Microsoft has revealed its new Xbox, the successor to the Xbox 360. It’s a next-generation console, with plenty of power under the hood, but it’s also clearly about consolidating your digital entertainment and operate as much more of a lifestyle device. “Where all of your entertainment comes alive in one place,” is how Microsoft’s Don Mattrick put it on stage during his introduction. The entire event was prefaced with a description of the various types of non-game media that’s becoming popular with online streaming set-top boxes and mobile devices. “To continue to lead, we must provide compelling answers to new questions,” Mattrick said. “Design and build an all-in-one system to light up a new generation of games, TV and entertainment,” in a way that’s “simple, instant and complete” is how he characterized the mission for the new device. Voice Control Kinect is part of the package, and it’s a voice controlled experience from power on throughout the entire process. Your voice cues the Xbox to your user profile and sets up all your custom options. Then, you can dictate activities to Xbox One, sort of like how many imagined Apple would do their own Apple TV with Siri. Changing between activities is as easy as telling the Xbox One exactly what you want it to be doing. It’s remarkably quick, quicker even than the process of changing channels on my at-home cable box hardware. But voice control isn’t the only trick, there’s also gesture recognition tech for controlling the system with your hands. Snap Mode There’s a “Snap Mode” feature, too, which looks like the Microsoft Windows 8 experience, in that it allows you to run two activities simultaneously. So you can watch a movie and then also browse the Internet at the same time, for example, to look up elements of that film. You can even use Skype, newly introduced to Xbox with the Xbox One, and have that running in Snap Mode too. The Snap Mode feature does something that has until now mostly been reserved for computers and for mobile and tablet devices: provides a second-screen experience that runs right alongside things like live TV. Adding basically a HUD layer to live TV might be the Xbox One’s biggest appeal for content providers who are looking for additional ways to engage audiences losing interest in traditional ads. Tech Details The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, along with a Blu-ray drive, as well as a native 64-bit architecture, a 500GB onboard hard drive, HDMI in and out, 802.11n Wi-Fi as well as an 8-core CPU and USB 3.0 connectivity. That’s mostly in line with what we’ve heard from previous rumors, but it’s still quite impressive. The big advantage of the Xbox One is its architecture, however, according to Microsoft’s Marc Whitten. He said essentially it’s like they’ve combined three operating systems in one to deliver the seamless transition between games, applications, and live entertainment. The Xbox architecture combines with Windows, via a third OS that handles fast switching between multi-tasking apps. Kinect And Controller The Kinect has been updated to capture 1080p video, as well as detect many more points on the body for more accurate recognition. It’s also better at recognizing voice input and gestures, and it can even read your heartbeat while you’re excercising. Overall it seems like Microsoft has put a lot of effort into developing the new Kinect, in order to smooth out any rough edges that the launch device had in terms of working as naturally as possible. The new controller looks like the one you know an dlove but has an integrated battery compartment (more like the PS Dual-Shock), as well as Wi-Fi Direct and a high precision D-Pad. The new trigger design is supposed to be much more powerful as well. Developing…
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Microsoft is about to unveil the next Xbox home gaming console, and they’re broadcasting the entire event live for all to watch. There will be thrills! Spills! Chills! And maybe some actual hardware, unlike at Sony’s PlayStation 4 reveal. Check it out above, or if you’re in an environment where you can’t listen in, or just prefer glorious words written by Greg Kumparak over these newfangled moving pictures, check out our live blog.
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Virtual private networking is a great way to accomplish a number of things, including making sure that your secrets stay your own, protecting against malware attacks, and getting around the geoblocking of audio and video content from networks, labels and basically anyone who wants to restrict your sweet, sweet access. It’s understandable, then, that as computing increasingly goes mobile, VPN would get more popular on mobile, too. Hotspot Shield, a free VPN from leading provider AnchorFree, has just announced that it has crossed 10 million total downloads on Android and iOS, with a growth rate of around 1.5 million new downloads per month. Hotspot Shield is a top productivity app on iOS, and on Android, it has already grown faster than its iOS counterpart in the Android ecosystem since its launch last year, and now around two-thirds of new users come from Android. The growth has come on strong very recently, with the app seeing its active user base double between now and the beginning of 2013. The company says it has managed to prevent 28.6 billion malware threats since its debut, and has also saved over 102 million MB of data via its compression algorithms. For paranoid and thrifty travellers, it’s a way to both add an extra layer of security at open public Wi-Fi hotspots like those you’ll often find in airports, and conserve data on tight roaming plans, too. What’s extra funny about the growth is that there’s a huge elephant in the room and AnchoFree is barely talking about it. In a release announcing the news, they offered this choice tidbit: Hotspot Shield is also used by travelers to access US content while abroad. Just that line, on its own, amid a sea of text emphasizing the data savings and security benefits of VPN. Which is probably because it’s unlikely content providers like thinking too much about the other, extremely useful benefit of VPNs: namely allowing you to sidestep geographic restrictions. If you want Spotify and you live in a country where it isn’t available yet, for instance, you could use a VPN to make it appear as though you’re based in the U.S., no matter where you actually are. Using it if you’re a U.S. citizen travelling abroad rides the fair side of the line, but that’s not how most are employing that particular tech. Beyond U.S. borders, there’s a strong and pervasive appetite for U.S. film and video content, the likes of which you can find on Hulu, for example, but not once you exit U.S. territories. AnchorFree isn’t playing up that angle, but I’ll bet it’s responsible for driving a fair amount of those 10 million downloads. So as long as some content is restricted in terms of where you can watch, it’s likely growth isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.
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Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing- or possibly because of its own behavior - is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful’s maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be comprised in the process. Bitdefender, a company which makes a variety of anti-virus, anti-theft, and other security applications for web and mobile, first launched Clueful a year ago as a $4.00 iOS app that detailed how the apps on users’ phones handle – or mishandle, as the case may be – personal data. The app launched in the wake of a number of high-profile security events, like address book-gate and locationgate, for example. (And you know they’re bad when there’s a “gate” attached, right?). For “unknown reasons,” Apple removed Clueful from its App Store shortly after its debut. The company spins this as “we revealed too much!” of course, but the more informed answer points to the fact that, to work, the app itself had to pull a list of apps from a user’s device, send them to Clueful’s servers and then cross-reference those with the apps it had in its database. Apple might not have cared for this process, especially considering the end result may have discouraged app downloads. Clueful later returned in a watered down web version. Apple mobile device users, of course, don’t have much to fear in terms of malware because of how Apple tests and approves apps ahead of making them publicly accessible in its iTunes App Store. However, Clueful still plays on the sometimes misguided fears some have, who believe that software makers are always purposely and maliciously trying to track your location, acquire your personal or financial data, spam you or your friends with unwanted messages or emails, and more. Often, apps accused of doing some or all of these things, are more the result of a rush to launch or shoddy coding, more so than malicious intent. And sometimes, they’re just early stage startups, making mistakes. Then there’s the fact that some apps are designed to work with this “sensitive” data in ways that help you – an app that wants to help you find nearby events or set geo-fenced reminders, for instance, needs to know where you are. Yes, there are malicious, virus-laden apps as well as those over-reaching in terms of what they need to function, but many operate in a gray area. So to the uninformed, being told that some app is “tracking you,” e.g., can perhaps cause concern when little to none is warranted. To Bitdefender’s credit then, at least the Android version of the application now ranks applications as low, medium or high risk, based on their “danger levels.” And you can also filter to just see those with “intrusive ads,” that “send unencrypted data,” or “are viruses,” for example, which could be useful if you’re not prone to being careful with your installs or are worried you have a problem app on your hands. On Android, Clueful is available for free, with an option to upgrade for added security including a real-time web scanner, on-install and on-demand app scanner, and more. This is provided by the company’s anti-virus app, which costs  $9.95 per year. That undercuts competitor Lookout’s Premium option, but it also lacks Lookout’s more comprehensive feature set which also includes remote wipe, lock, signal flare, locating lost phones, backup and restore, cross-platform support, and more. (Some of these options are available through Bitdefender’s other freemium apps, but not all.) Clueful may find better footing on Android, though, where users do have to be more cautious because apps are not vetted ahead of launch. Plus, a good chunk of Android’s user base are those upgrading from feature phones to a low-cost smartphone, and are still technically unsophisticated when it comes from sorting the good apps from the bad. The new version of Clueful is available here in Google Play.
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We are updating this blog during the live congressional testimony of Apple CEO Tim Cook. More details will be added soon. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook came out firing during his Congressional grilling, declaring, “we pay all of the taxes we owe, every single dollar”. A blistering senate investigation accused Apple of shady tax dodging, helping it avoid $13.8 billion in taxes. In his opening testimony, Cook affirmed its position that “we don’t rely on tax gimmicks” to avoid paying any taxes (for a review of how Apple stashes cash oversees, see our previous post). Cook had supporters on the panel, especially Senators Clare McCaskill and Rand Paul, a known libertarian who favors dramatically lowering the corporate tax rate. Paul wigged out on his fellow senators, accused them of vilifying a great American company for fulfilling their responsibility to maximize shareholder value [twitter https://twitter.com/SenRandPaul/status/336848667552145409%5D [twitter https://twitter.com/SenRandPaul/status/336867611868536832%5D McCaskill admonished Paul for his accusations against his senate colleagues, but made sure to note that “I. Love. Apple…I harassed my husband until he converted to a Macbook” Cook, for his part, lobbied for a simpler U.S. tax code, which should “revenue neutral, eliminate all corporate tax expenditures. a reasonable tax rate on moving foreign cash back to the us. we make this recommendation with eyes open, knowing it would probably raise our own tax payouts.” Cook admitted his gave his tax recommendation, “fully recognizing that this would result in an increase in Apple’s US taxes”.
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Last year, Twitter announced something it called the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which would keep patents in the hands of the designers and engineers that came up with the technology behind them. What this agreement serves as is a promise to only act on a patent for “defensive purposes.” Anything outside of that scope would need to be signed off on the creator of the patent itself. Here’s how Twitter defines “defensive purposes”: “Defensive purposes means that you can defend yourself should another party try to initiate patent litigation against you or your customers or users. Under the IPA, it also means that you can use these patents against anyone who has sued others offensively in the past (up to ten years).” The first patent to get the IPA treatment is Loren Brichter’s pull to refresh user interface interaction, which was built into Tweetie, the Twitter app that was acquired by the company and adopted as the official client. Basically, Twitter is saying it’s not going to go after companies that are using pull to refresh, or other parts of Brichter’s patent, within their app. If someone were to claim to have created the functionality first, only then would Twitter defend itself. Twitter has also announced that two other companies, Biz Stone’s Jelly and the Lift task tracking app, will also be adopting the Innovator’s Patent Agreement. With so many ideas running around, there should be no reason why the first person to successfully file a patent should hold the power to make everyone’s lives miserable. At the end of the day, all companies benefitted from Brichter’s work, and it’s been nice to see Twitter not going after anyone else for replicating parts of it. When the IPA was announced last year, Twitter VP of Engineering Adam Messinger had this to say: This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon. Using patents as a shield will hopefully slow down the rampant patent trolling that has plagued the technology space for the past ten years. Twitter, Jelly and Lift promise not to be trolls, and that’s a good thing. You can read the full IPA draft here to see if it’s something your company would want to adopt. [Photo credit: Flickr]
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The Meta 1 is a pair of virtual reality goggles that performs some very unique and useful tricks. While they are still in beta stage, the glasses are coupled with a Kinect-like camera to sense objects in real space and allow users to interact with virtual worlds with the swipe of their hand. The company founder, Meron Gribetz, says that the company is on track to create a mass produced solution shortly, but until then they have brought on Steve Mann, a real cyborg and wearable computing researcher, to act as an advisor. You’ll recall that Mann was assaulted in a Parisian McDonald’s for wearing a Google-Glass-like headset. “We brought Mann on board because of his expertise in two key areas: miniaturization and mediated reality. Mann has been developing a Google Glass-like device for years but recognized now was not the right time for something of that scale, because of the limitations of such a device. Rather than a phone accessory, Mann is keen to work with us to develop a fully fledged new interface for computers,” said Gribetz. “His scientific leadership in mediated reality will be a huge advantage for us when delivering an immersive augmented experience. Occlusion (hiding or modifying real world objects) is a key part of full augmented reality and Mann’s experience in mediated reality will allow us to bring the best solution to market in this area.” Gribetz is a Y Combinator alum and the project, which is still on Kickstarter, is nearly funded with 26 days to go. Users can receive a Dev Kit for $550. Epson will be building Meta’s next-generation VR glasses which will look considerably less DIY than the beta developer version. “The entrance into consumer wearables needs to be a high powered immersive device capable of fully replacing the computer and more. Heads up notification systems have their use cases, but they won’t be game changers. Mann’s commitment to a fully wearable future is why he chose to join us,” said Gribetz. Considering Mann has been wearing his computing power for most of this decade, it seems like a good fit.
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Postmaster, an Austin-based startup that aims to simplify shipping and parcel tracking through an easy to use REST API, launched earlier this year and today, the company announced that it has raised a seed investment round of $600,000 led by Capital Factory, Cloud Power and Zelkova Ventures, as well as a consortium of angel investors. The Postmaster team plans to use this additional funding – it launched as a member of the last TechStars Cloud class – to expand its development team and build additional carrier integrations. With Postmaster, e-commerce developers and merchants can easily add shipping features to their existing solutions. The service, for example, allows users to quickly compare rates across FedEx, UPS, Lone Star Overnight Canada Post and the USPS. This allows shippers to figure out what’s the fastest and most cost-effective way to ship a given parcel because the aggregate data Postmaster collects allows it to predict point-to-point shipping times for any given carrier. That’s data that companies like Amazon have for their shipping operations, but that’s not typically available to small businesses. Postmaster also, of course, allows its users to create shipping labels through its API and offers tracking, reporting and auditing tools. The company also today announced that it has partnered with Lone Star Overnight (LSO), a shipping company that focuses on overnight deliveries to Texas, Oklahoma, western Louisiana and southern New Mexico (and which has partnerships to serve all of California and Mexico, too). Using Postmaster, LSO’s customers now get access to all of its services through a white-labeled portal. This marks Postmaster’s first integration with a shipping carrier. “Our partnership with Lone Star Overnight is a win-win for everyone involved ,” said Jesse Lovelace, CEO and Co-Founder of Postmaster in a prepared statement today. “Postmaster will gain access to a wealth of shipping data instantly for even greater route optimization – not only for LSO customers, but for all Postmaster merchants. Additionally, this is the first simple and truly cross-carrier portal on the market for the public, solving some inherent issues that result from how siloed the carriers have traditionally been from one another.” Shipping is obviously a pretty hot area right now, but the focus has mostly been on same-day shipping, with Google, for example, buying BufferBox and launching its Shopping Express service, eBay testing same-day delivery in Chicago and Dallas and startups like Deliv trying to bring same-day delivery services to even more businesses and customers. ShipHawk, a TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley audience choice winner, is also looking to make a dent in the shipping market, but unlike Postmaster, which focuses more on developers, Shiphawk targets consumers and small businesses directly.
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About.me, the online identity platform that spun out from Aol* at the beginning of the year before acquiring the one-time Digg spinout Wefollow, is now lifting the curtains on its plans to generate revenue, with today’s debut of About.me Premium. Via this new, paid tier to the service, the company is adding some of the more advanced features users have requested, including domain mapping, Google Analytics integration, the ability to remove the About.me branding, and more, for a $4 per month fee. And that’s just to start. This is the first time About.me has charged users for any aspect of its service, co-founder Ryan Freitas tells us. With today’s release, the site will begin to offer features aimed at professional users, like the ability to display their About.me page on their own custom domain name – the most in-demand user request to date, he says. The site will walk users through the process of adjusting their DNS settings to map the new domain to their page. To accompany this change, Premium users can also remove the branding on their page, which includes the “about.me” logo and the top navigation bar entirely. However, branding won’t entirely disappear. A small button at the bottom will still say “me,” pointing those who are interested to more details about the About.me service. Users will also be able to check site statistics using Google Analytics, and jump to the front of support queues with priority email support. The company isn’t yet committing to a guaranteed turn-around time, however, because they’re currently unsure what user support volume will be. But Freitas says the company has always taken support seriously, and is now staffing up on the customer service side of the business. The company also announced its future plans with Premium, which speaks to how it will integrate the technology acquired by the purchase of Wefollow, which today still serves as a discovery tool that helps Twitter users find others to follow by interest. “There will be a secondary tier that allows for people who want to be discovered,” explains Freitas. “We’re going to be able to create a paid tier using the algorithms from Wefollow to promote [users] into a variety of different mechanisms that we’ll be unveiling over the next few months,” he says. This will include a search directory, similar to the one Wefollow offers today, as well as tools that will allow premium users to pay for better search placements. “That will probably be one of the first things we roll out – improved search and promoted search,” Freitas adds. About.me is working on improvements to its mobile application, which launched around a year ago. The app today serves more as a mobile-optimized way to use About.me’s service, by allowing users to create personal pages, discover and network with others, and similar to another startup called Highlight, it also helps you find nearby people. That latter feature – serendipitous discovery – hasn’t proven to be as successful a use case as originally thought, however. On mobile, the app needs to find a way to have a regular draw – something that would addict users to have them checking it or using it often. What that might be is a little bit up the air, but when we asked Freitas if the company would ever want to inch into the “social contacts” space to compete with apps like Brewster or Cobook, for instance, he didn’t rule it out. “I think there’s a defined space for mobile apps that try to handle contacts,” he says. “I think that if we were to do something, we would take a little bit of new tack on it…We know we have a little time to experiment, but we know we need to update the app.” Premium tiers for the social service aren’t the only potential sources of revenue for About.me. Though the company today offers a variety of page customization tools, it’s in desperate need of complete themes where everything from font choice to background images is chosen for those users (ahem) lacking design chops. Freitas agrees that’s an avenue they want to explore, noting that the WordPress theme marketplace model is “fantastic,” and that there is a “cohort of users who needs our help, and would love to be able to purchase those things.” But that’s further down the road. The new subscription-based Premium tier, however, is live today. You can sign up from the About.me homepage here. Disclosures!: About.me’s previous owner, Aol, is TechCrunch’s parent company. CrunchFund, a fund backed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, also invests in the startup. 
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It’s Xbox day! Almost exactly 8 years after the announcement of the Xbox 360, Microsoft is back with another one. We’re live on the ground at Microsoft’s Xbox campus in Redmond, where the company is about to show its next-generation console for the very first time. We’ll be bringing you the news as it breaks with our up-to-the-second liveblog. Join us, won’t you? The event is scheduled to start at 10 am Pacific (1 pm Eastern), but be sure to tune in a bit early — lets say… 9:30 am? Connectivity allowing, we’ll be bringing you photos and commentary fresh from the scene..
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Smartwatches are all the rage, and judging by the turnout and level of enthusiasm at the recent year one meetup for Pebble Kickstarter backers in San Francisco, there’s at least a passionate niche audience for the things. So it isn’t surprising to see them continue to pop up on Kickstarter. A new one called Agent has a few unique tricks, however, which its creators believe set it above the competition. What the Agent has that others don’t is a combination of power management features and wireless charging. It has not one but two processors, for instance, one with higher performance capabilities and one extremely low-power variant to handle simple background tasks. There’s a new Sharp Memory Display that combines the advantages of both a traditional LCD and e-ink black and white, which is very power conscious, as well as wireless Qi induction charging with an included pad. Since it’s based on the widely-accepted Qi standard, however, it should work with charging pads from a variety of manufacturers. The Agent is a refreshing change from other Kickstarter smartwatches in that it actually offers something new in terms of technical aspirations. The watch should get up to 7 days of battery life with its smart functions activated, or up to 30 days of standby in ‘watchface-only” mode. Even if that misses the mark by a bit, it should still beat the stated and actual battery life of existing devices like the Pebble. The gadget also features a 120HMz ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a 1.28-inch display, Bluetooth 4.0 (aka “Low Energy”), onboard motion and light sensors and an OS that allows developers to write apps for it using C# and Microsoft Visual Studio. It uses a Microsoft .NET runtime environment that Agent’s creators say will maximize memory and power efficiency, unlike with other smartwatches. The team says you’ll be able to start writing and emulating apps on the desktop as soon as the funding campaign is complete, which would be faster than the staged rollout of the Pebble SDK. The creators of the Agent are Secret Labs, a team of engineers that has been building open-source products under the brand name Netduino since 2010, as well as smart home technologies, and House of Horology, a custom timepiece manufacturer that brings some real watch cred to the game. Early bird pledges get a pre-order for $129, where the final price is expected to come in at around $249 when the product ships late this year.
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Airbrite, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce startup, is debuting its first product today called Celery (its name a play on the world “sell”). Celery is designed to be a “pre-commerce” store builder – or, in other words, it allows anyone to start selling ahead of having a product to ship. That means sellers can start taking credit cards now, then charge when their product is ready to launch. And in case you couldn’t figure it out by that description, Airbrite is hoping the product will be a hit with those raising funds using crowdfunding. In fact, says Airbrite co-founder Chris Tsai, the company has already seen some traction with crowdfunders during its private beta, which rolled out to hundreds of users this March. But, he clarifies, Celery isn’t just designed for those merchants – it’s for anyone in any business who needs to enable pre-commerce on any platform. Some of its early customers include Kickstarter crowdfunder the3doodler.com, e-commerce site dagnedover.com, connected hardware maker breathometer.com, and onesmall.biz. Tsai says the product itself was inspired by the shift the team saw happening in commerce – that sellers want to establish more personal connections with buyers, and vice versa. But to do so, they need tools that give them more flexibility. ”E-commerce is kind of like  blogging was five years ago. It was really challenging to get a good CMS up without a serious backend developer, then came things like Tumblr and Blogger which made it really easy for anybody to get a blog up and running,” Tsai explains. “It’s really hard today to get an e-commerce storefront that flexible and available anywhere,” he continues. “We want to make it easy to embed an e-commerce touchpoint wherever you are – whether it’s your website, your mobile app, on Facebook, or even on Google Glass.” In addition to Tsai, who previously led mobile commerce initiatives for Groupon overseas, Celery’s founding team includes Brian Nguyen, whose background is in social commerce, and Peter Shih, a key developer on LinkedIn’s iPhone development team, who also worked at Foursquare. Their diversity of experience with social, commerce, and multiple platforms helps to inform their decisions as to how to proceed with Celery. During their time in Y Combinator, the company was building its API and e-commerce platform, though originally with more emphasis on their support for mobile. Celery is actually built on top of Stripe, which makes it similar to newly launched MoonClerk, another e-commerce startup whose focus is on one-time and recurring payments. But it also competes in the broader e-commerce space with giants like PayPal and Google, as well as startups aiming to simplify the experience including Ribbon, Chirpify, Soldsie, Sellfy, Gumroad, and more. Stripe enables Celery’s flexible payment processing, but Celery’s platform also allows for pre-order management, pre-order customer service, tracking via analytics, plus support for coupons, emails to customers, and more – the whole checkout layer on top of payments. The company charges a 2 percent commission on transactions, in addition to Stripe’s 2.9 percent + $0.30 payment processing fees. In the future, Airbrite will introduce support for volume and bulk pricing for larger sellers, for pre-orders via Celery, and for general e-commerce, the company offers an open API. Based in San Francisco, Celery’s team of five has seed funding from YC and SV Angel, but declined to disclose additional investments, only stating that it’s in a “healthy” place right now, and is not looking to raise. Interested users can sign up for Celery here.
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In the debate surrounding native versus web apps, the mobile web has been getting a bad rap lately. Not least since Zuckerberg famously threw HTML5 under a bus. But for publishers, a mobile website is more often essential, even if they have a shiny so-called “native” app too. Today Brow.si, a new product from MySiteApp, is launching in open beta as an add-on for mobile websites that promises to bring a number of features to rival the engagement of native apps. These include social sharing, a read it later button, subscriptions, and push notifications (sort of). Developers can also create additional extensions for the Brow.si platform to add further desktop web/app-like functionality and monetization options. Once the Brow.si code has been integrated into a mobile website, the site gets the Brow.si toolbar added to it. Clicking on the toolbar reveals a row of buttons incorporating the new features, which include sharing the page to multiple social networks, a read it later option that ties into Pocket and Readability, and the ability to adjust font size. Further mini-apps are on their way, too. These will come from third-party developers that Brow.si hopes to attract, thus creating a marketplace as part of the platform. Having all of these features — and more — nicely implemented via a simple to install add-on takes care of much of the heavy lifting for publishers. As simple as it sounds, trying to crowbar in even something as mandatory as social sharing buttons onto a mobile website can be a kludge. Lastly, Brow.si is talking up its support for push notifications, a first for the mobile web, it claims. A more accurate description, however, might be to call it a bridge between a mobile website with the Brow.si add-on and the Brow.si Reader app, a native iOS app that site visitors are prompted to install. It’s via this native app that the push notifications arrive, even if they originate from a Brow.si-powered mobile website. Cleverly, the Brow.si Reader app is also a fully-fledged browser, meaning that it effectively puts the Brow.si toolbar across any site if viewed within it, which the company will be hoping that users habitually do. Meanwhile, Brow.si has been selected as a WordPress VIP feature partner, meaning that WordPress VIP customers will be able to install the Brow.si plugin with a single click to add its functionality to their mobile website. It’s also available for a range of other CMS software, including Drupal, Joomla and Blogger.
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TeamSnap, a company that provides tools for managing sports teams, has today announced that it is acquiring Weplay, a social networking site for athletes, parents and coaches to help facilitate coordination for events, games, practices, etc. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Trinity Ventures-backed startup, Teamsnap, is an online tool aimed at making practice scheduling, conditioning sessions, team rosters, payment plans, etc for all amateur sports. It tracks everything from parents’ payments for big tournaments all the way to who’s bringing the sliced oranges. So far, the company has raised a total of $4.3 million, including its latest round in February for $2.75 million. According to the release, Weplay had raised even more, a total of $15 million since its launch in 2008. The service acts as a social network with similar functionality to Teamsnap, wherein parents, coaches, and kids can coordinate practices, games, etc. for sports teams. Teamsnap claims that it will take over Weplay’s “customer base and technology” in the acquisition, though it’s unclear if the Weplay team will migrate over to Teamsnap or if this is the end of their Weplay chapter. It’s also unclear if Weplay will be rolled into Teamsnap or stand alone as its own product. We’ve reached out for clarification, but haven’t heard back yet. The release states that Weplay has over 2.25 million customers which will migrate over to the Teamsnap platform. The acquisition should bring Teamsnap’s total userbase to 5 million users in 195 countries. The deal makes sense considering just how similar the two platforms are. There are a growing number of services like this out there, and not one has risen to the top as a dominating force. Perhaps some consolidation will help Teamsnap reach that peak.
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Change.org got its start in 2007 as a social network for non-profits and for project-based giving. For years, growth was slow for the fledgling social action platform, but, over the last year, that changed dramatically. Change.org has grown from six million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today, and, as a result, has become one of the largest and fastest growing of its kind. In fact, this growth has led the company to take on its first round of outside financing in its six-year history, a sizable $15 million investment led by the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam. The firm, which has also backed platforms like Meetup and micro-lending giant Kiva.org, will be taking a minority (and non-controlling) stake in Change.org, even without the promise of a traditional liquidity event — as the company has expressly stated that it will not sell or IPO. Other investors in the round, which brings the startup’s total capital to around $20 million thanks to previous angel investments, includes Uprising, a new “mission-aligned” San Francisco-based fund, among others. But part of what makes Change.org unique (and appealing to investors) is that, unlike many others mission driven companies of its ilk, the startup is decidedly for-profit. Updating
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Burstly‘s grand vision coming out of its TestFlight acquisition is getting full reveal today with the announcement of the company’s new corporate structure, which rebrands Burstly’s monetization tools as SkyRocket, and opens them up to all mobile developers and publishers with a new self-serve option, whereas previously they’d been accessible only to the biggest fish in the app ecosystem pond. Burstly’s new corporate structure puts its three products under the larger brand, including TestFlight, FlightPath, and now SkyRocket. Together, these represent a full cycle of support covering the entire development process, from beta testing straight through analytics for shipped software, and on to monetization tools to help capitalize on insights gleaned from the analytics to increase conversions and revenue. There’s cross-functionality between each of the three components as well; including the TestFlight API in a mobile app means that it’s available to plug into and use for the FlightPath mobile analytics suite, and devs can use custom user segments created in FlightPath to then build different monetization options in SkyRocket. So, that means you could, for instance, see high flight risk users like those who have consistently run into crashes or been frustrated by bugs and target them with in-app rewards, or even unlock additional content for high value users to keep them pleased and spending. The new Busrtly suite will help the company funnel users between and across its products, but each will still remain available independently from the rest. But the sales funnel is remarkably clever, and TestFlight co-founder Ben Satterfield explained that it is indeed the hope of the company that customers will see the use value of embracing the whole cycle, versus just one or two components. Still, the flexibility is there to pick and choose. Burstly’s triple-threat play couldn’t come at a better time; at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, Google revealed that it would be including a beta testing dashboard and provisioning portal on its site. But that is primarily aimed at release candidate testing, which does occupy a role that’s quite different from what TestFlight offers in a number of ways. Still, also having the full-featured three-part platform as an additional bonus can’t hurt its ability to stand out as distinct from Google’s own developer tools. The new SkyRocket offers free add mediation, with as many partners as a developer needs, Satterfield says. There’s also a simple management platform that automates the process of setting up different partner accounts, and sends you a unified monthly check in exchange for a 10 percent monthly commission. “Some developers don’t have the bandwidth to manage multiple ad partners and our goal is to make this turnkey for a small percentage,” Satterfield explained regarding the pricing structure.
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More developments in the Sprint acquisition foodchain saga. As expected, Sprint is upping its offer for outstanding Clearwire shares to $3.40 per share, working out to an offer of about $2.5 billion. This comes after originally making an offer of $2.2 billion, based on $2.97 per share. The new offer values the carrier at $10.7 billion. And for those investors and bankers who are now thinking they can play a game of chicken against Sprint while the carrier itself is being courted by both Softbank and Dish, think again: “The offer represents Sprint’s best and final offer,” Sprint says flatly. Sprint was widely expected to up its price for the 50% of shares of Clearwire that it does not already own after shares in Clearwire rose last week to close at $3.20 per share. Clearwire shareholders were going to meet to vote today and were anticipated to vote against Sprint’s earlier offer, because it was too low. Sprint, in its statement to the market today, said that its offer is a 14% premium to its previous offer (first made in December 2012), and 162% premium to the price of Clearwire shares when Softbank made its first formal offer for that company, offering to buy it for $20.5 billion. Sprint itself is embroiled in a game of acquisition ball, with Japan’s Softbank currently getting outbid by Dish Networks. The news comes a day after Sprint received a special waiver from Softbank so that it could consider Dish’s offer of $25.5 billion for the company. As we understand it, the companies are not only arguing over who is willing to give Sprint shareholders more for the carriers’ assets, but which partner would make the best strategic sense. Dish would offer Sprint a very U.S. focused convergence play with more wireless bandwidth. Softbank would bring better technology and more scale and buying power for its wireless business. Clearwire is an important part of that picture because of its spectrum in the 2.5GHz band. “The revised offer demonstrates Sprint’s commitment to closing the Clearwire transaction and improving its competitive position in the U.S. wireless industry. Sprint is uniquely positioned to leverage Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz spectrum assets. Sprint’s Network Vision architecture should allow for better strategic alignment and the full utilization and integration of Clearwire’s complementary 2.5 GHz spectrum assets, while achieving operational efficiencies and improved service for customers as the spectrum and network is migrated to 4G LTE standards.” Sprint says it has now submitted the bid to Clearwire’s board of directors for formal approval.
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“Payment marketing” startup Swipely is announcing that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding. Although founder and CEO Angus Davis (who founded TellMe, which was acquired by Microsoft) said that he’s focused on “looking forward to the future,” it’s worth noting that this is the first round that Swipely has raised since the company moved on from allowing users to share credit card purchases with friends to its current focus on payments, marketing, and loyalty. He did say that the company was able to sustain itself for three years on its $7.5 million Series A because it spent the money “judiciously,” and because it was already bringing in significant revenue. Swipely’s helps merchants use their credit card payment data to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior. Customers can also sign up for a loyalty program that’s tied to the card that they already use, and the merchants can then send them targeted messages and offers. There have been a lot of new payment startups emerging in the past few years, Davis said, but they’re not competing with Swipely for the same customers — Square, for example, has also been adding features for merchants to manage loyalty programs, but Davis said Square businesses tend to be smaller than Swipely’s, who normally do at least $1 million a year in credit card sales. “We’re the new kids on the block in a pretty enormous market, and frankly, the peopel that hurt when we win are the legacy, old school payment providers,” he said. The round was led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from new investors First Round Capital, Greylock Partners, and Index Ventures. Davis said the funding should help Swipely “pretty dramatically ramp up the size of our team” and go “from serving hundreds of merchants today to thousands of merchants within the year.” In addition to finding new customers, Davis said he wants to offer additional services to the existing ones. When I asked what he had in mind, he pointed to Swipely’s most recent upgrade, which added a reputation tracking feature and analytics for measuring the in-store success of online promotions. Swipely says it currently manages $700 million in sales for its businesses, as well as relationships with nearly 2 million customers.
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Kudos to Apple’s finance lawyers, who are the Cirque Du Soleil of legal contortionism. On the eve of live testimony from CEO Tim Cook, CFO Peter Oppenheimer and Phillip Bullock, head of Apple’s tax operations, a scathing congressional investigation of Apple’s tax dodging strategy reveals how the computer giant avoided $13.8 billion in taxes through a clever labyrinth of offshore tax havens, shell corporations, and paper shuffling. “The ability to pay taxes of less than 2% on all of Apple’s offshore income gives the company a powerful financial incentive to engage in convoluted tax planning to avoid paying U.S. taxes,” notes the report from Senators Carl Levin and John McCain of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The 37-page report is jam-packed with all the edge-of-your-seat thrills one would expect from a congressional report on multinational tax policy; we summed up the good parts so you can concentrate your valuable workday procrastination on cat videos. 1. Ireland: Come For The Beer, Stay For The Tax Haven In addition to the majesty of rolling hills, towering waterfalls, and a rich culture, Ireland also welcomes billion-dollar multinational corporations with an appealing 12% tax rate. Even better, in a sweetheart deal with the makers of the laptop used to type this story, the Irish have offered Apple a tax rate below 2%. At least since 2009, according to the report, it was, on average, 0.06%. Senate investigators found this curious, since nearly all of Apple research, development, and board meetings are conducted in the United States. So, when they quizzed Apple about where it calls home, “Apple responded that it had not determined the answer to that question.” As a result, Apple has had an effective tax rate of just 20.1%, below the 24-32% it tells investors (according to the report), and well below the 35% the U.S. government wants it to pay. In 2011, it paid a mere $2.5 billion. 2. Sell To Yourself and It’s (Technically) Not Income On paper, Ireland would appear to buy enough Apple products to reconstruct Blarney Castle from discarded iPods, but Apple’s Irish HQ legal entity is merely a passthrough shell corporation to funnel profits to tax havens, says the report. The investigators determined that Apple cleverly splits itself into entities around the world, charged with selling products and intellectual property at distorted prices. For instance, Apple Sales International, a shell corporation entitled to Apple Inc’s intellectual property, sells products to its worldwide retailers at a “substantial” markup, technically raking in most of the profits from goods sold in stores. “For example, in 2011, Apple reported $34 billion in income before taxes; however, just $150 million of those profits, a fraction of one percent, were recorded for Apple’s Japanese subsidiaries, even though Japan is one of Apple’s strongest foreign markets. ASI, meanwhile, reported $22 billion in 2011 net income,” explains the report. 3. Choose Which Entity Pays Taxes (Hint: The One With The Lowest Income) Apple avoids taxes on its $102 billion in offshore holdings, thanks to an unintentional loophole that allows the company to decide which subsidiary gets taxed. In an effort to simplify the global tax rules, the IRS permitted multinationals to “disregard” sub-entities that were normally taxed (the so-called “check-the-box” rule). Apple structured the relationship so that its tax-haven entities received billions in otherwise taxable dividend payments from subsidiaries it had elected to be among its disregarded entities. In other words, according to the IRS, the payment within corporations is treated as a kind of internal transfer, which Apple funneled to its tax-friendliest locations. “Those figures indicate that Apple’s Japanese profits were being shifted away from the United States to Ireland, where Apple had negotiated a minimal tax rate and maintained two non-tax resident corporations.” Looking For A “Reasonable” Tax Code Apple, of course, is not the only major tech firm accused of dodging taxes through offshore havens. In Apple’s case, Tim Cook has already donned the good cop role ahead of his congressional grilling, alongside Apple also providing written testimony to the subcommittee. “If you look at it today, to repatriate cash to the U.S., you need to pay 35 percent of that cash. And that is a very high number,” said Cook. “We are not proposing that it be zero. I know many of our peers believe that. But I don’t view that. But I think it has to be reasonable.” Cook will reportedly plead with Congress to simplify the tax code. But, if that happens, a lot of very clever tax lawyers will lose their jobs. [Image Credit: Flickr User jpmpinmontreal]
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Expect a swathe of consolidation in the European e-learning sector in the coming months. Edxus Group, a new London-based corporate operating edtech company, is planning to plough in €50-60 million ($64-$77 million) over the next 18 months to develop and acquire European e-learning businesses and build out a single regional player with the scale to compete against U.S. edtech giants, it said today. Edxus plans to execute the first phase of its “buy and build” strategy over the next three to four months, deploying an initial €15-20 million to “consolidate a handful of European e-learning companies”. It did not specify which companies it has in its sights but said the target is those serving the K-12/primary and secondary school market. Northern Europe and the U.K. are the initial markets for the first wave of investment, with other European regions “under assessment for future plans”. The aim is to bring together “complementary expertise and products in curricula, data and instructional systems”, it added. Edxus said its overarching aim is to rival similar U.S.-backed moves. In the U.S. edtech giants such as Pearson, Blackboard, Macmillan, Kaplan and McGraw-Hill top the list of acquisitive e-learning companies. The European market is more fragmented and ripe for consolidation, according to Edxus — meaning a local scale player is needed to ensure U.S. companies don’t end up dominating the region too. “The US e-Learning market is already a few years ahead of Europe,” commented Edxus Group co-founder and CEO Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet in a statement. “Unless we can create scale and a fertile ecosystem, the European e-learning space will be dominated by American content and software. This buy and build strategy is designed to help foster the consolidation, scale and operational efficiencies required in Europe to help e-Learning companies to thrive.” Edxus’ initial investment funds come from its partner and backer: specialist media investment and advisory firm IBIS Capital. It’s unclear whether IBIS will fund the full program of consolidation, or just the first wave. “The European e-Learning industry currently displays both disruptive innovation and rapid growth but it is highly fragmented and lacks a dominant player. These are all characteristics of an attractive pre-consolidation phase industry so we expect our strategy to help the marketplace as a whole meet its enormous potential,” said IBIS Capital’s co-founder and CEO, Charles McIntyre, in a statement.
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In what is effectively a follow-on round, Brightpearl, the cloud software provider for multichannel retailers, has raised $8 million in Series B funding from previous backers Eden Ventures and Notion Capital. Both Eden and Notion seed-backed the UK company, before adding a further $5 million Series A in May 2011. This brings the total raised by Brightpearl to $14.5 million. Brightpearl provides cloud software for small to medium-sized retailers, which integrates orders, inventory and customer data across multiple retail channels — both online and bricks ‘n’ mortar. The problem that it’s set out to solve is that whilst it’s arguably easier than ever to start an e-commerce business, even a blended off-line/online one, there’s fragmentation in terms of the number of channels that you’re expected to sell into. The headache here occurs when trying to manage stock/inventory across channels, and dealing with things like double-selling, support, delivery, and tracking customers from one channel to another. Brightpearl’s cloud offering aims to take care of this heavy lifting, helping businesses scale and manage a multitude of SKUs across all of their online and brick-and mortar channels, with a “unified system for inventory, order, and customer data.” The customer data element is particularly noteworthy. To that end, earlier this month, Brightpearl announced further multichannel support by adding integrations with Amazon, Bigcommerce and Shopify, claiming to make it even easier for retailers to accelerate growth through “more effective merchandizing, better customer data and fully synchronized inventory management”. Since 2011, the company says that more than $600 million of gross merchandise value has been traded on its Brightpearl Commerce Acceleration Platform.
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The barrier to entry for the Unity game rendering engine for developers on iOS and Android has gotten lower, as use of Unity tech is now free on both mobile platforms. Unity CEO David Helgason announced the changed terms today during the Unite Nordic trade conference, according to Pocket Gamer’s Keith Andrew. The dropping of licensing fees for the engine’s basic tier means that features which once cost $800 now carry no charge at all. The change in pricing structure is all about building momentum for indie game creators and studio, according to Helgason. Unity has shifted to a free licensing structure on the web and on desktop platforms, and has long hoped to bring the same model to its mobile platform products, according to Pocket Gamer. Later on, the same deal could be made available to Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10, the company says. Unity 4 on iOS and Android offers a number of impressive features, including real-time shadows and multi-screen AirPlay support for building unique game experiences. For Unity, offering the basic license free to game devs is essentially also lowering the barrier to their revenue-generating paid tiers and offerings, including assets for in-game use and Pro and Basic add-ons, team licenses and more. For mobile devs, it gives them a level of access to tools used by some of the biggest and most successful gaming studios on Android and iOS, including Rovio (which uses Unity for Bad Piggies), as well as those used by hit indies like Year Walk, The Room and more. This is a good thing for the independent games development community, and hopefully it means we’ll see even more top-tier titles coming out of brand new places. The iOS and Android mobile software stores aren’t quite the Wild West of new and exciting indie content they once were, but they still provide small developers more exposure and opportunity than other platforms, and maybe this will help that continue to be true in the face of increasing investment in mobile software from big name game studios.
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Last week we reported that MessageMe, one of the latest messaging apps to hit the smartphone market, had picked up a $10 million Series A round of funding, and today, the company is officially confirming the news, along with some more details on how it’s been doing in the 2.5 months since it launched. It now has 5 million users across both iOS and Android — a five-fold increase on the 1 million that downloaded the app in its first 10 days. MessageMe aims to carve out a name for itself by offering more ways than the rest of the pack for users to communicate with each other on its messaging platform. In its case, notifications — via text messages, pictures, doodles, video, voice, location and music sent from one user to another — have risen three-fold, to 1,500 per second from 500 65 days ago. From what we understand, although MessageMe is partly founded by people with extensive gaming experience — Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal both worked together at social games company LOLapps (acquired by 6waves in 2011) — it will be messaging, not games, that will be the revenue driver for the company. Also: no plans to add in advertising, nor to charge for the app. Instead, it will build out premium messaging features such as stickers and money transfers. The latter is shaping up to be a particularly interesting area, with not only Google swaggering into the ring, but as of yesterday Square as well, alongside a number of other companies like Venmo and established names like PayPal and Western Union already dabbling in features like this. As we reported last week, and as confirmed by the company today, this latest round was led by John Lilly, the former CEO of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock; Lilly now joins the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe. Other investors in the round include previous backers True Ventures (where MessageMe was first incubated), First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, and Social+Capital Partnership. The company’s angels also include Airbnb’s Brian Pokorny, Hiten Shah, Eric Wu and TinyCo CEO Suleman Ali. The company is still in an early and small stage: currently there are only 10 people working for TinyInc Labs. I caught up with co-founder Sethi to speak a little more about the direction of the company: About those greyed-out tabs on your app. When are you launching stickers and money? We’ll start rolling out new features in about a month, although we’re already doing some staged rollouts in beta. Stickers will feature our own content, as well as branded content, from companies that we’ll be working with. Money will be done in partnership with someone. A lot of the new features will come first on Android. Although it’s an app that we launched only last week, it’s easier to add and develop new features on Android. What about Windows Phone and BlackBerry? We are taking a close look at all the platforms out there, including web, Windwos and BlackBerry. We’ll see where most of the demand is and what users are asking for to decide what the next step will be for MessageMe. Talk to me a bit about your thoughts on paid messaging services like WhatsApp or those that rely on adds for revenue. There is no paid version planned. We’re definitely adamant on keeping it free, simple and fast. We’re also not doing any banner ads or third-party data stuff. We want to make sure that everything you do is private and secure. Even with premium services, you will pay or have option to opt out before you see or use it — that will come into play with how we roll out stickers and accessing content. WhatsApp has stolen a march on the messaging apps world with its seemingly global appeal, with Facebook Messenger also doing this to a lesser extent. Meanwhile others have a very regional focus. Where do you sit in that spectrum so far? Outside of the U.S. most of our growth has been in Europe, and the UK specifically. Most of the usage so far is of a younger demographic. What message apps do you use? Besides MessageMe, I use WhatsApp because that’s what’s popular in South Africa [where he hails from] and also BBM. Because I worked in Asia, I also use KakaoTalk for friends in Korea and Line for friends in Japan. I think you’ll always have fragmentation, just as you still do in email [that begs the question of interoperability....]. Then again, I’m not your average user, but I use Line as heavily as MessageMe.
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When it comes to diagnoses and the possibility of undergoing serious medical procedures, we want second opinions (and trustworthy referrals) whenever we can get them. With 30 to 40 million Americans slated to receive insurance for the first time next year thanks to Obamacare — and with millions expected to experience higher costs and reduced coverage as a result — the system is in for a shock. That’s why one Bay Area startup sees a huge need for trustworthy, affordable online resource for second opinions, and referrals. And, potentially, a huge business opportunity. Conceived by Reputation.com co-founder Owen Tripp and chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital, Dr. Lawrence Hofmann, ConsultingMD launched in early 2012 to streamline the diagnosis process and help patients connect with top specialists for speedy second opinions. In other words, it wants to be the “Mayo Clinic of the Web,” as The Wall Street Journal intoned in February. Investors are intrigued; particularly, a firm that has quite a bit of experience investing in Health IT companies. Today, ConsultingMD announced that it has raised $10 million in series B financing from Venrock. While Tripp (like every founder on the planet) says that the company had interest from a range of investors, the company chose Venrock because he sees them as the “leading venture firm” when it comes to healthcare IT, and one that is committed to “advancing patient-centered care.” Updating
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How many crowdfunding platforms is evidence of a crowdfunding bubble? Well, when an organisation feels the need to launch a directory to list and detail all of the crowdfunding options in a single market it’s perhaps a sign that exuberance for crowdsourced financing is running a little high. Nesta, a U.K. charity focused on promoting national innovation, has launched just such a directory, detailing the U.K.’s crowdfunding landscape — and all, by its count, 31 current crowdfunding platforms up and running and begging for money on your behalf. The CrowdingIn directory certainly looks like a useful resource if you’re trying to figure out how best to get your next project funded, with the ability to filter by model and sector/area of interest. So, for example, if you’re looking for an equity investment model in the arts-creative sector then using the directory quickly narrows down those 31 platforms to just one. Or if you’re looking for a donation model in the same sector you’ll find there are four options to choose from. The rewards model is generally more populous, with two pages of results to sift through. But as a signposting service it’s still doing some useful legwork. The directory also summarises what each crowdfunding platform offers, details their conditions of use and links through to each website. Add to that, Nesta has put together a crowdfunding how-to guide. So far, so handy. But at the same time, 31 crowdfunding platforms does feel like an awful lot of local players for a single market. Consolidation feels inevitably and probably necessary. Or, as my colleague Steve O’Hear jokily puts it, how many crowdfunding platforms does it take to get a lightbulb funded? Not 31 surely… Of course there is variation in the crowdfunding platform offerings, with levels of specialism — including some very niche offerings, such as SolarSchools: a platform for U.K. schools to raise money to buy solar panels to fund clean energy. That’s not the place to go to fund your next great business idea, clearly. But there is also still plenty of crossover, especially for the rewards model in creative sectors — which is really where the whole crowdfunding phenomenon kicked off. Also worth flagging that the UK Crowdfunding Association, a self-regulating trade body for the sector, counts about half the number listed on Nesta’s directory among its membership — so there may be some useful cross-referencing to be done there. The Association does also include some platforms that aren’t apparently on Nesta’s list. So, depending on how you count it, the U.K. appears to have (even) more than 31 crowdfunding platforms…
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