We’re all familiar with the bill shock associated with roaming abroad with our cellphones. There are plenty of players that allow you to swap out your SIM card and use cheaper traffic, including Cubic Telecom. However, that process is tedious. So Cubic has secured new funding to enable a range of tablets and notebooks to have their technology built into partner devices. To do this they’ve raised a further $5.2 million in funding from Enterprise Ireland, Qualcomm Incorporated, ACT Venture Capital and TPS Investments. The money will be used to expand globally, and invest in the technology which essentially allows Cubic to operate like its own global mobile phone carrier, not an MVNO. As a licensed mobile network operator (MNO), Cubic Telecom partners with Tier 1 mobile operators to provide coverage in 230 countries. Its Software Defined Network (SDN) works across multiple technologies (3G, 4G-LTE, CDMA and WiFi). The Dublin based company has also secured contracts with a number of leading Fortune 100 tablet and notebook manufacturers to be in-built into their devices, though these partners have yet to be announced. The embedded nature of the service means any changes to the internal SIM can be Over The Air (OTA). Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom, says they will “enable the latest devices and applications to be always connected anytime anywhere.” In plain English, that means Cubic Telecom devices can integrate with content and apps. Thus, imagine a word where an app provider asked Cubic to allow its use to be free on Cubic dvices. All it would require would be a simple OTA update form Cubic to its customers. That could be a very powerful place to be. The company also announced that it will create a total of more than 70 new jobs over the next 3 years, as part of an investment supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.
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AngelPad, the San Francisco-based accelerator founded by former Googler Thomas Korte, held its sixth demo day yesterday. I wasn’t there (I know, it’s super-embarrassing), but I did get to meet with Korte and partner Carine Magescas today to talk about the newest batch of companies. Magescas said that in the three years since AngelPad was founded, “the premise of what we had in the beginning has been validated.” That premise breaks down to three main ideas, she said. First, she and Korte “push [the startups] really hard.” That’s particularly important in the company’s early stages, Korte said, because it can be hard for the founders to get honest feedback from their family and friends, and because making a relatively small change can have a big effect on a startup’s ultimate trajectory. Another reason the partners might be particularly tough on the startups is because they’re investing their own money. There’s no separate fund — at least not yet. (When I asked, Korte said, “There hasn’t been a fund to date,” followed by what may or may not have been a significant pause.) Second, Magescas said, “We are a really small family.” Twelve startups were chosen from thousands of applicants. The first AngelPad group had eight companies, and there was one with 15, but they’ve settled on a dozen for the last few classes. That allows the AngelPad team to spend a lot of time working one-on-one with each company. “I feel like it’s better to spend more time with less companies,” Korte said, adding that he’s realized that having a long list of well-known mentors isn’t as useful. There are outside experts who come in and give talks on a specific subject, but it really falls to Korte and Magescas to work closely with the founders. When you have too many different people offering “cookie cutter advice,” Korte said, “It hurts more than it helps.” Third, they said AngelPad has always had a strong focus on business-to-business companies. In fact, there’s not a single consumer-focused company in the current class, according to Korte — some of them might offer consumer products as part of their business, but none of them are focused on building large-scale, free services that make money from advertising. At the same time, Magescas said they’re open to consumer startups, they just have to be “really good.” So that’e the vision. Here are the companies, in alphabetical order: Audience.fm uses data from existing music services to help bands and marketers reach their desired audience. For example, if a band was making a tour stop in San Francisco, Audience.fm could identify the band’s biggest fans, and they could offer free or discounted tickets. Boxbee is a storage startup that delivers boxes to its customers. You fill the boxes with whatever you want to store, then Boxee picks up them up. It won the best new startup prize at this year’s Launch conference. Chasm.io is a content marketing network, where influencers and brands share content that they want to see promoted. Rather than getting paid for sharing sponsored content, it’s more of a quid pro quo system, where influencers are rewarded for successful sharing with points that they can redeem to share content of their own. DroneDeploy has built software for commercial drone operators (just to reemphasize — commercial drone operators, not military ones). The founders are former Googlers with machine learning PhDs from Cambridge and Edinburgh. We covered the company here. Fieldwire is a mobile task management system designed for workers who are out in the field. For example, it could be used by a team of construction workers while they’re on a construction site. HumanAPI aims to build an API for accessing all the data that’s being gathered on various health devices, sensors, and services. So instead of figuring out how to work with dozens of different devices, a medical provider could just pull data from HumanAPI. Iterable is an email marketing startup founded former Google and Twitter engineers. Customers can test different emails and also personalize the messages to each user without any coding. Pogoseat integrates with existing ticketing solutions and apps, allowing them to offer seat upgrades. Partners already include Ticketmaster, the Golden State Warriors, and other NBA teams. Roobiq aims to build a layer of voice commands and natural language processing on top of existing CRM systems, so a salesperson who’s out taking meetings could update their CRM from their phone without slowing down to type. SensorTower has built a marketing platform for mobile app developers, allowing those developers to track and improve their rankings on different search keywords. TheShelf is a collaboration platform where fashion brands can interact with fashion bloggers. There are already 1,500 bloggers on the platform. TrulyWireless has built an enterprise phone system that’s cheaper than traditional systems and runs entirely on smartphones. Interested investors can find the AngelList profile of each startup here.
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Video ad network Tremor Video has filed for its long-awaited public offering. The company’s shares will trade on the NYSE at TRMR and it wants to raise at least $86 million. Tremor Video, which runs ads on more than 500 Web sites and mobile apps, disclosed in its S-1 filing that from 2011 to 2012 its revenue increased from $90.3 million to $105.2 million. During that period, its gross margin improved from 35.2% to 41.7%, due in part to the adoption of its performance-based pricing models, while its net loss decreased from $21 million to $16.6 million. Since its founding in 2005, Tremor Video has received a total of $116 million in funding from Canaan Partners, Masthead Venture Partners, W Capital Partners, Meritech Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, as well as investors Jason Glickman, Mark Pinney and James Rossman. Its IPO will be underwritten by Credit Suisse and Jefferies. Tremor Video is among several video startups that are anticipated to launch IPOs this year. Bloomberg reports that YuMe and Adap.tv have also began planning public offerings as they look forward to strong growth in the video-ad market this year thanks to a boom in online commercials.
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Adly, a startup that connects advertisers with celebrities willing to post promoted messages on social networks, recently raised $2 million in additional funding. The new funding came from previous backer GRP Partners and new investor Siemer Ventures. Adly has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The company also launched a new product this week. It’s the first thing you’ll see if you go to the Adly website — a button that says “Match Me Up!” which allows Adly to analyze a business’ existing content and followers, then find publishers who are a good match to “amplify” their content. For example, when I signed in with my personal Twitter account, Adly said it found six celebrity publishers who, collectively, could increase my reach 61x and my engagement 31x. They include a blogger/entrepreneur with 103,000 followers, an analyst with 180,000 followers, and a podcaster with 199,000 followers. (I also tried to analyze TechCrunch’s account, but we have too many followers.) Who are these people? Well, you don’t actually get to find out until you actually start a campaign with Adly. Walter Delph, who became Adly’s CEO a little more than a year ago, said this is part of his larger strategy. One of Adly’s big selling points is the fact that advertisers aren’t just getting access to a lot of eyeballs. By enlisting celebrity endorsers, they’re hopefully prompting lots of conversation and engagement, i.e. reach that’s “earned” rather than paid for. The company’s next step is building more tools to ensure that the conversation and engagement is happening. To that end, Adly has been adding analytics to track the results of each campaign — the full reach of the message, the replies, the shares and the clicks. That dashboard, however, is really about looking back at a campaign (though customers get the data in real time, so they could adjust their spending accordingly). On the other hand, Delph said the celebrity matching tool is all about looking forward — it’s a way to get people started with Adly campaigns. He added that we can expect more features to come that take advantage of the company’s “reams and reams of data.” By the way, even though Adly is known as a celebrity endorsement network, it’s actually broader than that. The company has relationships with 75,000 influencers, and Delph estimated that only about 2,000 of them are celebrities in the traditional sense — “By celebrity, what I mean is, if you walked down the street you would recognize them.” The other 73,000 aren’t at that level, but they have influence that’s valuable to advertisers (at least when it comes to certain topics).
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No longer just an oddly flavored potato chip, the Limon is also a new sexy-time vibrator from a startup called Minna. The company is looking for backers for its “couples’ vibrator”, which just so happens to look like a pink lime-lemon hybrid. However, the Limon is no lemon or lime. It’s an ultra-powerful bullet vibrator that is controlled by how hard you squeeze it. That is, the harder you squeeze the lime part of the Limon, the harder the lemon-style tip will vibrate. Minna claims that it’s the strongest vibrator of its type in the world, thanks to the fact that they squeezed a motor made for larger toys into a lime-sized bullet vibrator. Of course, I’m sure the Jimmyjane Form 6 or the Hitachi Magic Wand beg to differ. The Limon also has a customizable memory, meaning that you can record and playback the vibration levels exactly how you did before. Interesting, right? Consider the scenario: Two lovers are chilling with their Limon and one has to go away for a week on some business trip. They can use the Limon the night before, and the lonesome lady will then have a recording of her partner giving her the good stuff. Sexy. Minna Life – Limon Couples Vibrator from BENT LENS Productions on Vimeo. The Limon battery will last anywhere between 90 minutes and three hours, depending on how aggressive you are. It’s waterproof, charges by USB cable and comes in both teal and pink. Of course, we’ll have to conduct a complete review, lest we shamefully leave these claims unverified. But for now, the Limon is looking for backers so that it can be made into a reality. It’s expected to go for $120, but donations start at $25. Want in?
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It’s almost impossible for the average computer to mine Bitcoins in any efficient way, hence the rise of Bitcoin mining machines so tuned to their specific purpose that they barely resemble PCs. To wit: the Cryonic Bitcoin FrostBit machine is a PC in name only and contains a liquid nitrogen generator, special ASIC chips, and a price tag that would make the Winklevii twins think twice. “It’s the first time a ‘PC’ has been built for consumers with built-in liquid nitrogen generators. We use helium compression technology to super-cool condensers that in turn condense nitrogen air into its liquid form. There’s nothing even remotely similar available to the consumers,” said CEO of Cryoniks, Inc. Fahad Koumaiha. “By sustaining cryonic temperatures we were able to achieve superconductivity with our custom designed ASIC processors. Not only do we get a huge boost in speed, but we cut down power consumption to around 2800W per unit; significantly less than anything on the market today.” The PC hits a peak of 2800W – the average PC hits 200W on a bad day – but the device can perform 1000 Gigahashes a second. To put that in perspective a strong PC with good graphics card can hit about 100 GH/S and in my experience I haven’t been able to get any my machines to hit higher than 50 GH/S. What are you going to pay for this ridiculous machine? Try a cool $15,000, which, sadly, you can’t pay for in BTC. Can this thing really pay for itself? Probably, but not immediately. There are some BTC fans who believe a $10,000 BTC isn’t too far off and if that happens the potential benefits of this machine far outweighs the cost. They are planning on shipping this monster in July so if you’re seriously into mining, it may be worth a look. Everyone else? Be satisfied with your low GH/S. It’s a cryonic, nitrogen-cooled world out there and we’re just visiting.
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As great as the web is, I still haven’t been able to kick my habit for buying fashion and lifestyle magazines off the newsstand. One of the things I love the most about monthly glossies are features like Vanity Fair’s My Stuff and Us Weekly’s What’s In My Bag, in which notable people reveal the exact products that they actually buy and use (celebrity chef David Chang uses Sensodyne toothpaste and wears Levi’s jeans, FYI.) It’s just compelling to find out more about people through their stuff. The folks at New York-based startup Vaunte think so too, and in fact, they think this kind of voyeuristic editorial approach could be the next generation of luxury e-commerce. Vaunte has created a web platform where notable people (think starlets, fashionable executives, designers, and socialites) show off the stuff in their closets — and put things up for sale. Vaunte started off as purely a consignment market that takes 30 percent commission for photographing and shipping seller’s items, but it has since expanded to also sell new versions of the items people show off. Though Vaunte has made a splash in the fashion news space since its November 2012 launch, it has flown under the radar in the tech and business press. But now for the first time, the company is revealing a bit more on the corporate side. TechCrunch sat down this week with Gilt Groupe veteran Leah Park and engineer/entrepreneur Andy Shin, two of Vaunte’s three co-founders — the third, ex Gilt Grouper Christian Leone, was in Los Angeles working on a Vaunte photoshoot — to talk a bit more about what Vaunte is and what’s in its future (video embedded below.) A Vaunte closet profileFirst, some numbers: Vaunte has raised $1.125 million in seed funding from Maveron, Battery Ventures, and fashion and retail mogul Christopher Burch. The company has a staff of nine, but is set to expand as it moves into a 6,000 square foot space in Manhattan that will serve as office space and inventory storage. Based on just word of mouth and a few press mentions, Vaunte has grown to 60,000 members and done more than half a million dollars in transactional revenue since launching in November. The big news going forward is that with the launch of its upcoming mobile app scheduled for this summer, Vaunte is set to open up its platform to let anyone display and sell their clothing and accessories on the site. These users will be charged less of a commission than the higher-profile sellers, since they will be responsible for taking their own photos. There is a significant amount of additional technology that Vaunte’s team had to build to make this app scalable to taking items from the general public — quality control on the photos that are taken and having to verify that luxury items are genuine, for example. It’s an expansion that will put Vaunte in an interesting intersection in the existing e-commerce market — its competitors will now range from Net-a-Porter to The RealReal to Poshmark to Threadflip and more. Personally, I’m excited to see what Vaunte has in store for its future. The first time I opened the site this week, I had one thought: “Uh oh. I am going to spend so much money here.” I’d imagine that I’m not alone. Park and Shin stopped by the TechCrunch TV studio to discuss Vaunte’s vision and give us an early look at the new mobile experience. Check it all out below:
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Bloomberg today reports that Google could face a new U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust probe into its display advertising business. As Bloomberg’s Brian Womack and Sara Forden note, the FCC is looking into whether Google used its strong position in this market to “illegally curb competition.” The investigators, the report also notes, want to see if Google used its display ads business to “push companies to use more of its other services.” We reached out to Google for a statement about this new investigation but Google did not have a comment on the report. As Bloomberg notes, the FCC investigation – assuming it will go forward – will likely focus on whether Google used its dominance in the display ad business to “squeeze out competitors in the display advertising market.” Google’s ad revenue from display ads was about $2.26 billion in 2012 and, according to a report by eMarketer, could hit $3.11 billion this year. According to the same report, Google currently owns about 17.6 percent of the display ad market, followed by Facebook and Yahoo. Google and the FTC are, of course, old acquaintances. The two have sparred pretty regularly over the last few years, and just this January, the FTC settled its latest antitrust probe with Google after a 20-month investigation. Google, at the time, agreed to make some voluntary changes, including how it handles its AdWords campaigns. Google also still faces a similar investigation in Europe, where it recently proposed to settle the European Commission’s investigation into its business practices. A number of other countries, including Canada, are also currently looking into the search giant’s business practices.
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Features: Ships with Windows 8 64-bit 13.3-inch display running at 2560 x 1440 (221ppi) 256GB SSD 2GHz Intel Core i7-3537U Processor 8GB of RAM MSRP: Starts at $1,599, model reviewed costs $1,999 Pros: An incredibly high-res display for a Windows laptop 2 years of free premium support Respectable battery life Cons: No discrete graphics card Man, this thing is expensive Eye Candy Meets Horsepower Toshiba isn’t exactly known for churning out attractive, high-end notebooks, which is why the company’s new Kirabook is such an oddity. It’s a handsome little thing if you’re into very (and I mean very) understated designs, though I imagine at least a few people will think the Kirabook looks downright dull. The Kirabook is wedge-shaped like many of its other ultrabook brethren but it’s thankfully very light on branding (save for a small, chrome-esque Toshiba logo slapped on a corner of the Kirabook’s lid), and a finish that comes as a result of the magnesium alloy chassis is nice enough. Sadly, that magnesium frame doesn’t mean the Kirabook is immune to scratches, something I quickly learned after stowing the thing in a checked bag while flying to Austin. It’s got a respectable spate of ports for an ultraportable too: AC power aside, there are a total of three USB 3.0 ports plus an HDMI out, a headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. If anything, the real eye-catcher here is that sumptuous screen. The Kirabook plays home to a 13.3-inch display running at 2,560 x 1,440 (that makes for a pixel density of 221ppi), and Toshiba likes to crow about it being the highest resolution display available on a Windows notebook. Credit where credit is due, that display is one of the Kirabook’s most notable high points: colors are generally vivid and bright, and the panel seems hardy enough to handle even the most frenzied touch inputs. That’s not to say it’s without its shortcomings though. There’s a bit of light leakage around the edge of the display panel and viewing angles aren’t the greatest — looking at the thing dead-on is pleasant enough, but there’s a bit of color distortion to be seen once you start moving around. But there’s one big problem when it comes to the display, and it has nothing to do with the panel itself. I won’t belabor the point too much — by now you’ve probably already made up your mind about Microsoft’s divisive OS — but the biggest disappointment is that Windows 8 and the apps that run on it just aren’t completely tuned for these HiDPI screens yet. Cruising through the touch-friendly start screen is a visual pleasure, as is firing up apps like Internet Explorer, Maps, Vimeo, and Netflix since they all thrive on these sorts of displays. Jumping into the desktop is another world entirely, and it’s full of applications and menus that appear blurry and ill-suited for such a neat display. What a bummer. When it comes to performance, the Kirabook manages to hold its own very nicely. We like running Geekbench around these parts, and on average the Kirabook scored between 7500 and 8000 when it came to running 64-bit benchmarks: very solid numbers, and there wasn’t anything that came up during my day-to-day use that managed to flummox the little guy. That is, except for gaming — the lack of a discrete GPU in a $2000 machine is concerning, and the integrated Intel HD 4000 plus the need to push a crazy number of pixels means that there will be very little Bioshock Infinite running on the Kirabook unless you dramatically crank down the quality. Speaking of day-to-day use, the Kirabook has more than enough juice to get you through the day. I’ve been toting the 2.9 pound notebook around for the better part of a week, and I’ve consistently been able to camp out in coffee shops and keep the Kirabook going for just over six hours. There’s little question that the Kirabook is actually a pretty speedy little bugger, but there is a caveat. The downside to all that power is that the tiny fan nestled on the Kirabook’s bum will fire up after even slight provocation, and it’s just loud enough to be grating if you decide to do anything processor-intensive for a while. If you work in environments with plenty of ambient noise it may not be much of a problem, but be warned — those of you who like to work in quiet, zen-like tranquility will probably get pretty miffed. I haven’t fiddled with many of Toshiba’s older laptop keyboards, but the consensus seems to be that they were largely rubbish. Keyboard snobs may just turn up their noses after a few moments with the Kirabook’s 6 row affair, but despite the fact that the keys feel a bit small I found that using it to peck out posts and emails wasn’t too bad at all after a break-in period. Sad to say, the trackpad was a completely different story. See, the trackpad occasionally seems to forget what it’s capable of — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to two-finger scroll in Chrome using the trackpad before the Kirabook suddenly stops accepting multi-finger inputs. This may not seem like a big deal to some of you (especially since the Kirabook sports a highly responsive, glass-covered touchscreen) but it’s tremendously frustrating to discover what worked 5 seconds ago doesn’t work any more for no apparent reason. The elephant in the room here is the price tag that’s attached to this highly portable package — the configuration I’ve been spending time with will set you back a cool $1,999. Toshiba has tried to temper the sticker shock by loading the Kirabook up with full versions of Photoshop Elements and Norton Internet Security (ugh), not to mention two years worth of premium support from a dedicated team of Kirabook specialists all within the United States, but the price differential will probably be enough to make some would-be ultrabook purchasers balk. Who is it for? Designers No. If you’re an artist looking to get some work done, I suspect the blurry, pixelated text and images that result from mixing a hi-res screen and applications that aren’t really ready for it may be enough to get you running for the hills. On the plus side, Photoshop makes full use of what limited screen real estate the Kirabook affords you and it’s easy enough to get into the swing of things… if you’re willing to squint, that is. Hooking the Kirabook up to an external monitor helps quite a bit, but the sketchy trackpad means you’ll definitely need other peripherals to chip in too. Founders No. If you’re a founder looking for a smart way to spend your newly-raised seed funds, you’d probably do well to stay away from the Kirabook. That’s not to say it’s a bad computer, but the crucial bang-for-the-buck factor is notably absent here. The most basic touchscreen-laden Kirabook retails for $1,699, or $100 more than an a higher-end 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. That’s not an insignificant premium to pay when the Kirabook is marred by a few prominent issues. And sure, you can pick out a slightly less expensive version that eschews the touchscreen, but then there’s really no point in Kirabook in the first place. Programmers Maybe? 13.3 inches may seem a little cramped for coding, but that multitude of pixels means that you’ve got plenty of real estate for crafting apps and tapping into APIs. Arguably the price tag is still too steep if all you’re looking for is a machine to run Visual Studio, Android Studio, or good ol’ Notepad++, but there’s nothing here that would immediately disqualify the Kirabook from being a coder’s companion. Bottom Line You know, for all of the little things Toshiba either got wrong or didn’t execute that well, I still actually really like the Kirabook. The company took a shot on something different, and even though this first iteration isn’t exactly a home run, it has made me rethink the prospect of spending my own money on a Toshiba computer. Once the Kirabook drops in price (which shouldn’t take long since Intel’s new Haswell chips are barreling down the pipeline), Toshiba’s nifty premium ultrabook may find the success it deserves. For now though, it’s just too pricey and too unpolished for anyone but the biggest Toshiba die-hards to splurge on — here’s hoping that Toshiba manages to firm up the formula when it comes time to whip up the Kirabook 2.
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Features: Convertible laptop 13-inch touchscreen Up To 128 GB SSD Intel Core i5 Processor MSRP: $999 Pros: Slim form factor works as a tablet and a laptop Nice design 10-finger multi-touch Cons: Mushy keys Accelerator sensing can be frustrating Underpowered for the price point Twist And Shout Convertibles were all the rage back in the 1950s (thanks to tailfins and the Corvette) and in the early 2000s (thanks to Microsoft and Sony). In the 2000s, however, we saw convertibles in the form of laptops that could twist and turn themselves into tablets. The result, usually, was a not-very-good-laptop folded into a not-very-good tablet. That’s what makes the Yoga special. This 13-inch laptop is as plain as can be – it has just two USB ports and an SD card slot – but becomes much more usable when you realize the various configurations you can bend it into. For example, as a laptop the screen stays straight up and there is a small central Windows button that you can either press or ignore under the screen bezel. You can also fold the laptop in half along one edge, essentially tuning off the keyboard and making the screen one big tablet. Finally, you can fold the Yoga into a tent, allowing you some modicum of control over the laptop via the keyboard or allowing you and another user to view the screen head-on. To be fair, the “folding” features are more of a gimmick than anything else. The vast majority of the time you’ll be using this in either standard laptop mode or tablet mode. However, unlike the Microsoft Surface, you don’t have to worry about the screen flopping over at inopportune moments, which is a huge plus. The Yoga can be rightly termed the perfect Windows 8 machine. Touchscreen access was surprisingly smooth and responsive but it wasn’t mandatory. This is a handsome, cleverly designed laptop that works as both a keyboard-based and touch device. Performance-wise, however, you’re going to take a bit of a hit on this device when compared to similar i5 devices. They Yoga 13 hit a Geekbench score of 4,664, which is low. The i5 MacBook Air, for example, gets about 5,000 other Core i5 laptops can hover at about 8,000 depending on the machine. The laptop lasted for 5 hours of standard use. The Core i5 in this model was enough for most work thrown at it but it’s still considerably underpowered. Other users I talked to mentioned some latency issues with the trackpad although I didn’t experience them during use. That said, I’m loath to ding the laptop on performance simply because Lenovo did something very unique with their laptop and made something that I’d actually carry. The goal of these reviews is to show some of the most unique and usable laptops available now, not the latest and greatest in terms of chipsets and processors. In terms of speeds and feeds the Yoga 13 does not shine. However, when it comes down to usability and class, the Yoga 13 is a real contender. Who is it for? Designers Yes. Photographers, artists, and media types will love the big, bright screen and the unique “bendable” spine makes it easy to share the screen with multiple users or flip it over to show off a snapshot or sketch. While it’s not exactly a Wacom digitizer – you basically get a capacitive touchscreen that will respond to simpler, passive styli – this laptop is definitely something you can get a little work done on. I would worry, however, about the limitations of the i5 processor and the on-board graphics. I wouldn’t recommend, say, rendering video or handling massive RAW files. Think of this as a showcase machine, designed to display your work after it is complete. Founders Yes. The Yoga is almost custom-built for salesmen and business folk. Want to get a point across? Fold this puppy up and treat it like a mini-whiteboard. Want to give a presentation? Lay it out flat like a tablet and swipe through the slides. Finally, when you have a bit of alone time and need a laptop, it’s right there and ready to go. If you’re running a Windows shop and need something that can act as both a tablet and a PC, this is probably your best bet right now. As an exploration of the Windows 8 form, this thing is great. Programmers No. I’m not certain that this is the right laptop for a coder. It’s definitely a cool idea but the value intrinsic in the folding hinge is lost on folks who probably need the machine to act as a primary typing device. I’d recommend looking at this thing in terms of whether or not you’d use the touch features on a daily basis and make your decision that way. Bottom Line The Yoga is a gimmick, to be sure. However, I think it does a good enough job at being a laptop and a tablet that the interstitial positions don’t matter as much. The Yoga 13 is everything the Surface was supposed to be and, although I do enjoy the Surface Pro, the Yoga is a superior experience.
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Salesforce.com met analyst expectations for its first quarter with non-GAAP earnings per share of 10 cents. Total first quarter revenues were $893 million, an increase of 28 percent on a year-over-year basis. Subscription and support revenues were $842 million, an increase of 29% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $50 million, an increase of 25%. It had operating cash flow of $283 Million, up 33%. Salesforce also raised its 2014 fiscal year reenues to an estimaged $3.835 to $3.875 billion. Salesforce.com is on a bit of a roll. Gartner nmed it the number one CRM platform in the world this past quarter. CEO Marc Benioff said in the earnings call that it had a record number of SAP customers moving to Salesforce. (We will update the story as more information comes available.)
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Pandora has had a busy quarter. In March, the social radio company saw its long-time CEO Joe Kennedy step down, leaving the board to scramble to find a replacement. On the bright side, Pandora launched an ad-free version for Windows 8 in March, surpassed 200 million users (with over 140 million accessing Pandora via mobile) in April, then launched a “Premieres” station for U.S. users and deepened its Facebook integration with a new Timeline App. For the first quarter, Pandora saw GAAP total revenue increase 97 percent year-over-year to $83.9 million (with non-GAAP mobile revenue of $86.7 million), which outpaced mobile listener hour growth at 47 percent year over year. Meanwhile, total revenue came in at $125.5 million, representing 55 percent year-over-year growth and non-GAAP total revenue of $128.5 million. What’s more, share of total U.S. Radio listening for Pandora grew to 7.33 percent in April — an increase from 5.86 percent in the same period last year. This news followed a strong earnings report from Pandora for the fourth quarter, thanks chiefly to mobile revenue growth of 111 percent year-over-year (to $80.3 million), which caused the company’s stock to jump for joy. Wall Street expected the trend to (mostly) continue for Pandora in the first quarter, with forecasts pegging revenue at $123.9 million (on losses of $0.10 per share) for the quarter, compared to a loss of $0.09 per share for Q1 last year — and revenue of $123.5 in Q4. Of his company’s performance, Kennedy said: Mobile listening hours and mobile ad revenue reached record highs, with growth in mobile ad revenue exceeding growth in mobile listening hours. During the quarter, we successfully implemented a mobile listening limit, enabling us to manage our content acquisition costs with minimal impact on listenership or revenue growth. Pandora’s subscriber base surpassed 2.5 million, adding more net new subscribers in the quarter than in all of fiscal 2013, giving Pandora the largest US streaming subscriber base of any music service.
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Postmates is looking to expand its business and make mobile, on-demand deliveries a widespread thing throughout cities around the country — that we already know. The company has been operating in San Francisco for a while, and launched in Seattle about three months ago. But where will it land next? All signs point to New York City. Postmates has a mobile app that allows customers to get food from restaurants, groceries, and even goods from retailers like the Apple Store or Nordstrom delivered within an hour for a low, fixed price. Thanks to a little scouring of the Internet and some clues that the company has left behind (as well as a photo from a local hipster tipster), we have reason to believe that the Big Apple will be the next city to have delicious lunches (or anything, really) delivered with just a few clicks of the Postmates mobile app. The picture-taker was not punched in the face immediately after taking this, btw For those of you in New York, don’t get too excited — yet. People who have downloaded the app there can’t quite use it yet, several of my friends sources have confirmed. That said, a tipster in New York swears that he saw a Postmates-branded bike courier tooling around the city, and sent along this photo. (Thanks, Jesus!*) Anyway, if Postmates is about to launch in New York City, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Back when I talked to him about Seattle, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann had mentioned it as an ideal market for future expansion. Oh yeah, and the startup has been trying to recruit couriers on Craigslist for about a month now. The company has also recently been looking to hire an operations manager in New York over the last few weeks. Want more proof that an NYC launch is probably coming soon? Well, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann is in New York City right now as we speak. Coincidence? We think not. @ded No idea. I'm in New York. Want me to look into it or is someone on its way?— Bastian Lehmann (@Basti) May 23, 2013 (For what it’s worth, he hasn’t responded to our requests for comment.) In March, Postmates announced that it had raised $5 million in funding led by Founders Fund as it looks to expand. Other investors include Crosslink Capital, Matrix Partners, SoftTech VC, AngelPad, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Scott Banister, Paige Craig, and Jawed Karim. == * Tipster’s name was not actually Jesus.
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A new bulletin from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns that lethal, undetectable 3D-printed firearms may be “impossible” to contain, Fox News reports After a Texas law student designed and released digital blueprints for the world’s first fully printable gun, the files have allegedly been downloaded more than 100,000 times, despite a domestic ban on distributing the files from the U.S. State Department. “Significant advances in three-dimensional (3D) printing capabilities, availability of free digital 3D printer files for firearms components, and difficulty regulating file sharing may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers who obtain or manufacture 3D printed guns,” reads a May 21 bulletin from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center obtained by Fox News. “Limiting access may be impossible.” The threats to plastic guns are so grave that private citizens who control the distribution channels have banned them from their networks. Notorious free-information rogue, Kim Dotcom, and one of the largest consumer-facing 3D printed manufacturers, Makerbot, have both outlawed and removed blueprints. Still, they exist on the same peer-to-peer file sharing services that distribute pirated entertainment (and legal software). “Even if the practice is prohibited by new legislation, online distribution of these digital files will be as difficult to control as any other illegally traded music, movie or software files.” The solution: universal searches. One law enforcement source told Fox News, “The only security procedure to catch [the 3D firearms] is a pat down. Is America ready for pat-downs at every event?”
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Google almost completely revamped the Google+ photo experience last week, but somehow the company didn’t get around to announce one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire yet: Google now uses computer vision and machine learning to let you search your own photos for things like sunsets, food and flowers. I also tried terms like “cars,” “beach” and “bikes” and Google consistently returned the right results. This search is build into Google+, but you can also use the regular Google search and use the query term [my photos of xyz] to find the right images. That’s a huge step forward for photo search in Google. As Google rightly notes, “searching for your photos can be challenging because the information you’re looking for is visual.” I know I’m anything but diligent about tagging my photos, so this new search feature actually allowed me to find random images I had uploaded to Picasaweb a long time ago. As Google’s Vic Gundotra noted when he announced the new features for Google+ Photos at I/O last week, Google wants to help its users manage their photos. “Organizing photos is often a hassle,” he said, but oddly enough, the company didn’t announce this search feature at I/O and instead waited a week before launching it.
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After being acquired by Facebook, the mobile back-end service Parse has been busy integrating itself into the company, as well as launching new services like web hosting for developers. The service has built tools to help developers focus on the front-end of their product, while handling all of the messy back-end things like cross-platform compatibility and testing. Naturally, Facebook integration is easier than ever for mobile developers thanks to the acquisition. Its been six years since Facebook’s Platform launched, and during a whiteboard session at its Menlo Park headquarters, the company discussed just how far its come. Doug Purdy, Director of Product Management, and Mike Vernal of Facebook Platform led the discussion. Ilya Sukhar, who recently joined Facebook with Parse, sat in on the discussion as well. Purdy set up the conversation about next steps by saying: “We’ve been thinking about how we can provide tools to developers to enable a more cross-platform world. We’re trying to create a platform that developers can build something that spans over devices and makes people the center. Regardless of the device that you or your friends are on, everyone can have a rich experience.” Sukhar, co-founder of Parse, talked a bit about Parse’s beginnings and day four at Facebook: If you think about applications broadly, there’s the front-end, and below the hood there’s a lot. The data side, how you sync it back to the server, the databases. None of these things bring value to the users or differentiate apps. Our SDKs make this dramatically easier for everyone. I was originally building mobile apps myself. I was spending a lot of time building things over and over again, things that were quite hard and painful. It’s time that I could have spent on the actual user experience or the utility of my app. So I decided to build Parse. We’ve grown from one person to 24. Since day one, we’ve had 80K apps, 200M installed apps. Generally, the community is very excited. All of our metrics are up and it’s been a really fun time. It’s good news that things are going smoothly, and it’s clear that Facebook sees Parse as a huge part of its developer ecosystem push for the future. As far as new services, Sukhar says the team, which is still operating independently, speaks to developers about what should come next. One of the top features that gets requested is functionality around push notifications and offline mode. The clear value for Facebook is that Parse’s platform could be the easiest way to urge developers to use Facebook ads. Once you get rid of the complexity of building out a backend for an app, you can pay attention to promoting your app more. Hopefully that promotion will come via Facebook, as Purdy mentioned comScore’s findings that the site is the top way to discover new apps. On whether less backend worries will lead to more promotion, Sukhar said: “This is something we’ve heard: ‘Parse has done well for me to get things out to market, but now I need users.’ We don’t have anything specific to announce today, but it’s clear that Facebook has the solution.”
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Lambda Labs, an early stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release a facial recognition API for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says. The move comes on the heels of a Congressional inquiry into Google’s new wearable technology, still very much in the prototype phase. Lambda Labs’ facial recognition API, launched into beta last year, is already used by 1,000 developers, including several major international firms. It now sees over 5 million API calls per month, and is growing at 15 percent month-over-month. Balaban also says that the company has been cash flow positive since November. Now that same API has been tailored specifically for Google Glass Apps to enable both facial and object recognition. Applied to Glass, the technology will enable apps such as “remember this face,” “find your friends in a crowd,”  ”networking event interest matching,” “intelligent contact books,” and more, Balaban explains. (You can see what apps developers are tweeting about here.) As potentially amazing / horrifying as that technology sounds, any apps using the technology couldn’t do so in real-time – that is, you couldn’t just walk around automatically recognizing people you see through Glass. The way Google’s Mirror API works right now is that you first have to snap a photo, send it to the developer’s servers, then get the notification back. The lag time on that would be several seconds at least, and would depend on how fast you could take a photo and share it. A forthcoming Glass software development kit (SDK), though, may change that. “There is nothing in the Glass Terms of Service that explicitly prevents us from doing this. However, there is a risk that Google may change the ToS in an attempt to stop us from providing this functionality,” Balaban says. ”This is the first face recognition toolkit for Glass, so we’re just not sure how Google, or the privacy caucus, will react.” The privacy caucus he’s referring to has to do with the congressional inquiry from earlier this month where eight members of Congress reached out to Google CEO Larry Page with over half a dozen questions about Glass’ capabilities and the potential impacts to user privacy. The Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, a group led by Texas Republican Joe Barton, wanted to know if Glass would collect data from users without their consent, whether or not Google would consider privacy before approving third-party apps, and a host of other things. One of those questions was whether or not Glass would have support for facial recognition. That’s something Steve Lee, Glass director of product management has already answered. In a statement offered to The New York Times, he replied, “We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place.” That’s not a solid “no,” of course. It’s more of a “no, for now.” Glass is simply too new of a technology to begin limiting what it will or will not do, at least in such definitive terms. Facial recognition, however, doesn’t appear to be specifically prohibited in Google’s API policies, which inform Glass developers what they can and can’t do in their applications. That means, for now at least, Lambda’s facial recognition API for Glass developers would be permitted. The only cause that would impact its use, according to Google’s policies, is one that says Glass is “not intended for use in connection with applications and services that might be subject to industry-specific privacy regulations.” Obviously, lawmakers could still enact such a policy, if they chose to do so. “Assuming Google and Joe Barton’s Privacy Caucus don’t attempt to stop us, [the API] will be available to everybody within the week,” Balaban says. Google, it should be noted, has long since had the technology to build apps capable of facial recognition itself, but has always tread very carefully to not incite a privacy backlash. In 2011, there were reports that Google was developing a mobile app that would allow users to snap pictures of people’s faces to access their personal information. That app never arrived, but facial recognition has since made an appearance within Google’s photo-sharing service Google+ Photos (previously Picasa), where users can now opt in to have their face recognized. This makes finding “pictures and videos of you easy,” explains the company’s documentation on the technology. Perhaps one day, users will be able to “opt in” to having Glass apps identify their faces, too? Time – and Congress’s reaction – will tell. Image credit: Glass concept from Jack Morgan on Dribble; Additional reporting: Frederic Lardinois
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It was just two weeks ago that fast-growing enterprise cloud storage company, Box, went out and acquired document embedding service and Y Combinator grad, Crocodoc. Apparently Aaron Levie sees what Yahoo is doing and he wants to show that Box is ready to do a little acquiring of its own. Today, Box followed up with its second acquisition in as many weeks, scooping up the tech behind French startup and Box, Dropbox and Google Drive client for iOS, Folders. Developed by Martin Destagnol, Folders and its tech will be integrated into Box’s new iOS app, which is in currently in development. Updating
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Former Badoo COO and ex-Googler Ben Ling has joined Khosla Ventures, according to sources. Ling, who has held senior operations roles for a number of big companies in the mobile and internet space, has been added to a growing team at Vinod Khosla’s venture firm. (Update: Khosla Ventures just confirmed Ling has joined, starting this week.) Ling most recently served as COO of Badoo, where he was hired to oversee product, engineering, partnerships, and business operations at the company. Ling joined Badoo in May 2012, but he left after only about six months. Prior to Badoo, Ling spent a number of years at Google, where his last role included overseeing images, videos, books, news, and finance as its senior director of search products and local business products. At YouTube, Ling was senior director of partnerships and platform, where he was responsible for music, movies, sports, news, in addition to mobile, TV, and API partnerships. In his first role at Google, he oversaw the company’s e-commerce products, including Google Checkout and Product Search. At Facebook, he served as the director of Facebook Platform, working on developer relations at the fledgling social network. There he helped build Facebook Connect, which is the social network’s hook into a number of third-party websites. In addition to his senior operations roles, Ling has also been an active angel investor and advisor to startups. Recent investments include Fab.com, Palantir, Square, PracticeFusion, and Quora. Ling has also held an advisory position at Pinterest and Pulse. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Ling told us that most of his experience as an entrepreneur has been in operations roles, helping companies like Google and Facebook scale their businesses both in terms of users and bringing in revenues. Meanwhile, over the last four years, he’s been working as an angel investor, identifying great products and teams and helping them to scale up. “In terms of thinking about my next steps, and thinking about what I could do next, I wanted to maximize the impact I could have by helping entrepreneurs to grow their businesses,” Ling said. He said that the opportunity at Khosla Ventures provides him with an opportunity to do that, since there are a lot of “parallels and similarities” to what he was doing as an angel investor — evaluating teams and talent, helping companies scale and with their hiring strategies. Ling said that we can probably expect to see him make investments in a lot of the same areas that he’s worked in previously — that includes companies focused on e-commerce or shopping, developer networks, search, finance, and local. He’s also had some experience with three-sided ecosystem businesses, such as the Facebook platform’s network of users, developers, and advertisers. Of course, Ling isn’t the only operations specialist to join Khosla Ventures. His hire comes just a few months after former Square COO Keith Rabois joined the firm. Part of the reason Khosla Ventures has been interested in bringing on entrepreneurs with that type of experience is that they can provide guidance for startups who need operational experience. Rabois, who is now 10 weeks in at Khosla Ventures, said, “Our organizing philosophy is to provide assistance to entrepreneurs and help them to build the most interesting companies they can… It’s about understanding what entrepreneurs need is less capital and more formative advice. Every time we evaluate a company we ask whether we can we help this entrepreneur build something special.” Both Ling and Rabois say that they’ve been impressed with the quality of entrepreneurs and the quality of the Khosla Ventures team as it works with those startups. With that in mind, Rabois said he’s really excited about building several big businesses as part of the Khosla Ventures team.
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This isn’t exactly the launch of Google Now for the desktop, which many of us have been patiently waiting for, but Google today announced that it is bringing a richer notifications experience to Chrome, starting with the latest beta. This definitely feels like it brings Google Now yet another step closer to the desktop. These new notifications, which developers can easily add to their own Chrome packaged apps and extensions, will pop up outside of the browser window and live in a center outside of the browser, so users will be able to receive notifications, even if the browser is not open. This feature is now available for Windows and Chrome OS users. Google says it’s coming to OS X and Linux “soon.” Chrome, of course, already features basic web notifications (and if you’re a Chrome and Google Apps user, you’ve probably seen them from services like Gmail). These rich notifications go a step further, though, as developers can add their own full-bleed icons, images, headlines and short messages to them. Developers can also decide for how long notifications should stay on the screen by specifying different priorities for each alert. The new notification center will be available through the Windows system tray or from the Chrome OS launcher. Last week, Google also announced its new Cloud Messaging for Chrome push notification service. While Google doesn’t mention them in today’s announcement, there is no reason why those push notifications couldn’t soon arrive in the new notifications center, too. You can find a full changelog of what’s new in Chrome 28 here.
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Score one for technology: Doctors 3D-printed an emergency airway tube that saved a 20-month old baby boy’s life. After imaging the boy’s faulty windpipe, doctors at the C.S. Mot Children’s Hospital printed 100 tiny tubes and laser-stitched them together over the trachea (video below). “Quite a few of the doctors said that he had a good chance of not leaving the hospital alive,” said the mother of the baby boy, who suffered from a severe version of tracheobronchomalacia, causing his bronchus to collapse. Desperate for a solution, the doctors obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to surgically sew the 3D-printed splint on the child’s airway. “It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK,” said Michigan University Professor Dr. Glenn Green, who came up with save-saving solution, with his partner Dr. Scott Hollister. “The material we used is a nice choice for this. It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that’s about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body,” added Hollister. Considering that most of the news around 3D printers has been about lethal, undetectable firearms, it’s nice to know that people are also using humanity’s newly found technological powers for good.
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Imonomy, an Israeli startup which makes software that analyses webpages and automatically inserts relevant, copyright-free images to accompany the content, has closed a $400,000 seed round from a group of angel investors. Investors include Inon Axel, former CEO of Kasamba (acquired by LivePerson for $40m), Liron Rose, cofounder of AfterDownload (acquired by ironSource for $28m), and Itai Levitan and Tal Shaked, partners at AfterDownload. Imonomy said it will be using the new seed funding for product development and initial marketing and sales activities. The startup was founded in the middle of last year by Oren Dror and Amit Halawa who previously held senior R&D and engineering positions at Yedda, an online Q&A service that was acquired by TechCrunch’s parent company AOL, back in 2007. Imonomy targets its software at smaller-sized web publishers who have a pool of online content but don’t necessarily have the means to spice it up with illustrations — either lacking the production staff to spend the time hunting down royalty free images or the licensing money to pay to display copyrighted images. Imonomy says its semantic software is being used by more than 500 medium-sized websites (with up to 10 million monthly impressions) at present, including AOL Answers and Articles Base. Imonomy’s software scans web content to figure out relevant images to serve up from its database of copyright-free images, and also determines the optimal place to position them on the page to improve user engagement. Inserted images support hover over links to other articles and also displaying ads, giving publishers (and Imonomy) a way to monetise the added eyecandy. It’s effectively a more aesthetic version of inline text link ads. “The idea behind Imonomy is that publishers of content-heavy web sites need to tools to help their sites be visibly attractive,” the startup tells TechCrunch. “High quality copyright-free images are hard to come by and the time and effort required to locate such pictures is a hassle. Imonomy created its content enrichment and monetization system to automate this process in order to help publishers save time, improve user engagement and create monetization opportunities.” Here’s how it describes its system on its website: Our database contains millions of images that cover every possible topic. Our system scans your webpage, finds the best fitting image and automatically insert them into the published page. Thus making content more interesting and informative. Our technology brings our customers greater user engagement and lower bounce rates, which has been in proven to result in significantly increased revenues. imonomy also creates intelligent links between pages, which encourages visitors to easily navigate to additional relevant content. The visual semantic engine can be implemented easily on any website, and we also provide a free API that expands the functionality and the systems abilities. In terms of competition, Imonomy concedes there are “numerous content enrichment tools” out there — name-checking the likes of OutBrain, Zemanta and GumGum — but argues that its approach is unique because it’s bundling “content enrichment and monetization opportunities in a single automated process to publishers for free”. It’s not charging for use of its technology, instead it has a freemium model, tied to the ads that are inserted along with the images — sharing this revenue with its publisher customers so also taking a cut itself. Its revenue-sharing percentage depends on the size of the publisher and the volume of traffic on its website. But for larger sites with more impressions it takes a lower percentage than for smaller, less well visited sites. The startup added that it expects to be profitable by the end of the year. An example of an added image plus ad powered by Imonomy’s engine is shown below:
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Toronto-based startup MyShoebox is facing a time in which photo sharing announcements are thick and deep; Google unveiled its updated Google+ photos experience last week at I/O, and this week we seen pretty big announcements from Yahoo! around Flickr. Does that intimated MyShoebox, a photo-focused startup launching its version 2.0 product on the tail of those bits of news? Not really, says MyShoebox founder and CEO Steve Cosman. MyShoebox is a service that scans a user’s entire offline photo collection, uploads it to cloud storage and applies organization algorithms to automatically categorize pics and provide different ways of viewing them. The cloud-based computational stuff is similar to what Google unveiled last week, though Google’s product is more advanced in terms of being able to identify “keeper” shots and automatically enhance uploads, but Cosman says his company isn’t worried about lagging behind giants like Google in terms of computational power. “I’m envious of the tech they’ve got,” he said in an interview. “We’re not about to catch up to Google in terms of cloud computational power and sophistication… [but] it’s much more interesting when you apply it to 10,000 photos than to the ones you upload piecemeal. If your photos are still sitting on the hard drive, there’s not much you can do with cloud computing editing tricks.” MyShoebox’s strength is in getting the pictures from storage and sources that aren’t connected, to the web, as quickly and painlessly as possible. It’s a shotgun, not a scalpel, and it’s very good at what it does. Now, the version 2.0 update introduces features that make that wide-cast net even wider, since it allows for sharing with friends and family. The new Shared Gallery feature means you can swap photos with small groups of friends, each dumping into the same pool. Cosman says that where you’d normally only get the one or two photos with you in it your friend chooses to upload, with this new system you’ll end up with thousands of photos added to your collection. His own nearly doubled when beta testing this feature, he says. Also new with this update is a dedicated iPad app, as well as rebuilt mobile apps for browsing your uploaded photo collection. The whole point of the update has been on taking the MVP that MyShoebox launched back in October, which saw tremendous demand, and bring it up to a level of performance that could better wow users. Cosman says that interest and engagement continues to be consistently high for MyShoebox, but says we’ll have to wait a while longer for updated hard numbers on its user base. The company may be a small fish in a big pond, but it’s looking to be the service that’s first to solve the problem of not what to do with your photos once they’re online, but the one that gets them there in the first place. That will put it in a perfect position to leverage the cloud computing tricks that are making photo editing and sharing great once they’re there, Cosman believes.
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Today a TechStars-backed company is launching out of private beta and into the App Store in an attempt to bring the Utopian notion of a barterer’s lifestyle to fruition. Bondsy, founded by a long-haired, bearded, and Brazilian Diego Zambrano, lets users trade anything they own for anything their network has to offer. Yet, unlike Zaarly, TaskRabbit, or other peer-to-peer marketplaces, Bondsy tries to take the focus away from money, and place the real value of the service on the experiences shared. When you first sign up, you’re asked to give permissions to Twitter and Facebook and you instantly dive into a stream of your friends’ trade-worthy items. These can be things like tickets, an old bicycle, access to your home while you’re away for the week, herbs from your garden, or really anything you’re looking to get rid of. Zambrano told me over coffee that he once traded some left-over chili to a couple of friends once. See, Bondsy only lets you trade with friends and friends-of-friends, with the ability to designate a certain item to one or both groups. You can even designate different prices for friends as opposed to the outlying network. Let’s say I’m getting rid of my old dresser. I can ask for $200 from friends-of-friends, and “Let’s talk…” for friends, meaning I’d be open to negotiating a fair offer or giving them a discounted price. See, Bondsy encourages you to trade things that aren’t necessarily of monetary value, since the network is only people who you know. Because friendship is baked right in, the actual transaction feels less like a chore and more like meeting up with a friend. And there’s already a topic of conversation on the table in the form of the things you’re trading. This also means that tradable items are more likely to be favors, baked goods, and experience-based than money-based. You can choose to flip through the stream of your friends’ items or see the entire friend-of-friend network, and the same social features that you see on other stream-based sharing sites still apply. On Bondsy, you can repost an item if your friends will be interested in it, and you can even cc particular friends in the comment with an @mention. Bondsy is available now in the iOS App Store.
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Google today announced that it has been taking its Street View Trekker – the compact backpack version of its Street View cars – and its underwater Street View cameras to the Galapagos Islands and that it plans to make these images available on Google Maps later this year. The company worked together with the Charles Darwin Foundation, the Galapagos National Parks Directorate and, for the underwater survey, the Catlin Seaview Survey. The Street View team, Google says, spent 10 days in the Galapagos to capture imagery from 10 locations that were selected by its partners. During these hikes, Google Maps project lead Raleigh Seamster says, the team “walked past giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, navigated through steep trails and lava fields, and picked our way down the crater of an active volcano called Sierra Negra.” Google, of course, has been taking the Trekker across the world already and most recently hiked around the Grand Canyon to take enough images for over 9,500 panoramas there and handed it over to a local hiker to get imagery of Canada’s Arctic territory. The underwater part of the project, however, is maybe even more impressive. As Google revealed at I/O last week, the Catlin Seaview Survey currently has four underwater Street View cameras and its diver can cover about 2km during a single dive. The Galapagos expedition, Seamster noted in today’s announcement, marks the first time the team has captured imagery from both land and sea at the same time.
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