Ad startup 140 Proof is opening up a partner platform for companies that want to take advantage of its social ad targeting. The company currently delivers ads to 50 social apps, including Echofon, TweetCaster, and Plume. Underlying the network is something that 140 Proof calls “Interest Graph Targeting,” where users are assigned different “personas” based on what they say and who they follow. Those personas allow advertisers to serve ads to people with specific interests, and the new platform makes this interest targeting available to other companies. Among other things, co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III pitches this as a way for brand advertisers to extend their reach beyond traditional advertising like TV. For example, if an advertiser wanted to reach people interested Glee, they could run an ad during the show, but they could also target social network users who have commented about Glee or follow Glee-related accounts (as illustrated in the image above). Interest-based targeting will also be key if mobile ads are going to make money, he says. Several mobile and social ad companies have already signed up, including Jumptap, Celtra, and OneLouder. It seems like 140 Proof might face one of the common challenges of platform companies sometimes — balancing the needs of the platform with the other parts of the business. In this case, an ad network might be a customer of the platform but also a competitor with the 140 Proof network. However Manoogian says the market dwarfs any individual company, so it will be “a long time before we run into any channel conflicts.” And while advertising is an obvious place to start, Manoogian and his co-founder and CEO Jon Elvekrog see broader possibilities for the platform. For example, they say that an e-commerce site could use 140 Proof targeting to deliver improved recommendations.
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Box is releasing a number of new features today, with the broad theme of addressing “the needs of our largest enterprise customers in deploying this kind of technology,” according to CEO Aaron Levie. Those features include the ability to search files across an entire company, a new dashboard offering more granular controls for company administrators, mobile security options like passcode locks, support for multiple email domains, activity notification archiving, and a new enterprise licensing agreement. Altogether, Levie says this means big companies can manage organization-wide Box deployments “at a scale that was never before possible.” This should also help some of those larger customers address issues like regulatory compliance. For example, Box’s search was previously limited to individual accounts. The new enterprise-wide search addresses e-discovery requirements, so if a legal issue arises, businesses can find content anywhere within the company. The new ELA is crucial too, Levie says, because it means customers should have more predictable pricing as the exact size of their teams change, rather than paying purely on a seat-by-seat basis as in the past. Levie adds that this is part of a larger trend, both within Box and across cloud industry. A few years ago, CIOs of large companies only wanted to use a service like Box in isolated pockets of the organization. “Today what we’re seeing is, companies are doing the inverse,” Levie says. “They actually want their core systems to be cloud. … They would rather have the core systems be from vendors that can focus all of their energy on solving all of their core problems instantly.” Hence the new features making that process easier. Levie also points to the successful IPOs of companies like Jive Software and Splunk as evidence of how the enterprise landscape is changing. That brings up another question: Given its growth and success, is there a Box IPO on the horizon? It may may be in the long-term playbook, but Levie says that for now, he’s enjoying the benefits of keeping the company private, so, “We’re definitely not going to do anything this year.
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Autodesk is expanding its growing portfolio of iPad apps today with SketchBook Ink. The pen-and-ink app is built on a new graphical engine that’s independent of resolution, allowing the created artwork to be exported in resolutions exceeding 100 megapixels. This, Autodesk hopes, will reinvigorate graphic artists and even doodlers about iPad content creation since the vector-based artwork can scale to massive print sizes. SketchBook Ink joins Autodesk’s relatively large assortment of iPad drawing apps. Although powered by a new engine, the app feels very similar to the other titles including SketchBook Pro. The interface is a bit scaled, almost reorganized to make for a more intuitive user experience. SketchBook Ink launches with seven preset ink styles and two types of erasers. “I am a frequent doodler. I mostly like to draw pictures of my dog and stuffed animals, but today, during a riveting Disrupt Battlefield session, my mind wandered to a sunny, lightly wooded retreat miles away from the nearest Internet-connected computer. So I drew this using the new SketchBook Ink app.” Said Elin Blesener, TechCrunch Community Manager yesterday after being caught messing around on an iPad instead of working. Autodesk built the app for sharing. Artwork can be exported to the iPad’s photo library, iTunes, Dropbox, and can be shared quickly via email. The slick interface makes scaling upon exporting rather easy with options to keep it small for web use or export for print with a resolution over 100 megapixels. “With more than 10 million downloads to date, we’re proud that the SketchBook family is changing how, where, and with what tools people unlock their creativity. People who never considered using a digital app for their artwork before, are now turning to SketchBook to produce incredible illustrations,” said Samir Hanna, vice president, Consumer Products, Autodesk in a statement released to TechCrunch. Starting today, the Autodesk SketchBook Ink App is available for $4.99 from the App Store. But if you act fast, you can nab it for $1.99 during a special introductory promotion.
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Mobile advertising company  Millennial  Media, one of the biggest in the U.S., has released its quarterly ad impression report, and the results show that Apple continues to remain the single-biggest brand, and most popular phone maker, on the Millennial ad network — with the rest of the list largely dominated by Android. Apple has a clear lead in the field of device makers based on brand: the popularity of Apple’s iPhone handsets, iPad tablets and iPod music players gave the company a share of 28.32 percent of all devices on the network, with its closest competitor, Samsung, picking up a share of 18.25 percent of the overall market impressions. Millennial also notes that non-phone devices are continuing to see a growing impact on the overall mix. RIM slipped down to number-five in the list of top manufacturers, and  with 10.16 percent of all devices, and Nokia, once the leading vendor of mobile handsets, is now down to 10th position, with a 0.91 percent share of mobile devices. When considering individual handset models, you can really see the strength of Apple’s strong portfolio essentially built around one device. Apple only had the iPhone (unspecified which precise model; perhaps all three) in the top-20, but usage of iPhones was enough to give it 15.1 percent of the whole market. The next-closest competitor was BlackBerry Curve with a 4.44 percent share of the market. In contrast to Apple, other handset makers are still relying on several handset models, which all do moderately well, so that in aggregate they are gaining better market share. For example, RIM has five handsets in the top-20, the biggest number. Together that accounted for only 12 percent of impressions. Samsung had four handsets, which together made eight percent of impressions. HTC also had four models in top-20, with Motorola listing three. Although the usage of tablets is really taking off — Millennial notes that is up by 33 percent over last year — smartphones are still accounting for the vast majority of traffic. Collectively, they account for 73 percent of all ad impression traffic, versus 62 percent the year before. Traffic from tablets and other non-smartphone devices went up as well, t0 20 percent from 15 percent, while feature phones are really in decline. Lower end devices not account for only seven percent of ad impression traffic, compared to 23 percent a year ago.  
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In March, VEVO launched a bold new redesign that provided TV-like viewing, with instantaneous and continuous playback. But the biggest addition to the platform, other than a beautiful new full-screen player, was a new social sharing feature that takes advantage of Facebook Open Graph. Not surprisingly, VEVO seen a dramatic increase in the number of videos that are watched and shared on the social network since then. VEVO has seen a 600 percent increase in Facebook-published or -watched videos when compared to February, to 4.5 million. It’s also signed up half a million new users via Facebook, which represents a 142 percent increase over the previous month. And the total number of impressions on Facebook grew to 171 million, which is a 181 percent change from February. A caveat: VEVO isn’t the only video provider to see a jump in sharing and usage immediately after integrating with Facebook Open Graph. Video applications like Viddy and Socialcam had seen huge increases in the amount of viewership and registrations after adding seamless sharing. But Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away — and VEVO can’t count on that tremendous growth to continue indefinitely. That said, it’s not just viewership from Facebook that is increasing. VEVO is also showing an uptick in engagement from users, who are watching more videos longer. Viewers watched an average of 4.3 videos in March, compared to 3.8 videos viewed in February. And they spent 15.2 minutes on the site, compared to 13.1 minutes during the prior month. Facebook also isn’t the only place where viewers are tuning in to watch music videos on VEVO. The video service is also seeing huge amounts of viewership on mobile devices. In the first three months of the year, VEVO saw 254 million worldwide streams on mobile devices and connected TV apps, which is up 32 percent from the previous quarter. It also saw active users for iPhone grow 28 percent and iPad grow 22 percent during the time period.
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Late last year, Yahoo filed for a trademark on the phrase “Yahoo Axis.” The filing raised more questions than answers at the time, but after six months Yahoo has finally spilled the proverbial beans — Axis is both a new search-oriented add-on for your web browser, and a new browser app for iOS. Before I talk about what it’s like to actually use Axis, let’s first discuss why the hell they’re doing this in the first place. TechCrunch spoke to Yahoo’s Director of Product Management Ethan Batraski, and he told us his his job has been to figure out what search looks like over the next few years. Yahoo Axis was one of his answers. “No one’s innovated on ‘How do I get rid of the search results page altogether’”, Batraski said. “That is what we want to do.” That’s exactly what they did. Once you download, install, and log into Axis with your Yahoo credentials (you do have Yahoo credentials, don’t you?), a small back bar will begin to live in the bottom left corner of your preferred web browser. Right now Axis plugs into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, though Batraski didn’t completely rule out the possibility of Yahoo eventually releasing their own browser should there be enough interest. That little black pill has a search bar nestled in it, and mousing over it causes it stretch across the bottom of your browser window. Actually clicking in the search box and plugging in a search query makes the bar expand to fill roughly the bottom third of your browser window, displaying easily-scannable thumbnails of Yahoo’s search results. Yahoo’s idea here is to give their (or perhaps more accurately, Microsoft’s) search engine its own flexible space to live in outside of the traditional browser paradigm. With Axis installed, users who need to find things online don’t need to tear themselves away from the page they’re currently looking at by navigating to a different page or opening a new tab. There’s no question that it takes a little getting used to — as a longtime Chrome user, it’s become second nature to open a new tab a bang a search query into the address bar — but it’s been very thoughtfully executed. When Axis works (which is most of the time) it works very well. Occasionally, the black search box will fail to close properly, leaving behind a partial remnant of the last search result thumbnail in its place. Perhaps one of the most annoying things about Axis (at least on a Mac) is scrolling horizontally through the thumbnails of search results. Users can click and drag through them with a mouse or hit buttons mounted to the left or right of the results panel, but scrolling side to side with a trackpad can be tricky. It causes the results to move over three results at a time, which sometimes means you miss seeing some results.It’s a relatively minor point of contention (and one that’s probably easy to fix), but still, there you have it. But Axis on the desktop is only one part of the equation — its other half lives on your iPhone (or your iPad). Yahoo has also whipped together a standalone browser app for iOS that seeks to bring that same revamped search experience to the mobile space. This is where Yahoo actually manages to make me swoon a little bit. The iOS app is surprisingly good — it’s more than handsome enough, it runs very smoothly (thanks mostly to its WebKit underpinnings), and your bookmarks sync between devices quickly once you make sure you’re logged in. I’ll also admit right here that I’m a bit of a sucker for their font choices, but let’s not dwell on that. If anything, the big thumbnails for search results play out even better on a small screen. There’s no angling to make sure your finger touches the link just right. That said, I’m not sure it’ll be replacing the stock Browser app for me — what’s great about Axis for the desktop is that it fits into whatever browser you’ve decided you like enough to use. On iOS though, there’s no way to set a default browser so it takes a conscientious effort to use Axis there. For now, the Axis browser app remains an iOS exclusive. It’s not entirely impossible that we’ll see a version make its way onto Android someday, though I imagine Google may not take too kindly to a another search company trying to set foot in their territory. Batraski referred to Axis as an “experiment,” but to my utter pleasure, it’s a pretty damned good one. Is it enough to make a dyed-in-the-wool Googler convert? Probably not, but with nearly 700 million users still using Yahoo, I reckon a solid chunk will find something to enjoy here.
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It’s been a whirlwind couple of days here in New York, as our expert judges watched earnest startups pitch their hearts out onstage at the third annual TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Thirty startups presented in the first two days, to be whittled down to six after much judge deliberation and founder bated breath: gTar, OpenGarden, UberConference, Ark, Babelverse and Sunglass. Those six had to come back today to present again, this time in front of super-hardcore finals judges Fred Wilson, Roelof Botha, Marissa Mayer, Mike Arrington, Chris Dixon, Eric Eldon and Chi-Hua Chien, who dug deep into everything from customer acquisition strategy and revenue models to actual acquisition strategy in the cases of both UberConference and Ark. Then the judges retired for an hour and a half of deliberation, and as always, had a hard time deciding on a winner because each of the final six had a compelling draw. We finally got down to two, gTar and UberConference, and, after more deliberation, decided that this year’s winner of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC is UberConference, a service that hopes to change the way you and I make conference calls by setting up the call around a visual interface. gTar, a guitar app that attached to an actual hardware guitar to help you learn how to play, put on an impressive showing and is the official runner-up. But UberConference, founded by Google Voice creator Craig Ferguson, eliminates unwieldly PINs and the confusion surrounding not knowing who is who on a call by providing a slickly designed dashboard for conference calling. If you don’t think this is a problem, just ask our new COO Ned Desmond how he felt when we confused him for someone else on a conference call. Thank you to partners Sequoia Captial, AT&T, Credit Suisse, Getaround, Google, Hatch, Outbid, Quotidian Ventures, About.me, AllStateBanners.com, CityGrid, Domain.com, .ME, IBM, Launchpad Ignition, Mobli, popchips, Smith & Keats Music, OpenTok from TokBox, twake, Udemy, Whit.li, Caraquri, Freshdesk, Connect by Getty Images, Mashery, ooVoo, Sedan Magic, Skookum Digital Works, SponsorHub, Thefuture.fm, Tremendous Theming by Themendous, TouchTunes, Worry Free Labs and Rent The Runway, Gilt and Warby Parker for providing wardrobe. And if you want to learn how to pitch, check out UberConference’s winning presentation:
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Kony Solutions, the unfortunately named makers of a write once, run everywhere mobile app development platform today announced that it has closed a $15 million series C round of financing. The funding was led by New York City-based venture capital firm, Insight Venture Partners, a 17-year-old firm that has invested in companies like Tumblr, Buddy Media, Wix, Chegg, and Twitter — to name a few. Insight also led Kony’s $19.1 million series A financing, which it closed in January of last year. With its latest infusion of capital, which brings total funding to nearly $39 million, the startup is looking fund the deployment of new sales and marketing programs, regional expansion, and to ramp up hiring. For those unfamiliar, Kony is on a mission to develop technologies and apps that both facilitate and accelerate customer engagement on any mobile operating system, device or channel. Through its flagship product, KonyOne, the startup offers a development environment and mobile middleware that allows big businesses to build and launch both enterprise and consumer apps. As a result, Kony now offers support for nearly every technology and deployment option out there, from native apps on all native OSes, HTML5-capable browsers, single page apps, wrappers, hybrids, and more — even support for BYOD deployments. The agility and scalability of its platform have attracted more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, banks, airlines, as well as automotive and insurance companies. Kony CEO Raj Koneru says that the startup will use its newest round of funding to continue managing and expanding on its recent growth, which (as of the end of its FY2012) had seen more than 200 percent growth in bookings and has added more than 30 new global customers, including Aetna, CIBC, Independence Blue Cross, Scottrade and Sun Life Financial. What’s more, the company recently launched a suite of off-the-shelf, vertical-specific apps for banking, healthcare, retail, and travel, while earning the business of more than 30 new customers, including Aetna, CIRC, BlueCrossBlueShield, Scottrade, and Sun Life Financial. With patents-pending for its flagship product, KonyOne, support of more than a billion user sessions annually, and its being named a “Visionary” startup by Gartner, Kony is really starting to find the kind of traction it will need to compete in a crowded space. For more, check out Kony at home here.
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President Obama’s technology advisors are looking for some “kick ass” fellows to work on the White House’s new digital road map for open government. Announced on stage at Disrupt 2012, CTO Todd Park and CIO Steven VanRoekel detailed five new projects, each which will need a team of open government geeks to help move forward. You can view the first part of the application process here. So, what are they looking for? Park told the audience that he’s looking for the first 5 people one would want to begin a startup with: a mix of people with technical expertise, an accomplished history, and a passion for disruption. Technical skills for some team members are definitely important (UI/UX experience, coding, etc). But, a history of causing some type of disruption is definitely key. If you’ve managed to make your industry more transparent, participatory, or collaborative, definitely indicate that on the second round application (which will be later emailed to applicants). Last, a passion for using technology for social change, especially open data, should probably make its way into the application. Park and VanRoekel are also interested in working with entrepreneurs outside of the fellows program. For instance, in June, Park will help with a health care “datapalooza“, which will feature companies that leverage the new government data. Entrepreneurs can also follow Park and VanRoekel on Twitter for upcoming news, and @reply them with great ideas. Good luck to all of the applicants and entrepreneurs, and keep TechCrunch updated if you develop any great products related to open data.
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Confirming rumors from last week, HP just publicly announced a layoff plan that will result a reduction of 8% of its workforce. Shortly after releasing the memo to Wall Street, HP CEO Meg Whitman sent a company-wide video message explaining the future of Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s company. She acknowledges throughout that HP is currently in trouble stating in the beginning, “HP’s performance is still not where it needs to be” and “We have a lot of work ahead of us to get HP back on track.” She also explains, a bit comically and perhaps erroneously, that “[HP] is currently rebuilding credibility one quarter at time, and to do that, we need to consistently deliver on what we say.” Whitman also reaffirmed HP’s commitment to infrastructure, PCs and printing, servers, storage and networking. “This is a differentiating strength for HP and one we can be proud of,” she said in the video. However, the axe is about to fall throughout HP. Before Whitman attempts to justify the cuts, she explains that HP’s employee count has grown at a pace unsustainable by its low revenue as of late. “We’re struggling under our own weight,” said Whitman in today’s internal video memo. “And we’ve got to restore a healthy balance in order to return HP to its position as a growing… thriving… innovating… industry leader. That’s what this is all about. And the workforce reduction is only one piece of a comprehensive effort. We see a lot of opportunity to remove complexity, streamline and reduce costs in a number of areas across HP.” Like previous rumors speculated, HP plans on reinvesting the savings into the company. “We’ll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization. And in each of our businesses, we’ll make investments to stay ahead of customer expectations and market trends.” This is a fresh move for HP who under previous leadership simply used the savings of a smaller company to help the ledger. In the consumer-focused PC and Printing Group, “we’ll be focused on design, engineering, quality, and generating demand and desire with our customers,” she said. In Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) “we’ll invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking. In Software, we’ll be investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings. This will include the extension of Vertica and Autonomy across our entire portfolio. And in Services, we’ll improve processes and build-out capabilities in cloud, security and information. We’ll also be strengthening our industry practices, as well as our service quality and innovation.” Whitman also detailed that HP is looking to better train their employees while providing a “career development and better tools and support.” Like most leaders, Whitman ends the video reminder her underlings that “In times of change, it’s easy to lose focus, waiting to see what happens next. We can’t let that happen. This a great organization, full of incredible people who are resilient, committed and who care about our customers and our company. I’m asking all of you to please keep driving forward. Close every deal. Leave nothing on the table. We need that now more than ever.” Below is a transcript of the video. Hi. Today HP announced second quarter results, and once again, we delivered on what we said we would do. Our publicly-stated guidance for non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was 88 to 91 cents. And we delivered 98 cents, beating our outlook by 7 cents a share on revenues of $30.7 billion. I thank all of you for your hard work and dedication. This is a journey. We’re rebuilding credibility one quarter at time, and to do that, we need to consistently deliver on what we say. You are at the heart of our results. Without your efforts, HP cannot thrive. But HP’s performance is still not where it needs to be. Our business is still declining. Year-over-year, non-GAAP EPS was down 21 percent and revenues were down 3 percent. We have a lot of work ahead of us to get HP back on track and that begins with executing against the strategy we’ve talked about in recent months. Our foundation is infrastructure, PCs and printing, servers, storage and networking. This is a differentiating strength for HP and one we can be proud of. HP Software extends and strengthens that foundation, solving customer challenges like managing, securing and automating the information flow across the data center. Services makes it all work together for the customer, ensuring their technology is meeting their needs. And finally, we combine our infrastructure, software and services into comprehensive solutions that deliver enormous customer value. Moving forward we’re aligning our powerful collection of assets to capture leadership in three strategic areas: Cloud, security, and information optimization. But to do this we must invest and we cannot afford to wait. As we discussed in Q1, our costs are expanding while our revenues decline, and this has been happening for too long. The strategic realignment we announced last quarter was a good first step in addressing this problem by beginning the process of removing complexity, simplifying our operations, and reducing costs. And today we’re taking the next step in this journey with the announcement of a multi-year restructuring that will touch every part of HP and create a more streamlined company. We’re taking a pre-tax charge of approximately $1.7 billion to be included in our FY12 GAAP results, as well as a further multi-year pre-tax charge of $1.8 billion. By the end of 2014, we expect to reduce the workforce by 27,000 positions through a combination of layoffs and early retirement. And we expect to generate run-rate cost savings of approximately $3 to 3.5 billion. These are difficult actions. Workforce reductions aren’t easy and we don’t take them lightly. They adversely impact people’s lives and are tough on the company, our culture and you. We’re trying our best to mitigate the impact as much as we can. We’ve limited hiring to try and reduce the number of people affected. For those positions we have open, we’re giving top consideration to internal candidates. We’re offering an upgraded early retirement package in the US, and expanding our career transition and planning services to better support employees. I know HP has been through a lot in recent years and this is another dose of change. But in this case, it’s absolutely essential for the long-term health of our company. Let me share a little perspective. At the end of 2009, we reported a workforce of about 304,000. At the end of 2010, we had almost 325,000 employees and at the end 2011, that number had ballooned to nearly 350,000. Over that same period, we saw year-over-year revenue growth of 10 percent in 2010, of 1 percent in 2011… and so far in 2012, revenues have been declining. We’re struggling under our own weight. And we’ve got to restore a healthy balance in order to return HP to its position as a growing… thriving… innovating… industry leader. That’s what this is all about. And the workforce reduction is only one piece of a comprehensive effort. We see a lot of opportunity to remove complexity, streamline and reduce costs in a number of areas across HP. I know that many of you remember the cost reduction of years past, like data center consolidation and centralizing functions such as HR, Legal, Finance and IT. What we’re doing now is different. We’re going after the big cost buckets and fundamental business process reengineering. This includes optimizing the supply chain, reducing the number of SKUs and platforms, continuing to hone our real estate strategy, simplifying our go-to-market, improving business processes, and implementing consistent pricing and promotions to drive end-user demand profitably. It’s harder work with greater potential payoff. Another difference from years past is what we plan to do with the savings. The majority of savings this time around will be invested in the business. We’ll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization. And in each of our businesses, we’ll make investments to stay ahead of customer expectations and market trends. In our PC and Printing businesses, we’ll be focused on design, engineering, quality, and generating demand and desire with our customers. In ESSN, we’ll invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking. Together they create a converged infrastructure that is the foundation for top customer initiatives such as cloud, big data analytics and social media. In Software, we’ll be investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings. This will include the extension of Vertica and Autonomy across our entire portfolio. And in Services, we’ll improve processes and build-out capabilities in cloud, security and information. We’ll also be strengthening our industry practices, as well as our service quality and innovation. Additionally, we’ll invest in our people – in better training, better career development and better tools and support. In times of change, it’s easy to lose focus, waiting to see what happens next. We can’t let that happen. This a great organization, full of incredible people who are resilient, committed and who care about our customers and our company. I’m asking all of you to please keep driving forward. Close every deal. Leave nothing on the table. We need that now more than ever. I’m confident in the decisions we’ve made and the direction we’re going. Together, we will define the future of HP and of our industry. We’ll be holding our next all employee broadcast on June 18th and I look forward to speaking with you then and answering your questions. Thank you.
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Within HP’s quarterly results today, a bit of a development on Autonomy, the company’s $10.2 billion enterprise software purchase from last year that was profitable when HP bought it but in the last quarter saw “significant” declines in its core licensing revenue: its founder and head Mike Lynch is stepping down, and he is getting replaced by a HP man: chief strategy officer and EVP of enterprise software Bill Veghte. HP says in its Q2 earnings release that this is being done to help improve Autonomy’s performance. In an internal memo to employees, which TechCrunch has obtained, CEO Meg Whitman says that the move is being made to as a mark of how HP is “investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings.” The same strategy will be applied to the company’s Vertica business, Whitman noted in the memo. HP’s Q2 earnings saw revenues down by three percent of $30.7 billion. Within that, the company saw a mixed (but overall declining performance) in its different divisions: The Personal Systems group saw flat revenues with a 5.5 percent operating margin. Commercial revenues were up three percent but the bigger portion, consumer revenue, declined by four percent. Total unit sales were down by one percent. Services were down by one percent with 11.3 percent operating marging. Imaging and printing (which is merging with PSG) is down 10 percent. Enterprise servers, storage and networking also down by six percent. HP financial services up by nine percent with a 9.9 percent operating margin. Sofware revenue up most of all: 22 percent with a 17.7 percent operating margin (no wonder this is the part that previous CEO, Leo Apotheker, wanted to keep and ditch all hardware). However, within this Autonomy saw a “significant” decline in license revenue. Autonomy’s performance probably represents something of a disappointment — and perhaps surprise to HP, since the unit seemed to be doing much better when the acquisition was announced in October. At the time of the deal, Apotheker noted: “Autonomy presents an opportunity to accelerate our strategic vision to decisively and profitably lead a large and growing space…Together with Autonomy, we plan to reinvent how both unstructured and structured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected. Autonomy has an attractive business model, including a strong cloud based solution set, which is aligned with HP’s efforts to improve our portfolio mix. We believe this bold action will squarely position HP in software and information to create the next-generation Information Platform, and thereby, create significant value for our shareholders…Autonomy is a highly profitable and globally respected software company, with a well-regarded management team and talented, dedicated employees. We look forward to partnering with a company who shares our commitment to solving customer problems by creating smart, cutting-edge products and solutions.”  Mike Lynch, the founder and current head, will be stepping down after a transition period, HP says, and it doesn’t look like it’s giving up on Autonomy any time soon: “the market and competitive positioning for Autonomy remain strong, particularly in cloud offerings,” the company writes in its statement.
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Internet music service Pandora just announced its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 2013. The company had a total revenue of $80.8 million, a 58% increase year-over-year. Out of these $80.8 million, $70.6 million came from advertising revenue and $10.2 million from subscription revenue. Advertising revenue increased 62% year-over-year and subscription revenue increased 38%. Despite its increased revenue, Pandora still reported a net loss per share of $0.12 and Non-GAAP net loss of $0.09 per share. Pandora currently has $80.6 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. That’s down $10 million from the last quarter. The company’s cash used for its operating activities increased significantly from $2.8 million in the year-ago quarter to $10.6 million. Looking ahead, Pandora is raising its expectations for the full fiscal year. The company now expects to make between $420-427 million in revenue for its fiscal 2013, resulting in a net loss per-share of between $0.07 and $0.11. More Listeners, More Advertisers Overall, the company’s active users reached a record 51.9 million this quarter, up 53% year-over-year. Pandora now has a 71.7% share of the top U.S. Internet radio services and commands almost 6% of the total U.S. radio listening market. According to Pandora, this means that advertisers are also getting even more interested in its services, as “They are moving quickly to speak with their target customers across the Pandora platform, with the majority of the top 50 digital advertisers in the U.S. already having bought multiplatform advertising on Pandora. “
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tape.tv has been around for a while – since July 2008 to be exact. It operates like a mix between an online version of MTV and Pandora. Just like the latter service, on Tape.tv users can skip, like or dislike the videos as they play, so the service starts to tailor itself to their tastes. I came across it in various visits to Berlin over the last couple of years but have been frustrated that this great service has only been aimed at the German market. However, I’m excited that it’s about to scale into new countries. The company has now raised €5 million ($6.2 million) in a Series B funding round. Participants include Atlantic Capital Partners GmbH , Dario Suter, Christoph Daniel and Marc Schmidhelny (DCM), prolific Berlin Angel investor Christophe Maire, alongside Investitionsbank Berlin and VC Kreativwirtschaft Berlin. The cash will be used to scale the business, appear on other platforms like smart TVs and launches into France and the UK in early autumn. The relaunch will also see the creation of an electronic program guide (EPG) for their own live shows and events. Its tape.tv’s catalogue of 45,000 videos has attracted around 3.5 million users in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, its main markets since it launched in July 2008. The company managed to navigate the tricky music licensing laws in Germany, which has seen YouTube hobbled in some areas. Founded by Conrad Fritzsch (CEO) and Stephanie Renner, Tape.tv plans to have an editorial team in each region it launches in, programming its sub channels, like Indie and Hip-Hop. Fritzsch says the company is now aiming at the convergence of Internet and TV towards SmartTV and hopes to extend to mobile as well. “The future of tape.tv will also be more social, based on user behaviour” he says. The company has 65 employees, many of them selling ads around the videos, and also has a real TV show on on the ZDFkultur channel in Germany. But it’s a lucrative business. It’s claiming to be running on €20 million in annual revenues. In Germany it has plenty of strategic partners, including ZDF.kultur, bild.de und spiegel.de and apps with Facebook, Spotify and Last.fm.
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Hearst is best known as print publisher, but this year its digital arm has been making a big push into social media. Its latest effort is a Father’s Day themed Facebook app for Redbook magazine. In order to use the Father’s Day app, people need to “like” the Redbook Facebook page. Once you’ve done that, you can bring up a list of all the dads in your network. Then you can post a Father’s Day message to any of their Facebook Walls, and optionally, on yours too. I was a little surprised to see the app coming from Redbook, which targets young married women — not necessarily the first audience I’d think of when it comes to celebrating Father’s Day. However, Brian Madden, director of social at Hearst Digital Media, points out that the emphasis is on thanking not just your father, but all the dads you know, whether it’s your husband, your brother, your uncle, or whomever. He also says this is a way for Redbook to leverage its fans to get into “the feeds of other like-minded women.” While I was interested in hearing about the Redbook app, I also wanted to get an update on Hearst’s general social strategy. Apparently Madden’s team was just created in February, and it’s focusing on two main strategies — increasing social sharing from Hearst websites, while also creating social network-specific experiences to engage fans. “The philosophy right now is to make sure that we have social strategies that pay,” says VP of Digital Grant Whitmore. “And when I say pay, I don’t necessarily mean in a monetary sense. We know that our social strategy can’t just be about counts of fans and followers, but it has to be tied to some measurable engagement.” When it comes to measurable engagement Hearst says the numbers are going up. In the first quarter of the year, on-site sharing was up 74 percent, and in April, Facebook drove a record 2 million visits to Hearst site. During that month, the reach of Hearst publications’ Facebook posts and pages also increased 30 percent compared to March.
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Technology has helped to level the playing field across a wide range of industries, letting more individuals come to the table in fields such as publishing, entertainment and, of course, building web startups. And according to Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers partner Chi-Hua Chien, the next space ripe for a big tech-powered wave of democratization is commerce. In an on-stage conversation with David Kirkpatrick at the TechCrunch NYC Disrupt conference Wednesday afternoon, Chien explained how tech has helped flatten a number of previously stratified spaces. The mid- to late-90′s saw the democratization of information — companies such as Google made data available to everyone, no matter where or who they were. After that came the democratization of distribution, with services such as Twitter and Facebook allowing anyone to broadcast their content and potentially attract an audience. The democratization of computing has occurred as well, with billions of people in the world now having access to computers because of the availability of low-cost mobile devices. Up next? The world of shopping and selling. “We’re now entering an era around the democratization of commerce,” Chien said. The past, he said, has been about “mass aggregation,” with companies such as Safeway and Wal-Mart rising to the top of the commerce space by simply being the best at aggregating a suite of products into one space. These big companies also built up their own brand names to make shoppers feel secure in buying things from them. Today, though, we are starting to “see an unwinding of aggregation of commerce as technology starts to disrupt” the industry, Chien said. “If you think about what a Wal-Mart does, it aggregates credibility and inventory,” Chien said. Credibility is the Wal-Mart brand name, and the inventory is simply products and storage. Today, credibility can be established by smaller players via social media, and real estate and inventory can be outsourced much easier. Chien pointed to two Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies to illustrate this movement: Square, which he said is democratizing becoming a merchant, and Zaarly for democratizing the ability to do a particular job. In a short conversation off-stage, he told me that Gumroad is also one of the Kleiner-backed startups that is leading the way toward big commerce disruption. Looking at Kleiner Perkins itself, Chien not surprisingly declined from discussing the lawsuit filed by investment partner Ellen Pao (the news of which TechCrunch was the first to break yesterday) during his fireside chat. But, he did shed some light on the firm’s larger strategy, in particular its increasing focus on making digital investments, after a few years of being more well-known for making moves in the green tech space. “In the last five years, [Kleiner has] added four investing partners focusing on consumer digital,” Chien said.
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When you’re stuck for three days in a big warehouse with the same group of smart people talking about the future of tech innovation over and over and over again (+beer), you start getting really silly. And some of the unique circumstances of year’s TechCrunch Disrupt New York have given us plenty to be silly about. For instance, there are birds, live birds (!) in the conference hall, and in fact I can hear them right now chirping LOUDLY while one of the demo companies presents onstage. The birds are so prevalent that they’ve spawned jokes from some of the speakers, like, “It’s so hip of you guys to hold a conference in a bird sanctuary” in addition to a fake Twitter account, @TechCrunchBird, which tweets stuff like, “*Frightened fluttering from music,* “”Disappointed chirp.,” “*quiet listening*,” and my personal favorite, 啁啾 ‪(‘Chirp’ in Chinese). Along with the CrunchBird, we’ve got the “Josh Constine Asking The Hard Hitting Questions” meme, inspired by the fact that Constine, one of our newest writers, GRILLED CEO Tim Armstrong hard on his fumbled moves with TechCrunch and Aol’s other content properties. Because the image of floppy-haired Josh taking down the high-powered Aol exec was so hilarious, we thought about some other situations in history where Josh’s mad interviewing skills and unerring, bloodthirsty quest for the truth could have come in handy. The sight of TechCrunch editor John Biggs riding around Startup Alley on a motorized beer cooler was so ridiculous that we turned into an equally ridiculous gif. And yes, you could pretty much watch this forever and never be sick of it. You know what else we will probably never be sick of? Putting MC Hammer on stage, and this year we got him up there twice as a Startup Battlefield judge (because of confusion he showed up late), resulting in a slew of “Judge Hammer Presides” jokes. The Hammer caption contest winner? Well “You have to ask yourself — how legit am I, in regard to my not quitting?” definitely has my vote. And speaking of hammered, here’s a random picture of our head developer Vineet Thanedar getting drunk on Churchkey beer at 10am. See you at Disrupt SF!
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Just a day after a gender discrimination suit was filed against one of Silicon Valley’s most storied firms Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, an all-male panel of VCs at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference said that sexism isn’t that much of an issue in the industry. “This business is a meritocracy by and large,” said Greg McAdoo, who is a partner at Sequoia Capital and said that the firm has female partners. “I have no doubt that there are pockets of issues, because in humanity you’re going to have that.” He added, “We look for folks who can help companies become great businesses over time and we don’t ask a lot of questions about gender or what have you.” Sequoia doesn’t have any female partners on the U.S. side, but it does have some in China. Yesterday, Ellen Pao, an investment partner with Kleiner Perkins sued her firm for sexual harassment and gender discrimination. We chronicled it in more detail here. In the suit, it basically says that Pao faced and eventually gave into sexual advances from another partner. When the relationship ended, the lawsuit said that partner retaliated against her professionally over several years. Kleiner Perkins has said the suit is without merit. No one except for McAdoo answered the question about sexism from moderator and “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick. The other panelists included CrunchFund’s Michael Arrington, First Round’s Josh Kopelman, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures’ Charlie O’Donnell and Kleiner Perkins’ Mike Abbott. Abbott is very new to Kleiner Perkins and only came on last December from Twitter after many of the instances mentioned in Pao’s suit allegedly happened. He couldn’t comment on the suit. Kleiner has several prominent female partners including Mary Meeker and Aileen Lee, who recently started an early-stage fund. Arrington has written a boatload about the “women in tech” issue but from a blogger’s vantage point. Meanwhile, O’Donnell’s dalliances with women in the New York tech scene have been exhaustively chronicled by Betabeat. The panelists also talked about a few other big issues in the industry right now — namely the rise of Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. Andreessen Horowitz has ensconced itself into the top tier of venture firms over the last few years — an astonishingly fast rise for a firm so young. It’s done this in part by saying that it’s a “full service” firm that provides a lot more than just capital. It helps with recruiting and operations. But the panelists said every other good firm does this too. They just don’t talk about it as much. “Venture capital is a service-oriented business. They’ve been doing it for a long time. Sequoia has taken many companies from being founded to IPO,” Arrington said. “What Andreessen is doing isn’t new. They’re just marketing themselves extremely well. If I were part of another firm, I would start thinking about marketing myself better and getting that message out.” The panelists also touched on Y Combinator’s rise too. The early-stage venture firm’s next class is going to have more than 80 companies and the number of applications for every cycle has grown so quickly that admissions are now down to 2 percent. But that’s also made its companies quite expensive to get into with the average valuation cap for the last class being around $10 million. “What they’re doing for entrepreneurs is great,” Kopelman said. “There are more and more companies being built. At the same time, venture capital industry is shrinking so we’ll see some atrophy for many of these companies. But this is natural. If you can shrink a failure cycle from 6 years to 1, then the entrepreneur gets six at-bats.” Arrington called out Sequoia for not investing in the last class — which was a prod to see if Y Combinator valuations are getting so high that they’re dissuading even top tier investors from going in. McAdoo said, “We have invested in a dozen YC companies over the years and a third of those rounds were done well after YC finished.” They also talked about Facebook’s IPO last Friday and whether its performance with a more than 23 percent decline since opening at $42.05 a share. “I don’t accept the premise of this question. The Facebook IPO is a ‘disaster’?” Arrington said. “It’s a PR disaster. We have a new $100 billion public company that’s going to acquire all of the companies we’re investing in.”
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A mixed bag of news for HP today: it has posted Q2 sales that have just edged out analyst expectations, but it has also confirmed 27,000 job cuts that should save it between $3 billion and $3.5 billion by 2014. The company is a tech behemoth: it employs 350,000 people worldwide, before these cuts were announced. This means the cuts are equivalent to about 8 percent of its workforce. The cuts fall squarely in the middle of the estimates that were reported in past weeks, with CEO Meg Whitman reportedly planning to cut between 25,000 and 30,000 jobs — news that investors seemed to actually find encouraging with the stock price rising on the news. The company has been slowly changing the course of its ship in the past quarter. In March, the company announced an “organizational realignment” in which it started to consolidate some of its hardware assets. Its Imaging and Printing Group were merged with its Personal Systems Group to create a new Printing and Personal Systems Group that is now led by Todd Bradley, who had been heading up the PSG since 2005. Last week HP announced that it would be giving shareholders a dividend of 13.2 cents per share. It is the third in FY2012 for HP. The company has 2 billion shares of common stock outstanding. Earning should be coming out any minute now and analysts think these will be largely within expectations: $29.92 billion in revenues and earnings per share of $0.91. As a point of comparison in demonstrating the drop in HP’s fortunes, EPS for the same quarter last year was $5.24. As AllThingsD pointed out earlier today, one big focus for the company is in its regional operations — specifically Europe. Some 37 percent of its revenues come from that part of the world — around $11 billion for this last quarter — and given the economic problems in Europe at the moment this means HP is the most exposed of the tech companies in the region. Shares in the company were down nearly 5 percent before the release was announced. Release below. More to come. PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire – May 23, 2012) – HP (NYSE: HPQ) today outlined plans for a multi-year productivity initiative designed to simplify business processes, advance innovation and deliver better results for customers, employees and shareholders. The restructuring is expected to generate annualized savings in the range of $3.0 to $3.5 billion exiting fiscal year 2014, of which the majority will be reinvested back into the company. Enabling investments in people, processes and technology will allow HP to accomplish the restructuring effort and to generate the savings. These moves are expected to yield significant improvements in efficiency and customer service during the next several years. HP expects to use the savings to boost investment in innovation around its three areas of strategic focus: cloud, big data and security, as well as in other segments that offer attractive growth potential. As part of the restructuring, HP expects approximately 27,000 employees to exit the company, or 8.0% of its workforce as of Oct. 31, 2011, by the end of fiscal year 2014. The company is offering an early retirement program, so the total number of employees affected will be impacted by the number of employees that participate in the early retirement plan. Workforce reduction plans will vary by country, based on local legal requirements and consultation with works councils and employee representatives, as appropriate. In addition to these restructuring actions, HP expects to achieve additional savings from non-headcount cost reductions, including supply chain optimization, SKU and platform rationalization, go-to-market strategy simplification and business process improvement. “These initiatives build upon our recent organizational realignment, and will further streamline our operations, improve our processes, and remove complexity from our business,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “While some of these actions are difficult because they involve the loss of jobs, they are necessary to improve execution and to fund the long term health of the company. We are setting HP on a path to extend our global leadership and deliver the greatest value to customers and shareholders.” HP expects to reinvest savings in each of its business segments to strengthen their ability to stay ahead of customer expectations and capitalize on growing market trends. HP will invest in research and development to drive innovation and differentiation across its core printing and personal systems businesses, as well as emerging areas. It will also invest in marketing, sales productivity and tools that simplify the customer experience and make it easier to do business with HP. Services will invest in accelerating service capabilities in the high client value areas of cloud, security and information analytics by enhancing HP intellectual property. Services will also strengthen its industry orientation and continue to differentiate its service offerings through quality and innovation delivered to clients. Combined, these activities are expected to shift the portfolio to a more profitable mix of higher-growth services. Additional work in lean process methodologies is expected to better serve clients and increase overall efficiencies. Software will invest to speed development in the areas of security, big data and the management of application lifecycle and infrastructure solutions, both on premise and in the cloud. It will also further leverage the capabilities of Autonomy and Vertica across the entire HP portfolio. Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking will invest to accelerate its research and development activities to extend its leading portfolio of servers, storage and networking. Together these assets create a Converged Infrastructure which is the foundation for top client initiatives such as cloud, virtualization, big data analytics, legacy modernization and social media. As a result of this restructuring, HP expects to record a pre-tax charge of approximately $1.7 billion in fiscal 2012 that will be included in its GAAP financial results for that period. Through fiscal 2014, HP expects to record additional pre-tax charges approximating $1.8 billion that will be included in its GAAP financial results for the appropriate periods.
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This afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, our own Josh Constine sat down with David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” to discuss what they thought about the future of the newly IPO’ed social network. Specifically, the two focused on the potential for Facebook’s advertising platform, its competitive advantages over incumbents and competitors, and its potential acquisition targets which could help its platform expand. Josh started off by asking Kirkpatrick what he thought was the most important thing Facebook should do going forward. David responded that Facebook shouldn’t do anything differently, even going so far as to say that doing so would be the “most perilous mistake they could make.” However, in terms of how the IPO could potentially affect the company’s focus, and specifically CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on product, was the fact that Zuckerberg now has to “sell a lot of ads.” As a public company, analysts will be making quarterly earnings projections, and Zuckerberg will have to waste a lot of time thinking about that, said Kirkpatrick. Whether Zuckerberg likes it or not, he will have to think about money now, Kirkpatrick lamented, a role that the CEO had historically dedicated to COO Sheryl Sandberg. However, Josh pointed out that shift may not be a bad thing — Zuckerberg hasn’t “applied his big brain to monetization yet,” he noted. The two then moved onto sharing their thoughts about the Facebook advertising platform, which had Josh asking what Kirkpatrick thought Facebook had done that was really special in ads. Responded the author, “to create an environment which can be so accurately targeted for advertising is an innovation in itself.” He added that it’s also effectively an unmonetized innovation at this time, and he’s confident that there’s a lot of revenue opportunity there in the future, too. Kirkpatrick said that he felt that even something as simple as putting an ad in your News Feed was an innovation. In discussing new monetization streams for the network, the potential for an offsite ad network that could one day rival Google’s AdSense was huge. There are already 9 million businesses and advertisers on the Facebook ad platform today, said Kirkpatrick. But highly targeted ads – the kind you would see on Facebook itself – could potentially freak people out when they showed up on the wider Internet, Josh pointed out. Kirkpatrick agreed to a point, but said that most people, including the average Facebook user, don’t seem to really care. There’s a tidal wave of “anti-targeting mindset,” especially in Europe, said Kirkpatrick, but it seemed to be mostly among the press, the government, and the “influentials” (which he dubbed the “punditocracy”). “A lot don’t understand Facebook or advertising that well,” he said of this group, painting them with a rather large brush. Kirkpatrick also said that not only does the average Facebook user not care about ads, in some of Facebook’s largest markets, it’s not a concern at all. Indonesia, for example – Facebook’s fourth largest country –  has no issue with Facebook’s advertising. Finally, in terms of what companies Facebook should acquire next, both agreed that moving into physical payments would make sense for the company. “Tumblr is an interesting company for Facebook to think about,” Kirkpatrick stated. He also thought that Facebook couldn’t help but be obsessing over Pinterest right now, but Josh vehemently disagreed. Instead, Josh’s picks were some sort of peer-to-peer payments company like Venmo, and an offsite ad network that would give Facebook the ability to scrape data from outside of its own network. As for the recent Instagram and Karma acquisitions, Kirkpatrick called them “unexpected and surprising,” saying that they’re really app related, which he thought was odd. “What’s really important for Facebook is being a platform,” he said. He thought the biggest investments would be to “augment their platform capabilities, not their app capabilities.” But he concluded that some things, like photos, may be so important to the platform that they felt they needed to spend a billion dollars on it.
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Shaker won TechCrunch Disrupt SF last year with its 3-D virtual nightclub built on top of Facebook, and June 8th it will finally launch in North America with the help of the music industry’s Live Nation and BandPage. Until then you can sign up for Shaker, and when you do, you’ll get a classic album cover of Bob Marley, The Clash, or another legend remixed with your Facebook photos and data. The partnerships, promotion, and landing page all point to a big focus on music as a social lubricant for hanging out with people on Shaker. It’s been a wild eight months since Shaker won Disrupt. It raised a $15 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures, and joined by CrunchFund, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun, and Israel’s Pitango Venture Capital. It also scored some more money from Motorola Mobility (now owned by Google), threw some online parties for New Year’s Eve and the NBA All-Star Game, and hosted a peace conference featuring Hillary Clinton. Shaker’s racked up tens of thousands of requests from people wanting to set up their own place to gather online with friends, fellow activists, and sexy strangers. Many of them will get their first chance to party or mingle on June 8th at 7:53pm PST when Shaker launches its first public meeting place. A concert may be in store for Shaker’s launch since it’s work working with Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster and one of the world’s biggest musician management firms, and BandPage, who became the de facto musician profile app on Facebook. But Shaker isn’t trying to be Turntable.fm. Instead of everyone just staring at the DJ, music is what will break the ice so Shaker users can meet each other or have something to talk about. That’s good news for the Internet, where those things can get awkward fast. It’s actually kind of absurd that when we think of “social” online, we think of feeds of text and photos. If you’ve ever jumped on Facebook or Twitter on a Friday night, it can be a little depressing — just a bunch of updates of people doing fun things without you. Video chat services like Google Hangouts are good for small groups, but they devolve into chaos and lag once you get too many people on at once. Shaker could seem like a gimmick to some, and it’s too silly or filled with gamification, that’s all it might end up being. But if its team can make Shaker feel like a real, natural virtualization of ourselves, it could make it cool to sit home alone on your computer. Because you won’t really be alone.
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This time last year, Brett Martin took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York to launch Sonar, a mobile app that connects you to friends and other people nearby, based on your existing social networks. Fast forward to today and the Battlefield runner-up is rolling out a major update to its mobile app that will allow Sonar to finally become the “Here-Now” social network. The app previously focused on providing relevant information to users about others around them based on connections via Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Twitter. Extremely useful for conferences like Disrupt, when you’re at a party or maybe even starting a new job. So what’s new? Aside from the usual under the hood tweaks, Sonar has crammed in Status, Sonar Presence, Notifications and Messaging. The status update serves as a hyperlocal broadcast tool for those within close proximity and even pushes out a notification to your friends when they’re close by. Sonar Presence runs in the background to let others know what you’re up to or when friends are nearby, pushing a notification to alert you to folks you are already connected to. Sonar says one way they’re set apart from other apps in the space is that they’re most interested in showing you real connections and people you actually care about. Like others in the space, battery issues remain because current devices aren’t optimized to use GPS properly. You can pause Sonar in the background, BTW. Notifications will only ping you when friends you actually know and are connected to are nearby. Messaging is pretty straight forward and lets you lob chats back and forth with other Sonar users. So if you’re heading into the office and Sonar notifies you that a co-worker is close by, you can send a message asking them to hold the elevator or ask if they need a coffee. Sonar also offers a replacement to the irritating “Where are you guys” texts that are a staple of meeting up at a concert or park. Brilliant, no? Oh, you think you’ve heard this before, have you? How useful is Highlight outside of the San Francisco tech circle? Because it’s pretty worthless in New York. There are folks working in every industry imaginable, not just tech. And what about getting results anywhere outside of a tech hub? Sonar says they had users in 35 countries just within a week of their launch last year, and have seen usage in more than 65 countries total. If you don’t see the value in a service like Sonar, then you’re totally missing the point and drinking the kool-aid. Oddly enough, I’d heard this pitch before but it came at a time before the App Store was even a thing. Back in 2008, Mike declared that he’d seen the “Future Of Social Networking.” He described it as such: A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar. Given the intimate connection we have with our mobile devices, who wouldn’t want this type of service at our fingertips? It’s not like we don’t immediately Google someone we’ve just met anyway. Mike never disclosed the name of the company and we never heard from them again. But it doesn’t matter. Sonar does just that and more. Sonar [App Store]
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Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge Alsup has this afternoon dismissed the jury and decided that the search giant’s mobile OS did not in fact infringe on Oracle’s patents. The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.) The jury’s decision was obviously a laborious one, following two years of a legal back-and-forth between the two tech giants. Oracle had initially filed the lawsuit back in August 2010, in which the company asserted that Android infringed on certain parts of the technology it acquired from its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Of course, that decision was only the first act in the three-part deliberations, which was slated to be followed by consideration of copyright, patent issues, and finally the damages Google would be liable for were they found guilty. Updating
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Last month, Marketo announced that it was acquiring social marketing startup Crowd Factory to add a social component to its marketing automation tools. Today the company is releasing its first products to come out of the deal. Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez says this represents the two companies’ technology “all put together into a single hybridized product.” Actually, Marketo is releasing two products, Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions, as part of a new Marketo Social Marketing suite. “I think there’s a tremendous pent-up hunger to take social marketing out of the silo and to bring it into the mainstream,” Fernandez says. And by that, he means that these aren’t just tools for marketing on Facebook, but rather for adding a social element to a broad range of online campaigns. Sanjay Dholakia, formerly CEO of Crowd Factory and now Market’s senior vice president of product marketing and corporate development, says there are two big pieces to the suite. First, it helps you “put this word-of-mouth lift on everything you’re doing” by adding a social element to relatively traditional marketing and advertising. For example, he says you could direct your AdWords campaign to a Marketo landing page (that includes social sharing, so that each paid click that you get through the ad can multiply into many more visitors. Second, he says this will help companies reach their audience in new ways, like sweepstakes and flash deals. And of course there’s analytics data to help you see the measure of your campaigns. Fernandez announced the new suite today as part of the Marketo Summit 2012.
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A number of cable, satellite, and IPTV providers have introduced TV Everywhere services that let viewers watch TV content online. But satellite TV provider DISH will be the first to introduce a standalone subscription TV service over-the-top, with the launch of its new DISHWorld package of international channels rolling out on the Roku streaming box. DISHWorld is made up of a series of international video channels from and makes them available on Roku for as little as $19.99 a month. The service allows DISH to take a bunch of content that doesn’t usually have a huge audience, and doesn’t cost a whole helluva lot to license, and make it available to niche audiences. And Roku is already a pretty popular device for watching international content. According to the Roku blog, DISHWorld has more than 50 international channels, including: A bunch of Arabic channels exclusive to DISH, including MBC, Al Arabiya, and Al Jazeera Hindi channels such as aapka Colors, Sony, SET Max, Star Plus, Zee TV, B4U, and aaj Tak Willow Cricket and TEN Cricket, which includes eight Cricket Boards and more than 150 days of live cricket a year Seven popular television channels from Pakistan, including GEO TV, ARY Digital, and Hum TV Four channels from Bangladesh, including ATN Bangla, Channel I, ETV Bangla, and NTV Bangla TV Globo Internacional and PFC, which have Brazilian television programs and soccer events So does this mean that DISH — or anyone else — could introduce a streaming package with some *ahem* more popular live channels? Like ABC, CBS or other broadcast TV channels? Maybe ESPN or cable channels like AMC or FX? Probably not. Think about it — these are networks that DISH spends very little to license, and it’s charging $20 a month. There’s probably no way that it could introduce a service of the content that most people watch and make it economically viable. That’s a bummer, but it’s just the way things are.
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iOS and Android aren’t leaving much room for Firefox to burrow into mobile. “We knew there was going to be a transition from desktop being primary to mobile and tablet being primary” said Mozilla’s former CEO and current board member John Lilly today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. “What I worry about, the scary part is that for the first time the platforms and distribution are tightly controlled before innovation has really started” Lilly explained that Internet Explorer once dominated web browsing and people said “How the hell do you break that?” But Firefox and Chrome came along and now the market is almost evenly split. But Lilly says “mobile’s not like that. Mobile is these tied-down vertical stacks that are controlled by Google and Apple, so we have a new impossible problem to become relevant on mobile.” As the world spends more and more of its time on mobile, Mozilla will have to figure out how to inject itself there. Firefox for Android is a good start, but tests against Chrome in February saw Mozilla’s version loading pages much slower. There just might not be enough value for Firefox to add in order to pull Android users from their default browser. And thanks to Apple’s draconian SDK agreement, Mozilla isn’t even allowed to release a full-version of Firefox for iOS. Lilly is optimistic about Mozilla’s desktop browser, ”I think Firefox is about as good as it’s ever been right now. But unfortunately, the Google juggernaut is there too. ”I know a lot of people probably moved to Chrome” Lilly said.
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