revolutionized the way people access, synch and share their data. All we want to do is save IT managers from indigestion and hair loss from all their corporate data running wild on iPhones, iPads, laptops and Androids — and to do that in a cost effective way.

Compliance with legal regulation is likely to be one of ownCloud’s strongest selling points to enterprise subscribers, but I have a suspicion that the open source underpinnings will prove to be extremely useful in the long term, too.
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