For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’ It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience. But that’s a stereotype that isn’t exactly true anymore. A small group of companies — both small, bootstrapped app startups and multi-billion dollar giants like Tencent — are showing that they can design apps or higher-end hardware with international appeal. Tencent, one of the country’s gargantuan Internet powers with a market cap of $72 billion dollars, often likes to point out the international reach of its messaging app Weixin or WeChat. That app has blossomed to more than 190 million monthly active users over the past year and with about 40 million of registered users outside of China. “I’m very glad to see the internationalization of Tencent,” said the company’s CEO Pony Ma this month at the GMIC conference in Beijing. He later added, “The manufacturing sector in China went globalized and the service industry can be internationalized as well…. It’s difficult, but if we can make it, it would be a revolution.” Interestingly enough, WeChat’s growth abroad is being fueled by the Chinese diaspora — immigrants are taking WeChat with them to stay in touch with their families back home, according to app-tracking services like Onavo. They base this hypothesis on the correlation of WeChat active usage with that of other Chinese-language apps. Younger Chinese startups are also building internationally as well. I met a Shanghai-based startup called Intsig two weeks ago that has a business card scanning app called Camcard with 50 million registered users and 10 million monthly actives, with half of them outside of China. “A lot of people are surprised when they find out we’re a Chinese company,” said Louisa Cao, who heads marketing for the company. It helps that exchanging business cards is much more ritualized and formal in China and Japan than it is in the West, so that gives startups in Asia a competitive edge on understanding what consumers want in a product in this area. Similarly, messaging apps out of Asia like Line, Kakao and WeChat are leading the way, with Western startups like Path arguably borrowing some of their strategies like stickers. Blux, another company out of Xian, the second-tier Chinese city that’s home to the famous army of Terra Cotta warriors, has built a higher-end photo app called Blux Camera that’s been featured by Apple more than 100 times on the iTunes homepage for global audiences. As the cost advantages that China has over Western markets narrows, the co-founder Jo Yin told me that it now can make economic sense to run global market-facing startups outside of the traditional hubs of Beijing and Shanghai (as they’ve become too expensive). One of the reasons that all of these startups can built products for foreign audiences is because they’ve been trained either at Western universities or through working for multi-nationals. Some are run by “sea turtles” or Chinese who have returned home after years of working or studying abroad. Intsig’s CEO Michael Zhen spent years at Motorola where he picked up ideas on how to manage teams and think globally. It’s also helped that the Chinese government has gone far in protecting and nurturing domestic technology companies and startups, a trend which continues with the government’s recent investment into a GPS alternative called Beidou and an Ubuntu-based OS that would help Chinese firms move off Western software platforms. Now that companies like Tencent have reached a certain prowess in domestic markets, they can look outwards. To be fair, achieving global reach is something only a small fraction of local Chinese startups can do. It requires an international fluency; founders have to understand what kind of design and marketing attracts foreigners. Chinese web services can seem noisy and busy; they can be filled with more links and text as Mandarin characters are complicated to create on QWERTY keyboards. There are even a few U.S. growth-stage companies that haven’t been dissuaded by Google’s very public about-face on the Chinese market and are hiring design and developer talent locally. Evernote recently launched a China-focused version of its enterprise service and they very intentionally took on local hires to develop product. “It’s easy to sell your products everywhere. But when we say we want to be a global company, it’s because we want to make our products everywhere,” said Evernote CEO Phil Libin, when he launched Evernote for Business locally in China. He went on to say that China’s copycat reputation is unfair. “Chinese companies don’t have a good reputation for innovation in the West. The reputation that Chinese companies have is that they don’t really innovate. They just copy and I don’t think this reputation is right. It’s not a problem that Chinese companies copy. It’s that everyone copies. Chinese companies don’t just copy. They copy and improve. Copy and improve is what everyone does everywhere. That’s what Apple does. That’s what Microsoft does. That’s what Facebook does. Very few companies start with a first-of-a-kind idea.” Indeed, probably the most interesting company to watch as it expands globally is Xiaomi, which did just that. They took Android and improved upon it. They’re probably the best example of how China is moving up the value-chain from low-cost manufacturing into high-end design. Just three years afters being founded, the company is on track to do $4.5 billion in handset and accessory sales. Some have made the metaphor that Xiaomi is the “Apple of Android” in that it’s an integrated hardware and software maker that has built its own special skin of Android and sells high-end hardware at or around the cost of materials. They compete head-to-head against Samsung in mainland China, and according to third-party mobile app analytic services like Umeng, they’re in second place. Although Xiaomi will only publicly talk about its plans to sell handsets in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a source close to the company says it’s been on the lookout for a general manager that could bring their Android skin, the MIUI, to North American audiences. They’ve been able to develop a rabid fan base locally in China because they allow people to participate in the designing of the phone by requesting features. Internally, they have small teams of engineers, product managers and designers that work alongside each other on a very fast cycle. They release a new version of the MIUI every week.   But they don’t know if the model will translate abroad yet. Chinese consumers are very comfortable with paying for the full-cost of the phones upfront and buying devices online instead of through brick-and-mortar stores. “We don’t know how developed regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong will accept products like Xiaomi,” said co-founder Lin Bin in an interview. “Greater China is just one step beyond mainland China.”
Read More...

Another photo sharing app bites the dust? Or is something with promise getting another chance? Either way you look at it, betaworks is adding more technology and team members to its arsenal, as photo sharing app Piictu has announced that the team will “join forces” with a betaworks company that has yet to launch. Piictu had raised $1.73 million in seed funding, yet never really took off. The app allowed you to share photos with captions, but Piictu wanted to focus on letting photos start conversations, rather than sit in a stream waiting for likes. The app’s approach was to get you to share photos in context of what you were doing. Here’s what the Piictu team shared today, including instructions on how to get your photos out of the service. You’ll have until June 7th to do so: Piictu is joining Kandu (a Betaworks company)! We’re excited to announce that Piictu is joining forces with Kandu – “a Betaworks company” that shares our vision and ideals of how technology is a catalyst for a better and richer world. Together we will continue to build and bring users great products and experiences for a brighter future. Obviously, this news doesn’t come without hardship. Unfortunately, the Piictu app will no longer be available. The important thing: You will not lose any of your photos and we trust you will reconnect with all your piictu-friends on other networks like tumblr, kik, twitter and instagram – some of our fave. Over the past two years we’ve had the opportunity of supporting and sharing unique moments of our lives in pictures. Piictu was built on the idea that “the change in use of photography” is opening new opportunities to communicate and interact as humans. We’ve seen this stand true and flourish not only on piictu, but on other networks as well. On Friday May 31st, the piictu app will no longer be available. You’ll be able to download your photos until Friday June 7th by following the instructions here From the entire team we want to thank you for the great energy, trust and support you have brought to the community and we look forward to bringing you more fun, exciting and heartfelt products in the future. No terms were made available, but we’ve reached out to betaworks for comment. However, this does feel like a stay of execution for an app that never took off. Again, it’s not known what Kandu is exactly, but we assume that it will have something to do with photography. Another betaworks product, Giphy, has been moving along quickly to provide a home for all of those awesome animated GIFs that we like to share. During TechCrunch Disrupt, betaworks CEO John Borthwick discussed his vision for the company, calling it a “puzzle.” What Borthwick and team are doing is bringing together the most useful parts of services, be it Digg or an eventual Google Reader replacement, and creating a suite with them. How it will all look once it fits together is unknown, but betaworks is on a bit of a roll after launching its game Dots recently.
Read More...

Google’s Drive app for Android just got a major redesign that brings the Google Now-like card-style look the company introduced with Google Now to its mobile productivity app. This new look, which Google says is cleaner and simpler than the previews design, will likely be the first thing users notice, but the company has also added a number of new features to the app. Most of these are small, like the ability to download copies of your files to your Android device, but the new document scanning features opens up a whole new range of use cases for Drive. The scanner tool, for example, which you can now find under the “Add New” menu, allows you to easily turn paper documents like receipts, letter and billing statements into PDFs. Thanks to Google’s advanced optical character recognition technology, you can also easily search them later on. This definitely feels a bit like Evernote and it’ll be interesting to see if Google will continue to go down this path in the future updates to the app. Also new in this version is an updated editing experience for Google Sheets spreadsheets. Users can now adjust font types and sizes for their spreadsheets and change cell text colors and cell alignment right from the application. The app now also finally supports Google’s Cloud Print.
Read More...

Shashi Seth, whose résumé includes management and executive roles at Yahoo, Aol, and Google, is joining the Tribune Company as the president of a new unit called Tribune Digital Ventures. Seth’s role was first reported yesterday at AllThingsD, and the company is now confirming the news. It says Tribune Digital Ventures will operate as an independent unit based in Silicon Valley. Seth told me that his job will be to develop new products around Tribune content, making sure that it “gets used appropriately on the Internet and mobile side.” A big part of that is finding new ways to circulate traffic between Tribune’s different properties, whether they’re in print (it publishes newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times), broadcast, or digital. The goal, he said is to create “a network effect across these disparate mediums and build a bridge between them.” It sounds like partnering with startups is going to be a part of that mission. As for whether that will involve making startup investments, Seth said, “It is within the realm of possibility, but I think first and foremost we have to come up with a strategy.” Seth left Yahoo in January, where he was most recently the senior vice president of its Connections business unit, which included products like Yahoo Search and Mail. He has also been the senior vice president of global ad products at Aol (which owns TechCrunch), head of monetization at YouTube, and search product lead at Google. He has startup experience as well, founding and serving as CEO of a wireless startup called Conexo and chief revenue officer at Cooliris. “I’m fascinated and disappointed at the same time with what the traditional media world is going through,” Seth said when asked why he joined the Tribune Company. “I know and feel it in my heart that the content itself is amazingly valuable. … I think newspapers and broadcasters have given up the ownership of that space to the new Internet world. What I’d love to do is find a way to actually a reclaim it.”
Read More...

Food trucks aren’t exactly new, but most only have one specific type of cuisine — even if that cuisine just happens to be all the latest rage in molecular-gastro Indian-Irish fusion. Not only that, but you’re often stuck waiting in a long line to order and pay, then waiting some more for your food to be ready. EAT Club, which is launching in private beta today, has a unique spin on the way that users get lunch. The service hopes to get rid of all the hassles around waiting in line, paying, and waiting for your food, all with a convenient food truck that serves a variety of foods, and a mobile app to handle ordering and payment. Over the last few years, EAT Club has served lunchers on the Peninsula with a variety of different food choices, but now it has made its was up to San Francisco, where it will serve startup kids and other hungry office workers. And it’s coming here with a food truck specially designed to provide eaters with a variety of awesome food choices. EAT Club’s food truck will have a variety of dishes from multiple restaurants available all in the same truck, giving customers a selection of cuisines to choose from. Charter restaurants participating include Bar Tartine, Nopalito, City Smoke House BBQ, and Onigilly, among others. Altogether, EAT Club has more than 30 restaurants signed up so far, and will have options from at least three available on any given day. How did EAT Club get those restaurants on board? Partly through the food truck itself, which is designed to provide the best experience for customers. A gutted-out old school bus, the EAT Club truck has been renovated with mobile ovens for hot foods and refrigerating units for cold foods. The end result is that all dishes are loaded into the truck right from the kitchen, so that when a customer picks up his food, it’s kept at the desired temperature. So the food is great, but what about the service? EAT Club handles that with a mobile app that allows you to choose among a bunch of different food options. It provides you with details about why the dishes were picked — EAT Club has a food curator, natch — and more information about the restaurant. Once you’ve found something you like, you just click to order and the app automatically charges your credit card. After that, you’re free to head down to the truck at your convenience and just pick up your food. No waiting, no fuss. To start, EAT Club will have its food truck parked around the Financial District and SOMA neighborhoods in San Francisco, hoping to appeal to office workers downtown who don’t have lunch provided to them every day. The app is available now in private beta, as the company tries to measure demand and make sure that it’s got the right amount of food ready for new users.
Read More...

Chrome 27 for the desktop arrived yesterday and today, Google updated Chrome for Android to version 27 as well. While the desktop update mostly focused on improved speed, the Android version actually includes a number of new features. The most important of these is probably the new fullscreen mode for phones. Just like in the iPhone app (or in the old stock Android browser), the toolbar will now disappear as you scroll down. Also new in this version is a somewhat simplified search experience: searching from the omnibox, Google says, will “keep your search query visible in the omnibox, making it easier to edit, and show more on your search result page.” The company has been experimenting with a similar feature in the desktop version of Chrome. It essentially turns the omnibox into the search interface instead of switching to the URL for your search and then replicating the search interface it on the search results page. On the desktop, this always takes me for a loop, but given the space constraints on a smaller screen, this will probably allow for a few more lines of search results to show without the need to scroll down. Other new features in this update include support for client-side certificates (something that’s often needed to connect to enterprise intranets) and tab history support for tablets (so you can use a long press on the back button to bring up your tab history.
Read More...

Skyhigh Networks discovers,manages and analyzes data from all the apps that people use at work. Today the company raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from existing investor Greylock Partners. Skyhigh discovers, analyzes and controls the cloud services that a customer’s employee uses. It sees the cloud services customers use and all the associated security issues associated with it. It analyzes the services to find the abnormalities and ways the company can save costs on subscriptions. It also adds an element of control by enforcing IT policies. The difference for Skyhigh is in the fine grain controls. When it finds abnormalities it can provide encryption, access control and other security features. The discover is based on existing logs and data from proxy and doing analytics. It has a registry of 2,600 services with 500 added every six weeks. For each service they create an independent score across 30 criteria. For the analysis the company has a Hadoop infrastructure. For the control the company has a reverse proxy and associated services it runs through its data centers. The company is about 18 months old. It raised a Series A round last March from Greylock. Skyhigh will primarily use the funding for sales, marketing, and engineering. Skyhigh has a platform that provides services with aspects of what you see in something like Splunk. It’s a market that security providers might serve as potential competitors. Skyhigh is leveraging the bring your own device movement (BYOD), which it addresses at its intersection with the thousands of services employees use but can’t afford to keep exposed to security risks.
Read More...

People are afraid that if they drive an electric vehicle, they’ll run out of juice somewhere. So to convince more people to buy electric cars and dominate the charging station locator market, Xatori and Recargo are merging. The combined charge finder developers will go by the name Recargo to promote their station map and trip planner app PlugShare. Xatori and its co-founders Forrest North (CEO) and Armen Petrosian (CTO) had raised $400,000 in 2011 for its suite of apps. PlugShare is North America’s largest network of EV charging stations, boasting 15,000 locations and 100,000 downloads. GreenCharge lets Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, and Plug-in Prius owners monitor their vehicles’ energy levels. ChargeManager lets businesses track the status of whole fleets of EVs. Recargo is a privately funded startup that runs a self-named charging station locator and Plugincars.com, a popular EV news source and community. Recargo CEO Brian Kariger will be the chief of the newly merged company, and North will become COO. All their employees are staying on through the deal, bringing Recargo’s headcount to around 15. Both companies’ offices in Venice and Menlo Park, Calif., will remain open. “Our goal is still to do whatever we can to encourage the growth of EV and plugin vehicles,” North tells me. “We met Recargo, hit it off, found we had some of the same objectives, and decided to work together.” North called the merger a “small deal” financially but said that “investors were taken care of.” Both Recargo and Xatori doubled their user base now, and will significantly grow their communities through the merger, as North says the companies only had about a 20 percent overlap in users. Beyond Recargo becoming a one-stop app for finding charging stations and EV news, the deal should boost its status with auto-makers. North tells me some car companies weren’t experienced working with tiny, nimble startups, but doubling its headcount will give it more clout. “We’re on a little more stable footing, have a longer runway, and a bigger team to help EV adoption.” The fact is that gasoline is everywhere, but most people don’t realize that electric vehicle chargers are rapidly proliferating. The are more than 10X as many charging stations in the U.S. now as at the start of 2011. Domestically, there are now over 20,000 charges, and by the end of 2013 there will be over 170,000 EVs on the road. If Recargo’s PlugShare app for iOS and Android can instill confidence in potential EV buyers so they’re not worried about ending up stranded, sales could accelerate. And honestly, that’s good for the rest of the tech world as well. Sometimes I worry that smart people are building frivolous apps and trying to get rich instead of tackling a serious global problem: climate change. If we don’t get the environment back on track, we might need to start factoring climate change into the valuations of giants like Apple. What happens to sales of iPhones if whole cities are consumed by the ocean as greenhouse gases from cars melt the ice caps and raise the sea level? Recargo‘s charging station maps might not be sexy, but they could help save the world.
Read More...

As Foursquare evolves, it wants to help you find either new places to check out or lead you to places where your friends have already been. Mixed in with that is recommendation technology to show you places that you might be interested in based on where you’ve been before. Today, Foursquare updated its iOS and Android apps with an advanced search option that lets you control how the service seeks out new venues for you. In its blog post today, Foursquare “dares” you to get “super specific” with your searches. Basically, the company is saying that they have enough data to find any place that you could imagine. One of the example searches is: “A cheap sushi place that’s nearby and open now, but that I haven’t been to yet.” Again, this is a search performed based on all of the data that Foursquare has collected over the years, but its first move into a more conversational search experience. Companies like Google are jumping on this bandwagon as well. When you perform a search like the one suggested above, you just get results as you’d normally expect. Foursquare is processing these inquiries surprisingly fast, which means that you’re likely to settle on a place quickly: The interesting part comes with the new filter options, where you can hone in on a venue based on whether you or a friend have checked in before, by price, if the venue has a special or if you’ve saved it to check out later: I feel like with this dynamic search and filter options, Foursquare has made the jump to become a true utility that might even cancel out a Google search or a Yelp deep-dive. That’s a pretty bold thought, but when you think about how much data Foursquare truly has, a lot of things that we haven’t even seen yet are possible. The filter options makes all of this data more manageable and of course, usable, to get you to try out more places. It’s also an incentive for more businesses to adopt Foursquare’s offerings, such as specials. If people start filtering their searches in the way that Foursquare suggests, then it behooves these restaurants and bars to have multiple specials lined up and ready to go. Think of it as a highlighted ad in Google search.
Read More...

With years of digital exhaust now behind us – over 240 billion photos on Facebook, 8 billion on Flickr, and not to mention the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every month – we’re now transitioning to a time when we’re in need of smarter tools for organizing and accessing our personal data archives. Only a few companies, so far, have dared to step into this space because the technical challenges its presents. One which shows some promise is the stealthy Moju Labs, a new consumer “big data” startup, which is soon preparing to launch. Founded by the former chief scientist at PayPal and current entrepreneur-in-residence at North Bridge Venture Partners, Mok Oh, Moju Labs is worth keeping an eye on for its team alone.  That team now includes ex-Google and Palantir engineer Justin Legakis and former Luvocracy product head Andrew Holt. The company isn’t yet talking about its product details because, well, there isn’t actually a product yet. There are, instead, a handful of prototypes whittled down from around a dozen to start. But there is an idea. And there’s a funding round about to close. Oh was with PayPal up until around six months or so ago. After leaving, he joined Northbridge as an EIR, which was where he began cooking up what’s now Moju Labs. He says his original inspiration actually came from his grandfather, who passed away about a decade ago. “There are all these great stories. He lived a great life,” Oh says. “But at the end of the day, I wished I knew him more.” This sparked something in him, and he decided he wanted to build something so that his kids, your kids, and our kids’ kids, wouldn’t have to feel the same way. “We’re always carrying around a device that’s called a smartphone, but it’s really a sensor device and we’re capturing so many things – not just photos, but audio and visual, too,” he says, hinting at what’s to come from Moju. “And on top of that, we’re wearing wearable computing stuff, and quantified self gadgets.” All these things are constantly being used to capture and measure data about you, but this is “dumb data,” Oh explains. It’s information, but it’s not stories. “And what really matters is people’s relationships and stories,” he says. Over the past few years, companies have been focused on building beautiful and simple mobile apps that allow us to easily capture and share our photos, videos and other data, but they’ve all been missing the “smarts” on the backend. So users have instead taken on the job themselves to tell the story they wanted to share, by organizing photos into albums, tagging people, adding captions, writing posts, etc. This may not be a sustainable process, given the amount of data we’re now creating. Another wave of startups will begin to solve this problem. Already, we’ve seen some progress. TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 finalist Everpix, for example, built software that analyzes the visual content of your photos, organizes them into “Moments,” hiding the bad photos, reconciling duplicates, merging corresponding metadata, and more. And just last week, Google at its I/O developer conference, further legitimized this space with an updated version of Google+ Photos which automatically picks out your best images, fixes and enhances them – essentially putting the power of photo-editing software in the cloud, and then doing the work for you. A feature dubbed “auto awesome,” for instance, can automatically create a group photo from a series of photos by combining the ones where people were smiling and others were not. Microsoft had launched similar technology back in 2010, but through its desktop software suite, Windows Live Photos. It never caught on. To be clear, Moju Labs wants to do more than just automatically – or automagically – organize and manage your photo collection. That would be only one piece to its overall vision. Photos are a starting point, but the company plans to eventually support all your personal data, then create a system you can query using natural language. So imagine that, one day, you could simply ask the service to tell you a story about a time when your family was on vacation, and everyone was happy. That sort of advanced query is Moju Labs’ end goal. “The whole albums system is really, really stupid right now,” laments Oh. But what’s the alternative? Of what his company is building, Oh will only say that “it’s not you going through a ‘timeline’ – these are non-linear created stories that are very relevant and very contextual.” “Photo albums are so stupid. Timelines are so stupid. Social media posts – not the content, but the way we consume them – are so stupid,” he adds. “It’s all very linear and time-driven, but it shouldn’t be that. It should be a collection, brought to together as a story.” With Moju’s product, as you query these archives using natural language and interact with the system, the system then learns and improves. As for what it will do when it launches, however, it’s probably going to look more like something that’s closer to Google’s product at first, but the team hopes to soon move beyond that. As impressive as Google’s advancements were to us, the end users, Oh considers them differently. “In terms of the backend learning, we’re pushing that an order of magnitude more than what Google’s doing at this point – I think they have very simple algorithms,” he says. Well, we’ll see…? Moju Labs hasn’t launched a product to the public, but TechCrunch readers who sign up here can be first to join the private beta when available later this year.
Read More...

In years to come, when we look back, it’s only then that we’ll know if Collaborative Consumption really is a movement or if history deems it to be the hollow marketing term that it sometimes appears to be. But in the midst of things, it’s hard not to think that something pretty interesting is happening, specifically relating to the issue of trust. Airbnb and its European rival 9flats, for example, got users used to the idea of inviting strangers into their home. Meanwhile, Housebites enables people to sell home-cooked meals as an alternative to a take-out. Launching today is Cookening, a new French startup co-founded by Cédric Giorgi (previously co-editor of TechCrunch France) that combines elements of both Airbnb and Housebites. Starting with France first, a country known for its gastronomy, it enables locals to be matched with foreigners — tourists in particular — so they can invite them into their homes to experience an authentic, in this case French, home dining experience. The pain-point that Cookening is targeting is that when traveling it’s not always easy to meet local people and experience authentic food. “As a passionate cook, it is impossible to easily invite new and relevant people to share a home cooked meal,” Giorgi tells TechCrunch. “This is what Cookening wants to solve.” Hosts create a profile on Cookening, which includes a table page showing photos of their favourite home-cooked dishes, a preset menu/meal structure, and a price for the guests. The profile is manually vetted by Cookening. Non-locals then simply choose the host/table booking, and make contact. Like similar peer-to-peer marketplaces, payment is handled by Cookening in order to help establish and maintain trust between hosts and guests, and the host only receives payment the day after a successful meal. It’s also how the startup will make money, charging a 20% commission. If it all sounds quite similar to an existing concept in France, known as “Table d’hôte”, where people host home cooked meals, that’s because it is. However, Giorgi says the practice was highly regulated. “We want to globalize and ease this concept so that everyone can experience the wonderful moment of sharing a meal with people you don’t know and that have different origins,” he says. Another important element of the Cookening concept is that hosts dine with their guests. This adds further trust — both parties are in theory eating the same food — plus it’s as much a social as gastronomic experience, a cultural exchange, if you will. To date, Cookening is bootstrapped but is looking to raise external funding. Alongside Giorgi, the startup’s other co-founder is Sébastien Guignot, previous head of development at French fintech startup Quanthouse that exited to Standard & Poor’s. Meanwhile, Cookening’s potential competitors include Feastly in the U.S., which focuses on meals organised between locals, not locals and tourists specifically. Israel’s (and Disrupt NY nominee) EatWith is probably a closer competitor, but isn’t targeting France at the moment. There are also some local rivals in the “Table d’hôte” tradition, though Giorgi says they lack Cookening’s peer-to-peer model.
Read More...

Cloudscaling has raised $10 million from Trinity Ventures, Juniper Networks, and Seagate Technologies in a deal that shows how software defined networking has become a focal issue for companies building out their own clouds. Cloudscaling delivers an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure system for enterprises, SaaS providers and cloud service providers. The company foreshadowed a deal with Juniper when it announced the company would provide Cloudscaling with its virtualized networking controller. That deal was precipitated by Juniper’s acquisition of Contrail Systems. The startup raised $10 million last July from Khosla Ventures. By December, Juniper had snatched up the company for $176 million. Network controllers have become a hot topic as more cloud projects get underway. The importance stems from the need to scale out networks in an affordable manner. Adding more hardware just gets too expensive. Virtualizing the controller means that the data flowing through the pipes can be managed in a granular way, optimized through software so the network can be used efficiently without lots of spillover costs for additional hardware. Contrail points to how Cloudscaling has positioned itself with a focus on providing networking for its customers building out enterprise and SaaS clouds. It puts the company in the same space as VMware-owned Nicira and BigSwitch. The difference for Cloudscaling comes in its dual focus on software to build out programmed cloud systems and SDN to give it scale and better manageability. Juniper, for its part, has spent a lot of time focusing on advancing its silicon and keeping on pace or even in front of the likes of Intel, Bias said. The company has also hired top-talent. For example, they hired Bob Muglia, a lead executive at Microsoft who oversaw the development of Windows Azure. Muglia now heads an entire division at Juniper dedicated to software. For Seagate, a traditional hard drive company, the opportunity is in providing the storage infrastructure and partnering with Cloudscaling and other providers such as Egnyte. It is also active in OpenStack and OpenCompute, the Facebook-led effort to open hardware to make it more adaptable for the new, cloud oriented infrastructures of the world. Cloudscaling represents the demand for scale out infrastructures. Data is spreading but for companies to keep up, they need the networking to extend but without adding a sprawling array of big hardware boxes. Instead they need software to virtualize the network so it can spread far and wide.
Read More...

Every year Google creates a summary Zeitgeist feature to sum up the year in search data, showing what has been the most popular among its users. Now, it’s rolling out Top Charts, a new monthly series of lists similar to that year-end feature, available on Google Trends as of today. It’s built on Google’s Knowledge Graph, and provides a representation of the actual things people are interested in, rather than just keywords alone. The charts are broken down in broad categories, and include lists of things like actors, animals, whiskeys, TV shows, space objects and medications just to name a few. The charts display a top five in the main page view, with a relative rating indicated by a colored bar, as well as arrows to indicate whether the items on that list have gone up or down since the last monthly period. You can drill down to see a full list of 10 items, as well as a brief description of each, its peak ranking and the total time it has appeared on the charts. They’re also embeddable, as you can see below. There are more than 40 Top Charts in total, and that’s not all Google has shown off today. There’s also a very cool animated visualized of the top trending search terms, which indicates what’s being actively searched for at this very moment, with a colorful background and smooth animated transitions. This tools is customizable as well, so you can view up to 25 searches at a time and set it for different regions. Finally the Trends home page displays elements of each of these, with a hot search term list, and ranking indicators that show popularity over time and by geography for different terms. The changes are not huge, but they do provide some useful data on a more frequent basis than we’ve seen before, which can help people identify what people are interested in, useful for media organizations targeting their content, for instance, or for anyone curious about the pulse of the world’s Googling population.
Read More...

SparkLabs, the startup accelerator that wants to inject South Korea’s startup ecosystem with Silicon Valley expertise, announced its second intake today. Its latest class is an international lineup of companies that represent a variety of sectors and are at widely different stages of funding, from bootstrapped financing to those that have closed a Series A round. Founded in 2012, SparkLabs’ offers a three-month-long mentorship driven program. Co-founder Bernard Moon says that one of the main challenges faced by South Korea’s startup industry is the lack of role models and guidance for founders. For example, many angel investors and venture capitalists have a financial background but lack entrepreneurial experience. SparkLabs has focused on building an impressive roster of mentors, many of whom are Silicon Valley founders. “We’re not the first accelerator or incubator in South Korea, but we are the first with a tangible outside network that is easily accessible by Korean entrepreneurs,” says Moon. “We also get applications from China, India, Taiwan, everywhere in Asia. Our dream is to be a gateway not just into Silicon Valley, but also to high-level people these founders never thought it would be possible to access.” While SparkLabs’ first class consisted of South Korean companies hoping to break into overseas markets, the latest intake include companies from Singapore and the U.S. that view South Korea as a gateway into Asia. “They see South Korea as more developed in terms of technology and a large early adopter base. A good foothold and feedback in South Korea helps them expand into Japan and possibly China,” says Moon. SparkLabs is also hosting its first annual conference, NEXT, on June 14 in Seoul. The event will focus on innovation and technology, with speakers including Ray Ozzie, the founder and CEO of Talko, Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Maria G. Gotsch, president and CEO of Partnership Fund for New York City and Jonathan Levine, CIO and CTO of Rakuten Group. SparkLabs’ inaugural cohort included educational tech startup KnowRe and WePlanet, the developers of Step Journal. Here is its second class: StyleWiki: A Seoul-based social wiki platform for fashion enthusiasts. iBabyBox: A Palo Alto-based online community where parents can share and sell secondhand baby products. Megaphone: Founded in New York City, this participation TV platform’s clients include NBC, Bravo, BBC, Amex, LG, Sprint, NFL and the New York Knicks. Megaphone integrates game graphics that can be controlled by Web browsers into TV shows and allows viewers to see aggregated results of all user activity and 30-second ads in real-time. MangoPlate: A mobile app that offers personalized restaurant recommendations in Seoul. Its search engine fine-tunes results each time a user adds a review or wish-list entry. Zoyi: A Korean tech company that has built products including AdbyMe, Korea’s first social media advertising platform and Cooki, a news summary curation service. Zoyi is backed by Southbridge Capital, a leading Korean venture capital firm. HeyBread: One of Korea’s leading curation commerce companies, HeyBread focuses on delivering premium organic breads from local bakeries to customers. The company plans to expand its service to the entire fresh food industry. Petsbe: A Seoul-based premium subscription service that delivers personalized orders of pet food and monthly supplies. Lateral: Headquartered in San Francisco, Lateral wants to redefine the fundamentals of online search by revamping outdated search methods. DesignPlusD: A Seoul-based productivity app that includes note taking, alarm reminder and calendar functions. The company’s Remember-Block memo app was the App Store’s number one productivity apps in 12 countries and was the top paid app in South Korea during January. TrakInvest: A Singaporean online social investment platform for equities that will be launched next month. The company, which is led Bobby Bhatia, the former managing director and head of principal investments at AIG for APAC, provides tools to identify and create future “alpha” generators. It has partnered with Thomson Reuters to provide research and analytics to its user base.
Read More...

Gifs, man! They’re trending harder than Jennifer Lawrence right now, but that doesn’t mean that finding them is the easiest thing in the world. That’s why Giphy, a startup that launched out of betaworks last month, is rolling out new tools to build out its library of awesome, high-quality gifs. See, Giphy is a gif search engine. It lets you search by keyword for any gif you could possibly want, and then saves load time and keeps things snappy by only playing the gif once you hover over one of the results. But sourcing the gifs you want is just the first step in organizing the community, which is the true goal behind Giphy. That said, the startup is today rolling out private artist accounts, which will bake attribution right into the gifs they create. The team has been looking for some of the most prominent gif creators and artists out there, and has chosen twelve to give private artists accounts. As it stands now, there are hundreds of thousands of gifs floating around the internet. Most of them end up on a tumblr somewhere, while others are created and shared through dozens of other platforms. But when you come upon a great gif, perhaps on #Whatshouldwecallme, do you ever think about the dude that created said gif? Probably not, but you should. It would be like not thinking of Rhianna every time you heard the song “Umbrella.” “What we’re seeing in the beginning of organizing the community,” said founder Jace Cooke. “We want to give these folks a home and connect them to publishers and brands. This will give them a following in a way that will help them monetize their work.” But artists profiles are only the first step in organizing the gif community. Giphy is also building out an API, which will be open in the next couple weeks. This lays the groundwork for Giphy to be used in other interesting applications as the gif craze heats up. According to betaworks, the Giphy API has received much more demand than the company has decided yet to meet, as they’re figuring out the best way to roll out access to the platform. The third and final goal at the moment is for Giphy to create stronger relationships with publishers who are using gifs for their content. Giphy has an automatic embed code for each gif, which publishers can use on their own sites. It’s simple, but these relationships are crucial in elevating gif artists on a pedestal where they can reach brands and monetize their work. As it stands now, private artists accounts are being rationed out at Giphy’s discretion. But what about the competition? Well, Giphy doesn’t have much competition outside of the wide world of tumblr gifs. But even with the newfound focus on creation (re: artists accounts), Giphy doesn’t see much of a threat in Vine or Cinemagram or any of the other user-generated gif makers. “There’s a nice social component to services like Vine and Instagram, but the validity of image on Instagram is pretty limited outside of a circle of friends,” said Cooke. It’s pretty rare for a Vine or Cinemagram to surpass being valid to friends and be an interesting piece of media in their own right.” That said, Giphy will continue to focus on high-level gif creation that provides content that’s accessible to a large majority of people on the internet, as opposed to needing social context. Expect big things from this one, guys. Gifs aren’t going anywhere soon, and Giphy has made itself the portal.
Read More...

Artkive, an app designed to eliminate the overwhelming guilt you get tossing your children’s brilliant artwork into the garbage, now has another purpose, too: you can order printed out books of their creations. Instead of just hiding the child’s crumpled up drawings and precious finger-paint covered handprints that school sends home – what is now, like every day? – under cereal boxes and empty bags of chips, you can assure yourself that you’ve found a more efficient means of saving these items instead. You snapped a photo of them. The sense of relief is overwhelming, I tell you. OK, I kid…a little. But as any parent will tell you, kids’ art output is overwhelming, forcing you to curate with a heavy hand. That’s why so many moms (and some dads, too) have begun snapping photos of the art before it hits the trash. Explains CEO Jedd Gold, who has extensive experience working in kids’ entertainment, including with the relaunch of nostalgic 80′s brands like Strawberry Shortcake and Trolls, he was inspired to build Artkive after witnessing this very behavior at home. “I was watching my wife take pictures of our kids’ artwork on her camera, that she would upload to her computer, and then she would upload from her computer to one of these photo sites. But by then she wouldn’t remember who created what piece, or when they were created, and they’d be out of order,” he says. “I thought, ‘there’s gotta be an app for that.’ But there really wasn’t.” So he launched one. The Kive Company raised $500,000 late last year for its mobile application that helps you to not just take the photos, but also annotate them with things like the child’s name, date of creation, and other comments. Although the original goal was to make the art archiving process easier – as you can tell by the name – the app’s small but growing customer base of 105,000 (almost all moms) have already found other uses for it. They’re documenting everything that you would save for a kids’ scrapbook, including report cards, photos, other items from events and school activities, and more. One woman even used the app to document the last seven months of her pregnancy. With this expanded focus, the printed book option begins to make more sense. Because as much as I love my own daughter’s art, I’m not sure how often I’d really revisit it in hardcover book format. But a scrapbook of her pre-kindergarten years? That I could get on board with. Gold initially tested the concept with an alpha product launched in December. He added a “print” button to the app, without offering an explanation or any details as to what the final product would be. Despite this lack of information, a couple hundred Artkive users ordered books. With the app’s recent update, the book purchasing feature has been overhauled. Users can now review and edit their books, changing things like the title, text on the page, the pictures it includes, and more. Books can either be 8×8″ or 8×11″, and start at $25 for 20 pages. Each additional page is $1.00 more. Before the holidays, the plan is to expand into gifts, like calendars and mugs, for example. Also new in the recent update is social sharing – something Gold had originally limited, thinking that the last thing anyone would want to see on Facebook was other people’s kids’ drawings. But Artkive’s user base disagreed. In addition, Artkive has also recently come to Android, however it’s not yet feature-complete with the iOS version due to the company’s limited resources. I love the idea behind Artkive, but the app itself needs to streamline things a bit. There are too many manual steps involved on almost all screens, from sign-up to upload. These are mainly minor inconveniences, but anything that takes more time that it should – or could – is something that will eventually find itself dropped in favor of quicker, smoother alternatives…like Shutterfly’s automatic upload on its mobile app, perhaps. Artkive is currently a free download on iTunes here, or Android here.
Read More...

Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of “handpicked” developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 600 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with  other directory services. Truecaller’s numbers are global in scope, and include landline, mobile and pre-pay digits — the latter category giving it an edge over other directory services, it argues. Being as phone numbers amount to highly sensitive data in the wrong hands, Truecaller is being careful about who is getting access to its API — hence no open API. Telemarketing companies are specifically barred from getting their wires in. Being the company that helped spammers is clearly not the kind of publicity Truecaller is hoping for here. One scenario where it envisages its API being a benefit to others but also without causing irritation to phone number owners is for call centres to identify who is calling before starting a call. Truecaller’s API allows for reverse number lookup, meaning developers can attach a name to a known number. It also returns a ‘Spam score’ to indicate if a number is a likely spammer (e.g. telesales or robocalls) and — at the other end of the spectrum — a ‘True score’ to indicate how important the number is. This score is “the measurment of how popular a phone number is with our users over time”. Name search is not included in the API but remains solely a feature of Truecaller’s mobile app. Truecaller is charging developers to use some of the features of its API, so this is clearly part of its monetisation strategy. Its free API includes only how popular a phone number is. Pricing for the more fully featured APIs starts at $299 per month, rising to $4,999. Truecaller said cloud e-signing company Scrive has been trying its API — as a way to validate the identity behind a phone number. It did not specify whether anyone has yet signed up as a paying customer. Last September Truecaller raised a $1.3 million Series A from Open Ocean, with the aim of expanding its footprint in its key markets of North America, Asia and the Middle East.
Read More...

One interesting element of Google I/O this year were the sensors laid out everywhere around Moscone tracking environmental data throughout the event. Those types of sensors are now all around us, including in our phones and in various smart home devices, and now a new Kickstarter project from ManyLabs wants to help kids get familiar with them very early on. The project is called Sensors for Students, and it wants to build a sensor collection kit that includes a plate for an open-source Arduino board and Grove shield combo, along with one of a variety of parts for a number of different types of sensors, including accelerometers, electromagnetic field detectors, a color sensor, a plant watering kit (similar to one component of the Bitponics automated hydroponic garden), and many more. The team behind ManyLabs consists of Peter Sand and Elliot Dicus, who formed the nonprofit with the ultimate intent of spreading low-cost hands-on tools for teaching science and math to the classroom. Sand has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, and has focused his work and research on computer vision, robotics and education. Sand and Dicus wanted to make it possible to get kids learning data literacy and experimenting with open source hardware early on in life. Their goals sound similar to those of Adafruit, the NY-based hardware company that’s also trying to make people more comfortable with concepts around electrical engineering and DIY maker culture, beginning early on in life. ManyLabs isn’t just supplying hardware, though, it’s also very clearly marketing a curriculum, with lessons and content being offered alongside each type of kit available to backers, along with online resources that will be made available on a yearly subscription basis. There’s no soldering required in the kits that are on offer, so these are suitable for a range of ages and skill levels, and ManyLabs hopes to put them in the hands of backers as soon as August this year, with kits beginning at $40. The most expensive individual kit is $75, and while ManyLabs requires you to supply your own Arduino, it’s still very affordable, a key value add for educational markets.
Read More...

Sometimes a writer creates a universe so compelling that others feel the need to join and help flesh out that world with their own tribute fiction. And sometimes you make something crappy like Gossip Girl and loads of people want to write using those characters and that world anyway. Now Amazon is introducing a way to let writers profit from their fan fiction, via “Kindle Worlds.” Worlds joins Kindle Singles and Kindle Serials as a way for authors to earn money from digital publishing, and the best part is that in this case you don’t even have to be all that creative – the idea is to let fans take original properties from other authors and then create stories around those, offering them up for purchase on the Kindle book store. Amazon then pays out royalties to both the original rights holder, as well as to the fan fiction author, with the author making around 35 percent of all net revenue for works over 10,000 words. There’s also a new revenue model aimed at shorter works, which would be between 5,000 and 10,000 words and will typically sell for under a dollar. Under this scheme, the author’s cut will be a digital royalty of 20 percent. Fanfic writers can sign up now at the official Amazon Kindle Worlds website, and the company expects to launch the Worlds storefront in June. There will be over 50 commissioned works included in the store at launch, Amazon says, and then it’ll be launching its self-serve submission platform for all authors to add their own completed works for consideration. This is a very shrewd business move on the part of Amazon, since it leverages existing popular properties in a way that would never be possible with just one series author (or even a small list of a few running a title), and since it taps into the existing massive market for fan-created fiction that already exists on the net. Heck, I’ve still got an extremely bad and extremely long Star Wars extended universe manuscript hidden in a closet somewhere. If I can find that, read my childish scrawl well enough to transcribe it, and if Amazon ever secured those rights from Disney, I’d consider throwing it up on Worlds for some easy cash. Amazon says it’s in the process of securing licensing deals from a variety of sources, including TV, movie, books, games and music properties. The only question I really have about this to be honest is why did this take so long to happen? If you want a near-bottomless supply of written content, fanfic is where it’s at. XOXO, Gossip Girl.
Read More...

If you’re a big huge e-commerce business, your time is money. Literally. Amazon.com made $61 billion last year, which boils down to $167 million a day, $7 million an hour, and $116,000 a minute. Every minute counts, which is why you cant afford to have your website go down or be slow, even for just a little while. That’s why Los Angeles-based content delivery startup EdgeCast launched a new product called EdgeCast Transact, provides a dedicated CDN built just for e-commerce companies, with all the features that e-commerce companies need. EdgeCast Transact is built on top of the company’s new Commerce Acceleration Network, which is built to be PCI-compliant and enable acceleration and optimization of e-commerce pages. While a number of CDNs tout features that e-commerce websites crave, like application acceleration, page optimization, and small-object delivery, EdgeCast is the only one that has broken its e-commerce offering out and put it on its own dedicated network infrastructure. And the company has spent the last year designing and testing out this purpose-built network for e-commerce providers so that they don’t have to share any infrastructure with media companies or social networks or whatever. That means that e-commerce companies won’t have to worry if there’s a DDOS attack against a media company, or a surge in traffic during the Super Bowl at a social networking site, or whatever. The network is also built to be fully redundant and have all sorts of failover and elastic provisioning to handle holiday traffic spikes and the like. For clients, that’s like not just buying a Rolls Royce, but having your own private highway to drive it on. At least, that’s what EdgeCast president James Segil says. Anyway, in addition to having their own private infrastructure, EdgeCast Transact is designed to provide secure sessions between the origin and end user. It also has mobile device detection and front-end optimization built in, to ensure the best performance regardless of the platform or device someone’s using to access the site. E-commerce companies benefit from also having access to a dedicated customer support team and “white-glove service,” which Segil says is needed for most of those customers. It’s also going to be updated with the needs of business customers in mind — which means e-commerce business cycles, code freezes during the holidays and other busy shopping seasons. EdgeCast continues to win business in the CDN market, with more than 6,000 customers. Those clients include some big names, like Twitter, Hulu, Pinterest, Etsy, and Tumblr. (Don’t worry, Yahoo is a client too.) The company now has about 215 employees, most of which are in the United States… Although it’s been expanding its footprint with sales and support internationally.
Read More...

Google has updated Chrome in build 27 to include conversational voice search, a feature it demoed on stage at Google I/O this year that allows you to search by voice, but also transcribes your queries in real time and lets you use natural language, asking Google straightforward questions and getting straightforward answers, both read back to you by dictation and in actual Google search results. The transcription feature is awesome, since you can actually watch Google try to anticipate what you’re going to say and then adapt in real time to the right query. So far in my testing, it hasn’t gotten anything wrong; this isn’t the clumsy voice input of five years ago that got things wrong as often as it got them right. Having it understand natural queries is also very cool, and for the first time, you get a sense that this is what we all imagined something like AskJeeves was meant to be, but good and effective. Questions that are easily answerable generally are. Ask about nation and state capitals and get the answer right away, read back to you by Google. Ask about a location and get a map. Ask about a person and get a brief bio. It’s a lot like having your own personal information agent or knowledge broker, and it’s so impressive that I might even eventually be able to get over my embarrassment of using it in public. Conversational search is available in the latest stable build, and can be accessed by going to Google’s homepage and clicking the microphone icon in the search bar. So far, I haven’t run into a single connectivity issue or mistaken query, but let us know if your experience differs. Also, Chrome itself wouldn’t detect the update to version 27 on my Mac, so you may have to go direct to the Chrome website and reinstall altogether to get this up and running.
Read More...

Porn is the new Tumblr. It seems that everyone with a CS degree and a little free time is trying to cash in (or at least dabble) in the world of online sexuality, a happenstance that I’d chalk up to the ubiquitousness of boobies online and the potential for perceived riches. But what inspires a pair of designers and artists to create a site that essentially catalogs every NSFW GIF they can find? I had to find out. To be clear, the site [THIS IS A NSFW LINK. DO NOT CLICK IT AT WORK OR EVER] is very NSFW. It’s also quite basic – you simply press your mouse button to slide through one image after the other in a cavalcade of protuberances and pneumatic efforts that brings to mind Chaplin’s Modern Times crossed with Skinemax. Seriously. Don’t click the link. It’s porn. Instead, let’s talk to Raj and Katie, founders of the site. They preferred to remain somewhat anonymous. John Biggs: Why did you guys make this? Raj: Serendipity. In the beginning, in order to ramp up on some new technologies, I built a webapp to pull the most popular animated gifs from the web and present them one after another. I honestly expected kitties, Batman, and Kermit the frog. Instead, the gifs ended up being 99% porn. The next day, I told 6 friends about this happy accident, and by the end of the week, we were getting 200 unique visitors daily. Chris (the designer) has since transformed my clever hack into a polished user experience, Kevin (the hustler) is exploring innovative business models, and Katie (the ballerina) has helped forge our brand and identity. We use the site ourselves, and we’ve just been kindling the fire – it feels like the project has taken on a life of its own. These are some of the responses to our site on Reddit. @TheWorstDrug that is…..AMAZING! Is it just for this particular one or will all of em eventually be like this?— Mirza-A (@Mirza_A88) May 11, 2013 @TheWorstDrug You're a magician with your site! Had to slap myself in the face to stop being hypnotized by it. Damn youuuu!! — Rabbit Sweet (@brabbitsweet) May 07, 2013 @TheWorstDrug opened it up @ work and lost all my concentration… This is the worst drug… Luv it— Texas proud (@tompaul64) May 06, 2013 JB: Who are you guys? Raj: I’m equal parts hacker and guitarist at heart, Chris is an artist, Kevin is a hustler, and Katie is a choreographer. We’re a group of friends, and we each bring unique talents to the table. We love working together. At the moment, we’re building a porn site. Next time, we might record a rock album. Quick story: A few months ago, we were trying to figure out where to take our product, so I issued Chris a No Fap Challenge. I asked him to not spank it to any porn site other than The Worst Drug for as long as possible. Chris lasted 3 days. He came back to me and told me that he couldn’t get off without video – so along with animated gifs, HTML5 video became our next major feature. JB: There seems to be a trend of women working on porn startups. Why? Katie: As porn becomes more mainstream, disrupting the current tech is fair game for anyone who isn’t afraid of it. This includes the kind of savvy and self-governing women who would abandon their kitchens and venture into the tech world in the first place. That’s my guess anyway. For me it was happenstance that the content was porn. These GIFs reveal the usually obscured popular content of the Internet. Imagine observing the planet from a distance, swiping through what we look at, laugh at, get aroused by, and share with each other. I was initially surprised, even shocked, that what we captured was basically all porn, but then I had to laugh. I love this big world of happy, normal, clever, horny people. We’re sexy. JB: Why porn? Why now? Raj: We’re driven by a particular philosophy. Recent studies have shown that there’s little correlation between porn use and deviant/risky sexual behavior. Researchers have also been looking into why porn is addictive. I’ve been trolling on 4chan for years, and I think that watching porn makes you a better person. It’s always my belief that knowledge is more powerful than ignorance, and porn is a particular type of knowledge. Also, there’s nothing in our algorithms that limits our content to porn. Our site simply pulls in the most popular animated gifs as determined by web users around the world. It just happens to be the case that these GIFs are all porn – we’re reflecting the world back at itself. JB: How will you make money? We don’t know – do you have any money? We’ve bootstrapped ourselves so far, and we’ve been able to cover our operating expenses. For the moment, we’re focused on building the best user experience that we can. Unrelated: Our name (The Worst Drug) reflects the addictive nature of the site. Chris chose our logo font because it looks like something that you’d see on a bottle of prescription pills – and it feels a little dirty, but still somehow clean. Our ‘u’ is a forward arrow key, as you can hit that key instead of clicking the image. JB: Do your parents know what you’re doing? Raj: My parents have no idea what I’m doing. My parents have never had any idea what I’ve been up to. They still don’t know that I once stole a nice pen from K-Mart in 6th grade. (I hope that my parents don’t read TechCrunch.) Katie: Yes, and my mom loves the site! She’s offered suggestions for the UI, and she’s even Tweeted about us to her 17 followers. Her response is flattering, but I question her taste, because I also showed her Two Girls, One Cup, and she thought it was hilarious and didn’t throw up in her mouth at all. JB: What’s your favorite kitten picture? See above.
Read More...

Practice Fusion has made a name for itself over the past few years by tapping into enormous demand for digital health information — particularly health records. From its inception in 2005, the startup has been on a mission to disrupt the slow-moving, archaic world of Healthcare IT by providing a free, web-based electronic medical records (EMR) platform to doctors and their practices. These days, we take free scalable, online platforms for granted, but at the time, Practice Fusion’s approach to EMR was far from being the norm in the healthcare market. Since then, the company has gone on to raise $70 million, attract some 150K medical professionals and grow to over 250+ employees. Today, Practice Fusion hosts digital health records for over 64 million people in the U.S., making it one of the largest web-based EMR platforms out there. With the success of its EMR software, Practice Fusion is now looking to extend the functionality of its platform with the goal of building a true end-to-end health service. Setting its sights on becoming the Salesforce.com for doctors and the Facebook for health, last month the company launched Patient Fusion — a new complementary site that allows anyone and everyone to compare doctor reviews and book appointments within an hour of arriving at the doctor’s office. The new service takes Practice Fusion into ZocDoc’s territory, combining Yelp-like reviews with an Uber-style on-demand booking service. However, unlike Yelp, which would allow users to rate doctors even if they’ve never stepped foot in their office, Patient Fusion aggregates ratings from patients after their visits. This allows the company to not only build a database of verified reviews (based on visits it knows actually took place), but to lay the groundwork for a sizable local physician search engine as well. With several million reviews now live, today Practice Fusion is taking the next step toward being a full-service health information platform with the launch of a free tool that aims to help patients keep better tabs on their health spending. Now, along with the ability to book appointments and access digital health records, Patient Fusion allows users to track their health spending across their entire history of medical visits. The platform, which officially launches in beta today, is available to Practice Fusion patients who are covered by national health insurance providers like Anthem Blue Cross and United. If the initial launch of Patient Fusion brought the company into Yelp (and ZocDoc) territory, then its new free service marks the beginning of Practice Fusion’s own version of Mint.com for health. By aggregating patients’ health information and family health bills, Patient Fusion allows users to track and visualize the history of their health costs, including out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles, for example. The idea is to help users more accurately plan their flexible spending account (FSA) contributions and estimate the cost of future visits to the doctor’s office, for example. Another key piece of the new service is that it includes insurance claims information to enable patients to view their claims history and determine which claims have been rejected, which have been accepted and which may need to be disputed. By allowing patients to more effectively stay on top of their health bills, the company also sees a potential upside for doctors — as easier expense management could lead to an increase in payments that are more accurate and are actually on time. With the average person now spending $3,000/year on out-of-pocket medical costs and with medical bills now representing one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., Practice Fusion is hoping that its new tools can alleviate some of this financial stress. While the company is far from being the only service to allow patients to track their health spending, the service has the benefit of being tied to one of the largest EMR platforms in the U.S. and a search and booking service that now includes more than 27,000 verified providers. By simplifying health expense tracking and by allowing people to view out-of-pocket expenses incurred to date (as well as costs covered by insurance and the remaining balance of their deductible) — all for free — Patient Fusion comes with plenty of appeal. This is especially true for doctors and practices already using the company’s EMR platform, as they can now direct their patients to its appointment booking and expense tracking tool without worrying about the high costs of ZocDoc or other similar services. And, for its new tool, having access to the huge network of medical professionals using its EMR software, this means ready-made scale. The new service will be of particular interest to startups like Simplee, which launched its own “Mint.com for healthcare expenses” service and medical wallet back in 2011 to enable people to better track visits, monitor benefits and pay bills online. More recently, Simplee has expanded its reach by bringing a payment and loyalty platform to hospitals in an effort to give them a better way to distribute bills (digitally), and, last month, it launched a new mobile app that allows people to pay their family’s medical bills from their phone — on the go. While Simplee has managed over $2 billion in medical bills to date, Patient Fusion’s new service puts the two companies in direct competition — at least in regard to this functionality. However, Practice Fusion’s version does not yet support bill payments, only expense management, nor does it yet have the mobile piece. Though Simplee’s platform is (arguably) more extensive at this point, it likely won’t be long before Practice Fusion fills the remaining gap. What’s more, as the company further extends it health platform, potentially adding integrations with popular health-tracking devices (like, say, Fitbit), Practice Fusion will begin to compete with a whole new category of startups and companies. While it remains to be seen which tools the average patient will find more accessible (and usable), at this point, given the ridiculous cost of healthcare and medical expenses, the average American will welcome any help in this regard with open arms.
Read More...

The last time we met with the folks from Scanadu, we had a very limited look its much buzzed-about line of gadgets that aim to bring vital sign monitoring beyond the realm of the hospital and available to anyone with a smartphone. This week, the company’s CEO Walter De Brouwer stopped by TechCrunch TV with an update to allow us to demo an updated version of the SCOUT and show that Scanadu is coming a significant step closer to actually having its devices in the hands of real users. As you’ll see in the video, De Brouwer says that Scanadu has discovered in recent months through early testing that there are a few features that people really want in their personal medical devices, so the company has made key updates to the Scout and its other tools — and we got a hands-on look at those. Updated version of the Scanadu Scout Also, true to Scanadu’s overall approach to making health accessible and modern, today the company is launching a 30 day crowdfunding campaign through Indiegogo which will let people pay to reserve a first-edition Scanadu Scout (the “early bird special” version is $149 for the device to the first 1,000 participants, with additional units going for $199.) Those who pitch into the campaign will also participate in a usability study of the gadget, which is necessary to bring the SCOUT to FDA approval. We talk about all this and more — and I get my own vital sign reading — in the video embedded above.
Read More...

Web security provider Blue Coat Systems — itself acquired in a $1.3 billion deal by Thoma Bravo at the end of December 2011 — is making an acquisition today: it’s buying Solera Networks, a specialist in big data security, for an undisclosed sum (although we have reached out to the company to ask). The deal is expected to close in the next thirty days. Solera, founded in 2005, had raised just over $51 million in VC funds, including a Series D of $20 million from Intel Capital last January. This looks to be the fourth acquisition for Blue Coat and part of what appears to be a brief shopping spree by the company. Most recently — earlier this month, in fact — bought Netronome for an undisclosed amount. That service, focusing on programmable semiconductor products — will complement the Solera acquisition. The two startups already work together, with Solera integrating its monitoring technology into Netronome’s products to specifically target encrypted traffic. In total, Blue Coat has spent some $268 million on acquisitions, not including today’s deal. The Solera acquisition will add the company’s DeepSee platform to Blue Coat’s security range and will give it the capability to process large data files of network traffic to assess for security threats. “The future of the industry is moving beyond just blocking malware and stopping targeted attacks to also identifying and resolving the full scope of the attacks in real time,” said Greg Clark, CEO at Blue Coat Systems, in a statement. “Retrospective capture and analytics are now an essential component of modern security architecture, and Solera has pioneered this field, creating a DVR for the network that records traffic and allows customers to easily mine that information.” Together the companies will have a user base that covers 75 million users across 15,000 enterprise customers, including what Blue Coat says is 86% of the Fortune Global 500. The company says it rates more than one billion Web requests per day. Solera’s customer base includes the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security and Defense, Hitachi, Qualcomm, Overstock.com, Parsons Corporation and Zions Bank. Steve Shillingford, CEO at Solera Networks, describes the company’s technology as a “security camera” on a network. “Along with the big data security analytics and intelligence needed to see zero-day threats and advanced cyberattacks in real-time, Solera DeepSee provides unmatched security forensics to help enterprises answer critical post-breach questions on the nature of the attack and how to prevent it in the future,” he noted in a statement. The news comes at the same time that Blue Coat has revamped its whole security portfolio into five areas — Security and Policy Enforcement Center (for business continuity); Mobility Empowerment Center; Trusted Application Center (for apps); Performance Center (for IT infrastructure); Resolution Center (for deep security analysis; likely where Solera will reside).
Read More...